Yesterday Wikipedia Review’s RSS feeds picked up on an interesting news article titled Wikipedia and the Intelligence Services: Is the Net’s popular encyclopedia marred by disinformation? written by Ludwig De Braeckeleer for OhMy News International. This article was picked up by no less than 3 of our RSS feeds [1] [2] [3] and seemed to be relevant. This was a news story that seemed to be of a similar stature to the Seigenthaler Sr. vandalism controversy, the Essjay lying about his credentials controversy, the creation of Wikitruth (administrators disastisfied with Wikipedia), and of course the Wikipedia administrator suspected by school campus police of being a murderer (later changed in to “police harassment”). All of these cases had Wikipedia articles created about them, and all of these cases had first been uncovered on Wikipedia Review. Yet on none of these occasions would Wikipedia admit that Wikipedia Review uncovered them. In this case, however, the main set of information was posted on Wikipedia Review, and used as the basis for this case, so surely this time they will admit it?

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Every once in a while I think of a word, or see it printed somewhere, and I wonder, “what does Wikipedia have on this word?” And “just how messed up is their entry on it?” Today’s word was “Gruff,” and sure enough, there was once a page on it, but it’s now a redirect to an article about characters in the Nintendo game “Animal Crossing.” Prior to its becoming a redirect, the Gruff article read sort of like this:

Gruff the goat is an anthropomorphic goat in Animal Crossing. He is quite grumpy and always talks in a deep grumbling voice. His catch phrase is “Bleh eh eh!” which is a possible reference to a goat. Gruff prefers to be arrogant and prefers to be left alone and sometimes distances himself from the other animals of the group. He will participate in the events in town… Read the rest of this entry »

The internet has always been a favorite place for those who enjoy the odd bit of irrational hyperbole now and again, along with the occasional complete breakdown of logic, and of course the ever-popular just-plain-wierd utterance. (Disclamer: The Wikipedia Review isn’t immune to this, though there’s nowhere near as much of it here as we’ve been accused of having - at least in some quarters.)

Hardcore users and administrators on the English Wikipedia have a variant of the English language all their own, full of acronyms and jargon, as well as some rather creative redefinitions of popular terminology. Read the rest of this entry »

Thanks to Somey, we are now allowing multiple authors to this “blog” (Wikipedia Review: Opinions and Editorials). To register, you can click on the “Register” link on the left of this page; then it will ask you for your preferred username and e-mail address. You will then automatically be sent a password. We then get a request to add you as an author, and if approved you can then post in this “blog.” I get to be the second author here, so given that I don’t really have anything else to say right now, I thought that I would say this.

Casual readers of The Wikipedia Review, in combing through its thousands of topics, are often surprised to find relatively little material about what many reporters, bloggers, and other commentators usually perceive to be Wikipedia’s biggest problem: namely, the many inaccuracies, and occasionally outright falsehoods, that are sometimes found in various Wikipedia articles.

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Over on WikiEN-L, our ol’ buddy Dave Gerard has brought our attention to a new Firefox search plugin that removes Wikipedia results from Google searches. It’s available here from Distilled, an SEO blog, and since it’s just one little XML file it takes only a few seconds to install. Simply put, all it does is add a new option to your search drop-down that says “Google Search excluding Wikipedia,” and it uses Google’s new Custom Search API to do just that. In the results page, the words “Google without Wikipedia” appear where the word “Web” would normally appear (screenshot).

Needless to say, some folks over at Wikipedia are poo-pooing this idea, depite the self-evident fact that it may be one of Mankind’s Greatest Inventions, or at the very least, the most essential Firefox add-on ever devised. Read the rest of this entry »

Welcome to blog.wikipediareview.com!

This is our first so-called blog entry. Some of us (well, me) prefer the term “editorial,” simply because it sounds nicer than “blog,” which sounds more like something that someone might do as a result of severe indigestion.

At the time of this writing, Wikipedia Review has existed for about 17 months. During that time, Wikipedia has grown into one of the most popular and extensive websites in the world, with global reach, versions in dozens of languages, tens of thousands of regular contributors, near-constant media attention, and literally hundreds of other websites using, or “scraping,” its content. (To be fair, it was already quite popular and extensive when we started.) Read the rest of this entry »