Categories

Archives

Meta:

Search

Blogroll

Recent Posts

Wikipedia’s Fundamental Flaw

August 28th, 2007 by Pwok

Truth and fact are at the core of an encyclopedia, be it “user-edited” or otherwise. Wikipedia is hollow at the core, because it subordinates truth to consensus and a passive compliance that it calls “civility.” This flaw has crippled its credibility, and will continue to do so as time marches on.

A thicket of Wikipedia “pillars,” “policies,” and guidelines give lip service to the truth, but the reality is different: Wikipedia’s users routinely remove verified facts from articles, and their actions are routinely upheld by administrators. As a result, no Wikipedia article can be considered reliable by its reader.

This is increasingly apparent in colleges, which have begun to forbid students from citing Wikipedia in their research. The general public is catching on as well, as a consequence of a series of revelations including a senior Wikipedia administrator’s fabrication of academic credentials (with the knowledge of Wikipedia’s founder, Jimmy Wales) and the revision of encyclopedia entries by corporations and government entities… Read the rest of this entry »

[Bloglines] [del.icio.us] [Digg] [Mister Wong] [Newsvine] [Reddit] [Segnalo] [Shoutwire] [Slashdot] [Squidoo] [StumbleUpon] [Technorati] [Email] More »

Posted at 12:05 am, August 28th, 2007 by Pwok in Administrators, Articles, Jimbo Wales, BLP Issues | 12 Comments »

The true history of Wikipedia

August 27th, 2007 by blissyu2

How can you trust the truth of Wikipedia’s articles if you can’t even trust the truth about their own history?

If you are like most people, you aren’t quite sure about how Wikipedia started. So you start off by checking out Wikipedia’s own entry on History of Wikipedia. You would assume that it would be correct, because they should know their own history. Then we get the question of trust. Do we trust that Wikipedia is accurate about itself? They have a policy on Neutral Point of View, so in theory we should be able to trust them. But at the same time, would we trust anyone when talking about themselves? A little research will uncover that Larry Sanger considers himself to be co-founder with Jimbo Wales, while Jimbo Wales considers himself to be the sole founder. Wikitruth, who seems to know a lot about such things, highlights how important that issue is. So you might be led to believe that that is the only issue, and that, thankfully, it is now listed in some form at least, in the article about the history of Wikipedia.

The problem is that there is more to it than that.

Read the rest of this entry »

[Bloglines] [del.icio.us] [Digg] [Mister Wong] [Newsvine] [Reddit] [Segnalo] [Shoutwire] [Slashdot] [Squidoo] [StumbleUpon] [Technorati] [Email] More »

Posted at 8:13 pm, August 27th, 2007 by blissyu2 in Articles, Wikimedia Foundation, Jimbo Wales | 4 Comments »

Michael Moore on Wikipedia

August 24th, 2007 by blissyu2

Michael Moore, creator of the documentary “Sicko” that criticises the US health system, has now targetted Ted Frank, who is a lawyer who has defended Merck in cases involving Vioxx, who were adversely affected by the movie and is hyper-critical of Michael Moore. Wikipedia’s response has been to label Michael Moore’s web site as an attack site, to delete all references to it, and to go out of their way to protect and support Ted Frank (Wikipedia user THF), including suggestions that he was “outed”, even though he originally called himself TedFrank on Wikipedia, only recently changed it to THF, and is a public figure with a Wikipedia article written about him.

Read the rest of this entry »