As part of our continued series highlighting some of last year’s most illustrative exchanges at The Review, we present this post from The Review’s resident Orwellologist, JohnA.

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Wikipedia Administrator : Believe it or not, some of us do stuff other than push POVs and hang out on AN/I. A lot of admin work is pretty dry and boring.

JohnA : I believe you. However you are being exploited to provide free labor in return for supporting an enormous enterprise because having sacrificed so much, it’s difficult to walk away from.

Once you realise that you want a life where someone isn’t turning your house and garden over every five seconds 24 hours a day 365 days a year, then you’ll start to dislike Wikipedia. Then you’ll feel like quitting. Then you’ll pick one final fight. Then you’ll sit in a darkened room and decide whether to go for “blaze of glory” or just walk away into the night.

It’s a labor of love, right until the moment you realise that the project and most everyone else, could not give a shit about you and what you’ve sacrificed for it. You’ve sacrificed so much but the returns will diminish and the “sysop”* bit will mean less and less emotionally and intellectually.

Oh and Jimbo Wales is making money hand over fist because of Wikipedia while you get nothing.

One day, you’ll wake up and realise that what seems like cynicism or vindictiveness on my part today, is nothing more that the unvarnished truth, the red pill that most of us here took some time ago.

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(* Wikipedia Administrator / System Operator)

(This post was submitted to the forum by The Review’s resident Troubleshooter, Gomi, on January 1, 2008)

Gomi: For the New Year, I decided to attempt to compile a list of Wikipedia Review’s criticisms of Wikipedia. I have tried to approach this broadly — I don’t agree with all of these myself, but this is my view of the complaints that come up over and over again. One thing that is clear, after looking at Wikipedia for several years, is that these problems are not getting better, they are getting worse.

Wikipedia Content

1. Wikipedia contains incorrect, misleading, and biased information. Whether through vandalism, subtle disinformation, or the prolonged battling over biased accounts, many of Wikipedia’s articles are unsuitable for scholarly use. Because of poor standards of sourcing and citation, it is often difficult to determine the origin of statements made in Wikipedia in order to determine their correctness. Pursuit of biased points of view by powerful administrators is considered a particular problem, as opposing voices are often permanantly banned from Wikipedia. Wikipedia’s culture of disrespect for expertise and scholarship (see below) make it difficult to trust anything there.

2. Wikipedia’s articles are used to spread gossip, abet character assassination, and invade the privacy of the general public. So-called “Biographies of Living Persons” are often the result of attempts by powerful but anonymous editors and administrators at humiliating or belittling those real-world people with whom they disagree. Wikipedia’s “anyone can edit” culture has allowed baseless defamation of various individuals to spread widely through the Internet. When the family, friends, associates, or subjects of these biographies attempt to correct errors or insert balance, they are often banned from Wikipedia for “Conflicts of Interest”. Subjects of these hatchet jobs usually must resort to legal action to get the articles removed or corrected, a course not available to all.

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Something monumentally offensive has happened this week on Wikipedia, and the powers that be are trying to sweep it under the rug. All Wikipedia critics should take this excellent opportunity to write letters to the Editors of their local and regional newspapers, and to contact their elected officials. The public opinion of Wikipedia can and should be changed by these six simple points:

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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 »

No, of course not!

That’s the simple answer, at least. After all, Wikipedia’s User:Jayjg is Bad News Personified: He’s a POV-pushin’, article-ownin’, checkuser-abusin’, personal-attackin’ son-of-a-whatever. And what’s more, he does it all completely anonymously. In effect, he’s the epitome of Wikipedia’s most questionable aspects, and yet he can hardly be said to be “getting away with it” - he’s at the center of a disproportionate number of nasty incidents that occur on Wikipedia, embattled, criticized, bashed, and targeted by pro-Wikipedians and anti-Wikipedians alike, on a near-constant basis. Very few people actually like him, sort of in the way nobody ever likes the dictator’s right-hand man, even while everyone seems to think the dictator himself is a “pretty good guy.”

And yet, I can’t help but feel rather sorry for him. Why is that, I ask myself? Read the rest of this entry »

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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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 »