List of Websites Critical of Wikipedia Options

[Selina]

Criticism of Wikipedia is often relegated to outside the system itself, due to the possibility of censorship or banning if an administrator decides they don't like what you say. (IMG:smilys0b23ax56/default/wink.gif)
There's plenty of fluff hyping Wikipedia on Wikipedia itself so there's no need to include sites dedicated to praising Wikipedia (if there is such a thing), however Wikipedia does have some positive points and well-written articles get included.

Here's some so far:

The Guardian: Can You Trust Wikipedia?
http://technology.guardian.co.uk/opinion/s...1599325,00.html

The Register: Who owns your Wikipedia bio?
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/12/06/wikipedia_bio/
Article criticial of Wikipedia.
"It's also like playing a game in the sense that playing it has no consequences. If something goes wrong, you just restart. No problem!" -Jimbo Wales on Wikipedia
"Wikipedia as a massively scalable, online role-playing game, or RPG. Players can assume fictional online identities - and many "editors" do just that. And drive-by shootings are common."

The Register: Wikipedia: magic, monkeys and typewriters
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/10/24/wikipedia_letters/
Mostly letters from previous Wikipedians who decided to stop editing.
"At first I thought Wikipedia was a great idea and started writing about the subjects I know with an academic take on them. [...] In the end I couldn't recognise my articles after about a week, and a few months later there was nothing left of them, having sufferd zillions of re-edits, irrelevant sentence adding and re-writes due to NPOV actually meaning MPOVNSE -my point of view, not someone elses. [...] I just gave up and let the idiots who THOUGHT they knew something about the subject or those with a vested interest in making things look good take the helm."

Why Wikipedia sucks. Big time.
http://homepage.univie.ac.at/horst.prillin.../06/000623.html

Why Wikipedia Must Jettison It's Anti-Elitism
http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2004/12/30/142458/25
Article by Larry Sanger, co-founder (along with Jimbo Wales) of Wikipedia.

Wikipedia Watch
http://www.wikipedia-watch.org/
Mostly concerned with Wikipedia privacy issues. From Daniel Brandt, also the owner of the Google Watch website. He raises an interesting question: Who should be sued for a defamatory Wikipedia article?

A Criticism of Wikipedia
http://www.kapitalism.net/thoughts/wikipedia.htm
Well-written article discussing the problems with Wikipedia. Lots of good points. Author claims to have been subjected to Denial-of-Service attacks by the 'Wikipedia cabal' after publishing it on his website.

WikiWatch
http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/wikiwoo.htm
Blog. Updated frequently. Good general criticism of Wikipedia, but also gets into the nitty-gritty of it (i.e. discusses specific articles). The author is a librarian.

Swastikipedia, by Jason Scott
http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/000100.html
Article focusing on the unreliability of Wikipedia

Wikipedia and the Future of Social Computing, by Ross Mayfield
http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2004/12/30/142458/25
A paraphrase of a speech by Jimbo Wales, pro-Wikipedia stance but accepting that he is the unelected "constitutional monarch" of Wikipedia.
Has some interesting comments.

http://www.slis.indiana.edu/news/story.php?story_id=958
"The present generation of bloggers seems to imagine that such crassly egotistical behavior is socially acceptable and that time-honored editorial and filtering functions have no place in cyberspace. Undoubtedly, these are the same individuals who believe that the free-for-all, communitarian approach of Wikipedia is the way forward. Librarians, of course, know better."

http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/wikiwoo.htm#Byrne2
"In general, Wikipedia is a game. Nobody making policy decisions is getting their knowledge of the Iraq War, stem cells or Social Security from Wikipedia, so in the grand scheme of things, it doesn't matter what Wikipedia says. But when they start writing biographies of living individuals, that can have real-world consequences on a person's life. It's not a game to those people."

CNet's review:
http://reviews.cnet.com/Wikipedia/4505-3642_7-31563879.html

http://www.opinioneditorials.com/guestcont...y_20051205.html
"Wikipedia should not be cited in the media nor anywhere for support because it is no different than quoting various anonymous sources who have no knowledge of the topic or who have fibs to spread about the topic."

[zacherystaylor]

Here's my new contribution.

http://zakherys.tripod.com/wikipedia_censorship.htm

I'll refine this page over the next couple of weeks and start a new string on the subject of preventing School violence or any other violence when I get the chance but not today.

I still think there are some good things about Wikipedia and if it is reformed it could be very benificial if not there could be another one built to do a better job if it's run by sincere people. This would be much more work and take more time so reform is preferable if there isn't to much resistance.

[Somey]

I'll refine this page over the next couple of weeks and start a new string on the subject of preventing School violence or any other violence when I get the chance but not today.

You'll definitely want to left-justify and shrink most (if not all) of that really, really large text in the upper-half of that thing. Maybe wider margins and a few images too, just to give it a more aesthetically-pleasing layout.

Otherwise, looks good! (IMG:smilys0b23ax56/default/smile.gif)

[GlassBeadGame]

I'll refine this page over the next couple of weeks and start a new string on the subject of preventing School violence or any other violence when I get the chance but not today.

You'll definitely want to left-justify and shrink most (if not all) of that really, really large text in the upper-half of that thing. Maybe wider margins and a few images too, just to give it a more aesthetically-pleasing layout.

Otherwise, looks good! (IMG:smilys0b23ax56/default/smile.gif)

I used to have some tripod sites, too. I know the css folks will scream but the easiest thing to do address the wide margins is to put all that text in a table with:

CODE

<table width="80%" border="0" align="center"><tr><td>

followed by all of your text in the body segment the close out with

CODE

</td></tr></table>

just before the close-body tag. Also if you want to keep the wallpaper you would have to move it inside the table as

CODE

<table width="80%" border="0" align="center" background="bg.jpg">

[CharlotteWebb]

I'm screaming already, but you could at least use a <div> tag rather than single-cell table.

I think most people would agree that the excessive font-size is the most serious issue with that page.

You might consider finding a good wiki-farm actually, one which isn't plagued by pornographic popup ads and such. Scribblewiki was pretty tame in that regard, just one standard-size banner which was fairly easy to paint out or simply ignore. I used to have some pages there but apparently the site got shut down and now redirects to some game-cheats forum, so I'm looking for something better myself.