Listen to this

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/ram/wikipediastory.ram

It will only be here for seven days.

Don't mind about the fact that the first 12 minutes or so sound a lot like a puff piece. It gets more interesting after that.

Not bad... not great, but not bad.

One thing I've noticed lately, though maybe I'm just imagining it, is that the William Connelley/Global Warming edit wars are always the example the media brings up to point out how experts are being frustrated by Wikipedia's rules, and by the necessity to edit-war with non-experts to put the scientifically-accepted versions of things into Wikipedia. That plays into WP's hands, really, because most people these days agree that global warming is happening and that it's caused by humans. What's more, there's a growing resentment towards "climate-change deniers" that's rapidly reaching the point where it's treated similarly to holocaust denial - so WP is getting some mileage out of that, every time that example is used.

There are plenty of topics, mostly having to do with religion, ethnic conflicts, and certain biographies and historical events, that generate a lot of conflict because there is no clear answer to the issues raised by those topics. But those never get mentioned in the media - either because the media these days is too lazy to try to explain such problems in the context of WP, or because the reporters simply assume that people will be too distracted by the issues being argued about, and the story will lose its focus or something.

That, to me, was the big disappointment about the Andrew Keen book - it was a fairly short book, and he could have added a few pages about some WP issues that are less clearly delineated than global warming... But in his case, I think he was more focused on the music industry, because that's his background.

So the real book on WP, and how edit-warring, POV-pushing, and admin power-tripping really affects content, has yet to be written.

What we're seeing with all these media pieces is a creeping growth in coverage of the flaws of wikipedia. The ratio of good to bad stories, which has changed radically in the last 12 months, is approaching 50-50. The tipping point will surely come, and we'll see a deluge of mainstream negativity aimed towards the site, and Der Jimbo.

And its not by accident. George Monbiot made it abundantly clear about the tactics used:



Then there was Ellen Goodman:



and Dave Roberts in Grist magazine attempted to establish the moral equivalence with Nazis as well:



... although Dave did actually withdraw his remark when it was widely disseminated on the Internets.

Certainly Connelley has never discouraged such an equivalence. Like Moonbat, Connelley is a political candidate for the Green Party (a fact never mentioned by the BBC), a party very much after Wikipedia's own - anarchistic, de-centralized leadership, anti-capitalist, middle class.

I fail to see what Connelley's supposed "expertise" is about. He's a climate modeller, an uncertified software engineer on a mission to save the world from people who disagree with Connelley's political views. He works for the British Antarctic Survey - so what? It doesn't make him an expert in economics.



Media laziness is how Connelley gets away with it. Nobody ever asks him a challenging question because there is incredible (and unjustified) deference to people with PhDs as if they were experts in all parts of science rather than just the contents of their own thesis.



The BLP issue is particularly important as well. How does Connelley, for example, get to own his own biography when people like Daniel Brandt had to fight so hard to get theirs removed?

mp3 format of this, stays active for like 90 days i think megaupload.com/?d=RTEJYE1X