I want these polished before I post them to the blog....





50 Reasons why not to donate to The Wikimedia Foundation (Wikipedia):


1. It's taken over google almost always listed first before other websites.
2. Next on the list in a google search after Wikipedia are the endless spammy mirrors.
3. It's then filled the web with misinformation.
4. It's now filling the world with falsehoods.
5. Libel on Wikipedia even when removed from Wikipedia lasts forever on all the spammy mirrors.
6. Wikipedia tells search engines not to follow any external links, except those to its favored sites such as its for-profit site, Wikia, where basically Wikipedia is pushing traffic to.
7. Wikipedia promotes certain sites such as amazon.com in links and in return, Amazon.com gives them huge donations, violating Wikipedia's non-profit status.
8. Wikipedia sometimes blacklists linking to sites merely because the sites criticize Wikipedia.
9. Wikipedia also sometimes blacklists linking to competitors of their major donors on completely made-up charges, such as when they blacklisted overstock.com
10. Imagine a website full of the worst scum of society. Then imagine them all pretending to be intellectuals. That’s Wikipedia. Not just administrators, but most everyone there.
11. A large percentage of their administrators are under the age of 15.
12. If you’re a renowned expert using your real name on Wikipedia and some administrators (e.g. kids) decide they don’t like you and ban you, then Wikipedia writes about you and ruins your reputation.
13. Wikipedia hurts real encyclopedias and helps to make them go out of business.
14. Wikipedia gives its software out for free, enabling attack sites like Encyclopedia Dramatica that would otherwise be stuck as blogs to become monstrous wikis that take over google.
15. Wikipedia even itself is an attack site in its articles and its writings about former users they don’t like.
16. Wikipedia and corporations that donate massive amounts of money into it go around intimidating any serious critics of Wikipedia.
17. What gets on wikis is determined not by what is right, but by the people who have enough time to edit war and work up the ranks to administrator and higher (aka. a role-playing game).
18. Administrators are anonymous and obviously some people would secretly have more than one administrator account.
19. Jimmy Wales doesn’t manage the wiki properly.
20. Jimmy Wales used to be a pornographer.
21. Wikipedia has tons of very gross and sexual pictures in it, even child pornography.
22. Wikipedia gives poor synopses for movies, books, etc. They don't give any details unless its spoilers whereas places like yahoo movies do it right.
23. They wouldn't let someone use Poo Bum Dicky Wee Wee as their username, which makes light humor on the finding by the Wiki Scanner that someone from the Australian government vandalized an article by adding "Poo Bum Dicky Wee Wee" to it.
24. Citizendium is slightly better run than Wikipedia and so would be more worthy of your donation.
25. Wikipedia has gone to painstaking detail to host articles about Brazil, Israel and Saudi Arabia practice apartheid. If that's how you want your country described for the rest of the world, get out your checkbook.
26. Wikipedia is liable to get sued and your donation would just be paying their legal fees and not helping an encyclopedia.
27. People have been stalked and harassed in real life because of it.
28. The harassment has even caused some people to have mental breakdowns.
29. Their tracking of people is basically IP addresses so any bad user can return, play nice to become an administrator, then cause trouble.
30. Most people deeply into the community hate any new changes to the site and enjoy reverting things that aren’t vandalism all day.
31. Almost all edits on articles are vandalism, fighting over content, and reverting, rather than improving articles.
32. Wikipedia will never remove old revisions and at best they hide them so a lot of their money is spent on the hard drive space to retain all text from vandalism, reverting, and edit wars.
33. Wikipedia compresses all the vandalism and garbage within old revisions all together at once so not only is it hard drive space but even more expensive processing power that uses their money.
34. Governments and organizations pay people to edit toward their bias into articles.
35. There are reports that even administrators trusted with the highest powers are paid.
36. Wikipedia falsely considers an internet troll to be someone who disagrees with an administrator and then lets real trolls run loose, ignored by or sometimes even supported by the administration.
37. The administrators have the power to change history but all are anonymous by default.
38. Wikipedia is not going to help children in third world countries because the bulk of its content is in the languages of first world countries and pretty much nothing is in the rest.
39. Wikipedia administrators sometimes give insulting and libelous messages as their reasons they ban you.
40. Most of their administrators are drunk with power.
41. The dispute resolution process is designed so that administrators can ban any editor long before the editor can get someone to do something about their complaint.
42. Wikipedia makes most of its administrative decisions in secret on its IRC channels and then back on its website its administration disavows any connection between itself and its IRC channels.
43. Whenever you edit a wiki article, you have to watch it for the rest of your life and fight people to make sure the edit sticks, or admit you wasted your time because your edit will eventually be removed.
44. Wikipedia’s neutral point of view was originally designed by Larry Sanger for experts to write and article and a neutral party review it, but instead what’s called neutral is whatever side that wins an edit war.
45. One of the main administrators, SlimVirgin, sockpuppeted on the account “Sweet Blue Water” and instead of a userpage stated it’s a blocked sock puppet, the userpage is deleted and protected from recreation. The administrators also refuse to keep a sockpuppeteer tag on SlimVirgin’s userpage, despite everyone else who socked has one.
46. The “let’s change reality” type of Wikipedia thinking spilled into real life and made Pluto no longer a planet.
47. The software design allows for if one person doesn’t like another, they can go through all their enemy’s old edits and stalk them for the editor’s personal information and things to revert.
48. Jimmy Wales and Wikipedia’s administrators always considers criticism of Wikipedia or its administrators as a personal attack and trolling.
49. Although Wikipedia pretends it doesn’t use voting, Wikipedia makes all its decisions based on a vote of all the non-banned accounts that bother to vote, which they call consensus. The ones that are bothered to vote most are lunatic extremists and these are who run Wikipedia from administering, to policy making, to article decisions, and even are the ones who vote for the arbitration committee and the arbitration committee are the ones who get to decide all the big decisions and they have a track record of making horrible decisions.
50. Jimbo Wales tries to use Wikipedia to rewrite history and claim himself as sole founder of Wikipedia.

I read #50 and keep wanting to add an l to make "sole flounder".

It is all GlassBeadGame's fault.

More than a few need work, but especially this one:



Come on now. The worst scum? I don't think even Kato would go that far.

Making some suggestions. My suggestions are in bold print:


50 Reasons why not to donate to The Wikimedia Foundation (Wikipedia):


1. It's taken over google and is almost always listed first before other websites.
2. Next on the list in a google search after Wikipedia are the endless spammy mirrors which make money off of Wikipedia content.
3. It has filled the web with misinformation.
4. It is now filling the world with falsehoods. <==== same thing....Maybe we need another?
5. Libel on Wikipedia even when removed from Wikipedia lasts forever on all the spammy mirrors who don't have to follow Wikipedia policy, because the content is already considered free under the GFDL. This is currently no way to remove this content without suing all of these organizations
6. Wikipedia tells search engines not to follow any external links, except those to its favored sites such as its for-profit site, Wikia. It would seem Wikipedia is pushing traffic to Wikia, for...whatever reason....
7. Wikipedia promotes certain sites such as amazon.com in links and in return, Amazon.com gives Wikia huge amounts of venture capital, which would seem to violating Wikipedia's non-profit status, given Wikipedia's close ties to Wikia.
8. Wikipedia sometimes blacklists linking to sites merely because the sites criticize Wikipedia.
9. Wikipedia also sometimes blacklists linking to competitors of their major donors on completely made-up charges, such as when they blacklisted overstock.com
10. Imagine a website full of the worst scum of society. Then imagine them all pretending to be intellectuals. That’s Wikipedia. Not just administrators, but most everyone there. <===this one is very weak. I'd either reword it or drop it...
11. A large percentage of their administrators are under the age of 15 and therefore not liable for criminal prosecution in most parts of the World. Who were you planning on suing?
12. If you’re a renowned expert using your real name on Wikipedia and some administrators (e.g. kids) decide they don’t like you and ban you, then Wikipedia writes about you and ruins your reputation.
13. Wikipedia is openly trying to put real encyclopedias out of business. Or at least, that's what Jimbo Wales has said.
14. Wikipedia gives its software out for free, enabling attack sites like Encyclopedia Dramatica that would otherwise be stuck as blogs to become monstrous wikis that take over google.<== I think that ED does a great service by showing just how horribles Wikis can be....but that's beside the point...
15. Wikipedia even itself is an attack site in its articles and its writings about former users they don’t like, including labeling real people as "banned" on google search engines etc.
16. Wikipedia and corporations that donate massive amounts of money into it go around intimidating any serious critics of Wikipedia. However, Wikipedia does not publish annual financial statements. What are they trying to hide?
17. What gets on wikis is determined not by what is right, but by the people who have enough time to edit war and work up the ranks to administrator and higher. Wikipedia would seem to be more of a role-playing game than an actual encyclopedia.
18. Administrators are anonymous and obviously some people would secretly have more than one administrator account. What do they have to hide? Conflicts of interest, perhaps? No one knows for sure.
19. Jimmy Wales doesn’t manage the wiki properly.
20. Jimmy Wales used to run a soft-core porn site. However, with Wikipedia, he pretends to support free expression of women and children. Is it possible that both statements are true?
21. Wikipedia has tons of very gross and sexual pictures in it, even child pornography. However, since it is uncensored, any child can access this information without any parental control.
22. Wikipedia gives poor synopses for movies, books, etc. They don't give any details unless its spoilers whereas places like yahoo movies do it right.<====very weak. I'd cut this one.
23. They wouldn't let someone use Poo Bum Dicky Wee Wee as their username, which makes light humor on the finding by the Wiki Scanner that someone from the Australian government vandalized an article by adding "Poo Bum Dicky Wee Wee" to it.<==also weak.
24. Citizendium is slightly better run than Wikipedia and so would be more worthy of your donation.<==only slightly? Not convincing. Let's cut this one.
25. Wikipedia has gone to painstaking detail to host articles about Brazil, Israel and Saudi Arabia practice apartheid. If that's how you want your country described for the rest of the world, get out your checkbook.
26. Wikipedia is liable to get sued because of their practices of publishing unauthorized biographical information and your donation would just be paying their legal fees and not helping an encyclopedia.
27. People have been stalked and harassed in real life because of Wikipedia.
28. The harassment by Wikipedia editors has even caused some people to have mental breakdowns.
29. Wikipedia's tracking of people is basically IP addresses so any hacker who has a problem with your edits can then find your computer and hack it. Is this a good thing?
30. Most people deeply into the community hate any new changes to the site and enjoy reverting things that aren’t vandalism all day.<==how does this make people not want to donate to WP? I don't think that it does...
31. Almost all edits on articles are vandalism, fighting over content, and reverting, rather than improving articles. Why does this need to be funded when Universities DO need funding for serious study?
32. Wikipedia will never remove old revisions and at best they hide them so a lot of their money is spent on the hard drive space to retain all text from vandalism, reverting, and edit wars This is a waste of your money.
33. Wikipedia compresses all the vandalism and garbage within old revisions all together at once so not only is it hard drive space but even more expensive processing power that uses their money.<== I would combine number 32 and 33 together, since it's basically the same thing
34. Governments and organizations pay people to edit toward their bias into articles. Are you going to fund the system of adding bias by giving money to run it? Don't you already fund this with your taxes?
35. There are reports that even administrators trusted with the highest powers are paid.
36. Wikipedia falsely considers an internet troll to be someone who disagrees with an administrator and then lets real trolls run loose, ignored by or sometimes even supported by the administration. <==again, very weak. Why would people funding WP care about this? I wouldn't
37. The administrators have the power to change history but all are anonymous by default. Who is accountable? Wikipedia and the Wikimedia foundation insist that they are not. So, who is?
38. Wikipedia is not going to help children in third world countries because the bulk of its content is in the languages of first world countries and pretty much nothing is in the rest. Wikipedia never considers the fact that people in third and fourth World countries might actually have parts of human knowledge that they don't. Why fund another neo-colonialist operation?
39. Wikipedia administrators sometimes give insulting and libelous messages as their reasons they ban you.<==Yes, but do the donors really care about this? Probably not, I would guess...
40. Most of their administrators are drunk with power. However Jimbo Wales refuses to address this problem. Why fund somebody's power trip?
41. The dispute resolution process is designed so that administrators can ban any editor long before the editor can get someone to do something about their complaint. Do you want to fund the 21st century's answer to the Salem Witch trials?
42. Wikipedia makes most of its administrative decisions in secret on its IRC channels and then back on its website its administration disavows any connection between itself and its IRC channels. What do they have to hide? Why are giving money to an organization that can't work out its problem in public?
43. Whenever you edit a wiki article, you have to watch it for the rest of your life and fight people to make sure the edit sticks, or admit you wasted your time because your edit will eventually be removed. This goes double if you are a World-renowned expert in the field discussed in the article. Some 15 year old is going to change your statement to what he saw on the Discovery Channel last night. Why does this need to be funded?
44. Wikipedia’s neutral point of view was originally designed by Larry Sanger for experts to write and article and a neutral party review it, but instead what’s called neutral is whatever the majority of the people on the site believe. If they all think that the Earth is flat, that's what the neutral point of view says. Why give your money to promote ignorance?
45. One of the main administrators, SlimVirgin, sockpuppeted on the account “Sweet Blue Water” and instead of a userpage stated it’s a blocked sock puppet, the userpage is deleted and protected from recreation. The administrators also refuse to keep a sockpuppeteer tag on SlimVirgin’s userpage, despite everyone else who socked has one.<==very weak. Why would anybody giving money care. Better to talk about her lying about her past inspite of the evidence currently available. What does she have to hide? is much more effective...
46. The “let’s change reality” type of Wikipedia thinking spilled into real life and made Pluto no longer a planet.<==um, I don't think that this can be clearly proven. I would drop this one.
47. The software design allows for if one person doesn’t like another, they can go through all their enemy’s old edits and stalk them for the editor’s personal information and things to revert.<<===Isn't that a good thing?? at least, I think so...Again, why would donors care about this?
48. Jimmy Wales and Wikipedia’s administrators always considers criticism of Wikipedia or its administrators as a personal attack and trolling. However, they themselves refuse to allow financial statements of their foundation be published. They even changed the bylaws to make this possible. Give your money to a "foundation" that provides financial statements.
49. Although Wikipedia pretends it doesn’t use voting, Wikipedia makes all its decisions based on a vote of all the non-banned accounts that bother to vote, which they call consensus. The ones that are bothered to vote most are lunatic extremists and these are who run Wikipedia from administering, to policy making, to article decisions, and even are the ones who vote for the arbitration committee and the arbitration committee are the ones who get to decide all the big decisions and they have a track record of making horrible decisions. No one is accountable for any of these decisions. Why are you funding this?
50. Jimbo Wales tries to use Wikipedia to rewrite history and claim himself as sole founder of Wikipedia. However, it is not clear what is the current relationship between Bomis (his softcore porn operation who initially funded Wikipedia), the Wikimedia foundation and Wikia (a for-profit organization whose board has several members who are on the board of the Wikimedia foundation) and Wikpedia; Indeed, it is not at all clear where the Wikimedia foundation begins and where Wikipedia stops. Go fund a real foundation with clear accounting, clear goals with no connections to venture capital and softcore porn. Why spend your money on soebody else's tax shelter?

some idea for discussion...

I found this interesting, but didn't like many of the articulations, and found many redundant, so I rewrote them. I included most of the points that I disagreed with. The parenthetical numbers are references to Lamont's originals.


SEO, Google, etc

1. Wikpedia has become the top result on Google for almost any search, giving undue credibility to what is often false or misleading information; (1,3,4)

2. Mirroring and illegitimate "scraping" of wikipedia text by spammers further aids the spread of out-of-date information. These mirrors continue to disseminate libel, slander, and scurrilous rumors about living persons; (2,4,5)

3. Wikipedia's links serve as a SEO (search engine optimizer) for big donors like Amazon, and for Wikia, the for-profit company headed by Jimmy Wales. This benefit to commercial enterprises may violate the Wikimedia Foundation's non-profit status; (6,7)


Suppression of Criticism, Abuse of Power

4. Wikipedia actively blacklists sites that are critical of the project, its administrators, and sites that may compete for donors[citation needed]; (8, 9)

5. Any criticism of Wikipedia and its administrators is called "trolling" and removed, leaving the project with few mechanisms for meaningful self-criticism and corrections. Wikipedia and its employees and admins have threatened legal action against those who have criticized it; (16,36,48)

6. Wikipedia's vociferous protection of the pseudonymity of its administrators serves to protect admins who are literally immature (i.e. teenagers), or who would be unlikely to hold positions of trust in other communities. These pseudonymous individuals are subject to no checks on conflicts or interest and other abuses; (11,18,37)

7. Powerful Wikipedia users and administrators frequently post attacks on other users, and these attacks are preserved indefinitely, smearing the online reputation of often innocent or well-meaning editors; (15,39)

8. Wikipedia's lack of formal rules or (most) policies leads to wildly inconsistent "enforcement" of its community norms, disallowing (e.g) user names that some admins don't like, while allowing very similar vandalism to stay. Powerful admins such as "SlimVirgin" are subject to different rules regarding punishment for and disclosure of sockpuppetry; (23,45)

9. Wikipedia's mechanisms for control of vandals and abusive users serve those aims poorly while reinforcing the power of the controlling elite. Abuse of "checkuser" (viewing IP addresses of users) and "oversight" removing embarassing edits from powerful users is hidden and unchecked; (29)

10. Wikipedia's dispute resolution process is unworkable and corrupt, with powerless editors often banned long before meaningful review has occurred. Wikipedia's quasi-judicial procedures are ineffective and corrupted by private lobbying, inconsitencies, changing rules, and general incompetence. (41,42)


Anti-Elitism, Poor Quality

11. Wikipedia's "everyone may edit" ethic, combined with its anti-elitism and institutionalized distrust of academic authority tends to drive away experts, leaving a core group of powerful, yet often uneducated editors; (10, 12)

12. Anti-elitism and anti-intellectualism often manifests itself in the form of condemnation, blocks and bans, and negative articles directed at intellectuals and academics who try to improve Wikipedia; (12)

13. Many Wikipedia articles are controlled by the "mob rule" of those who fixate on them, rather than more balanced or nuanced opinions of experts in the field. Wikipedia lacks any meaningful mechanism to overcome this "mob rule"; (17,25,43,44)

14. Wikipedia lowers the standards for encyclopedic information, damaging more professional and credible efforts to compile correct and complete information repositories; (13)

15. The vast majority of the edits on Wikipedia do not improve the quality of the contained information. Most are vandalism, reversion of vandalism, and edit warring over disputed points of view, none conducted in a scholarly fashion. Many resources are expended on maintaining this "noise" information. However, truly new information is very difficult to insert in many places, because of inherent conservatism and lack of exposure of most editors to academic sources; (30,31,32,33)

16. Wikipedia lacks any meaningful mechanism for detection of conflicts of interest, leading to recent revelations about paid editing of Wikipedia to insert biased information by governments, corporations, and individuals; (34)

17. Wikipedia's coverage of books and films is very inconsistent. Some provide detailed plot synopses to the point of being "spoilers", while others contain little or no useful information; (23)

18. The Wikimedia Foundation promotes wiki software for applications in which it is a poor solution, leading to many incomplete sites, and some that use the initial attractiveness of the Wiki solution to develop attack sites; (14)


Lack of/Poor Leadership

19. Wikipedia titular head, Jimmy Wales, speaks for the project while disavowing control of it. He maintains some unpopular policies through force of personality, while failing to institute others while claiming "community" opinion. Wales has used the project in attempts to burnish and whitewash his own reputation; (19,20,50)

20. Wikipedia contains photographs that are offensive to a large number of viewers, including photos of unusual sexual practices and those of nude children. Wales, a former pornographer, defends the existence of some of these photos, and not others; (20,21)


21. Wikipedia's voting practices on administratorship, articles for deletion, and other subjects, are subject to many abuses, including lobbying, vote stacking, and other forms of undue inflience. The notion of "rought community consensus", if ever valid, is now completely out of date; (49)


Legal Issues

22. Wikiedia's size and influence have made it a litigation magnet: it is only a matter of time before it will need to devote substantial resources (derived from donations) to legal defense; (26)

23. Wikipedia users have been stalked and harassed, with various negative effects. The software's edit history function makes this stalking alarmingly easy (27,28,47)


Bottom Line

24. Other projects such as Citizendium are attempting to improve on the Wikipedia model, cultivate experts, and improve quality, and are more worthy of support; (24)

That's a lot of rewriting. I hope someone takes over on this and finishes it up.

Capitalize the proper nouns, such as "Google".

I'm not taking over the re-write, but I would just say this... when I see a "top 50" list, I skip it. Too long, won't read. If there are many redundancies and weak messages, better to pare them down to a Top 20 list.

Good luck with this! I look forward to the blog post eventually.

Greg

I'm with Greg. Short, sweet and to the point.

remember, it's about why people shouldn't give money to WP, not about why we hate WP.

Gomi's list is a step in the right direction. If we can bring it down to twenty, then I think that's postable....

I saw the 10 on centaire and well I just thought it they were lacking.

Please leave that out. It's a really sensitive subject, and that's true anywhere online, including Wikipedia Review.