This story appears to be getting legs. They're gee-ing up the WikiTroops against me.

Now is the time for all good Wikipedia Reviewers to come to the aid of your cause.

Ben Moskowitz is currently offline Ben Moskowitz
Messages: 26
Registered: May 2009
Junior Member

he's a regular on the wikimedia foundation-l list.

maybe we should strike back, and comment negatively every time a
gregory kohs article appears...

On Feb 5, 2010, at 11:31 AM, Adi Kamdar wrote:

> On an interesting side note, whenever there's an article about
> Wikipedia anywhere on the internet, you're sure to have a "Gregory
> Kohs" comment on it right away (e.g. in the McGill article. He also
> commented when Jimbo came to Yale this year). His comments are
> usually negative. In fact, always negative. I'm not sure what he
> does, but he definitely has some google news alert or rss search
> going on so whenever anybody writes about wikipedia, he'll be first
> to strike.
>
> Semi-relatedly,
> -Adi

How ironic. Professor Taner Akcam was traveling from Minnesota to McGill University to deliver a lecture, but he was detained for several hours by airport security who didn't like the cut of his Wikipedia biography's jib.

McGill Tribune
Students Supporting Wikipedia, a new McGill club, officially received its interim club status on January 21. The group aims to raise money for the Wikipedia ...

"And do not forget the petty scoundrels in this regime; note their names, so that none will go free! They should not find it possible, having had their part in these abominable crimes, at the last minute to rally to another flag and then act as if nothing had happened!"
-- From the fourth leaflet of the White Rose Resistance in Germany, 1942. Five students and a professor who wrote and distributed the leaflets were executed in 1943.

"There was some disagreement over what the added value would be and whether this was something SSMU should support," said Olle. "We put [the application] aside and then we reviewed about four more applications, and in the course of reviewing those applications, we used Wikipedia about six times to look up things in the applications."

Heaven forbid they might actually have to go to the library! Then they might have felt compelled to start a club called "Students Supporting Their Own Library."

"It kind of sells itself," said Dillon Beaulne, a club executive. "One of our ideas is to put a donation box in the library and just write, 'If you used Wikipedia today, put in a quarter. With that selling point during exam time or essay writing time in McClennan or Schulich, it's going to get filled up because people use it."

Doesn't he mean "it's going to get filled up because people who do whatever a sign on a box says they should do use it"?

This story appears to be getting legs. They're gee-ing up the WikiTroops against me.

Now is the time for all good Wikipedia Reviewers to come to the aid of your cause.

It's quite one thing to warn students about the accuracy of Wikipedia as a source. But even more important is warning students about the dangers of contributing to Wikipedia without knowing the kind of place it is. The ethics of Wikipedia are also something that needs to be on the table.

You do all realize that Wikipedia maintains biographies of living people, and that the living people who are the subjects, have no control of these articles? If you attempt to control an article about yourself, that's a recipe for being banned from the site. A recent study shows that of these 430,000 biographies (170 new ones each day) only 7% can be found anywhere in print, including Who's Who. The other 93% are people about as notable as McGill professors.

In fact, WP presently has articles on 168 McGill faculty: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:McGi...versity_faculty. About half of these have passed away or are emeritus, but the other half are still teaching.

I see that math professor David Avis' bio started with his exact date of birth. Did he add that himself, or not? Who knows? Gregory Baum, a McGill theology prof, was once a Catholic priest until he married a nun and was defrocked (oh dear). That's no longer in his bio, but once was. And did you know that Thomas Chang, on the medical faculty at McGill "is the most balla s**t ever?" According to Wikipedia on January 12, this was true. It was quickly reverted by a robot, but had the last vulgarity not been used, it would have lasted longer. Norman Cornett was dismissed from his post at McGill, "apparently for his unorthodox teaching methods." Wups, now POSSIBLY for this unorthodox teaching methods. McGill says not, though.(Hmmm).

That gets me through the letter "C". You all can finish this yourselves if you've the patience and stomach. After all, you'll be watching out for yourselves for the rest of your academic lives, if it happens to you. My point is that Wikipedia is not just of interest because it can be unreliable about dry academic facts. It's also unreliable about anybody, and anybody can include YOU, you McGill teachers. What goes around, eventually comes around. If you GET IT, perhaps you can now put back on your mortarboards and thinking caps, and cogitate some more on the problems of a thing like Wikipedia.

Interesting notes from "RateMyProfessor.com" about professor "Landrum Kelly":

"He is an easy professor. Do the online quizzes and you should do fine. Masive curve. Just act like you are trying and he will give you an A."

"this man has lost his mind. likes to tell depressing stories in class. curves grades ALOT. tests come almost word for word from the online exercises, so do them! so far as learning material, you might as well just do it on your own."

I wonder if that's the same "landrumkelly" posting responses here that indicate Wikipedia is "getting better", even though a University of Minnesota study found that the rate of finding a "damaged view" of any Wikipedia article was increasing on what appears to be an early power law curve?

More info on the increasingly breakable Wikipedia:
http://chance.dartmouth.edu/chancewiki/ind...le_Wikipedia.3F