still has the energy to respond in detail to that brand of recycled Mimbo Jimbo.
4. seth_finkelstein - January 09, 2011 at 01:24 pm
I'm not an academic. But as a longtime observer and critic of Wikipedia, I'd contend that academics who support it are cutting their own throats. You make what I call the “extortion†argument — that Wikipedia is so popular that sophisticated professionals must work for it for free, donating their scarce time and energy to bail-out its failings (e.g. articles can be vandalized at any time by anyone, so must be constantly defended against this vulnerability). But you're doing this for an organization which will then strip out any credit for the unpaid effort, disrespect your expertise in the process of requiring you to constantly argue with cranks and bureaucrats, and you'll see this all turned around as an argument cut your funding. As well as having the main promoter go around asking a $50,000–$75,000 speaking fee for telling a story to businesspeople about the possibility of getting others to do the same thing. I assert there is something wrong with this picture.
As a technical note, when you talk of a “tenfold increase in Wikipedia-referred traffic†that's the sort of factoid which often gets echoed without any checking or context. Wikipedia articles are often re-used by spam websites, so it's entirely possible to have the entire traffic increase be from the activity of web crawlers and site scrapers. At the very least, there should be some burden on the claimant to investigate this, as it currently reads like a marketing pitch.
Note the links to your site might only last until someone, anyone, in the entire world, decides you have may have violated Wikipedia's many, many, article policies, and then drags you into a long, long, discussion about whether you have a “conflict of interest†and are being self-promotional.
I'll also leave a link, to a column I wrote:
“
Inside, Wikipedia is more like a sweatshop than Santa's workshopâ€
