I suppose I could have worded that better. What is it about Wikipedia that you dislike or majorly disagree with? I've noticed that there are a lot of different viewpoints here and I was curious to see what your thoughts were.

For some reason, when n00b new members start threads like this, it always ends badly. Probably because people just assume the person is either too lazy to read the existing threads, or else has some sort of hidden agenda... I usually try to give people the benefit of the doubt, though!

Anyway, Wikipedia creates an attractive nuisance by placing a publicly-editable website receiving preferential Google rankings on the interwebs where anyone with an axe to grind or a stupid grudge or some other insane notion or other can libel anyone or anything they want to get their petty revenge against them without spending a dime, and no effective preventative measures are taken against them whatsoever. Instead, it irresponsibly exploits thousands of so-called "volunteers," many of whom are children, whom we're asked to trust to repair the damage done by the aforementioned axe-grinders and revenge-grabbers, or perhaps even worse, we're asked to "fix it" ourselves, as if we have the time to monitor these things every second of every day without being paid, and even if we were to do so we'd be subjected to all kinds of asinine personal abuses and endless bickering by anonymous, unaccountable people whom the Wikimedia Foundation seems to think are all just wonderful, so wonderful that they'd throw them under the bus in a heartbeat and give up whatever they know about them to anyone who threatens even a smallest amount of legal action.

That's still a few lines too long, though. I'll try to shorten it some more...

Here is my contribution to cataloging these issues. Please read it first. Amazing how little has changed in 18 months or more.

In brief:

• Wikipedia is written by people who shouldn't be writing authoritative articles on anything - not even themselves.
• The people who should be writing authoritative articles don't do so because they will get banned.
• Open collaboration between strangers is a sure recipe for conflict and the production of casualties
• Administration is done in a haphazard way by winners of the MMORPG. Real life ability rarely has anything to do with it.
• No-one takes responsibility for anything except the people who actually produce original content who get ripped off - a recent example
• Truth is not an emergent property of anarchy and ignorance. War is.
• Value judgments should not be made by people yet to decide on their life skills, career or sexual orientation
• Scholarship is not an emergent property of Google searches or obsessive compulsive disorders
• History is the first casualty of war and Wikipedia is in a constant conflict to produce carefully worded propaganda
• Wikipedia is a demonstration that, given enough monkeys and enough keyboards, the Internet accepts monkey crap and broken keyboards instead of authoritative sourced information just so long as its free

Thank you for reminding me of this

http://wikipediareview.com/blog/20080104/c...s-of-wikipedia/

they give trolls power

See Reasons Why Wikipedia is a Gigantic Threat to Civilization.

On this morning after the death of Walter Cronkite, the contrast between his ethic and the profound lack of media ethics at Wikipedia could not be more starkly apparent.

Cronkite earned a deserved reputation as the most trusted voice in journalism in the 20th Century.

Wikipedia may rank as the most prominent untrustworthy source in the modern era of mass media.

While it's not an authoritative documentation of my gripes, a good deal of my contentions with Wikipedia (and more specifically its management by the Wikimedia Foundation) are summarized here.

My only remaining interest in Wikipedia is how it impacts on innocent third parties and the wider culture. This makes me unusually (for this forum) disinterested and even impatient with internal politics, wonkery, the vanities of "editing" and wiki personalities. My interests tends to be on matters of child protection, BLP victims, and "free culture's"erosion of other cultural and social institutions. This often takes the form of interest in litigation, outside advocacy, content reliability, pov mistreatment of unpopular "out-groups" and the operation of WMF as a non-profit.

oh? i was perhaps mistakenly under the impression that if it was not for him, America could have had more success in the Vietnam War, and it might not have been the blood bath it had been once we had pulled out.

I'm with you GBG.

Ahh... So you're the one.

Write a article - put it on wikipedia - then spend forever defending it
not just from vandals - but from well-meaning innocents
who feel that it does not conform with how they think reality should be
- -
Problem is, thanks to googles preference, many get their information from wikipedia

So far as I am concerned, there is no problem with Wikipedia as such. Wikipedia is full of crap, libel, misinformation, highly dysfunctional personalities, etc. Welcome to the internet, what did you expect? There are a million (maybe a billion) websites of lower quality than Wikipedia.

The problem is with Google. Wikipedia ranks way higher than those billion other sites, so people see all the crap on Wikipedia. The second problem is with the general public who believe the stuff on Wikipedia and think it's a good resource. I think the real problem here isn't that people trust Wikipedia; it's that they trust whatever turns up first on Google.

So, to sum up, if Wikipedia ranked low on Google, it would still be a pile of crap, but no one would give a damn and it would just be irrelevant. Because it's the internet crap that happens to do best on Google, Wikipedia is a problem and we have to care.

Ah.....then we can thank Google for this situation. In which case, is it even remotely possible that, maybe, Daniel Brandt was right all along, and Google is the greatest threat to peace, stability and freedom on the net?


Funny you mention that. Cronkite's corpse wasn't even cold, before the vilest-of-all-trolls on Free Republic started cursing his memory. That's the glory of the net, the dedicated asshole can find a readership, no matter how full of shit he really is. (And here is Cronkite himself, explaining why he did the Tet offensive editorial. Doesn't sound like the ravings of a "lefty America-hater" to me.....)

That's arguably true (I tend to think that it's false, but I'm also a filthy hippie), but unless your version of "media ethics" involves "withholding information from the public in order to maintain public support for a war that would, were all facts known, be extremely unpopular", this is no slight against his ethics.

Still, though, my sincere compliments on making a coherent point, and with only one emoticon no less.

So it wasn't the ineffective tactics, abysmal leadership, poorly trained troops, lack of a coherent strategy, and the failed state that we were fighting alongside that lead to defeat, it was Walter Cronkite! I knew it!

It wasn't just the American's defeat Walter caused but those of the French, Japanese, more French, Ming Chinese and Mongols as well.

Yes. It's me. Though there may be others...



So one problem is not that Wikipedia is crap (we know it is- but it's not alone), it's the authority given to the crap, by Google, but also by all sorts of others who should know better?

We need better looking admins. For every LaraLove or Tim Vickers who gives us a sugar rush of eye candy, there are at least 50 admins who look like they were created by Jim Henson. That needs to change!

You're such a one trick pony.

Lar, please stop beating a dead...oh, wait a minute.