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<img alt="" height="1" width="1" />[b]Wikipedia and NIH Will Collaborate on Future Online Health ...[/b]
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By Catalin Cimpanu, Web News Editor Yesterday, July 16th, members and contributors for the Wikimedia Foundation, owner of Wikipedia, met with National ...

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This may be the "intention" of the people attending the conference, but I assure you that this will never become a widespread Wikipedia community policy of any sort.



The NIH has no earthly idea the rat's nest in which they're settling.

Exactly right Greg, and here is the reason:



This group, momentarily well intended away from the insular "community" has no ability to deleiver any kind of reform, including assuring that NIH could possibly collaborate without the usual kind of mistreatment received by experts. These "Academies" are meant to be PR puff events to stem criticism. Despite this any kind of structured interactions between and Wikipedians and outsider are valuable, if only because the raised expectations, later dashed, will tend to build external pressure.

Wait, the Wikimedia Foundation owns Wikipedia? I thought they explicitly disavowed any sort of ownership of or control over Wikipedia....

Of course they own the domain wikipedia.org, but your wider point about accountability, diffusion and even slide of hand is, as always, well taken.

It's more a sort of equivocation: Wikimedia has nothing to do with Wikipedia whenever someone is upset with something on Wikipedia that Jimmy doesn't want to change, but Wikimedia owns Wikipedia whenever Jimmy thinks he can use it to get either money or positive press attention.

It's behavior like this that gave rise to the doctrine of equitable estoppel, and one of these days that's going to bite them in the butt.

I never heard this mentioned at any point in the conference, I think the author of that piece was a little confused. As you say, that idea is not a realistic goal.

"Tom Vickers" indeed,

By "Catalin Cimpanu". I guess that's what we get when we outsource English news writing to Romanians.

If only it were a Wiki!

Yes, then it could be corrected. Then "corrected" back. Then fight over how to word the incorrect claim. Then correct it again. Then "correct" it back once again. Then watch it get republished all over the Internet by scraper sites, since it's freely licensed. That would be such an improvement to this one copyrighted mistake, attributable to a single, identifiable, non-notable journalist. You think I'm kidding?

Thanks for pointing that mistake out, most helpful of you. If you want to do more fact-checking in the future I think there's a Wikiproject devoted to that, you might consider signing up sometime.

So that my checked facts can be "fixed back" at some point in the future, and so that I support a financial system that pays tax-advantaged dollars as rent to the privately-held company launched by the Foundation's founder?

Yeah... thanks, but no thanks.

Sock it to them Greg! No editing unless it profits you.

Hey, sbrown, way to go! You missed point #1, and you missed point #2.