The Great Failure of Wikipedia
download: 20060408-jscott-wikipedia.ogg
"The Great Failure of Wikipedia": Presentation by Jason Scott at Notacon 3 in Cleveland, Ohio, on Saturday, April 8, 2006. Covers the universally-editable encyclopedia-like site Wikipedia, architectural and procedural choices by co-founder Jimbo Wales and the often-unintended consequences of these choices and philosophy. Includes short overviews of the Brian Peppers Debacle, the Ashida Kim Controversy, and the fallacy of "Notability" and "Neutral Point of View" as implemented in Wikipedia as it currently stands.
Not intended to be a "Wikipedia shouldn't exist" screed, this speech/presentation is instead a quick-paced, profane listing of the results of Wikipedia's great experiment and how reality is changing the endeavor inherently and permanently.
Jason Scott runs TEXTFILES.COM and has made a number of essays and statements regarding Wikipedia at his weblog, ascii.textfiles.com.
Internet Archive: Free Download: The Great Failure of Wikipedia
Back in July, Justin Hall created a Wikipedia entry for me. I found this very peculiar. I was also mildly intrigued by how i was described in such a setting. Since then, some of my colleagues have edited the entry and my advisors have taunted me continuously. The most that i could say was weird weird weird.
apophenia » Blog Archive » on being notable in Wikipedia
I have written about the Wikipedia deletionist movement before. Deletionism, i.e. groups of editors who scroll the Wikipedia in order to propose articles for deletion, is based on a fundamentally faulty premise, namely that a online universal encyclopedia should be based on scarcity, and that there is no place for diversity and knowledge that is build on the edge. It also suffers from the intellectual ignorance of many editors, who have become arrogant through their power to delete. Finally, some of the objective rules required to avoid deletion, can easily be misused by people with an agenda. Scores of good articles, offering a wide variety of balanced citations from different sources, have become hagiographies because supporters of particular schools of thought, use the formal rules to censor out critique.
P2P Foundation » Blog Archive » On the deletion of scholar Ralph Siu by the ‘Wikipedia lynch mobs’
So apparently Wikipedia's Impulse Tracker article was recently reinstated, after having been deleted in December. To be fair, it was brought to my attention quite some time ago that some people who have administrative rights on Wikipedia have decided that it wasn't worth an article. A couple of people were urging me to "do something" about it. (Which would be... what, register for Wikipedia to paste it back in?)
Now I'll start off by noting that I have no objection to some Wikipedia article being deleted, in itself; Wikipedia can add or remove whatever content they want, and it really won't affect me too much. A few years ago, the Schism Tracker article was also deleted for being non-notable, then later reinstated, and deleted again. The reason for deletion was that it lacked (among other silly requirements) "news coverage in reliable sources." What? That's such a stupid reason to delete an article. I really doubt that, say, Evince or even xterm ever had a segment on NBC Nightly News, but I think they're entirely worth their own articles.)
However, I think the discussion on the deletion page ought to be enough to show that the people involved have no idea what they're discussing, and this is the part that bothers me tremendously.
Impulse Tracker Graveyard
While researching my next article about the Lockerbie bombing, I witnessed an incident that made me wonder whether intelligence agents had infiltrated Wikipedia.
Anyone who knows the universal success of Wikipedia will immediately grasp the importance of the issue. The fact that most Internet search engines, such as Google, give Wikipedia articles top ranking only raises the stakes to a higher level.
Wikipedia and the Intelligence Services - OhmyNews International