Stupid People Freaking Out About the Great (Intended) Wikipedia Blackout of 2012
To be expected, and I think Gawker has found some of the best ones:
Youth is no excuse … I call the members of this generation (and their educators) who are so confused, the WikiStupid.
Missing Wikipedia? Here’s How You Can Access It
As most Internet users already know, leading Internet companies like Google, Wikipedia, and Craigslist are protesting the SOPA legislation very publicly today, with Wikipedia totally blacked out. But, if you really, really need to access Wikipedia today, they have kindly explained how to come in through the back door:
Is it still possible to access Wikipedia in any way?
Yes. During the blackout, Wikipedia is accessible on mobile devices and smart phones. You can also view Wikipedia normally by disabling JavaScript in your browser, as explained on this Technical FAQ page. Our purpose here isn’t to make it completely impossible for people to read Wikipedia, and it’s okay for you to circumvent the blackout. We just want to make sure you see our message.
Wikipedia Censoring 9/11 Truth
Whatever editorial credibility Wikipedia may once have had, this report in the New York Times totally destroys it:
As the nation marked this terrible anniversary, people invariably turned to Wikipedia to learn about the events of Sept. 11, 2001. Nearly two million page views were registered last September for the article “September 11 Attacks,” a typically Wikipedian effort with exhaustive, even picayune, details of the events, bolstered by nearly 289 footnotes. This September, the total page view number could be something like six million.
Likewise, readers have repeatedly turned to the article “9/11 Conspiracy Theories.” The article — similarly detailed with 299 footnotes purporting to explain accusations of faked video footage or controlled demolition of the two buildings — had 400,000 page views last September, and is on pace to have more than a million views this year.
One thing is certain, however. Not one of those visitors got to the conspiracy theories page…
Selling Wikipedia Pages As Kindle eBooks
This article identifies a supposed ebook “author” whose 887 different ebooks were all apparently cut-and-pasted directly from Wikipedia entries!
The “WikiFocus” series targets obscure niches with few competing ebooks, like Hello Kitty, Aquaman, or the comic strip Archie.
“Of the 887 ebooks, all but 10 earned terrible reviews, averaging one star or less,” this article notes, “or received no reviews at all.”
A typical review? “This ‘book’ is just a word for word copy of the Wikipedia page.”
(And a least one other “author” has attempt the same trick, trying to pass off a Wikipedia page about Charlie Sheen as an $18.95 biography!)
The 404 Attacks – Meme or Scheme?
Photo: Mr.Bigg23 (CC)
[UPDATE: the Wikipedia page has been deleted.]
A Wikipedia article that’s been the subject of some internal argument there (based on the fact that much associated with this meme is by its nature unverifiable) was brought to my attention by one of the readers of my books. I can’t say I’m entirely enthusiastic about the possible uses that this thing might be put to in the hands of a group like Anon — though it seems to already be “their” M.O. anyway, and the dis-organization is structured along the same lines as the fictitious (?) “Mother Hive Brain” in a way that’s always amused me more than a little. In a world teetering on the brink, and in the midst of issues such as “NymWars,” this topic at the least seems finally ripe for discussion as well as action. From Wikipedia:
In practice, the 404 Attacks are a technique for disseminating…
Robots May Get Their Own Internet
Photo: Lorenzo Natale (CC)
Is this the beginning of machines relying on machines? BBC News reports:
Robots could soon have an equivalent of the internet and Wikipedia.
European scientists have embarked on a project to let robots share and store what they discover about the world.
Called RoboEarth it will be a place that robots can upload data to when they master a task, and ask for help in carrying out new ones.
Researchers behind it hope it will allow robots to come into service more quickly, armed with a growing library of knowledge about their human masters.
The idea behind RoboEarth is to develop methods that help robots encode, exchange and re-use knowledge, said RoboEarth researcher Dr Markus Waibel from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich.
“Most current robots see the world their own way and there’s very little standardisation going on,” he said. Most researchers using robots typically develop their own way for that…
Rush Limbaugh: Wikipedia Hypocrite
So Rush, is Wikipedia reliable, or not? Report from Gawker:
“Everybody in the world knows you don’t believe anything on Wikipedia,” Rush Limbaugh told his listeners last year. So, uh, it must be embarrassing for him that he just used Wikipedia as a source—and got his facts wrong.
On Tuesday, Limbaugh told his listeners about Judge Roger Vinson, of the Federal District Court in Pensacola, Florida, is presiding over a legal challenge to the country’s new health-care reform law. Here’s a transcript, quoting liberally from Vinson’s Wikipedia article:
Who is this judge? Judge Clyde Roger Vinson is a Ronald Reagan appointee. Judge Clyde Roger Vinson is an avid hunter. He’s an amateur taxidermist. Do you know what a taxidermist is? That’s right. For our liberal caller today, this would not be good news. A taxidermist stuffs dead game. If you go into a big, all-male club, you’ll see some moose head over the…
A History Of The Iraq War, Through Wikipedia Edits
Here’s how you write history in the contentious twenty-first century. Every edit made to the Wikipedia page The Iraq War, published as a bound, multi-volume set. Via booktwo:
This particular book—or rather, set of books—is every edit made to a single Wikipedia article, The Iraq War, during the five years between the article’s inception in December 2004 and November 2009, a total of 12,000 changes and almost 7,000 pages.
It amounts to twelve volumes: the size of a single old-style encyclopaedia. It contains arguments over numbers, differences of opinion on relevance and political standpoints, and frequent moments when someone erases the whole thing and just writes “Saddam Hussein was a dickhead”.
This is historiography. This is what culture actually looks like: a process of argument, of dissenting and accreting opinion, of gradual and not always correct codification.
And for the first time in history, we’re building a system that, perhaps only for a brief…
Wikipedia Editing Courses Launched By Pro-Israeli Cause Groups
Rachel Shabi writes in the Guardian:
Since the earliest days of the worldwide web, the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians has seen its rhetorical counterpart fought out on the talkboards and chatrooms of the internet.
Now two Israeli groups seeking to gain the upper hand in the online debate have launched a course in “Zionist editing” for Wikipedia, the online reference site.
Yesha Council, representing the Jewish settler movement, and the rightwing Israel Sheli (My I srael) movement, ran their first workshop this week in Jerusalem, teaching participants how to rewrite and revise some of the most hotly disputed pages of the online reference site.
“We don’t want to change Wikipedia or turn it into a propaganda arm,” says Naftali Bennett, director of the Yesha Council. “We just want to show the other side. People think that Israelis are mean, evil people who only want to hurt Arabs all day.”
Wikipedia is one of the…
FBI Vs. Wikipedia: Round One
The New York Times seemingly delights in ridiculing the FBI (careful you mainstream media guys, you may be biting the hand that feeds…):
The Federal Bureau of Investigation has taken on everyone from Al Capone to John Dillinger to the Unabomber. Its latest adversary: Wikipedia.
The bureau wrote a letter in July to the Wikimedia Foundation, the parent organization of Wikipedia, demanding that it take down an image of the F.B.I. seal accompanying an article on the bureau, and threatened litigation: “Failure to comply may result in further legal action. We appreciate your timely attention to this matter.”
The problem, those at Wikipedia say, is that the law cited in the F.B.I.’s letter is largely about keeping people from flashing fake badges or profiting from the use of the seal, and not about posting images on noncommercial Web sites. Many sites, including the online version of the Encyclopedia Britannica, display the seal.
Other organizations might simply back down. But…
Volunteers Log Off as Wikipedia Ages
Julia Angwin and Geoffrey Fowler report for the Wall Street Journal:
Wikipedia.org is the fifth-most-popular Web site in the world, with roughly 325 million monthly visitors. But unprecedented numbers of the millions of online volunteers who write, edit and police it are quitting.
That could have significant implications for the brand of democratization that Wikipedia helped to unleash over the Internet — the empowerment of the amateur.
Volunteers have been departing the project that bills itself as “the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit” faster than new ones have been joining, and the net losses have accelerated over the past year. In the first three months of 2009, the English-language Wikipedia …
