Youth is no excuse … I call the members of this generation (and their educators) who are so confused, the WikiStupid.

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.

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 by making a hypertext leap from a link in the main article about the Sept. 11 attacks. There is simply no mention of these theories, deemed fringe ideas, which have been repeatedly and officially discredited. They are written up in a variety of articles on Wikipedia, but they are kept on the fringe of the site.

This is no accident, but rather a Wikipedia policy concerning a topic as fraught with emotion as the Sept. 11 attacks. Thus the so-called gatekeepers of the media world — prominent newspapers, television news programs, newsweeklies — have an unlikely ally in Wikipedia, which bills itself as the encyclopedia anyone can edit…

[continues in the New York Times]

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!)

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 disinformation through various networks. The campaign thus far seems to be organized through mIRC, various message boards, and relatively small circles of culture jammers. The project in general, much like Operation Mindfuck, leads an outsider to an immediate double bind scenario: The only safe assumption is that everything that is read or disseminated globally through various media networks, especially but not limited to the internet, is false or a part of the 404 Attacks- However, this is not really a safe assumption at all, as it lends itself to widespread paranoia and skepticism at the very least.

Motives behind each individual’s level of participation vary across the board. Typically these motives include, but are not limited to: Increasing awareness, pulling the curtain back on the art of persuasion/”mind control”, increasing chaos in systems that tend towards homeostasis, and Doing It For The Lulz.

Techniques include, but are not limited to, strategic application of art crime (graffiti campaigns, reality tunnel manipulation, guerilla theater, etc.), meme dissemination, social engineering and production of media designed to disrupt traditional thought patterns in subhuman primates.

The first cited use of the 404 attacks was in the novel Fallen Nation, an excerpt of which, explaining the 404 concept, can be found here. Briefly quoting the excerpt:

How did this snowball? You’ll have to inspect my recent entries. In the time left in this incarnation, I can say this much…The net crackled here and there with chatter, frankly predicting the complete destruction of corporate and governmental information architecture by agents unknown. No one knew how or why this would happen, or even questioned the meme’s credibility; they just passed it on, working it into their conversations without gravity.

Looking back, it was the quietly asserted inevitability of the ‘404 attacks’ in these messages that in turn made the events inevitable. Whoever spread those initial communications is a genius of memetic engineering. Anyone with the motivation and skills to bring chaos to the infrastructure, receiving the meme, would immediately conclude that they were not alone, others had the same plans, and all they had to do was help it along. Soon artists, bands, hackers, and pretty much all those disenfranchised by the present regime passed this anarchistic mantra amongst themselves. What a joke. I doubt that the original authors had anything in the oven, save prodding everyone else into action.

In the novel, it is utilized by the fictional ontological terrorist organization ”The Mother Hive Brain Syndicate.” It has since been picked up by the hacker collective Anonymous.

(Full disclosure: Following Wikipedia’s guidelines I neither created nor edited this article because I’m associated with some of the original sources. I would otherwise change several inaccuracies.)

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 machine to build up a corpus of data about the world.

[Continues at BBC News]

“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 fireplace. A taxidermist is responsible for it. “After a 2002 hunting trip during which he killed three brown bears, Vinson had their heads mounted over the door through which defendants must pass to enter the courtroom. At the time Vinson said the sight of the severed bear heads would ‘instill the fear of God’ into the accused. The heads were removed in June 2003,” it didn’t even take a year (laughing) “following complaints by local defendants’ rights groups.”

What a scary, conservative-sounding judge! Too bad none of that is true…

[continues at Gawker]

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 time but certainly for the moment, is capable of recording every single one of those infinitely valuable pieces of information. Everything should have a history button. We need to talk about historiography, to surface this process, to challenge absolutist narratives of the past, and thus, those of the present and our future.

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 world’s most popular websites, and its 16m entries are open for anyone to edit, rewrite or even erase. The problem, according to Ayelet Shaked of Israel Sheli, is that online, pro-Israeli activists are vastly outnumbered by pro-Palestinian voices. “We don’t want to give this arena to the other side,” she said. “But we are so few and they are so many. People in the US and Europe never hear about Israel’s side, with all the correct arguments and explanations.”

Read More: Guardian

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 Wikipedia sent back a politely feisty response, stating that the bureau’s lawyers had misquoted the law. “While we appreciate your desire to revise the statute to reflect your expansive vision of it, the fact is that we must work with the actual language of the statute, not the aspirational version” that the F.B.I. had provided.

Michael Godwin, the general counsel of the Wikimedia Foundation, wrote, “we are prepared to argue our view in court.” He signed off, “with all appropriate respect.”

An F.B.I. spokesman, William Carter, said that such letters go out “from time to time” from the office of general counsel.

“You can’t use the F.B.I. seal, by law, unless you have the permission of the F.B.I. director,” he said.

Cindy Cohn, the legal director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, called the dust-up both “silly” and “troubling”; Wikipedia has a First Amendment right to display the seal, she said…

[continues in the New York Times]

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 …