[Web4lib] Wikipedia vs Britannica

[Patricia F Anderson]

Here is another example of where something like what Chuck describes has 
happened.

<http://www.wikipedia-watch.org/>

Other related examples. NOTE: I am not saying these items should be there, 
just that this is a topic to consider. The banned pages I stumbled on 
duplicated content elsewhere in Wikipedia, which seemed fair to me.

<http://www.cadenhead.org/workbench/news/2818>

<http://www.seanbonner.com/blog/archives/001944.php>

And the flip side:

Vandals, Administrators, and Sockpuppets, Oh My! An Ethnographic Study of 
Wikipedia's Handling of Problem Behavior / Michael Lorenzen 
<http://www.michaellorenzen.com/wikipedia.html>

So, real, but no real idea how common. One source suggests these are 
normal growing pains and will be corrected by folks like us making people 
aware of them and working to correct them.

-- Patricia Anderson, pfa at umich.edu

On Thu, 15 Dec 2005, Chuck0 wrote:

> Drew, Bill wrote:
>> Under what conditions were you banned?  I have edited several for
>> corrected content without any problems.
>
> I do not like being put on the spot with a question like that.
>
> I made yet another attempt to correct false information that is being added 
> to an entry by a handful of Wiki-zealots. An analogy to what I did might be 
> if I found a section about how Jesus created fossils in the entry for 
> "evolution" and deleted it. The people who added that section with bogus 
> information are "watching" the article, they notice my changes, "revert" them 
> back, and then enlist an "admin" friend to ban my IP after I remove the bogus 
> information.
>
> This goes on all the time on Wikipedia. This is the ugly side of Wikipedia 
> and it is a serious problem.
>
> Chuck
> _______________________________________________
> Web4lib mailing list
> Web4lib at webjunction.org
> http://lists.webjunction.org/web4lib/
>
>
>