Piling on…
From the /. comments, here’s another Wikipedia scandal I’d never heard of…
At some point I picked up in slashdot comments about the whole antisocialmedia.net / Gary Weiss / Judd Bagley / Overstock.com mess and decided I was interested enough to spend the time (several hours) reading everything I could about it and trying to figure out what the heck was going on. I haven’t got the several hours more it would take to try to recreate and document my findings here in a slashdot post, but I came into this with no preconceived notions, and if I had any leanings, I really like wikipedia and wanted it to be in the right. But I mostly concluded otherwise. Yes, Judd Bagley took many inappropriate actions- but who cares, he’s just some guy. It looks like Wikipedia took many more incorrect actions, and it’s a foundation that is supposed to behave appropriately.
I found the documentation of rampant editorial abuse to pursue personal agendas, going all the way up the support of Jimbo, to be very convincing. Read anitsocialmedia.net, examine the documentation, look at attempts to counter Bagley’s arguments on the web, and draw your own conclusions, but I came off extremely disappointed in Wikipedia, and will be even more suspicious of its content in the future. I already was prepared to take Wikipedia content with a grain of salt because it can be edited by anyone, but it’s much worse to know that an editor can have their own petty dictatorial custodianship of an article where they deliberately delete well documented and referenced relevant facts, perpetuate falsehoods, don’t let anyone else edit it or even discuss it on the discussion page, ban even extremely well-established editors with good reputations if they try to touch these articles, and even delete the history of the article and the history of their own edits and contributions. I still think wikipedia’s valuable, because most articles aren’t run this way, but I always have to keep in mind that some are, and I don’t really know if I’m looking at something people were free to edit and debate on the talk page and try to work towards a consensus on, or the biased opinions of a single dictatorial editor.
Frankly, I still love Wikipedia, but I do believe they really have gotten away from what this wiki thing was all about. There are now so many layers and structures, rules and regs, it runs the risk of imploding. Which is perfectly fine — someone will take up the mantle, and the GFDL‘d content, and the community will keep on keepin’ on…
Hopefully sooner rather than later…