Monday, September 1, 2008

Corruption of Wikipedia (http://wikicensored.info/)

Wikipedia gains its power by hosting a large amount of useful information (prominently ranked by search engines) that is tightly controlled by censorship.

However, according to Paulo Correa, Alexandra Correa and Malgosia Askanas [2005]:

If the “ranking” users - those that are more equal than the others - do not attain this position based on their expertise, what, then, is their “rank” based on? It is based on their devotion to Wikipedia-itself-as-social-dogma, on the amount of time they spend dutifully performing tedious maintenance chores, on their bureaucratic zealotry and their policial aspirations. In other words, in Wikipedia, ultimate decisions about what constitutes “encyclopedic fact” and what constitutes “vandalism” devolve to a cadre of Internet bureaucrats with no other qualifications than their devotion to Wikipedianism.…One of the main problems stems precisely from the fact that Wikipedia's de-facto arbiters of what constitutes “science”, “information”, “fact”, “knowledge” - those who make it into the ranks of Wikipedia administrators, and who have the time and persistence to win any “edit war” - are Internet technobureaucrats without any actual love of knowledge or any respect for those who spend their life fighting for it. What these people mean by “knowledge” is a certain type of mainstream opinion, shaped by the latest trends in Google, Nature, Wired, NASA, the Sierra Club, etc. Wikipedia, in spite of its much-waved banner of “Neutral Point of View”, is permeated by a systemic bias. “Neutral point of view”, in Wikipedia, denotes a point of view that represents the 70th-percentile “consensus” of Web 2.0 technobureaucratic opinion.(emphases added)

This article explores issues regarding the corruption of Wikipedia.

Please see the article at Corruption of Wikipedia