rigorousintuition.ca

"We aren't democratic." That's how Wikipedia founder Jimmy "Jimbo" Wales described his famously-collaborative online encyclopedia in a recent puff piece from The New York Times Magazine. "The core community appreciates when someone is knowledgeable," he said, "and thinks some people are idiots and shouldn't be writing."

This is true. Despite its popular reputation as a Web 2.0 wonderland, Wikipedia is not a democracy. But the totalitarian attitudes of the site's ruling clique go much further than Jimbo cares to acknowledge.

In early September, the Wikipedia inner circle banned edits from 1,000 homes and one massive online retailer in an attempt to suppress the voice of one man.

His name is Judd Bagley, and when the ban came down, he hadn't edited Wikipedia in over a year. He was merely writing about the site, from his own domain. The Wikipedia elite blacklisted Judd Bagley because he accused them of using their powers to hijack reality.

<link to full story>

This is a fascinating story thanks for sharing!

and timely given Hugh's recent thread on which disinformation techniques are being used.

The mere fact that this happened is worthy of our considered thinking as to WHY it happened and WHAT it might reveal about disinformation.

I don't know if anyone has seen this or whether it has been posted on RI already.

It is an article from a recent edition of Nexus titled The Truths and Lies of WikiWorld

The lead-in comment in the article sums it up:

Since its creation in 2001, Wikipedia has grown as the online phenomenon that apparently allows the truth to be managed democratically; but over the past year it has also been exposed as a real-life "Ministry of Truth". Worse: people have been arrested and terrorised due to incorrect information being posted on this free Internet encyclopaedia.

woooah! good article dazzle, thanks!

Fascinating take on this from Bagley. The charges here are profound. Thanks to JR for pointing me to this on another thread.

http://antisocialmedia.net/lecture1/player.html

bks wrote:Fascinating take on this from Bagley. The charges here are profound. Thanks to JR for pointing me to this on another thread.

http://antisocialmedia.net/lecture1/player.html

I'm seven minutes into this very educational lecture.. thanks for the link, bks

this: http://rigorousintuition.ca/board/viewtopic.php?t=23335 from professorpan (posted, i noticed, at 11:11 this morning).

To get a sense of how transparenly totalitarian (and how ripe with disinfo it is), go to the the wikipedia pages for False Memory, DID, or SRA. Then take a look at the discussion pages and history pages. Withing that little universe of WP pages, you will see the same cast of names banding together, bullying other users and generally presenting a deeply, deeply skewed version of reality, all the while claiming that anyone who posts conflicting information is "wildly" out of bounds. Their attacks are always the same - they will tell you that you are at risk of being banned for "POV-pushing" and refer you to some arcane compendium of WP policy, regardless of its relevance to your post.

I actually contacted and corresponded with one of the WP founders about this problem. He seemed genuine in his response, but I never heard back and eventually gave up on posting there.

I've followed the web trail of several users who are the most vocal and inflammatory on those pages (there are maybe 5 of them total). I loved it when I found out one user in particular who had been adamant in his defense of the scientific legitimacy of "False Memory Syndrome," total denial of SRA and claims that DID is not real turned out to have a personal webpage where he maintained a list of "romantic/sexual relationships between people of very different ages," a nice little pedo-taxonomy broken out into categories of 1 decade, 2 decade, 3 decade, etc.

"POV-pushing" Ha!
i mean, Duh!
what else would it be?
Wiki, itself, is POV