War on Wikipedia
Dec. 13th, 2005 12:00 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
avramWikipedia’s been in the news a bit recently. John Seigenthaler, former administrative assistant to Robert Kennedy, discovered recently that a prankster had posted a biography of him to Wikipedia, claiming that he‘d been thought to have been involved in the assassinations of the two Kennedy brothers. Painful, but there are assholes all over, and at least he was able to get the offending material changed; try doing that with dead trees. (It took the NY Times 18 months to apologize for falsely accusing Wen Ho Lee of espionage, and all those papers are still out there accusing him in libraries all over the world.)
Some jackass is trying to gin up a class action suit. he claims that it took Seigenthaler “more than four months anguish and hard work” to get his Wikipedia entry changed — clear bullshit, since all Seigenthaler needed to do was log in and change it himself. This is probably a mis-reading of the line from Seigenthaler’s article, in which he says that the false information stood for four months; that’s probably the span between when it was posted and when he saw it.
And that’s about typical of the quality lawsuit site’s arguments. Here, check out the news articles they link to. Right now there’s four of them, all articles on Baou.com. One covers a spat over linking to QuakeAID, an earthquake relief organization, but it doesn’t bother explaining the arguments behind the spat, or that QuakeAID is owned by the Baou Trust. Another goes on about Nazi salutes and socialism and the holocaust (or “Wholecaust”) and holy crap, it’s like an autism sufferer ate a few Ayn Rand books and threw up into the keyboard.
Piling on is Andrew Orlowski, who must have gotten tired of attacking Google. Notice the name Daniel Brandt in in Orlowski’s article, described as a “researcher” and “prominent critic” of Wikipedia? That name sounded familiar, and so I googled around, and it turns out Brandt was the guy behind the anti-Google site Google-Watch, who got upset that Google gave his business site, NameBase, a big link farm, a lower rank than he thought it deserved.
Some jackass is trying to gin up a class action suit. he claims that it took Seigenthaler “more than four months anguish and hard work” to get his Wikipedia entry changed — clear bullshit, since all Seigenthaler needed to do was log in and change it himself. This is probably a mis-reading of the line from Seigenthaler’s article, in which he says that the false information stood for four months; that’s probably the span between when it was posted and when he saw it.
And that’s about typical of the quality lawsuit site’s arguments. Here, check out the news articles they link to. Right now there’s four of them, all articles on Baou.com. One covers a spat over linking to QuakeAID, an earthquake relief organization, but it doesn’t bother explaining the arguments behind the spat, or that QuakeAID is owned by the Baou Trust. Another goes on about Nazi salutes and socialism and the holocaust (or “Wholecaust”) and holy crap, it’s like an autism sufferer ate a few Ayn Rand books and threw up into the keyboard.
Piling on is Andrew Orlowski, who must have gotten tired of attacking Google. Notice the name Daniel Brandt in in Orlowski’s article, described as a “researcher” and “prominent critic” of Wikipedia? That name sounded familiar, and so I googled around, and it turns out Brandt was the guy behind the anti-Google site Google-Watch, who got upset that Google gave his business site, NameBase, a big link farm, a lower rank than he thought it deserved.