Today

Between December 2007 and March 2008, journalist Cade Metz penned a series of articles for The Register, the British technology focused online newspaper. These articles exposed the dark side of Wikipedia that we Reviewers see on a daily basis. Some of the pieces are vital exposés of Wikipedia’s cultish internal activities, others raise [...]

April 18

Another accomplished academic fell afoul of Jimbo Wales’s ‘Cultural Revolution’ this week. This latest calumny involved the usual Star Chamber trial and subsequent banishment imposed by anonymous figures lacking published credentials.This week’s victim was a well-known mathematical physicist, a Director of a research group at a major Canadian research centre and Professor at a major [...]

April 15

Wikipedia Reviewer DocGlasgow wrote this essay on Wikipedia last week, attempting to address the major problems facing Wikipedia’s treatment of Biographies of Living People (BLPs). These articles are at the front line of Wikipedia’s culture of defamation and anonymous revenge. DocGlasgow’s full study can be found here. DocGlasgow : To solve or mitigate a problem, you [...]

April 8

“Director IJsbrand van Veelen goes looking for the truth behind Wikipedia. In this film, “Wikipedians,” the folks who spend their days writing and editing articles, explain how the online encyclopedia works. In addition, the parties involved discuss Wikipedia’s ethics and quality of content. It quickly becomes clear that there are camps of both believers and [...]

April 5

Previous Wikipedia Review editorials have exposed Wikipedia’s failure to apply basic ethical standards when writing about living people, and its capacity to cause serious harm to the reputations of the subjects of their biographies. This post reviews the efforts of Barry Kort (Wikipedia user name: Moulton), an academic who is currently a Visiting Scientist at [...]

March 31

In amongst the many and varied discussions, users of our forums make insightful observations which deserve highlighting. One such post is in response to this comment by Wolfe: “If people can write a functional open source operating system, there is no reason why they can’t write an encyclopaedia.” UseOnceAndDestroy writes: This comparison keeps turning up, and while [...]

March 23

On 23 March 2008, Canadian journalist Rachel Marsden posted the below to her user space on Wikipedia, she posted the same thing to Jimbo Wales’s talk page. Marsden had conducted a brief affair with the Wiki God-King, who then ordered changes to her biography on her behalf. In early March, Wales posted a long personal [...]

March 18

This post was submitted to the forum by The Review’s resident Wikipedia Watcher Daniel Brandt. The post was in response to a piece in The Register by Cade Metz researching Roger McNamee, the major donor to the WikiMedia Foundation. ___________________________________ Daniel Brandt : The New York Times yesterday quoted Florence: Florence Nibart-Devouard, the chairwoman of the Wikimedia [...]

March 14

This post was submitted to the forum by The Review’s resident Arbiter of the Absurd, Moulton . Worrying About Wheel-Warring in Our WikiWoe Wheel-Warring in WikiDrama, like political give and take everywhere, follows an oft-observed model. The model presented here applies in general to all WikiDrama at any level of intensity, from a simple reversion to clamorous [...]

March 10

Recently we focused on the plight of Overstock.com representative Judd Bagley, and his efforts to have Wikipedia acknowledge that feuding journalist Gary Weiss was using a number of aliases to “control” articles related to the company. Other media sources have examined how Wikipedia came to be used as, in Bagley’s words, “a literal weapon against me [...]