July 7th, 2007
Brit believes that Wikipedia engages in censorship
Is Wikipedia running a censorship board? John Barberio thinks so. After more than two years as an active contributor to the free online encyclopedia, the 27-year-old Oxfordshire man recently left the project over the behavior of its “OTRS volunteers,” unpaid administrators who act on reader complaints about the site’s content.
A few quotes from John Barberio appear in the recent article from The Register:
“I dislike using the scary C word, but OTRS are acting as a censorship board.”
Mr. Barberio is further quoted as saying:
“And worse, they appear to be acting as an inept, heavy-handed amateurish censorship board.”
Source: Digg.com
June 29th, 2007
The anonymous Wikipedia editor responsible for posting on Wikipedia that WWE wrestler Chris Benoit’s wife was dead 14 hours before law enforcement officers discovered the body has confessed to making the entry, stating that the comment was a “terrible coincidence.” The editor left a lengthy apology to the Wikipedia community.
In a post made at 12:26 AM EDT Friday morning to the talk page of a Wikinews article headlined as the “Death of Nancy Benoit rumour posted on Wikipedia hours prior to body being found”, the user admitted to writing that Nancy Benoit was dead at the Wikipedia article page for Benoit came from information that was garnered from “rumors and speculation online.” Freakishly, the post turned out to be true.
The person submitting the apology is said to have logged the same ip address as the original Wikipedia editor posting about the death of wrestler Chris Benoit’s wife.
WAGA television in Atlanta reported that investigators believed Benoit killed his wife and 7-year-old son over the weekend, then himself on Monday.
ABC News had reported that the Wikipedia editor’s posting had become “a major obstacle in the murder-suicide criminal investigation.” Lieutenant Tommy Pope, speaking for the Fayette County, Georgia Sheriff’s Department said:
“We’ve got to put a lot of effort and time into working to prove or disprove that someone put up a hoax situation or that somebody was conceiving the death from out of state.”
Pope went on to speak of the large number of tips investigators received about the anonymous editor’s Wikipedia entry.
Sources: Wikinews story | Digg.com story | World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE)
March 30th, 2007
NPR Morning Edition podcasts the project by Wikipedia’s co-founder, Larry Sanger to create a rival encyclopedia site. Sanger says Citizendium will require contributors to use real names and prove expertise. And experts will be asked to check for accuracy.
From citizendium.org:
The Citizendium (sit-ih-ZEN-dee-um), a “citizens’ compendium of everything,” is an experimental new wiki project. The project, started by a founder of Wikipedia, aims to improve on that model by adding “gentle expert oversight” and requiring contributors to use their real names.
At least some of the external links on Citizendium.org show the Google nofollow attribute which blocks link credit from Google search results. Wikipedia previously installed the nofollow code on external links.
January 25th, 2007
Search Engine Journal has confirmed that Google methods of avoiding spam are being integrated into Wikipedia. The nofollow attribute introduced by Google in 2005 was originally intended to hamstring blog comment spam and has since been the source of much wrangling and discussion by SEO’s as to what exactly it does and which search engines have truly adopted the standard.
This post appeared on the January 20th Wikipedia Mailing List Message from Brion Vibber entitled [WikiEN-l] Nofollow back on URL links on en.wikipedia.org articles for now:
Having been requested by Jimmy to do so, and having seen a fun rumor of a “search engine optimization world championship” contest targeting WP[1], I’ve gone ahead and switched rel=”nofollow” back onto URLs in en.wikipedia.org’s article namespace.
Clickfire has sampled the source code and further confirmed that the nofollow attribute is appearing again.
read more about Wikipedia adding nofollow | See digg story and comments
