/-.-Pedia
I feel like I have to say some words in support of Wikipedia after reading a few “stories” on Slashdot.
Number One: Wikipedia and Plagiarism
Short extract (Spo22a writes):
“Daniel Brandt found the examples of suspected plagiarism at Wikipedia using a program he created to run a few sentences from about 12,000 articles against Google Inc.’s search engine.”
In short: 142 Wikipedia articles out of 12000 (that’s about 1,83%) were suspected of plagiarism (this means they contained information coming from some other source).
Number Two: Long-Term Wikipedia Vandalism Exposed
Short extract (Daveydweeb writes):
“The accuracy of Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia, came into question again when a long-standing article on ‘NPA personality theory’ was confirmed to be a hoax.”
In short: the article is about a not widely known personality theory invented by Anthony M. Benis. The suspect is that the article has been mainly written by Benis himself to promote his theory. The article has been proposed for deletion and a debate has been opened.
Number Three: Wikipedia Used To Spread Virus
Short extract (eldavojohn writes):
“The German Wikipedia has recently been used to launch a virus attack. Hackers posted a link to an all alleged fix for a new version of the blaster worm. Instead, it was a link to download malicious software.”
In short: some smart idiots (please don’t call them hackers unless you know the real meaning of this word) sent emails with a link to the fake fix in the hope that unsuspecting users would trust a Wikipedia link.
Let’s just pretend we forget that Wikipedia currently (November 6th 2006, at 10:25 Greenwich time) has 1,469,055 articles, 88,962,608 edits, some of them made by registered users (there are 2,671,333 of them).
If you know what Wikipedia is about you wouldn’t ever think about accusing it of plagiarism. This is the main problem. Wikipedia is an open (please look up the word “open” at British Enciclopedia, Daniel) enciclopedia. This means that everybody (well, everybody with some world wide web enabled device, a keyboard or compatible hardware, a few working neurons and some time to waste) can post new stuff and edit existing articles.
It’s impossible to avoid problems like plagiarism, offensive passages, hoaxes and whatever else nobody likes. It’s just one of the unavoidable drawbacks that such an open system has.
Nevertheless, we should not forget that everybody is free to find such problems and either solve them or notify the Wikipedia editors. There’s just no need to go around yelling “They go around claiming it’s almost as good as Britannica. They are trying to be mainstream respectable.”. This would be trying to be mainstream hypocrite as to my opinion.
Now about hoaxes and partisan articles. There is no way such an article can last more than a few days or weeks if the article itself is about a well known subject. It could of course last more than one year if it’s about some weird personality pseudo-theory. Who the hell knows Anthony M. Benis? I am even more famous than this guy as to googlefights 
There have been some far more interesting attempts to alter Wikipedia articles:
“US Congressional staffers and possibly other federal employees who have engaged in unethical and possibly libelous behavior in violation of Wikipedia policies (WP:NPOV, WP:CIV). The editors from these IP ranges have been rude, abrasive, immature, and show disregard for Wikipedia policy. The editors have frequently tried to censor the history of elected officials, often replacing community articles with censored biographies despite other users’ attempts to dispute these violations. They also violate Wikipedia:Verifiability, by deleting verified reports, while adding flattering things about members of Congress that are unverified.
“The offending editors have been blocked. This RFC is needed to gather community comments. It is proposed that a one week block is not enough. The block was lifted January 30, 2006. A new block for additional vandalism was enforced for three hours February 1, 2006 at 14:59.” (source)
But why do people care about a damn retired physician and his theory? What if I add a post about my own theory called “coffeine addicted white bunnies from mars are going to take over the world on tuesday 22th october - live on the ILoveBunnies channel”?
Now about viruses: why the hell should someone download a fix from hackersincorporated.com and not from i.e. Microsoft only because of a malitious link on Wikipedia? hackersincorporated.com is not a known antivirus vendor, is it? Wikipedia allows such idiots to perform such kinds of attacks, sure, but they won’t last that long as usual attacks because Wikipedia has a load of visitors and the first one who discovers it will be able to remove the malicious link.
Let me end this post with a somehow cynical note: did you ever hear somebody claiming that British Encyclopedia contains hoaxes? Ever seen any Slashdot story about it? Why not? Why should I blindly trust a closed encyclopedia? What if there is bulls*** in British Encyclopedia too? I sure have no way to change things. It takes much longer to have an error edited on BE than on Wikipedia.
Same about open source software. What if Microsoft Outlook sends all my emails containing the words “kill” and “bush” to the FBI having all that traffic made invisible by the Microsoft Windows kernel? Ok, it’s just a joke, I am not seriously thinking about it (I’m not that paranoid, sorry). But why don’t we concern about it? “Open” means everybody can see if somebody is playing the bad boy. “Proprietary” means that somebody can see if somebody (possibly the same somebody) is a bad boy. And there will always be bad boys, so to hell with all this hypocricy, don’t you notice there is something wrong here?