Crusades against the Great Satan, Wickedpedia

I have to trade off every so often between "jihad" and "crusade" to avoid charges of religious discrimination.

My own battles against Wikipedia made me aware of Wikipedia's large number of enemies and I wondered how much success others have had in fighting Wikipedia, so I decided to find out and here is what I found.

What is perhaps the best-known example of libel in Wikipedia, the Seigenthaler affair, was described in an article in USA Today:

By John Seigenthaler

"John Seigenthaler Sr. was the assistant to Attorney General Robert Kennedy in the early 1960's. For a brief time, he was thought to have been directly involved in the Kennedy assassinations of both John, and his brother, Bobby. Nothing was ever proven."
— Wikipedia

This is a highly personal story about Internet character assassination. It could be your story.

I have no idea whose sick mind conceived the false, malicious "biography" that appeared under my name for 132 days on Wikipedia, the popular, online, free encyclopedia whose authors are unknown and virtually untraceable.

Seigenthaler's bio had other false information, but the claim that he was suspected of involvement in the Kennedy assassinations was the most damaging.

The USA article also said,
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Federal law also protects online corporations — BellSouth, AOL, MCI Wikipedia, etc. — from libel lawsuits. Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, passed in 1996, specifically states that "no provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker." That legalese means that, unlike print and broadcast companies, online service providers cannot be sued for disseminating defamatory attacks on citizens posted by others . . .

. . . .Wikipedia's website acknowledges that it is not responsible for inaccurate information, but Wales, in a recent C-Span interview with Brian Lamb, insisted that his website is accountable and that his community of thousands of volunteer editors (he said he has only one paid employee) corrects mistakes within minutes.

My experience refutes that. My "biography" was posted May 26. On May 29, one of Wales' volunteers "edited" it only by correcting the misspelling of the word "early." For four months, Wikipedia depicted me as a suspected assassin before Wales erased it from his website's history Oct. 5. The falsehoods remained on Answers.com and Reference.com for three more weeks.

However, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act does not protect Wikipedia against libel charges by Cheri Yecke because the attacks on her were posted by Wikipedia staffers, including "King Jimbo" Wales himself!

According to Wikipedia's account of the Seigenthaler incident, some reforms were instituted as a result, including a new Wikipedia guideline called "Biographies of living persons," but these reforms are not doing any good. For example, the "Biographies of Living persons" guideline says that "blogs should never be used as a source about a living person, including as an external link, unless written or published by the subject of the article," but not only was this rule ignored in Cheri Yecke's bio but it was ignored in an arbitrary, discriminatory manner, two blogs but not mine being accepted as sources.

Also, a January 2006 news article reported that a German court shut down the German-language branch of Wikipedia for two days:

A fierce debate continued to rage in Germany's online community on Friday over a court ruling that forced the closure of Wikipedia's German language Web site for nearly two days this week. In a country where the most-publicized free speech cases surround right-wing or Nazi speech, it was an entry about an obscure German hacker that took the world's biggest encyclopedia offline.

The legal challenge, which began in December, peaked on Jan. 17 when a Berlin administrative court ordered the shutdown of Wikipedia.de and any redirects that took users to Wikipedia's mother site in the United States. The court had threatened Wikipedia's German parent organization with a €250,000 fine and executives with up to six months in prison if it didn't abide by the court order.

Germans could still surf the content on the US parent site, but they couldn't get to it through the Wikipedia.de address that Internet history buffs here have hardwired into their memory. With over 343,000 articles, the public domain encyclopedia's German-language community is its second largest after English and has surpassed popular commercial publisher Brockhaus as the source most Germans go to when they need to freshen up on the invention of the wheel, the Neanderthal man or Ghandi.

Following a brief court-ordered hiatus, Wikipedia.de began serving its eager readers again on Friday after attorneys petitioned the court on behalf of the organization to have the injunction lifted and paid a small fine to temporarily circumvent it . . .

The temporary injunction came after the parents of a German hacker sued the site for naming their son in an online encyclopedia entry. The hacker, who goes by the name of "Tron," was famous in the German hacker scene for his hacks, which included decrypting Pay TV and telephone cards and for developing plans for an encrypted telephone. After his death in 1999, articles and books were written about the man, whose real name is Boris F., and conspiracy theories began to brew that the hacker was murdered.
Six years after his mysterious death -- which was officially ruled as suicide -- a major debate has broken out over "Tron's" privacy rights . . .

. . . the Berlin court has conceded that it may not have the legal authority to force the American site to remove the reference to Boris F.'s real name, which can be found on the US site. US privacy laws are far looser than those in Germany and would not allow restrictions to be placed on the publication of a deceased person's full name.

A webpage has a long list of fights against Wikipedia.

There have been some modest successes in fighting Wickedpedia, but not many. I hope that my charge that Wickedpedia is violating the IRS rules for 501(c)(3) nonprofits turns out to be a chink in Wickedpedia's armor.
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