Wikipedia-bashing articles

An article in The Guardian likens Wikipedia to a "sweatshop":

Wikipedia is frequently touted as a marvel of collaboration, a model of peer production. But it may be more instructive as a laboratory of pathologies of social interaction.

. . . . .The combination of feuds and relentless focus on negatives associated with Wikipedia creates an obsession by some devoted Wikipedians about the evils visited upon them.

. . . . This toxic mix of paranoia, fear of infiltrators and a social system where status can be acquired by fighting off threats (real or imagined) exploded recently into a governance scandal familiar to any observer of bureaucratic politics. A prominent Wikipedia administrator unilaterally revoked the account of a highly regarded contributor. When questioned, the response claimed the evidence was too sensitive to be released to the public, but had been vetted at the highest levels. Shortly after, the administrator reversed the action, apologising and citing new information.

. . . . For all Jimmy Wales's self-promotion regarding his supposed ability to build good communities, it's apparent his skill is instead in knowing how to sell a dysfunctional community effectively. One subtext of the Wikipedia hype is that businesses can harvest an eager pool of free labour, disposable volunteers who will donate effort for the sheer joy of it. The fantasy is somewhat akin to Santa's workshop, where little elves work happily away for wages of a glass of milk and a cookie. Whereas the reality is closer to an exploitative cult running on sweatshop labour.

Seth Finkelstein, the author of the above article, has a blog with a lot of anti-Wikipedia articles. One article says,

It's hard to convey to the acolytes within the cult of Wikipedia how petty and in fact, downright creepy, it can appear to outsiders. At this point more sane Wikipedia administrators will pop up and say it's just a few bad apples, the other admins will keep them in check. And my reply there is that still reveals a pretty disturbing sociological aspect of Wikipedia. Especially one that might give pause to the impulse to proclaim lots of experts should work for free to increase its power and respectability (and notably also increasing the capability of small cliques of Wikipedia admins to engage in political vendettas).

"More sane" is relative -- no sane person would work for Wikipedia.

A 5-17-07 article in The Guardian says,
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Search at Google.com on evolution or Iraq or Aids or Gordon Brown, and the same site will appear at the top of the list of results: Wikipedia. Alter your search into one for John Keats or Muhammad Ali or Christianity or platypus or loneliness, and the same thing will happen. Pacific Ocean? Wikipedia. Catherine de Medici? Wikipedia. Human brain? Wikipedia.

. . . more and more of our time online is being spent at an ever-smaller number of megasites. The wilds of the internet are being carved up among a handful of vast information plantations.

. . . .Web statistics tell the tale. The blogger Richard MacManus recently examined trends in online traffic over the past five years. He found that between the end of 2001 and the end of last year, the number of Internet domains expanded by more than 75%, from 2.9m to 5.1m. At the same time, however, the dominance of the most popular domains grew substantially. At the end of 2001, the top 10 websites accounted for 31% of all the pages viewed on the net. By the end of last year, the top 10 accounted for fully 40% of page views. There are more destinations online, but we seem to be visiting fewer of them.

. . . On the internet, the big get bigger. It wasn't supposed to be like that. When the web arrived in the early 1990s, it was heralded as a liberating force that would free us from the confines of gated communities like AOL and Compuserve. The internet was supposed to be an open, democratic medium, an information bazaar putting individuals on the same footing as big companies.

Lawrence Solomon, a journalist I quoted previously, wrote in the National Review,

Ever wonder how Al Gore, the United Nations, and company continue to get away with their claim of a “scientific consensus” confirming their doomsday view of global warming? Look no farther than Wikipedia for a stunning example of how the global-warming propaganda machine works.

As you (or your kids) probably know, Wikipedia is now the most widely used and influential reference source on the Internet and therefore in the world, with more than 50 million unique visitors a month.

In theory Wikipedia is a “people’s encyclopedia” written and edited by the people who read it — anyone with an Internet connection. So on controversial topics, one might expect to see a broad range of opinion.

Not on global warming. On global warming we get consensus, Gore-style: a consensus forged by censorship, intimidation, and deceit.

. . . . Turns out that on Wikipedia some folks are more equal than others. Kim Dabelstein Petersen is a Wikipedia “editor” who seems to devote a large part of his life to editing reams and reams of Wikipedia pages to pump the assertions of global-warming alarmists and deprecate or make disappear the arguments of skeptics.

. . . . .Now Petersen is merely a Wikipedia “editor.” Holding the far more prestigious and powerful position of “administrator” is William Connolley.

. . . . . by virtue of his power at Wikipedia, Connolley, a ruthless enforcer of the doomsday consensus, may be the world’s most influential person in the global warming debate after Al Gore.

. . . . . Wikipedia is full of rules that editors are supposed to follow, and it has a code of civility. Those rules and codes don’t apply to Connolley, or to those he favors.

. . . ..Nor are Wikipedia’s ideological biases limited to global warming. As an environmentalist I find myself with allies and adversaries on both sides of the aisle, Left and Right. But there is no doubt where Wikipedia stands: firmly on the Left. Try out Wikipedia’s entries on say, Roe v. Wade or Intelligent Design, and you will see that Wikipedia is the people’s encyclopedia only if those people are not conservatives.

Here is a list of websites that are critical of Wikipedia. Here is a long webpage condemning Wikipedia.

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Wikipedia's bad reputation

A comment thread on a Volokh Conspiracy article about Wikipedia is loaded with negative opinions about Wikipedia. Here is the first comment that I added to the thread:

Dangermouse said,

Don't use Wikipedia at all, ever, to research politics, social topics, environmental issues, religion, culture and some history. Politically incorrect information is often purged from those articles, at the behest of the no-life lefty zombies that run the site.

I wholeheartedly agree. Wikipedia is OK on non-controversial topics but really sucks royally on controversial topics. On controversial topics, Wickedpedia is not even a good source of references because politically incorrect references are routinely purged.

I made a suggestion for handling controversial entries: When an item is disputed, simply enter a brief description of the item, a statement that the item is disputed, and links to external websites or separate Wikipedia discussion pages where the disputed item is discussed or debated. There would be no Wikipedia endorsement of the disputed item and Wikipedia article pages would not be cluttered up with long discussions of controversial items. THIS SIMPLE, SENSIBLE SUGGESTION WAS IGNORED. Wickedpedia's preferred methods for handling disputes are censorship and endless edit wars. Wickedpedia also has a crazy set of rules that the control-freak Wickedpedia administrators exploit to "lawyer you to death" if you try to make a politically incorrect entry. One of Wickedpedia's problems is that it tries to look like a printed encyclopedia and fails to take advantage of the Internet's capability of instantly linking to external sources where disputed items can be discussed and debated.

Wickedpedia has reached the point of no return -- all the decent people have left the organization in disgust and all that is left is a bunch of crazies.

I am glad to see that there are so many other commenters here who share my negative opinion of Wikipedia.

My blog has three post-label groups of articles that attack Wikipedia [1] [2] [3]

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Casey Luskin slams Wickedpedia again

Note: I just about finished writing this article when I discovered that I covered this material before [1] [2] [3] (the Casey Luskin quote below was borrowed from a magazine article he wrote), but I decided to post this article anyway.

In a recent article on Evolution News & Views, Casey Luskin said,

There’s one last tale to be told regarding the Kitzmiller lawsuit and the banning of ID. Wikipedia has developed a reputation for being a biased and inaccurate source, especially when it comes to controversial issues such as ID. After the ACLU banned Of "Pandas and People" from Dover science classrooms, one Wikipedia user dared to take seriously Wikipedia’s encouragement to be "bold when updating articles”: He added the Pandas textbook to a page listing banned books.

Anticipating the intellectual lure of banned ideas, Wikipedia’s editors then removed the Pandas textbook from the banned-books page and locked the page from further edits, alleging it had been "vandalized.” Pointing out that ID has been banned is called a Wiki-crime, and banned pro-ID textbooks apparently must be banned from pages listing banned books.

Actually, a number of Wikipedia users tried to add "Of Pandas and People" to the list of banned books and I was one of them. The debate over whether to add the book is here, here and here. This debate has good examples of what radio talk show host Bill Greene called the "lawyering to death" by Wickedpedian control-freak administrators. According to the Wickedpedia rules, a statement that "bears shit in the woods" represents "original research" unless verified by a "reliable non-partisan source," and without such verification the statement may not be added to a Wikipedia article even if a note is added that the statement has not been verified. I am not exaggerating.

The hypocritical Darwinist scumbags want to have it both ways: They brag that they succeeded in getting "Of Pandas and People" banned but they don't want the book to be included in a list of banned books because that would imply that the Darwinists believe in the censorship of ideas, and heavens, we can't have that, can we?

You can't tell me, you lousy trolls, that Wikipedia does not have a bad reputation, considering that so many teachers and schools have banned Wikipedia as a primary source for student research and when at least one school district went so far as to block Wikipedia from all of the district's computers. Previously I thought that blocking Wikipedia altogether on school computers was a bad idea because Wikipedia is often a good source of information on non-controversial subjects and a good source of references, but sometimes even Wikipedia's reference lists are biased (for example, Wikipedia censored a link to the Discovery Institute's rebuttal of a Wikipedia article that criticizes a DI report on Judge Jones' wholesale cribbing from an ACLU brief), so why take the risk? Wickedpedia's arbitrary censorship has also turned off a lot of would-be contributors -- what people in their right minds would want to volunteer time and effort to help build an encyclopedia that practices arbitrary censorship?

Once a reputation is lost, it can be impossible to regain it. Wikipedia could promise today to stop the arbitrary censorship, but how many people would hear such a promise and how many people would believe it? Wikipedia could try to show its good faith by providing many examples of not arbitrarily censoring contributions, but it would be like trying to prove a mathematical proposition by showing examples -- we can never run out of examples.
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Questionable citation of Wickedpedia by court opinion

Because of Wikipedia's unreliability on controversial issues, I have many times condemned authoritative citation of Wikipedia by court opinions, scholarly journal articles, etc.. On the Volokh Conspiracy blog, Eugene Volokh now has an article questioning citation of Wikipedia by a federal appeals court opinion:

Courts have cited Wikipedia over 300 times, and many of those cites are in my view just fine when the citation is for a tangential and uncontroversial matter. But the Seventh Circuit's use of Wikipedia in Rickher v. Home Depot, Inc., handed down Monday, strikes me as troubling.

The key issue as to one part of the plaintiff's lawsuit was the definition of "wear and tear." The plaintiff cited Webster's II New College Dictionary and Random House Webster's College Dictionary, which defined the term as “Depreciation, damage, or loss resulting from ordinary use or exposure” and “Damage or deterioration resulting from ordinary use; normal depreciation,” But the court disagreed:

Although it is true that dictionary definitions of “wear and tear” often employ the word “damage,” that does not mean that damage and “wear and tear” are synonymous. Wear and tear is a more specific phrase that connotes the expected, often gradual, depreciation of an item. See Wear and Tear, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wear_and_tear, last visited May 30, 2008.

[Wikipedia said -- ]

It is a form of depreciation which is assumed to occur even when an item is used competently and with care and proper maintenance. For example, friction may erode a hammer’s head. In the normal use of a hammer for its designed task erosion is impossible to prevent, and any attempt to eliminate this erosion would make the hammer useless. At the same time, it is expected that the normal use of a hammer will not break it beyond repair until it has gone through a certain amount of use.

A subtle difference, but one the Seventh Circuit thought to be quite important, and that does indeed appear to me important to the course of litigation.

More details are in Volokh's article. I have commented extensively in the comment thread under the article and I am continuing to add comments. Later I may hijack the thread for a tirade against Wickedpedia.
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I am blocked on Conservapedia

I am now unable to post comments on Conservapedia because my IP address is blocked there. The excuse: violation of the "90/10 rule" -- i.e., large contributions to talk pages in comparison to contributions to the articles. I pointed out that I am new to Conservapedia and therefore have had no opportunity to contribute to the articles. Also, all of my comments on this talk page have been responses to other commenters' responses to my comments, and most of my comments have been defensive. It is outrageous that I am now unable to defend myself against attacks on my positions in that talk page. Conservapedia rules are no better than Wikipedia rules.

The disreputable practice of IP address blocking is often ineffective and often unintentionally blocks other Internet users who share the same ISP proxy. It also discriminates against Internet users who use only one IP address. Anonymous proxies are sometimes -- but not always -- effective in evading IP address blocks, and have not been effective lately.

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Crazy Conservapedia and Wikipedia rules

"So I'm the bad guy? How did that happen?"
-- D-Fens in movie "Falling Down"
(maybe D-Fens was really sane and it was the world that was crazy)



I have started posting on Conservapedia and have found that the Conservapedia rules are as crazy as the Wikipedia rules. For example, Conservapedia's "90/10 rule" says,

The 90/10 rule, unique to Conservapedia, authorizes the blocking of accounts that engage in excessive talk, bickering, last wordism, and other unproductive activity. Specifically, as has been stated in the rules since soon after the formation of Conservapedia:

Unproductive activity, such as 90% talk page edits and only 10% quality edits to Conservapedia articles, may result in blocking of the account

The 90/10 rule is remarkably adept at discouraging and eliminating the mobocracy or talk pollution that runs rampant on other sites, such as Wikipedia. Implementation is simple and application is swift.

"Last wordism" is defined as follows:
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Last wordism is the belief that victory can be obtained in a debate or discussion by having the "last word." Some argue that last wordism is often a characteristic of "less intellectually robust presentations."[1].

Last wordism reflects a lack of restraint, a characteristic of wrongdoing or sin. The ultimate in last wordism was men asking for Jesus to be crucified and Pontius Pilate stating that Jesus was to be crucified, to which God responded with the resurrection of Jesus Christ.

Wikipedia has what I call the "bears-don't-shit-in-the-woods-unless-a-reliable-nonpartisan-source-says-so" rule:

Editors should not make the mistake of thinking that if A is published by a reliable source, and B is published by a reliable source, then A and B can be joined together in an article to come to the conclusion C. This would be synthesis of published material which advances a position, which constitutes original research. "A and B, therefore C" is acceptable only if a reliable source has published this argument in relation to the topic of the article.

In other words, if a reliable nonpartisan source is found that says that bears shit all the time, and another reliable nonpartisan source is found that says that bears live in the woods, concluding that bears shit in the woods "would be synthesis of published material which advances a position, which constitutes original research," which is not allowed on Wackopedia. I am NOT exaggerating -- I ran into precisely this problem when I tried to add "Of Pandas and People" to the Wackopedia list of banned books.

Though I am now logged in on Conservapedia, I find that for some strange reason I cannot add more comments to a talk page that I myself started under my username LarryFarma. However, my original comment did get a favorable response from Conservapedia founder Andy Schlafly:

LarryFarma raises an excellent question about whether a goal of Lenski and Blount's project was to generate citrate-eating E. Coli bacteria. (I did not find the answer in the paper.) Did the researchers figure out, after many years of fruitless attempts, how best to promote the percentage of citrate-eating E. Coli bacteria in a population? The details of the data might shed light on how that goal was achieved, if in fact that was the goal. They should turn over the data for public scrutiny so that questions can be resolved.--Aschlafly 19:33, 26 June 2008 (EDT)

Some of the additional material that I wanted to post on Conservapedia is now posted here in this comment.
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Arbitrary censorship on the Internet promotes "truthiness"

Boy Scout salute


==============================================

What is truth?
-- Pontius Pilate


Book reviews and summaries on Amazon.com's website for "True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society" say,

From Publishers Weekly
In 2005, Stephen Colbert catapulted the word truthiness -- the quality of an idea feeling true without any backup evidence -- into the public consciousness. Salon blogger Manjoo expands upon this concept in his perceptive analysis of the status of truth in the digital age, critiquing a Rashomon-like world in which competing versions of truth vie for our attention . . . .

From the Inside Flap
In True Enough, Manjoo presents findings from psychology, sociology, political science, and economics to show how new technologies are prompting the cultural ascendancy of belief over fact. In an age of talk radio, cable TV, and the Internet — the blog --- and YouTube-addled million-channel media universe — it is no longer necessary for any of us to confront notions that contradict what we "know" to be true. Stephen Colbert calls this "truthiness"— when something feels true without any evidence that it is. Here Manjoo probes the cognitive basis of truthiness, exploring how biases push both liberals and conservatives to select and interpret news in a way that accords with their personal versions of "reality."

Why has punditry lately overtaken news, with so many media outlets pushing partisan agendas instead of information? Why do lies seem to linger so long in the cultural subconscious even after they've been thoroughly discredited? And why, when more people than ever before are documenting the truth with laptops and digital cameras, does fact-free spin and propaganda seem to work so well? True Enough explores leading controversies of national politics, foreign affairs, science, and business, explaining how Americans have begun to organize themselves into echo chambers that harbor diametrically different facts — not merely opinions — from those of the larger culture.

=====================================================

"The news media are supposed to help us understand the world, and faster, better, more varied communication technologies are supposed to enrich that process of understanding. True Enough explains why things have so often worked in reverse—and why Americans no longer disagree just about opinions and political values, but about basic factual realities. This problem of 'truthiness' is depressingly familiar, but Farhad Manjoo adds useful information and insights about its origins, effects, and possible solutions."
—James Fallows, National Correspondent for the Atlantic Monthly and author of Breaking the News

"Well worth reading. Make no mistake: this is no run-of-the-mill exposé of media bias, but a sophisticated analysis of the ways and means by which lies and distortions do so well in today's fractured, cynical media world."
—Todd Gitlin, Professor of Journalism and Sociology, Columbia University, and author of The Bulldozer and the Big Tent

A major, largely unrecognized cause of this problem of "truthiness" is a sick, cynical Internet culture that condones and even approves arbitrary censorship of website visitors' comments and contributions. This arbitrary censorship not only prevents the presentation of a variety of opinions but also prevents the presentation of inconvenient facts and corrections of factual errors. And the Internet has enabled arbitrarily-censoring BVD-clad bloggers and Wickedpedian "bureaucrats" (Wikipedia's own title for top administrators) to reach much larger audiences than they otherwise would have. Furthermore, Wickedpedia and blogs are being authoritatively cited by court opinions, scholarly journal articles, and other authorities, making this arbitrary censorship even more of a problem.

Larry Fafarman
-- Association of Non-Censoring Bloggers
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Journalist slams Wickedpedian censorship

Wickedpedian censorship has not only been pissing off little guys like me but has also been pissing off people -- in this case, a journalist for a major publication -- who are in a position to do some major additional damage to Wikipedia's already badly tarnished reputation as a source of information on controversial issues.

A lot of people have the mistaken idea that the big source of Wikipedia's problems is open editing, where virtually anyone can try to edit Wikipedia articles. This open editing sometimes results in vandalism or innocent errors from unknowledgeable editors. However, these effects of open editing can be self-correcting. A much bigger problem is the biased fascist control-freak Wikipedia administrators who exploit the arcane Wickedpedia rules to "lawyer to death" and arbitrarily censor others' views. This censorship is not self-correcting.

Lawrence Solomon, a journalist for Financial Post and National Post, which are major Canadian publications, said the following about the Wickedpedian control freaks' bias against critics of global warming theory:

In contrast to the high-handed treatment that greet global warming skeptics, those who support the orthodoxy are puffed up and protected from criticism, their errors erased and their controversies hushed. This is the case with Naomi Oreskes, a scientist with a PhD who had arrived at an absurd finding: That no studies in a major scientific database questioned the UN view of climate change. . . . .

. . . .In any event, her Wikipedia page is not really about her but her study, which has been thoroughly discredited by credible journalists and scientists. To suppress these critiques, the trollers apply Wikipedia’s bewildering rules as to what can and can’t appear, and when the rules are inadequate, the trollers make up new ones on the fly.

Several weeks ago, as I described in an earlier column, I attempted to correct passages on the Oreskes page that would lead readers to think her study had been vindicated and also to think that U.K. scientist Benny Peiser, one of her critics, had abjectly withdrawn his criticisms. Wikipedia’s rules thwarted me, used to revert my corrections, again and again. Those who came before me in attempting to make corrections, and, I would find out, those who came after, were similarly thwarted.

Wikipedia refused to accept Peiser’s critique, or his interpretation of his own views, or an account of his views that he had provided to me, or an account of his views published in a peer-reviewed journal, or an account of his views published in The Wall Street Journal, or an account of his views published by the U.S. Senate committee on environment and public works. Instead, the Wikipedia trollers insisted that all of the above sources were disqualified or irrelevant under Wikipedia rules, and that the trollers’ own understanding of Peiser’s views trumped all others.

There's just no satisfying the Wickedpedian control freaks -- I know this from personal experience.

Related articles by Larry Solomon are here, here, and here. An Uncommon Descent post about the articles is here.

A commenter remarked,

We can thank Google -- and its ranking of search results -- for Wikipedia’s rise in popularity and the unfortunate fact that it is the “go to” resource for many using the Internet today. The problem is that many believe that Wikipedia is a legitimate source, which clearly it is not.

Good point -- Google's Link Popularity ranking method [1] [2] is also a reason why newer blogs find it difficult to compete with long-established blogs.

In the law profession, Wikipedia was apparently once highly regarded as a reference -- I don't know if it still is. A Feb. 5, 2007 article on a law professor's blog said,

Last week, we blogged stories on whether students or courts should cite, and law professors should write for, Wikipedia. The New York Times reports that "[m]ore than 100 judicial rulings have relied on Wikipedia, beginning in 2004, including 13 from circuit courts of appeal, one step below the Supreme Court. (The Supreme Court thus far has never cited Wikipedia.)"

I asked my crack research assistant, Drew Marksity, to determine how many times law professors have cited Wikipedia in law review articles. Using Westlaw's JLR database, Drew found that 545 articles cite Wikipedia. (An additional 125 articles mention Wikipedia but do not cite it as authority.)

The proper way to handle most Wikipedia editing disputes is to post a brief description of the disputed item along with a note that the item is disputed, a brief statement of the reason(s) for the dispute, and URL links to external websites or Wikipedia discussion pages where the dispute is discussed or debated. That way (1) there is no suggestion of Wikipedia endorsement and (2) Wikipedia articles are not cluttered up with long debates about controversial issues. Wikipedia's ways of handling disputes are long edit wars and censorship by control-freak administrators.

Wikipedia's bad reputation as a source of information on controversial issues has passed the point of no return.

Now supertroll ViU is going to respond with a remark about how I was vandalizing Wickedpedia and was properly censored. It happens every time, as surely as Lucy pulls the football away from Charlie Brown at the last instant every time he tries to kick it.
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Scientific American duped by Wickedpedia

A report of a roundtable discussion between Scientific American magazine editors and Mark Mathis, associate producer of the movie "Expelled," said,

One point requires response here. Mathis charged that some 92 percent of the judge’s decision in the Dover intelligent design trial was copied directly from papers filed by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). We said we would follow up and find out the truth. We did. In fact, Mathis was wrong in three ways. One, even the Discovery Institute’s own charge is that the judge copied 90.9 percent of ACLU material for one specific section in the judge’s decision. Second, a correct statistical workup finds that the number is as low as 35 percent, depending on whether you include material filed that is not included in the decision and the length of word strings. But the most important point is one that I guessed at in the conversation. We spoke to actual legal experts who told us that when the sides in a trial file their facts, it is with the hope that they make the case strongly enough for the judge to incorporate their texts into the finding of fact section of the decision. Therefore the charges that Mathis makes against Judge Jones are both incorrect in detail and spurious in spirit. For more information, you can go to footnote 88 in the Wikipedia entry on the Discovery Institute. There’s more info on the permissibility of using filed facts in a decision at The Panda’s Thumb Web site, pandasthumb.org. It’s an entry called "Weekend at Behe’s" dated December 12, 2006.

Regarding the Discovery Institute's charge that 90.9 percent of the Dover opinion's ID-as-science section was copied from an ACLU brief (the DI report that originally made the charge is here) --
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(1) The Wickedpedian control-freak administrators refused to post a link to the DI's defense of the charge.

(2) The Wickedpedian adiminstrators refused to post criticism or a link to criticism of the computer method used to obtain much lower estimates of the extent of copying.

Wickedpedia has no credibility. The smoking gun is in the following Wickedpedia discussion pages for the article titled "Discovery Institute" -- "Casey Luskin", "Text Comparison", and "Appeals Court opinion". These are archived discussion pages -- some of the comments in them have since been censored by the Wickedpedian control-freak administrators.

Here is an excerpt from these discussion pages:

The text comparison cited in the court opinion required only a simple word-finding function, which even the simplest word-processing programs possess (i.e., the program counted the number of times "creation" or "creationism" appeared and the number of times that "intelligent design" was substituted). A simple word-finding function is trivial in comparison to your program's attempt to compare ideas of the opinion's ID-as-science section and the ACLU's "proposed findings of fact and conclusions of law " brief (a discussion of Elsberry's computerized comparison of the opinion and the ACLU brief is here). Using a computer program to compare ideas in two different texts is unreliable -- particularly when the program shows a low correlation -- because ideas can remain unchanged while substituting synonyms, inserting or deleting superfluous or non-essential words, paraphrasing text, and scrambling sentences and paragraphs. The only reliable way to compare the ideas in two different texts is by a side-by-side visual comparison of the two texts, and the Discovery Institute's report showed the two texts side by side for a visual comparison. The similarity of ideas in the opinion and the ACLU brief is readily apparent in this side-by-side comparison. BTW, I don't accept the DI's 90.9% text correlation figure either.

Your statement here that your program is "approved for use and considered authoritative in Federal court" is a gross misrepresentation. You failed to show that even a single judge ever accepted the results of your program for the purpose that you claimed here: a comparison of the ideas in two different texts as opposed to mere word-finding, which virtually any word-processing program can do. Furthermore, your statement "approved for use and considered authoritative in Federal court" implies approval by the entire federal court system whereas you have not shown approval by even a single federal judge.

And here is another quote --

You folks are really making a mountain out of a molehill by making such a big stink about adding a rebuttal from the Discovery Institute. You are contributing to Wikipedia's already bad reputation as an unreliable source.

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Crazy Wickedpedia rules

A Wickedpedia rule says,

Editors should not make the mistake of thinking that if A is published by a reliable source, and B is published by a reliable source, then A and B can be joined together in an article to advance position C. This would be synthesis of published material serving to advance a position, which constitutes original research. "A and B, therefore C" is acceptable only if a reliable source has published this argument in relation to the topic of the article.

In other words, Wickedpedia bans the following reasoning as impermissible "original research":

(1) The American Library Association's definition of "banned book" includes books that have been banned from school curricula.

(2) Judge Jones banned the book "Of Pandas and People" from the curriculum of the Dover schools.

(3) "Of Pandas and People" is a banned book according to the ALA's definition.

You think I am kidding? A Wickedpedian control freak administrator said,

Nice piece of original research, which we do not allow here. Do you have some relibale non-partisan sources that state that the book is banned? -- Kim van der Linde

-- and then later,

Larry, your whole reasoning still is original research, how you want to twist it. Come up with that reliable non-partisan source that conforms that the book is banned and we talk further.

Also, the following rules are full of vague terms that the Wickedpedian control-freak administrators can use to "lawyer to death" those who disagree with them:

Self-published sources (online and paper)

Anyone can create a website or pay to have a book published, then claim to be an expert in a certain field. For that reason, self-published books, newsletters, personal websites, open wikis, blogs, forum postings, and similar sources are largely not acceptable.

Self-published material may, in some circumstances, be acceptable when produced by an established expert on the topic of the article whose work in the relevant field has previously been published by reliable third-party publications. However, caution should be exercised when using such sources: if the information in question is really worth reporting, someone else is likely to have done so.

Self-published sources should never be used as third-party sources about living persons, even if the author is a well-known professional researcher or writer; see WP:BLP#Reliable sources.

Articles and posts on Wikipedia may not be used as sources.

Self-published and questionable sources in articles about themselves

Material from self-published and questionable sources may be used as sources in articles about themselves, so long as:

it is relevant to their notability;
it is not contentious;
it is not unduly self-serving;
it does not involve claims about third parties;
it does not involve claims about events not directly related to the subject;
there is no reasonable doubt as to who authored it;
the article is not based primarily on such sources.

Wickedpedia sucks.
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Wikipedia edit war over Darwin-Lincoln birthdate coincidence

A dispute over whether to add the Darwin-Lincoln birthdate coincidence to Darwin's biography was one of the biggest edit wars in Wikipedia history:
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Is sharing a birthday with Abraham Lincoln important enough to include in the Charles Darwin article, or is it a bit of trivia that has no place in an encyclopedia? As of 4 February 2005, there has been an eight week-long revert war over a single sentence. . . . . The discussions at Talk:Charles Darwin/Lincoln and LincolnArchive01, plus the arbitration pages amount to some 30,000 words, which is about the length of a short Agatha Christie novel.

An overwhelming majority of Wikipedians finally decided to omit the coincidence. One advocate of including the coincidence reverted the Darwin biography 37 times [1].

The solution under my proposed Wikipedia dispute resolution procedure would be to add the birthdate coincidence along with (1) a note that there is a dispute over whether including the coincidence is appropriate and (2) links to Wikipedian and external-website discussions and debates on the dispute.

Despite the triviality of the birthdate coincidence, the Darwin Day celebrations include a Darwin-Lincoln essay contest.

Ironically, we are not even sure of Lincoln's actual birthdate -- he was born on the frontier, where people tend to lose track of dates.
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Stupid Wikipedia manual

Someone had the stupidity to write a manual for Wikipedia editors, "Wikipedia: the Missing Manual." [1][2]. The only thing that people need to know about editing Wickedpedia is that editing it is a waste of time. Wickedpedia is a lost cause. Many schools and teachers prohibit students from using Wickedpedia as a source, and one school district went so far as to block Wickedpedia on all of the school district's computers, with the result that the students can't even use Wickedpedia to find other sources. I just hope that the dog on the cover chews up the book real good.

A lot of people have the mistaken idea that the main -- or even the sole -- cause of bias and error in Wickedpedia is the open editing, but a bigger cause is censorship of good edits by the Wickedpedian control freak administrators. It is this censorship by the administrators that prevents Wickedpedia from being self-correcting. For example, once I tried to add the book "Of Pandas and People," a book that a federal judge banned from public school classrooms, to the Wickedpedia list of "banned books." The Wickedpedian control freaks refused to accept the entry. As a compromise, I proposed listing the book along with a note that the listing was disputed and links to external websites where the dispute was discussed or debated. No soap. The Wickedpedians finally completely rewrote the whole banned books article just to avoid listing the book.

"Wikipedia: The Missing Manual" does not mention the quickest, easiest, and fairest way of resolving many Wikipedia disputes: give a brief description of the disputed item along with a statement that the item is disputed and links to external websites where the item is discussed or debated. The alternatives are edit wars and arbitrary censorship by Wickedpedian control freak editors. A preview of "Chapter 10: Resolving Content Disputes" (subtopic "Resolving Content Disputes Informally") says,

The first part of this chapter focused on ways to decrease the probability of getting into a content dispute. But if you're editing articles, such disputes are almost inevitable, unless no one else cares enough to edit the same articles. This section shows you what to do if someone disputes one of your edits, or disagrees with how you responded to one of his edits. When you're in a content dispute, your goal should be to resolve the matter informally. You usually try to reach an informal resolution by discussing the matter on the article talk page, as discussed on page xx.

With any luck, both you and the other editors who get involved in the discussion about content are reasonable, respectful of the other editors (who are also unpaid volunteers), and focused solely on what's best for Wikipedia. Taking that approach improves the chances of a successful outcome. If you find yourself disagreeing with another editor about content, start with the following suggestions. You'll be much less likely to need to use more formal methods to resolve matters.

Discuss Edits, Not Editors (page XX) stressed the importance of avoiding incivility, and assuming good faith. Those objectives hold even more true once a dispute is underway. Don't make disagreements a personal matter if you want to easily resolve content disagreements.

Remember that your goal is improve an article, not to win an argument. As the guideline Wikipedia:Etiquette (shortcut: WP:EQ) puts it, "Concede a point when you have no response to it, or admit when you disagree based on intuition or taste. Ski instructors tell new students, If you"re not falling, you're not learning." In Wikipedia, when you edit articles, you should consider your errors (when pointed out) as an indication that youre learning. There's absolutely nothing wrong if your changes to an article weren't perfect. What's absolutely wrong is defending something because you did it and another editor didn't like it, and you think that somehow you have to defend the edit simply because it's yours.

The stupid author of this book is living in a dream world that has no connection to reality.
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King Jimbo Wales has the nerve to ask librarians to help improve Wickedpedia

A news article says,

"Librarians are not engaging with the academies," said Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales. "If libraries throughout the world formed regional groups and made an effort, they would be playing a positive role within Wikipedia. The job of the librarian is about highlighting the weaknesses and strengths of information."

Jimmy Wales, one of the founders of online encyclopedia phenomenon Wikipedia, has called on librarians to become deeply involved in the Web-based communities that surround his products.

One professional librarian who specializes in the field of electronic publications responded on his blog,
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According to Jimmy Wales, the quality of the Wikipedia would be improved if only librarians 'engaged' with the encyclopedia. He wants information professionals to form and join Wikipedia Academies to create a generation of editors who will drive the standards upward. The job of a librarian, you may be interested to learn is 'about highlighting the weaknesses and strengths of information'.

. . . Now, perhaps I'm reading this incorrectly, but is he actually trying to shift the responsibility for ensuring the quality of content over to information professionals? When exactly are we supposed to be doing this? I'm all in favour of fixing and improving things, but I think it's a stretch to try and put responsibility onto the profession.

And fatheaded King Jimbo doesn't seem to understand that a lot of people have simply lost interest in trying to improve Wickedpedia. Wickedpedia is a lost cause. Trying to improve Wickedpedia is like trying to make the proverbial silk purse out of a sow's ear. One school district has even gone so far as to block Wickedpedia on all of the school district's computers, with the result that students cannot even use Wickedpedia to find other sources. That is some testimonial for Wickedpedia.
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Fatheaded Ed Brayton in Wickedpedia edit war

Unscrupulous BVD-clad blogger Fatheaded Ed Brayton is now involved in an edit war in Wickedpedia. The edit war is over entries of references to Michigan Messenger, a multi-blogger blog where Fatheaded Ed is a co-blogger.

Ed, the Wickedpedia rules say no personal blogs may be used as references. Meshuga Messenger is a personal blog, no matter how you look at it. The bloggers on Meshuga Messenger are amateurs. There is no editorial oversight. There are no consequences -- other than through court action -- for knowingly publishing false or unverified information. Personally, I think that Wikipedia should allow references to personal blogs so long as there are disclaimers stating that there is no Wikipedia endorsement. But if there is a rule banning personal blogs, that rule should be followed to the letter.

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