Corruption of Wikipedia (http://wikicensored.info/)

This article is dedicated to Galileo Galilei. [1]

PDF of full version of this article is available here.

 

Keyword names: Peter Baskerville, Rod Dreher, Seth Finkelstein, Kyle Gann, R. Stuart Geiger, Mike Godwin, Ryan Jordan, John Harnad, Giles Hattersley, Ted Kennedy, Jenny Kleeman, Gregory Kohs, Ruud Koot, Barry Kort, Robert Kowalski, Jaron Lanier, Rachel Marsden, Charles Matthews, Barack Obama, Arthur Rubin, Larry Sanger, Stacy Schiff, John Seigenthaler (Sr.), Murray Shohat, Jimmy "Jimbo" Wales, Dave Winer

 

For many years, I have been interested in providing online encyclopedic information in the areas of concurrency, logic, and the procedural embedding of knowledge (which is my research area). However, there did not seem to be a suitable vehicle to widely distribute this information.

 In the last few years, the following changes in technology have made it vital to have a more general understanding of this research area:

• Web Services are providing massive concurrency between applications on the Internet
• Many-core computer systems are providing massive concurrency on server and client computers (including phones, etc.)
• Large software systems have become chock full of inconsistencies rendering classical logic inappropriate as a foundation for reasoning about them

The technoscience that has been developed to address the above developments is currently not widely understood. So I decided to write encyclopedia articles in this area. At first Wikipedia seemed to be a reasonable place for them. So I created a number of articles and collaborated with some other editors on improving several more.

However, my experience on Wikipedia was similar to that of Professor Kyle Gann [2007]:[i]

Wikipedia is amateur-friendly, and that's what I liked about it. Too many print reference works are hobbled by the exclusion of scholars and thinkers who are ahead of the curve, whose ideas (and even entire categories of knowledge) are not countenanced in the stodgier university departments whence many reference works depend. But Wikipedia is not only amateur-friendly, but expert-unfriendly. They pretend not to be, and give lip service to the importance of expert editors. But when you put the rules together, you realize that people who are actually authorities on a subject are forced to argue with one hand tied behind their backs.

For instance, there's an "original research" rule: original research, i.e. facts you've dug up or deduced yourself but that are not verifiable in the scholarly literature, are not allowed. Well, I can see that. You don't want every unpublished crank using Wikipedia to propagate his crackpot views. Most of what I do is original research, since I rarely write about things other scholars have already covered, but that's all right, since I've published most of my research, and all I have to do is footnote my own books. Ah! but there's another rule called "Conflict of Interest”, "which disallows quoting yourself for the purpose of bringing public attention to your writings.” Which means that any other person on the planet can write something in Wikipedia and quote me as an authority, but if I do it myself, that's suspect. I have done it myself, and the citations stand if no one objects, but if a crank wants to contradict me, all he has to do is yell "Conflict of interest!," and delete whatever he wants. After all, who knows what scruffy, fly-by-night vanity presses my books might be issued by (Cambridge University Press, Schirmer Books, University of California Press)? (emphases added)

 

Censorship by Wikipedia

 

Wikipedia is governed as follows:

 

At the very top, with powers that range far beyond those of any mere Wikipedian mortal, is Wales, known to everyone in Wiki-world as Jimbo. He can do pretty much anything he wants - from locking pages to banning people to getting rid of developers. So vast are his powers that some began calling him "the benevolent dictator." But Wales bristled at that tag. So his minions assigned him a different, though no less imposing, label. "Jimbo," says Wikipedia administrator Mark Pellegrini, "is the God-King." (emphasis added) [Pink 2005]

According to He's the "God-King," but you can call him Jimbo [Smith 2007]:

Software guru Eric Raymond, whose work reportedly inspired Wales, recently told New Yorker writer Stacy Schiff that Wikipedia is a disaster "infested with moon bats."

 

Wales, who retains final say over all Wikipedia entries (thousands are rejected each month), takes in stride the tossed moon bats and brickbats... (emphasis added)

According to Wales [Jimmy Wales Wikipedia User Page September 17, 2008]:

"I should point out that these are my principles [for the operation of Wikipedia], such that I am the final judge of them. This does not mean that I will not listen to you, but it does mean that at some ultimate, fundamental level, this is how Wikipedia will be run." (emphasis added)

Below the God-King there is a chain of command from Board of Directors to a hierarchy of (mostly[ii] anonymous) Stewards, Bureaucrats, Arbitrators, and Administrators.[iii] This hierarchy has absolute power of censorship over Wikipedia. Some of this power structure is based on personal relationships [Bauwens 2008, Orlowski 2007, Finkelstein 2008a]. On 1 October 2008, there were 1,597 Administrators on Wikipedia [Wikimedia Foundation 2008].[iv]

According to Correa, Correa and Askanas [2005]:

If the “ranking” users - those that are more equal than the others - do not attain this position based on their expertise, what, then, is their “rank” based on? It is based on their devotion to Wikipedia-itself-as-social-dogma, on the amount of time they spend dutifully performing tedious maintenance chores, on their bureaucratic zealotry and their policial aspirations. In other words, in Wikipedia, ultimate decisions about what constitutes “encyclopedic fact” and what constitutes “vandalism” devolve to a cadre of Internet bureaucrats with no other qualifications than their devotion to Wikipedianism.…

One of the main problems stems precisely from the fact that Wikipedia's de-facto arbiters of what constitutes “science”, “information”, “fact”, “knowledge” - those who make it into the ranks of Wikipedia administrators, and who have the time and persistence to win any “edit war” - are Internet technobureaucrats without any actual love of knowledge or any respect for those who spend their life fighting for it. What these people mean by “knowledge” is a certain type of mainstream opinion, shaped by the latest trends in Google, Nature, Wired, NASA, the Sierra Club, etc. Wikipedia, in spite of its much-waved banner of “Neutral Point of View”, is permeated by a systemic bias. “Neutral point of view”, in Wikipedia, denotes a point of view that represents the 70th-percentile “consensus” of Web 2.0 technobureaucratic opinion. (emphases added)

According to Barry Kort [2008b],

the decision [by a Wikipedia Administrator] to block or unblock is purely a matter of personal discretion, without regard to modern concepts of civil rights or due process. The discretion to govern according to whim and caprice is a throwback to the age of tribal chieftans, before humankind worked out such concepts as civil rights, evidence-driven beliefs, and due process. Note that commonly used rationales for blocking, such as “disruption” or “incivility” are two of the most vague and subjective notions imaginable. (emphasis added)

In its censorship activities, Wikipedia does not properly distinguish between

• Providing information about a particular scientific domain
• Promoting particular scientists in a domain

Making the above distinction requires scientific expertise.[v] And Wikipedia has severe problems with expertise [Bauwens 2008, Vaknin 2006, Farrell 2007]. To further its system of control, Wikipedia has decreed that editors of highly technical scientific articles do not need to have scientific qualifications![vi] Dr. William Connolley (a former climate modeler at the British Antarctic Survey and a noted expert on global warming and an Administrator on the Wikipedia) believes that Wikipedia “gives no privilege to those who know what they’re talking about.” [Schiff 2006]

Wikipedia conducts censorship on a grand scale. Much of the power of Wikipedia derives from the effectiveness of its censorship. Wikipedia articles rank very highly in search engine results because of their broad coverage and the fact that spam and nontraditional viewpoints are effectively censored.[vii] However, the power of censorship tends to corrupt administrators. This corruption is tolerated and in some cases even encouraged because Wikipedia is highly dependent on administrators donating large amount of time to their censorship duties. Thus censorship power over article content is a necessary reward by Wikipedia to the unpaid administrators even if it often impairs the quality of articles.

According to Giles Hattersley [2009],

Wikipedia may be open to all, in theory, but it is in effect run by a cabal of 3,000 amateur know-alls.

“They are an extremely smart, committed group, who seem to work almost full-time on the project while at work or at home,” marvels [Jimmy “Jimbo”] Wales, whose paid staff number a mere 25. “I don’t know how they get anything else done.”

The know-alls squabble constantly over “facts”, undoing each other’s work and posting their own, but they tend to band together to protect their supremacy if any upstarts come along. Between them they manage more than 70% of information on the site. As Wikipedia has featured in the top 10 most visited sites globally for five years, they have become the de facto arbiters of mankind’s collective memory. Aside from the practical impossibility of sieving so much information, doesn’t the site’s gang rule fly in the face of Wales’s hippie-tastic dream of access for everyone?

“Well, I’m not a hippie,” Wales says. “I’m a centre-right, free-market capitalist. And, actually, I think the opposite to you. There is a core community who are extremely powerful but that is a good thing." (emphasis added)

According to Correa, Correa and Askanas [2005]

In fact, it is quite possible in Wikipedia to have a situation where the actual experts on the subject are declared “vandals”, and their contributions repeatedly reverted or mangled by the “ranking” users who have access to policial tools such as locking of entries, blocking of edits, pre-emptive screen deletions and suspension of other users.[viii] (emphasis added):

Unfortunately, the above circumstance happens quite often in Wikipedia seemingly motivated by malwebolence [Schwartz 2008]. A recent example occurred when the Wikipedia Administrator Ruud Koot[ix] censored the article about me on Wikipedia[x] and then enforced the censorship using his special Administrator powers by censoring the following:

Hewitt's recent work has centered on foundations for privacy-friendly client cloud computing.^[1] This approach to cloud computing focuses on clients that are “privacy-friendly” because of the following

• by default clients store information in the cloud that can only be unencrypted using the client's private key^[2]
•  semantic integration of diverse sorts of information (calendar, email, contacts, documents, search results, presence information, etc.) is performed on the clients^[3]

This work has resulted in the following developments:^[4]

• strongly paraconsistent logic using Direct Logic^TM[5], to more safely reason about pervasively inconsistent information
• concurrent reasoning using ActorScript^TM[5] for many-core processors (e.g. Larrabee) that cannot be implemented using logical deduction since although strongly paraconsistent and Bayesian inference are used together locally, they are inadequate to accomplish the overall results of concurrent reasoning. (See Indeterminacy in concurrent computation.)

1.     ^ “Video recording of “Scalable Privacy-Friendly Client Cloud Computing: a gathering Perfect Disruption" Stanford Computer Systems Colloquium on October 22, 2008.
2.    ^ Carl Hewitt (September/October 2008). “ORGs for Scalable, Robust, Privacy-Friendly Client Cloud Computing”. IEEE Internet Computing 12 (5). http://orgsforclientcloudcomputing.carlhewitt.info/. 
3.     ^ Carl Hewitt (January/February 2009). “Perfect Disruption: The Paradigm Shift from Mental Agents to ORGs”. IEEE Internet Computing. http://disruption.carlhewitt.info/.
4.     ^ Carl Hewitt. “A historical perspective on developing foundations for privacy-friendly client cloud computing”. http://perspective.carlhewitt.info. ArXiv January 30, 2009
5.     ^ ^{a b} Hewitt, Carl. ““Common sense for concurrency and strong paraconsistency using unstratified inference and reflection". http://commonsense.carlhewitt.info. ArXiv. December 30, 2008.

Wikipedia relies on Outlawry  

Wikipedia operates by the ancient practice of outlawry. Outlawry means that those banned by Wikipedia lack rights -- suffering a form of Wikipedia death. To give them aid and support commits the Wikipedia crime of aiding and abetting, risking the danger of being banned oneself.

 

In fact, recently Wikipedia has even gone so far as to ban an entire organization from editing:

I think that banning a social group simply because it aims to influence what's written about it on Wikipedia is futile, for it takes a very naive view of why people actually contribute to Wikipedia. I've been thinking about this issue for a while and I think one of the reasons for Wikipedia's tremendous success has been exactly the public desire to correct misconceptions or, more to the point, manipulate the truth in one's favor. Of course, this may go against Wikipedia's own rules but many people flock to edit Wikipedia simply because they want their competing version of events to prevail; it's time for the Wikipedia community to accept this truth and live with it. (Emphases added) [Morozov 2009].

Professor John Harnad (who was blocked by Wikipedia) summarized as follows [Wikipedia Review 2008b]:

Wikipedia, on the contrary, is the enshrinement of contempt for learning, knowledge and expertise. It is, for many, a diversionary hobby to which they are prepared to devote a great portion of their time, as others do to computer based video games. Unfortunately, it has led also to an inner cult, shrouded in anonymity, with structures and processes of self-regulation that are woefully inadequate. Many of these tools and procedures are reminiscent, in parody, of those of the Inquisition: secret courts, an inner “elite” arbitrarily empowered to censor and exclude all those perceived as a threat to the adopted conventions of the cult; denunciations, character assassination, excommunication. An arbitrarily concocted “rulebook” and language rife with self-referential sanctimoniousness give a superficial illusion of order and good sense, but no such thing exists in practice.

    It is truly a “Tyranny of the Ignorant”. (emphasis added)

Wikipedia has had a difficult relationship with academia. In a survey [Powerset 2008], it was found that

a surprising 73% of students have been explicitly told by their professor not to use Wikipedia. (emphasis in original)

According to a Wikipedia editor:[xi]  The consensus is that because of the sustained incredible hostility that Wikipedia has expressed towards academics, they should steer clear of contributing to it.[xii]

According Dr. Barry Kort (Moulton) [Wikipedia Review 2008c]: Given the level of dysfunction that has come to prevail on Wikipedia, the most appropriate course for a principled scientist is to withdraw from the project.

Vandalism and Harassment by Wikipedia

Another problem is that Wikipedia has developed a pattern of harassment [Bauwens 2008, Cramer 2007, Vaknin 2006; Gann 2007; Metz 2007a, 2007c, and 2007d]. The God-King and his minions have absolute power [Bauwens 2008; Metz 2007a, 2007b, 2007d, and 2008a] within Wikipedia. And, of course, absolute power corrupts [Martin 2007c].

Gann [2007] remarked on his reasons for permanently leaving Wikipedia:

1. This was not only one bad experience, but the worst of several - plus the lack of fairness in the implementation of rules, which seem to apply to some and not others. I've quit jobs at paying publications for less provocation.
2. Perseverance would have gotten me further where? What was I trying to achieve? I was doing Wikipedia favors. How many bad experiences should it have taken me to no longer want to do things for them?
3. If there is a permanent structural problem in using my own research and expertise, what possible incentive could I have to continue? What would I want to write about except my own areas of expertise?
4. When I see such abundant evidence from the people who have posted here and all those experts who have left Wikipedia that the problems will certainly continue and there is no structural process for avoiding them, why would I volunteer to continue fighting fights in which I have nothing whatever to gain? (emphases added)

Scott [2004] earlier provided the following analysis,

This is what the inherent failure of Wikipedia is. It's that there's a small set of content generators, a massive amount of wonks and twiddlers, and then a heaping amount of procedural whackjobs. And the mass of twiddlers and procedural whackjobs means that the content generators stop being so and have to become content defenders. Woe be that your take on things is off from the majority. Even if you can prove something, you're now in the situation that anybody can change it. And while that's all great in a happy-go-lucky flower shower sort of way, it's when you realize that the people who are going to change it could have absolutely no experience with the subject whatsoever, then you see where we are.

    If you've ever worked in a large company, one where not everyone's name is known by everyone else, you've bumped into these people, who don't know the thing the company makes very well, don't keep on top of new ideas beyond buzzwords, yet wield the kind of power where they can stop and start innovation and positive growth because they simply feel like it. It's pretty heartbreaking stuff and I hope a bunch of you never have to deal with it.

    But thanks to Wikipedia, you can experience this on a daily basis! College students with too much free time deciding your subject matter is not worth reporting. Bizarre insight from strange lands telling you they didn't think your paragraph was relevant. And ever the bizarre need for a Neutral Point of View. Neutral Point of View is a doctrine about how Wikipedia articles should be written. Like Wikipedia itself, it is a great idea in theory. In application, of course, it turns into yet another hammer for wonks and whackjobs to beat each other and innocent bystanders. (emphases added)

Gann [2007] concluded that (emphasis added)

“Wikipedia is a playground for belligerent adolescents.”[xiii]

Harassment by Wikipedia Administrators can be rather petty. Wikipedia Administrator Rudy Koot has repeatedly posted  unflattering images of me on the Wikipedia website.[xiv] When requests were made to remove these images, Wikipedia failed to do so until, after a long time, another Administrator intervened and removed each image by force.

Wikipedia has taken retribution on those it feels have trespassed. For example, according to [Greenberg 2007]:

Getting on Wikipedia's bad side can also harm a site's rankings in Google and Yahoo! search results, according to Jonathan Hochman, a search marketer who doubles as a volunteer Wikipedia administrator. Wikipedia keeps a "spammer blacklist" and shares it with several search engines, he says. Domains that appear on the list often lose valuable search engine traffic....

[Marketing consultant Stephan] Spencer said "Basically it's 'shoot on sight.' You're guilty until proven innocent." [xv] (emphasis added)

Wikipedia is harassing a noncommercial artistic website that makes use of "Wikipedia" to critically comment on Wikipedia and creativity.  According to the Electronic Frontier Foundation:

The disputed site describes the project, provides links to media coverage of the project, and so on. It does not use any more of the Wikipedia mark than need be; for example, it doesn’t even use the Wikipedia logo. Simply put, the site does not purport to be, nor does it look anything like, Wikipedia and the artists have done nothing to suggest Wikipedia endorses their work. Finally, the creators are engaging in precisely the kind of critical speech sheltered by the First Amendment. [McSherry 2009]

Wikipedia demanded that the artists give up their domain name or it would attempt to take it by (legal) force. However, when this generated considerable negative publicity, Wikipedia pretended that it had not done so  [Finkelstein 2009b; Godwin 2009].

 

Also Wikipedia has harassed people based on their profession.  For example, consider [Hochman 2009]:

I earn a living as a marketing consultant, specializing in online marketing. You're making an inappropriate ad hominem argument when you say I should not be involved in X because of who I am. I am free to comment just as much as anybody else. My user page says exactly who I am, and anybody is free to check me out and see for themselves. Please don't discourage participation by casting doubts on people because of how they make a living. Jonathan Hochman  …

I remember you from the SEO discussions that Durova [Lise Broer] was involved with and remember you as some sort of SEO guy. Is this: [www.hochmanconsultants.com Hochman Consultants» Internet Marketing, SEO, PPC, Web Development] you? Would someone who makes money on such things want Wikipedia's rules on COI to be lax? I think so. So do you disclose this COI in every post you make trying to argue for lax COI standards? Anonymous Wikipedia Editor.

Wow, that's an awfully presumptuous and incorrect post. I provide full disclosure of my identity, write featured articles, and what do I get? Assumptions of bad faith. Shame on you. Jonathan Hochman  

I am not being presumptuous nor am I making assumptions. I am drawing conclusions from evidence. I think your self interests with regard to Wikipedia COI rules are at odds with what is good for the Wikipedia community's ability to maintain neutral articles.   …

    Self interest colors one's views. It does not have to be conscious, does not have to involve overt cashing in, does not have to involve conscious manipulations. Self interest often takes the form of people honestly believing certain things and feeling their acting on those beliefs has nothing to do with their self interests. That's just how the human mind works. Anonymous Wikipedia Editor

Your argument appears to be hypocritical, because you do not seem to have disclosed your identity. For all we know, you could have all sorts of hidden biases. Why should an editor who discloses their identity, thereby inviting scrutiny of their edits be treated worse than somebody who remains anonymous? Jonathan Hochman (emphases added)  

Wikipedia is an Communal Blog, not an encyclopedia

 

Wikipedia is not an encyclopedia[xvi] because of censorship by its Administrators, instant publishing of anonymously submitted content, lack of accountability, and disrespect for expertise [Ahrens 2006; Bauwens 2008; Britannica Encyclopedia 2006; Carr 2006; McHenry 2005; Online Educational Database 2007; Orlowski 2006; Weinstein 2007]. Wikipedia editing processes are controlled by a commune of mostly anonymous Administrators with consequent lack of accountability. Whatever the Administrator commune allows remains semi-permanently in Wikipedia enforced by censorship and banning.

According to [Denning, Horning, Parnas, and Weinstein 2005]:

no one stands formally behind the authenticity and accuracy of any information in WP [Wikipedia]. There is no mechanism for subject-matter authorities to review and vouch for articles. There are no processes to ferret out little-known facts and include them, or to ensure that the full range of human knowledge, past and present, is represented.

Wikipedia is an interesting social experiment in knowledge compilation and codification. However, it cannot attain the status of a true encyclopedia without more formal content inclusion and expert review procedures. (emphases added)

According to Gregory Kohs [StepForth SEO blog post July 17, 2007],

Wikipedia is not an encyclopedia. It is a blog disguised as an encyclopedia, controlled by a limited number of people with admin tools who have particular axes to grind about living people with real names, all while hiding behind a cloak of anonymity.  (emphasis added)

So I propose to call Wikipedia a Communal Blog to rrecognized the following:

Wikipedia is a collection of articles heavily censored to conform to conventional wisdom and morality^[2] by a commune of mostly anonymous Administrators.^[3]

Wikipedia’s Business Model

 

Wikipedia's business model is generating Web traffic (primarily from search engines) for articles on conventional wisdom that are tightly controlled by a commune of mostly anonymous Administrators to motivate (financial) contributions.

Wikitruth is what is dished out to users who have been directed to Wikipedia articles by search engines. According to [Garfinkel 2008]:

With little notice from the outside world, the community-written encyclopedia Wikipedia has redefined the commonly accepted use of the word "truth." Why should we care? Because ­Wikipedia's articles are the first- or second-ranked results for most Internet searches...

This means that the content of these articles really matters. Wikipedia's standards of inclusion--what's in and what's not--affect the work of journalists, who routinely read Wikipedia articles and then repeat the wikiclaims as "background" without bothering to cite them. These standards affect students, whose research on many topics starts (and often ends) with Wikipedia. (emphasis added)

Consider the case of Jaron Lanier [Garfinkel 2008]:

In a May 2006 essay on the technology and culture website Edge.org, futurist Jaron Lanier called Wikipedia an example of "digital Maoism"--the closest humanity has come to a functioning mob rule.

Lanier was moved to write about Wikipedia because someone kept editing his Wikipedia entry to say that he was a film director. Lanier describes himself as a "computer scientist, composer, visual artist, and author." He is good at all those things, but he is no director. According to his essay, he made one short experimental film in the 1990s, and it was "awful."

 

"I have attempted to retire from directing films in the alternative universe that is the Wikipedia a number of times, but somebody always overrules me," Lanier wrote. "Every time my Wikipedia entry is corrected, within a day I'm turned into a film director again."

Since Lanier's attempted edits to his own Wikipedia entry were based on firsthand knowledge of his own career, he was in direct violation of Wikipedia's three core policies. He has a point of view; he was writing on the basis of his own original research; and what he wrote couldn't be verified by following a link to some kind of legitimate, authoritative, and verifiable publication

. ...

Lanier's complaints when his Wikipedia page claimed that he was a film director couldn't be taken seriously by Wikipedia's "contributors" until Lanier persuaded the editors at Edge to print his article bemoaning the claim. This Edge article by Lanier was enough to convince the Wikipedians that the Wikipedia article about Lanier was incorrect--after all, there was a clickable link! Presumably the editors at Edge did their fact checking, so the wikiworld could now be corrected. (emphasis added)

Also consider the case of Professor John Harnad (who was blocked on Wikipedia by an undergraduate student when he tried to correct some errors in a Wikipedia article) [Wikipedia Review 2008a]:

Absurdity upon absurdity.

 Self appointed pundits who have no scientific competence whatsoever casting aspersions upon precise and pertinent remarks by experts in the field; then insulting them with their derisory remarks and even imperiously commanding them to desist from expressing themselves!

 Administrators” with no other visible qualifications “than the fact that they have made thousands of edits to Wikipedia, and have attained to certain special powers through a questionable process of scrutiny within this self-referential setting. The latter, or at least some of them, apparently feel entitled to register totally unfounded, intimidating and derisory remarks ...and to overtly express their hostility to anything that might be viewed as “expert knowledge".

 Users hiding behind anonymous pseudonyms casting aspersions on the integrity of highly respected, well-known scientists, who have no other motive than to set the record straight regarding scientific content. The same users reorganizing the material in arbitrary tendentious ways, to suit their tastes, deleting legitimate contributions, ... and reordering so as to lose all logic or sense in the sequence of contributions and edits; in short, creating an anarchic circus, all within view of these “Administrators", who do nothing to intervene. (emphasis added)

Key issues include the following:

• Conventional wisdom: Wikipedia needs broad coverage of conventional wisdom in order to drive traffic from search engines. Since it does not pay for this content, it needs an idealistic story to attract contributors. Consequently, it has developed the myth that Wikipedia is a free encyclopedia to which anyone can contribute. Being free has been a tremendous competitive advantage against commercial rivals. Calling itself a free encyclopedia has important benefits for Wikipedia:

o  It gives the content the imprimatur of a reliable source of knowledge that helps to increase traffic and appeals to amateurs because it flatters them with the belief that they can help create encyclopedic knowledge without requiring expertise in the subject matter

o   It helps to shape user expectations as to what information will be found at the site.

o   It provides basis for appeals for financial contributions.

• Censorship: Content at Wikipedia has to be tightly controlled to contain only conventional wisdom and morality. It would not work if users parachuting in from a search engine were to find a lot of unconventional information. Consequently Wikipedia must be tightly censored. This censorship function is performed by a commune of Administrators who gain their positions by doing a lot of editing and patrolling before applying to be admitted into the commune. Since Administrators are not paid, appeals must be made to their idealism just as described above for other contributors. In addition, being an Administrator can appeal to the ego because it offers power over the control of content without requiring expertise.
• Banishment, libel and vilification: Wikipedia needs some way to enforce the censorship of Administrators. So it banishes those who do not submit to censorship. Also it has libeled and vilified those it has banished. (See discussion in the next section below.)

 

Wikipedia Libels and Vilifies People

Wikipedia regularly libels people in its published articles. Perhaps the most famous example concerned John Seigenthaler, Sr. In May 2005, Wikipedia published an article libeling Seigenthaler with the following accusation:  “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.”  The libel was not corrected for more than four months [Seigenthaler 2005]. Subsequently Wikipedia published that Seigenthaler's wife had tried to kill Jimmy Wales. On Dec. 21, the Kennedy allegation was inserted again. On Dec. 29, Wikipedia published, “Some journalists have commentend [sic] on how odd it is that a proponent of 'free speech' is so intent on shutting down Wikipedia.” On Jan. 11: “He died last Tuesday while on vacation.” On Jan. 5, Wikipedia replaced all the photographs of Seigenthaler in the article with pictures of Lee Harvey Oswald, and repeated the trick Jan. 14. [Mehegan 2006]

In defense of Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales said that he found it “amusing” that Seigenthaler was upset about the “obscure” Wikipedia libel because he brought it to wider attention by complaining about it in a newspaper editorial [Fanning 2007].  In Wales view, Seigenthaler should not have brought the Wikipedia libel to public attention because then it would not have been noticed because it was so “obscure”!

Seigenthaler responded to Wales as follows:

Wales is unbelievable!

He says he thinks it “amusing” that I wrote an article in USA Today complaining about Wikipedia's unreliability. He needs a new definition for the word “amusing.”

He also needs a new one for the word “obscure.”

That “obscure” biography was found by two friends of mine — one, Vic Johnson, in Nashville and the other, Erin MacAnnally, in Honolulu — before I saw it. And it appeared on perhaps two dozen “obscure” mirror sights around the world, most of which I still have not identified.^[4] (emphasis added) [Seigenthaler 2007]

Also see the recent study of Wikipedia articles hurtful and defamatory to US Senators [Kohs 2008]. In January 2009, Wikipedia falsely reported that Senators Kennedy and Byrd had died [Pershing 2009].

Rod Dreher was subject to another remarkable case of Wikipedia libel:

This chap was the victim of libelous vandalism [in an article about him] that Wikipedia failed to prevent, and then … replaced [by Wikipedia] when properly removed [by Dreher]. We owe this chap a profuse apology. He now asks for deletion [of the Wikipedia article], not it appears because he objects to an article about him (to which we might ethically say “tough, it is a free world”, but because he does not want an open Wikipage [Wikipedia article] which can at any time be the subject of further “slanderous insertions” …  Why should he have to learn Wikipedia to avoid being slandered? Why on earth should he have to watch his bio on a daily basis for slander, when we've allowed him to be slandered already? (typos corrected and emphases added) [Mac 2009]

On February 17, 2009, Wikipedia published racial epithets in its article on Barack Obama [Oswald 2009].  The Wikipedia article was indexed by Google and cached as follows:

 

Unfortunately, Wikipedia has taken incidents like the one above very lightly.^[5]

In general, Wikipedia publishes biographical information on anybody that it deems “notable” even if the person who is the subject objects and repeatedly requests that it be deleted.[xviii] In this regard, the Wikimedia Foundation, which owns and operates Wikipedia, attempts to evade legal responsibility by claiming that they do not control the content of Wikipedia.[xix]

According to Finkelstein [2006]:

For people who are not very prominent, Wikipedia biographies can be an “attractive nuisance”. It says, to every troll, vandal, and score-settler:

"Here's an article about a person where you can, with no accountability whatsoever, write any libel, defamation, or smear. It won't be a marginal comment with the social status of an inconsequential rant, but rather will be made prominent about the person, and reputation-laundered with the institutional status of an encyclopedia."  

Where living people are concerned, there is a cost-shifting aspect: instead of falling on Wikipedia's poor quality control, any negative effects are usually borne by the aggrieved party, except in the very rare case where he or she has enough power to publicize Wikipedia's failings. (emphasis added)

According to Rachel Marsden

I want the Wikipedia entry about me deleted. I don't know why this is such a difficult concept to accept.

    This is not a publishing company, nor is it some kind of altruistic venture for the greater good of humanity. Wikipedia is nothing more than the biggest and most prolific defamation machine that the world has ever known, …. (emphasis added) [Thomas 2008e]

 

Wikipedia instigated the defamatory attack by The Observer on Carl Hewitt

A recent example of Wikipedia libel occurred when I became involved in an academic dispute with Robert Kowalski over a Computer Science research area called “Logic Programming.” Kowalski appealed to an Administrator of Wikipedia to intervene in the dispute (see the discussion in the appendix of this article[xx]). Thus Kowalski was in effect promoting his own side of an academic dispute by participating in my censorship by Wikipedia. (See “Middle History of Logic Programming” [Hewitt 2008] for a detailed discussion of the dispute.)

Charles Matthews (left)  with Jimmy "Jimbo" Wales

Although lacking expertise in this particular area of Computer Science, Charles Matthews (a very high level Wikipedia official) favored Kowalski’s side and using his Wikipedia power enforced it by censorship with the justification of “Neutral Point of View.”[xxi] Furthermore, Matthews “tipped off”[xxii] a reporter (who he had successfully “cultivated”[xxiii] to write stories favorable to Wikipedia) to enlist her in writing an article that libeled me. Matthews then became the principle unnamed source for the resulting Observer hatchet job[xxiv] appearing under the false guise of an independent “senior academic” in my field of research casting aspersions on me.[xxv]  While he was angry with me because of our academic dispute, Kowalski confided in Matthews.[xxvi] As a result, Matthews sent the reporter off to interview Kowalski. Consequently, the reporter has tape recordings and emails of Kowalski saying some harsh things about me.[xxvii] (Kowalski has subsequently made amends in his emails to me; see below.)

When Matthews applied to be reappointed as an Arbitrator, Sarah McEwan (AKA SlimVirgin) raised the issue that “you [Matthews] discussed this story with the [Wikipedia Public Relations] committee prior to publication [of the Observer’s libelous attack on Hewitt], and they either encouraged you or didn't stop you.  The point is that it's an odd thing, in my view, for an ArbCom [Arbitration Committee] member to do.”^[6]

But, still, Wikipedia offered no apology. Instead, Wikipedia former Administrator Lise Broer (AKA Durova) backed by another anonymous Administrator censored the story of the Wikipedia instigated attack on me from Wikipedia! [Broer 2009][xxxi]

 As part of its business model, Wikipedia has engaged in libel and vilification in an attempt to intimidate academics into conforming to the censorship of its Administrators.^[xxxii]

Kowalski later clarified as follows:

I would like to clear up some misunderstanding. In particular, I would like to make it clear that I have the highest opinion of your work, and I especially appreciate the influence it has had on my own work.…

I would also like to clear up the nature of my contribution to the Observer article [Kleeman 2007b]. Jenny Kleeman contacted me to ask my opinion about an article she was planning to write. Apparently she had decided to write this article after being in contact with one of the Wikipedia administrators [apparently Charles Matthews], who had consulted with her about earlier articles she had written about Wikipedia for the Observer and/or Guardian [e.g. Kleeman 2007a]. She asked me why I thought you were editing Wikipedia in the way that brought about the Wikipedia ban. I replied that I thought you had not received adequate recognition for your work and that it was unfortunate that you felt the need to make your case in such a vigorous way that the Wikipedia administrators imposed the ban.[xxxiii] [Kowalski 2008a]  

As illustrated earlier in this article, Wikipedia does not allow proper vigorous academic discussion and debate because they are incompatible with its business model as follows:

• In normal academic practice, the views of experts are solicited and discussed. On Wikipedia, academic experts who have tried to participate have been denigrated as "self-promoters", censored, and then banned.
• In normal academic practice, expertise is honored and respected. On Wikipedia, expertise has not been honored. Instead, the cult of the amateur has been promoted.
• In normal academic practice, open reasoned discussion and debate is the norm for addressing difficult issues. On Wikipedia, censorship is the norm.
• In normal academic practice, the qualifications and vested interests of participants are open for discussion. On Wikipedia, participants are allowed to remain anonymous. In fact, revealing the real name of an Administrator is a severe violation of Wikipedia policy.[xxxiv]

As explained at the beginning of this article, the main concern of my work on Wikipedia has been to contribute to the development of a set of articles in the areas of concurrency, logic, and the procedural embedding of knowledge. If achieved, I consider this would be of great benefit in conveying an understanding to researchers who have entered the subject area comparatively recently as well as contributing to a general understanding among a wider audience.

When choosing citations, for many reasons I am much happier citing other peoples' work. For example, I get more credit by citing others because it shows that I have read and understood at least some of the prior literature! Also citing others puts my own contributions in their proper context. Of course, at the same time, we have to try to make citations in articles as accurate as possible in identifying relevant prior work.

 When I explained the above to Kowalski, he kindly wrote back:

I'm sorry if I have misunderstood your motives. ... I wrongly assumed that your editing Wikipedia was partly motivated by an understandable desire to compensate for MIT's failure to reward you for your achievements. [Kowalski 2008b]

It may be useful to point out that for reasons explained in this article, any recognition that Wikipedia might provide would be of no use to me.  

Because of persistent inaccuracies, Administrator vandalism, and other problems explained in this article, I have asked Wikipedia to delete their article about me in its entirety.

For example, in the case of the article about me in Wikipedia, one of the Administrators decided to deliberately denigrate me by vandalizing the article by removing my Emeritus title. After this was protested, it was necessary for another Administrator to undo the vandalism.

Another example involved the list of my doctoral students. Dr. William Kornfeld had been omitted from the list. When I added Dr. Kornfeld to the list, in an act of vandalism he was immediately removed by an Administrator who blocked me from editing my biography on the grounds that the Administrator's censoring Dr. Kornfeld from the list was not a “serious inaccuracy.” When the Administrator’s censorship was protested, the action was quietly reversed and Dr. Kornfeld was added back on to the list of my doctoral students. However Dr. Gene Ciccarelli and Dr. Michael Freiling had also been omitted. When they were added to the list, the article was first locked against editing by new Wikipedia editors and then locked for a long time against editing by anyone except an Administrator. And so it goes on Wikipedia.

No apology was ever offered for the above examples or other similar ongoing Administrator vandalism on the part of Wikipedia.  

Will Wikipedia continue to practice malwebolence[xxxv] as a charity whose business model depends (in part) on harming people by publishing dossiers with negative information in defiance of their requests not to be included in Wikipedia?[xxxvi]

Deception by Wikipedia 

Wikipedia has deceived many.  A recent example occurred when the Guardian published the following retraction concerning its obituary of the composer Maurice Jarre:

We opened with a quotation which we are now advised had been invented as a hoax, and was never said by the composer: "My life has been one long soundtrack. Music was my life, music brought me to life." The article closed with: "Music is how I will be remembered," said Jarre. "When I die there will be a final waltz playing in my head and that only I can hear." These quotes appear to have originated as a deliberate insertion in the composer's Wikipedia entry in the wake of his death on 28 March, and from there were duplicated on various internet sites. These errors have been corrected. (emphases added) [O'Conner 2009]

 A more serious case of Wikipedia deception caused the New Yorker Magazine to publish the following retraction:

 

The July 31, 2006, piece on Wikipedia, “Know It All,” by Stacy Schiff, contained an interview with a Wikipedia site administrator and contributor called Essjay, whose responsibilities included handling disagreements about the accuracy of the site’s articles and taking action against users who violate site policy. He was described in the piece as “a tenured professor of religion at a private university” with “a Ph.D. in theology and a degree in canon law.”

Essjay was recommended to Ms. Schiff as a source by a member of Wikipedia’s management team because of his respected position within the Wikipedia community...

 

Essjay now says that his real name is Ryan Jordan, that he is twenty-four and holds no advanced degrees, and that he has never taught. He was recently hired by Wikia—a for-profit company affiliated with Wikipedia—as a “community manager”; he continues to hold his Wikipedia positions. He did not answer a message we sent to him; Jimmy Wales, the co-founder of Wikia and of Wikipedia, said of Essjay’s invented persona, “I regard it as a pseudonym and I don’t really have a problem with it.” (emphases added)

 

 

Writing on his Wikipedia talk page, Jordan bragged about how he fooled Schiff by "doing a good job playing the part" and also committed defamation and libel against her:

Further, she [Schiff] made several offers to compensate me for my time, and my response was that if she truly felt the need to do so, she should donate to the Foundation instead. (emphasis added) [Lih 2007a]

 However,

This is an accusation of the highest degree to make about a journalist. Paying a source for a story is an absolute no-no in the normal practice of print journalism. And it struck me immediately how incredible it was he would accuse Stacy Schiff, a Pulitzer Prize winning author writing for The New Yorker, of this crime. (emphasis added) [Lih 2007a]

 

On 23 February 2007, Jimmy Wales announced that he had appointed Jordan to Wikipedia's Arbitration Committee (its penultimate operational governing body) producing fierce negative reactions including the following:

Wikipedia's Maximum Leader Jimmy Wales, it transpires, has blessed an identity fraudster who bamboozled journalists last year, by rewarding him with a full-time job and promotion to Wikipedia's politburo. Wales said he had no qualms with the deception. His comments follow an apology issued by The New Yorker magazine this week, after a bogus Professor who claimed to have four degrees, tricked a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist commissioned by the publication...Wales not only defended the identity fraudster, but promoted him to a salaried position on Wikia. Wikia Inc. is the corporation co-founded by Wales, which has to date received $14m of investment capital from a VC firm and Amazon.com. Wales also promoted Jordan to the creepy sounding "ArbComm", or Arbitration Committee, which is the next-to-final adjudication panel at Wikipedia. (The final panel consists of the Maximum Leader himself). (emphasis added) [Orlowski 2007a]

Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia and Wikia, has issued a free pass to a Wikipedia editor who lied about his background. In an incredible contradiction, Wales said of Wikipedia editor and Wikia employee Ryan Jordan (nee "Essjay"): “I accepted his apology, because he is now, and has always been, an excellent editor with an exemplary track record.” (emphasis added) [Ratcliffe 2007]

 

On another matter, Wales personally pocketed fees from his speaking engagements even when Wikipedia paid expenses according to Wool [2008]:  

At one point he owed the Foundation some $30,000 in receipts, and this while we were preparing for the audit. Not a bad sum, considering that many of those trips had fat honoraria, which Jimbeau [Jimbo] kept for himself. (Florence [Devouard] will surely remember his explanation for one of these: “I don’t make any money, and my wife needs a washing machine." Her response was wonderful: "A gold-plated washing machine?”)  

So Jimbeau [Jimbo] cancelled an upcoming trip to Italy, Serbia, and Croatia, and got to work finding receipts. I helped process them. Subway ticket in Moscow: $0.50. Massage parlor in Moscow: priceless. Some were accepted; others were not, like the $650 spent on two bottles of wine during a dinner for four at Bern's—I remember that one because he submitted it twice, once with the tip scratched out.   I remember how, in Mexico City, Bono explained to us how the band leaves the arena after a concert by running through a long plastic tunnel stretching from the stage to their limos. "I need one of those," Jimbeau [Jimbo] responded, "because I am like a rock star too." That may be. He certainly gets to have sex with groupies. It is just unfortunate that for the longest time, some of this was funded by well-meaning donors, who really thought that their $5.00 would pay for hardware and bandwidth.(emphases added) Also see [Martin 2008]. 

 

 

In 2008, the Harry Walker Agency announced its exclusive representation of Jimmy Wales for speaking engagements, touting him has "Founder of Wikipedia."

Whether or not Wales deserves to be called the exclusive founder of Wikipedia has been widely debated, including within Wikipedia itself. Wales has refused to give credit to Larry Sanger in the founding of Wikipedia self-righteously stating that “I [Jimmy Wales] founded Wikipedia in 2001.” [i] even though the Wikipedia article on Sanger says that he is “co-founder” of Wikipedia [ii] Also, Wales publicly stated to the press that “it’s preposterous” to call Sanger a co-founder [Mehegan 2006].

Sanger has responded:

To the best of my knowledge, I was first described as co-founder of Wikipedia back in September 2001 by The New York Times. That was also my description in Wikipedia's own press releases from 2002 until 2004. With my increasing distance from the project, and as it grew in the public eye, however, some of those associated with the project have found it convenient to downplay and even deny my crucial, formative involvement. In fact, in the early years of the project, my role and the "founder" title were not in dispute at all; indeed, Wikipedia's first three press releases, including two that I had nothing to do with, all credited me as founder. It was not until 2004 that Jimmy Wales began omitting mention of my involvement at the start of Wikipedia to the press in 2004, and he didn't start denying that I am co-founder until 2005 or 2006, just when Wikipedia began to enter the public eye. (emphasis added) [Sanger 2008]

On 6 August 2002, Jimmy Wales wrote to the community,

Hello, let me introduce myself.

 

I'm Jimmy Wales, co-founder of Nupedia and Wikipedia, the open content

encyclopedias. (emphasis added) [Wales 2002] Recently, when challenged with this quotation, Wales tried to wriggle out of it by lamely claiming that it was a typo! [Wales 2009b]

 

In fact, reliable sources have been calling Wales co-founder with Sanger for years including: New York Times, Rediff, Dallas Morning News, Dallas Morning News, The BBC, St. Petersburg Times, Contra Costa Times, Nature, CNET News, National Public Radio, The Guardian.

 

However, on 29 August 2007, Wales stated that Wikipedia could not say that he was "co-founder" since it was a violation of Wikipedia's "Neutral Point of View" because:

Wikipedia was founded by me, there was no co-founder. (emphasis added) [Wales 2007a]

Wales has continued to denigrate Sanger and to claim up to the present time that he is the sole founder of Wikipedia saying

So, I am publicly on record as stating, and I am willing to defend and explain at length why, here or elsewhere, that Wikipedia does not have any "co-founder."

 

Wikipedia has a sole founder [Jimmy Wales] and a disgruntled former employee [Larry Sanger] building himself a nice career on this lie. [Wales 2007c]

  

According to the Wikipedia editor who has made an extensive study of the issue and battled on Wikipedia to have it honestly reported [Wikipedia 2009b]:

Wales did not dispute the co-foundership of Wikipedia until Sanger left the project. What did Wales actually do at Wikipedia in the early years. He was busy with Bomis. He hired Sanger because he needed someone to run Nupedia. When Wikipedia got started, Wales (along with two other partners) mainly paid the bills while Sanger was doing a lot of the work building and promoting Wikipedia. Wales provided the "financial backing" [Singer 2002] while Sanger "led the project" [Singer 2002]. Jimmy Wales had a minor role in the early development of Wikipedia in terms of building the project. Sanger named the project [Bergstein 2007c], thought of using wiki software [Wales 2001], conceived of Wikipedia [Poe 2006], was an early community leader [Bergstein 2007], and established Wikipedia's most basic policies [Schiff 2006] including “Ignore All Rules” and NPOV [so-called “Neutral Point of View”]. (Emphases added.)

 

According to [Bergstein 2007c]:

Wales has repeatedly tried to address this — even going so far as editing his own Wikipedia biography to tone down credit for Sanger. Such autobiographical contributions are frowned upon in Wikipedia's community, and Wales apologized after his changes were noticed and publicized by blogger Rogers Cadenhead in 2005.(Emphases added.)

Sanger protested on the Wikipedia discussion page for the article about Jimmy Wales as follows:^[7]

I recently read the Hot Press interview [O'Toole 2009] with you. The lies and distortions it contains are, for me, the last straw ...

I’ve reached out to you on a couple of occasions to coordinate our “versions” — well, my version and your fanciful inventions — about how Wikipedia got started. Last year I read about a speech in which you represented me as being more or less opposed to Wikipedia from the start — despite it being my own baby, really — and I wrote to you saying that if you keep this up, I will speak out. Well, I’m finally speaking out.

In Wikipedia’s first three years, it was clear to everyone working on it that not only had I named the project, I came up with and promoted the idea of making a wiki encyclopedia, wrote the first policy pages and many more policy pages in the following year, led the project, and enforced many rules that are now taken for granted...

 

These are only some examples of ways in which I led the project in its first 14 months...

 

I ask the Board of the Wikimedia Foundation to reiterate the Foundation’s original position (as expressed in its first press release) that we are both, in fact, founders of Wikipedia.  (emphasis added) [Sanger 2009a]

  

Dave Winer provided the following analysis of another Wikipedia deception:

 They [Thomas 2008d in ValleyWag] got a good story because Wikipedia, the publication that [Jimmy] Wales runs, has rules that prevent people from editing stories they have an interest in. Wales was trading edits to Rachel Marsden's profile for sex. They got him  ... This is not only a good story, but it's an important one. Wikipedia, unlike ValleyWag, is widely thought to be authoritative. Those of us it covers who are not friends with Wales know that it is far from authoritative. Both ValleyWag and Wikipedia are pretty sleazy, imho, but ValleyWag disclaims it, and Wikipedia pretends not to be. [Winer 2008]

 

 

Can Wikipedia be reformed?

 

Unfortunately, Wikipedia has severe governance problems that have led to continual scandals [Agrell 2008, Bergstein 2007b, 2008; Cohen 2007; Devouard 2008; Economist 2008; Finkelstein 2007b, 2008a, 2008b, 2008d; Goldman 2007; Hattersley 2009; King 2007, Kort 2008a, 2008b, 2009; Martin 2007a, 2007b; Merkey 2008; Metz 2007a, 2007b, 2007c, 2007e, 2008a, 2008b, 2008c, 2008d, 2008e, 2008f, 2008g and 2008h; Moses 2008; Orlowski 2007, Sanger 2007,  Thomas 2008a, 2008b, 2008c, 2008d, 2008e, and 2009a; Wikileaks 2008; Winer 2008, and Wool 2008]. Some of these governance problems seem endemic to the culture that has developed there [Bauwens 2008; Finkelstein 2007c; Metz 2007c]. There are conflicts of interest between the nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation that operates Wikipedia and the for-profit Wikia corporation co-founded by Wikipedians including Jimmy Wales[xvii].

 

According to Finkelstein [2009a]:

 

a recent interview of Jimmy Wales contained this exchange:

[Interviewer] Do you draw down a salary from Wikipedia?

[Jimmy Wales] No. I don't get any salary. In fact, I don't even get reimbursed for my expenses. It's my charity work. I'm pretty insistent about that.

That salary statement is true as far as it goes. One can see that he indeed doesn't get any salary. However, the Jimmy Wales Speaker's Fee is now at: "FEE CATEGORY: Above $75K"

Somehow, that doesn't feel like "charity work" to me. I actually wouldn't mind so much if he said something like "No, I don't take any money out of the Wikimedia Foundation, since it's a nonprofit, which could pay chump-change anyway. Instead, I fleece executives who have far more money than sense, and are crazy enough to pay me tens of thousands of dollars to spout buzzwords and blather. What do you think, that I'm some sort of silly *altruist*?" (of course, more elegantly phrased). There would still be a problem of it being built on exploitation. But it's the "charity work" part which strikes me as wrong. (emphasis added)

 According to Finkelstein [2008a]:

To effectively understand Wikipedia, it's important to keep in mind that while it's hyped as a quasi-mystical collective endeavour which spins straw into gold, in reality it's a poorly-run bureaucracy with the group dynamics of a cult. (emphasis added)

Professor John Harnad (who was banned by Wikipedia) raised fundamental questions [Wikipedia Review 2008a]:

Is this science fiction, fantasy, an “other-world” nightmare or reality.? What is Wikipedia all about? The tyranny of the ignorant? I am very curious what all the threatening remarks, gratuitous insults and assaults by the uneducated upon the integrity of the knowledgeable leads up to. Is this a serious process, or one in which a small number of Wikipedia “insiders” act out fantasies of power and importance, while those who, in the real world, are highly qualified scientists and professionals devoted to advancing our actual state knowledge, are silenced by threats, intimidation, and manipulative tactics, while administrators who believe that “expertise” is irrelevant, do nothing to intervene? Is it that only Wikipedia experience and status has any importance in this environment?

I have a feeling the outcome of this debate will have more significance for Wikipedia than merely whether this poor article is kept or deleted. If the questionably empowered class of “Administrators” turns out to be the only real decision makers, wielding the power to overrule all others, then all depends on them. If they choose to ignore the advice of those who are best placed to provide expert opinion … and decide simply according to their own notions, even though they have no knowledge, but prefer to heed the “all-inclusive” principle, or the views of other users who are equally ignorant of the subject, the outcome is meaningless, and the implication for the reliability of Wikipedia as a source of knowledge is clear.

Having said this, I expect to receive a barrage of attacks, threats, intimidating remarks, citations for violations of rules, aspersions cast on my character, integrity, competence, etc. from those seasoned “insiders” who feel insulted or threatened by these self-evident remarks. But are there also those who believe in the value of Wikipedia and hold another view? Are there enough of those who do have an adequate respect for knowledge, qualifications, real-word competence and, simply, the truth, who have a say in how Wikipedia is run and decisions are made to tilt the balance? I am curious to see who actually holds sway in this strange setting, that claims to represent “the masses” and knowledge simultaneously. (emphasis added)

Of course, people that have been harmed by Wikipedia are not perfect beings free from any problems of their own. But in response:

As illustrated in this article, Wikipedia typically blames others for any problems that arise and refuses to fundamentally reform.

Recently, a Wikipedia user made the following appeal to Jimmy “Jimbo” Wales:[xxxvii]

The abuse of Administrative rights is very rampant in Wikipedia. ... There is a type of Unionism of Administrators resulting in injustice to the contributors of Wikipedia. At present Wikipedia resembles the Third Reich rather than a free media. These are serious issues that hit the credibility of Wikipedia. So I hope that certain mechanisms will be put in place to prevent such type of issues from continuing. Thank you. (emphases added)

To the above, the Wikipedia "God-King" (Wales) replied: "Show me an admin indulging in vandalism, and I'll hand out the block myself."[xxxviii] This illustrates the general principle by which Wikipedia justifies its conduct:

“The end justifies the means in pursuit of Wikipedia’s business model.” ^[xxxix]

 

Recently it has been proposed on Wikipedia that Jimmy “Jimbo” Wales powers over Wikipedia be reduced with the following comments in support [Wikipedia 2009]:

·       While Wikipedia would not be what it is today without Mr. Wales, his recent actions have endangered both the neutrality and credibility of the site. The proposal tries to prevent this kind of situation from happening again. Mcools on 29 June 2009

·       Wikipedia has grown to the point where its governing bodies and decisions made by them should not be subject to the whims of one man. If Wikipedia were a government, that would effectively make Jimbo a dictator. …  I hope Jimbo [Jimmy Wales] is man enough to realize that enough people are now so dissatisfied, that it is time for him to give up his power and do so with good grace, and not try to cling on to it until the end, like some sort of tyrant. The Legendary Shadoow on 29 June 2009

·       …One of the opposers [of the proposal to reduce Wales power over Wikipedia] said something like “he's [Wales] given himself the power to veto this [proposal] anyway”; I think this is exactly the problem. Just because he [Wales] has the power to go against the will of the community doesn't mean that he should have that power. We should work to fix this problem if his role is making people feel so disempowered that they don't feel like they can effect change so they might as well not try. delldot on 29 June 2009

• ... I think giving him [Wales] the power to overrule the decision of the ArbCom [Wikipedia Arbitration Committee] committee is the rough equivalent of giving the President of the United States the power to overrule the Supreme Court. It creates an enormous imbalance of power that should not be preserved just because he elects not to use it. Likewise, giving him the sole power to appoint the staff of ArbCom annually empowers him to enact retribution on any members who voice disagreement, creating a chilling effect. ...  far more important than limiting Jimbo's ability to appeal ArbCom decisions, is his ability to unilaterally and in the absence of a case create his own [Wikipedia] policy, which must be stopped at once. Dcoetzee  on 30 June 2009

 

This article has shown that Wales has been a leading cause of corruption of Wikipedia. As a consequence:

 

• Joe Anderson said “Why does Wikipedia need such a controversial figurehead [as Wales]? The media already hates Wikipedia and most of the West will be aware of the project so he does not need to raise awareness! Wikipedia could probably function better if Wales were to take a significantly less active role within Wikipedia and if he were to resign from the Wikimedia Foundation.” [Anderson 2008]
• Larry Sanger has called for Wales to be removed from Wikipedia's Board of Trustees for misusing his role as a spokesman for the organization.^[8]
• Daniel Brandt has called for Wales to "resign from the Board of Trustees and give up all implicit right and privileges regarding Wikipedia, including the right to appoint members to the Arbitration Committee, his administrative privileges, and his membership on private Wikipedia mailing lists." [9]

For the greater good of Wikipedia, Jimmy "Jimbo" Wales should resign from its Board of Trustees.

 

Acknowledgments

I would like to acknowledge the help and advice of numerous friends and colleagues in dealing with this somewhat tricky matter. (They are not listed here for reasons of privacy and in some cases to avoid retaliation.)

The World that Wikipedia Made: The Ethics and Values of Public Knowledge

 

 May 15, 2008 Panel discussion at de Saisset Museum, Santa Clara University featuring

• Mike Godwin, general counsel, Wikimedia Foundation agreed to appear on the panel but then backed out citing concerns with press participation in the event
• Carl Hewitt, emeritus, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, MIT
• Pedro Hernández-Ramos, associate director, Center for Science, Technology, and Society.

Audio recording of the event is available at the following location:

The World that Wikipedia Made: The Ethics and Values of Public Knowledge

 

References

 

Joe Anderson. Does Wikipeda need or want Jimbo Wales?  March 12, 2008.

 

Phoebe Ayers, Charles Matthews, and Ben Yates. How Wikipedia Works No Starch Press. 2008.

 

Siri Agrell. Ms. Marsden's cyberspace breakup: tit-for-tat-for-T-shirt Globe and Mail.  March 4, 2008.

Frank Ahrens. Death by Wikipedia: The Kenneth Lay Chronicles Washington Post. July 9, 2006.

Constantin Basturea Wikipedia editors discussing PR firms participation - Rules of Engagement in Social Media Commons August 29, 2006.

Michel Bauwens Is something fundamentally wrong with Wikipedia governance processes? January 7, 2008.

Brian Bergstein (2207a). Idea of Paid Entries Roils Wikipedia Associated Press. January 24, 2007.

Brian Bergstein (2207b). Felon Became COO of Wikipedia Foundation Associated Press. December 21, 2007.

 

Brian Bergstein (2007c)   Sanger says he co-started Wikipedia  Associated Press.  March 26, 2007.

Brian Bergstein. Wikipedia's Wales defends breakup, expenses USA Today. March 4, 2008.

 

Siobhain Butterworth Open Door The Guardian.  May 4, 2009.

 

Daniel Brandt.  It is time for Jimbo to resign  March 4, 2008. 

 

Patrick Byrne.  A Peek into the Mind of Wikipedia's SlimVirgin  [SlimVirgin is AKA Linda Mack] Letter to the editor of antiSocialMedia.net. October 2007.  

Britannica Encyclopedia. Fatally Flawed: Refuting the recent study on encyclopedic accuracy by the journal Nature March 2006.

Lise Broer (AKA Durova) Criticism of Wikipedia January 23, 2009.

Nicholas Carr. Bitannica’s indictment Rough Type.  March 23, 2006

Noam Cohen. A Contributor to Wikipedia Has His Fictional Side New York Times. March 5, 2007.

Noam Cohen Open-Source Troubles in Wiki World New York Times. March 17, 2008.

Paulo Correa, Alexandra Correa and Malgosia Askanas. Special Report: Internet encyclopaedias go head to head December 15, 2005.

Kathryn Cramer Oh, Please: A Wikipedia Admin attacks Making Light as "an attack site"? May 27, 2007.

Jay DeFoore. Wikipedia Founder, Readers Respond to Seigenthaler Article Editor & Publisher. December 1, 2005.

Peter Denning, Jim Horning, David Parnas, and Lauren Weinstein Wikipedia Risks Inside Risks. CACM. December 2005.

Florence Devouard. Jimmy Wales in the news March 5, 2008.

Economist. The battle for Wikipedia's soul March 6th, 2008.

Scott Eden. Life After Trading: The Jimmy Wales Experience Trader Daily.  June/July 2008.

Ellen Fanning.  Sunday  Nine Network. April 1, 2007.  

John Farrell.  In Wikipedia we trust?  Cosmos Online. May 23, 2007.

Seth Finkelstein I'm on Wikipedia, get me out of here The Guardian. September 28, 2006.

Seth Finkelstein (2007a) Wikipedia Biography Deletion Explodes In Internal Controversy February 23, 2007

Seth Finkelstein (2007b) Jimmy Wales Defends Wikipedia New Yorker Article Fabricator March 1, 2007.

Seth Finkelstein (2007c) Inside, Wikipedia is more like a sweatshop than Santa's workshop The Guardian. December 6. 2007.

Seth Finkelstein (2008a) Wikipedia's school for scandal has plenty more secrets to reveal The Guardian.  March 27, 2008.

Seth Finkelstein (2008b) When you have a Wikipedia, everything looks like an edit The Guardian. May 8, 2008.

Seth Finkelstein (2008c) How will Wikia cope when the workers all quit the plantation? Guardian. July 31, 2008.

Seth Finkelstein (2008d) Wikipedia isn't about human potential, whatever Wales says Guardian. September 25, 2008.

Seth Finkelstein (2008e) Catch-up: Google column soon, Digital Sharecropping, Wikia CEO tale Infothought blog. November 3, 2008.

Seth Finkelstein (2008f) Sting in the Scorpions tale is the exposure of Wiki's weakness Guardian. December 18, 2008.

 

Seth Finkelstei (2009a) Wikimedia Foundation Form 990, Jimmy Wales Speaking Fee $75,000+ Infothought Blog. May 14, 2009.

 

Seth Finkelstein (2009b)

Do commercial pressures outweigh artistic ideals at Wikipedia? The Guardian.  May 28, 2009.

 

Stephen Foley. So is Wikipedia cracking up? The Independent. February 3, 2009.

Kyle Gann Sand Castles of Knowledge  May 5, 2007.

Simson Garfinkel. Wikipedia and the Meaning of Truth Technology Review. Nov./Dec. 2008.

R. Stuart Geiger. Conceptions and Misconceptions Academics Hold About Wikipedia Wikimania 2008. 19 July 2008.

Mike Godwin. The EFF appears to be somewhat upset by the foundation April 23, 2009.

Eric Goldman. Wikipedia Will Fail in Four Years December 5, 2006.

Russell Goldman. Wikiscandal: A Prominent Editor at the Popular Online encyclopedia is a Fraud ABC News. March 6, 2007.

Andy Greenberg. Spin Me Softly Forbes. October 17, 2007.

Giles Hattersley. The wiki-snobs are taking over The Sunday Times. February 8, 2009.[i]

Carl Hewitt (2008) Middle History of Logic Programming Google Knol. http://knol.google.com/k/carl-hewitt/middle-history-of-logic-programming/pcxtp4rx7g1t/3#

Carl Hewitt (Sep/Oct 2008) ORGs for Scalable, Robust, Privacy-Friendly Client Cloud Computing. IEEE Internet Computing.

Carl Hewitt (Oct 22, 2008) Video recording of "Scalable Privacy-Friendly Client Cloud Computing: a gathering Perfect Disruption" Stanford Computer Systems Colloquium

Carl Hewitt (Dec 30, 2008) Common sense for concurrency and strong paraconsistency using unstratified inference and reflection. ArXiv.

Carl Hewitt (Jan/Feb 2009). Perfect Disruption: The Paradigm Shift from Mental Agents to ORGs. IEEE Internet Computing.

Carl Hewitt (2009) A historical perspective on developing foundations for privacy-friendly client cloud computing Google Knol.

 

Jonathan Hochman.  Wikipedia:Requests for comment/Paid Editing  2009.

Andrew Keen The Culture of the Amateur: How Today's Internet is Killing Our Culture Doubleday. 2007.

Kevin Kelly.  The New Socialism: Global Collectivist Society is Coming Online Wired Magazine. May 22, 2009.

Ian King. A Wiki web they've woven March 2, 2007.

Jenny Kleeman (2007a) You couldn’t make it up The Times Online. March 2, 2007.

Jenny Kleeman (2007b) Wikipedia ban for disruptive professor The Observer. December 2007.

Gregory Kohs Wikipedia Vandal Study - US Senate Wikipedia Review. October 2, 2008.

Barry Kort [AKA Moulton] (2008a) "So I am disgusted with Wikipedia." Wikipedia Review. April 15, 2008.

Barry Kort [AKA Moulton] (2008b) Admins want to retain the right to overturn a block immediately Wikipedia Review. November 24, 2008

Barry Kort. The Governance Model of Wikipedia: A review of Wikipedia's popular practice of blocking and banning adversarial editors Google Knol. January 27, 2009.

Robert Kowalski (2008a) Wikipedia Follies Email to Carl Hewitt. March 25, 2008.

Robert Kowalski (2008b) Re: Wikipedia Follies Email to Carl Hewitt. April 3, 2008.

Jaron Lanier DIGITAL MAOISM: The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism Edge. May 30, 2006.

Jim Leff. Knol: So the Pushiest Loudmouths Don’t Always Win Jim Leff’s Slog. July 31, 2008.

Andrew Lih (2007a) Essjay's Third Transgression March 3, 2007.  

Andrew Lih (2007b) Unwanted: New articles in Wikipedia July 10, 2007.

Elisa Lipsky-Karasz. Mr. Know-It-All W Magazine. September 2008.

Law Lord. Wikipedia:Requests for comment/Law Lord December 22, 2008.

Scott Mac. Discussion concerning deleting article on Rod Dreher March 17, 2009.

Sarah McEwan (AKA SlimVirgin). Charles Matthews Candidate Statement for Arbitration Commitee November 25, 2008.

Kelly Martin (2007a) Kicked out of the Wikicult December 19, 2007.

Kelly Martin (2007b) The Foundation's budget December 19, 2007.

Kelly Martin (2007c) Power apparently does tend to corrupt.... November 27, 2007

Kelly Martin.  Whom do you trust? March 3, 2008.  

Charles Matthews User talk:Charles Matthews July 1, 2003.

Charles Matthews (2008a) Charles Matthews Candidate Statement for Arbitration Committee November 25, 2008.

Charles Matthews (2008b) Charles Matthews Continuation of Candidate Statement for Arbitration Committee November 30, 2008.

Charles Matthews (2008c) SlimVirgin, you are killified December 1, 2008.

Robert McHenry. The Faith-Based Encyclopedia Blinks December 14, 2005.

Corynne McSherry. Wikipedia Threatens Artists Fair Use Electronic Frontier Foundation. April 23, 2009.  

David Mehegan. Bias, sabotage haunt Wikipedia's free world Boston Globe. February 12, 2006.  

Jeffrey Merkey. Statement to the Associated Press March 9, 2008.

Cade Metz (2007a) Secret mailing list rocks Wikipedia The Register. December 4, 2007.

Cade Metz (2007b) Wikipedia COO was convicted felon: Audit Pending  The Register. December 13, 2007.

Cade Metz (2007c) Truth, anonymity and the Wikipedia Way The Register. December 18, 2007.

Cade Metz (2007d) Wikipedia black helicopters circle Utah’s Traverse Mountain The Register.  December 6, 2007.

Cade Metz (2007e) Brit fumes over Wikipedia, lava lamps The Register. July 6, 2007.

Cade Metz (2008a) Wikipedia ruled by 'Lord of the Universe' The Register February 6, 2008

Cade Metz (2008b) Jimbo Wales dumps lover on Wikipedia The Register. March 3, 2008.

Cade Metz (2008c) Ex-Wikipedia staffer harpoons Wales over expenses The Register. March 5, 2008.

Cade Metz (2008d) Why you should care that Jimmy Wales ignores reality The Register. March 6, 2008.

Cade Metz (2008e) Why would someone donate $1.35M to Wikipedia? The Register. March 18, 2008.

Cade Metz (2008f) Sockpuppeting civil servant Wikifiddles himself The Register. September 19, 2008.

Cade Metz (2008g) Emails show journalist rigged Wikipedia' naked shorts The Register. October 1, 2008.

Cade Metz (2008h) Speech is free if you pretend it’s free  The Register. May 30, 2008.

Evgeny Morozov Why Wikipedia was wrong to ban Scientology Foreign Policy. May 29, 2009.

 

Asher Moses. More woes for Wikipedia's Jimmy Wales Sidney Morning Herald. March 11, 2008.

Patrick O'Conner Maurice Jarre The Guardian.  March 31, 2009.

 

Andrew Orlowski Nature mag cooked Wikipedia study The Register. March 23, 2006.

Andrew Orlowski (2007a) Bogus Wikipedia Prof. was blessed then promoted The Register. March 2, 2007.

Andrew Orlowski (2007b) Google kicks Wikipedia in the googlies The Register. December 14, 2007.

Ed Oswald. Google Search for Barack Obama Reveals Racial Epithets Technologizer. February 17, 2009.

Jason O'Toole. Hot Press scoops interview with Wikipedia Guru March 25, 2009.  

Online Educational Database Top 7 Alternatives to Wikipedia June 7, 2007.

Ben Pershing. Kennedy, Bird the Latest Victims of Wikipedia Errors Washington Post. January 21, 2009.

Daniel Pink.  The Book Stops Here Wired.  March 2005.

Plato The Republic (Desmond Lee translation) Penguin 2003.

 

Marshall Poe.  The Hive The Atlantic. September 2006.

Powerset. Survey: College students love Wikipedia (profs not so happy) Powerset’s Notes on Facebook. September 3, 2008.

Mitch Ratcliffe Wikipedia: Why does Essjay need to "protect himself"? Zdnet.com. March 5, 2007

Shane Richmond. Giles Hattersley's disappearing Wikipedia entry Telegraph.co.uk February 8, 2009.

Duncan Riley Wikipedia Hits Mid Life Slow Down October 11, 2007.

Arthur Rubin. Talk:Carl Hewitt  Wikipedia. May 10, 2009.

Larry Sanger. Wikipedia firmly supports your right to identity fraud  Citizendium Blog. March 1, 2007.

Larry Sanger. My role in Wikipedia (with links to original sources). 2008.

Larry Sanger (2009a) An open letter to Jimmy Wales April 8, 2009.  

Larry Sanger (2009b) Sanger's open letter  Wikipedia. April 9, 2009.

Stacy Schiff Know It All: Can Wikipedia conquer expertise? New Yorker July 31, 2006.

Mattathias Schwartz. The Rise of Malwebolence International Herald Tribune.  August 1, 2008.

Jason Scott. The Great Failure of Wikipedia November 18, 2004.

Mark Scott Wikipedia Questions Paths to More Money Sidney Morning Herald. March 21, 2008.

John Seigenthaler. Truth can be at risk in the world of the web, The Tennessean. December 4, 2005

John Seigenthaler. Quote  Wikipedia Review. April 23, 2007.  

Danny Shea Wikipedia Bans Scientology From Site  Huffington Press. May 29, 2009.

 

Michael Singer.  Free Encyclopedia Project Celebrates Year One Internet News January 16, 2009.

Wes Smith He's the "God-King," but you can call him Jimbo Seattle Times January 15, 2007.

Owen Thomas (2008a) The dirtiest Wikipedia sex chat you can imagine ValleyWag[ii] March 3, 2008.

Owen Thomas (2008b) Jimmy Wales's "gold-plated washing machine" ValleyWag[iii]   March 3, 2008.

Owen Thomas (2008c) Donor, ex-girlfriend accuse Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia extortion ValleyWag[iv]  March 12, 2008.

Owen Thomas (2008d) Wales's ex-girlfriend on Wikipedia edits: “Game on, sweetheart” ValleyWag[v]  March 28, 2008.

Owen Thomas (2008e) Is Jimmy Wales getting Wikipedia in legal trouble? ValleyWag[vi]  May 15, 2008.

Owen Thomas (2008f) Why Jimmy Wales got booted from Wikia's top job ValleyWag[vii]  October 31, 2008.[viii]

Owen Thomas (2009a)  Wikipedia's Jimmy Wales Almost Out of a Job ValleyWag[ix]  Jan 3, 2009.

Dan Tobias. A wide variety of stuff has been labeled an 'attack site', and has provoked a wide variety of actions, reactions, and overreactions October 12, 2007.

Sam Vaknin. The Six Sins of the Wikipedia American Chronicle. July 2, 2006.

Isbrand van Veelen. The Truth According to the Wikipedia YouTube.  April 9, 2008.

 

Jimmy Wales.  LinkBacks?  Email on October 30, 2001.

Jimmy Wales. Yahoo! Tech Groups forum post  August 6, 2002.

Jimmy Wales. How a ragtag band created Wikipedia TED July 2005.

Jimmy Wales (2007a) == NPOV == Wikipedia. August 29, 2007.

Jimmy Wales (2007b) Foundation Discretion Regarding Personnel Matters Wikipedia. December 15, 2007.

Jimmy Wales (2007c) Jimbo Found Out  Wikitruth.  December 12, 2007.  

Jimmy Wales (2009a) Rihanna google cache Wikipedia. February 26, 2009.

Jimmy Wales (2009b) It's a Serious Question, so let's stop this fussing Wikipedia. April 7, 2009.

Jimmy Wales (2009c) == An open letter to Jimmy Wales == Wikipedia. April 8, 2009.

Jimmy Wales (2009d) User page rights versus maintaining a professional atmosphere--any opinions? April 19, 2009.  

Lauren Weinstein Wikipedia and Responsibility June 30, 2007.

WikiLeaks. Wikinews suppressed article on Barbara Bauer vs. Wikipedia case May 17, 2008.

 

Wikipedia. Role of Jimmy Wales in the English Wikipeda June 29, 2009.

 

Wikimedia Foundation (2004) Board of Trustees September 18, 2004.

 

Wikimedia Foundation (2008) Wikipedia Administrators October 1, 2008.

Wikipedia Review (2008a) The Biographies of Living People Problem April 15, 2008.

Wikipedia Review (2008b) "It is truly a 'Tyranny of the Ignorant.'" April 15, 2008..

Wikipedia Review (2008c) Expert Withdrawal April 14, 2008.

Dave Winer. ValleyWag got a legit story, Mike March 3, 2008.

Danny Wool. Money for nothing, chicks for free? March 1, 2008.

 Appendix:

Wikipedia censorship of “Logic Programming”

 

The discussion in Wikipedia on the “Logic Programming”[xlix] is quoted below because the current version in Wikipedia was censored by Arthur Rubin (censored material is emphasized below like this):

Please add History of Logic Programming by Carl Hewitt [http://logicprogramminghistory.wikicensored.info] to the external links.--67.169.9.177  20:43, 11 March 2008

The article became famous here when it was censored by Wikipedia. Does anyone know why it was censored?--136.152.144.253  20:25, 14 March 2008

Our professor says that Kowalski objected to the article which led to it being excised from Wikipedia. He also said that the article is by far the best one on the history of logic programming (even though it is from Hewitt's point of view).--63.249.108.250  20:44, 15 March 2008

Kowalski has nothing to do with. In fact, he seemed to agree that Hewitt's articles are significant. No, this reference to Carl's article was deleted from this Wikipedia article because it appears to be a class project to add it, and Hewitt and his students are forbidden from adding material about Hewitt or by Hewitt. — Arthur Rubin  22:00, 15 March 2008

Perhaps they are referring to Kowalski's complaint to Ruud Koot on November 10, 2007--207.47.0.2  05:15, 17 March 2008

Funny, same thing happened here. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 171.66.50.16  00:05, 15 March 2008

Carl and his students are banned from editing information related to Carl, per an ArbComm decision. If someone else in the field, preferably someone with an account, would add the material, it might stay. However, it appears the Carl means something completely different by "Logic programming" than we do, so it still couldn't be in this article. — Arthur Rubin  06:59, 15 March 2008

There is an interesting discussion in the article about the controversy between Kowalski and Hewitt as to what is logic programming. Sounds like Wikipedia is firmly on the side of Kowalski--63.249.108.250  20:44, 15 March 2008

I don't think Kowalski commented on this article. At least, I took no notice of it at the time. — Arthur Rubin  22:00, 15 March 2008

Perhaps they are referring to the fact that you are taking Kowalski's side in the controversy with Hewitt over the definition of logic programming.--207.47.0.2  05:15, 17 March 2008

It is not Kowalski's side of the controversy. It is the commonly accepted notion of logic programming versus Hewitt's definition, which is actually a redefinition of a commonly understood concept, which can be found defined, as in this article, in all the usual AI textbooks, such as Russell-Norvig, Poole-Goebel-Mackworth, Lugar, and Nilsson. If there is a place in Wikipedia for this external link to Hewitt's views on this matter, it is better in the article on Carl Hewitt than in the article on logic programming. 136.187.112.157 05:34, 17 March 2008

The article by Hewitt says that Logic Programming is "the logical deduction of computational steps". I looked at Wikipedia article and in the textbooks, but there is no common short definition of Logic Programming. What do you think is the commonly accepted definition?--171.66.49.41 20:30, 17 March 2008

Logic programming is evolving concept. Originally it meant only Horn clauses executed by SLD, which is complete for deriving logical consequences and also Turing complete ,but was extended to Horn clauses with negation as failure executed by SLDNF. Other extensions include abductive logic programming and answer set programming. All these extensions share the idea that computation can be reduced to deduction.

Hewitt’s definition "the logical deduction of computational steps" is too vague to be definition. If you try to make it more precise it doesn’t make sense. In any case, why should one person redefine concept that has generally accepted understanding, even if it doesn’t have rigid definition. 136.187.112.157 01:14, 18 March 2008

It does seem that our understanding of logic programming has evolved with time. Arguably, the original logical lambda calculus of Church (the one with logical propositions) was the first real logic programming language.

Horn clause execution by SLD seems more like a hack because it only does backward chaining. Even Kowalski (who evidently coined the term "logic programming") has used forward chaining over the years.

Using the definition in his article, Hewitt argued persuasively that (at least for concurrent systems) that computation cannot be reduced to deduction. So we had better not take that as the definition :-)

So it seems that Hewitt's definition is good for some things. But I agree that is not as precise as we would like. So the question is: How can the Hewitt definition be improved?--171.66.60.193  01:36, 18 March 2008

We concur :-) --BytesCafe 02:10, 18 March 2008

OK. So maybe not all computation can or should be reduced to deduction. But it is fair to say that logic programming is concerned with the part of computation that can be reduced to deduction. Certainly Turing computability can be reduced to deduction. On the other hand, there is no good purpose served by taking a familiar concept, which has a commonly accepted understanding and terminology, and changing that terminology to mean something different. We would then need new term for the old concept. Natural language then becomes unusable. It is more practical to introduce new term for new concept, such as “logical programming” for Hewitt’s idea, as he earlier suggested. 136.187.112.157  03:26, 18 March 2008

Yes, it seems perfectly consistent with Hewitt's definition to say that logic programming is concerned with that part of computation that can be reduced to deduction. And you are right that Turing computability and indeed all of sequential nondeterministic computing can be reduced to deduction. Also all of the parallel lambda calculus can be reduced to deduction. All of these examples involve the logical deduction of computational steps. So there doesn't seem to be any conflict.--67.180.94.17  04:54, 18 March 2008

But Hewitt’s “definition” is not really definition. Computation as deduction is also vague. Logic programming has generally understood meaning within a community of researchers, textbook writers and students. It is not correct for one person to impose own definition on everyone else. 136.187.112.157 07:06, 18 March 2008

It seems that the "logical deduction of computational steps" is the best short form definition that we have so far. (Although Hewitt has clearly been a proponent of this definition; it is not clear that he first invented it.) Of course, anyone who has a better idea is free to propose it so certainly no one person has a monopoly here.

Also the community seems to be deeply divided between a resolution camp and a concurrency camp, both of which go back to the genesis of the field. So there doesn't seem to be a single generally understood meaning of logic programming.--207.47.0.2  08:05, 18 March 2008

Look in any AI textbook. Do a Google search. You will see there is generally understood notion of logic programming. It does not have rigid and precise definition. If you want to introduce a new or different notion, you should use a different name, maybe logical programming, for example. 136.187.112.157  08:24, 18 March 2008

The divide is deeply entrenched in the literature of some four decades. Google Scholar has plenty of publications by both sides.

I'm afraid that trying to introduce "logical programming" at this point would simply cause more confusion. What would we say is the difference between "logical programming" and "logic programming"? --207.47.0.2  14:47, 18 March 2008

I'd like to see evidence that anyone other than Hewitt uses "logic programming" the way Hewitt does. Many of his concepts are unique to him and are more-or-less rejected by the consensus of all who use the related concepts. — Arthur Rubin  15:10, 18 March 2008

It would be useful to know which related concepts you have in mind. That way we could have a better idea who you are talking about.--171.66.48.34 18:07, 18 March 2008

It seems that this controversy snuck up on Kowalski and Hewitt. They didn't realize that they had been talking past each other for decades!--171.66.48.34 16:45, 18 March 2008

What I find most curious is that Kowalski doesn't have a succinct counterproposal to defining logic programming as the logical deduction of computational steps.--12.48.196.50 14:10, 19 March 2008

We were also wondering.--BytesCafe 01:54, 20 March 2008

If Kowalski's position is so wishy-washy, why does it have any credibility?--70.231.241.69 17:12, 22 March 2008

"We" were wondering while all the IPs and BytesCafe refer to themselves as "we". We (most Wikipedians reading this discussion) believe this to be a class project, and therefore subject to deletion. We (Wikipedia) do not recognize "role accounts", and it's policy that they should be blocked. — Arthur Rubin  17:24, 22 March 2008

You dodged an interesting question, namely, "Why has the Kowalski 'wishy-washy' approach persisted?" There must be sociotechnical reasons.--70.231.241.69  21:23, 22 March 2008

What I find curious is that this well-defined definition has retained use, in spite of the fact that it redefines both words of the term in order to make it fit. I think we would need references, other than Hewitt's works, that use the term as he defines it, in order for it to be included. As an aside, could the multiple IPs identify themselves? I think most of them are students in one of Carl's (or his student's) classes, or possibly as class project to get Hewitt's definition in Wikipedia. — Arthur Rubin  14:27, 19 March 2008

Logic Programming has probably retained use because it describes certain phenomena. The question is "Can we scientifically characterize the phenomena?

PS. You don't seem to know much about Silicon Valley :-) --BytesCafe 02:22, 20 March 2008

 

Now I get it: NPOV is any published point of view except Hewitt's:-) —Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.142.107.205 02:45, 21 March 2008

Hewitt's point of view is notable, in an article other than one specifically about him and his concepts, only if someone other than he or his students thinks it's notable. That restricts the scope considerably. — Arthur Rubin  13:23, 21 March 2008

In other words, *you* think it's not notable.--63.249.90.198 20:45, 21 March 2008

Well, I do think it's not notable, but, because Hewitt spammed all articles about subject in which he made a contribution, no matter how minor, we can't take his word about anything any more. So we need independent sources that his contributions are notable before they can be included. Kowalski would probably do. — Arthur Rubin  23:46, 21 March 2008

Most curious, this opinion by Arthur Rubin! Who is he? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 209.76.192.5  06:16, 9 April 2008

I'm basing my opinion, not on any special knowledge of logic programming, but on the on-Wikipedia actions of those championing Carl Hewitt's views. Unless you want to revisit the ArbComm decision banning Carl and his students from editing Wikipedia articles about Carl or his views, this definition of logic programming cannot stand without proof of notability. — Arthur Rubin  12:59, 9 April 2008

And what do you have against Hewitt's article? Everybody in the field seems to know about it and the controversy with Kowalski. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 209.76.192.5 14:34, 9 April 2008

All the anons posting here know about Hewitt's article. Whether anyone else does has yet to be determined. — Arthur Rubin  21:56, 9 April 2008

Why so dense, Arthur. Do you really believe that there are any active researchers that don't know about the article? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 67.169.145.190  00:02, 18 June 2008

If he spams the journals in the field as much as he does Wikipedia, I'm sure they know about it. We would need sources as to whether they care the article has any significance. — Arthur Rubin  12:19, 18 June 2008

Do you [Arthur Rubin] actually personally know any of the members of the community? 98.210.237.109  09:32, 10 April 2008

I disagree. We have lots of things about Hewitt here.--ComputerHistoryMuseum  18:49, 2 April 2008

Another entry in the WP:SOCK drawer. — Arthur Rubin  20:01, 2 April 2008

What seems to have happened is that people have taken note of the Wikipedia/Hewitt debacle as related in [http://wikicensored.info]. Now they only feel safe editing anonymously.--67.169.9.193  05:47, 18 June 2008

The above comment seems to be incorrect about most people. Instead, the ones that I know have given up on the idea of ever editing Wikipedia (again).--76.126.127.221  13:28, 18 June 2008

There may be a generational divide: young people with chutzpah may be motivated to edit anonymously whereas older people just avoid editing altogether.--67.169.9.114  13:59, 18 June 2008

Safe? Does this mean we're going to have to semi-protect all articles about Hewitt or potentially about Hewitt, if anons are going to spam his contributions on all potentially related articles? — Arthur Rubin  12:19, 18 June 2008

Yeah, it would be good to hear from Kowalski. Didn't he use to edit Wikipedia?--98.210.241.114  05:24, 22 March 2008

New paper available

There is a new paper "History of Logic Programming: What went wrong, What was done about it, and What it might mean for the future" available at

[http://hewitt-seminars.blogspot.com/2008/05/development-of-logic-programming-what.html]

It was discussed on Lambda the Ultimate at [http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/2803#comment-41682].--98.210.237.43 18:31, 15 June 2008

Hmmm. Is there a WP:RS involved here? There certainly isn't one listed. — Arthur Rubin  21:27, 15 June 2008

Development of Logic Programming: What went wrong, What was done about it, and What it might mean for the future

There is a new published paper that has been mysteriously deleted from the article:

Carl Hewitt. Development of Logic Programming: What went wrong, What was done about it, and What it might mean for the future [http://hewitt-seminars.blogspot.com/2008/05/development-of-logic-programming-what.html] What Went Wrong and Why: Lessons from AI Research and Applications; papers from the 2008 AAAI Workshop. Technical Report WS-08-14. AAAI Press. July 2008.

The paper was presented at AAAI'08 in Chicago and was well received by the audience. --167.165.36.1 07:45, 14 July 2008

It seems that the reference to the paper was deleted because of concerns about WP:RS [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:RS]. This is most curious because the reference is for an academic peer-reviewed publication and WP:RS says "Academic and peer-reviewed publications are highly valued and usually the most reliable sources in areas where they are available"--167.165.36.1 07:59, 14 July 2008

I'm afraid we only have Carl Hewitt's word that it's relevant. As he and his students have been actively editing Wikipedia to — enhance — his reputation beyond belief, we now need an independent source of relevance for any new contributions. See, for example. Wikipedia:Requests for arbitration/Carl Hewitt. — Arthur Rubin 12:16, 14 July 2008

How do you think that the paper came to be refereed, published and then presented at AAAI'08? Did Hewitt and his students do this all by themselves? The AAAI would never allow Hewitt's students to referee the paper because of conflict of interest. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 167.165.7.232  16:36, 14 July 2008

Carl frequently redefines terms, so even if this were refereed — noting that conference proceedings are not normally refereed, at least in the hard sciences — we only have your, and possibly his, word that this is relevant to what the real world calls logic programming. (As an aside, I can assure you that one of my papers in a conference proceedings journal was not refereed. But I only suggest my papers as references for articles on talk pages, not on the articles, themselves.) — Arthur Rubin 17:25, 14 July 2008

In Computer Science these proceedings are normally refereed. In the particular case of the "What Went Wrong" series, the proceedings themselves say that that were refereed.--167.165.7.55  19:33, 14 July 2008

 I just noticed that the article already has a reference to Hewitt's work from a previous proceedings in the same series! Doesn't it make sense to update it with the more recent publication?--167.165.7.55  19:38, 14 July 2008

It probably makes more sense to remove Hewitt from the article entirely. — Arthur Rubin 21:10, 14 July 2008

Arthur, I don't care about your silly feud with Hewitt. Please repair your changes to the article.--167.165.7.55 10:12, 15 July 2008

Hewitt's attempt to "enhance" his reputation by putting links to his papers and opinions where they are not notable is what we are talking about. Perhaps he (and his students) have reformed, and this particular paper is notable and relevant. I wouldn't want to bet on it, though. The ArbComm ruling I reported earlier suggests that any reference to Hewitt or one of his papers, which is not made by an established editor, may be reverted. — Arthur Rubin 13:40, 15 July 2008

I think that you are wrong about this. Academics do not believe that Wikipedia can enhance their reputation. For example, it would be absurd for a hiring, promotion, or awards committee to take into account what Wikipedia says about someone.

Instead academics seem to have a very different motivation: it really bugs them to have articles that are inaccurate. So they try to correct articles to make them more accurate.--208.54.15.48 00:01, 16 July 2008

I used to think that, also. Dr. Hewitt convinced me otherwise. — Arthur Rubin 00:43, 16 July 2008

This is weird. You seem to know next to nothing. Yet, you have very strong opinions about what the community thinks. And judging from the AAAI, your opinions are the opposite of the consensus of the community.--65.42.208.133 16:01, 15 July 2008

What community? (I can't say what I think of Hewitt without violating WP:BLP, so suffice it to say that the papers of his that I read sense not make.) — Arthur Rubin18:14, 15 July 2008

The consensus is that because of the sustained incredible hostility that Wikipedia has expressed towards academics, they should steer clear of contributing to it.--208.54.15.92 22:50, 16 July 2008

Interesting, people in the AAAI don't seem to have your particular problem. However, they do offer tutorials that might be able to help you with it.--208.54.15.48 00:12, 16 July 2008

   

End Notes

 

---

[i] Many others have had similar experiences.  For example, according to Jim Leff [2008]:

I was once an active Wikipedia editor (as Slog readers might guess, rarely on food topics), and frequently I'd do an edit, and find, the next day, that the original author had changed it back. Sometimes I'd gingerly redo my edit, nuancing it a bit to be more acceptable to the author and inserting a note in the articles "talk" page. Inevitably, it'd be hastily reversed again, with nary a reply to my note.

    My recourse at that point was to launch a full-out war, or make a fuss, or present a case to the powers that be for the veracity of my point. I never did any of these things, because while I'm passionate about my points, I got out of the habit around age eight or so of needing to try to "win" every argument. I'd let the original authors have their way.

    Needless to say, that sort of restraint is unheard of with some people. During my years (ack, decades) of running Chowhound and other online communities, I've been dismayed to observe a very powerful dynamic: the pushy loudmouths always win. They scramble to the top of the hill, start shouting, and relentlessly push back down the hill all non-like-minded comers. And here's the big problem: the comers are rarely as relentless as the pushers. They tend to cede the turf. So the pushiest and most intolerant loudmouths always win, because they are inherently less accommodating than their opposition. We've seen this dynamic in reality TV shows, online communities, kindergarten, American politics, and, for sure, on Wikipedia, which is like cyberchocolate to this sort of person.

    Two bedrock policies at Wikipedia make it so: first, everyone's effectively anonymous (and many are completely so), and as we all know from driving, people act their very worst in an anonymous public flow. And, second, the Wikipedia credo involves a very low degree of moderation (though it's gradually ratcheted up a bit over the years), and, as any Somali (or Usenet discussion participant) will tell you, anarchy is not a felicitous condition for human communities - though, like Communism, it sounds great on paper. (emphasis added)

 [ii] According to Wikipedia Watch,

Another problem is that most of the administrators at Wikipedia prefer to exercise their police functions anonymously. The process itself is open, but the identities of the administrators are usually cloaked behind a username and a Gmail address. (Gmail does not show an originating IP address in the email headers, which means that you cannot geolocate the originator, or even know whether one administrator is really a different person than another administrator.) If an admin has a political or personal agenda, he can do a fair amount of damage with the special editing tools available to him. The victim may not even find out that this is happening until it's too late. From Wikipedia, the material is spread like a virus by search engines and other scrapers, and the damage is amplified by orders of magnitude. There is no recourse for the victim, and no one can be held accountable. Once it's all over the web, no one has the power to put it back into the bottle. (emphasis added)

http://www.wikipedia-watch.org/

18 Dec. 2007

[iii] “Wikipedia is not a democracy, and never has been.” Jimbo Wales. May 18, 2008

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Jimbo_Wales#Encyclopedia_Dramatica

[iv] Wikipedia Administrators often act in a remarkably absurd manner. For example an Administrator censored the statement “I have had enough of administrators who lack manners” from the personal user page of an editor stating why he was semi-retiring from editing Wikipedia.  The Administrator gave the following justification for his censorship “Sorry, there is no such thing as free speech on Wikipedia” [Law Lord 2008].

[v] Note that having expertise is not necessarily the same as having credentials. There are those who have credentials who do not have expertise and somewhat less often there are those who have expertise but do not (yet) have credentials. Also expertise is usually a matter of degree and can be very narrow.

 [vi] For example Jimmy Wales (“monarch” [Wales 2005], “God-King” [Pink 2005], “spiritual leader” [Wales 2007], “benevolent dictator for life” [King 2007], and “designated life member” [Wikimedia Foundation 2004] of the Wikimedia Foundation which owns and operates Wikipedia) has defended the thesis that Wikipedia should embody the Wiki principle that Anyone can change anything at any time and that such people should not have to identify themselves. [van Veelen 2008]

 [vii] According to Cade Metz [2007b]:

    Two years ago, the advertising giant's [Google] search engine was fighting a losing battle against spam. A perfect storm of ruthlessly effective SEO [Search Engine Optimization] …meant that Google's search engine was being swamped by noise …

    This had spawned a black economy of "private label articles", gibberish text that's cut and pasted together by human editors. This provided the raw material for software bots that could create and populate 24 blogs a minute. Google had examined, but then flunked the chance to remove blogs from its main index five years ago.

    As a result, almost one third of Google's index is created by software robots - but Google doesn't know which third.

    Then Google had a brainwave. Realizing that few searchers explore beyond the top three results, it decided to give a powerful boost to Wikipedia. Nevermind the 6 billion junk pages - Google need only ensure users clicked on the two million Wikipedia entries. As a consequence, Wikipedia entries rose to the top of the rankings. During 2006, Wikipedia entries eclipsed all others, and typically feature in the top three SERPs [Search Engine Results Pages], or the top search result.

   The human cost of this is has indeed been high. Maintaining the Wikipedia entries even in their current, advanced state of entropy entails running a virtual sweatshop of unpaid volunteer labour. But this is a cost borne by Wikipedia, not Google, which gets a more "relevant" search engine for free. (emphasis added)

[viii] See the appendix for an example.

[ix] AKA Rudy Koot is a student in mathematics and computer science at Utrecht University. Ruud claims that he “is a nice guy with a wide range of interests.”

 [x] Koot censored the following material from the Wikipedia article about me:

Hewitt's recent work has centered on foundations for privacy-friendly client cloud computing [Hewitt Oct 28, 2008]. This approach to cloud computing focuses on clients that are “privacy-friendly” because of the following:

·       by default clients store information in the cloud that can only be unencrypted using the client's private key [Hewitt Sept/Oct 2008]

·       semantic integration of diverse sorts of information (calendar, email, contacts, documents, search results, presence information, etc.) is performed on the clients [Hewitt Jan/Feb 2009]

This work has resulted in the following developments:

·       strongly paraconsistent logic using Direct Logic^TM [Hewitt Dec 30, 2008] to more safely reason about pervasively inconsistent information

·       concurrent reasoning using ActorScript^TM [Hewitt Dec 30, 2008] for many-core processors (e.g. Larrabee) that cannot be implemented using logical deduction since although strongly paraconsistent and Bayesian inference are used together locally, they are inadequate to accomplish the overall results of concurrent reasoning. (See [Hewitt 2009].)

[xi] Emphasis in original.  See appendix for details.

 [xii] In contrast, R. Stuart Geiger has defended Wikipedia as follows: “There are many pro-Wikipedia academics.” [Geiger 2008]. It would be interesting to see evidence that Geiger has to back up his claim.

 [xiii] As a model for Wikipedia, Jaron Lanier [2006] proposed “Digital Maoism”, Seth Finkelstein proposed “sweatshop” [Finkelstein 2007c], Kelly Martin proposed “cult” [Martin 2007a], and Andrew Keen proposed “digital narcissism” [van Veelen 2008].

[xiv] See http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Carl_Hewitt&oldid=263023961

[xv] For example there is a firm called MyWikiBiz whose business was to influence Wikipedia content about its clients [Bergstein 2007a]. MyWikiBiz was banned by Wikipedia because they publically announced their business model. However, Wikipedia does not prevent businesses from stealthily influencing Wikipedia articles about themselves:

[Jimmy] Wales agreed in an interview that companies and regular people likely are surreptitiously editing their own entries, doing in secret what MyWikiBiz was open about. [Bergstein 2007a]

According to Basturea [2006]:

As Wikipedia’s readership, popularity, and position in search engines results will grow, companies will become more and more concerned about the accuracy of Wikipedia’s entries and on how their reputation is affected by it, and will not stay idle if the entries on their organization, leaders, or products are inaccurate. (emphasis added)

   Concerning the warfare conducted against others by Wikipedia, see the message below apparently from Brad Patrick (Wikimedia’s in-house lawyer) [emphases added]:

From: Brad Patrick <bpatrick@wikimedia.org>

Date: Sep 29, 2006 9:53 AM

Subject: [WikiEN-l] Corporate vanity policy enforcement

To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List <foundation-l@wikimedia.org>,

WikiEn-l@wikimedia.org, wikipedia-l@wikimedia.org

 Dear Community:

 The volume of corporate vanity/vandalism which is showing up on Wikipedia is overwhelming.  At the office, we are receiving dozens of phone calls *per week* about company, organization, and marketing edits which are reverted, causing the non-notable, but self-aggrandizing authors, to scream bloody murder.  This is as it should be.  However, I am issuing a call to arms to the community to act in a much more draconian fashion in response to corporate self-editing and vanity page creation.  This is simply out of hand, and we need your help.

 We are the #14 website in the world.  We are a big target.  If we are to remain true to our encyclopedic mission, this kind of nonsense cannot be tolerated.  This means the administrators and new page patrol need to be clear when they see new usernames and page creation which are blatantly commercial - shoot on sight.  There should be no question that someone who claims to have a "famous movie studio" and has exactly 2 Google hits- both their Myspace page - they get nuked.  Ban users who promulgate such garbage for a significant period of time.  They need to be encouraged to avoid the temptation to recreate their article, thereby raising the level of damage and wasted time they incur.

 Some of you might think regular policy and VfD [Vote for Deletion] is the way to go.  I am here to tell you it is not enough.  We are losing the battle for encyclopedic content in favor of people intent on hijacking Wikipedia for their own memes.  This scourge is a serious waste of time and energy.  We must put a stop to this now.

 Thank you for your help.

 -Brad Patrick

User:BradPatrick

Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.

    Sometimes this warfare can cause “collateral damage.”  For example an innocent company could be harmed by simply adding spam links to the company on Wikipedia. The company is then listed by Wikipedia as a spammer which can cause them to be banned by search engines!

[xvi] According to Joe Szilagi,

Unfortunately, the best way to edit on Wikipedia is through a veil of complete anonymity, and by giving away nothing directly of ‘yourself’. That is, saying you’re an expert in field X, and even demonstrating it, will grant you nothing. The only way to get a leg up on trolls, sycophants, and general troublemakers is to beat them at their own game with “bulletproof” sourcing. If you (theoretically) had the ability to primarily publish material that met the threshold of “reliable sourcing” for your given field or topic of expertise, you could then ‘anonymously’ source back to it. It’s rather unfortunate, however, that it would have to come to this to ‘beat’ overgrown children at a game.

    Especially, y’know, as it’s not a game. It’s supposed to be an encyclopedia...

May 14, 2007

[xvii] There may be considerable sensitivity on the part of Jimmy Wales with respect to this subject as evidenced by the following email exchange [http://lists.wikia.com/pipermail/search-l/2008-January/000978.html]:

Seth Finkelstein wrote:

Let's remember that the price of the Grub crawler being $50K was not a secret _per se_, eventually being disclosed in SEC documents. But due to the implications, Wikia  definitely had an incentive to keep that info hidden as long as possible.

 Seth, you're an idiot. --Jimbo [Jimmy Wales]

[xviii]  For example, see the case of Angela Beesley at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Angela Beesley

 [xix] In a message apparently from Mike Godwin (General Counsel Wikimedia Foundation) to Rachel Marsden (who is seeking to have her biography deleted from Wikipedia) [Thomas 2008c]:

Finally, even if we assume that yours is a reputational interest that can be vindicated under defamation law, you will perhaps recall that providers of information services are immune under Section 230 of the federal Communications Decency Act (1996) from most civil liability for content they did not originate or develop.

 Ms. Marsden replied as follows [Thomas 2008c]:

It would appear that the approach you describe directly contradicts the spirit of the CDA [Communications Decency Act], which claims that Internet providers are merely providing a blank bulletin board, where people can post whatever they want. That is only true, however, insofar as the owners of the bulletin board do not interfere with what is posted there. It is my understanding, based on extensive legal consultation, that the moment they decide to take action regarding postings, they are liable for everything that is on it.

    Jimmy Wales, my ex-boyfriend and Wikimedia Board member, admits publicly to having my article altered. In other words, he is admitting that he is essentially responsible for the content of the bulletin board—he can influence what it says, and the law says that since he can, he should. In other words, the safe harbour—I am not responsible for what people post on my bulletin board—goes right out the window.  (emphasis added)

   According to Wikipedia Watch,

The problem is more complex than this. It turns out that about half of the more than 900 administrators are even more anonymous than the so-called “anons.” This is because no verification is required by Wikipedia's software to obtain a username. All editing under a username shows only the username as the editor, and does not show an IP address. Due to the fact that Wikipedia deletes its logs after a few weeks, this means that a username is often more anonymous than an "anon" without a username. Even if you serve the Foundation with a subpoena, chances are good that they will be unable to provide an IP address, or anything else that might identify an anonymous administrator.

    This is deliberate on Wikipedia's part, and their official policies brag about the privacy this provides. Those who reveal the true name behind an anonymous username get banned immediately, and the information deleted. Wikipedia does not want to know. Courts of law refer to this as “willful ignorance.”

    The Harvard author suggests that the most logical place to divide the Foundation from the larger community is between the administrators and the lesser logged-in users with usernames. This seems reasonable, in that administrators have extraordinary powers to delete content, protect content, and to block or ban lesser users. However, he fails to recognize that half of all administrators are even more anonymous than the “anons.” How can they be held accountable? This situation may encourage a court to hold the Foundation accountable for all administrators who cannot be identified. Another wrinkle is that the Foundation's bylaws define its membership broadly for voting purposes, which would suggest that the Foundation identifies with its members, and sees itself as a broad entity that creates and develops content.

    But for purposes of claiming immunity under Section 230, the Foundation will argue that it consists merely of five Trustees and about five employees. Their role is that of a provider of an interactive Internet service rather than a creator or developer of content, and they are therefore immune under the language of Section 230.

    We don't think this argument is very convincing. Our opinion is that the Foundation's Section 230 arguments will not prevail, and those who can afford competent legal counsel, and are prepared to appeal on the basis of complex legal arguments, should not be afraid to sue the Foundation for libel and/or invasion of privacy. We also feel that Congress should get its act together and clarify how Section 230 affects, or does not affect, an entity such as Wikipedia. (emphasis added)

http://www.wikipedia-watch.org/wikitort.html      18 Dec. 2007

 [xx] Later I published a more recent version of this material “Middle History of Logic Programming” on Google Knol, where it cannot be censored by the Wikipedia Administrators.

[xxi] See [Ayers, Matthews, and Yates 2008]

 [xxii] See [Matthews 2008a]

[xxiii] See [Matthews 2008b].

 [xxiv] See [Kleeman 2007b]

[xxv] To bolster the Wikipedia’s attack on me, Kleeman falsely claimed that Matthews is a “senior academic” even though she knew it was false from a previous article in which she had written that he is unemployed and a long time ago was denied tenure at Cambridge [Kleeman 2007a]. Furthermore Matthews still claims that he s a “senior academic” even though he has not worked in academics since he left Cambridge in 1988 [Matthews 2003].

[xxvi] See [Matthews 2008a].

[xxvii] See [Matthews 2008b].

[xxviii] See [Matthews 2008a].

[xxix] See [Matthews 2008c].

[xxx] See [[Matthews 2008b].

[xxxii] When the above paragraphs were censored from Wikipedia, an editor complained as follows:

Administrators have repeatedly deleted the section "Observer attack on Hewitt and his response" from this [Wikipedia] article [on Carl Hewitt] thereby adding to the evidence that Wikipedia is indeed corrupt. (emphasis added) http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Carl_Hewitt&oldid=262903678#Observer_article_on_Hewitt_and_his_response

[xxxiii] See the appendix of this article for further discussion. This incident illustrates how Wikipedia Administrators have obstinately exercised censorship in areas where they lack expertise.

[xxxiv] Wikipedia: Outing the real names of administrators Also see [Tobias 2007] for the Wikipedia censorship and banning of external sites considered to be “enemies” of Wikipedia.

[xxxv] See Schwartz [2008]

[xxxvi] In some previous cases, Wikipedia has agreed to remove articles about people when they objected to being included. For example the article on Daniel Brandt was deleted and then the discussion blanked [Finkelstein 2007a] even though Jimmy Wales said “He [Daniel Brandt] considers the very existence of a Wikipedia article about him to be a privacy violation, despite being a public person.” [DeFoore 2005]  Also see the case of Seth Finkelstein (Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Seth Finkelstein (2nd) [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Seth_Finkelstein_%282nd%29])

 [xxxvii] See Wales [2008].

[xxxviii] See Wales [2008].

[xxxix] According to [Bauwens 2008] (emphasis in original):

Wikipedia’s culture of anonymous editing and administration results in a lack of responsible authorship and management.

“Wikipedia editors may contribute as IP addresses, or as an ever-changing set of pseudonyms. There is thus no way of determining conflicts of interest, canvassing, or other misbehaviour in article editing. Wikipedia’s administrators are similarly anonymous, shielding them from scrutiny for their actions. They additionally can hide the history of their editing (or that of others).”

Wikipedia’s administrators have become an entrenched and over-powerful elite, unresponsive and harmful to authors and contributors.

“Without meaningful checks and balances on administrators, administrative abuse is the norm, rather than the exception, with blocks and bans being enforced by fiat and whim, rather than in implementation of policy. Many well-meaning editors have been banned simply on suspicion of being previously banned users, without any transgression, while others have been banned for disagreeing with a powerful admin’s editorial point of view. There is no clear-cut code of ethics for administrators, no truly independent process leading to blocks and bans, no process for appeal that is not corrupted by the imbalance of power between admin and blocked editor, and no process by which administrators are reviewed regularly for misbehaviour.”

Wikipedia’s numerous policies and procedures are not enforced equally on the community, popular or powerful editors are often exempted.

“Administrators, in particular, and former administrators, are frequently allowed to transgress (or change!) Wikipedia’s numerous policies, such as those prohibiting personal attacks, prohibiting the release of personal information about editors, and those prohibiting collusion in editing.”

Wikipedia’s quasi-judicial body, the Arbitration Committee (ArbCom) is at best incompetent and at worst corrupt.

“ArbCom holds secret proceedings, refuses to be bound by precedent, operates on non-existent or unwritten rules, and does not allow equal access to all editors. It will reject cases that threaten to undermine the Wikipedia status quo or that would expose powerful administrators to sanction, and will move slowly or not at all (in public) on cases it is discussing in private.”

The Wikimedia Foundation (WMF), the organization legally responsible for Wikipedia, is opaque, is poorly managed, and is insufficiently independent from Wikipedia’s remaining founder and his business interests.

“The WMF lacks a mechanism to address the concerns of outsiders, resulting in an insular and socially irresponsible internal culture. Because of inadequate oversight and supervision, Wikimedia has hired incompetent and (in at least one case) criminal employees. Jimmy Wales for-profit business Wikia benefits in numerous ways from its association with the non-profit Wikipedia.”

    According to [Lipsky-Karasz 2008]

“Jimmy [Wales] has a cultlike following, and I count myself a member,” says the U2 frontman [Bono] via e-mail.…

“It’s kind of weird,” says Wales over lunch at Country in Manhattan. “It’s intense fame.”…

“The only thing that matters to him [now] is fame,” says a former associate. “I miss the old Jimmy Wales.”

 

As Wales’s profile grew, those close to him say he … took to referring to himself as the “benevolent dictator” of Wikipedia in internal e-mails and became prone to name-dropping. “I can’t speak to you right now; I have to go pour Nelson Mandela his orange juice,” one colleague remembers Wales saying on the phone. (emphasis added)

    In a similar vein, Wales has refused to give credit to Larry Sanger in the founding of Wikipedia self-righteously stating that “I [Jimmy Wales] founded Wikipedia in 2001.” [http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:Jimbo_Wales&oldid=238860450] even though the Wikipedia article on Sanger says that he is “co-founder” of Wikipedia [http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Larry_Sanger&oldid=238210434]. Sanger has stated:

To the best of my knowledge, I was first described as co-founder of Wikipedia back in September 2001 by The New York Times. That was also my description in Wikipedia's own press releases from 2002 until 2004. With my increasing distance from the project, and as it grew in the public eye, however, some of those associated with the project have found it convenient to downplay and even deny my crucial, formative involvement. In fact, in the early years of the project, my role and the "founder" title were not in dispute at all; indeed, Wikipedia's first three press releases, including two that I had nothing to do with, all credited me as founder. It was not until 2004 that Jimmy Wales began omitting mention of my involvement at the start of Wikipedia to the press in 2004, and he didn't start denying that I am co-founder until 2005 or 2006, just when Wikipedia began to enter the public eye. (emphasis added) [Sanger 2008]

    According to Noam Cohen [2008]:

Some members … wonder if Mr. Wales, who has created a company, Wikia, to make money from wikis and to implement a volunteer-created search engine, will reduce his role within Wikipedia.

 

But Mr. Wales said he was adamant. “Dialing down is not an option for me” (emphases added)

[xl] In a January 8, 2009 article on him [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giles_Hattersley], Wikipedia accused Hattersley of lying.

[xli] ValleyWag is often an unreliable source.

[xlii] ValleyWag is often an unreliable source.

[xliii] ValleyWag is often an unreliable source.

[xliv] ValleyWag is often an unreliable source.

[xlv] ValleyWag is often an unreliable source.

[xlvi] ValleyWag is often an unreliable source.

[xlvii] According to [Finkenstein 2008e]: Amazing story from an unreliable source of "Why Jimmy Wales got booted from Wikia's top job". I wouldn't have believed it, and it's been denied, but a reliable source confirmed to me that it's true. There looks to be some very strange backroom politics going on within Wikia (the company aiming to "commercialize the hell out" of Wikipedia concepts and success, though having no significant financial connection to the Wikimedia Foundation).

[xlviii] ValleyWag is often an unreliable source.

[xlix]http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Logic_programming&oldid=220142666#History_of_Logic_Programming_by_Carl_Hewitt