 |
|
| Science Forum Index » Psychology - Psychotherapy Forum » WIKIPEDIA MAKES NO GUARANTEE OF VALIDITY... |
|
Page 1 of 1 |
|
| Author |
Message |
| childadvocate... |
 Posted: Thu Aug 20, 2009 4:11 pm |
|
|
|
Guest
|
Wikipedia : all information read here is without any implied warranty
of fitness for any purpose or use whatsoever
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:General_disclaimer
http://www.wikipedia-watch.org/
http://www.pressaction.com/news/weblog/full_article/brandt01212006/
http://ritualabuse.us/ritualabuse/articles/ritualabuse-us-blacklisted-by-wikipedia/
WIKIPEDIA MAKES NO GUARANTEE OF VALIDITY
"Please be advised that nothing found here has necessarily been
reviewed by people with the expertise required to provide you with
complete, accurate or reliable information."
"However, Wikipedia cannot guarantee the validity of the information
found here. The content of any given article may recently have been
changed, vandalized or altered by someone whose opinion does not
correspond with the state of knowledge in the relevant fields."
"Wikipedia is not uniformly peer reviewed; while readers may correct
errors or engage in casual peer review, they have no legal duty to do
so and thus all information read here is without any implied warranty
of fitness for any purpose or use whatsoever."
Wikipedia's Accountability Problem
By Daniel Brandt
There is a problem with the structure of Wikipedia. The basic problem
is that no one, neither the Trustees of Wikimedia Foundation, nor the
volunteers who are connected with Wikipedia, consider themselves
responsible for the content. If you don’t believe me, then carefully
read Wikipedia’s disclaimer.
At the same time that no one claims responsibility, there are two
unique characteristics of Wikipedia that can be very damaging to a
person, corporation, or group. The first is that anyone can edit an
article, and there is no guarantee that any article you read has not
been edited maliciously, and remains uncorrected in that state, at the
precise time that you access that article.
The second unique characteristic is that Wikipedia articles, and in
some cases even the free-for-all “talk” discussions behind the
articles, rank very highly in the major search engines. This means
that Wikipedia’s potential for inflicting damage is amplified by
several orders of magnitude.
http://www.pressaction.com/news/weblog/full_article/brandt01212006/
http://www.wikipedia-watch.org/
While Wikipedia itself does not run ads, they are the most-scraped
site on the web. Scrapers need content — any content will do — in
order to carry ads from Google and other advertisers. This entire
effect is turning Wikipedia into a generator of spam. It is primarily
Google's fault, since Wikipedia might find it difficult to address the
issue of scraping even if they wanted to. Google doesn't care; their
ad money comes right off the top.
For example, it did not take long, using the Google and Yahoo engines,
to find 52 different domains that scraped Wikipedia's page on rock
band Lynyrd Skynyrd. Interestingly, Google listed more than four times
the number of duplicate scrapes than Yahoo. This could be related to
the fact that 83 percent of these scraped pages carry ads — almost
always ads from Google. Some of these scrapes are template-generated
across different domains, suggesting that they are created by
programs. At that point zombie PCs might be dispatched to click on the
ads.
Jimmy Wales, the man behind Wikipedia....After he made a fortune in
futures trading, he started up Bomis.com in the mid-1990s. Bomis was
one of the first sites to scrape the ad-free Open Directory Project,
and turn it into a huge mass of paid
links and ads, mixed together with porn.
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. |
|
|
| Back to top |
|
|
|
|
|
All times are GMT - 5 Hours
The time now is Mon Nov 30, 2009 2:42 am
|
|