I stumbled across this....

http://www.wikipediaclassaction.org/

Welcome!

There is a problem with the operation and functionality of Wikipedia. The basic problem is that none of the Trustees of Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., nor any of the volunteers who are connected with Wikipedia, consider themselves responsible and therefore accountable for the content.

They believe themselves to be above the law.

WikipediaClassAction.org is currently gathering complaints from the entire Internet community, including individuals, corporations, partnerships, etc., who believe that they have been defamed and or who have been or are the subject of anonymous and malicious postings to the popular online encyclopedia WikiPedia.

Alternatively, if you are aware of postings on Wikipedia that are either untrue and or potentially libellous to another, please contact them and make them aware of the offending content and this website so that they may file a complaint with our group.

Our intention and the purpose of this website is multi-fold. Specifically, we seek to achieve the following:

* Expose the inherent faults and flaws of the Wikipedia online encyclopedia


* Force Wikimedia Foundation Inc., through legal action, to change its current practices that permit anyone to post content to their website, without formal attribution and without recourse back to Wikimedia Foundation and or the author of the content


* Recover substantial monetary damages, on behalf of those who have suffered as a direct result of Wikimedia's flaw business model


* Establish a precedent that will ensure similar websites are held responsible for their content

Recent news articles have exposed the growing problem with Wikipedia's methods. Untrue information posted to Wikipedia, as fact, by an anonymous 'volunteer' (Brian Chase, 38, a resident of Nashville, TN was later exposed as the person behind the lie) suggesting that journalist John Seigenthaler had been involved in the assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy was eventually removed by Wikipedia's co-founder Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales, but only after more than four months anguish and hard work by Seigenthaler.

If you are interested in joining in our planned lawsuit, please contact us.

Two minutes of reading later and all sorts of questions come up.

Do we really want to get into where the N.S.D.A.P (Nazis) got their salute?

The free speech issues bear some investigating and it would help to contact the wiki moderators about any actual fact-findings you may come across.

Accurate reports welcome. Strange inflammatory rhetoric designed to foster emotional discontent is not so welcome.


Posted: Dec 12, 2005 3:53pm
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Here is the public side of the story: http://www.cnn.com/2005/US/12/11/wikipedia.ap/index.html

And you can see malicious poster lost his job from his prank.

I sincerely hope none of what they hope to achieve comes to pass.

I use wikipedia almost daily for research purposes, and love it. Created and used by academics and many others in the community it is an excellent quick reference, and if used with reasonable judgement, and appropriate follow up in primary sources, the "open" nature is not a problem, and in fact allows for contributions of often relatively esoteric and difficult to find in formation, that would not be included in a "normal" encyclopedia or your be found in your local library.

There was a study published just recently that showed that it had only slightly more errors than Encyclopedia Britannica and most of these in both were typo's spelling issues, wrong dates, names, etc., as opposed to glaring conceptual errors, but in both there were a some of these and as expected without Britannica's editorial review process there were more at wikipedia.

but...

"In the wake of questions of accuracy, a survey by the science journal Nature finds that science entries in the volunteer-driven, online encyclopedia Wikipedia are "not markedly less accurate" than those found in Encyclopedia Britannica." - From All Things Considered, December 15, 2005 where Nature reporter Mark Peplow discusses the survey. You can listen to a report concerning this at:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5055388

One of the great things about the wiki concept is that the content can be changed or edited by all of its contributors, thereby creating an evolving, growing, living encyclopedic resource. Contributors to an article can track changes to it over time, and if they feel the entry diverges to much or needs corrections, they can jump back in and bring back into focus what they felt was being lost. If some other contributor then feels it needs to move back in a different direction they can jump in as well.

This can create a kind of intellectual tug of war that is very interesting to watch as entries change as multiple contributors build an article at times to quick consensus, at others to controversy. What is great though is that the tugging back and forth on the content brings about the evolution of a reasonably balanced, comprehensive article inclusive of divergent points of view.

In an effort to protect against vandalism each contribution is backed up and saved so that past versions can be reverted to when needed.

Because of recent discoveries by the magic community that there are a few articles that include some methods exposure there are some that have jumped to regard wikipedia as a threat and have been tempted to judge it negatively. Remember methods can and are posted anywhere on the net and be found by google. Our secrets will be kept by the code of conduct of our community and nothing else. Any who wish to know a secret will be able to either find it or buy it. Most of our audience either doesn't care about the secrets beyond the moment of wondering "How did he do that?" and even if they do read will forget the method.

In our modern culture everyone knows we "have something up our sleeve" or some "trick" to make the effect happen. Very few will believe that you are in league with the devil or hold some other form of mystical powers. Extremely baffled... potentially, hopefully even truly entertained with a magical moment or story that is beautiful to watch, a real performance art piece to take them into a sense of wonder many so rarely experience today. With a performance like this it doesn't even matter if they know how it is done. Anyone seen a good linking rings routine lately? I did and my brother who is not a magician but knows about the "key" from his childhood was left doubting. Its the performance not the methods.

I would encourage any and all to explore wikipedia more deeply. Search for almost anything you can think of and most likely you will find something of interest. Don't believe everything you read there, or anywhere else for that matter, but as I mentioned above it often serves me well as a quick resource to initiate new discoveries, or to help clear up foggy recollections.

Hamilton

The whole world is changing - faster and faster.

You can attempt to influence the course and direction of that change, but try to halt it and you'll be crushed.

I was pleasantly stunned about the accuracy. Considering that absolutely anyone can edit an article immediately, and there are no "senior" editors. And it's free!

There may be no senior editors, but there are large numbers of "page guardians." People with an interest in the subject covered by the pages they watch and who may well have contributed to setting some of those pages up. They decide which pages they want to watch and flag these on their account. When someone changes a page they are watching, they check to see what change has been made. Because they are knowledgeable they can quickly judge if the change is a sensible one. If it isn't they revert it back to the previous version. Often this will happen with one or two minutes of the change being made, but usually an hour. These people are Wiki hacks and they are online all the time so it's useless trying to get past them. Some of them also have moderator status to ban people who delete and make silly changes.

For example, say you didn't like the Balducci levitation being exposed, and you changed the explanation to say it was done by large electromagnets and superconductive shoes. They know that that's rubbish so it would get reverted and your internet number may get reported or banned for vandalism if you persisted. But if you added that it was invented several hundred years ago and made popular by Blaine's street magic, that kind of sensible edit would be accepted and left to become part of the permanent article.

So that's basically how it works. It's largely accurate because clever people give up their time to keep it that way.

I am aware of "page guardians;" I've spent time reading the discussion pages for many Wikipedia articles. They can be quite interesting, especially if the article concerns a contentious topic. The Out of this world card trick discussion is worth a look: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Out_of......trick%29