Thoughts on Antiquity, Patristics, putting things online, freedom of speech, information access, and more
An amusing story from Wikipediocracy, the Wikipedia criticism site. A user at Wikipedia has now banned any link to Wikipediocracy from Wikipedia, by adding the site to the “spam” blacklist. Of course Wikipediocracy is not spam; this is censorship of an external site. Since Google privileges Wikipedia so much, this reduces traffic to Wikipediocracy and [...]
An interesting article at Wikipediocracy makes some interesting points: Who writes Wikipedia? … In a recent op-ed published in the Los Angeles Times, Wikimedia Foundation executive director Sue Gardner proudly highlighted the fact that the Wikimedia community includes many very young contributors: The youngest Wikipedian I’ve met was 7 … There’s a recurring motif inside [...]
I have been looking at a section of the article at the new Mithras pages on the initiation process into the cult. This section is copied from the Wikipedia Mithras article as it was at the start of 2011, before the article was deliberately poisoned. But that doesn’t mean, necessarily, that it is sound. I’ve [...]
You learn a great deal from a forum like Wikipediocracy. A correspondent reminded me of this article today. The Daily Dot gives the story in less abbreviated form here: From 1640 to 1641 the might of colonial Portugal clashed with India’s massive Maratha Empire in an undeclared war that would later be known as the Bicholim [...]
One of the pleasures of reading the Wikipediocracy forum, as I do from time to time, is to see hard evidence of what I experienced myself, that it is very dangerous for ordinary people to attempt to contribute to Wikipedia. Today’s thread discusses a long term editor hiding behind the name “MaterialScientist”. This post comments: [...]
Regular readers will know that I had a very bad experience attempting to contribute to the Mithras article on Wikipedia, when I was the target of a deliberate campaign of violence and defamation by an obvious troll operating at least two accounts, who simply wanted to own my work and push a falsehood. It ended with a [...]
Incoming links revealed to me the existence of the Wikipediocracy site this weekend. Our Mission: We exist to shine the light of scrutiny into the dark crevices of Wikipedia and its related projects; to examine the corruption there, along with the structural flaws; and to inoculate the unsuspecting public against the torrent of misinformation, defamation, [...]
Quite by accident I found myself looking at this page (not safe for work), which calls itself “Encyclopedia Dramatica”. It has some pithy (and very rude) things to say about Wikipedia. The format would tend to make most of us dismiss it, but much of it is at least half true, and will bring a smile [...]
In to town, to hand back Vermaseren’s Mithras: the secret god. No sign yet of two British Library loans of other Mithras books. I was relieved to discover that the local library was open, as I had feared that it might not be — there is a public sector workers strike today. I am still [...]