On Thu, Dec 08, 2005, Uri Even-Chen wrote about "Re: [off topic] Wikipedia & Jimmy Wales": > Wikipedia is not free. Wikipedia is operated by people, with hierarchic > ranks, who control it. Anything in the articles which doesn't fit their > agenda will be removed or modified, and any person whom they don't like > (for any reason) will be banned from Wikipedia. Believe me, I know.
But the fact is that anybody (including you and me) can go to Wikipedia and fix what we find wrong. If you decide to go to Wikipedia's site, you can set its agenda. This is very different from other sites, like http://google-watch.org itself, where I cannot modify what they say if I don't like them. So perhaps google-watch.org is more "dangerous" than Wikipedia?? Personally, I think neither is dangerous. It's ironic how this guy's main blaim of Wikipedia is that anybody can come in and write a article badmouthing him. And this when this guy's job and hobby is writing sites that badmouthing others (politicians, Google, and now Wikipedia)? At least in Wikipedia, the "victim" can correct the errors - on his sites, his victims have no recourse. By the way, your comment about Heirarchic ranks is wrong. There are no ranks, just tens of thousands of editors (anyone can be one, you can even be anonymous), and there is one layer of "system operators" who have very few special privilages (among them, the privilage to delete a page, something which an ordinary user cannot do). Any computer system I know of have such operators, and it doesn't make every such system a "dictatorship". > Wikipedia is not objective, and not free. It reminds me the book > "Animal Farm". Remember the sentence "All people are equal, but some > people are more equal than others"? That's Wikipedia. All projects run by humans, including Wikipedia, have their share of power struggles and people who try to enforce their opinions on others. But unlike any other site where the site operator can easily force their opinions on others (e.g., try getting a controversial announcement into "slashdot"), on Wikipedia its far easier for any Tom, Dick and Harry to write opinions which differ from those of the "owners" of Wikipedia. > You can't correct falsehoods in Wikipedia. Believe me, I tried. If the > editors ("system operators") don't like what you wrote, it will be > changed back and you will be banned. If you can't convince others that your change is worthwhile, then maybe they were right and your change shouldn't be on Wikipedia. After all, Wikipedia is not your personal site and not a soapbox. I've been editing on Wikipedia, and using it, for about two years, and nothing even close to what you described ever happened to me. > There are excellent articles in Wikipedia, in areas such as mathematics, > science etc. But when it gets to politics or to anything else where > there are different opinions - Wikipedia is not neutral. Wikipedia is not perfect, and some articles are crappy because of such "edit wars" between people of opposing political views. But from that to saying that Wikipedia is evil, there is a long way. > www.google-watch.org is the third most popular site about Google, which > is not operated by Google. And that says something. It doesn't say anything to me... It looks like a totally unimpressive statistic. Heck, my own site had pagerank 7 until recently, beating this "google-watch.org". -- Nadav Har'El | Thursday, Dec 8 2005, 7 Kislev 5766 [EMAIL PROTECTED] |----------------------------------------- Phone +972-523-790466, ICQ 13349191 |Take my advice, I don't use it anyway. http://nadav.harel.org.il | ================================================================= To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
