Recent Changes - Search

Encyc

Sections

edit SideBar

Reasons Not To Contribute To Wikipedia

The Reasons Not to Contribute to Wikipedia are many. Whether one is donating time or money to this project, the volunteer should be aware of the following principles:

Free Content

The most valuable commodity on the internet today is something called content. Loosely defined, this is news, information, creative writing, or images that draw the attention of internet surfers and make them stay at a particular website. Whenever someone makes a constructive edit to Wikipedia, that person is generating content, for free, that is worth something. Most internet websites make some attempt to monetize content. Wikipedia is no exception. Through relationships with Wikia.com, Amazon.com, and other for-profit companies, a lot of money is being made from the content being donated to Wikipedia.

Political Activism

The average Wikipedia editor is not allowed to edit every article. On controversial topics, there is a core of administrators who controls the content, often through a combination of software tools, peer pressure, and the power to ban accounts. Contributors will often be labelled as troublemakers, or trolls, for attempting to change the content of controversial articles.

Whenever good, useful, free content is generated, that goes towards making Wikipedia a more heavily-trafficked, respected, educational resource. In other words, the reputation of Wikipedia is enhanced through the work of well-intentioned volunteers. Wikipedia administrators in turn use this reputation to promote their pet agendas, whether they are animal rights, Lyndon LaRouche fanaticism, criticism of the United States and Israel, pro-life, or any of a host of other issues that the average person may or may not agree with.

The Administrators are Spying on You

Anonymous administrators with no background checks are given software tools to check your IP address and they have other ways to find out about you. They discuss personal details of regular contributors on secret mailing lists and many people may find out who you are, where you live, where you work, who your family is, etc. There is no anonymity on Wikipedia, except for the administrators.

Some of this confidential information was kept on a mailing list for the Arbitration Committee, a group of high ranking administrators responsible for settling disputes. The contents of this list were leaked in June 2011, and published on Wikipedia Review. The Arbitration Committee also maintains a wiki which has files on Wikipedia users. This has been hacked and leaked as well.

Theft

Large sections of Wikipedia are plagiarized or stolen from other websites and countless reference books. Even where not strictly against the law, such as under "fair use", building a project based on intellectual scavenging and theft is not nice. The Encyclopedia Britannica, for example, works hard to generate content. Wikipedians steal this content, and cite Britannica frequently at the ends of articles. Large chunks of content are also taken from the Jewish Encyclopedia and from U.S. government publications such as the Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships. The original resources are often better than the Wikipedia articles derived from them.

The result of this theft is that the the original websites are pushed down in the search rankings, and books are not bought or checked out of libraries. The incentive to write books and publish original, creative web pages is lost, and society as a whole misses out.

Silliness

Wikipedia has been invaded by immature people of all ages. They have set up an administrative bureaucracy which is comical as well as sad. This would not be a problem, except that these administrators have real power and can enforce decisions on Wikipedia that have effects on real life people outside of their system.

Pretentiousness

The intellectual pretentiousness on Wikipedia is quite embarrassing. Watching two users argue, using "sources" that they found using a Google search, should make any honest and sane contributor question why they are helping. Wikipedia has codes against incivility and personal attacks, but the community has found hundreds of less-conventional (but equally as obvious) ways to insult each other and flame-wars erupt and persist for months, even years.

There is a Cabal

In November 2007, the existence of two secret mailing lists including a small group of administrators and Jimbo Wales was revealed. Wikipedia's pretentions of openness and community consensus-based decision making are a sham. Rules such as the "Three Revert Rule" work against individuals by allowing groups to game the system.

The License Can Change

In December 2007, Jimbo Wales announced that the previously-used GNU Free Documentation License will be changed to make it compatible with a "Creative Commons" license. What this means to the volunteers who built Wikipedia is that Jimbo and the Foundation can renege on whatever license applied at the time the content was generated.

Pornography

Wikipedia is filled with hardcore pornography, far more explicit than anything you'd see in Playboy or Penthouse. Wikipedia makes no effort to protect children from exposure to this material. The Wikimedia Foundation encourages the use of Wikipedia in schools from Kindergarten through 12th grade.

See Also

External Links

Edit - History - Print - Recent Changes - Search
Page last modified on June 29, 2011, at 03:18 PM