Wikipedia
From dKosopedia
Wikipedia describes itself as "a free-content encyclopedia, written collaboratively by people from around the world," which is essentially true, but the site is not permitted as reference material for college papers and even Wikipedia warns against relying upon - "cannot guarantee the validity of the information found here". There are active editions in more than 150 languages. As of May 3, 2007, the English-language site (the largest) contained more than 1.7 million different articles on many subjects. Wikipedia is owned and run by the Wikimedia Foundation of St. Petersburg, Florida, whose stated goals are "to develop and maintain open content, wiki-based projects and to provide the full contents of those projects to the public free of charge."
Its English-language version site: http://en.wikipedia.org
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Conflicts of Interest
Rather than go over a wide variety of flaws built into Wikipedia's system that can lead to what Stephen Colbert termed wikiality, this section is devoted to actual observances of Wikipedia being involved with or the source of propaganda, disinformation, and factual errors.
Sock Puppets for Hire
In March 2011, a year after Koch hired New Media Strategies to manipulate articles and blogs, Wikipedia banned the previously well-known Republican publicity firm.[1] Beginning in February 2011, Scott Walker and Wisconsin brought corporations buying political influence and media to the mainstream media. Centered mainly on Koch's influence on Walker through election campaign contributions and then buying lobbyists and busing people in to support Walker at speeches after protests began, other news sources began finding other connections, which eventually led to Wikipedia recognizing the shills paid via Koch Industries as a marketing expense.
Google's Murder Abortion
Found in early 2011, Google returned Wikipedia's abortion page as a stop result for searches on "murder".[2] Google looked into the problem and fixed it, blaming it on Wikipedia.[3][4] Within a week of the report and fix, Wikipedia had still not disclosed this on their site and it's unclear whether they intend to undo, correct, or prohibit further changes by the people involved.
dKosopedia versus Wikipedia
The most important reason for there to be a dKosopedia in addition to a large and more heavily trafficked Wikipedia is that Wikipedia is philosophically devoted to a "neutral point of view" (NPOV) and "consensus" (not of reliable sources, but of Wikipedia's contributors). These 2 "policies" have the effect of suppressing reality in favor of being balanced and agreeable. While it's better than pure political spin variations of the wiki concept, such as Conservapedia, it creates a false parity between a credible viewpoint and an incredible one simply to be "neutral" (See also: Meta Main), largely because it rarely and selectively enforces its own rules on reliable and verifiable sources. The so-called neutral point of view that Wikipedia claims is sometimes closer to the opinion of founder, Jimbo Wales.{citation needed}. For example, {citation needed} is frequently used to insert and allow opinions that have no factual basis, yet remain in articles indefinitely.
While Wikipedia attempts to be what its name implies, an encyclopedia site, dKosopedia tries to make a broader use of the potential of the wiki media form by using the site as a place to develop and document progressive ideas that have both immediate and historical relevance to our world, rather than focusing strictly on collecting random information simply because its popular or has widespread MSM coverage. Thus, in it's present state, Wikipedia is more like a CNN of encyclopedias.
Importing material between Wikipedia and dKosopedia
Both Wikipedia and dKosopedia license their content under the GNU Free Documentation License. Accordingly, material can be imported from one project to the other if the requirements of the GFDL are met. One such requirement is that principal authors must be credited. The easiest way to do that is to link back to the source, so that a reader can see the authors by checking the page history. Therefore:
- Material copied from Wikipedia to seed or augment a dKosopedia article should generally include an attribution line of this type:
- This article incorporates material from the Wikipedia article "McCarthyism". The list of authors can be found here.
- Material copied from dKosopedia to Wikipedia should include a similar attribution line. It should also conform to the NPOV policy or it will probably be reverted in short order.
- If you're copying only material that you yourself wrote, you don't need to include such a link. You might find it useful to note that you're the author, however, in your edit summary and/or on the article's talk page. Otherwise a later editor might think that the terms of the GFDL had been violated.
Other Wikipedia Variants
- SourceWatch - tracks political and financial connections
- WikiLeaks - dedicated to nearly complete government transparency, openly publishing whistle blower documents and allowing truly anonymous contributions of any type of media (video, images, audio) (cf., WikiLeaks)
- Wiktionary open dictionary
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