The Spanish police are investigating four Internet users for edits made in the months up to July 2009 to the Spanish Wikipedia's article about politician Javier Arenas of the center-right People's Party (PP). As reported[1] by news agency EFE on September 25, a resident of Albacete and one of a village in the Levante were recently summoned to testify at their local courts, joining as suspects two other Internet users that had come under scrutiny some months ago. According to the PP, whose complaint led to the investigation, the offending edits included "insults and coarse language" against Arenas and his family, and false information that was subsequently used by a government member to insinuate that Arenas had needed a long time to complete his law degree.
Various media reported on comments made by Wikipedia Founder Jimmy Wales on a recent visit to Malaysia. AFP ("Wikipedia founder says Malaysia should ditch censorship") quoted him as saying that "a very open flow of information" was important in "making sure that the people have the information they need" and that "I want to write that information (on sites like user-generated Wikipedia) so that my fellow citizens have the knowledge they need so they can't be oppressed."
On the other hand, Wales repeated earlier criticism of Wikileaks (see Signpost coverage: "Difficult relationship between WikiLeaks and Wikipedia"), a website set up to publish leaked information: As reported by Associated Press, Wales said that the site has committed an "irresponsible" act by knowingly releasing the contents of classified military information, and that it could potentially "put innocent lives at risk". In related news, Wales recently explained on Wikipedia why the domains wikileaks.com, wikileaks.net, wikileaks.us, wikileaks.biz, and wikileaks.mobi appear still to be registered to Wales' company Wikia, even though
| “ | Wikia does not serve any of the sites. The CNAME records in DNS direct the traffic to www.wikileaks.org.
The domain names were legally transferred to Wikileaks a long time ago, but for unknown reasons, Wikileaks never completed the technical aspects of the transfer. Wikia has made multiple requests to them to do so, with no result yet. Mr. Assange has indicated that he is very busy right now, which seems likely to be true, given recent news events. |
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Malaysian tabloid The Star quoted Wales [2][3] on various other topics, e.g. his education, negative media coverage by Fox News related to his deletions of sexual images on Commons earlier this year ("That controversy, says Wales, is all over, too. 'Fox News basically ran some outrageous, inflammatory stories that were absolutely not true'), the dispute over whether Larry Sanger should be called a co-founder of Wikipedia ("this so-called controversy has overshadowed his contribution not as co-founder but as a very important employee and a very important part of the early community"), a 2009 Wall Street Journal article about Wikipedia having lost 57,000 editors within a year ("I said, ‘Well, I found them – in my refrigerator’. It was just a badly done study") and many other topics.
Yet another interview with Wales was published a few days later in the Financial Times Magazine—a list of personal questions titled The Inventory. Asked for his "mentor", Wales said that one is Larry Lessig ("He was one of the first people who realised what I was doing at Wikipedia"). To the question "What ambitions do you still have?", Wales replied: "My goal for the next 10 to 20 years is to build Wikipedia in the languages of the developing world."
Discuss this story
I don't get the "in my refrigerator" joke. Is it meant to be a macabre serial killer joke?--greenrd (talk) 09:04, 5 October 2010 (UTC)[reply]
I don't see why the PLoS article needed to mention Wikipedia's Manual of Style; not only do many established Wikipedians either ignore it or are unaware of its existence, it doesn't provide anything that a combination of the guidance of more familiar academic style guides (such as the MLA Handbook) & studying relevant Featured Articles would. A more important omission would be the no original research policy, since the natural inclination of any expert would be to add new & original material to an article, & getting tripped up by this policy could inadvertently discourage people we'd obviously desire for their expertise. In any case, the article could only cover so much ground & obviously some things had to be left out. -- llywrch (talk) 16:14, 5 October 2010 (UTC)[reply]