To quote Sam Vaknin:
It is a question of time before the Wikipedia self-destructs and implodes. It poses such low barriers to entry (anyone can edit any number of its articles) that it is already attracting masses of teenagers as “contributors” and “editors”, not to mention the less savory flotsam and jetsam of cyber-life.
Apparently Sam has an ax to grind. He apparently expects Wikipedia to become a black hole from which nothing, not even light, can escape, and with it, huge portions of the web will be torn asunder, floating around in the accretion disc that forms, before plummeting towards the singularity. He sites the following “Six Sins of the Wikipedia”:
- The Wikipedia is opaque and encourages recklessness.
- The Wikipedia is anarchic, not democratic.
- The Might is Right Editorial Principle.
- Wikipedia is against real knowledge.
- Wikipedia is not an encyclopedia.
- The Wikipedia is rife with libel and violations of copyrights.
However, a counter story was created by someone over at Wikipedia. However, at the bottom of the article, in an e-mail from Sam, it was mentioned that there were class action lawsuits being prepared against Wikipedia. However, my attempt to find any information about this, including that the site that supposedly had the information (http://www.wikipediaclassaction.org) redirected to something completely worthless, was in vain. Chances are, this is nothing worth while, and probably won’t happen.
Some comments in Digg included Firemeboy saying:
Why are we listening to a guy who has a home page that looks like this.
http://www.narcissistic-abuse.com/
and Matt’s comment of:
This Vaknin fellow was accredited by a commercial Brainbench Institution. One of those places where you buy your degree. As for Wikipedia, I believe it to be a good source of information and a fantastic example of collaborative work towards a positive goal. One must always be careful to check sources and facts. Sounds to me like Vaknin had a dispute with some moderator over a particular article and decided to throw a hissy fit.
These quotes seemed to be the general consensus on Digg.
I agree, you need to be careful of what you use Wikipedia for, and then you check your references. There is also a discussion hiding in the Digg comments as to whether or not Wikipedia, or even encyclopedias in general, should be cited as references in college or university classes. I would think this depends on the subject matter in question, as well as the difficulty level of the class. For an intro class, it would be helpful to use Wikipedia to cite basic information in case you couldn’t quite comprehend the way the text book presented it. Even better, use Wikipedia as a way of enhancing what you learn from class and the text book. I would imagine that if I read the article about something on Wikipedia while working on a term paper, I had better just list it down, just to be safe. I think part of the reason I believe that to be something to do is because I seldom wrote papers for my classes, as they were not part of the course. Whatever.
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