Thursday, November 24, 2011
Duns Scotus banned from Wikipedia
Here. More insight into the bizarre world of Wikipedia. 'Johnny the Vandal' spends his time creating hundreds of Wikipedia accounts every week in order to vandalise the encyclopedia. There is a whole team of people reverting his edits, and placing those little tags on the account page. This has nothing to do with creating a comprehensive and reliable free reference work, and indeed diverts attention from that noble project. The obvious solution would be to have some form of identification before users could open accounts. This would prevent the silly and pointless activities of both Johnny the vandal, and the 'vandal reversion' industry on Wikipedia. It would also deter those more subtle vandals whose aim is to create libellous biographies like this. But Wikipedia has not got its head around that idea yet.
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5 comments:
Interesting that the only edit was http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Square_of_opposition&diff=prev&oldid=461922791, which adds http://www.logic--museum.com/cantor/Eximport.htm
Is there more here you aren't saying?
>>Is there more here you aren't saying?
Not much more. There was a series of vandalistic edits to that article, as well as to other articles on the subject of logic and medieval philosophy, by different accounts such as ‘Dunz Scotuz’, ‘Billy Ockham’ etc – follow User:Ckatz’s edit trail to find them all. My own account was (wrongly) identified as the source, but a ‘sockpuppet investigation’ cleared me. I honestly don’t know who Johnny the Vandal is. A kind administrator (Alison) eventually cleared up the problem – see the discussion here. I thought Alison's last comment was thoughtful. Wikipedia has a way of turning small disputes into mountainous piles of toxic waste.
Why ‘Johnny’ is reverting links to the Logic Museum (my website) I don’t quite know. I expect he saw my post in Wikipedia Review about it, and thought it would be fun.
Some philistinish knave, tampering with the scholastic masterpieces! Do put a call into Holmes and Watson, or at least Miss Marple, I dare say.
Serio, re-perusing a few wikis I wd agree there's often bias---the wiki-wizards tend to find one "scholar" on a topic, and he spouts away, with little input . On broader subjects there may be some debate/dissent, but with philosophical topics it's often just a quick run-down from one appointed guru (lets hope not a follower of Miss Rand).
But..actually I agree with the one long-hair programmer now asking for donations--wikis do provide a valuable service, and should be supported. I ve heard some religious conservatives don't care for them.So be it. Viva Wiki!
>>But..actually I agree with the one long-hair programmer now asking for donations--wikis do provide a valuable service, and should be supported. I ve heard some religious conservatives don't care for them.So be it. Viva Wiki!
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I think wikis provide a valuable service, but I think Wikipeidia needs some serious reform.
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