The Church of Scientology has reportedly been banned from making edits to Wikipedia. The Register is reporting that the Wikipedia Arbitration Committee voted 10 to 0 (with one abstention) in favour of a move to ban all IP numbers associated with the controversial organisation from editing articles. The block takes effect immediately.
The Church of Scientology has struggled to keep control of its public image in recent years. It was established in 1952 to promote Science Fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard’s ‘Dianetics’ self-help programme. In its 57 year history Scientology has been controversial due to its mysterious teachings, only available to those willing to pay vast sums of money and undergo regular ’security checks’ to ensure they could be trusted.
Those unable to pay are sometimes invited to join the ‘Sea Org’, a group of people who sign ‘Billion-year contracts’ to devote their life (and future lives) to doing hard, and often menial, work for the Church. There have been suspicious deaths at Scientology centres and even the Scientology’s status as a Church has been questioned by those who believe that they use the ‘Religion’ status purely to claim tax exemption.
While in the past dissent was dealt with by legal threats, smear campaigns and and dirty tricks, Scientology has found the age of the Social Web much harder to control. Anonymous, a loosely-associated group of people across the world opposed to the ‘Church’, use the internet to organise regular pickets at Scientology centres and post Youtube videos exposing the organisation’s wrongdoings.
The ‘Church’ has fought back with takedown notices and by mobilising its members to post comments supporting Scientology. Long-time anti-Scientology campaigner Mark Bunker had his Youtube account repeatedly shut down after complaints about the content of his videos.
The problem Scientology faces is that the web is getting bigger and faster by the day. Messages spread faster than ever and the dominant message out there is that ‘Scientology is bad’. For an organisation that trades on selling its secrets for a huge fee, the open, social web is a dangerous place. Anyone considering joining the Scientology is one Google search away from all the criticism of the Church that they could want.
With this new Wikipedia ban it looks like a net is closing in on Scientology that it may struggle to escape from.
Well, I didn’t ask but I’m guessing this would put a smile on Andrew Keen’s face. Oh, in fact; Andrew Keen LOVES this cartoon MORe than anything else in the world. Don’t believe me? Give me ten minutes and check wikipedia!
The average site for a popular consumer product is:
A. Slick with a high level of ‘production values’.
B. Made in flash.
C. About as socially engaging as a log.
Skittles changes all that in one go by essentially giving up on having a site of its own. If you go to skittles.com you see a realtime Twitter search for “skittles.” All that is left from the old corporate branded experience is a small widget-like navigator in the right hand corner.
If you click “videos” it goes to Skittles’ Youtube page, if you click “images” it directs you to a Flickr search, “products” is the Skittles Wikipedia article and clicking “friends” will take you to the skittles fan page on Facebook. This breaks with the tradition of consumer products with boring mass sites that feel like generic dance clubs -I’m looking at you Pepsi. Skittles have decided that the best online experience is one created by its own customers.
Predictably the Twitterati went wild after discovering that any tweet mentioning “skittles” would make it the new Skittles front page and it was inundated with tweets like:
mobob: #skittles is doing a very nifty thing, but i’m still not going to eat them, they always tasted way too much like rocks.
shehulk123: All the skittles talk on twitter today makes me want to go out and taste the rainbow.
brianboyko: @poneal - so… skittles gets people to talk about skittles on twitter by showing people talking about skittles on twitter. I don’t get it.
mpk: @obra you are way out of date on today’s fast-moving Internet. That Skittlesthing is *so* six hours ago.
Many have said that Skittles is making a mistake opening itself up to the worst impulses of the Web. They should ask themselves if any other consumer product has managed to get this level of attention online, ever.
Kudos to Skittles for leading the way!
Update: So Skittles now defaults to the Wikipedia page for Skittles (yesterday it was their Facebook fan page). It seems to me that they are rotating through their different profiles, either as part of a strategy or just trying to see what achieves better customer interaction. To see the Twitter live search now click “chatter”. But the question remains; when will we see some Digg love?
Can you picture what will be
So limitless and free
Desperately in need…of some…strangers hand
In a…desperate land Jim Morrison, 1967
Wikipedia received $890,000 from the Stanton Foundation in order to make the encyclopedia easier to use. A wiki edit page currently has too much knobs and twiddly bits for an average user. Three newly-hired developers will take these complex details away.
“Wikipedia attracts writers who have a moderate-to-high level of technical understanding, but it excludes lots of smart, knowledgeable people who are less tech-centric,” Wikimedia Foundation executive director Sue Gardner said in a press release. “One of our key priorities is to attract those people and persuade them to help write and edit the encyclopedia.”
Will a lower barrier to edit mean the end of Wikipedia?
Making the crowd-sourced encyclopedia easier to edit will make it easier to abuse. The fact that there is a hurdle to overcome is what prevents Wikipedia from becoming a mess. Some even argue – Andrew Keen anyone? – that Wikipedia already is a mess. Just imagine what will happen if even Joe Sixpack starts editing pages about brain surgery.
Or will it make Wikipedia even more interesting?
“Ideally”, CNet writer Caroline McCarthy notes, “[Wikipedia's] millions of articles will have a broader depth of coverage”.
I don’t know anyone who regularly edits Wikipedia pages. A few thousand attic room geeks decide what kind of information we get to see. So yes, it’s good to welcome some ordinary citizens to share their specific knowledge on hobby’s or their field of expertise.
It all comes down to…
Whether you believe in people are not. Are you an elitist, like Andrew Keen, who sees Web 2.0 users as an infinite amount of monkeys and therefore as a threat to our culture? Or are you the Jimmy Wales-kinda guy? When I asked him some tough Wikipedia questions during an interview in January, he replied: “It’s very difficult to fool a community”. Wales repeats the same mantra as eBay: “People are good”
This week we celebrated a Dutch premiere: Bob Sijthoff, business man and son of the Financieele Dagblad founder sued the WikiMedia Netherlands foundation and association. He allegedly molested a Swiss banker in 2004 for which he was dragged to court in April 2008. He also bought some apartments, and one of Holland’s most well-known mobsters functioned as a mediator in these transactions.
Of course the news about these shady activities is featured on his Wikipedia page. As you can imagine, Sijthoff doesn’t dig the “insulting” texts.
So he decided to sue Wikipedia. Sijthoff wants them to remove the page as well as to reveal the identity of the author: some guy with the nickname Jacob H.
Sijthoff will be surprised by the effect of his legal action. Hundreds of blog posts and news articles about his case will appear on the web. Whatever he does, nobody can ever Google his name without stumbling upon a blog post like this. That makes his Internet reputation doomed forever.
And you know what, he’ll probably not even win the case. All the mentions on Wikipedia are based on news sources. On December 10th, we’ll know for sure.
Reuters has just published research that shows that consumers who rely on Wikipedia for information on medications are putting themselves at risk of potentially harmful drug interactions and adverse effects. Earlier today I wrote about research by Microsoft about Cyberchondria and then I suddenly remembered this post I had written a while ago on my personal blog titled “Would you trust WikiPedia with your life?“. I think it is still a valid point so I decided to simply copy paste it here:
Would you trust WikiPedia with your life?
WikiPedia is cool and I use it several times a week. Still, the discussion regarding the quality of the information offered is far from over as far as I’m concerned. I recently read Everything is Miscellaneous by David Weinberger which is an incredibily inspiring book. In his book Weinberger quotes (original article) Robert McHenry who is a former Editor in Chief of the Encyclopedia Britannica:
“The user who visits Wikipedia to learn about some subject, to confirm some matter of fact, is rather in the position of a visitor to a public restroom. It may be obviously dirty, so that he knows to exercise great care, or it may seem fairly clean, so that he may be lulled into a false sense of security. What he certainly does not know is who has used the facilities before him.”
It is easy to dismiss this quote because of the background of this writer and most people do. As a former editor of Encyclopedia Britannica it is only logical to question his motives. Sure he doesn’t like WikiPedia!
But I’m not interested in questioning his motives. I’m interested in his argument. In fact, I’m inclined to agree with his point, although I don’t necessarily want to dismiss WikiPedia based on it.
Weinberger and every other WikiPedia enthusiast (including me) have always pointed out that although some articles on WikiPedia might not be completely correct they always end up getting better as time passes and informed people correct mistakes and fill in the blanks at incomplete articles. And if a mistake would be made (on purpose or by accident) it would eventually be fixed by other people who recognise it as such.
This is something you take into account as you browse WikiPedia and it is considered a minor nuisance. I don’t think it is a minor nuisance though. I think it undermines the whole system.
A friend of mine changed 20 lesser known diseases on WikiPedia from benign to malignant. People visiting those pages will be misinformed and that will greatly impact their lives. If only for a few hours. Yes, some articles were changed within minutes but some are still not updated. And even if they are updated within minutes it is still possible that a few visitors read those pages during those few minutes that the information was wrong.
Now I have some good news and bad news.
The good news is that I made this up. No friend of mine changed any diseases on Wikipedia. At least, not that I know of.
And that is the bad news. How can we ever trust WikiPedia? How can you know that the information on the page you visit hasn’t been changed by information terrorists (or simply misinformed people) a few seconds ago? You should at least monitor the information on the page you read for a few days before you can trust it a little bit more, and check the information on other services like Answers.com or, well, the Encyclopedia Britannica.
Some of the information on Wikipedia may be wrong some of the time and we will have to work on a mechanism to make sure we know which parts are undisputed and can be trusted.
Until then, make sure you wash your hands, very carefully, on your way out.
Visualized using code_swarm (Processing) and my new Wikipedia page history parser Wikiswarm (Ruby). Code and instructions on how to make your own visualizations can be found in the README or on jamiedubs.com
Music is from DJ Z-Trip’s Obama Mix and I like it!
Deletionpedia, as you could have guessed, is a site automatically chronicling all the English-language entries that are deemed not worthy of almighty Wikipedia’s standards and subsequently deleted.
That translates into 63,551 pages so far, and it’s an excellent way to get a feel of what the standards of Wikipedia actually are all about.
Here’s how it works:
A Wikipedia user tags a page on Wikipedia as a candidate for deletion.
We upload all pages which have these tags to a temporary store. As of May 2008, this store holds about 10 GiB of data.
We check Wikipedia’s deletion log, which lists pages which are deleted from Wikipedia.
If the page which was deleted is in our temporary store, we upload it onto the Deletionpedia wiki
“Deletionpedia would make a fine research project for sociology students to study what groupthink does when applied to a community-built compendium of knowledge. Better yet, a thorough review of the discussion pages may lead to a new psychological disorder being named, based on the need to examine trivial knowledge to a level of minutiae never seen before.”
Granted, most people do not see Knol as a direct threat to Wikipedia, and the title of the post might upset some people… Even Google noted that Knol is not designed to compete with Wikipedia, but you have to admit that from a online knowledge-base perspective, the sites are quite similar. Knol might become the preferred choice in this field within a very short time.
1. Moderated data
The big difference between the two is that Knol is less anonymous then Wikipedia, it allows the author to moderate their respective articles. The idea is that the Author remains involved, since their name and reputation is permanently attached to it. This approach takes people out of anonymity and potential incorrect contributions, and might lead to higher quality articles prone to error. Knol allows the community to rank respective Knols, and allows more Knols about the same topic, another big difference between the two services.
2. Ads enabled
Knol will have ads enabled from launch, supplied by Google AdSense. Simply enable your adsense in your profile page, and you are ready to make some money from your content. If you have been contributing to Wikipedia (or not), simply copy your data to Knol and get Adsense dollars from it.
3. Google pagerank
Wikipedia currently enjoys a lot of top ranking results on Google, but one day after launch, Danny from Search Engine Land found that 1/3 of the pages listed on the Knol home page that I tested ranked in the top results. Example: He found that the search term “How to Backpack” scores on number three, i’m not sure if Google applied any additional page-rank to the site, as the search term scores in the top three on Yahoo as well. However, the fact Knol’s search results appear on Google are an immediate threat to Wikipedia’s traffic.
By now anyone who’s interested in the next web knows about the public beta release of Google Knol, the Google-owned Wikipedia killer that actually reminds me more of Squidoo than the free encyclopedia we’ve all grown accustomed to seeing pop up in the first search results for a whole lot of keywords. And if you’re not interested in the next web, you’ll soon get to know Google Knol too. Some ‘knols’ (units of knowledge) have already started getting spectacularrankings in Google’s search engine, a trend that will no doubt continue.
But rather than speculating if that’s good or evil, I noticed something funny when looking up more information about Google Knol. I wound up on Knol.com, which is home to a Netherlands-based steamcleaning equipment vendor. They’re featuring news releases on their homepage, and one of them was about the launch of Google Knol, which obviously drove quite some traffic to their website as well.
It’s in Dutch, so let me give you the rundown: after the blog post from Google announcing the public beta launch, the company received tens of thousands of visitors from over 130 countries to their website. Knol appreciates the fact that so many heads are now turned in their direction (despite the fact that it’s bound to be quite irrelevant traffic, I might add) thanks to Google, but they want to make it clear that they will not be evaluating any offers for their domain name, which is now obviously worth a lot more than last week. This is the part of the news release that made me smile:
“NOTE: We sell steamcleaning equipment and don’t sell our domain !!”
I’m left wondering if Google got in touch with the company themselves, and how much cash they would be prepared to throw at them for acquiring the domain.
Written on 29th May 2009
2 COMMENTS 
The Church of Scientology has reportedly been banned from making edits to Wikipedia. The Register is reporting that the Wikipedia Arbitration Committee voted 10 to 0 (with one abstention) in favour of a move to ban all IP numbers associated with the controversial organisation from editing articles. The block takes effect immediately.
Written on 14th May 2009
Written on 4th March 2009
The average site for a popular consumer product is:
Written on 4th December 2008
Can you picture what will be
Of course the news about these shady activities is featured on 
Written on 22nd September 2008
Written on 25th July 2008
By now anyone who’s interested in the next web knows about the 
The Next Web Blog is closely associated with The Next Web Conference which is held annually in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. At this event speakers from all over the world come together to talk about, and show off, the future of the Web. (More info 
