Why this Site?

  • Our Mission:
  • We exist to shine the light of scrutiny into the dark crevices of Wikipedia and its related projects; to examine the corruption there, along with its structural flaws; and to inoculate the unsuspecting public against the torrent of misinformation, defamation, and general nonsense that issues forth from one of the world’s most frequently visited websites, the “encyclopedia that anyone can edit.”
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  •  Visit the Wikipediocracy Forum, a candid exchange of views between Wikipedia editors, administrators, critics, proponents, and the general public.
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  • Please click here for recent Wikipediocracy press releases.

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Wikipedia – keeping it free.
Just pay us our salaries.

By Andreas Kolbe

The other day, I was fortunate enough to be treated to a fundraising banner on Wikipedia:

DEAR WIKIPEDIA READERS: To protect our independence, we’ll never run ads. We survive on donations averaging about £10. Now is the time we ask. If everyone reading this right now gave the price of buying a programmer a coffee, our fundraiser would be over within an hour. We’re a small non-profit with costs of a top 5 website: servers, staff and programs. Wikipedia is something special. It is like a library or a public park. A temple for the mind where we can all go to think and learn. If Wikipedia is useful to you, take one minute to keep it online and ad-free another year. Thank you.

UK fundraising bannerI don’t seem to have been the only one being shown the banner, judging by a rash of breathless posts on Twitter where people are proudly announcing:

I have just donated to #Wikipedia. Help keep it free! #keepitfree

Donations link added, of course.

There’s just one problem here: the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) – the non-profit that runs Wikipedia and other crowdsourced projects such as Wikimedia Commons and Wiktionary – is wealthy enough today to keep Wikipedia “online and ad-free” for about a decade.

So why does it want even more of your money?

1,000% growth in revenue

Under Sue Gardner’s leadership (2007–2014), the Wikimedia Foundation’s revenue skyrocketed, based on fundraising banners designed to solicit small donations from a very large number of Wikipedia readers.

Wikimedia_Foundation_financial_development_2003-2013…continue reading Wikipedia – keeping it free.
Just pay us our salaries.

How Wikipedia screws up an article – the Hannah Anderson Kidnapping

By Cornpone T. McGillicutty

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Well, folks, it’s time again to see how the sober, competent, and respected editors of the world’s free encyclopedia, Wikipedia, are handling their job—compiling and curating the “sum of human knowledge,” as Mr. Jimmy Wales once put it. As an aside, Jimmy is actually his first name, says so right there on his user page, so it ain’t disrespectful to be calling him that. Jimmy’s just folks.

Back ’round last August I was turning the pages of a newspaper, and read about some terrible goings-on out in California. The LA Times article was well-written enough, but I had a whole bunch of unanswered questions, so I fired up my computer, and visited Wikipedia. It’s durn near my favorite website, it just has so much stuff happening all the time.

Now, Wikipedia has its rules, and its little ways, and its customs. There’s a policy that Wikipedia is not news, but a pillar of Wikipedian belief is that rules should not get in your way if you all are improving the encyclopedia.

Boy howdy, folks were just improving the snot out of our encyclopedia at the Wikipedia article on the Hannah Anderson kidnapping. Just check out that there talk page.

Deep philosophical questions were being addressed, I tell you. The most important one was this conundrum: Are dogs people?

 

That was persistently and passionately argued and campaigned, for and against, fore and aft, on the talk page for this Wikipedia article covering this horrible tragedy in California. You see, folks, in an ‘infobox’ (a box to the right inside the main Wikipedia article, containing what are supposed to be the salient facts about the event), I saw next to the word “Deaths” this declaration: “3 people

…continue reading How Wikipedia screws up an article – the Hannah Anderson Kidnapping

Wikipedia and the war on women’s dignity

By Nathalie Collida With research contributions from tarantino, James P. Persica, and Eric Barbour

Between what has become known as GamerGate and the Apple iCloud incident, you could be forgiven for thinking that the Internet has declared a full-on war on women’s privacy. Over 100 female celebrities have had their iCloud accounts hacked and personal, mostly nude photographs of themselves published on 4chan and Reddit. Video game developer Zoe Quinn endured a vituperative online harassment campaign from men’s rights advocates after her ex-boyfriend publicly accused her of infidelity – including, and, as it turned out, wrongly, of having had an affair with a journalist to ensure favorable coverage of her interactive fiction game, Depression Quest. In addition to being unfairly accused of corruption and called all kinds of names, both on the Internet and through anonymous phone calls, Quinn found her address revealed on Reddit together with illegally obtained nude photographs of herself.

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Feminist media critic Anita Sarkeesian recently went into hiding, after her latest series of videos analyzing how women are used as background decoration in video games resulted in death threats against her and her parents and the publication of their home addresses on twitter. Since launching her Tropes vs. Women project in 2012, Sarkeesian has become a popular target for misogynists. Attacks on the critic by men’s rights advocates and Internet trolls included graphic threats of rape as well as a crudely-made video game in which players scored points for punching Sarkeesian in the face. Following the latest Twitter onslaught, a slew of Angry Men on the Internet were predictably quick to suggest that she may have made up the death threats to garner sympathy and donations. Two men’s rights activists are now asking you to part

…continue reading Wikipedia and the war on women’s dignity