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Wikipedia: All murdered Israeli children are murdered by… Arabs

By Sam Lee

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Wikipedia organizes its article topics into categories, which assists the reader in locating articles related to a general field of interest… or, it helps propagandists to consolidate their preferred bias over a broad topic area, depending on your point of view. If you look at Category:Murdered Israeli children (T–H–L) you will note that all the listed 32 articles in this category have one thing in common: they were killed by Arabs, or, in a case where the killer has not been apprehended; were suspected of being killed by an Arab.

Now this is strange, as it is a sad fact that in the industrialised world, the majority of murdered children are killed by a parent, or other next of kin. Take the US, for example, where more than half of all infanticides (killing of children less than the age of 5) are committed by a parent, while only 10-20% are committed by a stranger, or by parties unknown.

Alas, if you follow the Israeli media, you will soon find that there is no lack of children being killed by a family member there, either. A study in 2010 showed that 40 Israeli children had been killed by a parent in the previous 7 years.

And after that, we have had:

2010: Omer, 10 years old, Roni, 8, and Or, 5, killed by their father, Itay Ben Dror 2013: Yahav, 5 and Eden, 3, killed by their father, Eli Gur 2013: Igor, 7, and Mira, 5 , killed by their mother, Karina Brill 2014: Yishai, 11, and Sara, 10, killed by their father, Avi Levy

Alas, these children will never get their own pages on Wikipedia. They were not killed by Arabs.

Almost the same goes for

…continue reading Wikipedia: All murdered Israeli children are murdered by… Arabs

Guilty?

By Mila and friends

banned

Recently, an experienced and prominent Wikipedian, who goes by the user name Demiurge1000, was banned by the Wikimedia Foundation Legal team from ever again working on Wikipedia or any of its related sites. Philippe Beaudette, Director of Community Advocacy for the Wikimedia Foundation, provides a good perspective on how big of a deal such global bans are: “the number of times that the WMF has moved to ban someone from our community like this can probably be counted on one hand.” And he’s right: for more than a decade since Wikipedia was created, there have as far as we know only been four such bans.

The WMF has been very tight-lipped on the reason for the ban, but there are a few bits and pieces that could be used to figure out what was the rationale. According to James Alexander, a manager of Legal and Community Advocacy for the WMF, the ban “was done as part of our ongoing obligation to protect the site and its users.”

Jimmy Wales, co-founder of Wikipedia and a trustee of its Foundation, believes that “the Foundation should take a much harder line and ban not just based on the narrow grounds they use today”. He explains that by “narrow grounds” he means “child protection”. So, if the impartial observer were to put it all together, they might reasonably assume that Demiurge1000 was given this “global ban” by the WMF to protect Wikipedians, and most likely to maintain compliance with Wikipedia’s Child Protection policy.

So far so good; it would appear that the WMF is working diligently to protect its users who happen to be children. But is that in fact the

…continue reading Guilty?

The Wikipedia Fundraising Banner: Sad but Untrue

By the Masked Maggot and friends

 

We’ve been amused and bemused watching the reactions to the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) fundraising campaign over the past couple of weeks. Simply and clearly put, here’s why you should think twice about donating:

Wikipedia is written by volunteers. If you want to give someone a gratuity, try to give it to the people who did the work. The WMF does not write the encyclopedia. While a few pennies (just under 6, in fact) of your donated dollar go to the internet hosting, the vast majority goes to providing salaries, travel expenses, and really nice furniture for the rapidly growing staff of what has essentially become a software company. The software produced has been fairly poor, and has been imposed by the foundation on the volunteers, who really wish the foundation wouldn’t do that.

This isn’t at all surprising to those of us who have watched the development of the WMF over the years. Jimmy Wales, who calls himself the “sole founder”, was actually more like a venture capitalist or a rainmaker: the idea, ideals, and architecture were developed on a philosophy listserv where Larry Sanger (don’t let Jimmy hear you call him “co-founder”) led the effort. The encyclopedia project itself was then taken up by avid volunteers from slashdot and usenet. Jimmy realized that he’d alienate the volunteers if he tried to monetize it, but as it turned out he could make a great living out of it by becoming the spiritual leader and taking paid speaking gigs. Recently, he even got a half-million dollars from a foundation dedicated to giving a good humanist aura to Dubai (the Wikipedians aren’t sure what to think about that).

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The Wikimedia Foundation was set

…continue reading The Wikipedia Fundraising Banner: Sad but Untrue