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.”
  • How you can participate:
  •  Visit the Wikipediocracy Forum, a candid exchange of views between Wikipedia editors, administrators, critics, proponents, and the general public.
  • 'Like' our Wikipediocracy page on Facebook.
  •  Follow Wikipediocracy on Twitter!

Press Releases

  • Please click here for recent Wikipediocracy press releases.

Google Search

Child Pornography on Wikimedia Commons

by Delicious carbuncle

 

Let’s be very clear about this – in my experience, the Wikimedia Foundation (who own Wikipedia and the site’s image repository, Wikimedia Commons) takes the issue of child pornography very seriously. The WMF has no tolerance for explicit images of people who are underage. This may be simply because hosting child pornography is illegal in the jurisdictions where the Wikimedia servers are, but whatever the reason, my reporting of child pornography to WMF employees has always resulted in swift and decisive action. The trouble is that Wikimedia projects are not administrated by WMF employees, they are administrated by volunteers. And some of those volunteers do not share the WMF’s concerns about hosting child pornography.

Meet Matt Buck

Matt Buck is an admin on Wikimedia Commons, where he goes by the clever pseudonym Mattbuck. He’s not the Matt Buck who is a talented illustrator, or the Matt Buck who is a bodybuilder and fitness model. He’s this Matt Buck, who is a maths PhD student at the University of Nottingham.Mattbuck is very active on Commons and one of the more prominent admins there. When someone believes an image on Commons should be deleted for some reason, they start a deletion discussion. Commons editors will discuss the rationale for deleting or keeping the image and an admin will close the discussion (and delete the image if that is the decision reached). Mattbuck is one of a group of editors who tend to appear at deletion discussions about images relating to nudity or sexuality to offer reasons why the image should be kept. Since he is an admin, Mattbuck also closes a lot of these types of discussions. Mattbuck also keeps galleries of “sexuality” and “nudity” images in his userspace, presumably so that he can spot problem images. These

…continue reading Child Pornography on Wikimedia Commons

Meet the editors: Meco

By Delicious carbuncle

Another in a in a series of blog posts highlighting lesser-known Wikipedia editors.

So far, I’ve introduced you to Wikipedia editors For An Angel (AKA Ospinad) and Crakkerjakk without revealing their real-life identities. This time I will be introducing you to Meco, who tells us on his Wikipedia user page that he is 48 year-old “Halvor aka Halvor Raknes aka Halvor Raknes Johansen aka Halvor R. Johansen” from Oslo, Norway.

Some background

.

You probably won’t remember this, but in 2010 it was revealed that Amazon.com had been selling an ebook entitled The Pedophile’s Guide to Love and Pleasure. It made a great topic for discussion on the news networks. Faced with the predictable outrage, Amazon quickly pulled the book and everyone moved on. Of course, someone wrote an article about the book and its author in Wikipedia. As I recall, it was an excuse to air the author’s somewhat unusual views on relationships between children and adults. This article and the deletion discussion I started for it were where I first took notice of Meco.

Meco is an old-timer. He has been editing Wikipedia since 2006 and has over 50,000 edits on the English-language WP. As Meco’s user page notes, he was banned from the Norwegian-language Wikipedia in 2007. Of course, just because you have been banned on one Wikimedia Foundation project doesn’t mean you aren’t welcome on a different one.

In June 2009, Meco created the article for Sons, a film about “the conflict between a pederastic man and the boys with whom he has had intimate relationships”. In July 2012, Meco created an article on WP about a documentary called Are All Men Pedophiles?. This article had already been created and deleted twice before. Meco

…continue reading Meet the editors: Meco

Wikipedia intervenes to hide identity of Russavia

By Gregory Kohs

 

A masquerade mask uploaded by Russavia

Wikipedia was in a bit of chaos last week, as some of its administrators and its Arbitration Committee sought to wipe away any mention of the real name of a user who goes by the nickname “Russavia”. One popular and prolific editor of military history articles has been indefinitely blocked for “outing” Russavia. And an administrator with nearly five years under his belt who sought to unblock the history buff was defrocked of his admin toolkit in the early hours of March 5th. Alas, the people who built Wikipedia have developed an accompanying set of rules that are so extreme, heavy-handed, and (not surprisingly) unevenly enforced, it’s not hard to believe that fewer and fewer people have the courage to edit the wiki encyclopedia any more.

What is especially perplexing is the fact that “Russavia” has identified himself as Australian web merchant Scott Bibby in numerous places across the internet, but because he has never sought to identify himself on Wikipedia, no other Wikipedia editor is ever allowed to identify him by his real name. Furthermore, Russavia’s account on Wikipedia has been blocked since April 2012, so this entire kerfuffle has been fought over the identity of someone who was already kicked off of the site.

The puzzling affair began with a blog post on Wikipediocracy. The post explained in clear detail how Russavia is one of the most prolific and intractable contributors of photos to Wikimedia Commons (the photo album cousin of Wikipedia), how he so offends opponents that he got blocked for a year from Wikipedia, and how his name is without a doubt Scott Bibby. The post also described a moment on Wikipedia when a female editor complained to

…continue reading Wikipedia intervenes to hide identity of Russavia