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…continue reading How Jimmy Wales rode Tony Blair’s coattails
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by Gregory Kohs . On Saturday, October 18, Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales and his politically-connected third wife, Kate Garvey, were in Dublin, Ireland to deliver separate talks at the prestigious “One Young World” 2014 Summit. The equivalent value for both of them to attend was approximately $5,400, including taxes, but of course for them the conference waived any registration fees. In fact, according to Henny Hamilton, the conference’s PR coordinator, One Young World merely paid for round-trip airfare and one night’s hotel lodging for the duo, and no speaking fee was paid to them. Considering what the conference got for that airfare and hotel bill, it’s difficult to say whether it was worth it. Garvey, introduced as “a fantastic woman” to a light smattering of applause, was scheduled to speak to the audience about ambitious new objectives of the United Nations. But in actuality, the moment after she took the podium, Garvey explained that she was there “to introduce someone else” because she didn’t “do the speaking in this”. Garvey spoke for only 80 seconds before her spot at the podium was taken by a more youthful and nubile speaker, Alessandra Orofino from Brazil. Given that the conference is intended solely for delegates between the ages of 18 and 30, and many of them enjoy stunning Mr or Miss Universe good looks of their own, the audience was probably not disturbed by the agenda hand-off. Jimmy Wales, for his part, was scheduled to speak for 30 minutes, and that’s exactly what he delivered. There was frankly nothing new disclosed in his talk to the audience. The speech consisted almost entirely of themes regurgitated from previous sessions delivered by Wales. One critic described Wales as looking more and more like Mike Myers’ …continue reading Another Day, Another Junket By Andreas Kolbe Wikipedia, the crowdsourced online encyclopedia that anyone can edit, has often been credited with “democratising knowledge”. But it’s a strange sort of democracy. Wikipedia has a near-monopoly online: almost any search engine query will return a Wikipedia article as a top result. Most internet users only read the first search result. And in fact, users often do not even have to click through to Wikipedia. More and more material from Wikipedia is displayed on Google’s own search results pages, thanks to the Google Knowledge Graph panel and Google’s new snippet overlay. No wonder that there is such great interest from the most diverse parties to influence Wikipedia’s content. News from Azerbaijan A case in point is the government of Azerbaijan. Azerbaijan is an oil- and gas-rich former Soviet republic that has for more than two decades been ruled by the Aliyev dynasty. Likened in leaked US diplomatic cables to a mafia don, its current president Ilham Aliyev is seen as “increasingly authoritarian and hostile to diversity of political views.” The 2014 Human Rights Watch report on Azerbaijan reads as follows: The Azerbaijani government’s poor record on freedom of expression, assembly, and association dramatically deteriorated during the year. The authorities arrested dozens of political activists on bogus charges, imprisoned critical journalists, broke up several peaceful public demonstrations, and adopted legislation that further restricted fundamental freedoms. This crackdown was the backdrop for the October 2013 presidential election, in which incumbent President Ilham Aliyev was re-elected for a third term with 84.5 percent of the vote. So when in September of last year an obscure news item about the Azerbaijani Wikipedia was raised for discussion in our forum, it seemed worthy of a second look. Published by Azeri business news portal abc.az, it told the world, in somewhat broken English: …continue reading Wikipedia – the new ministry of truth |
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