New law would ban Wikipedia
There is a massive movement to starve-out Wikipedia, the
anonymous web site where anyone can create and overlay "facts"
without credentials nor accountability. Wikipedia pollutes the
search engine results with anonymous false facts, many of which are
defamatory, and Wikipedia provides a platform for criminals to
publish misinformation that is illegal in some countries.
This article says that Wikipedia web pollution is largely from
goodwill from Google, who may need to change their motto from "do no
evil":
"The analysis showed that for the week ending Feb 10, 2007,
70% of Wikipedia’s upstream visits came from search engines -
50% from Google alone."
Now we see this
new Congressional Bill which would block many "bad" web sites
that hurt innocent people:
"A bill introduced by Sen. Ted Stevens (R-AK) would block
social networking programs and other popular websites from
computers at public libraries and computers."
Wikipedia has long been banned as a credible source for schools
and universities, and this
ZDNet article
notes that Wikipedia has a link credibility problem as well:
"There's been a lot of justified
banter about Wikipedia's ability to
handle growth, the credibility of some
Wikipedia entries, the ease or lack
thereof of others who may wish to
challenge those entries.
Maybe it's me, but I sense a far more
complex problem with Wikipedia.
That would be problems with citations
that document the text of many, if not
most, Wikipedia articles."
House Bill S 49 addresses the problem via pornography, a very
effective method, since pornography is routinely posted by vandals
on Wikipedia, and the law provides for large fines and imprisonment
of the offenders. A similar law in the 1960 effectively ended
snail-mail porn, by providing tough fines and prison for offenders.
People have long suggested that the web cannot be regulated, but
with the recent news where a
man
was extradited to foreign prison for web site content, this is
changing fast.
Ultimately, it's an issue of accountability for publishing, and
today's technology will soon make anonymous illegal activity a thing
of the past. It's also heartening to think that sites like
Wikipedia may be forced to become accountable and abandon their anonymous nature;
providing the
identity and academic credentials of all of their publishers.
Wikipedia seeks to pollute the web?
It gets harder to use web searches
to find valid Oracle information on the web, and opening-up web
publishing to billions of people has contributed to the credibility
issue.
First it was blogging, where
thousands of new Oracle-related blogs are created monthly, many of
them being "Hoovers" (a Hoover is a vacuum) that crawl the web and
publish blogs of Oracle keyword spam.
Now, we see a new death threat to
web credibility with Wikipedia, a totally anonymous and un-credible
authority that has been banned as a citation source by all
respectable American universities, and for good reason.
Does Wikipedia support terrorism?
Wikipedia has also been
accused of supporting terrorism, a very serious charge:
"So where the founder and CEO
of Wikipedia has no problem about his editors lying to the
public, he also has no problem with his editors supporting and
inciting acts of terrorism.
No where will you ever find Al-Qaeda, Hamas, Islamic Jihad and
Hezbollah described as terror organizations by Wikipedia.
Wikipedia will quote the US State Department or the United
Nations Security Council as saying that they are terror groups,
but Wikipedia itself will only describe these organizations as
"militants.""
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