Posts by Maury Markowitz

Microsoft's maps lost Melbourne because it used bad Wikipedia data

Re: All mapping software depends on external data

The external data was correct. There is no GIGO here.

Fukushima fearmongers are stealing our Jetsons future

OMG, we can't go to Mars now?

A mission that's at least two generations in the future is impacted by this week's already fading news?

Riiiiight.

Wikipedia black helicopters circle Utah's Traverse Mountain

forest for the trees

Of course I "get it". _My_ point is that an article complaining about a super-secret cabal controlling "the truth" had better try to, you know, get to "the truth".

I'm completely familiar with the problems that societies have with the idea that there's some sort of gatekeepers of "the official knowledge", whether that "official knowledge" is the latin bible under the protection of the Vatican, philosophy of 13th century universities, or, in this case, some sort of half-baked collaborative blog site. And pointing out problems with these generally self-serving organizations has been going on for thousands of years - literally.

But is _this_ the right way to point them out? By creating skewed articles are filled with innuendo and misrepresentations? I think I need to say this again; this article states in black and white that the ban was "because Judd Bagley has accused Wikipedia's uber-administrators of skewing the contents of four online articles". But the reasons for the ban are clearly recorded on the site and have absolutely nothing to do with this. Bagley created dozens of accounts to continue arguing long after he had been repeatedly told to stop. The more recent activity was about blocking IPs apparently owned by the company in question. That's it. That's the _entire_ story. This is some sort of smoking gun about the abuse of power? Whatever.

You can't simply ignore these problems and say that's not the issue. This IS the issue. "Old media", of which El Reg is a member, _is_ one of those "gatekeepers of truth", one that makes pretensions far in excess of anything the wikipedia has ever claimed. The wiki has problems dealing with conflict? Big deal. Aren't problems accurately reporting reality just a tad more important?

Maury

Spot on, for a change

> It seems The Register is now being purged as a reference as

> it's now considered an 'unreliable source'.

A perfectly accurate description, IMHO.

Did any one of you bother to actually check the claims made in this article? It's not like it's a lot of work, it might take five whole minutes, starting with the links here. If you do bother to check, you'll notice that Bagley appeared in the naked short article and started making libelous attacks on "nameless" traders while re-directing links from existing articles in major magazines to his own site. People removed these edits, as they should have, and he re-added them. Over and over again.

When people told him to stop, he started attacking anyone that edited the articles or his user page, eventually trying to "out" one of the editors (laughably). That brought in the admins, who he immediately abused as well, and that led to a block. All of this happened in _one day_. Not to be stopped by that, he then started creating account after account after account so he could continue to abuse people for almost a month. That led to a ban, not when he "was merely writing about the site, from his own domain", but wayyyy back in 2006 when all of this was actually happening.

Read it for yourself: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_checkuser/Case/WordBomb

This well recorded reality contrasts rather harshly with the claims in this article. The Reg claims Bagley "hadn't edited" in a year, which is a rather nice spin on "banned". It then goes on to say the "address was banned because Judd Bagley has accused Wikipedia's uber-administrators of skewing the contents of four online articles", which is obviously not the case -- he was banned over a year ago due to a variety of well recorded reasons.

But let's not let publicly recorded history get in the way of a good conspiracy theory, eh? Then what we do on the slow news days?