Wikipedia has a long history of problems

Wikipedia has a long history of problems with accuracy, bias and allegations of connections to pedophilia and pornography.

1) The Bomis Connection
2) Pedophilia Allegations
3) Wikipedia Accuracy Problems
4) Summary of the problems with Wikipedia
5) Bias in child abuse articles – banning websites with information on child abuse crimes

The Bomis Connection

Wikipedia was financially supported by Bomis a dot-com company that was founded in 1996. It was founded by Jimmy Wales (one of the founders of Wikipedia) and Tim Shell. Bomis ran a website called Bomis Premium at premium.bomis.com until 2005, offering customers access to premium, X-rated pornographic content.

Until mid-2005, Bomis featured the Bomis Babe Report publishing news and reviews about celebrities, models, and the adult entertainment industry. The Babe Report linked to Bomis Premium and often posted updates about new models joining Bomis. Bomis has operated nekkid.info, a free repository of selected erotic photographs. Bomis continues to host The Babe Engine, which indexes photos ranging from glamour photography to pornography. (from Wikipedia)
also see :
Congress Reacts to Wikipedia Firestorm By James R. Marsh on April 29, 2010 http://www.childlaw.us/2010/04/congress-reacts-to-wikipedia-f.html

Pedophilia Allegations

FOX News ran an expose on the connections of child pornography, Wikimedia and Wikipedia.

Wikipedia Distributing Child Porn, Co-Founder Tells FBI By Jana Winter FOXNews.com April 27, 2010
http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2010/04/27/wikipedia-child-porn-larry-sanger-fbi/
“The parent company of Wikipedia is knowingly distributing child pornography, the co-founder of the online encyclopedia says, and he’s imploring the FBI to investigate.

Larry Sanger, who left Wikipedia in 2002, said Wikimedia Commons (the parent company of Wiki products including Wikipedia, Wiktionary, Wikinews and Wikiquote) is rife with renderings of children performing sexual acts. Sanger sent a letter to the FBI earlier this month outlining his concerns and identifying two specific Wikimedia Commons categories he believes violate federal obscenity law. The first category, entitled “Pedophilia,” contains 25-30 explicit and detailed drawings of children performing sexual acts. The category was created three years ago. The second, “Lolicon,” provides cartoons similar in detail and depiction. One of the more egregious cartoons shows a rendering of a young child about to perform oral sex on a much older man.” Wikimedia Foundation posted an online response stating that The Wikimedia Foundation obeys the law and had not been contacted by the FBI or any other law-enforcement agency about allegedly illegal content. They stated that they delete illegal material when they are told about it.

Wikipedophilia By James R. Marsh on April 20, 2010
http://www.childlaw.us/2010/04/wikipedophilia.html
“About two years ago, rumors started floating around about Wikipedia’s involvement with child pornography and the pedophile agenda. First there was a row about this image on Wikipedia depicting child nudity. Then there was the long-standing allegation by Perverted Justice that:
Pedophiles have long sought to use Wikipedia to justify and promote their agenda. They organize together in order to create Wikipedia accounts and then seek to use Wikipedia’s all-inclusiveness to promote their point of view. When pointed out, Wikipedians themselves often don’t believe that there is an organized campaign to subvert the user-edited encyclopedia in order to promote the pedophile agenda.
http://www.wikisposure.com/Wikipedia_Campaign

Well now these allegations have risen to a new level. Last week, Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger reported the site’s parent organization to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, saying he believes the Wikimedia Commons “may be knowingly distributing child pornography.”

EXCLUSIVE: Shakeup at Wikipedia in Wake of Porn Purge By Jana Winter – FOXNews.com 5/14/10 updated on May 17, 2010
On May 7, FoxNews.com reported exclusively that Wales had personally deleted many of the images from Wikimedia’s servers, and that he’d ordered that thousands more be purged. Now many of those images have been restored to their original web pages….
http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2010/05/14/exclusive-shake-wikipedia-porn-pressure/

see http://ritualabuse.us/2010/06/issue-93-july-2010/
for more information on the Wikipedia – Pedophilia allegations

Wikipedia Accuracy Problems

There have been a variety of newspaper articles and studies over the years showing accuracy problems with Wikipedia.

Comparison of Wikipedia and other encyclopedias for accuracy, breadth, and depth in historical articles
Findings – The study did reveal inaccuracies in eight of the nine entries and exposed major flaws in at least two of the nine Wikipedia articles. Overall, Wikipedia’s accuracy rate was 80 percent compared with 95-96 percent accuracy within the other sources. This study does support the claim that Wikipedia is less reliable than other reference resources. Furthermore, the research found at least five unattributed direct quotations and verbatim text from other sources with no citations.
http://www.emeraldinsight.com/Insight/viewContentItem.do;jsessionid=B5971624ED12D3D4BFBFFC762150B834?contentType=Article&contentId=1674221

Scope, Completeness, and Accuracy of Drug Information in Wikipedia. Ann Pharmacother. 2008;42(12):1814-1821
RESULTS: Wikipedia was able to answer significantly fewer drug information questions (40.0%) compared with Medscape Drug Reference (MDR) (82.5%; p < n =" 48)" n =" 14)." p =" 0.024).

CONCLUSIONS: Wikipedia has a more narrow scope, is less complete, and has more errors of omission than the comparator database. Wikipedia may be a useful point of engagement for consumers, but is not authoritative and should only be a supplemental source of drug information.
http://www.theannals.com/cgi/content/abstract/42/12/1814

Wikipedia itself makes no guarantee of validity at its General Disclaimer page.

quotes:

WIKIPEDIA MAKES NO GUARANTEE OF VALIDITY

“Please be advised that nothing found here has necessarily been reviewed by people with the expertise required to provide you with complete, accurate or reliable information.”

“However, Wikipedia cannot guarantee the validity of the information found here. The content of any given article may recently have been changed, vandalized or altered by someone whose opinion does not correspond with the state of knowledge in the relevant fields.”

“Wikipedia is not uniformly peer reviewed; while readers may correct errors or engage in casual peer review, they have no legal duty to do so and thus all information read here is without any implied warranty of fitness for any purpose or use whatsoever.”

Wikipedia ‘shows CIA page edits’
An online tool that claims to reveal the identity of organisations that edit Wikipedia pages has revealed that the CIA was involved in editing entries.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/6947532.stm

See Who’s Editing Wikipedia - Diebold, the CIA, a Campaign
By John Borland Email 08.14.07 The result: A database of 34.4 million edits, performed by 2.6 million organizations or individuals ranging from the CIA to Microsoft to Congressional offices, now linked to the edits they or someone at their organization’s net address has made. Some of this appears to be transparently self-interested, either adding positive, press release-like material to entries, or deleting whole swaths of critical material.
http://www.wired.com/politics/onlinerights/news/2007/08/wiki_tracker

Jimbo Wales ends death by Wikipedia
Kennedy murder shames online cult
By Cade Metz in San Francisco
On Tuesday afternoon, following a Washington luncheon celebrating the inauguration of President Barack Obama, longtime US Senators Ted Kennedy and Robert Byrd kicked the proverbial bucket. At least, that’s what happened in Wikiland. In our world, they’re still among the living.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/01/22/wikipedia_vandalism_crackdown/

Wikipedia black helicopters circle Utah’s Traverse Mountain
By Cade Metz in San Francisco 6th December 2007
Wikipedia is not a democracy. But the totalitarian attitudes of the site’s ruling clique go much further than Jimbo cares to acknowledge. In early September, the Wikipedia inner circle banned edits from 1,000 homes and one massive online retailer in an attempt to suppress the voice of one man.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/12/06/wikipedia_and_overstock/

The word on Wikipedia: Trust but verify
Popular online encyclopedia, plagued by errors, troubles educators By Lisa Daniels and Alex Johnson msnbc.com and NBC News
March. 29, 2007 “I was looking at a stack of final examinations,” said Waters, a professor of Japanese studies at Middlebury College in Vermont, “and I found several instances of misinformation that [were] identical from one student to another.” All of those students in Waters’ Japanese history class late last year had been steered wrong by the same source — Wikipedia, the sprawling online encyclopedia that has revolutionized how ordinary people find information.
….The department banned students from using it as a source in their papers, although they are allowed to consult it for background material, a move that was quickly mimicked by professors at other schools, including UCLA and the University of Pennsylvania. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17740041/

10 Questions: Jimmy Wales 3/21/07
How can I persuade my teachers to allow me to use Wikipedia as a legitimate research source?—Kaitlyn Grigsby, Medina, Ohio
I would agree with your teachers that that isn’t the right way to use Wikipedia. The site is a wonderful starting point for research. But it’s only a starting point because there’s always a chance that there’s something wrong, and you should check your sources if you are writing a paper.
http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1601491,00.html

One great source — if you can trust it
By Hiawatha Bray, Globe Staff July 12, 2004
So of course Wikipedia is popular. Maybe too popular. For it lacks one vital feature of the traditional encyclopedia: accountability. Old-school reference books hire expert scholars to write their articles, and employ skilled editors to check and double-check their work. Wikipedia’s articles are written by anyone who fancies himself an expert….
Ross admits to reading and enjoying Wikipedia, and has even gotten ideas there for future Britannica articles. But the absence of traditional editorial controls makes Wikipedia unsuited to serious research. “How do they know it’s accurate?” Ross asks. “People can put down anything.”
http://web.archive.org/web/20060621181459/http://www.boston.com/business/technology/articles/2004/07/12/one_great_source____if_you_can_trust_it/

Wikipedia and Beyond – Jimmy Wales’ sprawling vision -
Katherine Mangu-Ward from the June 2007 issue
Wales moved to Chicago and became a futures and options trader. After six years of betting on interest rates and currency fluctuations, he made enough money to pay the mortgage for the rest of his life. In 1998 he moved to San Diego and started a Web portal, Bomis, which featured, among other things, a “guy-oriented search engine” and pictures of scantily clad women. The en déshabillé ladies have since caused trouble for Wales, who regularly fields questions about his former life as a “porn king.” In a typically blunt move, Wales often responds to criticism of his Bomis days by sending reporters links to Yahoo’s midget porn category page. If he was a porn king, he suggests, so is the head of the biggest Web portal in the world….

Wikipedia does fail sometimes. The most famous controversy over its accuracy boiled over when John Seigenthaler Sr., a former assistant to Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, wrote about his own Wikipedia entry in a November 2005 USA Today op-ed. The entry on Seigenthaler included a claim that he had been involved in both Kennedy assassinations. “We live in a universe of new media,” wrote Seigenthaler, “with phenomenal opportunities for worldwide communications and research-but populated by volunteer vandals with poison-pen intellects.”….

Wikipedia’s other major scandal hasn’t been quite as easy for Wales to laugh off, because he was the culprit. In 2005 he was caught with his hand on the edit button, taking advantage of Wikipedia’s open editing policy to remove Larry Sanger from the encyclopedia’s official history of itself. There has been an ongoing controversy about Wales’ attempts to edit his own Wikipedia entry, which is permitted but considered extremely bad form. After a round of negative publicity when the edits were discovered, Wales stopped editing his own profile. But in the site’s discussion pages, using the handle “Jimbo Wales,” he can be found trying to persuade others to make changes on this and other topics.
http://reason.com/archives/2007/05/30/wikipedia-and-beyond

A Little Sleuthing Unmasks Writer of Wikipedia Prank By KATHARINE Q. SEELYE December 11, 2005
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/11/business/media/11web.html

Wikipedia’s Accountability Problem By Daniel Brandt
Saturday, January 21, 2006
There is a problem with the structure of Wikipedia. The basic problem is that no one, neither the Trustees of Wikimedia Foundation, nor the volunteers who are connected with Wikipedia, consider themselves responsible for the content. If you don’t believe me, then carefully read Wikipedia’s disclaimer. At the same time that no one claims responsibility, there are two unique characteristics of Wikipedia that can be very damaging to a person, corporation, or group. The first is that anyone can edit an article, and there is no guarantee that any article you read has not been edited maliciously, and remains uncorrected in that state, at the precise time that you access that article.
The second unique characteristic is that Wikipedia articles, and in some cases even the free-for-all “talk” discussions behind the articles, rank very highly in the major search engines. This means that Wikipedia’s potential for inflicting damage is amplified by several orders of magnitude.
http://www.pressaction.com/news/weblog/full_article/brandt01212006/

Wikipedia Watch – This site examines the phenomenon of Wikipedia. We are interested in them because they have a massive, unearned influence on what passes for reliable information.
http://www.wikipedia-watch.org/

Wikipedia to Limit Changes to Articles on People By NOAM COHEN
August 24, 2009 Although Wikipedia has prevented anonymous users from creating new articles for several years now, the new flagging system crosses a psychological Rubicon. It will divide Wikipedia’s contributors into two classes — experienced, trusted editors, and everyone else — altering Wikipedia’s implicit notion that everyone has an equal right to edit entries….Under the current system, it is not difficult to insert false information into a Wikipedia entry, at least for a short time. In March, for example, a 22-year-old Irish student planted a false quotation attributed to the French composer Maurice Jarre shortly after Mr. Jarre’s death. It was promptly included in obituaries about Mr. Jarre in several newspapers, including The Guardian and The Independent in Britain. And on Jan. 20, vandals changed the entries for two ailing senators, Edward M. Kennedy and Robert C. Byrd, to report falsely that they had died.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/25/technology/internet/25wikipedia.html

The 15 Biggest Wikipedia Blunders JR Raphael, PC World
Aug 26, 2009 Here are 15 of the biggest Wikipedia blunders the new editing system might have prevented. These false facts, according to widely published accounts, all appeared on the Wikipedia site at some point.
http://www.pcworld.com/article/170874/the_15_biggest_wikipedia_blunders.html

Summary of the problems with Wikipedia

1) There is no guarantee its information is correct.

2) Its editors are anonymous and may be biased about the topic they are writing about and may be unqualified to write encyclopedia articles.

3) There is inconsistent or no fact checking, depending on the article.

4) The rules of Wikipedia at times are used to control article content and delete other content from strong sources.

5) Experts working on certain topics in Wikipedia may be derided and discouraged from contributing to certain articles.

Therefore, one is probably better off reading a real encyclopedia or journal article, due to the high potential for reading inaccurate information and a slanted or biased article.

Bias in child abuse articles – banning websites with information on child abuse crimes

Editors and Administrators have worked hard to maintain a strong bias from the perspective of the alleged or convicted perpetrators in a variety of child abuse articles, including the ones connected to ritual abuse topics. Even when presented with information directly from court cases, this information has been deleted from articles. Several administrators watch these articles, to make sure that balancing information is not allowed in these articles. Even when the perpetrators discussed in these articles were convicted of a child abuse or ritual abuse crime and lost every appeal, many Wikipedia articles will still lean toward the perspective that the conviction was unjust and not allow information from the victim’s perspective of the crimes.

Editors attempting to make these articles balanced have been harassed and even banned from Wikipedia. Several web pages with legal case, scientific journal articles and mainstream newspaper articles have been banned by Wikipedia.

Wikipedia has blacklisted four websites that describe ritual child abuse and extreme child abuse crimes in detail. These sites are: http://extreme-abuse-survey.net , http://ritualabuse.us , http://www.endritualabuse.org and http://abusearticles.wordpress.com

These sites contain journal articles and news accounts of these crimes. These websites are perfectly fine websites with accurate legal information with a variety of scientific studies and news articles. It appears that no pages in Wikipedia will be allowed to have any links to these sites.

blacklisting and deleting important information from Wikipedia
http://abusearticles.wordpress.com

The following information from four articles at Wikipedia was deleted due to it being from the newly blacklisted wordpress site http://abusearticles.wordpress.com . This site provided information from mainstream newspapers and court documents showing evidence that abuse had occurred in these cases.

These included information deleted from the Fells Acres Case article, the McMartin Preschool Trial case article, from the from Day Care Sex abuse cases and from the Wenatchee sex ring article.
Other articles have also had balancing information deleted from them.
http://ritualabuse.us/ritualabuse/articles/ritualabuse-us-blacklisted-by-wikipedia/

Wikipedia “Satanic Ritual Abuse” article critique
November 8, 2008
Intimidation, bullying, sarcasm: such are the tactics used by the current editors of Wikipedia’s “Satanic Ritual Abuse” article (and other related articles): (1) discounting the existence of sexual crimes against children associated with true or staged satanic worship; and (2) undoing references in Wikipedia articles by editors who present findings from research and legal cases that support the existence of ritual/sexual crimes against children by organized groups of pedophiles.
http://ritualabuse.us/ritualabuse/articles/press-release-wikipedia-satanic-ritual-abuse-article-critique/

The Truth about Satanic Ritual Abuse
A Rebuttal to Wikipedia’s Portrayal of Satanic Ritual Abuse
November 2, 2008 By Wanda Karriker, PhD
Satanic Ritual Abuse (SRA) is NOT a moral panic.
SRA is a subset of Ritual Abuse (RA).
(The article cites several studies proving the exstence of ritual abuse as a phenomenon.)
http://ritualabuse.us/ritualabuse/articles/the-truth-about-satanic-ritual-abuse/

There are many sources on the Internet proving the existence of ritual abuse crimes.

These include:
http://ritualabuse.us/ritualabuse/
http://ritualabuse.us/ritualabuse/studies/satanic-ritual-abuse-evidence-with-information-on-the-mcmartin-preschool-case/
http://childabusewiki.org/index.php?title=Ritual_Abuse