Yesterday, January 18th, was the day that many websites around the World, participated in a blackout which is basically where they would blackout their website in order to protest SOPA, the Stop Online Piracy Act, and PIPA, the Protect IP Act.

Both would destroy the freedoms we currently have on the Internet and put people in jail for up to five years for the littlest amount of what would be considered copyright infringement.

Wikipedia and Google were two of the biggest sites to participate, Wikipedia actually blacking out their entire site and Google just blacking out their logo with a link to sign a petition. The day after, it seems that the blackouts worked very well in getting people involved.

Via Los Angeles Times:

“Wikipedia, the largest Web player to block access to its pages for a full 24 hours, reports that a whopping 162 million people experienced the blackout on the online encyclopedia’s landing page. In addition, 8 million U.S. readers took Wikipedia’s suggestion and looked up their congressional reps from the site.”

Google got a whopping 4.5 Million signatures for it’s petition to stop SOPA and PIPA. Keep in mind, that was just up until 1:30PM PST so they likely had even more before the day was up. Twitter had a lot of people talking about the two bills and reported around 2.4 Million tweets in just the first 16 hours.

The popular blogging platform WordPress saw around 25,000 blogs participating by blacking out their blogs, as well as 12,500 who had a stop censorship ribbon their site.

Do you believe SOPA and PIPA will end up passing?

SOPA Blackout Gets People Involved Shows World’s Top Websites is a post from: The Inquisitr

I also tried to access Wikipedia pages at least twice today, failing to remember about the blackout. Twice. Anyway, here are my 10 ways to help you get you through a Wikipedialess day:

1. Remember what you did before Wikipedia? Nothing. Learn to do nothing again.
2. Realise that Wikipedia is run by mysterious editors who sometimes don’t get things right. They’re not gods. Good, you’ve learnt something.
3. Use your mobile phone and feel like a blackout cheat.
4. Use other sites. I know it’s difficult and feels weird but believe me there are other sites out there with information on them.
5. Switch off your site. Even if it only gets 2 visitors a day those 2 dedicated visitors will feel like you feel. Cross. And that will make you feel better. Take that Wikipedia!
6. Moan about it to your mates. This is one of those times when moaning become legitimate. It’s far better than “my milk ran out and I couldn’t get to the shop because my toilet broke and there was water everywhere so I had to wait in all day for the plumber who charged a mint…”
7. Get out. That’s right, leave the house. Leave your laptop. See the outside world. There, isn’t it beautiful? What do you mean what time does the blackout end?
8. Take up smoking again. Only joking. I meant drinking.
9. Look it up in an Encyclopedia. You must have one somewhere from 1987, given to you as a present. You never opened it. Now is the time. It’s a funny looking big thing. A book.
10. Press F5. One of the great lessons of life on the internet is that if you don’t like something press F5. Try it. Keep trying. Don’t give up.

10 Ways To Get You Through The Day Without Wikipedia is a post from: The Inquisitr

7,000 websites are going dark today to lead the Anti-SOPA and PIPA protests.

Here’s a short list of some of the bigger players and a description of what they have to say about the destructive nature of the Stop Online Piracy Act and Protect IP Act.  FYI Internet giants AOL, Yahoo, YouTube and many others have expressed opposition to SOPA and PIPA but are not joining the protest movement. 

WIKIPEDIA: The English versions of Wikipedia has been dark since Wednesday night at midnight. Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales tweeted,

“This is going to be wow. I hope Wikipedia will melt phone systems in Washington on Wednesday. Tell everyone you know!”

BOING BOING: Boing Boing also went dark at midnight Wednesday, the company posted the following,

“Boing Boing is offline today, because the US Senate is considering legislation that would certainly kill us forever. The legislation is called the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA), and would put us in legal jeopardy if we linked to a site anywhere online that had any links to copyright infringement,”

REDDIT: Reddit goes dark for 12 hours starting at 8am Eastern time Wednesday morning. The site was quoted on a blog earlier this week as saying,

“Instead of the normal glorious, user-curated chaos of reddit, we will be displaying a simple message about how the PIPA/SOPA legislation would shut down sites like reddit, link to resources to learn more, and suggest ways to take action,”

GOOGLE: Google is not going dark to protest SOPA/PIPA but will be linking to information and advocacy on their site, the company has said the following,

“Like many businesses, entrepreneurs and web users, we oppose these bills because there are smart, targeted ways to shut down foreign rogue websites without asking American companies to censor the Internet. So tomorrow we will be joining many other tech companies to highlight this issue on our U.S. home page.”

MOZILLA: Mozilla is redirecting traffic from their main English sites to an informational portal with info on how to fight SOPA and PIPA.  The redirect will be in effect from 8am – 8 pm.  he site issued the following statement,

  “We hope the blackout of our U.S. sites will help bring attention to this important issue and encourage users to educate themselves about PIPA and SOPA,” Mozilla said in a statement. “All users will still be able to receive security updates and access our technical support website. This will NOT affect Firefox users.”

WORDPRESS: WordPress is going dark for 24 hours but a lot of their users sites will not be.  The company said this,

“If you want to join the protest by blacking out your WordPress site or applying a ribbon, there is now a variety of blackout plugins in the WordPress.org plugins directory. While joining the protest in this manner is laudable, please don’t forget to also make those phone calls to U.S. Senators—they’re the ones with the voting power.”

TWITPIC: The Twitter Pic Site is currently hosting a Stop SOPA picture which links to information about the bill.  The CEO of Twitter did not want to join the blackout movement, calling it foolish.  He issued a tweet saying,

“That’s just silly. Closing a global business in reaction to single-issue national politics is foolish.”

CHEEZBURGER NETWORK: Cheezburger Network in on 24 hour blackout, tweeting,

“All Cheezburger sites will also be instituting a blackout on January 18th to protest SOPA and PIPA,”

If you have anymore please feel free to comment on this post.

7,000 Sites Go Dark To Protest SOPA and PIPA is a post from: The Inquisitr

While the spotlight is only now really focusing sharply on this badly-written law, SOPA first attracted criticism months ago. Back in November, a letter [PDF] was sent to four high-seated U.S. politicians in the Senate and House of Representatives. It was signed by nine Internet behemoths: AOL, Google, Facebook, Ebay, LinkedIn, Mozilla, Twitter, Yahoo!, and Zynga. In said letter, the companies said they “were concerned that [measures proposed by SOPA] pose a serious risk to our industry’s continued track record of innovation and job creation.” They wanted SOPA to be pulled down. They saw it as ham-fisted and harmful, and they were prepared to speak out about it.

Many of us found the united stance of these companies heartening. The Internet’s meanest gunslingers had rode into town to help the little guys. So why, as we enter SOPA Blackout Day, have so many of those outspoken tech firms delivered such limp-wristed protests?

Check the sites of those who signed that November 2011 letter, and anti-SOPA sentiment is all but invisible. AOL, Yahoo!, LinkedIn, Zynga, Ebay: at the time of writing, none of these have a single syllable about SOPA anywhere on their front pages. Twitter also skirts the issue, with CEO Dick Costolo even calling the shutting down of sites “foolish.” Mozilla does mention SOPA in a blog post linked on its front page, though it’s well below the fold. Next to all of these, Google’s response – an anti-SOPA Google Doodle and a link to a petition addressed to Congress – looks positively revolutionary.

Tellingly, Wikipedia (which didn’t sign the aforementioned letter, and hey – doesn’t answer to shareholders) is the only online giant to stage an effective protest, blacking itself out for 24 hours. It’s a powerful move from a site that remains the fifth most popular in the world, and it will have an effect. It is joined by Reddit, and then a further clump of middle-sized sites and companies, such as BoingBoing and the Cheezburger network. The gesture is appreciated by opponents of SOPA, but there’s a nagging feeling that the big boys, the heroes who signed that November letter, have let the side down.

There’s another reason the relative inaction of bigger sites is disappointing. Sites such as Reddit and BoingBoing are far more likely to be visited by educated readers, people who already know about the sinister SOPA. Temporarily closing a site like Reddit or BoingBoing is a ballsy move, and will justifiably win admirers, but it feels like these few bold sites are preaching to the choir.

I am convinced more courageous action from the Internet’s big players could have shut SOPA down for good. Imagine if Facebook had closed its doors: 800 million users shut out in an instant. Imagine if sites like Yahoo!, AOL, and Twitter had yanked the shutters up. More intriguingly, imagine the complete storm if Google had shut up shop for just a few hours. The coverage would be immense, surely a billion more people would be educated, and the signatures would weigh in the tens of millions. SOPA (and its ugly sister PIPA) would be dead in the water. All in return for a few hours of downtime.

As it is, the pusillanimous reaction of these big sites means SOPA will now be able to retreat to the shadows and bide its time. It will be tweaked, refined, and will likely return in the future, insufficiently diluted. SOPA Blackout Day was an opportunity for the web to truly stand as one and deliver the killing blow to an unreasonable, poorly conceived law. SOPA will be back. Next time, let’s hope a few more giants deliver actions as well as words.

[Op-Ed] Why the Internet Giants Have Let SOPA Protestors Down is a post from: The Inquisitr

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales took some time out of his busy schedule on Tuesday to talk with CNN’s Erin Burnett about the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA) both of which threaten a great deal of harm to various internet properties and personal rights regarding censorship and first amendment protections.

In his interview he talks about the burdens placed on community sites such as Wikipedia which would be required under the law to police their communities with absolute authority at every turn.

Burnett asks Jimmy Wales about Pirate Bay, asking if he supports sites setup for piracy.

“For me I think that site is a problem and I think the right way to fix it is to not place censorship on the internet, not to force Google to stop listing them, not to force Wikipedia to stop talking about them, the right answer is too follow the money, if you got large scale piracy going on it’s a trade issue and I think that’s the right approach.”

When asked how the bill would affect Wikipedia he states:

“In the worst versions of the bill Wikipedia would be considered a search engine and we would not be able to even link to something like the Pirate Bay even in our encyclopedic description of what Pirate Bay is. I think that’s a real problem, that raises really serious first amendment issues.

Here’s the full video of the conversation:

Wales’ interview comes at the same time that Wikipedia has went dark for 24-hours in protest of the internet crippling acts.

Do you side with Jimmy Wales and Wikipedia or do you think Congress needs to pass the SOPA and PIPA bills?

Wikipedia Founder Jimmy Wales Talks To CNN About SOPA and PIPA Faults [Video] is a post from: The Inquisitr

As promised Wikipedia has went dark. The world’s largest repository of knowledge announced at the start of this week that they would protest the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA) by turning off access to their English based websites for a 24 hour period.

Users to the site are now greeted with the following message:

Imagine a World
Without Free Knowledge

Wikipedia Has Gone Dark In Protest Of SOPA/PIPA Acts is a post from: The Inquisitr

Well, this is a big effing deal.

Expect snide rebuttals to grind to a shrieking halt on Wednesday, as in addition to Reddit, Wikipedia- one of the most traversed websites worldwide- will be going dark to protest the controversial and frankly stupid proposed Stop Online Piracy Act, or SOPA. SOPA has sparked massive outcry on the internet, but outside the web community, the disastrous bill has had little to no attention in the news or amongst the general public.

While certain communities- like Reddit- have been closely monitoring the progress of SOPA, it became clear early on that drastic action would likely be necessary to raise awareness of just how dangerous SOPA is to the internet at large. And while Reddit’s blackout will raise some, it’s sort of a closed garden in that if you heavily rely on Reddit to entertain you, it’s very likely you already know SOPA is dangerous, awful and fascist, so the impact is limited.

Not so with Wikipedia, a resource that has, in the past decade, become crucial to many web users as a source for school, work and bets in bars. But expect a full twenty-four hours without the site, Jimmy Wales confirms on Twitter. Earlier today, the Wikipedia chief tweeted:

Student warning! Do your homework early. Wikipedia protesting bad law on Wednesday! #sopa

Wales confirmed that SOPA had been “crippled,” but pointed to the equally dangerous Protect Intellectual Property, or PIPA, Act wending its way through the Senate. Wales says:

A letter from the community and a call to action – to call and write Congress. My goal is to melt switchboards!

Wales invoked the memory of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. on the day reserved to honor him, also tweeting:

“Freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.” MLK – on Wednesday, Wikipedia demands.

Will the Wikipedia blackout on Wednesday affect your work or schooling? Do you think it will have an effect in drumming up dissent against SOPA and PIPA?

[Image]

Wikipedia Going Dark Wednesday in Solidarity With Reddit to Protest SOPA is a post from: The Inquisitr

Anyone who uses or even stumbles upon Wikipedia, is familiar at least somewhat with their fundraisers. There’s been numerous jokes and even web apps made of Jimmy Wales, Co-Founder of Wikipedia, displayed on every site you visit. All jokes aside, their fundraiser paid off yet again and the 5th most popular site in the World can continue to operate.

From Associated Press:

“More than 1 million people throughout the world contributed the money during a 46-day fundraising drive, which concluded Sunday. The amount pledged to the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit group that oversees the volunteer-driven Wikipedia, is a third more than the $15 million donated during the previous year’s fundraising campaign.”

That comes out to an average of $20 per person which is pretty generous. Of course, it’s worth mentioning that Wikipedia gets donations throughout the year aside from their final big push.

They’re hoping to hit $29.5 Million ending June 30th which, at the one third more of what they were able to get this time around, shouldn’t be too difficult to reach that amount if not more than that in the next 6 months.

“Wikimedia expects to spend $28.3 million in the current fiscal year, with nearly half the money going toward employee salaries and other staffing costs. The foundation currently employs about 90 workers.”

Just how big is Wikipedia? In the English language alone, there are just under 4 Million articles with nearly 10 Million views per hour. The site reaches nearly 15% of all Internet users according to Alexa.

Wikipedia Banks $20 Million From Year End Fundraiser is a post from: The Inquisitr

As a person who basically routes their entire life through the internet- professional, personal, lifestyle- one of the things that gets me agitated about the whole SOPA brouhaha is how little the average web user is concerned with the ostensible end of the internet as we know it.

The few outside communities like Reddit who are aware of even the existence of SOPA don’t really seem to comprehend how seriously it could impact even basic web use, and many worryingly seem to believe that the delayed passage does not mean- in the words of a Daily Kos writer- that the bill is “favored to pass.” (Which, you guys, it still is.)

The continued failure of the bulk of web users to realize the threat SOPA poses means that the few who understand the impact need to do everything in their power to wake the web up to its imminent potential destruction. And it seems that some of the biggest entities are considering a “nuclear option” to get users active, to spur political action and maybe- just maybe- convince lawmakers to ignore special interests and ditch SOPA.

AOL, eBay, Facebook, foursquare, Google, IAC, Linkedin, Mozilla, OpenDNS, PayPal, Twitter, Wikipedia, Yahoo! and the Zynga Game Network are all members of an organization called the NetCoalition, and there is said to be chatter about shutting off the sites for a time to drive home the message that a future with SOPA sucks for everyone. Daily Kos quotes:

When the home pages of Google.com, Amazon.com, Facebook.com, and their Internet allies simultaneously turn black with anti-censorship warnings that ask users to contact politicians about a vote in the U.S. Congress the next day on SOPA, you’ll know they’re finally serious…

“There have been some serious discussions about that,” says Markham Erickson, who heads the NetCoalition trade association that counts Google, Amazon.com, eBay, and Yahoo as members. “It has never happened before.”

Scarily, not even the action proposed is guaranteed to stop SOPA or the Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA), but it would be a hell of a newfangled protest and could be a political game-changer.

Are you concerned about SOPA?

SOPA-Opposing Web Giants Consider ‘Nuclear Option’ to Thwart Law is a post from: The Inquisitr

Because Wikipedia is in constant need of citations and donations, apparently.

Why Reading Wikipedia Articles Sucks Now is a post from: The Inquisitr

Does this happen to you? There’s actually a game of it you can play in reverse, Wiki Ball.

Wikipedia. Not Even Once. is a post from: The Inquisitr

I can sympathize, Wikipedia, I grew up in a broken home, too. I mean, my parents were married, but I had to like, write essays on paper with pens. The pain is lifelong.

[via]

Wikipedia Explains the Pain of a ‘Broken Home’ is a post from: The Inquisitr

Graduating this month? Admit it, Wikipedia provides 97% of your sources. [Citation needed]

Wikipedian Graduates is a post from: The Inquisitr

Wikipedia: sometimes, it is accurate.

[reddit]

The internet’s opinion of IE is a post from: The Inquisitr

Everyone writing a research paper or looking to resolve an argument this afternoon was SOL after Wikipedia suffered an outage.

Protocols to redirect traffic to servers in Florida also failed, causing the site to go down globally for a short time, Wikipedia reported in a post on their blog:

Due to an overheating problem in our European data center many of our servers turned off to protect themselves. As this impacted all Wikipedia and other projects access from European users, we were forced to move all user traffic to our Florida cluster, for which we have a standard quick failover procedure in place, that changes our DNS entries.

However, shortly after we did this failover switch, it turned out that this failover mechanism was now broken, causing the DNS resolution of Wikimedia sites to stop working globally. This problem was quickly resolved, but unfortunately it may take up to an hour before access is restored for everyone, due to caching effects.

We apologize for the inconvenience this has caused.

As of now (4:45 pm EST) Wikipedia is working normally in New York, but there may be some scattered difficulties reaching the site as information propagates across the internet.

Wikipedia suffers outage after server failure is a post from: The Inquisitr

Ron Livingston, best known for roles in Office Space and Sex and the City, is suing over continual Wikipedia edits claiming the actor is gay and in a long-term relationship with a man.

Livingston married a woman named Rosemarie DeWitt earlier this year, but a dedicated Wikipedia editor changes the entry frequently with claims that Livingston is being totally gay with someone named “Lee Dennison.” A claim filed this weekend in L.A. County Superior Court indicates that the “false and malicious” allegations appear almost immediately on Livingston’s Wiki when his reps correct the information. (Could the editor be… a scorned Lee Dennison?)

TMZ says the culprit also created fake Facebook profiles for both Livingston and Dennison, listing the two alleged gay homosexuals as “in a relationship.” Livingston is suing for libel, invasion of privacy and unauthorized use of his likeness. The fact that controversies like this imply being gay is a horrific allegation aside, Queerty points out that now Livingston’s page is guaranteed to devote a section to gayness regardless of the outcome of the case. Which is kind of a total win for the “hacker.”

Ron Livingston sues Wikipedia over gay rumors is a post from: The Inquisitr

Anyone who has taken even a modicum of history will remember the age of the Robber Barons in the United States. What it boiled down to in exceedingly simplistic terms was vast amounts of wealth and power concentrated in the hands of a few extremely powerful businessmen. It was a wealth and power accumulated by whatever means necessary and lead to increasing monopolistic activity that ended up with the government having to step in and break up this monopolies.

The most powerful Robber Barons were the industrialists who first controlled the railways that provided the majority of continental travel and transfer of goods around the country. This same type of predatory types of businesses practices occurred with the fledgling oil industry (Standard Oil and the Rockefeller family) which brought in a whole new flock of robber barons.

Today the idea of robber barons might seem a rather foreign concept but the reality is that we could very well be seeing the creation of a whole new set of Robber Barons – The Internet Robber Barons. Unlike the industrial robber barons before them though this generation of the Internet Robber Barons are operating in two different realms. The first are the corporations that control the how, why and where of accessing the the web whereas the second and maybe even more insidious group are those collecting and keeping every bit of data on the web.

Whether it be Google who’s stated mission is to index all the information in the world through to Facebook who is collecting one of the largest databases in the world on human thought, behavior and interaction the idea is to lock that all away in computers that they control.

The Electronic Gatekeepers

The Internet is one of mankind’s greatest achievements to date. The changes it has wrought on our society are only just beginning to be felt and even at this point there is a feeling that this beginning is only a tsunami of change yet to come.

As incredible as what the present provides and the future portends it all hinges on one simple thing – ease of access. This ease of access though covers many different areas but in the end they are controlled by those corporations that hold the keys to tollbooths we all have to pass through in order to be a part of something that is quickly moving from a luxury to that of being a necessity.

Whether it be via means like cable, DSL or even WiFi the giant telecommunications, and increasingly media providing, companies can control who can access the Internet, how they can access it, for how long they can access it, and increasingly what they can access. With control of access held in the hands of a few companies; which grow fewer with each acquisition and merger, consumers have increasingly little voice in what is suppose to be the vehicle of free distribution and sharing of information.

Matthew Lasar at Ars Technica had an excellent post that looked at the era of robber barons of the past and echo a nerve racking similarity to what we face now and will continue to face well into the future. In the post he wrote the following:

In many ways this story is far field from our contemporary debates about network management, file sharing, and the perils of protocol discrimination. But the main questions  seem to remain the same—to what degree will we let Western Union then and ISPs now pick winners and losers on our communications backbone? And when do government regulations grow so onerous that they discourage network investment and innovation?

Already we are seeing a shift towards the consolidation of access provider and content creator with the recent deal where Comcast, one of the largest Internet access providers in the US, is buying controlling interest in NBC a national content producer. There is no doubt now that this Pandora’s Box has been opened that other access providers will look to do the same thing or possibly the content producers looking to control the access by purchasing access controllers.

In either case this consolidation doesn’t bode well for the consumer and we are forced to stand by as this new set of Robber Barons consolidate their position and power.

Information is power and we willingly hand it over

As worrisome as the consolidation of power and the ability to control access to the Internet is falling into the hands of fewer and fewer companies there is always the stop-gap measure of government intervention. As in the past when the public outcry has gotten loud enough the government has been forced to step in and break up this type of power base.

Unfortunately there is no such remedy when it comes to the accumulation of data in the hands of a few powerful companies. Companies who give the illusion of altruistic reasons for spending millions upon millions of dollars to supposedly store all this data collected every minute of the day.

Except there is nothing altruistic in this apparent madness because these companies have taken one of the modern axioms to heart. Information is power.

The one problem up until the increasing popularity of the web, specifically social media and all the data collection tools hidden under the guise of names like Twitter, Facebook and a continually growing number of tools, was that while storage of the data was relatively cheap; and getting cheaper all the time, the act of collecting the data was expensive. Collecting data on the scale never before imagined would require armies of people working non-stop to collect and input all that information.

Enter user-generated content.

From uploading images to Flickr, to non-stop transmission of 140 character tidbits of information, to creating and maintaining the world’s largest encyclopedia this work could be done by the average person – and all for free.

Even though there are many hopefuls that are dreaming to be the next Facebook, the next Google, or the next Wikipedia the fact is that as we progress forward the chances of this happening become slimmer and slimmer. In effect all the world’s information is very rapidly coming under the control of a few increasingly powerful companies and no amount of warm and fuzzy social media juice is going to dethrone them.

A new generation of Robber Barons are being created. A generation who will in effect control how it is shared and who can have access to it as well as controlling how much of that information they will be allowed to see, read or use. They will also control the value of that information and like everything else in the world it will have a price on it – a price which they control.

The open and ubiquitous web

As much as we might like to believe in the illusion of an open web that can be access by everyone in the world from anywhere in the world by any possible method the reality is that right now, and for much of the foreseeable future, this ideal is nothing more than a pipe dream.

The new Robber Barons are coming to town and as history has shown us nothing good can come of it. Yet we are handing them the keys to the vaults without asking ourselves if this is such a good idea. This unfortunately will only result in us once again repeating history – a history that should have been our warning signs instead of our tombstones.

The Internet Robber Barons is a post from: The Inquisitr

Psychologists are getting their panties all knotted up because Wikipedia has ostensibly ruined their Rorschach Ink Blot party. The controversy came to light yesterday with a New York Times article regarding the well-known and oft-mocked “ink blot” test. Proponents of Wikipedia are opposed to suppression of freely available knowledge, and this includes the 90-year-old diagnostic tool.

The debate raged on a small scale for months due to the publication of one of the ten Rorschach plates, but in June, all Wikipedian hell broke loose. James Heilman, a doctor from Canada, posted all ten plates and common responses to each. Dr. Heilman explained his motivation to the Times:

“I just wanted to raise the bar — whether one should keep a single image on Wikipedia seemed absurd to me, so I put all 10 up,” Dr. Heilman said in an interview. “The debate has exploded from there.”

Dr. Heilman further illustrates the impetus behind his actions:

“Restricting information for theoretical concerns is not what we are here to do,” Dr. Heilman said, adding that he was not impressed by the predictions of harm from those who sought to keep the Rorschach plates secret. “Show me the evidence,” he said. “I don’t care what a group of experts says.”

To illustrate his point, Dr. Heilman used the Snellen eye chart, which begins with a big letter E and is readily available on the Wikipedia site.

“If someone had previous knowledge of the eye chart,” he said, “you can go to the car people, and you could recount the chart from memory. You could get into an accident. Should we take it down from Wikipedia?”

Indeed, the most vocal of Wikipedia’s critics in this debate seem to be those who stand to lose money over the publication of the plates. At 90 years old and having been ingrained in pop-psychology for years, the test has to be of limited value as it stands. While doctors have had nearly a century of responses to study, it has to be taken into account that Wikipedia is not the only place a determined test-cracker can get the lowdown on Rorschach results. Instead of blaming Wikipedia for being a platform for mass-distribution of information again, the complaining parties need to accept that we live in a time where this kind of thing is not only possible, but highly likely.

Is it not the responsibility of those to which we entrust our medical care to be aware of and proactive about concerns such as the corroded value of certain diagnostic tools? Rather than bemoaning the inevitable, shouldn’t they be hard at work finding a new way to gain insight into humanity’s supressed urges?

[Image courtesy of two gay Darth Vaders being dusted simultaneously by blue crabs as seahorses laugh at their predicament.]

Wikipedia under fire for publishing Rorschach “cheat sheet” is a post from: The Inquisitr

Earlier this month, we learned about the kidnapping and subsequent escape of Times reporter David Rohde in Afghanistan. But did you know Wikipedia was in on it, too?

Back in November of 2008, Rohde was taken near Kabul and held for nearly seven months- all the while, the Times managed to execute a surprisingly successful media blackout, which very well may have saved Rohde’s life. But yesterday the Times ran a piece detailing how they worked behind the scenes to kill the story on Wikipedia, with the help of founder Jimmy Wales, time and time again.

It’s an interesting conundrum for Wikipedia. The site is kind of a mascot for new media, how our concept of citation and fact has been shaped by the ubiquitous source, the benefits of crowd-sourcing versus the possibly biased opinions of one or a handful of crusty old academics. I’ve often argued that while vandalism on Wikipedia happens, undetected bias or other academic pollution is just as likely in traditional sources for citation and learning- and arguably more dangerous because people don’t use the “grain of salt” rule there. It even famously spawned a Colbert segment on “Wikiality.” (Colbert is a known and shameless Wikipedia vandal.)

But as Wikipedia struggles to maintain legitimacy as a source for reliable information, this story casts a new light on the issue. Luckily for Wikipedia, this issue was clearly life or death. But what if it isn’t? Or what if it’s just a ho-hum person and not a NY Times reporter? And how can you stop the crowd from releasing possibly harmful information- and should you? If so, when? In the Times piece, Jimmy Wales said in reference to a particularly fervent editor who tried repeatedly to edit the Rohde entry:

“We had no idea who it was,” said Mr. Wales, who said there was no indication the person had ill intent. “There was no way to reach out quietly and say ‘Dude, stop and think about this.’ ”

But the crowd is not necessarily sympathetic to the nuances of these particular gray areas. Wales unfroze the page personally that Saturday, the day Rohde’s release was finally reported.

When the news broke Saturday, the user from Florida reposted the information, with a note to administrators that said: “Is that enough proof for you [expletives]? I was right. You were WRONG.”

A professor at NYU who studies Wikipedia commented on the controversy in the piece as well.

“Wikipedia has, over time, instituted gradually more control because of some embarrassing incidents, particularly involving potentially libelous material, and some people get histrionic about it, proclaiming the death of Wikipedia. But the idea of a pure openness, a pure democracy, is a naïve one.”

[Image: XKCD]

Wikipedia damages shaky credibility with Rohde coverup is a post from: The Inquisitr

Not only are they closed-minded but they are also grumpy, or so says Yair Amichai-Hamburger of the Sammy Ofer School of Communication in Israel.

Along with a team of psychologists Yair surveyed 69 Israeli contributors to Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia, and compared them to a sample of 70 students that were matched age-wise and amount of Internet usage. As expected the Wikipedians were more comfortable online but much to everyone’s surprise they scored low on agreeableness and openness. This was based on the results from a questionnaire that looked at five traits: openness to experience and ideas, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness and neuroticism.

Amichai-Hamburger speculates that rather than contributing altruistically, Wikipedians take part because they struggle to express themselves in real-world social situations. "They are compensating," he suggests. "It is their way to have a voice in this world."

This is consistent with previous research on online communication, says Scott Caplan of the University of Delaware in Newark, who suspects that heavy users of sites such as Digg and Twitter may have similar characteristics. "People who prefer online social behaviour tend to have higher levels of social anxiety and lower social skills," he says.

Source: The New Scientist – Psychologist finds Wikipedians grumpy and closed-minded

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