Thought 5

Thursday, June 29th, 2006

We’ve been taking loads of photos this afternoon, you can see some at my flickr, and some on LaurenF.net (the first ten are new)

my sleeping angel-by lauren

4 Comments so far »

  1. The sleeping angel is very nice!
    I tagged you with a meme today, let me know if you like it?

    Dewayne Mikkelson on June 30, 2006 12:46 pm

  2. err, you going to have to explain what tagging me with a meme is.

    Andrew on June 30, 2006 2:04 pm

  3. Here is a good explanation for you, http://www.jackyan.com/blog/2006/03/journalists-in-ction.html

    Dewayne Mikkelson on June 30, 2006 2:25 pm

  4. The whole Wikipedia concept is fatally flawed. The notion that one can produce an authoritative encyclopedia without any kind of editorial control is patently ridiculous.

    There is a far greater and more insidious threat to Wikipedia than simple character assassination or falsehood. It can broadly be labelled “infomercial content” (i.e. content that purports to be informative but has a commercial bias). A good example is the entry on Barcelona (Spain). The whole article reads like a tourist brochure and any reference to the city’s pollution problems is swiftly removed by an army of self-appointed censors. There are strong indications that the Barcelona Tourist Board (or its army of acolytes) has effectively hijacked the site. This kind of thing is going to become more prevalent as Wikipedia becomes better known. Basically, there is nothing that can be done to stop this corporate take-over of Wikipedia without editorial control yet such control runs counter to the whole Wiki ethos.

    The idea that “a community of users” is going to apply some common sense criteria regarding content is a mistaken one. In the case of the Barcelona entry, the influence of Catalan/Spanish speakers on both content and style is all too evident. The locals seem eager to “sell” their city to the wider world and to show off their appalling English. Wikipedia not only lacks the control mechanisms to stop them, it also wilfully fails to recognize it has a serious problem.

    Helen Masters on June 26, 2007 12:00 pm


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