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Guerrilla Wikipedians rate rival's chancesCommunique releasedPublished Saturday 23rd September 2006 03:17 GMT
Last week Wikipedia founder Larry Sanger announced his intention to create a counterpart, giving it the clumsy name of Citizendium. This momentous event has been pored over by bloggers, newspaper columnists and egghead theorists, by the ... er. Well, perhaps as many as half dozen have weighed in. (Maybe after being so thoroughly turned over by America's satirists, it's deeply uncool to even profess an interest in the fate of the baroque exercise in rules and procedures that's Wikipedia. In their right mind, who on earth cares?) But for the record, we noticed that there had been no response from the guerrilla group at the heart of the vast bureaucracy that's Wikipedia. (And even Kafka on LSD couldn't invent something called - seriously - "ArbComm") "Hands up for a Flat Earth?" US satirist Stephen Colbert explains the consequences of "voting for the truth"Since March a number of comrades - many of whom have achieved the exalted rank of "Administrator" within the cultish organization - have been laying the mechanics of Wikipedia bare, for all to see, on a site called Wikitruth.info. If you'd bought into the cosy media myth that Wikipedia was a utopian scout camp of all the world's net nerds furrowing away over this stove called "knowledge", you need to have a look at Wikitruth. It's got the appeal of Spy or Private Eye, magazines where you cared less what the subject matter of what they were supposed than what they were really writing about. If they can keep it up, Wikitrith may long outlive Wikipedia. These communiques from within the heart of the bureaucracy describe personal betrayal, ethical conflicts, and downright surrealness - stories that have never been heard before. Even in Klingon. They're funny, tightly-written, and have a beginning, a middle and an end: not something that can be said for most of the articles on Wikipedia, the site they both work on, and mercilessly critique. (Marvel, for example, at the sudden appearance of an attractive woman in the midst of the triddlers. Panic ensued - but an ingenious solution to the intruder was devised. This link is NSFW - you have been warned.) Once you've read Wikiruth, it's hard to think of Wikipedia as anything other than an autistic care group for the obese and the underemployed. Especially after had one viewed its attempts to "do a good job" with a dispassionate eye. Naturally, Wikitruth.info is considered such an act of treachery by Wikipedians that every link to the site at Wikipedia is rapidly removed. As the Village Voice observed, this neatly demonstrates the values of a site that boasts it gathers together all the world's information - except when that information is a (too) accurate critique of itself. So, tentatively, we wondered if the Wikitruth people thought Sanger's new, new Wikipedia had a cat's chance in hell? The collective - and how rarely we get to interview a collective - replied thus:
It's not every day you interview a collective identity - we missed Luther Blissett, and one day we'll get to interview Wu Ming. Larry isn't the shameless sales huckster that Jimmy is, they conclude. But if you were sincerely starting a project to document your favourite subject, why the heck would you want QWERTY-enabled know-nothings from Hicksville to run the show? This utopian belief, that laid waste to Wikipedia in a matter of a few years, represents a problem for Sanger, too. Reg readers registered their apathy, with former Wikipedian Kevin Hall adding this note:
That's a good point. For new 'net users the wide open infinite web (©Wired magazine 1994) has become a blob called Wikipedia/Google - served up by one anonymous corporation and distilled by an anonymous bureaucracy, and colored a dull brown, the color of mixed up plasticene, or collective intelligence at work. The life of the mind, of discovery and enquiry and discourse, now just take place elsewhere. But just don't tell this to the US State Department. Wikipedia and its founder Jimmy Wales, it seems, is at the front line of the United States' War On Heathens. Come on, Osama. Get stuck into our Arbitration Processes - if you think you're hard enough. ®
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