Is Wikipedia a scam?
Many, if not most searches on Google, are going to return results from Wikipedia. The site gives an impression that it is an ‘all-user contributed content’ and that it can contain anything. This false vision of Wikipedia was destroyed the first time I decided to offer a contribution to the Encylopedia.
My first contribution was an article about VNet Publishing, a project my wife and I started, and an article about the Virtual Web Platform which is a free software application I developed to help developers build web applications for small businesses. Doesn’t this seem like the kind of things you should find at Wikipedia?
WRONG!!!
Within 2 hours of submitting the articles, they were marked for deletion by editors… editors who are most likely employees of Wikipedia. The only thing they could site against the articles was “Notability”, saying “the project and the application are not notable.” What kind of joke is this? The application was developed as part of the VNet Publishing project, and contains features which don’t exist in any other freely available web applications. How much more notable could an application be than providing unique features?
The truth is that, Wikipedia, like any Encyclopedia, is biased. While they don’t openly promote certain products or businesses over others, they do it in a sneaky way. The way they do it is by deleting any articles which don’t, in some way, support their hidden agendas, or worse, this may be like the google DMOZ directory where you have to pay off the editors to keep your submissions listed.
Save your money and don’t send donations to Wikipedia! There are many Wiki-based encyclopedia’s on the internet and some of them are probably really developed by the internet community. Wikipedia is clearly not a good net citizen, and I hope this article will open your eyes to the corporate greed and manipulation of information which is taking place on the internet!
*** Update: December, 28 2010
After a conversation with the editor responsible for the deletion the following information was attained. First, the editor denied being directly employed by Wikipedia and offered contacts where I could verify this information. When confronted regarding receiving payment from another source for their editing the editor made no comment. It seems that these editors may be being paid by third party interests such as political groups or businesses with interest in controlling the content on Wikipedia. Either way, while I have been unable to determine the exact nature of the scam, there seems to be something questionable going on behind the scenes.
