Wikipedia (from 142 perspective)

Note: This article represents the point of one user, 142.177, who has been banned from all Wikipedia venues because of repeated and persistent trolling.

Wikipedia is a large public wiki run by the Wikimedia "foundation', which some claim is a front for James Wales and Bomis Corporation, their partners and friends. Because Wikipedia censors much discussion of its own deficiencies, especially its legally significant ones, this article will focus on these, to balance the view at w:Wikipedia.

Wikipedia claims to be an encyclopedia based on the GFDL text corpus. That is, it claims to have the editorial standards of an encyclopedia. It further asserts by claiming it is applying the terms of the GFDL that anything written and released under GFDL, including those directly submitted via the Wikipedia user interface which is based on mediawiki, can be legally included in the Wikipedia corpus.

http://wikipedia.org is the largest GFDL access point. Although, it is in technical violation of several points of the GFDL due to a combination of software deficiencies, mismatches of the software with the terms of the GFDL, and a developer and sysop power structure that is the opposite of democratic. It is generally run better in the 22 languages other than English, since the guiltiest parties actually can't read those languages. For instance the French Wikipedia is among the best run. Probably the worst run is the Simple English Wikipedia - which seems to have no framework even for deciding what "Simple" is to mean... what purposes or audiences it is to serve and what level of English mastery they may have - and has actually discouraged any discussion or policy setting in that regard.

The English Wikipedias and Mediawiki are enemy projects in that their goals and values differ so radically from those of Consumerium that any confusion of one set of policies or concept of responsibility on those projects with the policies or responsibilities of Consumerium is a net negative - that is, anyone who says regarding an important decision that "X isn't what we do on Wikipedia" should be told "right, thanks, go sod off" since that's the clearest possible evidence that X is the right thing to do. Wikipedia is often used as a bad example in discussions about the wiki way - Meatball Wiki even has a page called "Wikipedia is not typical" decrying its uniquely destructive and abusive culture. Its custom software lacks basic capabilities like an XML dump - this is considered software imperialism by some and a bad copy problem by others, and a self-interested fork problem by still others. This is perhaps not surprising, as, it will be those who are attracted to the idea of forking freely that will be attracted to both wikis and the GFDL...

Wikipedia also has serious failings as an encyclopedia. There is no special process or mechanism to deal with a political dispute, with factions that can't or won't reconcile their terms to each other, and it explicitly has refused to work out any separate policy for terminology dispute or for an identity dispute, despite these being quite clearly all different things with different paths to resolution - or not. There are no designated editors to make final decisions, in any language, instead this is a power struggle of sorts, with a GodKing who speaks only English and can't possibly read all the disputed articles or judge their content. He works on "reputation" alone ultimately, which means the power structure is strictly hierarchical etc..

Other failings: Wikipedia has no full text search facility, and no capacity to review or work with large dumps of the GFDL text corpus it maintains without separate software that must be able to accept large MySQL dumps. It often goes down, and its hardware does not seem to be able to keep up with the heavy loads. These seem to be mediawiki deficiencies specifically.

Wikipedia articles, flawed as they are, can often be a good first reference for someone with no knowledge at all of a topic, especially if they have good references. After reading a Wikipedia article, it is usually possible to enter a few search terms in google or another search engine and find more credible material on the same subject, confident that you are using the terms that are recognized there. Indeed, it is the ability to find several dozen to a hundred or so hits on google that is often used as a criteria for an acceptable title of an article. This one good feature is abused by applying it to subtitles, however, and generally by applying it only to subjects politically disliked by the sysops.

Wikipedia's article on itself w:Wikipedia makes various claims about its origins which are generally credible, but doesn't say enough about its many problems. There is an entire separate site devoted to that, the "meta" (see m:), and this debates issues of m:governance, but the difference between such proposals and real m:Wikipedia Governance are great indeed. It seems Wikipedia has gone at least two years without seriously considering its governance structure, and that Wikimedia is simply a front organization for the same power structure that was described in early 2002 by Wales - a simple hierarchy with himself in charge, no accountability to anyone, not even donors who believe they are supporting a GFDL encyclopedia with "open" editing.

There has been some examination of the project's role and the way it portrays itself, see w:Wikipedia:Itself for a list of contributions relevant to the form of Wikipedia, itself.

List of related wikipedia articles

If you see something in wikipedia that could be useful, please put it here, if the Wikipedia article is not complete you should put it in the Research page - Lists and timelines are very welcome.

Understanding buying choices and their effects:

w:Conversion of units
w:GTIN
w:EAN
w:UPC
w:List of countries
w:List of timelines
w:List of reference tables
w:List of stock exchanges
w:List of supermarkets
w:Commodity markets - buying on the largest scale
w:Money - what it is and how it works, commodifying everything even you
w:Tariff

Understanding moral choices as expressed in the marketplace:

w:list of ethics articles - why would you care what you buy?
w:Globalization makes it harder to know what your money does
w:Transparency International tries to make it easier to find out
w:Greenpeace has six campaigns to affect buying choices, and advocates
w:Accounting reform which would make more liabilities visible to you
w:Full cost accounting in particular would make waste visible
w:Means of persuasion, e.g. w:advertising, w:propaganda of
- w:Productivism assumes that everything humans make is good
- w:Consumerism assumes that everything humans want is good

Directly relevant to consumerium mission, making actual moral buying choices:

w:Slow Food - tied for third most relevant? buy local, organic, etc.
w: Sweatshop - tied for third most relevant? often the target of
w: Boycott - second most relevant? usually shorter term than
w:Moral purchasing describes most exactly the consumerium.org mission
w:Local food

Other

brand management, how products are positioned and gain identity. The "Wikipedia" brand has this concern too, leading to:
tracking of Self-references of the project to itself, which Consumerium needs too so it knows what it is and is becoming.
w:Wikipedia:itself which is the view of the english version of Wikipedia from Wikipedia, itself, and is used to mediate disputes about its direction and purposes.