The Register‘s latest rant against Wikipedia was sent to me by one of the people mentioned in the article. It purports to explain how “the Wikipedia elite [has decided] to take a topic as weighty as the health of US financial markets under its control without informing the public of its decision.” What follows is a long and rambling story about a dispute between Overstock.com head Patrick Byrne and Businessweek reporter Gary Weiss. Weiss, apparently, is the puppetmaster behind a grand conspiracy theory designed to keep the public in the dark about the evils of a practice called naked short selling by preventing a link to Byrne’s PowerPoint presentation on the subject from being linked to from the relevant Wikipedia paget.
Seriously. A guy named Judd Bagley soon got into an edit war over the link with another user. Bagley wanted the link included, the other user didn’t. Bagley thinks the other user is Weiss. Weiss says he’s never edited Wikipedia. The article goes on to explain more disagreements Bagley had with various Wikipedia editors. Not having followed the story, I have no idea if the ban of Bagley was appropriate. But there certainly doesn’t appear to be anything in there that comes close to damning evidence of Wikipedia’s “inner circle.”
Even the Register admits that “There’s no denying that Judd Bagley is, shall we say, overzealous when it comes to Wikipedia.” There’s clearly a lot of personal history here that I don’t know, and so I have trouble getting too worked up over the fact that Wikipedia has been attempting to block him from the site. What the article does not do is provide any evidence that there’s more going on here than a petty personality conflict. There’s a lot of rumor and innuendo, but no specific evidence of wrongdoing by “the Wikipedia elite,” whoever that is. And the Register article has an hysterical tone that makes me extremely skeptical of the scant evidence it does provide. El Reg clearly has an axe to grind, and so I’m not about to take their word for it when they say there’s a grand conspiracy going on.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.