Article: 'Wikipedia is worthless and damaging'

@Mac at 1:02 pm:
“Isn’t part of Wikipedia’s problem is the anonymity of editing the materials? should would be editors provide their real names and verified before being accepted as an editor? And that they should use their real names anytime they edit?”
MAC, I suggest you look at my horror story about real names. I didn’t OUT a erson. I used his real name in what I assumed was a secure venue (my complaint of Connolley-like behavior) – and they BANNED ME FOR LIFE, when his real name was KNOWN to them on the in=side anyway, and no one outside Wiki high-level editors saw it.
They consider real names as “personal information”. As long as they do that, most of the Connolleys can operate in obscurity.
And US? We get banned for life, trying to undo the wrongs the agenda people put into Wikipedia.

@Mac –
At the same time, I compltely agree with you on using real names. I think that EVERY Wiki edit should have a Wiki footnote as to who put it in. They HAVE that information already.
Giving anonymity to editors is THE problem. There is no need for that anonymity. If someone puts information into Wikipedia, then the world should have access to WHERE THE INFO CAME FROM.
Britannica – EVERY entry has initials of its authors, with a key in the Index for who is what set of initials.
Why NOT Wikipedia?
WHY would they even CONSIDER anonymity a good idea? It is just an open invitation to abuse.
Witness Connolley.

@kwinterkorn at 1:17 pm:
“What Wikipedia ought to do is stop allowing easy re-edits, but instead allow dissenting opinions/comments to be appended or linked. Where there is controversy, Wikipedia should not try to present an orthodoxy.”
They DID make some effort to address the “controversial subjects” like CAGW. But all they ended up doing was put a header on those, telling the reader that it is a controversial subject. They did NOT make any tangible effort to weed out the Connolleys or to rein them in.
Your suggestions are pretty reasonable and would be a foundation upon which to build. In the Wiki board rooms, who knows how loudly it all would get shouted down.
1. I’d like to see the entire upper portion of controversial subjects in a red font. That would draw attention to it. The way it is now, a reader is scanning DOWN and would often miss the alert as it is done at present. (HOLY SH**!!! They do NOT even have such a warning on Global warming!)
2. I like the idea of NOT trying to present an orthodoxy on controversial subjects. There is one side, and there is the other. There is no middle ground. The readers should be allowed to KNOW that.
3. For controversial subjects they should have right and left sections.columns for that subject. PRO and CON. Every editor would have to declare for one side or the other. Alternatively, once one edited on one side, that editor would NOT be allowed to edit on the other side. (There are ways to sneak around that, of course. Simply have two people work together – one posting on HIS side while the other trolls the other side.***)
4. ANY edit made on either side would be allowed to be challenged. Sandbaggers/plants might be used to edit in opposition to the stated position of that side, so a mechanism would be necessary to bar such plants. Anyone found “guilty” of planting “wrong-side” edits (supportive of the other side) would be banned. For LIFE.
*** This is why I think the real names of editors of EVERY edited passage (including virgin entry information) should be known.

@dbstealey at 2:30 pm:
“Yes. Winston Churchill wrote in his book, The River War:
‘How dreadful are the curses which Mohammedanism lays on its votaries! Besides the fanatical frenzy, which is as dangerous in a man as hydrophobia in a dog, there is this fearful fatalistic apathy. The effects are apparent in many countries. Improvident habits, slovenly systems of agriculture, sluggish methods of commerce, and insecurity of property exist wherever the followers of the Prophet rule or live. A degraded sensualism deprives this life of its grace and refinement; the next of its dignity and sanctity. The fact that in Mohammedan law every woman must belong to some man as his absolute property …‘”
For argument’s sake, I’d point out that when this was published (1899) the world was a far different place than today. Not many countries (mostly, but not quite only. northern Europe and the U.S.A., Canada and Australia) were up to snuff with England. Therefore the first few points Churchill brought up were applicable to many countries in the world, not just Muslim ones.
I would point out that progress in those areas Churchill picks on (and others) is not uniform around the world. Some must always be ahead of the pack. In 1899 England was one of those. To point at those who were behind in “the race to civilization and progress” as if their lack of development was sinister is pompous, arrogant, and pathetic in its hubris. To point at nations covered in sand with 12 inches of rain (if that) a year and pick on their agriculture is absolutely infantile. Comparing them to the rainy British Isles in agriculture is patently ridiculous. Of COURSE their agriculture was stilted. Churchill only throws those things in to pads his arrogant attitude with the obvious. And he would have certainly known it was bullshit. But it pandered to the anti-Islamists.
The last bolded passage – about women being owned by men – He could as easily aimed his darts at 90% of the world in 1899. America was 2 decades more before having women’s suffrage. Men in almost every country were sovereign behind closed doors. It was well into the 1970s before even America began protecting spouse abuse and spouse rape. And America was clearly not targeted by Churchill for the return of British dominance.
Basically, what Churchill laid out in this passage was racism. And who among us here can stand up and say America was racist free in 1899? England might have been, but even today – against Pakistanis and other brown-skinned folks – England has its racists, as does Germany and France – and it ain’t dead in the good old US of A. If someone wants to quibble about the phrase “absolute property”, argue it with women who were beaten all throughout the 1900s in households around the world.
Churchill was just “bomfoggering” in this passage, filling the air with the sound of his voice, even if it was only in black and white. His disdain for “improvident habits” could have been cause for invading the East End or many a pub in England or Ireland – not to mention any rugby or soccer stadium, on into the 21st century. His attack on “slovenly systems of agriculture” could have applied to most of even the agricultural world. The Ukraine and Belarus, as well as Poland, Hungary, Romania, France, Spain, etc., etc. could have qualified for English invasion, by that standard – as they were mostly using sickles for the harvest, and horses and oxen for farm wagons and plows. “Sluggish methods of commerce” – now THERE is a reason to invade and to hate! Perhaps a merchant overcharging his neighbors might qualify to see Gurkas on his doorstep in Brighton.
No doubt Chhurchill made the same cries for empire in India, against the Hindus, except with different specifics. If not, were not Indian girls still given over in marriage due to the father’s wishes? Did the girls volunteer to be chattel for strangers?
What a man of his time! A hater of anything not British – the man who as much as any oversaw (and thus had great responsibility for) the demise of the British Empire, and yet he stands astride history as a valiant warrior. As a young man he and his kind strode like colossi over a mostly brown-skinned empire that was truly an empire, and to do so he had to have the mental state of a murderer and tyrant, like the rest of the British aristocracy and military elite (And yet, somehow they frittered it all away, under his watch). And to the Empire wasn’t wives who were seen as “absolute property” but men, women and children alike, as long as their skin wasn’t white. It was okay for British to have virtual brown slaves, but not for brown to enslave brown. It was in his ascendancy that the empire crumbled, and yet he is never given blame enough. Nor for the scores of thousands killed because of the manufactured and artificial reasons he gives above – made right by might, by skin color and by stealing countries right and left, at the point of a gun. The British Empire was not built on its civility, but on its butchery. Better to kill a brown head of household than to let him have ownership of his wife – when the British did the same thing, but based on color, not gender.
Who were the barbarians? The nation stealers or those with too few guns? Is it more civilized to invade or to have poor agriculture?
And who can look back from 2014 and project backward today’s standards of civilization onto the past? Look to the lectures of Hans Rosling to see how far the backward people in the world have risen since the heel of Empire was broken. And are still rising. Many of the top countries in income are former colonies (not even counting the USA).