Will

Comments: wikipedia watch

These comments were emailed to me from said Daniel Brandt:

My objection to Wikipedia began because I discovered that an anonymous admin had started an article stub on me. She had contact information for me, but I was not notified that this stub had been started. I discovered it by accident. Furthermore, it turned out that she was pursuing an agenda against me. This became clear a few
days after we began working on the article. At that point I reconsidered my position, and I decided that to let this article proceed at all on Wikipedia, amounted to a violation of my privacy.

I took it up with Jimmy Wales, and he supported his anonymous administrator. Two weeks later it is becoming clear that there is nothing I can do to get the article deleted.

Now my fate is in the hands of anonymous amateurs who not only know little about me, but are not inclined to pursue any serious research. For example, the article currently is trying to figure
out if I really was an activist at USC. This is what they report: "In interviews Brandt describes himself as having been an antiwar activist at the University of Southern California during the
Vietnam War era. He claims to have resisted the draft and to have been prosecuted for so doing."

Contrast this to the Daily Trojan, January 12, 1971: "On Dec. 4, 1970, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals reversed the decision of a lower court and found Daniel L. Brandt, a former USC student,
innocent on charges of failing to report for physical examination and refusal to submit to induction into the Armed Forces of the United States.... Dan Brandt was the editor and creator of Prevert, a monthly student activist newspaper, and the de facto leader of the student activist movement at this university in the late '60's."

Rather amateurish reporting from the Daily Trojan, but still miles ahead of Wikipedia. Why should I have to put up with Wikipedia? Is your right to read amateurish reporting greater than my right to
privacy? Remember, a Wikipedia article on me will very likely outrank all other links that mention my name, and this will be true on all the major search engines, a few months from now when the new
ranking cycle kicks in. It will be there for the next 100 years, and everyone and anyone can come along and play anonymous editor, unless some other anonymous editor with more privileges overrules
them.

That bothers me, because anonymous editors at Wikipedia seem to feel that I have no right to shape the article, and certainly no right to get it deleted. There's no worthwhile appeal process. If I request a vote on deletion, I will easily get outvoted by a whole host of anonymous Wikipedia cultists.

I recommend that everyone read the current Forbes Magazine cover story on blogging. The same problems that this story describes with anonymous bloggers are also present at Wikipedia in the form of anonymous administrators and editors.

Are their any lawyers out there who would like to help me out on this?

Daniel Brandt
www.google-watch.org

Posted by will at October 30, 2005 1:16 PM

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