According to the Electronic Frontier Foundation:
Last February, a pair of artists, working with several collaborators, created a Wikipedia article and invited the general public to add to it, following Wikipedia’s standards of credibility and verifiability. The work was intended to comment on the nature of art and Wikipedia. But Wikipedia editors did not take kindly to the project, and it was shut down within fifteen hours for being insufficiently “encyclopaedic.”
Fast forward a couple of months. The artists, Scott Kildall and Nathaniel Stern, have created a noncommercial website that documents the project, called Wikipedia Art. The domain name for the project: wikipediaart.org.
Yep, they used the term “wikipedia” in their domain name. “Wikipedia” is a trademark owned by the Wikimedia Foundation. And now the Foundation has demanded that the artists give up the domain name peaceably or it will attempt to take it by (legal) force.
Does Wikipedia really want to get into a Fair Use battle? If you took away all the copyrighted material used on every single Wikipedia page, what would be left? Who would still use it? Its Google rankings would plummet. Jimmy Wales might even have to find a new scam to fund his expensive tastes.
Lawyers: Is there anything they can’t ruin?
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I have found the one thing that lawyers can’t ruin, and that is the lawyer-on-lawyer battle royale I have planned later this week. Any lawyers arriving at the door, for whatever reason, go into the pit. It’s foolproof!
…Right?
Wikipedia is such garbage anyway. You’re not allowed to cite it on reasearch papers or pretty much anything else, that’s pretty much the first thing professors say in class. A website that lets anyone edit anything? How is it still in business? It is really a scam.
As a general source, it’s fairly good, but the fluidity makes it horrible for academic papers. It changes too much to be citable, but usually most inacuracies are caught fairly quickly.
However, the snootiness of the Wikipedia community is starting to turn me off, and this is just one more to add to the list. Not that someone had a vendeta against the Deceiver page and eternally pissed me off in their pettiness or anything… nope, no way.
Catherine,
“Wikipedia is such garbage anyway. You’re not allowed to cite it on reasearch papers or pretty much anything else, that’s pretty much the first thing professors say in class”
One good thing about wikipedia though is that the sources cited in the article are often eligible for citation. In my own papers, I’ve found it to be a good source of sources. Perhaps not as good as a journal database for most of the finer information I often need, but good as a starting point at least. Just so long as you read through the source they use instead of taking for granted that the information is actually in the source cited. Just to be on the safe side.
Mike Godwin’s side of the story:
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2009-April/051505.html
Number of tech press who contacted WMF before writing up a story: 0.
Wikipedia is such a flawed idea. Editors gain precedence through volume, not quality. So people who apparently don’t work and never leave the house have gained control and are allowed to put their spin on the articles they “own.” They shout down whomever dares to disagree with them. And since most people aren’t willing to do hours of work for free and engage in “edit wars” for weeks at a time, the freaks win.
Well, beyond the universe of college where essays with citations rule your life, Wikipedia is a phenominally useful source of knowledge that can very quickly and painlessly give the lowdown on just about any subject imaginable.
However, I confess that my faith in the Wikipedia has been deeply shaken this year, after becoming the brunt of Wiki-users’ hostility and finding out just how flipping hateful these apparently unemployed editing nerds are. What bothers me, I suppose, is thinking they’re all probably like 19 and know less than I do, but because they’ve written like 50 articles and all I do are Gnome projects, I’m the certified numbskull. (Yeah, sorry, little bitter over here.)
I still use Wikipedia every time I want to know about something fast, but some little abused part of my soul hurts when I do so.
Wikipedia is hardly the end all for knowledge, but as a quick reference on information that can be quickly verified, it’s not bad.
What kills me about this is that it seems that every time someone comes out with something good and different that is meant to be free and fluid, it eventually turns into everything they started out trying not to be.
Habanada. I like Wikipedia. It’s 19 year old college students I hate.
That guy has a head and hairdo like Butters on South Park. X-D
Wikipedia is so filled with flaws that I am amazed anyone uses it for anything but e-mail tidbits to mess with friends. I have noticed over the last two years that the slant in political leanings is becoming more apparent. Maybe there is a correlation to all the newspapers failing and most of the same papers pulling source material from Wiki.
I like Wikipedia for a quick hit on questions that suddenly occur to me, like why worms end up on the pavement after a rainstorm. It’s hard to imagine an editing war on that subject. On anything with potential political/religious/etc. ramifications, I’m pretty good at separating the chaff from the wheat (or so I think). As Hmmm… said, look at the original source material when you need to be certain.
You can’t call Wikipedia a hypocrite here – if they reference all the data they have appropiately and it comes from responsible sources, then they are doing everything in the right.
If these artists are profitting from stealing the name of Wikipedia, then they are in the wrong. If they were to reference or put one of those “THIS SITE IS IN NO WAY AFFLIATED WITH WIKIPEDIA.ORG” warnings, they may get away with that.
Thank you to Darek the copyright lawyer. Never mind, everybody.
Derek, it seems that they do put one up of those warnings: “This web site documents a performance art work that promotes critical analyses of the nature of art, knowledge and Wikipedia. It is not affiliated with Wikipedia in any way.”
Jannah *removes foot from mouth* and done. I guess the only question is did they have that warning before they were threatened with legal action or after? IF Wikipedia continues with a legal matter after that, then I would agree with Simon on this one. If they drop it, they weren’t hypocrites, just protecting their assets and there’s nothing wrong with ensuring the safety of one’s assets in my OPINION (that was for the SS McGrumpyPants).
I (occasionally) use wiki for the links provided in the articles. When it comes to the lesser known bands and musicians, there are some good links to the websites where you can download mp3s. When I search for those mp3 downloads on my own, I usually get viruses instead
I’ve been close to the Wikipedia Art story since day one. You might want to read my interviews with the two artists. Are the artists ‘trolls’as Jimmy Wales has called them? I don’t think so– not anymore than some of the longtime Wikipedia editors who mark articles about artists as not notable even though the subjects of the articles have exhibited in museums and so on.
On Wikipedia a baseball player who only played one game is considered notable, a politician who never won an election can be notable without question– but artists who have exhibited in a few museums often have articles about them questioned or speedy deleted unless they have been reviewed in the New York Times or one of the longstanding art magazines. That appears to happen often.
Read:
http://www.myartspace.com/blog/2009/02/wikipedia-art-virtual-fireside-chat.html
http://www.myartspace.com/blog/2009/04/art-space-talk-scott-kildall-and.html
There is a difference between copyright and trademark. The content of the article is copyrighted. But the name is trademarked. Wikipedia has to protect its trademark in order to keep using it. There’s an obvious likelihood of confusion between the two domain names. Wikipedia is 100% in the right here.