Wikipedia Gets Critical Reception from UK Press at Wikimania 2014 113
metasonix (650947) writes On Sunday the 2014 Wikimania conference in London closed. Wikimania is the major annual event for Wikipedia editors, insiders and WMF employees to meet face-to-face, give presentations and submit papers. Usually they are full of "Wiki-Love" and good feelings; but this year, as the Wikipediocracy blog summarized, Wikipedia and its "god-king" Jimmy Wales came under considerable fire from the UK media — a very unusual occurrence. And much of it was direct criticism of Wales himself, including a very hostile interview by BBC journalist James O'Brien, who had been repeatedly defamed in his Wikipedia biography by persons unknown.
Quit whaling on Jimmy (Score:2)
What do these people have against Wales?
Re:Quit whaling on Jimmy (Score:5, Interesting)
Wikipediocracy isn't a "blog", it's a troll website for a walleyed lunatic fringe of Moonies, Scientologists, pro-ana activists and conspiracy loonies who got banned from Wikipedia and aren't taking it well. metasonix, the OP, is a prime example of such braincases - http://www.metasonix.com/v3/index.php/the-wikipedia-project
Re:Quit whaling on Jimmy (Score:5, Informative)
The guy who wrote the linked article (Andreas Kolbe) is legit. He contributes quite a bit to Wikipedia and I believe is interested in making it better. He's also critical of many aspects of it, but not trollishly so.
Much of the rest of Wikipediocracy is indeed filled with unsavory characters who're angry they weren't allowed to push various agendas on Wikipedia, though. What seems to have kicked it off initially, among other things, was one of its co-founders getting banned because he tried to expand his linkfarm business [wikipedia.org] into Wikipedia.
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> Andreas Kolbe) is legit.
Well, this article he wrote is nonsense. I know nothing else about the guy.
He just takes every controversy and paints it as an unsolvable failure of the iron-fisted Wikimedia Foundation.
I hope he edits Wikipedia better than he writes blog entries.
Re:Quit whaling on Jimmy (Score:5, Interesting)
Well, this article he wrote is nonsense. I know nothing else about the guy.
He just takes every controversy and paints it as an unsolvable failure of the iron-fisted Wikimedia Foundation.
Funny -- it seemed to me like one of the most insightful and relatively balanced pieces on Wikipedia I've read in some time. Despite having a number of serious complaints, the author also talks about very positive aspects of the event, as in: "Wikimania was in many ways an inspirational event. There was a palpable sense of enjoyment and celebration in the air..." and later in the final conclusion "As I travelled to Wikimania, I worried that I might hate it. But my worst fears did not materialise." He clearly cares greatly about Wikipedia and wants to make it better.
In fact, some of the potential solutions he mentions address the biggest problems of Wikipedia and could finally be the path to solve them. For example:
Medical content, notably the current initiatives to have medical articles peer-reviewed by academic experts (Cancer Research UK is involved, and is now hosting a Wikipedian in Residence), and provide readers with a permanent and prominent link to that peer-reviewed article version. It's an excellent idea that in the long run could also be transferred to other topic areas. Experts might be more inclined to contribute and review articles if their work is guaranteed some lasting presence. We hope the Foundation will support that effort.
Wikipedia has grown over the years by leaps and bounds with all the wonderful contributions from random people. But for articles that have achieved a relatively good status, Wikipedia is spending more and more time fighting the "barbarians at the gates" who want to vandalize, post misleading information pushing an agenda, and just random editors with little expertise who wikilawyer their way into having the article the way they like, regardless of an expert consensus on the topic. All of this could be solved by keeping articles more "stable" (maybe have a separate proposed edits page, or an "experimental" page that could be edited by anyone and is not the default) and incorporating advice from subject matter experts.
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy [stanford.edu], which is older than Wikipedia and the best resource on philosophy on the internet, shows how this can be done well. Wikipedia wouldn't have to let go of the option for the general public to edit pop culture articles on their favorite Star Trek or Buffy or Friends episode or whatever -- but for subject matter where there is a peer-reviewed expert academic literature available and experts who are willing to contribute, why not help make that possible?
Similar policies could solve some of the biographical article problems brought up in the summary -- even just holding proposed edits in a queue for experienced and validated editors to allow them would prevent nonsense such as that mentioned in TFA where a reporter has to complain about: "I have spoken publicly about my children having been born as a result of fertility treatment. And my Wikipedia page, which I didn't even know existed, contained a phrase along the lines of 'he wasn't man enough to impregnate his own wife'," a statement that went unchallenged on Wikipedia for nearly a month. The author (and the reporter complaining here) is right -- there's simply no excuse for that sort of nonsense, particularly when Wikipedia has such a poor track record of figuring out ways for real people to correct factual problems in articles about themselves.
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> the author also talks about very positive aspects of the event
Don't be distracted. He threw in a few kind words about the "sense of enjoyment" and he finishes by saying he didn't hate the conference. Surely that's not enough to make you think the author is objective?
On everything of substance the blog entry was moan, moan, moan.
I'm very interested in discussing Wikipedia's problems.* But I've no time for disingenuous rants like this one.
(* such as declining numbers of active editors, and the increas
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Thankfully there is more to life, and the world, th
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I'm interested in those problems. I'm just not interested in being informed by a ranter who's selective coverage indicates that he has an agenda other than simply providing an overview of the issues in question. That sort of person might disingenuously provide out of date info, or leave out key facts.
He makes out like Wikipedia is screwing the world, and that contradicts my observations that Wikipedia is massively making the world a better place to live in. If someone tells me the sky is usually green, t
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As for the monkey-selfie story, the press coverage there has been fairly neutral, or a
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(Thanks for the friendly reply, quite disarming, sorry I was a bit abrasive.)
The monkey-selfie story is a red flag for me because it's a honeypot for zero-effort journalists. The headlines come already half-written. It does have to get solved, but there are loads of other issues that are at least as important but are getting no attention from journalists because they'd take more work.
The proposed (and rejected) use of patented video formats is a much bigger story but it has no buzzwords and what picture a
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Don't be distracted. He threw in a few kind words about the "sense of enjoyment" and he finishes by saying he didn't hate the conference. Surely that's not enough to make you think the author is objective?
No, that's not enough, though it speaks to his general feelings about the event. If this person simply was an opponent of Wikipedia or hated it, I doubt he would have thrown those bits in.
No -- to me, what made it more than a rant is the fact that there were plenty of proposed solutions and emphasis on ideas to improve things. There were plenty of negative issues brought up, but also discussion of many ways that things could get better.
I'm very interested in discussing Wikipedia's problems.*
As another commenter has already pointed out, you seem only interest
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> you are frustrated by the negative tone, the airing of "dirty laundry," etc.
On the contrary. I'm disappointed that the blogger ignored the dirtier laundry and instead focussed on the attention grabbing stuff like monkey selfies.
He indeed proposes solutions, but he doesn't mention that similar things have been in discussion for years and there are known problems with these proposals.
That's what I call disingenuous. The author seems informed about Wikipedia, so he should know that his missing the target
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I keep hearing that editing Wikipedia is terrible, but I edit now and then, and somehow I haven't run into it. Maybe I should edit Israel-Palestine articles or something to see a more heated area. In archaeology (which is what I mostly write about) people seem nice.
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Weird, I've never run into that.
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Copyright dispute with Wikipedia (Score:2)
A series of self-portraits taken by Indonesian monkeys has sparked a copyright dispute between Wikipedia and a British wildlife photographer, says Wikipedia is using his copyrighted images without permission. Photographer David Slater complained that Wikipedia rejected his requests for the images to be removed from the website. Although the monkeys pressed the button, Slater set up the self-portraits by framing them and setting the camera on a tripod. The Wikimedia Foundation claims that no one owns the cop
Re:Copyright dispute with Wikipedia (Score:4, Informative)
A series of self-portraits taken by Indonesian monkeys has sparked a copyright dispute between Wikipedia and a British wildlife photographer, says Wikipedia is using his copyrighted images without permission. Photographer David Slater complained that Wikipedia rejected his requests for the images to be removed from the website. Although the monkeys pressed the button, Slater set up the self-portraits by framing them and setting the camera on a tripod. The Wikimedia Foundation claims that no one owns the copyright to the images, because under U.S. law, 'copyright cannot vest in non-human authors', the monkeys in this case.
http://www.sfgate.com/news/wor... [sfgate.com]
Let's see here:
1) "A series of self-portraits" -- I seem to recall a set of pictures initially, some of which could be considered self-portraits, many of which were of the general area the camera was pointed at with some monkey bits partially in the picture. This was not a selfie-shoot; some of the pictures just happened to be a) of the monkey and b) in focus.
2) Slater set up the self-portraits. False. Slater set up the camera, and was completely surprised by the monkey who came in while he wasn't paying attention and started taking random pictures. I read his original article before this whole thing blew up. Back then he was just excited to share this with the rest of the world. It's true that he curated the photos (got rid of the ones that weren't worth publishing), but there was no artistic intent in his leaving his camera unattended.
3) Non-human authors. This same public domain situation exists if you set up your camera with a motion sensor and capture your cat doing funny things. Unless you had intent (difficult to prove, and you have to PROVE it under copyright law), such images are in the public domain.
So yeah; the thing about a site like Wikipedia, is that everyone who wants free publicity but doesn't get the concept of making information FREELY available will try to coopt it for their own use -- and someone has to be the gatekeeper.
Personally, I think for 90% of the articles, Wales does a decent job as the final gatekeeper, and Wikipedia ends up as a more useful resource than Encyclopedia Brittanica. For that other 10%... 8% of it is stuff that should indicate almost immediately that you should go somewhere else for the real story. The final 2% is an issue, but is still a better hit/miss ratio than you'd get from pretty much any other third-party source.
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Which only indicates that you haven't looked at the actual content of Wikipedia very closely. I have. Yes, there are many good, usable articles on it. There are also millions of "junk" articles, thousands of hoaxes, tens of thousands of people being defamed in their biographies, hundreds of thousands of people glorifying themselves by writing their own bios (against Jimbo's own rule), and various other abuses
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Odd; I usually go to Wikipedia for the citations. I guess this just shows that if you provide an infinite graffiti wall, you get all kinds.
As for Wales; he's definitely hands-off at this point, but his figurehead position set the ground rules that people are supposed to be using. I think some people admire him purely because of what he accomplished, against significant odds. Really -- with all the things wrong with Wikipedia, it's still one of the best things of its kind we've got. You can't fix humanit
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Slater set up the self-portraits. False. Slater set up the camera...
Exactly. He set up the camera. Do you always contradict yourself like this? And as for there being "no artistic intent," I suppose he went out and followed those black macaque monkeys around for three days just so he could have them nearby while he took photos of fallen tree limbs and snails?
This same public domain situation exists if you set up your camera with a motion sensor and capture your cat doing funny things. Unless you had intent (difficult to prove, and you have to PROVE it under copyright law), such images are in the public domain.
It's not "difficult to prove" at all, particularly given that no sane person is going to sit in a courtroom and insist, under oath, that you didn't set up the motion-sensor for your camera, which you also set up, for so
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So if you prepared yourself a nice BBQ meal on the deck, went inside for a moment, and came back out to discover that the local fauna had consumed it all, you'd claim that you meant for them to eat it all along, because you made it?
Sorry, but your argument is tenuous to the point of breaking.
If you go with that argument, then every picture that's taken that includes some man-made artefact is in copyright violation. That's not how copyright works. You could just as easily, by extension, claim that Nikon ac
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Any rational, thinking person understands what "intent" means in an artistic context. Of course, if Nikon were to give you a camera rig for free, fly you out to Indonesia at their expense, and tell you to take photos of monkeys, they could easily claim copyright on the resulting images - in fact, the m
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Is this some sort of game to you? We're talking about people's livelihoods. If you want to indulge in sophistry and absurd strawman-making go ahead, but you're not likely to convince anyone with that stuff.
This is definitely not some sort of game; this is hammering out where the copyright is allowed to infringe on public domain for a limited time to promote the sciences and the arts (and as a side effect allowing individuals to make a living at it). When people assume copyright covers more than it actually does, they sometimes end up in situations where they over-invest in a process expecting returns that are above and beyond what is covered by law. In other cases, people attempt to abuse the law for priva
Kill wiki editor anonymity (Score:2, Funny)
If you're writing about someone else, put your fscking name to it. Wikitards are cowards.
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Cowardice exists only in your mind, AC.
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Jokes are funny, what he wrote isn't funny, and so what he wrote is not a joke.
Meanwhile the general public in London... (Score:5, Informative)
A yahoo news article claims the general public in England trusts Wikipedia [yahoo.com] more than traditional news outlets.
And "defamed" or called out on something questionable? Genuinely asking, I never heard of this British journalist until today...
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That's nice.
Wikipedia is not news and news outlets are not an encyclopedia. They aren't related and can't be compared.
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WikiNews is news so maybe I should have mentioned it as well. I don't necessarily agree with the sentiment expressed in the article, just pointing out a related article.
My take on Wikipedia with regard to news is that it probably can't be trusted at face value as most "news" these days is so controversial and people on the fringes of opinion have a huge bias and interest in spinning this news.
Wikipedia works for me as a starting point for serious studying of a subject (e.g. the list of references in the be
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That's the problem with a lot of the criticism of Wikipedia. Too many people think it's a place to publish news or original content. They don't understand what an encyclopaedia is.
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Too many people think it's a place to publish news or original content. They don't understand what an encyclopaedia is.
Unfortunately, neither do most Wikipedians.
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Re:Meanwhile the general public in London... (Score:4, Interesting)
Wikipedia is not news and news outlets are not an encyclopedia.
Wikipedia has entries for most major breaking news stories. These entries tend to be more accurate and more up-to-date than most news websites. You cannot go to Wikipedia for a list of headlines, but if you want information about a specific news event, it is a good place to go.
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And "defamed" or called out on something questionable? Genuinely asking, I never heard of this British journalist until today...
There is nothing really wrong with him. He's mostly known for his talk radio show, not his articles.
On his radio show, he has people calling in, but he frequently cuts people off (as most good radio show hosts do).
Here is what I found through the wikipedia revision history:
James is in very vocal support of continued mass immigration into the UK, sees no negatives to it, and labels anybody who questions the desirability of this as 'racist' or 'bigoted'.
If any white Anglo Saxon caller to his show should dare to say that they feel even slightly threatened by the influence of new 'cultures' forced on the neighbourhood that they, and generations of their family, were born and brought up in, James will bully them before cutting them off, normally using an ad break or the travel news as an excuse. Women often get this treatment too. He is clearly more comfortable bullying them.
However, James also regularly offends many new immigrants to the UK by mocking religion in a very offensive manner, and it could therefore be argued that he causes far greater offence to these new immigrants, on an almost daily basis, than any BNP supporter ever has. His frequent mockery of religion has also demonstrated his hypocrisy as James has admitted that he had his daughter baptised.This will probably be a 'Get the kid into the successful local Catholic School' ploy. Luckily the priests involved at his local Catholic school, St Mary's in Chiswick are aware of James, his views on religion and his lack of practice. He may be shocked when he finds that having attended Ampleforth will not be enough.
To be fair, I haven't looked at everything, but if this is the only kind of content he's complaining about, then he had it easy. Anyone with half a brain would see the bias in these unsourced comments.
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EU right to alter history (Score:3)
Isn't this in the EU, where the right to alter history [wikipedia.org] is already the law of he land?
So what is this reporter complaining about? If he doesn't like what someone is saying about him, all he had to do is erase the article from the internet and change history into whatever he likes. It's not like he's in the U.S.
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it's not a right to alter history. It's a right to disassociate yourself from your actions of the past in a search engine.
I mean, if you stole a candy bar 10 years ago and then got caught and charged, a
Re:EU right to alter history (Score:5, Insightful)
Also, the practice of brand management is exactly the kind of thing we should scared of. Blackwater does awful shit, and changes their name every couple of years so we don't point to the same evil bastards again and again.
Wrongfully accused (Score:1)
Every one is missing the fact that people do get wrongfully accused. And the trouble is that the accusation comes up and people never bother to give the benefit of the doubt.
And when you have idiotic laws like our sex offender laws where you pee in public you are on the list and everyone who sees your name there thinks you had sex with some little kid.
People are cruel and very judgmental.
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Then perhaps we should fix the idiotic laws instead of creating more idiotic laws.
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Also, you don't seem to understand that to fix a law, you must pass a new law that replaces, augments, or amends it, or else repeals it altogether. If you're living in the USA, this isn't really a good time to be asking for
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The company that refuses to hire you because you stole a candy bar 10 years ago isn't going to give you a rejection letter saying so. They'll make up some BS excuse. There's no way to prove that the company did this short of doing a statistical analysis on hundreds of companyes and determining that people who stole a candy bar 10 years ago have some reduced chance of getting jobs, and even then you're not going to be able to prove any single company did it when that company has too few applicants who stol
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Better idea (Score:2)
How about we just become more tolerant people and call out people who are not being tolerant people instead of trying to fight the realities of the spread of information . If someone doesn't get a job because they stole a candy bar 10 years ago, organize a boycott of that company for being such petty dicks.
Organizing boycotts like that seems like it would be capricious and unreliable. My idea is we could develop a system where companies that are overly picky about their employees' records in a way not related to their job, have more trouble finding employees and have to pay more for the same level of quality in an employee. Then, the company would have to lower the quality of its products, or raise their prices, and customers will note this and realize that the company is flawed, and decide to buy less of the
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Ah, so you're the sort of person who thinks Communism, Libertarianism, and strong password policies could work if we all just got along?
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Altering History has precedent (Score:2)
History has always been altered. Napoleon was the greatest general in the world not because of his generalling, but because he *bought the newspapers*.
People who had a bad reputation used to be able to move to another town. Now we have tracking.
That's good because it warns us when someone actually has molested children, but bad because it makes people unemployable even a thousand miles from their home because of stupid mistakes they made when they were 18 or 19, for example.
It's not black and white that a
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Isn't this in the EU, where the right to alter history is already the law of he land?
So what is this reporter complaining about?
Yes it is, and the reporter is complaining about: "Wales insisted, apparently without irony, that requests for Google to remove links – not actual web pages, not actual source material, just links – to pages covered by the ruling (which includes libellous attack pages, revenge porn, and old police blotters) should, at minimum, be adjudicated by a court of law. In other words, European taxpayers should pay, without limitation, for their already-overburdened court systems to deal with every single
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quibble on usernames (Score:2)
Although I think this policy doesn't make a lot of sense even as it is, it's not quite that strict. The English Wikipedia doesn't have a policy against company names in usernames, but against shared "cor
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The idea is to stop users who may claim special authority over the content of some articles, on the basis that they represent an organisation mentioned within them. Naturally, it's the internet, so it's difficult to verify this, and those doing it would have a clear conflict of interest when editing an article related to them. So a good way of nipping this behavior in the bud this is to disallow "corporate" names.
Of course this doesn't stop organisations editing their articles under another name. But at
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Wiki needs to be purchased.
And the idiot knee-jerk reaction strikes again. *GONG*
Wikipedia, and the Mediawiki Foundation, ARE private. Private, not-for-profit corporations that are not state or public agencies of any kind. They have paid staff that do actual work to make the wiki better too. The "magic of contracts" has nothing to do with any of this.
If you're going to spout some half-baked ideology, at least try to understand it.
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Fuck you asshole.
Did you bother reading past the first sentence or are you just into Knee Jerk reactions to challenges towards your own political agenda.
It is evident that the changes the above AC cited should be made because their existing paid staff aren't doing shit to prevent it from become a hell hole of ignorance and private agendas.
I'm sorry but you aren't going to get qualified people to edit things for free. Whet you will get are as described above.
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Wiki needs to be purchased.
By who? Who is going to pay for it that can be trusted to not push their own agenda?
Where is the money going to come from? Adverts? Do you think advertisers won't have an agenda, and interest in what appears on Wikipedia?
Why would unpaid volunteers submit articles to a commercial organisation that profits off their work?
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Prohibit circular cites to other Wiki articles.
That's already a well-established policy: WP:CIRCULAR [wikipedia.org]
oh, OMG, BBC... (Score:1)
Read the article, it's nonsense (Score:5, Informative)
The linked article is just tabloid journalism.
I wrote a comment about how the media experts were focussing on the wrong problems and how they clearly -surprisingly- knew very little about Wikipedia and its problems - BUT then I read the source article and found it's just an attack piece, cherry picking the least interesting parts of the conference and painting every controversy as being the fault of an iron-fist dictat from the Wikimedia Foundation.
What I learned: wikipediocracy is a nonsense website.
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The linked article is just tabloid journalism.
I wrote a comment about how the media experts were focussing on the wrong problems and how they clearly -surprisingly- knew very little about Wikipedia and its problems - BUT then I read the source article and found it's just an attack piece, cherry picking the least interesting parts of the conference and painting every controversy as being the fault of an iron-fist dictat from the Wikimedia Foundation.
What I learned: wikipediocracy is a nonsense website.
I agree, it seems to me these news organizations are just trying to discredit a competitor. You can't trust the news at all anymore. It's always been questionable but it's gotten worse over the past 10yrs... and incredibly bad over the past 2yrs or so.
Last night I was listing to police scanners from Ferguson, MO. People looted the Walmart, stole assault rifles, then road around shooting up the neighborhood. I saw images from people with cellphones of groups of police 50+ all in riot gear firing teargas and
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as criminal Jimmy says, " we refuse to allow facts on wikipedia".
* citation needed
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It's fine (Score:2)
After Jimmy gets to edit, he'll be welcomed as a hero, with roses tossed at his feet [Citation Needed]
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[Citation Needed]
Well, if you need a Citation [wikipedia.org], you probably have done at least something wrong.
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Or GM X-Body [wikipedia.org]? You'd be in a much worse spot...
James O'Brien versus Iain Duncan-Smith (Score:1)