Misplaced Pages

Revision as of 08:53, 23 May 2018

Criticism of Misplaced Pages—of its content, procedures, and operations, and of the Misplaced Pages community—covers many subjects, topics, and themes about the nature of Misplaced Pages as an open source encyclopedia of subject entries that almost anyone can edit. Misplaced Pages has been criticized for the uneven handling, acceptance, and retention of articles about controversial subjects. The principal concerns of its critics are the factual reliability of the content; the readability of the prose; and a clear article layout; the existence of systemic bias; of gender bias; and of racial bias among the editorial community that is Misplaced Pages. Further concerns are that the organization allows the participation of anonymous editors (leading to editorial vandalism); the existence of social stratification (allowing cliques); and over-complicated rules (allowing editorial quarrels), the conditions of which permit the misuse of Misplaced Pages. These assertions sometimes give rise to predictions of Misplaced Pages's end.

The reliability of Misplaced Pages is often questioned. In "Misplaced Pages: The Dumbing Down of World Knowledge" (2010), Edwin Black characterized the editorial content of articles as a mixture of "truth, half-truth, and some falsehoods". Similarly, in "Wisdom?: More like Dumbness of the Crowds" (2007), Oliver Kamm said that the encyclopedic articles usually are dominated by the editors with the loudest and most persistent editorial voices (talk pages and edit summaries). Politics and ideology entries are also criticized on Misplaced Pages. In two works published in 2012, "The 'Undue Weight' of Truth on Misplaced Pages" by Timothy Messer–Kruse, and "You Just Type in What You are Looking for: Undergraduates' Use of Library Resources vs. Misplaced Pages" by Mónica Colón–Aguirre and Rachel A. Fleming–May, the authors analyzed and criticized the undue-weight policy (relative importance of a given source), and concluded that Misplaced Pages is not about providing correct and definitive information about a subject, but instead presenting, as editorially dominant, the perspective taken by most authors of the sources for the article. This allegedly uneven application of the undue-weight policy creates omissions (of fact and of interpretation) that might give the reader false impressions about the subject matter, based upon the incomplete content of the Misplaced Pages article.

Misplaced Pages is also sometimes characterized as having a hostile editing environment. In Common Knowledge?: An Ethnography of Misplaced Pages (2014), Dariusz Jemielniak, a steward for Wikimedia Foundation projects, stated that the complexity of the rules and laws governing editorial content and editors' behavior is a licence for the "office politics" of disruptive editors and drives away new, potentially constructive editors. In a follow-up article, "The Unbearable Bureaucracy of Misplaced Pages" (2014), Jemielniak said that abridging and rewriting the editorial rules and laws of Misplaced Pages for clarity of purpose and simplicity of application would resolve the bureaucratic bottleneck of too many rules. In "The Rise and Decline of an Open Collaboration System: How Misplaced Pages's Reaction to Popularity is Causing its Decline" (2013), Aaron Halfaker stated that the over-complicated rules provoked the decline in editorial participation that began in 2009—frightening away new editors who otherwise would contribute to Misplaced Pages.

Criticism of content

Misplaced Pages is described as unreliable at times. Journalist Edwin Black has characterized the editorial content of articles as a mixture of "truth, half-truth, and some falsehoods". and Oliver Kamm has said that articles are usually dominated by the editors with the loudest and most persistent editorial voices (talk pages and edit summaries), usually by an interest group with an ideological "axe to grind" on the subject, topic, or theme of the article in question.

Misplaced Pages articles on politics and ideology have also been criticized. Two works published in 2012 are critical of the undue-weight policy (relative importance of a given source), and concluded that, because the purpose of Misplaced Pages is not to provide correct and definitive information about a subject, but to present, as the consensus opinion, the majority opinion advanced by the authors of the entry's sources. The uneven application of the undue-weight policy creates omissions (of fact and of interpretation) that might give the reader false impressions about the subject matter, based upon the incompleteness of the Misplaced Pages article.

Misplaced Pages is sometimes characterized as having a hostile editing environment. In Common Knowledge?: An Ethnography of Misplaced Pages (2014), Dariusz Jemielniak, a steward for Wikimedia Foundation projects, stated that the complexity of the rules and laws governing editorial content and the behavior of the editors is a burden for new editors and a licence for the "office politics" of disruptive editors. In a follow-up article, Jemielniak said that abridging and rewriting the editorial rules and laws of Misplaced Pages for clarity of purpose and simplicity of application would resolve the bureaucratic bottleneck of too many rules. In The Rise and Decline of an Open Collaboration System: How Misplaced Pages's Reaction to Popularity is Causing its Decline (2013), Aaron Halfaker stated that the over-complicated rules and laws of Misplaced Pages unintentionally provoked the decline in editorial participation that began in 2009—frightening away new editors who otherwise would contribute to Misplaced Pages.

There have also been works that describe the possible misuse of Misplaced Pages. In "Misplaced Pages or Wickedpedia?" (2008), the Hoover Institution said that Misplaced Pages is an unreliable resource for correct knowledge, information, and facts about a subject, because, as an open source website, the editorial content of the articles is readily subjected to manipulation and propaganda. The 2014 edition of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's official student handbook, Academic Integrity at MIT, informs students that Misplaced Pages is not a reliable academic source, stating, "the bibliography published at the end of the Misplaced Pages entry may point you to potential sources. However, do not assume that these sources are reliable—use the same criteria to judge them as you would any other source. Do not consider the Misplaced Pages bibliography as a replacement for your own research."

Accuracy of information

Not authoritative

Misplaced Pages acknowledges that the encyclopedia should not be used as a primary source for research, either academic or informational. The British librarian Philip Bradley said that "the main problem is the lack of authority. With printed publications, the publishers have to ensure that their data are reliable, as their livelihood depends on it. But with something like this, all that goes out the window." Likewise, Robert McHenry, editor-in-chief of Encyclopædia Britannica from 1992 to 1997, said that readers of Misplaced Pages articles cannot know who wrote the article they are reading—it might have been written by an expert in the subject matter or by an amateur. In November 2015, Misplaced Pages co-founder Larry Sanger told Zach Schwartz in Vice: "I think Misplaced Pages never solved the problem of how to organize itself in a way that didn't lead to mob rule" and that since he left the project, "People that I would say are trolls sort of took over. The inmates started running the asylum."

Comparative study of science articles

In "Internet Encyclopaedias Go Head-to-head", a 2005 article published in the Nature scientific journal, the results of a blind experiment (single-blind study), which compared the factual and informational accuracy of entries from Misplaced Pages and the Encyclopædia Britannica, were reported. The 42-entry sample included science articles and biographies of scientists, which were compared for accuracy by anonymous academic reviewers; they found that the average Misplaced Pages entry contained four errors and omissions, while the average Encyclopædia Britannica entry contained three errors and omissions. The study concluded that Misplaced Pages and Britannica were comparable in terms of the accuracy of its science entries". Nevertheless, the reviewers had two principal criticisms of the Misplaced Pages science entries: (i) thematically confused content, without an intelligible structure (order, presentation, interpretation); and (ii) that undue weight is given to controversial, fringe theories about the subject matter.

The dissatisfaction of the Encyclopædia Britannica editors led to Nature publishing additional survey documentation that substantiated the results of the comparative study. Based upon the additional documents, Encyclopædia Britannica denied the validity of the study, stating it was flawed, because the Britannica extracts were compilations that sometimes included articles written for the youth version of the encyclopedia. In turn, Nature acknowledged that some Britannica articles were compilations, but denied that such editorial details invalidated the conclusions of the comparative study of the science articles.

The editors of Britannica also said that while the Nature study showed that the rate of error between the two encyclopedias was similar, the errors in a Misplaced Pages article usually were errors of fact, while the errors in a Britannica article were errors of omission. According to the editors of Britannica, Britannica was more accurate than Misplaced Pages in that respect. Subsequently, Nature magazine rejected the Britannica response with a rebuttal of the editors' specific objections about the research method of the study.

Lack of methodical fact-checking

Inaccurate information that is not obviously false may persist in Misplaced Pages for a long time before it is challenged. The most prominent cases reported by mainstream media involved biographies of living people.

The Misplaced Pages Seigenthaler biography incident demonstrated that the subject of a biographical article must sometimes fix blatant lies about his own life. In May 2005, an anonymous user edited the biographical article on American journalist and writer John Seigenthaler so that it contained several false and defamatory statements. The inaccurate claims went unnoticed from May until September 2005 when they were discovered by Victor S. Johnson Jr., a friend of Seigenthaler. Misplaced Pages content is often mirrored at sites such as Answers.com, which means that incorrect information can be replicated alongside correct information through a number of web sources. Such information can develop a misleading authority because of its presence at such sites.

In another example, on March 2, 2007, MSNBC.com reported that then-New York Senator and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had been incorrectly listed for 20 months in her Misplaced Pages biography as valedictorian of her class of 1969 at Wellesley College, when in fact she was not (though she did speak at commencement). The article included a link to the Misplaced Pages edit, where the incorrect information was added on July 9, 2005. The inaccurate information was removed within 24 hours after the MSNBC.com report appeared.

Attempts to perpetrate hoaxes may not be confined to editing existing Misplaced Pages articles, but can also include creating new articles. In October 2005, Alan Mcilwraith, a former call center worker from Scotland, created a Misplaced Pages article in which he wrote that he was a highly decorated war hero. The article was quickly identified as a hoax by other users and deleted.

There have also been instances of users deliberately inserting false information into Misplaced Pages in order to test the system and demonstrate its alleged unreliability. Gene Weingarten, a journalist, ran such a test in 2007, in which he inserted false information into his own Misplaced Pages article; it was removed 27 hours later by a Misplaced Pages editor. Misplaced Pages considers the deliberate insertion of false and misleading information to be vandalism.

Neutral point of view and conflicts of interest

Misplaced Pages regards the concept of a neutral point of view as one of its non-negotiable principles; however, it acknowledges that such a concept has its limitations—its NPOV policy states that articles should be "as far as possible" written "without editorial bias". Mark Glaser, a journalist, also wrote that this may be an impossible ideal due to the inevitable biases of editors.

In August 2007, a tool called WikiScanner—developed by Virgil Griffith, a visiting researcher from the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico—was released to match edits to the encyclopedia by non-registered users with an extensive database of IP addresses. News stories appeared about IP addresses from various organizations such as the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Republican Congressional Committee, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, Diebold, Inc. and the Australian government being used to make edits to Misplaced Pages articles, sometimes of an opinionated or questionable nature. Another story stated that an IP address from the BBC itself had been used to vandalize the article on George W. Bush. The BBC quoted a Misplaced Pages spokesperson as praising the tool: "We really value transparency and the scanner really takes this to another level. Misplaced Pages Scanner may prevent an organisation or individuals from editing articles that they're really not supposed to." Not everyone hailed WikiScanner as a success for Misplaced Pages. Oliver Kamm, in a column for The Times, argued instead that:

The WikiScanner is thus an important development in bringing down a pernicious influence on our intellectual life. Critics of the web decry the medium as the cult of the amateur. Misplaced Pages is worse than that; it is the province of the covert lobby. The most constructive course is to stand on the sidelines and jeer at its pretensions.

WikiScanner only reveals conflicts of interest when the editor does not have a Misplaced Pages account and their IP address is used instead. Conflict of interest editing done by editors with accounts is not detected, since those edits are anonymous to everyone except some Misplaced Pages administrators.

Scientific disputes

The 2005 Nature study also gave two brief examples of challenges that Wikipedian science writers purportedly faced on Misplaced Pages. The first concerned the addition of a section on violence to the schizophrenia article, which exhibited the view of one of the article's regular editors, neuropsychologist Vaughan Bell, that it was little more than a "rant" about the need to lock people up, and that editing it stimulated him to look up the literature on the topic.

Another dispute involved the climate researcher William Connolley, a Misplaced Pages editor who was opposed by others. The topic in this second dispute was the greenhouse effect, and The New Yorker reported that this dispute, which was far more protracted, had led to arbitration, which took three months to produce a decision. The outcome of arbitration, as reported by Nature, was a six-month parole for Connolley, during which he was restricted to undoing edits on articles once per day.

Exposure to political operatives and advocates

While Misplaced Pages policy requires articles to have a neutral point of view, it is not immune from attempts by outsiders (or insiders) with an agenda to place a spin on articles. In January 2006 it was revealed that several staffers of members of the U.S. House of Representatives had embarked on a campaign to cleanse their respective bosses' biographies on Misplaced Pages, as well as inserting negative remarks on political opponents. References to a campaign promise by Martin Meehan to surrender his seat in 2000 were deleted, and negative comments were inserted into the articles on United States Senator Bill Frist and Eric Cantor, a congressman from Virginia. Numerous other changes were made from an IP address assigned to the House of Representatives. In an interview, Misplaced Pages de facto leader Jimmy Wales remarked that the changes were "not cool".

Larry Delay and Pablo Bachelet wrote that from their perspective, some articles dealing with Latin American history and groups (such as the Sandinistas and Cuba) lack political neutrality and are written from a sympathetic Marxist perspective which treats socialist dictatorships favorably at the expense of alternate positions.

In 2008, the pro-Israel group Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA) organized an e-mail campaign to encourage readers to correct perceived Israel-related biases and inconsistencies in Misplaced Pages. CAMERA argued the excerpts were unrepresentative and that it had explicitly campaigned merely "toward encouraging people to learn about and edit the online encyclopedia for accuracy". Defenders of CAMERA and the competing group, Electronic Intifada, went into mediation. Israeli diplomat David Saranga said that Misplaced Pages is generally fair in regard to Israel. When it was pointed out that the entry on Israel mentioned the word "occupation" nine times, whereas the entry on the Palestinian People mentioned "terror" only once, he responded, "It means only one thing: Israelis should be more active on Misplaced Pages. Instead of blaming it, they should go on the site much more, and try and change it."

Political commentator Haviv Rettig Gur, reviewing widespread perceptions in Israel of systemic bias in Misplaced Pages articles, has argued that there are deeper structural problems creating this bias: anonymous editing favors biased results, especially if the editors organize concerted campaigns of defamation as has been done in articles dealing with Arab-Israeli issues, and current Misplaced Pages policies, while well-meant, have proven ineffective in handling this.

On August 31, 2008, The New York Times ran an article detailing the edits made to the biography of Alaska governor Sarah Palin in the wake of her nomination as the running mate of Arizona Senator John McCain. During the 24 hours before the McCain campaign announcement, 30 edits, many of them flattering details, were made to the article by Misplaced Pages single-purpose user identity Young_Trigg. This person has later acknowledged working on the McCain campaign, and having several Misplaced Pages user accounts.

In November 2007, libelous accusations were made against two politicians from southwestern France, Jean-Pierre Grand and Hélène Mandroux-Colas, on their Misplaced Pages biographies. Jean-Pierre Grand asked the president of the French National Assembly and the Prime Minister of France to reinforce the legislation on the penal responsibility of Internet sites and of authors who peddle false information in order to cause harm. Senator Jean Louis Masson then requested the Minister of Justice to tell him whether it would be possible to increase the criminal responsibilities of hosting providers, site operators, and authors of libelous content; the minister declined to do so, recalling the existing rules in the LCEN law.

On August 25, 2010, the Toronto Star reported that the Canadian "government is now conducting two investigations into federal employees who have taken to Misplaced Pages to express their opinion on federal policies and bitter political debates."

In 2010, Al Jazeera's Teymoor Nabili suggested that the article Cyrus Cylinder had been edited for political purposes by "an apparent tussle of opinions in the shadowy world of hard drives and 'independent' editors that comprise the Misplaced Pages industry." He suggested that after the Iranian presidential election, 2009 and the ensuing "anti-Iranian activities" a "strenuous attempt to portray the cylinder as nothing more than the propaganda tool of an aggressive invader" was visible. The edits following his analysis of the edits during 2009 and 2010, represented "a complete dismissal of the suggestion that the cylinder, or Cyrus' actions, represent concern for human rights or any kind of enlightened intent," in stark contrast to Cyrus' own reputation as documented in the Old Testament and the people of Babylon.

Commandeering or sanitizing articles

Articles of particular interest to an editor or group of editors are sometimes modified based on these editors' respective points of views. Some companies and organizations—such as Sony, Diebold, Nintendo, Dell, the United States' Central Intelligence Agency, and the Church of Scientology—as well as individuals, such as United States Congressional staffers, were all shown to have modified the Misplaced Pages pages about themselves in order to present a point of view that describes them positively; these organizations may have editors who revert negative changes as soon as these changes are submitted.

Editing for financial rewards

In January 2007 Rick Jelliffe stated in a story carried by CBS and IDG News Service that Microsoft had offered him compensation in exchange for his future editorial services on Misplaced Pages's articles related to OOXML (Office Open Extensible Markup Language). A Microsoft spokesperson, quoted by CBS, commented that "Microsoft and the writer, Rick Jelliffe, had not determined a price and no money had changed hands—but they had agreed that the company would not be allowed to review his writing before submission". Also quoted by CBS, Jimmy Wales expressed his disapproval of Microsoft's involvement: "We were very disappointed to hear that Microsoft was taking that approach".

Quality of the presentation

Quality of articles on U.S. history

In the essay, “Can History be Open Source?: Misplaced Pages and the Future of the Past” (2006), the academic historian Roy Rosenzweig criticized the encyclopedic content and writing style used in Misplaced Pages, for not distinguishing subjects that are important from subjects that are merely sensational. That Misplaced Pages is “surprisingly accurate in reporting names, dates, and events in U.S. history”, and that most of the factual errors he found “were small and inconsequential”, some of which “simply repeat widely held, but inaccurate, beliefs”, which are also repeated in the Microsoft Encarta encyclopedia and in the Encyclopædia Britannica; yet Rosenzweig’s major criticism is that:

“Good historical writing requires not just factual accuracy but also a command of the scholarly literature, persuasive analysis and interpretations, and clear and engaging prose. By those measures, American National Biography Online easily outdistances Misplaced Pages.”

Rosenzweig also criticized the “waffling—encouraged by the policy— means that it is hard to discern any overall interpretive stance in Misplaced Pages history ”, and quoted the historical conclusion of the biography of William Clarke Quantrill, a Confederate guerrilla in the United States Civil War, as an example of weasel-word waffling:

“Some historians . . . remember as an opportunistic, bloodthirsty outlaw, while other continue to view him as a daring soldier and local folk hero.”

In American National Biography Online, the historian James M. McPherson contrasted the content and writing style of Misplaced Pages's biography of United States President Abraham Lincoln to that of the U.S. Civil War article, and found that each entry was essentially accurate in covering the major episodes of President Lincoln’s life. The "richer contextualization" of McPherson's work, as well as "his artful use of quotations to capture Lincoln’s voice" and "his ability to convey a profound message in a handful of words," were contrasted with Misplaced Pages's history-article prose. The prose of the Misplaced Pages articles was "both verbose and dull" and thus difficult to read, because "the skill and confident judgment of a seasoned historian” are absent from the antiquarian writing style of Misplaced Pages, as opposed to the writing style used by professional historians in the American Heritage magazine. It was also mentioned that while Misplaced Pages usually provides many references, these are not the most accurate references.

Quality of medical articles

In the article "Misplaced Pages Cancer Information Accurate," a study of medical articles, Yaacov Lawrence of the Kimmel Cancer Center of Thomas Jefferson University found that the cancer entries were mostly accurate. However, Misplaced Pages's articles were written in college-level prose, as opposed to in the easier-to-understand ninth-grade-level prose found in the Physician Data Query (PDQ) of the National Cancer Institute. According to Lawrence, "Misplaced Pages’s lack of readability may reflect its varied origins and haphazard editing.”

In its 2007 article "Fact or Fiction? Misplaced Pages’s Variety of Contributors is Not Only a Strength," the magazine The Economist stated that the quality of the writing in Misplaced Pages articles usually indicates the quality of the editorial content: "Inelegant or ranting prose usually reflects muddled thoughts and incomplete information.”

The Wall Street Journal debate

In the September 12, 2006, edition of The Wall Street Journal, Jimmy Wales debated with Dale Hoiberg, editor-in-chief of Encyclopædia Britannica. Hoiberg focused on a need for expertise and control in an encyclopedia and cited Lewis Mumford that overwhelming information could "bring about a state of intellectual enervation and depletion hardly to be distinguished from massive ignorance." Wales emphasized Misplaced Pages's differences, and asserted that openness and transparency lead to quality. Hoiberg said that he "had neither the time nor space to respond to " and "could corral any number of links to articles alleging errors in Misplaced Pages", to which Wales responded: "No problem! Misplaced Pages to the rescue with a fine article", and included a link to the Misplaced Pages article about criticism of Misplaced Pages.

Systemic bias in coverage

Misplaced Pages has been accused of systemic bias, which is to say its general nature leads, without necessarily any conscious intention, to the propagation of various prejudices. Although many articles in newspapers have concentrated on minor factual errors in Misplaced Pages articles, there are also concerns about large-scale, presumably unintentional effects from the increasing influence and use of Misplaced Pages as a research tool at all levels. In an article in the Times Higher Education magazine (London) philosopher Martin Cohen describes Misplaced Pages as having "become a monopoly" with "all the prejudices and ignorance of its creators," which he calls a "youthful cab-driver's" perspective. Cohen concludes that "o control the reference sources that people use is to control the way people comprehend the world. Misplaced Pages may have a benign, even trivial face, but underneath may lie a more sinister and subtle threat to freedom of thought." That freedom is undermined by what he sees as what matters on Misplaced Pages, "not your sources but the 'support of the community'."

Researchers from Washington University developed a statistical model to measure systematic bias in the behavior of Misplaced Pages's users regarding controversial topics. The authors focused on behavioral changes of the encyclopedia's administrators after assuming the post, writing that systematic bias occurred after the fact.

Critics also point to the tendency to cover topics in a detail disproportionate to their importance. For example, Stephen Colbert once mockingly praised Misplaced Pages for having a longer entry on 'lightsabers' than it does on the 'printing press'. In an interview with The Guardian, Dale Hoiberg, the editor-in-chief of Encyclopædia Britannica, noted:

People write of things they're interested in, and so many subjects don't get covered; and news events get covered in great detail. In the past, the entry on Hurricane Frances was more than five times the length of that on Chinese art, and the entry on Coronation Street was twice as long as the article on Tony Blair.

This critical approach has been satirised as "Wikigroaning", a term coined by Jon Hendren of the website Something Awful. In the game, two articles (preferably with similar names) are compared: one about an acknowledged, serious, or classical subject and the other about a popular or current one. Defenders of a broad inclusion criteria have held that the encyclopedia's coverage of pop culture does not impose space constraints on the coverage of more serious subjects (see "Wiki is not paper"). As Ivor Tossell noted:

That Misplaced Pages is chock full of useless arcana (and did you know, by the way, that the article on "Debate" is shorter than the piece that weighs the relative merits of the 1978 and 2003 versions of Battlestar Galactica?) isn't a knock against it: Since it can grow infinitely, the silly articles aren't depriving the serious ones of space.

In 2014, supporters of holistic healing and energy psychology began a change.org petition asking for "true scientific discourse" on Misplaced Pages, complaining that "much of the information related to holistic approaches to healing is biased, misleading, out-of-date, or just plain wrong". In response, Jimmy Wales said that Misplaced Pages only covers works that are published in respectable scientific journals.

Notability of article topics

Misplaced Pages's notability guidelines, which are used by editors to determine if a subject merits its own article, and the application thereof, are the subject of much criticism. Nicholson Baker considers the notability standards arbitrary and essentially unsolvable:

There are quires, reams, bales of controversy over what constitutes notability in Misplaced Pages: nobody will ever sort it out.

Criticizing the "deletionists", Baker then writes:

Still, a lot of good work—verifiable, informative, brain-leapingly strange—is being cast out of this paperless, infinitely expandable accordion folder by people who have a narrow, almost grade-schoolish notion of what sort of curiosity an on-line encyclopedia will be able to satisfy in the years to come. It's harder to improve something that's already written, or to write something altogether new, especially now that so many of the World Book-sanctioned encyclopedic fruits are long plucked. There are some people on Misplaced Pages now who are just bullies, who take pleasure in wrecking and mocking peoples' work—even to the point of laughing at nonstandard "Engrish". They poke articles full of warnings and citation-needed notes and deletion prods till the topics go away.

Another criticism about the deletionists is: "The increasing difficulty of making a successful edit; the exclusion of casual users; slower growth—all are hallmarks of the deletionists approach."

Complaining that his own biography was on the verge of deletion for lack of notability, Timothy Noah argued that:

Misplaced Pages's notability policy resembles U.S. immigration policy before 9/11: stringent rules, spotty enforcement. To be notable, a Misplaced Pages topic must be "the subject of multiple, non-trivial published works from sources that are reliable and independent of the subject and of each other." Although I have written or been quoted in such works, I can't say I've ever been the subject of any. And wouldn't you know, some notability cop cruised past my bio and pulled me over. Unless I get notable in a hurry—win the Nobel Peace Prize? Prove I sired Anna Nicole Smith's baby daughter?—a "sysop" (volunteer techie) will wipe my Misplaced Pages page clean. It's straight out of Philip K. Dick.

In the same article, Noah mentions that the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Stacy Schiff was not considered notable enough for a Misplaced Pages entry before she wrote an extensive New Yorker article on Misplaced Pages itself.

A 2014 study found no correlation between characteristics of a given Misplaced Pages page about an academic and the academic's notability as determined by citation counts. The metrics of each Misplaced Pages page examined included length, number of links to the page from other articles, and number of edits made to the page. This study also found that Misplaced Pages did not cover notable ISI highly cited researchers properly.

Partisanship

U.S. commentators, mostly politically conservative ones, have suggested that a politically liberal viewpoint is predominant. Andrew Schlafly created Conservapedia because of his perception that Misplaced Pages contained a liberal bias. Conservapedia's editors have compiled a list of alleged examples of liberal bias in Misplaced Pages. In 2007, an article in The Christian Post criticised Misplaced Pages's coverage of intelligent design, saying that it was biased and hypocritical. Lawrence Solomon of the National Review considered the Misplaced Pages articles on subjects like global warming, intelligent design, and Roe v. Wade all to be slanted in favor of liberal views. In a September 2010 issue of the conservative weekly Human Events, Rowan Scarborough presented a critique of Misplaced Pages's coverage of American politicians prominent in the approaching midterm elections as evidence of systemic liberal bias. Scarborough compares the biographical articles of liberal and conservative opponents in Senate races in the Alaska Republican primary and the Delaware and Nevada general election, emphasizing the quantity of negative coverage of Tea Party-endorsed candidates. He also cites some criticism by Lawrence Solomon and quotes in full the lead section of Misplaced Pages's article on its rival Conservapedia as evidence of an underlying bias.

Jimmy Wales has said, "The Misplaced Pages community is very diverse, from liberal to conservative to libertarian and beyond. If averages mattered, and due to the nature of the wiki software (no voting) they almost certainly don't, I would say that the Misplaced Pages community is slightly more liberal than the U.S. population on average, because we are global and the international community of English speakers is slightly more liberal than the U.S. population. There are no data or surveys to back that." Shane Greenstein and Feng Zhu analyzed 2012 era Misplaced Pages articles on U.S. politics, going back a decade, and wrote a study arguing the more contributors there were to an article, the less biased the article would be, and that — based on a study of frequent collocations — fewer articles "leaned Democrat" than was the case in Misplaced Pages's early years. Sorin Adam Matei, a professor at Purdue University, said that, "For certain political topics, there's a central-left bias. There's also a slight, when it comes to more political topics, counter-cultural bias. It's not across the board, and it's not for all things."

American and corporate bias

In 2008, Tim Anderson, a senior lecturer in political economy at the University of Sydney, said that Misplaced Pages administrators display an American-focused bias in their interactions with editors and their determinations of which sources are appropriate for use on the site. Anderson was outraged after several of the sources he used in his edits to the Hugo Chávez article, including Venezuela Analysis and Z Magazine, were disallowed as "unusable". Anderson also described Misplaced Pages's neutral point of view policy to ZDNet Australia as "a facade" and that Misplaced Pages "hides behind a reliance on corporate media editorials".

Racial bias

Misplaced Pages has been criticized for having a systemic racial bias in its coverage, due to an under-representation of people of colour within its editor base. The President of Wikimedia D.C., James Hare, noted that "a lot of black history is left out" of Misplaced Pages, due to articles predominately being written by white editors. Articles that do exist on African topics are, according to some critics, largely edited by editors from Europe and North America and thus reflect their knowledge and consumption of media, which "tend to perpetuate a negative image" of Africa. Maira Liriano of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, has argued that the lack of information regarding black history on Misplaced Pages "makes it seem like it's not important." San Francisco Poet Laureate Alejandro Murguía has stressed how it is important for Latinos to be part of Misplaced Pages "because it is a major source of where people get their information."

Gender bias and sexism

Misplaced Pages has a longstanding controversy concerning gender bias and sexism. Gender bias on Misplaced Pages refers to the finding that between 84 and 91 percent of Misplaced Pages editors are male, which allegedly leads to systemic bias. Misplaced Pages has been criticized by some journalists and academics for lacking not only women contributors but also extensive and in-depth encyclopedic attention to many topics regarding gender. Sue Gardner, the former executive director of the foundation, said that increasing diversity was about making the encyclopedia "as good as it could be". Factors the article cited as possibly discouraging women from editing included the "obsessive fact-loving realm", associations with the "hard-driving hacker crowd", and the necessity to be "open to very difficult, high-conflict people, even misogynists." In 2011, the Wikimedia Foundation set a goal of increasing the proportion of female contributors to 25 percent by 2015. In August 2013, Gardner conceded defeat: "I didn't solve it. We didn't solve it. The Wikimedia Foundation didn't solve it. The solution won't come from the Wikimedia Foundation." In August 2014, Misplaced Pages co-founder Jimmy Wales acknowledged in a BBC interview the failure of Misplaced Pages to fix the gender gap and announced the Wikimedia Foundation's plans for "doubling down" on the issue. Wales said the Foundation would be open to more outreach and more software changes.

Writing in the Notices of the American Mathematical Society, Marie Vitulli states that "mathematicians have had a difficult time when writing biographies of women mathematicians," and she describes the aggressiveness of editors and administrators in deleting such articles.

Firearms-related articles

Misplaced Pages has been criticized for issues related to bias in firearms-related articles. According to critics, systematic bias arises from the tendency of the editors most active in maintaining firearms-related articles to also be gun enthusiasts, and firearms-related articles are dominated by technical information while issues of the social impact and regulation of firearms are relegated to separate articles. Communications was facilitated by a "WikiProject," called "WikiProject Firearms", an on-wiki group of editors with a common interest. The alleged pro-gun bias drew increased attention after the Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in Parkland, Florida in February, 2018. The Wikimedia Foundation denied the influence of campaigns.

Sexual content

Misplaced Pages has been criticized for allowing graphic sexual content such as images and videos of masturbation and ejaculation as well as photos from hardcore pornographic films found on its articles. Child protection campaigners say graphic sexual content appears on many Misplaced Pages entries, displayed without any warning or age verification.

The Misplaced Pages article Virgin Killer—a 1976 album from German heavy metal band Scorpions—features a picture of the album's original cover, which depicts a naked prepubescent girl. In December 2008, the Internet Watch Foundation, a nonprofit, nongovernment-affiliated organization, added the article to its blacklist, criticizing the inclusion of the picture as "distasteful". As a result, access to the article was blocked for four days by most Internet service providers in the United Kingdom. Seth Finkelstein writing for The Guardian argues that the debate over the album cover masks a structural lack of accountability on Misplaced Pages, in particular when it comes to sexual content. For example, the deletion by Misplaced Pages co-founder Jimmy Wales of images of lolicon versions of the character Wikipe-tan created a minor controversy on the topic. The deletion was taken as endorsement of the non-lolicon images of Wikipe-tan, which Wales later had to explicitly deny: "I don't like Wikipe-tan and never have." Finkelstein sees Misplaced Pages as composed of fiefdoms, which makes it difficult for the Misplaced Pages community to deal with such issues, and sometimes necessitates top-down intervention.

In April 2010, Larry Sanger, a co-founder of Misplaced Pages who had left the organization eight years previously, wrote a letter to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, outlining his concerns that two categories of images on Wikimedia Commons contained child pornography, and were in violation of United States federal obscenity law. Sanger also expressed concerns about access to the images on Misplaced Pages in schools. Sanger later said that it was probably not correct to call it "child pornography", which most people associate with images of real children, and that he should have said "depictions of child sexual abuse". Wikimedia Foundation spokesman Jay Walsh said that Misplaced Pages doesn't have "material we would deem to be illegal. If we did, we would remove it." Following the complaint by Larry Sanger, Jimmy Wales deleted many sexual images without consulting the community; some were reinstated following discussion. Critics, including Wikipediocracy, noticed that many of the sexual images deleted from Misplaced Pages since 2010 have reappeared.

Exposure to vandals

As an online encyclopedia which almost anyone can edit, Misplaced Pages has had problems with vandalism of articles, which range from blanking articles to inserting profanities, hoaxes, or nonsense. Misplaced Pages has a range of tools available to users and administrators in order to fight against vandalism, including blocking and banning of vandals and automated bots that detect and repair vandalism. Supporters of the project argue that the vast majority of vandalism on Misplaced Pages is reverted within a short time, and a study by Fernanda Viégas of the MIT Media Lab and Martin Wattenberg and Kushal Dave of IBM Research found that most vandal edits were reverted within around five minutes; however they state that "it is essentially impossible to find a crisp definition of vandalism". While most instances of page blanking or the addition of offensive material are soon reverted, less obvious vandalism, or vandalism to a little viewed article, has remained for longer periods.

A 2007 peer-reviewed study that measured the actual number of page views with "damaged" content, concluded:

42% of damage is repaired almost immediately, i.e., before it can confuse, offend, or mislead anyone. Nonetheless, there are still hundreds of millions of damaged views.

Privacy concerns

Most privacy concerns refer to cases of government or employer data gathering; or to computer or electronic monitoring; or to trading data between organizations. "The Internet has created conflicts between personal privacy, commercial interests and the interests of society at large" warn James Donnelly and Jenifer Haeckl. Balancing the rights of all concerned as technology alters the social landscape will not be easy. It "is not yet possible to anticipate the path of the common law or governmental regulation" regarding this problem.

The concern in the case of Misplaced Pages is the right of a private citizen to remain private; to remain a "private citizen" rather than a "public figure" in the eyes of the law. It is somewhat of a battle between the right to be anonymous in cyberspace and the right to be anonymous in real life ("meatspace"). Misplaced Pages Watch argues that "Misplaced Pages is a potential menace to anyone who values privacy" and that "a greater degree of accountability in the Misplaced Pages structure" would be "the very first step toward resolving the privacy problem." A particular problem occurs in the case of an individual who is relatively unimportant and for whom there exists a Misplaced Pages page against their wishes.

In 2005 Agence France-Presse quoted Daniel Brandt, the Misplaced Pages Watch owner, as saying that "the basic problem is that no one, neither the trustees of Wikimedia Foundation, nor the volunteers who are connected with Misplaced Pages, consider themselves responsible for the content."

In January 2006, a German court ordered the German Misplaced Pages shut down within Germany because it stated the full name of Boris Floricic, aka "Tron", a deceased hacker who was formerly with the Chaos Computer Club. More specifically, the court ordered that the URL within the German .de domain (http://www.wikipedia.de/) may no longer redirect to the encyclopedia's servers in Florida at http://de.wikipedia.org although German readers were still able to use the US-based URL directly, and there was virtually no loss of access on their part. The court order arose out of a lawsuit filed by Floricic's parents, demanding that their son's surname be removed from Misplaced Pages. On February 9, 2006, the injunction against Wikimedia Deutschland was overturned, with the court rejecting the notion that Tron's right to privacy or that of his parents were being violated.

Criticism of the community

Role of Jimmy Wales

The community of Misplaced Pages editors has been criticized for placing an irrational emphasis on Jimmy Wales as a person. Wales's role in personally determining the content of some articles has also been criticized as contrary to the independent spirit that Misplaced Pages supposedly has gained. In early 2007, Wales dismissed the criticism of the Misplaced Pages model: "I am unaware of any problems with the quality of discourse on the site. I don't know of any higher-quality discourse anywhere."

Conflict of interest cases

A Business Insider article wrote about a controversy in September 2012 where two Wikimedia Foundation employees were found to have been "running a PR business on the side and editing Misplaced Pages on behalf of their clients."

Unfair treatment of female contributors

Some female editors have stated that they have been harassed by male editors.

The English Misplaced Pages Arbitration Committee has been criticized as unfairly targeting female and feminist editors.

In an article for Slate, David Auerbach criticized the decisions made by the Arbitration Committee, in a December 2014 case centered around the site's Gender Gap Task Force. Auerbach was critical of the committee's decision to permanently ban a female editor involved in the case, while not banning her male "chief antagonists", stating "With the Arbitration Committee opting only to ban the one woman in the dispute despite her behavior being no worse than that of the men, it's hard not to see this as a setback to Misplaced Pages's efforts to rectify its massive gender gap."

In January 2015, The Guardian reported that the Arbitration Committee had banned five feminist editors from gender-related articles on a case related to the Gamergate controversy, while including quotes from a Misplaced Pages editor alleging unfair treatment. Other commentators, including from Gawker and ThinkProgress, provided additional analysis while sourcing from The Guardian's story. Reports in The Washington Post, Slate and Social Text described these articles as "flawed" or factually inaccurate, pointing out that the Arbitration case had not concluded as at the time of publishing; no editor had been banned. After the result was published, Gawker wrote that "ArbCom ruled to punish six editors who could be broadly classified as 'anti-Gamergate' and five who are 'pro-Gamergate'." All of the supposed "Five Horsemen" were among the editors punished, with one of them being the sole editor banned due to this case. An article called "ArbitrationGate" regarding this situation was created (and quickly deleted) on Misplaced Pages, while The Guardian later issued a correction to their article. The Committee and the Wikimedia Foundation issued press statements that the Gamergate case was in response to the atmosphere of the Gamergate article resembling a "battlefield" due to "various sides of the discussion violated community policies and guidelines on conduct", and that the Committee was fulfilling its role to "uphold a civil, constructive atmosphere" on Misplaced Pages. The Committee also wrote that it "does not rule on the content of articles, or make judgements on the personal views of parties to the case". Michael Mandiberg, writing in Social Text, remained unconvinced.

Lack of verifiable identities

Scandals involving administrators and arbitrators

David Boothroyd, a Misplaced Pages editor and a Labour Party (United Kingdom) member, created controversy in 2009, when Misplaced Pages Review contributor "Tarantino" discovered that he committed sockpuppeting, editing under the accounts "Dbiv", "Fys", and "Sam Blacketer", none of which acknowledged his real identity. After earning Administrator status with one account, then losing it for inappropriate use of the administrative tools, Boothroyd regained Administrator status with the Sam Blacketer sockpuppet account in April 2007. Later in 2007, Boothroyd's Sam Blacketer account became part of the English Misplaced Pages's Arbitration Committee. Under the Sam Blacketer account, Boothroyd edited many articles related to United Kingdom politics, including that of rival Conservative Party leader David Cameron. Boothroyd then resigned as an administrator and as an arbitrator.

Essjay controversy

In July 2006 The New Yorker ran a feature by Stacy Schiff about "a highly credentialed Misplaced Pages editor". The initial version of the article included an interview with a Misplaced Pages administrator using the pseudonym Essjay, who described himself as a tenured professor of theology. Essjay's Misplaced Pages user page, now removed, said the following:

I am a tenured professor of theology at a private university in the eastern United States; I teach both undergraduate and graduate theology. I have been asked repeatedly to reveal the name of the institution, however, I decline to do so; I am unsure of the consequences of such an action, and believe it to be in my best interests to remain anonymous.

Essjay also stated that he held four academic degrees: Bachelor of Arts in Religious Studies (B.A.), Master of Arts in Religion (M.A.R.), Doctorate of Philosophy in Theology (Ph.D.), and Doctorate in Canon Law (JCD). Essjay specialized in editing articles about religion on Misplaced Pages, including subjects such as "the penitential rite, transubstantiation, the papal tiara"; on one occasion he was called in to give some "expert testimony" on the status of Mary in the Roman Catholic Church. In January 2007, Essjay was hired as a manager with Wikia, a wiki-hosting service founded by Wales and Angela Beesley. In February, Wales appointed Essjay as a member of the Misplaced Pages Arbitration Committee, a group with powers to issue binding rulings in disputes relating to Misplaced Pages.

In late February 2007 The New Yorker added an editorial note to its article on Misplaced Pages stating that it had learned that Essjay was Ryan Jordan, a 24-year-old college dropout from Kentucky with no advanced degrees and no teaching experience. Initially Jimmy Wales commented on the issue of Essjay's identity: "I regard it as a pseudonym and I don't really have a problem with it." Larry Sanger, co-founder of Misplaced Pages, responded to Wales on his Citizendium blog by calling Wales' initial reaction "utterly breathtaking, and ultimately tragic." Sanger said the controversy "reflects directly on the judgment and values of the management of Misplaced Pages."

Wales later issued a new statement saying he had not previously understood that "EssJay used his false credentials in content disputes." He added: "I have asked EssJay to resign his positions of trust within the Misplaced Pages community." Sanger responded the next day: "It seems Jimmy finds nothing wrong, nothing trust-violating, with the act itself of openly and falsely touting many advanced degrees on Misplaced Pages. But there most obviously is something wrong with it, and it's just as disturbing for Misplaced Pages's head to fail to see anything wrong with it."

On March 4, Essjay wrote on his user page that he was leaving Misplaced Pages, and he also resigned his position with Wikia. A subsequent article in The Courier-Journal (Louisville) suggested that the new résumé he had posted at his Wikia page was exaggerated. The March 19, 2007 issue of The New Yorker published a formal apology by Wales to the magazine and Stacy Schiff for Essjay's false statements.

Discussing the incident, the New York Times noted that the Misplaced Pages community had responded to the affair with "the fury of the crowd", and observed:

The Essjay episode underlines some of the perils of collaborative efforts like Misplaced Pages that rely on many contributors acting in good faith, often anonymously and through self-designated user names. But it also shows how the transparency of the Misplaced Pages process—all editing of entries is marked and saved—allows readers to react to suspected fraud.

The Essjay incident received extensive media coverage, including a national United States television broadcast on ABC's World News with Charles Gibson and the March 7, 2007, Associated Press story. The controversy has led to a proposal that users who say that they possess academic qualifications should have to provide evidence before citing them in Misplaced Pages content disputes. The proposal was not accepted.

Anonymity

Misplaced Pages has been criticised for allowing editors to contribute anonymously (without a registered account and using an auto-generated IP-labeled account) or pseudonymously (using a registered account), with critics saying that this leads to a lack of accountability. This also sometimes leads to uncivil conduct in debates between Wikipedians. For privacy reasons, Misplaced Pages even forbids editors to reveal information about an anonymous editor on Misplaced Pages.

Editorial process

Level of debate, edit wars and harassment

The standard of debate on Misplaced Pages has been called into question by persons who have noted that contributors can make a long list of salient points and pull in a wide range of empirical observations to back up their arguments, only to have them ignored completely on the site. An academic study of Misplaced Pages articles found that the level of debate among Misplaced Pages editors on controversial topics often degenerated into counterproductive squabbling:

For uncontroversial, "stable" topics self-selection also ensures that members of editorial groups are substantially well-aligned with each other in their interests, backgrounds, and overall understanding of the topics ... For controversial topics, on the other hand, self-selection may produce a strongly misaligned editorial group. It can lead to conflicts among the editorial group members, continuous edit wars, and may require the use of formal work coordination and control mechanisms. These may include intervention by administrators who enact dispute review and mediation processes, completely disallow or limit and coordinate the types and sources of edits.

In 2008, a team from the Palo Alto Research Center found that for editors that make between two and nine edits a month, the percentage of their edits being reverted had gone from 5% in 2004 to about 15%, and people who only make one edit a month were being reverted at a 25% rate. According to The Economist magazine (2008), "The behaviour of Misplaced Pages's self-appointed deletionist guardians, who excise anything that does not meet their standards, justifying their actions with a blizzard of acronyms, is now known as "wiki-lawyering"." In regards to the decline in the number of Misplaced Pages editors since the 2007 policy changes, another study stated this was partly down to the way "in which newcomers are rudely greeted by automated quality control systems and are overwhelmed by the complexity of the rule system."

Another complaint about Misplaced Pages focuses on the efforts of contributors with idiosyncratic beliefs, who push their point of view in an effort to dominate articles, especially controversial ones. This sometimes results in revert wars and pages being locked down. In response, an Arbitration Committee has been formed on the English Misplaced Pages that deals with the worst alleged offenders—though a conflict resolution strategy is actively encouraged before going to this extent. Also, to stop the continuous reverting of pages, Jimmy Wales introduced a "three-revert rule", whereby those users who reverse the effect of others' contributions to one article more than three times in a 24-hour period may be blocked.

In a 2008 article in The Brooklyn Rail, Misplaced Pages contributor David Shankbone contended that he had been harassed and stalked because of his work on Misplaced Pages, had received no support from the authorities or the Wikimedia Foundation, and only mixed support from the Misplaced Pages community. Shankbone wrote, "If you become a target on Misplaced Pages, do not expect a supportive community."

David Auerbach, writing in Slate magazine, said:

I am not exaggerating when I say it is the closest thing to Kafka’s The Trial I have ever witnessed, with editors and administrators giving conflicting and confusing advice, complaints getting "boomeranged" onto complainants who then face disciplinary action for complaining, and very little consistency in the standards applied. In my short time there, I repeatedly observed editors lawyering an issue with acronyms, only to turn around and declare "Ignore all rules!" when faced with the same rules used against them. (...) The problem instead stems from the fact that administrators and longtime editors have developed a fortress mentality in which they see new editors as dangerous intruders who will wreck their beautiful encyclopedia, and thus antagonize and even persecute them.

Consensus and the "hive mind"

Oliver Kamm, in an article for The Times, said that Misplaced Pages's reliance on consensus in forming its content was dubious:

Misplaced Pages seeks not truth but consensus, and like an interminable political meeting the end result will be dominated by the loudest and most persistent voices.

Wikimedia advisor Benjamin Mako Hill also talked about Misplaced Pages's disproportional representation of viewpoints, saying:

In Misplaced Pages, debates can be won by stamina. If you care more and argue longer, you will tend to get your way. The result, very often, is that individuals and organizations with a very strong interest in having Misplaced Pages say a particular thing tend to win out over other editors who just want the encyclopedia to be solid, neutral, and reliable. These less-committed editors simply have less at stake and their attention is more distributed.

Wikimedia steward Dariusz Jemielniak says:

Tiring out one's opponent is a common strategy among experienced Wikipedians I have resorted to it many times.

In his article, "Digital Maoism: The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism" (first published online by Edge: The Third Culture, May 30, 2006), computer scientist and digital theorist Jaron Lanier describes Misplaced Pages as a "hive mind" that is "for the most part stupid and boring", and asks, rhetorically, "why pay attention to it?" His thesis says:

The problem is in the way the Misplaced Pages has come to be regarded and used; how it's been elevated to such importance so quickly. And that is part of the larger pattern of the appeal of a new online collectivism that is nothing less than a resurgence of the idea that the collective is all-wise, that it is desirable to have influence concentrated in a bottleneck that can channel the collective with the most verity and force. This is different from representative democracy, or meritocracy. This idea has had dreadful consequences when thrust upon us from the extreme Right or the extreme Left in various historical periods. The fact that it's now being re-introduced today by prominent technologists and futurists, people who in many cases I know and like, doesn't make it any less dangerous.

Lanier also says the current economic trend is to reward entities that aggregate information, rather than those that actually generate content. In the absence of "new business models", the popular demand for content will be sated by mediocrity, thus reducing or even eliminating any monetary incentives for the production of new knowledge.

Lanier's opinions produced some strong disagreement. Internet consultant Clay Shirky noted that Misplaced Pages has many internal controls in place and is not a mere mass of unintelligent collective effort:

Neither proponents nor detractors of hive mind rhetoric have much interesting to say about Misplaced Pages itself, because both groups ignore the details... Misplaced Pages is best viewed as an engaged community that uses a large and growing number of regulatory mechanisms to manage a huge set of proposed edits... To take the specific case of Misplaced Pages, the Seigenthaler/Kennedy debacle catalyzed both soul-searching and new controls to address the problems exposed, and the controls included, inter alia, a greater focus on individual responsibility, the very factor "Digital Maoism" denies is at work.

Excessive rule-making

Various figures involved with the Wikimedia Foundation have argued that Misplaced Pages's increasingly complex policies and guidelines are driving away new contributors to the site. Former chair Kat Walsh has criticized the project in recent years, saying, "It was easier when I joined in 2004... Everything was a little less complicated.... It's harder and harder for new people to adjust." Top Misplaced Pages administrator Oliver Moran also views "policy creep" as the major barrier, writing that "the loose collective running the site today, estimated to be 90 percent male, operates a crushing bureaucracy with an often abrasive atmosphere that deters newcomers who might increase participation in Misplaced Pages and broaden its coverage".

In his 2014 book, Common Knowledge?: An Ethnography of Misplaced Pages, Jemielniak, the Wikimedia steward, states similarly that the sheer complexity of the rules and laws governing content and editor behavior has become excessive and creates a learning burden for new editors. In a 2013 study, Aaron Halfaker of the University of Minnesota concluded the same thing. Jemielniak suggests actively abridging and rewriting the rules and laws to fall within a fixed and reasonable limit of size and complexity to remedy their excessive complexity and size.

Social stratification

Despite the perception that the Misplaced Pages process is democratic, "a small number of people are running the show", including administrators, bureaucrats, stewards, checkusers, mediators, arbitrators, and oversighters. In an article on Misplaced Pages conflicts in 2007, The Guardian discussed "a backlash among some editors, who say that blocking users compromises the supposedly open nature of the project and the imbalance of power between users and administrators may even be a reason some users choose to vandalize in the first place" based on the experiences of one editor who became a vandal after his edits were reverted and he was blocked for edit warring.

See also

• Censorship of Misplaced Pages
• Deletionism and inclusionism in Misplaced Pages
• History of Misplaced Pages
• List of Misplaced Pages controversies
• Reliability of Misplaced Pages
• Predictions of Misplaced Pages's end
• Misplaced Pages:Criticisms
• Misplaced Pages:Press coverage
• Misplaced Pages:Replies to common objections
• Misplaced Pages:Why Misplaced Pages is not so great

References

1. ^ Black, Edwin (April 19, 2010). "Misplaced Pages—The Dumbing Down of World Knowledge". History News Network. Retrieved October 21, 2014.
2. ^ Kamm, Oliver. "Wisdom? More like dumbness of the crowds". The Times. Archived from the original on August 14, 2011. (Author's own copy Archived September 5, 2016, at the Wayback Machine)
3. ^ Messer-Kruse, Timothy (February 12, 2012). "The 'Undue Weight' of Truth on Misplaced Pages". The Chronicle of Higher Education. Retrieved August 30, 2015.
4. ^ Colón-Aguirre, Monica; Fleming-May, Rachel A. (October 11, 2012). "'You Just Type in What You Are Looking For': Undergraduates' Use of Library Resources vs. Misplaced Pages" (pdf). The Journal of Academic Librarianship. p. 392. Retrieved March 27, 2014.
5. ^ "Misplaced Pages Experience Sparks National Debate". The BG News. Bowling Green State University. February 27, 2012. Retrieved March 27, 2014.
6. ^ Jemielniak, Dariusz (2014). Common Knowledge?: An Ethnography of Misplaced Pages. Stanford University Press.
7. ^ Jemielniak, Dariusz (June 22, 2014). "The Unbearable Bureaucracy of Misplaced Pages". Slate.
8. ^ Vergano, Dan (January 3, 2013). "Study: Misplaced Pages is driving away newcomers". USA Today. Retrieved November 19, 2014.
9. ^ Jemielniak, Dariusz (June 22, 2014). "The Unbearable Bureaucracy of Misplaced Pages: the legalistic atmosphere is making it impossible to attract and keep the new editors the site needs". Slate. Retrieved September 18, 2016.
10. Petrilli, Michael J. "Misplaced Pages or Wickedpedia?". Education Next. Retrieved October 22, 2014.
11. "Citing Electronic Sources". Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Retrieved October 21, 2014.
12. ^ Waldman, Simon (October 26, 2004). "Who knows?". The Guardian. London. Retrieved December 30, 2005.
13. Vallely, Paul (October 10, 2006). "The Big Question: Do we Need a More Reliable Online Encyclopedia than Misplaced Pages?". The Independent. London. Archived from the original on October 24, 2006. Retrieved October 18, 2006. {{cite news}}: Unknown parameter |deadurl= ignored (|url-status= suggested) (help)
14. Schwartz, Zach (November 11, 2015). "Misplaced Pages's Co-Founder Is Misplaced Pages's Most Outspoken Critic". Vice.
15. "Research:Wikimedia Summer of Research 2011/Newbie teaching strategy trends". Meta.wikimedia.org. June 3, 2011. Retrieved December 6, 2013.
16. ^ Giles, Jim (December 15, 2005). "Internet Encyclopaedias Go Head to Head". Nature. 438 (7070): 900–901. Bibcode:2005Natur.438..900G. doi:10.1038/438900a. PMID 16355180.
17. "Misplaced Pages head to head with Britannica". ABC Science. Agence France-Presse (AFP). December 15, 2005.
18. "Supplementary Information to Accompany Nature news article 'Internet Encyclopaedias Go Head to Head'" (doc). Nature. 438: 900–901. December 22, 2005. Retrieved August 30, 2015.
19. ^ "Fatally Flawed: Refuting the Recent Study on Encyclopaedic Accuracy by the journal Nature" (PDF). Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. March 2006. Retrieved June 30, 2009.
20. "Britannica attacks". Nature. 440 (7084): 582. March 30, 2006. Bibcode:2006Natur.440R.582.. doi:10.1038/440582b. PMID 16572128. Retrieved July 14, 2006.
21. "Misplaced Pages study 'fatally flawed'". BBC News. March 24, 2006.
22. "Encyclopædia Britannica and Nature: A Response" (PDF). Press release. March 23, 2006.
23. John Seigenthaler (November 29, 2005). "A false Misplaced Pages 'biography'". USA Today.
24. Seelye, Katharine Q. (December 3, 2005). "Snared in the Web of a Misplaced Pages Liar". The New York Times.
25. "Mistakes and hoaxes on-line". Australian Broadcasting Corporation. April 15, 2006. Retrieved April 28, 2007.
26. Dedman, Bill (March 3, 2007). "Reading Hillary Clinton's hidden thesis". MSNBC. Retrieved March 17, 2007.
27. "Hillary Rodham Clinton [archived version]". Misplaced Pages.org. July 9, 2005. Retrieved March 17, 2007.
28. "Hillary Rodham Clinton [archived version]". Misplaced Pages.org. March 2, 2007. Retrieved March 17, 2007.
29. Paige, Cara (April 11, 2006). "Exclusive: Meet the Real Sir Walter Mitty". Daily Record. Archived from the original on September 30, 2007. Retrieved November 24, 2007. {{cite web}}: Unknown parameter |deadurl= ignored (|url-status= suggested) (help)
30. Weingarten, Gene (March 16, 2007). "A wickedly fun test of Misplaced Pages". The News & Observer. Archived from the original on March 20, 2007. Retrieved April 8, 2006.
31. "Misplaced Pages:Vandalism [archived version]". Misplaced Pages.org. November 24, 2009.
32. Mark Glaser (April 17, 2006). "Misplaced Pages Bias: Is There a Neutral View on George W. Bush?". PBS. Retrieved October 27, 2007. The search for a 'neutral point of view' mirrors the efforts of journalists to be objective, to show both sides without taking sides and remaining unbiased. But maybe this is impossible and unattainable, and perhaps misguided. Because if you open it up for anyone to edit, you're asking for anything but neutrality.
33. Verkaik, Robert (August 18, 2007). "Misplaced Pages and the art of censorship". The Independent. London.
34. Blakely, Rhys (August 15, 2007). "Exposed: guess who has been polishing their Misplaced Pages entries?". The Times. London. Retrieved August 15, 2007.
35. Fildes, Jonathan (August 15, 2007). "Misplaced Pages 'shows CIA page edits'". BBC. Retrieved August 15, 2007.
36. Metz, Cade (December 18, 2007). "Truth, anonymity and the Misplaced Pages Way: Why it's broke and how it can be fixed". The Register.
37. Schiff, Stacy (July 31, 2006). "Know It All". The New Yorker. Retrieved March 12, 2014.
38. Lehmann, Evan (January 27, 2006). "Rewriting history under the dome". Lowell Sun. Archived from the original on February 2, 2006. Retrieved February 2, 2014. {{cite web}}: Unknown parameter |deadurl= ignored (|url-status= suggested) (help)
39. "Senator staffers spam Misplaced Pages". January 30, 2006. Retrieved September 13, 2006.
40. Bachelet, Pablo (May 3, 2006). "War of Words: Website Can't Define Cuba". The Miami Herald. Archived from the original on August 30, 2015.
41. Sanchez, Matt (May 14, 2008). "Wiki-Whacked by Political Bias". Retrieved July 8, 2008.
42. Delay, Larry (August 3, 2006). "A Pernicious Model for Control of the World Wide Web: The Cuba Case" (PDF). Association for the Study of the Cuban Economy (ASCE). Archived from the original (PDF) on September 10, 2008. Retrieved July 8, 2008. {{cite web}}: Unknown parameter |deadurl= ignored (|url-status= suggested) (help)
43. ^ McElroy, Damien (May 8, 2008). "Israeli battles rage on Misplaced Pages". The Daily Telegraph. London: Telegraph Media Group Limited. Retrieved May 8, 2008.
44. "Letter in Harper's Magazine About Misplaced Pages Issues". CAMERA. August 14, 2008. Retrieved March 31, 2010.
45. Liphshiz, Cnaan (December 25, 2007). "Your Wiki Entry Counts". Haaretz. Retrieved August 30, 2015.
46. Rettig Gur, Haviv (May 16, 2010). "Israeli-Palestinian conflict rages on Misplaced Pages". The Jerusalem Post. Retrieved December 6, 2013.
47. Cohen, Noam (August 31, 2008). "Don't Like Palin's Misplaced Pages Story? Change It". The New York Times.
48. "Sarah Palins Misplaced Pages entry glossed over by mystery user hrs. before VP announcement". Thaindian News. September 2, 2008.
49. "Wikipédia en butte à une nouvelle affaire de calomnie". Vnunet.fr. November 28, 2007. Archived from the original on May 16, 2008. {{cite web}}: Unknown parameter |deadurl= ignored (|url-status= suggested) (help)
50. "Responsabilité pénale des intervenants sur Internet : hébergeur du site, responsable du site et auteur d'allégations diffamatoires". Official website of the French Sénat. February 14, 2008. Retrieved August 30, 2015. {{cite web}}: Italic or bold markup not allowed in: |publisher= (help)
51. Woods, Allan (August 25, 2010). "Ottawa investigating Misplaced Pages edits". Toronto Star. Retrieved August 26, 2010.
52. Nabili, Teymoor (September 11, 2010). "The Cyrus Cylinder, Misplaced Pages and Iran conspiracies". blogs.alJazeera.net. Retrieved November 19, 2013.
53. Jackson, Ron (August 4, 2009). "Open Season on Domainers and Domaining — Overtly Biased L.A. Times Article Leads Latest Assault on Objectivity and Accuracy". Retrieved August 30, 2015.
54. "Umbria Blogosphere Analysis — Misplaced Pages and Corporate Blogging" (PDF). J.D. Power Web Intelligence. August 24, 2007. "Organizations like Sony, Diebold, Nintendo, Dell, the CIA and the Church of Scientology were all shown to have sanitized pages about themselves."
55. MacDonald, Marc (February 1, 2008). "Misplaced Pages Continues To Sanitize Bush Content". Retrieved August 30, 2015.
56. Grace, Francie; Bergstein, Brian (January 24, 2007). "Microsoft Violates Misplaced Pages's Sacred Rule". CBS News. Associated Press. Retrieved September 3, 2008.
57. Gohring, Nancy (January 23, 2007). "Microsoft said to offer payment for Misplaced Pages edits". CIO magazine. IDG News Service. Retrieved August 30, 2015.
58. Gohring, Nancy (January 24, 2007). "Microsoft's step into Misplaced Pages prompts debate". Computerworld. IDG News Service. Archived from the original on May 17, 2009. Retrieved August 30, 2015. {{cite web}}: Unknown parameter |deadurl= ignored (|url-status= suggested) (help)
59. ^ Rosenzweig, Roy (June 2006). "Can History be Open Source? Misplaced Pages and the Future of the Past". The Journal of American History. 93 (1): pp. 117–146. doi:10.2307/4486062. Archived from the original on April 25, 2010. Retrieved August 11, 2006. {{cite journal}}: |pages= has extra text (help); Unknown parameter |deadurl= ignored (|url-status= suggested) (help) (Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media)
60. "Misplaced Pages cancer information accurate". United Press International. June 4, 2010. Retrieved December 31, 2010.
61. "Fact or fiction? Misplaced Pages's Variety of Contributors is Not Only a Strength". The Economist. March 10, 2007. Retrieved December 31, 2010.
62. ^ "Will Misplaced Pages Mean the End Of Traditional Encyclopedias?". The Wall Street Journal. September 12, 2006. Archived from the original on January 15, 2016. Retrieved September 13, 2006. {{cite news}}: Unknown parameter |deadurl= ignored (|url-status= suggested) (help)
63. ^ Cohen, Martin. "Encyclopaedia Idiotica". Times Higher Education. Retrieved August 30, 2015.
64. Das, Sanmay; Allen, Lavoie; Malik, Magdon-Ismail (November 1, 2013). "Manipulation among the arbiters of collective intelligence: How Misplaced Pages administrators mold public opinion". CIKM '13 Proceedings of the 22nd ACM international conference on Information & Knowledge Management. San Francisco, California, US: ACM. pp. 1097–1106. doi:10.1145/2505515.2505566. ISBN 978-1-4503-2263-8.
65. Stephen Colbert. The Colbert Report episode 3109. August 21, 2007.
66. Brophy-Warren, Jamin. "Oh, that John Locke". The Wall Street Journal. No. 2007-06-16. p. 3. Retrieved August 30, 2015.
67. Hendren, Johnny "DocEvil" (June 5, 2007). "The Art of Wikigroaning". Something Awful. Retrieved June 17, 2007.
68. Brown, Andrew (June 14, 2007). "No amount of collaboration will make the sun orbit the Earth". The Guardian. London. Retrieved March 27, 2010.
69. Tossell, Ivor (June 15, 2007). "Duality of Misplaced Pages". The Globe and Mail. Retrieved June 20, 2007.
70. Sifferlin, Alexandra (March 25, 2014). "Misplaced Pages Founder Sticks It To 'Lunatic' Holistic Healers". Time. Retrieved October 22, 2014.
71. Newman, Lily Hay (March 27, 2014). "Jimmy Wales Gets Real, and Sassy, About Misplaced Pages's Holistic Healing Coverage". Slate. Retrieved October 22, 2014.
72. ^ Kirby, J.P. (October 20, 2007). "The Problem with Misplaced Pages". J.P.'s Random Ramblings . Archived from the original on August 9, 2011. {{cite web}}: Unknown parameter |deadurl= ignored (|url-status= suggested) (help)
73. Baker, Nicholson (March 20, 2008). "The Charms of Misplaced Pages". The New York Review of Books. 55 (4). Retrieved August 30, 2015.
74. Johnson, Bobbie (August 12, 2009). "Misplaced Pages approaches its limits". The Guardian. Retrieved August 30, 2015.
75. Noah, Timothy (February 24, 2007). "Evicted from Misplaced Pages". Slate. Retrieved March 31, 2010.
76. Samoilenko, Anna; Yasseri, Taha (January 22, 2014). "The distorted mirror of Misplaced Pages: a quantitative analysis of Misplaced Pages coverage of academics". EPJ Data Science. 3 (1). doi:10.1140/epjds20.
77. Johnson, Bobbie (March 1, 2007). "Conservapedia — the US religious right's answer to Misplaced Pages". The Guardian. London. Retrieved March 27, 2010.
78. Turner, Adam (March 5, 2007). "Conservapedia aims to set Misplaced Pages right". IT Wire. Retrieved May 12, 2008.
79. Huntington, Doug (May 9, 2007). "'Design' Proponents Accuse Misplaced Pages of Bias, Hypocrisy". The Christian Post. Retrieved August 9, 2007.
80. Solomon, Lawrence (July 8, 2008). "Wikipropaganda On Global Warming". National Review. CBS News. Retrieved July 20, 2008.
81. Scarborough, Rowan (September 27, 2010). "Whacks the Right". Human Events. Retrieved October 3, 2010.
82. Glaser, Mark (April 21, 2006). "Email Debate: Wales Discusses Political Bias on Misplaced Pages". PBS Mediashift. Retrieved August 30, 2015.
83. Greenstein, Shane; Zhu, Feng (March 1, 2016). Do Experts or Collective Intelligence Write with More Bias? Evidence from Encyclopædia Britannica and Misplaced Pages — Working Paper 15-023 (PDF). Cambridge, MA, USA: Harvard Business School. Retrieved October 31, 2016.
84. Greenstein, Shane; Zhu, Feng (December 1, 2012). "Is Misplaced Pages Biased? Verifying the "neutral point of view"". Retrieved October 31, 2016.
85. Khimm, Suzy (June 18, 2012). "Study: Misplaced Pages perpetuates political bias". The Washington Post. Retrieved May 29, 2013.
86. Matsakis, Louise (March 16, 2018). "Don't Ask Misplaced Pages to Cure the Internet". Wired. Retrieved March 17, 2018.
87. Browne, Marcus (February 12, 2008). "Misplaced Pages accused of 'US-centric bias'". ZDNet Australia. Retrieved August 30, 2015.
88. Melamed, Samantha. "Edit-athon aims to put left-out black artists into Misplaced Pages". Philadelphia Daily News. Retrieved April 13, 2015.
89. Smith, Jada. "Howard University Fills in Misplaced Pages's Gaps in Black History". The New York Times. Retrieved April 13, 2015.
90. Goko, Colleen. "Drive launched to 'Africanise' Misplaced Pages". Business Day. South Africa. Retrieved April 13, 2015.
91. Cassano, Jay. "Black History Matters, So Why Is Misplaced Pages Missing So Much Of It?". Fast Company. Retrieved April 13, 2015. {{cite web}}: Italic or bold markup not allowed in: |website= (help)
92. Reynosa, Peter. "Why Don't More Latinos Contribute To Misplaced Pages?". El Tecolote. Retrieved December 5, 2015.
93. Gardner, Sue (February 19, 2011). "Nine Reasons Why Women Don't Edit Misplaced Pages, In Their Own Words" (blog). suegardner.org.
94. ^ Cassell, Justine (February 4, 2011). "Editing Wars Behind the Scenes". The New York Times.
95. ^ Cohen, Noam (January 30, 2011). "Define Gender Gap? Look Up Misplaced Pages's Contributor List". The New York Times. Retrieved January 31, 2011.
96. Gleick, James (April 29, 2013). "Misplaced Pages's Women Problem". The New York Review of Books. Retrieved November 19, 2013.
97. Filipacchi, Amanda (April 24, 2013). "Misplaced Pages's Sexism Toward Women Novelists". The New York Times. Retrieved August 30, 2015.
98. Dunn, Gaby (May 1, 2013). "Does Sexism Lurk?". DailyDot.com. Retrieved November 19, 2013.
99. Zandt, Deanna (April 26, 2013). "Yes, Misplaced Pages Is Sexist – That's Why It Needs You". Forbes. Retrieved November 19, 2013.
100. Andrew Lih (June 20, 2015). "Can Misplaced Pages Survive?". The New York Times. Washington. Retrieved June 21, 2015. ...the considerable and often-noted gender gap among Misplaced Pages editors; in 2011, less than 15 percent were women.
101. Statistics based on Wikimedia Foundation Misplaced Pages editor surveys 2011 (Nov. 2010-April 2011) and November 2011 Archived June 5, 2016, at the Wayback Machine (April - October 2011)
102. Cohen, Noam (January 30, 2011). "Define Gender Gap? Look Up Misplaced Pages's Contributor List". The New York Times. Retrieved January 31, 2011.
103. Huang, Keira (August 11, 2013). "Misplaced Pages fails to bridge gender gap". South China Morning Post.
104. Misplaced Pages 'completely failed' to fix gender imbalance Archived December 29, 2016, at the Wayback Machine, BBC interview with Jimmy Wales, August 8, 2014; starting at 45 seconds.
105. Template:Cite article
106. Parakilas, Jacob (March 18, 2014). "Misplaced Pages, neutrality and guns". Action on Armed Violence. Archived from the original on September 14, 2017. Retrieved March 7, 2018. But if a reader had started on the page for either of Breivik's guns, the Ruger or the Glock, they would not know this. That reader would find a great deal of technical information about the weapons in question – their weights, lengths, cartridges, rates of fire, magazine capacities, muzzle velocities – and detailed descriptions of their designs, all illustrated with abundant photographs and diagrams.
107. Walther, Matthew (November 7, 2017). "The adolescent cult of the AR-15". The Week. Retrieved March 23, 2018. What do the perpetrators of the massacres at Sandy Hook, at Aurora, at Orlando, and at Sutherland Springs have in common? They were all men under 30 and they all used versions of the same kind of firearm, the AR-15, the semi-automatic version of the military's M-16 and the bestselling gun in America. It might be difficult to make this connection because as I write this, the section on the use of AR-15s in mass killings has been deleted from Misplaced Pages...
108. Brandom, Russell (March 6, 2018). "How gun buffs took over Misplaced Pages's AR-15 page; After Parkland, gun control information was strangely hard to find". The Verge. Vox Media. Retrieved March 9, 2018. But on Misplaced Pages, as in the real world, the users with the deepest technical knowledge of firearms are also the most fervent gun owners and the most hostile to gun control. For critics, that's led to a persistent pro-gun bias on the web's leading source of neutral information at a time when the gun control debate is more heated than ever.
109. "Pro-gun Misplaced Pages users spark fierce editing war; Editors against tighter controls on firearms have been purging information that shows weapons such as AR-15s in a bad light". Sky News. March 7, 2018. Retrieved March 9, 2018. The bias in the articles was not explicit, but structural. The project did not insert false information into the articles, but instead purged information that showed the weapons in a bad light - dismissing it as "off topic".
110. Brennan, David (March 7, 2018). "Pro-gun Group Edited AR-15 Misplaced Pages Page to Hide Mass Shootings". Newsweek. Retrieved March 9, 2018. A group of pro-gun Misplaced Pages editors tried to hide the true number of mass shootings associated with the AR-15 rifle in the aftermath of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in Parkland, Florida.
111. Einenkel, Walter (March 8, 2018). "A gun group has been editing Misplaced Pages's firearms pages to sanitize mass shootings, for months". Yahoo! News. Newsweek. Retrieved March 9, 2018. The Wikimedia Foundation has defended itself and Misplaced Pages from allegations of being host to these kinds of influence campaigns, arguing that the encyclopaedia is constantly being updated and improved.
112. Benjakob, Omer (March 18, 2018). "Gun Enthusiasts Are Waging a War of Attrition on Misplaced Pages, and It Looks Like They're Winning". Haaretz. Retrieved March 23, 2018. According to The Verge report and an independent follow-up by Haaretz, the top editors of the Colt page are pro-gun enthusiasts who skewed the information presented on it and are also involved in editing other articles on Misplaced Pages – for example, the much more general article, titled AR 15 – to push their worldview...Through countless exhausting debates, this small group of pro-gun Misplaced Pages editors – linked together through Misplaced Pages's Firearms project (or "WikiProject: Firearms," mentioned below) – has managed to control almost completely the discourse around the rifle, predominantly by making sure any potentially negative details about it be excluded from the original Colt AR-15 article.
113. "Misplaced Pages attacked over porn pages". Livenews.com.au. Archived from the original on September 17, 2008. Retrieved March 31, 2010. {{cite web}}: Unknown parameter |deadurl= ignored (|url-status= suggested) (help)
114. Raphael, JR (December 10, 2008). "Misplaced Pages Censorship Sparks Free Speech Debate". The Washington Post. Retrieved May 10, 2009.
115. ^ Seth Finkelstein (December 18, 2008), Sting in the Scorpions tale is the exposure of Wiki's weakness, The Guardian, retrieved May 23, 2018 {{citation}}: Italic or bold markup not allowed in: |publisher= (help)
116. Dorothy Howard; Patrick W. Galbraith (November 20, 2015), Meet the manga avatars of your favorite tech platroms, Hopes&Fears, retrieved May 23, 2018 {{citation}}: Italic or bold markup not allowed in: |publisher= (help)
117. ^ Agence France-Presse (April 29, 2010). "Misplaced Pages rejects child porn accusation". The Sydney Morning Herald.
118. "Wikimedia pornography row deepens as Wales cedes rights". BBC News. May 19, 2010. Retrieved May 19, 2010.
119. Gray, Lila (September 17, 2013). "Misplaced Pages Gives Porn a Break". XBIZ. Retrieved October 20, 2013.
120. Viégas, Fernanda B.; Wattenberg, Martin; Dave, Kushal. "Studying Cooperation and Conflict between Authors with history flow Visualizations" (PDF). CHI. {{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
121. Priedhorsky, Reid; Chen, Jilin; Lam, Shyong (Tony) K.; Panciera, Katherine; Terveen, Loren; Riedl, John (November 4, 2007). "Creating, destroying, and restoring value in wikipedia". Proceedings of the 2007 international ACM conference on Supporting group work. ACM. Retrieved August 30, 2015.
122. ^ Donnelly, James; Haeckl, Jenifer (April 12, 2001). "Privacy and Security on the Internet: What Rights, What Remedies?". Archived from the original on December 1, 2008. {{cite web}}: Unknown parameter |deadurl= ignored (|url-status= suggested) (help)
123. See "Public and Private Figures" Archived May 19, 2016, at the Wayback Machine by the Digital Media Law Project for the legal distinction.
124. Brandt, Daniel (September 9, 2005). "Misplaced Pages's Hive Mind Administration". Archived from the original on May 23, 2016. {{cite web}}: Unknown parameter |deadurl= ignored (|url-status= suggested) (help)
125. Lever, Rob (December 11, 2005). "Misplaced Pages Becomes Internet Force, Faces Crisis". Agence France-Presse (AFP). Archived from the original on October 6, 2007. Retrieved December 26, 2007. {{cite web}}: Unknown parameter |deadurl= ignored (|url-status= suggested) (help)
126. "Court overturns temporary restraining order against Wikimedia Deutschland". Heinz Heise. February 9, 2006. Archived from the original on February 8, 2007. Retrieved January 31, 2014.
127. Arthur, Charles (February 9, 2009). "Jimmy Wales in drive-by shooting of Misplaced Pages". The Guardian. Retrieved August 31, 2015.
128. Mitchell, Dan (December 24, 2005). "Insider Editing at Misplaced Pages". The New York Times. Retrieved August 31, 2015.
129. "Misplaced Pages Co-Founder Creates Competing Site". Infopackets.com. April 4, 2007. Retrieved November 19, 2013.
130. Bergstein, Brian (March 26, 2007). "Building an alternative to Misplaced Pages". NBC News. Retrieved November 19, 2013.
131. "Misplaced Pages Vs Citizendium.org: The Art of Competing with Oneself". Yahoo! Voices. April 17, 2007. Archived from the original on July 28, 2014. Retrieved November 19, 2013. {{cite web}}: Unknown parameter |deadurl= ignored (|url-status= suggested) (help)
132. "Misplaced Pages Co-Founder Unveils Rival 💕". Fox News Channel. Associated Press. March 28, 2007. Retrieved November 19, 2013.
133. ^ Bergstein, Brian (March 25, 2007). "Citizendium aims to be better Misplaced Pages". USA Today. Retrieved August 30, 2015.
134. Wood, Mike (January 9, 2013). "I Get Paid To Edit Misplaced Pages For Leading Companies". Business Insider. Retrieved November 19, 2013.
135. ^ Paling, Emma (October 21, 2015). "How Misplaced Pages Is Hostile to Women". The Atlantic. Archived from the original on October 21, 2015. Retrieved October 21, 2015.
136. Auerbach, David (December 11, 2014). "Encyclopedia Frown: Misplaced Pages is amazing. But it's become a rancorous, sexist, elitist, stupidly bureaucratic mess". Slate. Retrieved December 17, 2014.
137. Hern, Alex (January 23, 2015). "Misplaced Pages votes to ban some editors from gender-related articles". The Guardian. Retrieved August 30, 2015.
138. ^ Auerbach, David (February 5, 2015). "The Misplaced Pages Ouroboros". Slate. Retrieved February 5, 2015.
139. Louise, Maryam (January 25, 2015). "GamerGate Misplaced Pages Ruling Bans Harassed Feminist Editors, Outrage Ensues". Inquisitr.com. Retrieved August 30, 2015.
140. Williams, Lauren (January 23, 2015). "Misplaced Pages Wants To Ban Feminists From Editing GamerGate Articles". Think Progress. Retrieved August 30, 2015.
141. Bennett, Alanna (January 24, 2015). "Misplaced Pages Has Banned Five Feminist Editors From Gamergate Articles & More". The Mary Sue. Retrieved August 30, 2015.
142. Cush, Andy (January 23, 2015). "Misplaced Pages Purged a Group of Feminist Editors Because of Gamergate". Gawker. Archived from the original on September 13, 2015. Retrieved August 30, 2015. {{cite web}}: Unknown parameter |deadurl= ignored (|url-status= suggested) (help)
143. ^ Dewey, Caitlin (January 29, 2015). "Gamergate, Misplaced Pages and the limits of 'human knowledge'". The Washington Post. Retrieved January 29, 2015.
144. ^ Mandiberg, Michael (February 1, 2015). "The Affective Labor of Misplaced Pages: GamerGate, Harassment, and Peer Production". Social Text. Retrieved February 21, 2015.
145. Cush, Andy (January 30, 2015). "The Gamergate Decision Shows Exactly What's Broken About Misplaced Pages". Gawker.com. Archived from the original on February 17, 2015. Retrieved February 17, 2015. {{cite web}}: Unknown parameter |deadurl= ignored (|url-status= suggested) (help)
146. Beaudette, Philippe (January 27, 2015). "Civility, Misplaced Pages, and the conversation on Gamergate". Wikimedia Foundation. Retrieved January 28, 2015.
147. "User Rights Log". Misplaced Pages.
148. "Arbitration Series". Misplaced Pages.
149. Tozer, James (June 7, 2009). "Labour councillor David Boothroyd caught altering David Cameron's Misplaced Pages entry". Daily Mail. Retrieved April 25, 2013.
150. Metz, Cade (May 26, 2009). "Sockpuppeting British politico resigns from Wikisupremecourt". The Register. Retrieved May 27, 2009.
151. "Meta: Steward requests/Permissions". Meta-Wiki. Retrieved August 15, 2014.
152. Welham, Jamie; Lakhani, Nina (June 7, 2009). "Misplaced Pages 'sentinel' quits after using alias to alter entries". The Independent. Retrieved March 31, 2010.
153. ^ Schiff, Stacy (July 31, 2006). "Know it all: Can Misplaced Pages conquer expertise?". The New Yorker. Retrieved August 30, 2015.
154. Finkelstein, Seth (March 8, 2007). "Oh, what a tangled web we weave when first we practise to deceive". The Guardian. Retrieved August 1, 2007. At some point, Essjay said he had sent a letter to a real-life college professor using his invented persona's credentials, vouching for Misplaced Pages's accuracy. In the letter he wrote in part, "It is never the case that known incorrect information is allowed to remain in Misplaced Pages."
155. "Talk:Five solas [archived version]". Misplaced Pages.org. June 11, 2005. Retrieved June 18, 2007.
156. Orlowski, Andrew (March 2, 2007). "Bogus Misplaced Pages Prof. was blessed then promoted: The Counterfactual History Man". The Register. Retrieved March 18, 2007.
157. "Fake professor in Misplaced Pages storm". BBC News. March 6, 2007. Retrieved March 8, 2007.
158. Bergstein, Brian (March 25, 2007). "Sanger says he co-started Misplaced Pages". The Washington Post. Associated Press. Retrieved March 26, 2007. The nascent Web encyclopedia Citizendium springs from Larry Sanger, a philosophy Ph.D. who counts himself as a co-founder of Misplaced Pages, the site he now hopes to usurp. The claim doesn't seem particularly controversial—Sanger has long been cited as a co-founder. Yet the other founder, Jimmy Wales, isn't happy about it.
159. Meyers, Peter (September 20, 2001). "Fact-Driven? Collegial? This Site Wants You". The New York Times. Retrieved August 30, 2015. "I can start an article that will consist of one paragraph, and then a real expert will come along and add three paragraphs and clean up my one paragraph", said Larry Sanger of Las Vegas, who founded Misplaced Pages with Mr. Wales.
160. Mehegan, David (February 12, 2006). "Bias, sabotage haunt Misplaced Pages's free world". Boston Globe. Retrieved July 30, 2007.
161. Sanger, Larry (March 1, 2007). "Misplaced Pages firmly supports your right to identity fraud". Citizendium Blog. Archived from the original on March 4, 2007. Retrieved March 2, 2007. {{cite web}}: Unknown parameter |deadurl= ignored (|url-status= suggested) (help)
162. "User talk:Jimbo Wales [archived version]". Misplaced Pages.org.
163. Sanger, Larry (March 3, 2007). "Jimmy Wales' latest response on the Essjay situation". Citizendium Blog. Archived from the original on March 6, 2007. Retrieved March 3, 2007. {{cite web}}: Unknown parameter |deadurl= ignored (|url-status= suggested) (help)
164. "Essjay's Wikia user page". Wikia.com. Retrieved September 19, 2007.
165. Wolfson, Andrew (March 6, 2007). "Misplaced Pages editor who posed as professor is Ky. dropout: Man resigns post after controversy". Louisville Courier-Journal. Archived from the original on May 17, 2007. Retrieved March 7, 2007.
166. Wales, Jimmy (March 19, 2007). "Making amends". The New Yorker. p. 24.
167. Cohen, Noam (March 5, 2007). "A Contributor to Misplaced Pages Has His Fictional Side". The New York Times. Retrieved March 5, 2007.
168. "[ABC News broadcast on Essjay]". ABC News. Retrieved March 8, 2007.
169. Bergstein, Brian (March 7, 2007). "After flap over phony professor, Misplaced Pages wants some writers to share real names". USA Today. Associated Press. Retrieved August 30, 2015.
170. Williams, Martyn (March 9, 2007). "Misplaced Pages Founder Addresses User Credentials". PC World. IDG News Service. Retrieved August 31, 2015.
171. "Misplaced Pages's credentials policy [archived version]". Misplaced Pages.org. January 5, 2008.
172. ^ Spicuzza, Mary (February 13, 2008). "Misplaced Pages Idiots: The Edit Wars of San Francisco". SF Weekly. p. 2. Retrieved August 30, 2015.
173. "Privacy". Misplaced Pages.
174. Arthur, Charles (December 14, 2005). "Log on and join in, but beware the web cults". The Guardian. Retrieved July 14, 2006.
175. Stvilla, Besiki; Twidale, Michael; Smith, Linda; Gasser, Les (February 21, 2008). "Information Quality Work Organization in Misplaced Pages" (PDF). Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology. Archived from the original (PDF) on August 20, 2007. {{cite journal}}: Unknown parameter |deadurl= ignored (|url-status= suggested) (help) (subscription required)
176. Johnson, Bobbie (August 12, 2009). "Misplaced Pages approaches its limits". The Guardian. Retrieved May 25, 2014.
177. "The battle for Misplaced Pages's soul". The Economist. March 6, 2008. Retrieved August 31, 2015.
178. Halfaker, Aaron; Geiger, R. Stuart; Morgan, Jonathan T.; Riedl, John (2012). "The Rise and Decline of an Open Collaboration System: How Misplaced Pages's Reaction to Popularity Is Causing Its Decline" (PDF). American Behavioral Scientist. 57 (5): 664. doi:10.1177/0002764212469365. ISSN 0002-7642. Retrieved August 30, 2015.
179. Hickman, Martin; Roberts, Genevieve (February 13, 2006). "Misplaced Pages – separating fact from fiction". The New Zealand Herald. Retrieved April 17, 2007. Such checking leads to a daily battle of wits with the cyber-wreckers who insert erroneous, ludicrous and offensive material into entries. How frequently entries get messed about with depends on the controversy of their subjects. This week the entry Muslim is being attacked dozens of times a day following the row about cartoons of Mohammed with angry denunciations of suicide bombing and claims of hypocrisy. Prime Minister Tony Blair's entry is a favourite for distortion with new statements casting aspersions on his integrity.
180. Kleinz, Torsten (February 2005). "World of Knowledge" (PDF). Linux Magazine. Archived from the original (PDF) on October 2, 2015. Retrieved May 12, 2007. The Misplaced Pages's open structure makes it a target for trolls and vandals who malevolently add incorrect information to articles, get other people tied up in endless discussions, and generally do everything to draw attention to themselves. {{cite web}}: Unknown parameter |deadurl= ignored (|url-status= suggested) (help)
181. "Wiki page on Three-revert-rule". Misplaced Pages.
182. Shankbone, David (June 7, 2008). "Nobody's Safe in Cyberspace". The Brooklyn Rail. Retrieved July 10, 2008.
183. Auerbach, David (December 11, 2014). "Encyclopedia Frown". Slate.
184. Hill, Benjamin Mako (March 27, 2013). "The Institute for Cultural Diplomacy and Misplaced Pages". mako.cc. eous. Retrieved August 31, 2015.
185. Postril, Virginia (November 17, 2014). "Who Killed Misplaced Pages?". Pacific Standard. Retrieved August 31, 2015.
186. ^ Lanier, Jaron (May 30, 2006). "Digital Maoism: The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism". Edge. Retrieved April 30, 2007.
187. Shirky, Clay (June 7, 2006). "Reactions to Digital Maoism". Corante.com. Archived from the original on June 13, 2006. Retrieved May 1, 2007. {{cite web}}: Unknown parameter |deadurl= ignored (|url-status= suggested) (help)
188. Angwin, Julia; Fowler, Geoffrey A. (November 27, 2009). "Volunteers Log Off as Misplaced Pages Ages". The Wall Street Journal. Retrieved July 28, 2013.(subscription required)
189. Simonite, Tom (October 22, 2013). "The Decline of Misplaced Pages". MIT Technology Review. Retrieved March 26, 2015.
190. Wilson, Chris (February 22, 2008). "The Wisdom of the Chaperones: Digg, Misplaced Pages, and the myth of Web 2.0 democracy". Slate. Retrieved January 14, 2013.
191. Kleeman, Jenny (March 25, 2007). "Wiki wars". The Guardian. Retrieved October 4, 2007.

Further reading

• Keen, Andrew. The Cult of the Amateur. Doubleday/Currency, 2007. ISBN 978-0-385-52080-5 (substantial criticisms of Misplaced Pages and other web 2.0 projects).
  • Keen, Andrew (June 16, 2007). "Does the Internet Undermine Culture?". NPR. Retrieved March 31, 2010 (Audio version (with transcript) of the NPR interview with Andrew Keen on June 16, 2007).{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: postscript (link)
• Rafaeli, Sheizaf & Ariel, Yaron (2008). "Online motivational factors: Incentives for participation and contribution in Misplaced Pages." In A. Barak (ed.), Psychological aspects of cyberspace: Theory, research, applications (pp. 243–267). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
  • "Cyberpsych.Yeda.info". Archived from the original on November 27, 2012. Retrieved November 19, 2013. {{cite web}}: Unknown parameter |deadurl= ignored (|url-status= suggested) (help)
• Simonite, Tom (October 22, 2013). "The Decline of Misplaced Pages: Even As More People Than Ever Rely on It, Fewer People Create It". MIT Technology Review. 116 (6). Technologyreview.com. Retrieved August 9, 2014.

External links

• A Compendium of Misplaced Pages Criticism – Wikipediocracy
• The Geographically Uneven Coverage of Misplaced Pages – Oxford Internet Institute – University of Oxford

• Articles tagged with the inline citation overkill template from February 2018
• Criticism of Misplaced Pages