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The site is "known for digging up dirt on Misplaced Pages's top brass", wrote reporter Kevin Morris in the '']''.<ref name=vandalizing /> Novelist ] wrote in '']'' that the site "intelligently discusses and entertainingly lambastes Misplaced Pages’s problematic practices."<ref name=Amanda1>{{cite web|last=Filipacchi|first=Amanda|title=My Strange Addiction: Misplaced Pages |date=10 July 2013 |url=http://blogs.wsj.com/speakeasy/2013/07/10/my-strange-addiction-wikipedia/|publisher=Wall Street Journal|accessdate=11 July 2013}}</ref> The site is "known for digging up dirt on Misplaced Pages's top brass", wrote reporter Kevin Morris in the '']''.<ref name=vandalizing /> Novelist ] wrote in '']'' that the site "intelligently discusses and entertainingly lambastes Misplaced Pages’s problematic practices."<ref name=Amanda1>{{cite web|last=Filipacchi|first=Amanda|title=My Strange Addiction: Misplaced Pages |date=10 July 2013 |url=http://blogs.wsj.com/speakeasy/2013/07/10/my-strange-addiction-wikipedia/|publisher=Wall Street Journal|accessdate=11 July 2013}}</ref>
==Background== ==Background==
] is a ], ] ], supported and hosted by the ] ]. Those who can access the website can edit most of its articles.<ref>{{cite web|title = Misplaced Pages founder defends decision to encrypt the site in China|url = http://www.theverge.com/2015/9/4/9260981/jimmy-wales-wikipedia-china|website = The Verge|accessdate = September 19, 2015}}</ref> Misplaced Pages is ranked among the ten most popular websites,<ref name="Alexa siteinfo" /><!-- 7th is an approximation, so sticking to vague phrasing is probably best. --> and constitutes the ]'s largest and most popular general ].<ref name="Tancer" /><ref name="Woodson" /><ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.comscore.com/Insights/Press_Releases/2012/9/comScore_Media_Metrix_Ranks_Top_50_US_Web_Properties_for_August_201|title=comScore MMX Ranks Top 50 US Web Properties for August 2012|publisher=comScore|date=September 12, 2012|accessdate=February 6, 2013}}</ref> ] is a ], ] ], supported and hosted by the ] ]. Those who can access the website can edit most of its articles.<ref>{{cite web|title = Misplaced Pages founder defends decision to encrypt the site in China|url = http://www.theverge.com/2015/9/4/9260981/jimmy-wales-wikipedia-china|website = The Verge|accessdate = September 19, 2015}}</ref> Misplaced Pages is ranked among the ten most popular websites,<ref> "How popular is wikipedia.org?". Alexa Internet</ref><!-- 7th is an approximation, so sticking to vague phrasing is probably best. --> and constitutes the ]'s largest and most popular general ].<ref>Bill Tancer (May 1, 2007). "Look Who's Using Misplaced Pages". Time. Retrieved December 1, 2007. The sheer volume of content is partly responsible for the site's dominance as an online reference. When compared to the top 3,200 educational reference sites in the US, Misplaced Pages is No. 1, capturing 24.3% of all visits to the category. Cf. Bill Tancer (Global Manager, Hitwise), "Misplaced Pages, Search and School Homework", Hitwise, March 1, 2007</ref><ref>Alex Woodson (July 8, 2007). "Misplaced Pages remains go-to site for online news". Reuters. Retrieved December 16, 2007. Online encyclopedia Misplaced Pages has added about 20 million unique monthly visitors in the past year, making it the top online news and information destination, according to Nielsen//NetRatings.</ref><ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.comscore.com/Insights/Press_Releases/2012/9/comScore_Media_Metrix_Ranks_Top_50_US_Web_Properties_for_August_201|title=comScore MMX Ranks Top 50 US Web Properties for August 2012|publisher=comScore|date=September 12, 2012|accessdate=February 6, 2013}}</ref>


] and ] launched Misplaced Pages on January 15, 2001. The ] is now one of 291 Misplaced Pages editions and is the largest with ] articles (having ] 5,000,000 articles in November 2015). There is a grand total, including all Wikipedias, of over ] in over 250 different languages.<ref name="CBS">{{cite web|url=http://www.cbsnews.com/news/wikipedia-jimmy-wales-morley-safer-60-minutes/|title=Misplaced Pages cofounder Jimmy Wales on 60 Minutes|accessdate=April 6, 2015|publisher=]}}</ref> As of February 2014, it had 18 billion page views and nearly 500 million ]s each month.<ref name="small screen" /> A ] of 42 science articles found in both '']'' and Misplaced Pages was published in '']'' in 2005, and found that Misplaced Pages's level of accuracy approached ''Encyclopedia Britannica''{{'}}s.<ref name="GilesJ2005Internet" /> ] and ] launched Misplaced Pages on January 15, 2001. The ] is now one of 291 Misplaced Pages editions and is the largest with ] articles (having ] 5,000,000 articles in November 2015). There is a grand total, including all Wikipedias, of over ] in over 250 different languages.<ref name="CBS">{{cite web|url=http://www.cbsnews.com/news/wikipedia-jimmy-wales-morley-safer-60-minutes/|title=Misplaced Pages cofounder Jimmy Wales on 60 Minutes|accessdate=April 6, 2015|publisher=]}}</ref> As of February 2014, it had 18 billion page views and nearly 500 million ]s each month.<ref name="small screen" /> A ] of 42 science articles found in both '']'' and Misplaced Pages was published in '']'' in 2005, and found that Misplaced Pages's level of accuracy approached ''Encyclopedia Britannica''{{'}}s.<ref name="GilesJ2005Internet" />

Revision as of 02:36, 19 March 2016

Wikipediocracy
Wikipediocracy logo
Wikipediocracy screenshot taken May 18, 2013
Type of siteBlog and forum
Available inEnglish
URLwikipediocracy.com
CommercialNo
RegistrationOptional, required for some features
Users779
LaunchedMarch 16, 2012; 12 years ago (2012-03-16)
Current statusActive
Content licenseCopyright retained by authors

Wikipediocracy is a website for discussion and criticism of Misplaced Pages. Its members have brought information about Misplaced Pages's controversies to the attention of media. The site was founded in March 2012 by users of Misplaced Pages Review, another site critical of Misplaced Pages.

The site is "known for digging up dirt on Misplaced Pages's top brass", wrote reporter Kevin Morris in the Daily Dot. Novelist Amanda Filipacchi wrote in The Wall Street Journal that the site "intelligently discusses and entertainingly lambastes Misplaced Pages’s problematic practices."

Background

Misplaced Pages is a free-access, free-content Internet encyclopedia, supported and hosted by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. Those who can access the website can edit most of its articles. Misplaced Pages is ranked among the ten most popular websites, and constitutes the Internet's largest and most popular general reference work.

Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger launched Misplaced Pages on January 15, 2001. The English Misplaced Pages is now one of 291 Misplaced Pages editions and is the largest with 6,935,268 articles (having reached 5,000,000 articles in November 2015). There is a grand total, including all Wikipedias, of over 38 million articles in over 250 different languages. As of February 2014, it had 18 billion page views and nearly 500 million unique visitors each month. A peer review of 42 science articles found in both Encyclopædia Britannica and Misplaced Pages was published in Nature in 2005, and found that Misplaced Pages's level of accuracy approached Encyclopedia Britannica's.

Website user activism

Wikipediocracy contributors have investigated problems, conflicts, and controversies associated with Misplaced Pages, some being reported by mainstream media. The site's stated mission is "to shine the light of scrutiny into the dark crevices of Misplaced Pages" and related projects. In a doctoral thesis, Heather Ford, a specialist in Internet policy and law, commented on Wikipediocracy's role, saying, "As Misplaced Pages’s authority grows, and more groups feel disenfranchised by its processes, the growth of watchdog groups like Wikipediocracy who act as translators of Misplaced Pages’s complex structures, rules and norms for mainstream media and who begin to give voice to those who feel that they have been excluded from Misplaced Pages’s representational structures will continue."

Revenge editing

In 2013, Wikipediocracy members contacted Salon.com reporter Andrew Leonard to alert him about the "Qworty fiasco." User Qworty had attracted attention for his provocative comments in a debate on Misplaced Pages's treatment of female writers. It emerged that many of his past contributions affected the site's treatment of (and targeted rivals of) writer Robert Clark Young. This background information led to Leonard's challenging Young, in an article Revenge, Ego, and the Corruption of Misplaced Pages, which identified Young as Qworty. Just before the publication of Leonard's article, because of this behavior, Qworty had been banned from editing Misplaced Pages biographies of living persons.

Discussion of governments

Wikipediocracy contributors' criticisms of Misplaced Pages have been discussed in news stories covering Jimmy Wales's relationship with the government of Kazakhstan, the Gibraltarpedia controversy, and an anonymous edit made from a U.S. Senate IP address that labelled whistle-blower Edward Snowden a "traitor".

In May 2014, The Telegraph, working with Wikipediocracy, uncovered evidence identifying the civil servant who had allegedly vandalized the Misplaced Pages articles on the Hillsborough disaster and Anfield.

Wikimedia Foundation

A Wikipediocracy blog post reported in 2013 that Misplaced Pages was being vandalized from IP addresses assigned to the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF). Responding to the allegations, WMF spokesman Jay Walsh stated that the IP addresses belonged to WMF servers and were not used by the WMF offices. He stated that the addresses were assigned to some edits by IPs due to a misconfiguration, which was corrected.

Other issues

One Wikipediocracy forum discussion identified the Misplaced Pages account responsible for a hoax article Misplaced Pages administrators had recently deleted. The "Bicholim conflict" article described a fictitious 1640–41 Indian civil war. It was awarded Misplaced Pages's "Good article" status in 2007, and retained it until late 2012, when a Wikipedian checked the article's cited sources and found that none of them appeared to exist.

A September 2013 story resulting from a Wikipediocracy tip-off concerned commercial plastic surgeons editing Misplaced Pages's plastic surgery articles to promote their services. Concerns with violations of conflict of interest guidelines and the provision of misinformation in the relevant articles had also been raised by Wikipediocracy members on Misplaced Pages itself.

In January 2014, a Wikipediocracy blog post pointed out that according to official Wikimedia statistics, page views for all major language versions of Misplaced Pages had experienced significant and unprecedented drops over the course of 2013. The blog post linked these falls to the introduction of the Google Knowledge Graph.

In February 2015, Misplaced Pages's Arbitration Committee banned a user after finding he had edited to promote the Indian Institute of Planning and Management and added negative material to the article on another university. The user's edits had been noted in Wikipediocracy in December 2013.

References

  1. "Wikipediocracy - Index Page". wikipediocracy.com. Retrieved 29 January 2016.
  2. "wikipediocracy.com info". alexa.com. Retrieved 16 December 2015.
  3. ^ Leonard, Andrew (17 May 2013). "Revenge, ego and the corruption of Misplaced Pages". Salon.com. Retrieved 18 May 2013.
  4. Murphy, Dan (1 August 2013). "In UK, rising chorus of outrage over online misogyny: Recent events in Britain draw more attention to endemic hostility towards women online". The Christian Science Monitor. Retrieved 1 August 2013. {{cite news}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
  5. Hersch, Global moderator (15 March 2012). "Welcome". Mission statement and welcome to the public. Wikipediocracy. Retrieved 26 June 2013.
  6. LaPlante, Alice (14 July 2006). "Spawn Of Misplaced Pages". InformationWeek. Archived from the original on 12 June 2011. Retrieved 1 September 2012.
  7. Shankbone, David (June 2008). "Nobody's safe in cyberspace". The Brooklyn Rail. Retrieved 1 July 2008.
  8. ^ Morris, Kevin (23 April 2013). "Misplaced Pages says its staffers are not vandalizing Misplaced Pages". The Daily Dot. Retrieved 24 May 2013.
  9. Filipacchi, Amanda (10 July 2013). "My Strange Addiction: Misplaced Pages". Wall Street Journal. Retrieved 11 July 2013.
  10. "Misplaced Pages founder defends decision to encrypt the site in China". The Verge. Retrieved September 19, 2015.
  11. "How popular is wikipedia.org?". Alexa Internet
  12. Bill Tancer (May 1, 2007). "Look Who's Using Misplaced Pages". Time. Retrieved December 1, 2007. The sheer volume of content is partly responsible for the site's dominance as an online reference. When compared to the top 3,200 educational reference sites in the US, Misplaced Pages is No. 1, capturing 24.3% of all visits to the category. Cf. Bill Tancer (Global Manager, Hitwise), "Misplaced Pages, Search and School Homework", Hitwise, March 1, 2007
  13. Alex Woodson (July 8, 2007). "Misplaced Pages remains go-to site for online news". Reuters. Retrieved December 16, 2007. Online encyclopedia Misplaced Pages has added about 20 million unique monthly visitors in the past year, making it the top online news and information destination, according to Nielsen//NetRatings.
  14. "comScore MMX Ranks Top 50 US Web Properties for August 2012". comScore. September 12, 2012. Retrieved February 6, 2013.
  15. "Misplaced Pages cofounder Jimmy Wales on 60 Minutes". CBS News. Retrieved April 6, 2015.
  16. Cite error: The named reference small screen was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  17. Cite error: The named reference GilesJ2005Internet was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  18. Ford, Heather, "Fact factories: Misplaced Pages and the power to represent", Kellogg College, Oxford, August 2015, DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.1.4068.9361 Archived 2015-11-26 at the Wayback Machine
  19. ^ Nichols, Martha; Berry, Lorraine (20 May 2013). "What Should We Do About Misplaced Pages?". Talking Writing. Retrieved 20 May 2013.
  20. "Qworty: the fallout". Wikipediocracy. Retrieved 4 September 2015.
  21. Leonard, Andrew. "Misplaced Pages's Shame". Salon. Retrieved 4 September 2015.
  22. Manhire, Toby (5 June 2013). "Misplaced Pages and the scourge of "revenge editors"". New Zealand Listener. Retrieved 5 June 2013.
  23. Morris, Kevin (25 December 2012). "Misplaced Pages's odd relationship with the Kazakh dictatorship". The Daily Dot. Retrieved 18 May 2013.
  24. Hermans, Steven (8 January 2013). "Critics question neutrality of Kazakh Misplaced Pages". NET PROPHET. Retrieved 26 May 2013.
  25. Williams, Christopher (24 December 2012). "Misplaced Pages co-founder Jimmy Wales restricts discussion of Tony Blair friendship". The Telegraph. Retrieved 26 May 2013.
  26. Alfonso, Fernando (25 October 2012). "Misplaced Pages's Jimmy Wales breaks silence on resurgence of influence-peddling scandal". The Daily Dot. Retrieved 18 May 2013.
  27. Orlowski, Andrew (26 October 2012). "Wales: Let's ban Gibraltar-crazy Wikipedians for 5 years". The Register. Retrieved 19 May 2013.
  28. Joe Kloc (3 August 2013). "Is a U.S. senator trolling Snowden's Misplaced Pages page?". The Daily Dot. Retrieved 4 September 2013.
  29. Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai (6 August 2013). "Misplaced Pages Editor Traced to U.S. Senate Changes Snowden's Bio to 'Traitor'". Mashable. Retrieved 4 September 2013.
  30. Oliver Duggan (21 May 2014). "Civil servants behind 'sickening' Hillsborough slurs identified". The Daily Telegraph. Retrieved 21 June 2014.
    Kashmira Gander (21 May 2014). "Hillsborough Misplaced Pages posts: Suspected civil servant a Merseyside resident". The Independent. Retrieved 21 June 2014.
    Oliver Duggan (17 June 2014). "Civil servant fired after Telegraph investigation into Hillsborough Misplaced Pages slurs". The Daily Telegraph. Retrieved 21 June 2014.
    Mark Tran (17 June 2014). "Civil servant sacked for offensive Misplaced Pages edits on Hillsborough". The Guardian. Retrieved 17 June 2014.
    Oliver Duggan (17 June 2014). "How The Telegraph identified the Hillsborough Misplaced Pages vandal". The Daily Telegraph. Retrieved 21 June 2014.
  31. Hogsky, Roger (22 April 2013). "Busy day at the Wikimedia Foundation office?". Blog. Wikipediocracy. Retrieved 24 May 2013.
  32. Morris, Kevin (1 January 2013). "After a half-decade, massive Misplaced Pages hoax finally exposed". The Daily Dot. Retrieved 18 May 2013.
  33. Schroeder, Audra (20 September 2013). "Are plastic surgeons nip/tucking ads into high-profile Misplaced Pages articles?". The Daily Dot. Retrieved 7 October 2013.
  34. Orlowski, Andrew (13 January 2014). "Google stabs Misplaced Pages in the front. Is Knowledge Graph killing its readership?". The Register. Retrieved 20 January 2014.
    Kloc, Joe (8 January 2014). "Is Google accidentally killing Misplaced Pages?". The Daily Dot. Retrieved 20 January 2014.
    van Lier, Helen (14 January 2014). "Bezoek Misplaced Pages fors gedaald door Google". de Volkskrant. Retrieved 20 January 2014.
    Belfiore, Guillaume (13 January 2014). "Google Knowledge Graph aurait causé une baisse du trafic de Misplaced Pages en 2013". Clubic. Retrieved 20 January 2014.
    Dojcsák, Dániel (13 January 2014). "A Google megfojtja a Wikipediát". HWSW. Retrieved 20 January 2014.
    van Riet Paap, Jeroen (13 January 2014). "'Google helpt Misplaced Pages om zeep'". Webwereld. Retrieved 20 January 2014.
  35. Chari, Mridula (25 March 2015). "Misplaced Pages bans editor for consistent bias in favour of Arindam Chaudhuri's IIPM". Scroll.in. Retrieved 5 April 2015.

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