Misplaced Pages

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The major points of criticism of Misplaced Pages, an online encyclopedia, are the claims that the principle of being open for editing by everyone makes Misplaced Pages unauthoritative and unreliable (see Reliability of Misplaced Pages), that it exhibits systemic bias, and that its group dynamics hinder its goals.

The Seigenthaler and Essjay incidents caused criticism of Misplaced Pages's reliability and usefulness as a reference; Misplaced Pages has also been the subject of parody and other humorous criticism.

Criticism of the content

Robert McHenry, a former editor-in-chief of the Encyclopædia Britannica, said that Misplaced Pages errs in billing itself as an encyclopedia, because that word implies a level of authority and accountability that he believes cannot be possessed by an openly editable reference. McHenry argues that "the typical user doesn't know how conventional encyclopedias achieve reliability, only that they do." Andrew Orlowski expressed similar criticisms, writing that the use of the term "encyclopedia" to describe Misplaced Pages may lead users into believing it is more reliable than it may be.

Academics have also criticized Misplaced Pages for its perceived failure as a reliable source, and because Misplaced Pages editors may not have degrees or other credentials generally recognized in academia. For that reason, the use of Misplaced Pages is not accepted in many schools and universities in writing a formal paper, and some educational institutions have banned it as a primary source while others have limited its use to only a pointer to external sources. This criticism, however, does not only apply to Misplaced Pages but to encyclopedias in general – some university lecturers are not impressed when students cite print-based encyclopedias in assigned work.

Some academic journals do refer to Misplaced Pages articles, but are not elevating it to the same level as traditional references. For instance, Misplaced Pages articles have been referenced in "enhanced perspectives" provided on-line in the journal Science. The first of these perspectives to provide a hyperlink to Misplaced Pages was "A White Collar Protein Senses Blue Light," and dozens of enhanced perspectives have provided such links since then. The publisher of Science states that these enhanced perspectives "include hypernotes – which link directly to websites of other relevant information available online – beyond the standard bibliographic references."

Misplaced Pages's policies state that assertions should be supported by reliable, published sources—ideally, by peer reviewed publications. Jimmy Wales, the de facto leader of Misplaced Pages, stresses that encyclopedias of any type are not usually appropriate as primary sources, and should not be relied upon as authoritative.

Accuracy of information

Lack of authority

Misplaced Pages acknowledges that it should not be used as a primary source for research. Librarian Philip Bradley stated in an October 2004 interview with The Guardian that "the main problem is the lack of authority. With printed publications, the publishers have to ensure that their data is reliable, as their livelihood depends on it. But with something like this, all that goes out the window." Robert McHenry similarly noted that readers of Misplaced Pages cannot know who has written the article they are reading – it may or may not have been written by an expert.

Due to lack of intrinsic authority, Misplaced Pages has been also criticized by Geoffrey Nunberg for relying too much on citing sources even though the said sources may not be more accurate than Misplaced Pages itself.

Comparative study on scientific articles conducted by Nature

In December 2005 the journal Nature conducted a single-blind study comparing the accuracy of a sample of articles from Misplaced Pages and Encyclopædia Britannica. The sample included 42 articles on scientific topics, including biographies of well-known scientists. The articles were compared for accuracy by academic reviewers who remained anonymous − a customary practice for journal article reviews. Based on their review, the average Misplaced Pages article contained 4 errors or omissions; the average Britannica article, 3. The study concluded: "Misplaced Pages comes close to Britannica in terms of the accuracy of its science entries".

Encyclopædia Britannica's initial concerns led to Nature releasing further documentation of its survey method. Based on this additional information, Encyclopædia Britannica denied the validity of the Nature study, stating that it was "fatally flawed" as the Britannica extracts were compilations that sometimes included articles written for the youth version. Nature acknowledged the compiled nature of some of the Britannica extracts, but denied that this invalidated the conclusions of the study. Encyclopædia Britannica also argued that while the Nature study showed that the error rate between the two encyclopedias was similar, a breakdown of the errors indicated that the mistakes in Misplaced Pages were more often the inclusion of incorrect facts, while the mistakes in Britannica were "errors of omission", making "Britannica far more accurate than Misplaced Pages, according to the figures".

Nature has since rejected the Britannica response and published a point-by-point response to Britannica's specific objections about alleged errors.

Lack of fact-checking on specialized topics

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 Seigenthaler 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 between May and 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 (currently Secretary of State) Hillary Rodham Clinton had been incorrectly listed for 20 months in her Misplaced Pages biography as valedictorian of her class of 1969 at Wellesley College. (Hillary Rodham, the former Senator's maiden name, was not the valedictorian, 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. After the msnbc.com report, the inaccurate information was removed the same day.

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 claimed to be a highly decorated war hero. The article was, however, 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; however it was not conclusive as the false information was removed the next day 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 neutral point of view (NPOV) as one of its non-negotiable principles. However it acknowledges that such a concept has its limitations – its policy indeed states that articles should be "as far as possible" written without bias. Mark Glaser, a journalist, also wrote that this may be an impossible ideal due to the inevitable biases of editors.

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.

The second dispute reported by Nature involved the climate researcher William Connolley, who was opposed by anonymous editors (Nature considered anonymous editors that did not use their real names). The topic in this second dispute was climate change; Nature reported that this dispute was far more protracted, and 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 this time he was restricted to one revert per day. Connolley's opponents were reportedly banned from editing climate articles also for six months.

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 U.S. Senator Bill Frist and Eric Cantor, a congressman from Virginia. Numerous other changes were made from an IP address which is assigned to the House of Representatives. In an interview, Misplaced Pages de facto leader Jimmy Wales remarked that the changes were "not cool." Some organizations are making efforts to correct inaccuracies.

Larry Delay and Pablo Bachelet write 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 April 2008, the Boston-based 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. Excerpts of some of the e-mails were published in the July 2008 issue of Harper's Magazine under the title of "Candid camera". 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". According to some defenders of CAMERA serious misrepresentations of CAMERA's role emanated from the competing Electronic Intifada group; moreover, it is said, some other Palestinian advocacy groups have been guilty of systematic misrepresentations and manipulative behaviors but have not suffered bans of editors amongst their staff or volunteers. Five editors involved in the campaign were sanctioned by Misplaced Pages administrators. Israeli diplomat David Saranga said that Misplaced Pages is generally fair in regard to Israel. When confronted with the fact that the entry on Israel mentioned the word "occupation" nine times, whereas the entry on the Palestinian People mentioned "terror" only once, he replied

"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 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 informations 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 commandeered and sanitized to continually reflect a point of view that sheds a favorable light on the subject or group. Editors essentially "squat" on pages, watching for negative entries, then immediately revert them. This is especially true of pages on politicians as shown on USA Congressional staff edits to Misplaced Pages. Sanitized pages range from the Tanaka Memorial being sometimes protected by sympathetic Chinese, to the page on The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, a group that regularly sanitizes "its" page. The page on Scientology has also been subject to being commandeered and put under the Misplaced Pages:Protection policy. These habits of commandeering, sanitizing and squatting discourage informed experts from spending the time and attention to make well-footnoted entries for fear that accurate and time-consuming work will be quickly deleted.

Editing for financial rewards

In January 2007 Rick Jelliffe claimed 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".

In a story covered by the BBC, former Novell chief scientist Jeffrey Merkey claimed that in exchange for a donation his Misplaced Pages entry was edited in his favor. Jay Walsh, a spokesman for Misplaced Pages, flatly denied the allegations in an interview given to The Daily Telegraph.

WikiScanner systematically exposes biased 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 anonymous IP edits in the encyclopedia with an extensive database of 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 for a handful of privileged Misplaced Pages admins.

Conflicts involving policy makers

In February 2008, British technology news and opinion website The Register published an article called "Misplaced Pages ruled by 'Lord of the Universe'" about a prominent Misplaced Pages administrator, Jossi Fresco. It reported that Fresco declared a conflict of interest related to Prem Rawat, then made "biased" edits to the Prem Rawat article to minimize criticism, and altered the Misplaced Pages policies over personal biography and "conflict of interest", to favour them. The article pointed out that Fresco was also involved in Misplaced Pages's "Conflict of Interest Noticeboard", the situation which the Register article described as "a conflict of conflict of interest". The article ended with the claim: "Jossi Fresco may bear the most extreme conflict of interest in the history of Misplaced Pages – and he edits the policy that governs conflict of interest." Fresco subsequently ceased participation in Misplaced Pages.

Some of the most scathing criticism of Misplaced Pages's claimed neutrality came in The Register, which in turn was allegedly criticized by founding members of the project. According to The Register:

In short, Misplaced Pages is a cult. Or at least, the inner circle is a cult. We aren't the first to make this observation.

On the inside, they reinforce each other's beliefs. And if anyone on the outside questions those beliefs, they circle the wagons. They deny the facts. They attack the attacker. After our Jossi Fresco story, Fresco didn't refute our reporting. He simply accused us of "yellow journalism". After our Overstock.com article, Wales called us "trash".

Quality of the presentation

Quality of writing

Roy Rosenzweig, in a June 2006 essay that combined both praise and criticism of Misplaced Pages, had several criticisms of its prose and its failure to distinguish the genuinely important from the merely sensational. He said that Misplaced Pages is "surprisingly accurate in reporting names, dates, and events in U.S. history" (Rosenzweig's own field of study) and that most of the few factual errors that he found "were small and inconsequential" and that some of them "simply repeat widely held but inaccurate beliefs", which are also repeated in Encarta and the Britannica. However, he made one major criticism.

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.

Contrasting Misplaced Pages's treatment of Abraham Lincoln to that of Civil War historian James McPherson in American National Biography Online, he said that both were essentially accurate and covered the major episodes in Lincoln's life, but praised "McPherson's richer contextualization… his artful use of quotations to capture Lincoln's voice … and … his ability to convey a profound message in a handful of words." By contrast, he gives an example of Misplaced Pages's prose that he finds "both verbose and dull." Rosenzweig made a further criticism, contrasting "the skill and confident judgment of a seasoned historian" displayed by McPherson and others to the "antiquarianism" of Misplaced Pages (which he compares in this respect to American Heritage magazine), and said that while Misplaced Pages often provides extensive references, they are not the best ones.

Rosenzweig also criticized the "waffling—encouraged by the npov policy— means that it is hard to discern any overall interpretive stance in Misplaced Pages history." By example, he quoted the conclusion of Misplaced Pages's article on William Clarke Quantrill. While generally praising the article, he pointed out its "waffling" conclusion: "Some historians…remember him as an opportunistic, bloodthirsty outlaw, while others continue to view him as a daring soldier and local folk hero."

Other critics have made similar charges that, even if Misplaced Pages articles are factually accurate, they are often written in a poor, almost unreadable style. Frequent Misplaced Pages critic Andrew Orlowski commented: "Even when a Misplaced Pages entry is 100 per cent factually correct, and those facts have been carefully chosen, it all too often reads as if it has been translated from one language to another then into to a third, passing an illiterate translator at each stage." A study of cancer articles by Yaacov Lawrence of the Kimmel Cancer Center at Thomas Jefferson University found that the entries were mostly accurate, but they were written at college reading level, as opposed to the ninth grade level seen in the Physician Data Query. He said that "Misplaced Pages's lack of readability may reflect its varied origins and haphazard editing." The Economist noted that the quality of writing of Misplaced Pages articles can be a guide to the reader: "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 claimed 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 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, indeed trivial, 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 frames Misplaced Pages of having "become a monopoly" with "all the prejudices and ignorance of its creators", which he describes as a "youthful cab-drivers" perspective. Cohen's argument, however, finds a grave conclusion in these circumstances: "To 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'."

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 "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 topic popular or current. 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.

Notability of article topics

Misplaced Pages's notability guidelines, 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", Nicholson 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.

Yet another criticism about the deletionists is this: "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.

Liberal bias

Another criticism is that a politically liberal bias is predominant. According to Jimmy Wales: "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." 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. The racialist magazine American Renaissance asserted that Misplaced Pages has a strong liberal bias in racial topics.

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.

American and corporate bias

Tim Anderson, a senior lecturer in political economy at the University of Sydney, said that Misplaced Pages administrators display a U.S.-oriented bias in their interaction with editors, and in their determination of sources that are appropriate for use on the site. Anderson was outraged after several of the sources he used in his edits to Hugo Chávez, 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".

Gender 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. An article in The New York Times cites a Wikimedia Foundation study which found that fewer than 13% of contributors to Misplaced Pages are women. Sue Gardner, the executive director of the foundation, said 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."

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. The original release cover caused controversy and was replaced in some countries. In December 2008, access to the Misplaced Pages article Virgin Killer was blocked for four days by most Internet service providers in the United Kingdom, after it was reported by a member of the public as child pornography. The Internet Watch Foundation, a nonprofit, nongovernment-affiliated organization, criticized the inclusion of the picture as "distasteful".

In April 2010, Larry Sanger 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 U.S. federal obscenity law. Sanger later clarified that the images, which were related to pedophilia and one about lolicon, were not of real children, but said that they constituted "obscene visual representations of the sexual abuse of children", under the PROTECT Act of 2003. That law bans photographic child pornography and cartoon images and drawings of children that are obscene under American law. Sanger also expressed concerns about access to the images on Misplaced Pages in schools. Misplaced Pages strongly rejected Sanger's accusation.

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, Wales deleted sexual images without consulting the community. After some editors who volunteer to maintain the site argued that the decision to delete had been made hastily, Wales voluntarily gave up some of the powers he had held up to that time as part of his co-founder status. He wrote in a message to the Wikimedia Foundation mailing list that this action was "in the interest of encouraging this discussion to be about real philosophical/content issues, rather than be about me and how quickly I acted."

Exposure to vandals

Misplaced Pages has a range of tools available to users and administrators in order to fight against 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 has remained for longer periods. For example, a user made several racist edits to Martin Luther King, Jr. Day that were not reverted for nearly four hours. Columnist Sujay Kumar commented:

While Misplaced Pages says that most vandal edits are removed within five minutes, some falsities have managed to go unnoticed. An outlandishly fake entry about Larry King's uncontrollable flatulence was posted for a month.

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.

"Death by Misplaced Pages"

"Death by Misplaced Pages" is a phenomenon in which a person is erroneously proclaimed dead through vandalism. Articles about the comedian Paul Reiser, British television host Vernon Kay, and the West Virginia Senator Robert Byrd, who died on June 28, 2010, have been vandalized in this way.

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. The plaintiffs appealed to the Berlin state court, but were refused relief in May 2006.

Criticism of the community

The Misplaced Pages community (people who contribute to Misplaced Pages) is also subject to various criticisms. Emigh and Herring argue that "a few active users, when acting in concert with established norms within an open editing system, can achieve ultimate control over the content produced within the system, literally erasing diversity, controversy, and inconsistency, and homogenizing contributors' voices." The community has also been criticized for responding to complaints regarding an article's quality by advising the complainer to fix the article themselves. Professor James H. Fetzer criticized Misplaced Pages in that he could not change the article about himself; to ensure impartiality, Misplaced Pages has a policy that discourages the editing of biographies by the subjects themselves except in "clear-cut cases", such as reverting vandalism or correcting out-of-date or mistaken facts.

The community has been described as "cult-like," although not always with entirely negative connotations. A larger social community also helps in maintaining a supportive atmosphere and collective etiquette, such as resolving disputes by appealing to reliable sources and Misplaced Pages's own policies.

Misplaced Pages does not require that its users identify themselves. This means that multiple people may use one account—or, more often, one person may use multiple accounts, often in an attempt to influence an argument. The latter practice is known as "sockpuppetry", which is actively discouraged on Misplaced Pages.

Jimmy Wales' role

The community of Misplaced Pages editors has been criticized for placing an irrational emphasis on Jimmy Wales as a person, with phrases such as "What Would Jimbo Do?" Wales' 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.

Selection of editors

Stacy Schiff notes in her New Yorker article about Misplaced Pages that

Misplaced Pages is an online community devoted not to last night's party or to next season's iPod but to a higher good. It is also no more immune to human nature than any other utopian project. Pettiness, idiocy, and vulgarity are regular features of the site. Nothing about high-minded collaboration guarantees accuracy, and open editing invites abuse.

Lack of credential verification and the Essjay controversy

In July 2006 The New Yorker ran a feature about Misplaced Pages by Stacy Schiff. The initial version of the article included an interview with a Misplaced Pages administrator known by the pseudonym Essjay, who was described as a tenured professor of theology. Essjay's Misplaced Pages user page (now removed) made the following claim:

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 claimed on his userpage 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 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 U.S. television broadcast on ABC's World News with Charles Gibson and a March 7, 2007 Associated Press story that was picked up by more than 100 media outlets listed in the Google news cache. The controversy has led to a proposal that users claiming to possess academic qualifications would have to provide evidence before citing them in Misplaced Pages content disputes. The proposal was not accepted.

In 2009, it was revealed that a British Labour councillor had been anonymously editing Misplaced Pages as 'Sam Blacketer', including many political articles in the UK. He resigned from membership of the Arbitration Committee.

Anonymity of editors

Misplaced Pages co-founder Larry Sanger wrote:

Widespread anonymity leads to a distinguishable problem, namely, the attractiveness of the project to people who merely want to cause trouble, or who want to undermine the project, or who want to change it into something that it is avowedly not – in other words, the troll problem.

But more importantly, allowing anonymous editing generally induces a lack of authority, accountability, and healthy (or at least civil) interaction:

... Misplaced Pages's anonymity reduces the accountability that stimulates healthy exchanges. ... "When you put everybody in a system that is flat, where everybody can say yes or no, without any sense of authority, what you get is tribalism", ... "What has gone into the article creation is very often the result of this dysfunctional system. It presents itself with this aura of authority, whereas what goes on behind the scenes is anything but."

On many occasions, open (anonymous) editing is the source of many problems: Pettiness, idiocy, vulgarity, lack of accuracy, abuse (complete quotation).

A February 2008 article in SF Weekly details a journalist's futile attempts to track down the real identity of Misplaced Pages user Griot, who got involved in edit wars over the biography of Ralph Nader as well as local politicians, and was eventually banned on Misplaced Pages for sock puppeteering. The article draws the distinction between the press and Misplaced Pages:

Say what you will about the press: There is at least a measure of accountability in a newspaper that is rarely seen on Misplaced Pages. It's called a byline. I mean, I'm sure I've produced some less-than-brilliant work during the dozen or so years I've been a journalist. But at least I've had the guts to sign my name — my real name — to what I write.

The article also quotes Paul Grabowicz, the new-media program director for the University of California at Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism:

"I guess I have the same feeling about Misplaced Pages and other citizen-generated sites about the media: The more transparency the better" "People should be able to find out who is producing the information."

In Misplaced Pages itself the term "anonymous" is used in a much narrower sense than in the citations above. Namely only those editors that do not have a registered account, and use an auto-generated IP-labeled account, are called anonymous or "anons". To disambiguate the two notions on anonymity, in the remainder of this section the term unregistered is used for the narrower Misplaced Pages meaning.

Unregistered editors reveal their IP addresses, which can be used by admins to register complaints with Internet service providers or to put "range blocks" in place. Admins may also choose not to block because they might exclude regular contributors who share the same IP. Knowledgeable computer users and hackers, though, are easily capable of finding ways around IP blocking. Many have suggested requiring users to register before editing articles, and on December 5, 2005 non-registered editors were prohibited from creating new articles on the English Misplaced Pages. This does not address the larger problem of anonymity however.

Editorial process

Level of debate, edit wars, flame 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."

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.

Another edit war reported in mainstream press happened soon after the death of Kenneth Lay, the disgraced former CEO of Enron, who died from a heart attack. Several editors to the encyclopedia added content to Lay's Misplaced Pages biography surmising that the death was in fact a suicide, well in advance of any official determination of cause of death. Such edits were reverted and re-inserted several times; eventually the article reported the cause of death as a heart attack. As of July 2007, there is no evidence to suggest that Lay's death was by other than natural causes. The edit history of the article was investigated by the press, and The Washington Post published a column on the subject.

Another edit war occurred in August 2009 on Swedish Misplaced Pages, where Onoff employees removed critical content from the article about Onoff, a Swedish retail chain that sells home electronics and appliances. Erik Frankedal, press contact for Onoff, told Computer Sweden that he didn't know about this edit and didn't have the time to check it out. IDG reported about this event.

An SF Weekly article commented on the stakes of edit wars:

Many an edit war may seem like a fight over nothing to the casual observer, but considering that according to its staff, the popular, multilingual Web site gets about 7 billion views per month, stakes can be high. An edit yields what millions of people read on the site on any particular topic.

A common complaint about Misplaced Pages concerns so-called "flame wars", or deliberate insults made by users to create a hostile environment. The increasingly hostile environment in Misplaced Pages has led to a sharp and alarming decline in the number of Misplaced Pages editors, as reported in a recent article in The Wall Street Journal on 27 Nov 2009, titled "Volunteers Log Off as Misplaced Pages Ages"

Volunteers have been departing the project that bills itself as "the 💕 that anyone can edit" faster than new ones have been joining, and the net losses have accelerated over the past year. In the first three months of 2009, the English-language Misplaced Pages suffered a net loss of more than 49,000 editors, compared to a net loss of 4,900 during the same period a year earlier. ... "Misplaced Pages is becoming a more hostile environment", contends Mr. Ortega, a project manager at Libresoft, a research group at the Universidad Rey Juan Carlos in Madrid. "Many people are getting burnt out when they have to debate about the contents of certain articles again and again."

This concern has been acknowledged by Misplaced Pages; civility and "no personal attacks" are official policies of the project, and the concept of "wikiquette" has been adopted by some users in response.

In an 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 that "If you become a target on Misplaced Pages, do not expect a supportive community."

Consensus and the "hive mind"

Oliver Kamm, in an article for The Times, expressed skepticism toward Misplaced Pages's reliance on consensus in forming its content:

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.

In his article, Digital Maoism: The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism (first published online by Edge: The Third Culture, 30 May 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 follows:

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 goes on to point out the economic trend 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.

In a 2005 study, Emigh and Herring note that there are not yet many formal studies of Misplaced Pages or its model, and suggest that Misplaced Pages achieves its results by social means—self-norming, a core of active users watching for problems, and expectations of encyclopedic text drawn from the wider culture.

Social stratification

An article in Computer Power User asserted that former editors of Misplaced Pages formed Wikitruth, a site that exposes alleged censorship and infighting on the encyclopedia. Jimmy Wales dismissed the site as a "hoax" created by editors who had their articles deleted or modified on Misplaced Pages.

Since its creation, Misplaced Pages ostensibly upheld the basic principle of equal status for all good faith editors. As of 2010, Jimmy Wales still claimed in his statement of principles for Misplaced Pages:

There must be no cabal, no elite, and no hierarchy or structure to get in the way of this openness to newcomers. Any security measures to be implemented to protect the community against real vandals (and there are real vandals, who do occasionally affect us), should be implemented on the model of "strict scrutiny."

Expansion of administrator authority

On the other hand, to reduce vandalism and to control user conduct, Misplaced Pages created a class of volunteer administrators or "sysops" who are invested with the means and authority to discipline users. Administrator powers include deleting articles, protecting pages from editing, and blocking users; actions that ordinary (non-sysop) editors cannot do nor undo. Special rules and protocols were set up to prevent administrators from abusing their powers; such as the Misplaced Pages:Articles for deletion (AfD) page, a forum to discuss article deletions. An administrator who wished to delete an article was required to post a notice on the article itself, and wait for comments of other editors, before carrying out the deletion. Moreover, since every sysop can undo the actions of other sysops, any reported abuse by one individual can in principle be corrected by his peers.

Nevertheless, those extra powers inevitably meant that the opinion of administrators, individually and as a whole, would prevail over that of ordinary users in certain kinds of disputes. While the principle of equality among editors was never formally revised, changes in Misplaced Pages policies have gradually increased the effective authority and independence of administrators. These changes intensified after 2006, when the Seigenthaler biography incident forced Misplaced Pages to tighten its defences against malicious edits. For instance, at some point sysops were given the authority to speedily delete, without prior discussion on the AfD, articles that were clearly malicious, or deemed inappropriate by any of several other criteria. In 2010, these criteria were further widened to include biographies of living persons (BLPs) which did not include adequate references, irrespective of their contents being verifiable or not. As a consequence of these enlarged powers, administrators have increasingly had to impose their opinion, ex officio, over that of ordinary users. At the same time, the body of Misplaced Pages rules and procedures kept increasing in size and complexity. This further increased the authority gap between administrators and veteran editors, who know the rules, and ordinary editors — especially novice ones.

Complaints about administrator abuse

Complaints about abuse of power by administrators are frequently made in Misplaced Pages's internal forums, including the discussion pages associated with specific articles, pages for discussions of rules and procedures, the message boards of individual users, as well as general bulletin boards. Many of those complaints appear to be due to ignorance or misunderstanding of Misplaced Pages's rules. Only a small fraction of those allegations have been formally submitted to Misplaced Pages's disciplinary committees. Allegations have also been made in those internal forums that administrator abuse has been steadily increasing in frequency and severity, and that it is one major reason for decline in editor numbers since 2006--a striking reversal from its exponential growth from 2001 to 2005.

In the context of these complaints, the term "administrator" is often used to also encompass editors who are not formally administrators, but who engage in administrative activities like tagging and categorizing articles, running robots, writing and enforcing rules, and proposing user bans and article deletions, or who are mistaken by other editors as administrators on the basis of their previous actions or arguments.

Allegations of administrator abuse have recently started to circulate outside Misplaced Pages in blogs, online technical forums, and in mainstream media. "Some disillusioned former Wikipedians gripe about such bureaucratic heavy-handedness and/or the rabidity of some of the site's devotees, grumbling about 'Swastikipedia.'" It has also been noted that, despite the perception of Misplaced Pages as a "shining example of Web democracy" that "a small number of people are running the show." Despite the need for some form of control in an open system, this "doesn't explain the kind of territorialism—the authorial domination by 1 percent of contributors—on the site's pages." In an article on Misplaced Pages conflicts, The Guardian noted complaints that administrators sometimes use their special powers to suppress legitimate editors. The article discussed "a backlash among some editors, who argue 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 vandalise in the first place."

'My vandalism started after an edit conflict over the Courier-Journal's sports and editorial coverage, where my – what I felt were – legitimate edits on the page for C-J criticism were removed and I was blasted,' he says. 'I have being vandalising Misplaced Pages and its user pages for months, mostly because seeing my vandalism or that of others was funny as hell... and to punish admins.'

Perception of administrators as a closed community

Among the allegations of administrator abuse, one often finds claims that the administrators have become a clique whose goals or viewpoints set them apart from ordinary users. An article on The Register, dated 4 December 2007 and entitled "Secret mailing list rocks Misplaced Pages", alleged the use of a private mailing list to coordinate administrative actions. A follow-up article on 8 December 2007 specifically alleged that administrators were collaborating with critics of Overstock.com to "own" articles about the company.

Consistency of complaints

The existence and significance of widespread administrator abuse is highly disputed within Misplaced Pages. A common rebuttal to such allegations is that a raising of editorial standards became necessary to improve the quality of Misplaced Pages articles. In particular, the higher rates of article deletions observed since 2006 are claimed to be necessary to meet new guidelines on allowed article topics, such as a set of "notability" requirements. The same argument is used to justify the insertion of tags in articles that warn readers against perceived flaws and/or request that other editors perform certain editorial actions.

There have been no systematic surveys of the opinions of ordinary editors about sysop behavior, or about Misplaced Pages governance in general. A limited enquiry was made in 2009 among former Misplaced Pages editors, with the goal of finding out the reasons why they had left. Another experiment was conducted in 2009, with the goal of determining whether Misplaced Pages had indeed become hostile to new editors. In this experiment, several experienced editors pretended to be inexperienced new users, deliberately created poor-quality articles, and followed their fate over the following weeks.

Pareto effect

Known phenomena such as the Pareto principle and the 1% rule affect the Misplaced Pages community. Misplaced Pages's own statistics show that only a small number of users account for a large number of the edits made. The alleged results of this is that Misplaced Pages, as viewed, is not truly a global community work but rather the work of an anonymous minority whose material is overrepresented. (Note that this is different from the complaints regarding administrators because the users in question are not required to be administrators, just to edit a lot.) In 2006, Jimmy Wales himself observed that the majority of Misplaced Pages edits are made by a group of around 500 people who "all know each other". However, when amount of text was used as a metric instead of edit count, the result was often the opposite. Most of the top contributors to the content of articles tended to be not big-time editors, but rather people who only edited Misplaced Pages occasionally - many of whom had not even bothered to register a Misplaced Pages account.

Plagiarism concerns

The Misplaced Pages Watch criticism website in 2006 has listed dozens of examples of plagiarism by Misplaced Pages editors on the English version. Jimmy Wales, the Misplaced Pages co-founder, has said in this respect: "We need to deal with such activities with absolute harshness, no mercy, because this kind of plagiarism is 100% at odds with all of our core principles."

Impact on society

Some observers claim that Misplaced Pages is undesirable, because it is an economic threat to publishers of traditional encyclopedias, many of whom may be unable to compete with a product that is essentially free. Nicholas Carr writes in the essay "The amorality of Web 2.0", speaking of the so-called Web 2.0 as a whole: "Implicit in the ecstatic visions of Web 2.0 is the hegemony of the amateur. I for one can't imagine anything more frightening." Others dispute the notion that Misplaced Pages, or similar efforts, will entirely displace traditional publications. For instance, Chris Anderson, the editor-in-chief of Wired Magazine, wrote in Nature that the "wisdom of the crowds" approach of Misplaced Pages will not displace top scientific journals with their rigorous peer review process.

Satire of Misplaced Pages

Misplaced Pages has been satirized by humorists who call attention to factual inaccuracies that may appear in articles owing to sloppy or biased editors or vandalism. For example, an article in The Onion was entitled "Misplaced Pages Celebrates 750 Years Of American Independence." In a piece on The Colbert Report, entitled "Wikiality" (a portmanteau of "wiki" and "reality"), Stephen Colbert encouraged his viewers to change Misplaced Pages's article on elephants to state that the number of African elephants had tripled over the past six months. Colbert's comments provoked a wave of vandalism of various articles at Misplaced Pages. On the January 29, 2007 edition of his program, Colbert did another segment on an attempt by Microsoft to hire writers to skew certain Misplaced Pages articles in their favor, ending with a call by Colbert to change the Misplaced Pages article on "truth" to the phrase "Truth has become a commodity" and offering a $5 cash reward to the first viewer to do so. The most recent satire of Misplaced Pages occurred on January 5, 2011 on the Daily Show with Jon Stewart on Comedy Central. During an interview with Misplaced Pages "volunteer" Jimmy Wales, Stewart claimed he was in fact, Batman; Wales responded with laughter and suggested that Misplaced Pages administrators would correct and lock Stewart's page. Quickly, the online community responded, editing Stewart's page to represent his claim to be Batman. Misplaced Pages administrators responded by correcting the changes and locking Stewart's page. Stewart joins the group of Comedy Central personalities including Daniel Tosh and Stephen Colbert, who have called for specific humorous Misplaced Pages edits.

In the American Dad! episode "Black Mystery Month" the character Steve Smith, seeking the "one place where a person can put out crazy information with no evidence that millions will accept as true," turns to Misplaced Pages.

An article in The Sun derided Misplaced Pages for including a "List of big-bust models and performers". Quoting an unnamed "company source", the article concluded: "It's every computer geek's dream come true – definitely one of Misplaced Pages's breast, I mean best, assets".

In a GamesRadar editorial, columnist Charlie Barrat juxtaposed Misplaced Pages's coverage of video game-related topics with topics that have greater real-world significance, such as God, World War II and former U.S. presidents. The voluminous material that in many cases exists regarding the former when compared with the latter is the subject of his criticism and satire.

Satire also exists in the form of parody encyclopedias such as Encyclopedia Dramatica and Uncyclopedia.

See also

• Deletionism and inclusionism in Misplaced Pages
• History of Misplaced Pages
• Reliability of Misplaced Pages
• User-generated content
• Misplaced Pages:Press coverage
• Misplaced Pages:Why Misplaced Pages is not so great
• Misplaced Pages:Criticisms
• Misplaced Pages:Replies to common objections
• Misplaced Pages Review and Wikitruth, two web sites about Misplaced Pages frequently critical of it and its leadership.

Further reading

• Andrew Keen. 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). Listen to: the NPR interview with A. Keen, Weekend Edition Saturday, June 16, 2007.
• Sheizaf Rafaeli & Yaron Ariel (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.

References

1. McHenry, Robert (2005-12-14). "The Faith-Based Encyclopedia Blinks". TCS Daily. Retrieved 2008-10-12.
2. Orlowski, Andrew (2005-12-12). "Who's responsible for Misplaced Pages?". The Register. Retrieved 2009-06-30. The public has a firm idea of what an 'encyclopedia' is, and it's a place where information can generally be trusted, or at least slightly more trusted than what a labyrinthine, mysterious bureaucracy can agree upon, and surely more trustworthy than a piece of spontaneous graffiti—and Misplaced Pages is a king-sized cocktail of the two.
3. ^ Lysa Chen (2007-03-28). "Several colleges push to ban Misplaced Pages as resource". Duke Chronicle. Retrieved 2007-04-02.
4. Youngwood, Susan (April 1, 2007). "Misplaced Pages: What do they know; when do they know it, and when can we trust it?". Rutland Herald. Retrieved 2007-04-05. Perhaps the most important thing to understand about Misplaced Pages – both its genius and its Achilles heel – is that anyone can create or modify an entry. Anyone means your 10-year-old neighbor or a Nobel Prize winner – or an editor like me, who is itching to correct a grammar error in that Misplaced Pages entry that I just quoted. Entries can be edited by numerous people and be in constant flux. What you read now might change in five minutes. Five seconds, even.
5. "A Stand Against Misplaced Pages", Inside Higher Ed (January 26, 2007). Retrieved on January 27, 2007.
6. ^ McHenry, Robert (2004-11-15). "The Faith-Based Encyclopedia". Tech Central Station. Retrieved 2008-10-12. Cite error: The named reference "McHenry" was defined multiple times with different content (see the help page).
7. Noam Cohen (2007-02-27). "Misplaced Pages on an academic hit list". NY Times News Service. Retrieved 2007-04-16. Middlebury professor Thomas Beyer, of the Russian department, said: 'I guess I am not terribly impressed by anyone citing an encyclopedia as a reference point, but I am not against using it as a starting point.'
8. Linden, Hartmut (2002-08-02). "A White Collar Protein Senses Blue Light". Science. Retrieved 2005. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |accessdate= (help) (subscription access only)
9. Yolanda S. George and Shirley S. Malcolm. "Perspectives from AAAS" (PDF). American Association for the Advancement of Science. Retrieved 2007-10-27.
10. "Misplaced Pages: Verifiability".
11. ^ Brian Bergstein (2007-04-02). "Misplaced Pages co-founder seeks to start all over again—this time with contributors' real names". Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Associated Press. Retrieved 2007-04-21. Misplaced Pages's de-facto leader, Jimmy Wales, counters that real names are overrated. Sorin Adam Matei and Caius Dobrescu. "Ambiguity and conflict in the Wikipedian knowledge production system". 2006 International Communication Association Annual Meeting, Dresden, Germany. Archived from the original on June 10, 2007. Retrieved 2007-04-26. The participants included several notable contributors, such as James Wales, Misplaced Pages's founder and de facto arbiter and leader of the project. Holden Frith (2007-03-26). "Misplaced Pages founder launches rival online encyclopaedia". The Times. London. Retrieved 2007-04-26. Misplaced Pages's de facto leader, Jimmy Wales, stood by the site's format.
12. Misplaced Pages: "A Work in Progress", BusinessWeek (December 14, 2005). Retrieved on 2007-01-29.
13. "Misplaced Pages:Researching with Misplaced Pages". Misplaced Pages. Retrieved 2005-12-14.
14. ^ Waldman, Simon (2004-10-26). "Who knows?". The Guardian. London. Retrieved 2005-12-30.
15. G. Nunberg, A Wiki's as Good as a Nod, NPR Fresh Air commentary 6/5/07 (Misplaced Pages: Blessing or Curse?). Quote: It explains the exaggerated deference that Wikipedians pay to published sources, even though a lot of the books and articles the contributors cite turn out to be no more reliable than Misplaced Pages itself.
16. G. Nunberg, Linguist Reflects On 'Years Of Talking Dangerously', NPR Fresh Air from WHYY, Jun 3, 2009.
17. ^ Jim Giles (2005-12-15). "Internet encyclopaedias go head to head". Nature. 438 (7070): 900–901. doi:10.1038/438900a. PMID 16355180. {{cite journal}}: |access-date= requires |url= (help)
18. "Supplementary information to accompany Nature news article "Internet encyclopedias go head to head"". Nature. 2005-12-22.
19. ^ "Fatally Flawed – Refuting the recent study on encyclopedic accuracy by the journal Nature" (PDF). Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. March 2006. Retrieved 2009-06-30.
20. "Britannica attacks". Nature. 440 (7084): 582. 2006-03-30. doi:10.1038/440582b. PMID 16572128. Retrieved 2006-07-14.
21. "Misplaced Pages study 'fatally flawed'". BBC News. 2006-03-24.
22. "Encyclopædia Britannica and Nature: a response" (PDF). Press release. 2006-03-23.
23. John Siegenthaler (2005-11-29). "A false Misplaced Pages "biography"". USA Today.
24. Katharine Q. Seelye (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. 2006-04-15. Retrieved 2007-04-28.
26. Dedman, Bill (2007-03-03). "Reading Hillary Clinton's hidden thesis". msnbc.com. Retrieved 2007-03-17.
27. "Hillary Rodham Clinton". Misplaced Pages. 2005-07-09. Retrieved 2007-03-17.
28. "Hillary Rodham Clinton". Misplaced Pages. 2007-03-02. Retrieved 2007-03-17.
29. Cara Paige (2006-04-11). "Exclusive: Meet the Real Sir Walter Mitty". Daily Record. Retrieved 2007-11-24.
30. "Media coverage of Misplaced Pages hoax results in article". Misplaced Pages. 2006-04-17. Retrieved 2009-06-30.
31. Gene Weingarten (2007-03-16). "A wickedly fun test of Misplaced Pages". The News & Observer. Archived from the original on March 20, 2007. Retrieved 2006-04-08.
32. "Misplaced Pages:Vandalism". Misplaced Pages. Retrieved 2009-11-26.
33. "Misplaced Pages:Neutral point of view/FAQ". Misplaced Pages. Retrieved 2006-09-13. Neutral point of view is a fundamental Wikimedia principle and a cornerstone of Misplaced Pages. All Misplaced Pages articles and other encyclopedic content must be written from a neutral point of view, representing fairly, and as far as possible without bias, all significant views that have been published by reliable sources.
34. Mark Glaser (2006-04-17). "Is There a Neutral View on George W. Bush?". PBS. Retrieved 2007-10-27. 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.
35. Margaret Kane (2006-01-30). "Politicians notice Misplaced Pages". CNET.com. Retrieved 2007-01-28.
36. "Senator staffers spam Misplaced Pages". Retrieved 2006-09-13.
37. Pablo Bachelet (2006-05-03). "War of Words: Website Can't Define Cuba". The Miami Herald. Retrieved 2008-07-08.
38. Matt Sanchez (2008-05-14). "Wiki-Whacked by Political Bias". Pajamas Media. Retrieved 2008-07-08.
39. Larry Delay (2006-08-03). "A Pernicious Model for Control of the World Wide Web: The Cuba Case" (PDF). Association for Study of the Cuban Economy(ASCE). Retrieved 2008-07-08.
40. Metz, Cade, "US Department of Justice banned from Misplaced Pages, The Register, April 29, 2008.
41. "Candid camera". Harper's Magazine. 2008-07. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
42. "Letter in Harper's Magazine About Misplaced Pages Issues". Camera. 2008-08-14. Retrieved 2010-03-31.
43. Andre Oboler, "Exposed - Anti-Israel Subversion on Misplaced Pages," May 14, 2008, Media Critiques at http://www.honestreporting.com/articles/45884734/critiques/new/Exposed_-_Anti-Israeli_Subversion_on_Wikipedia.asp; also see Andre Oboler, "Wiki Warfare: Battle for the on-line encyclopedia," May 13, 2008, Jerusalem Post at http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Op-EdContributors/Article.aspx?id=101037
44. McElroy, Damien (2008-05-08). "Israeli battles rage on Misplaced Pages". The Daily Telegraph. London: Telegraph Media Group Limited. Retrieved 2008-05-08.
45. Your wiki entry counts, Haaretz, By Cnaan Liphshiz 25.12.07
46. Haviv Rettig Gur, "Israeli-Palestinian conflict rages on Misplaced Pages," Jerusalem Post, 16.05.10, at http://www.jpost.com/Israel/Article.aspx?id=175660.
47. Noam Cohen (August 31, 2008) "Don’t Like Palin’s Misplaced Pages Story? Change It" Technology. 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, 28 novembre 2007.
50. Question from Senator Jean-Louis Masson to the Minister of Justice, and the Minister's response
51. Allan Woods (August 25, 2010). "Ottawa investigating Misplaced Pages edits". Toronto Star. Retrieved 26 August 2010.
52. The Cyrus Cylinder, Misplaced Pages and Iran conspiracies | Al Jazeera Blogs
53. Jackson, Ron (2009-08-04) http://www.dnjournal.com/archive/lowdown/2009/dailyposts/20090804.htm
54. Umbria Blogosphere Analysis – Misplaced Pages and Corporate Blogging (2007-08-24) http://www.jdpowerwebintelligence.com/downloads/CNN_Wikipedia.pdf "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 (2008-02-01) http://www.beggarscanbechoosers.com/2008/02/wikipedia-continues-to-sanitize-bush.html
56. ^ Brian Bergstein (Jan. 24, 2007) Microsoft Violates Misplaced Pages's Sacred Rule The Associated Press. Retrieved on 2008-09-03.
57. ^ Nancy Gohring (Jan 23, 2007) "Microsoft said to offer payment for Misplaced Pages edits" IDG News Service. Retrieved on 2008-09-03.
58. ^ Nancy Gohring (Jan 24, 2007) "Microsoft's step into Misplaced Pages prompts debate" IDG News Service.
59. March 12, 2008 Wiki boss 'edited for donation' Technology. BBC News.
60. Robert Verkaik (August 18, 2007). "Misplaced Pages and the art of censorship". The Independent.
61. Rhys Blakely (2007-08-15). "Exposed: guess who has been polishing their Misplaced Pages entries?". London: Times Online. Retrieved 2007-08-15.
62. Jonathan Fildes (2007-08-15). "Misplaced Pages 'shows CIA page edits'". BBC. Retrieved 2007-08-15.
63. ^ Wisdom? More like dumbness of the crowds | Oliver Kamm – Times Online
64. Cade Metz (December 18, 2007). "Truth, anonymity and the Misplaced Pages Way: Why it's broke and how it can be fixed". The Register.
65. Metz, Cade, "Misplaced Pages ruled by 'Lord of the Universe'", The Register, February 6, 2008.
66. Cade Metz (March 6, 2008). "Why you should care that Jimmy Wales ignores reality". The Register. Retrieved on 2008-09-03.
67. ^ Arthur, Charles (2005-12-15). "Log on and join in, but beware the web cults". The Guardian. London. Retrieved 2006-07-14.
68. ^ Roy Rosenzweig (2006). "Can History be Open Source? Misplaced Pages and the Future of the Past". The Journal of American History. 93 (1): 117–146. doi:10.2307/4486062. Retrieved 2006-08-11. {{cite journal}}: Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help) (Center for History and New Media)
69. Andrew Orlowski (2005-10-18). "Misplaced Pages founder admits to serious quality problems". The Register. Retrieved 2007-09-30.
70. "Misplaced Pages cancer information accurate". UPI. 4 June 2010. Retrieved 31 December 2010.
71. "Fact or fiction? Misplaced Pages's variety of contributors is not only a strength". The Economist. 10 March 2007. Retrieved 31 December 2010.
72. ^ "The Wall Street Journal Online". 2006-09-12. Retrieved 2006-09-13.
73. ^ Cohen, Martin. "Encyclopaedia Idiotica". Times Higher Education (28 August 2008): 26.
74. Stephen Colbert, The Colbert Report, episode 3109, August 21, 2007.
75. Brophy-Warren, Jamin. "Oh, that John Locke". The Wall Street Journal (June 16, 2007): P3.
76. Hendren, Johnny "DocEvil" (2007-06-05). "The Art of Wikigroaning". Something Awful. Retrieved 2007-06-17.
77. Brown, Andrew (2007-06-14). "No amount of collaboration will make the sun orbit the Earth". The Guardian (June 14, 2007). London. Retrieved 2010-03-27.
78. Ivor Tossell (2007-06-15). "Duality of Misplaced Pages". Toronto Globe and Mail. Retrieved 2007-06-20.
79. ^ J.P. Kirby (October 20, 2007). The Problem with Misplaced Pages. J.P.'s Random Ramblings.
80. Volume 55, Nicholson Baker (March 20, 2008) The Charms of Misplaced Pages – The New York Review of Books Vol. 55, Number 4.
81. Bobbie Johnson, Guardian Newpapers Limited, 2009
82. Noah, Timothy (2007-02-24). "Evicted from Misplaced Pages. – By Timothy Noah – Slate Magazine". Slate.com. Retrieved 2010-03-31.
83. Mark Glaser (2006-04-21). "Wales Discusses Political Bias on Misplaced Pages". PBS Mediashift. Retrieved 2007-08-21.
84. Johnson, Bobbie (2007-03-01). "Conservapedia—the US religious right's answer to Misplaced Pages". The Guardian. London. Retrieved 2010-03-27.
85. Turner, Adam (2007-03-05). "Conservapedia aims to set Misplaced Pages right". IT Wire. Retrieved 2008-05-12.
86. Doug Huntington (2007-05-09). "'Design' Proponents Accuse Misplaced Pages of Bias, Hypocrisy". The Christian Post. Retrieved 2007-08-09.
87. Solomon, Lawrence (2008-07-08). "Wikipropaganda On Global Warming". National Review. CBSNews.com. Retrieved 2008-07-20.
88. Nicholas Stix: Misplaced Pages on Race – ‘World’s biggest encyclopedia’ serves up propaganda. American Renaissance. July 2007
89. Scarborough, Rowan (2010-09-27). Misplaced Pages "Whacks the Right". Human Events. Retrieved 2010-10-03. {{cite web}}: Check |url= value (help)
90. Marcus Browne (February 13, 2008) Misplaced Pages accused of 'US-centric bias' ZDNet Australia
91. http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2011/02/02/where-are-the-women-in-wikipedia/a-culture-of-editing-wars
92. Noam Cohen, "Define Gender Gap? Look Up Misplaced Pages's Contributor List," The New York Times. Found at The New York Times, January 31, 2011.
93. "Misplaced Pages attacked over porn pages". Livenews.com.au. Retrieved 2010-03-31.
94. Metz, Cade (7 December 2008). "Brit ISPs censor Misplaced Pages over 'child porn' album cover". The Register. Retrieved 10 May 2009.
95. Raphael, JR (December 10, 2008). "Misplaced Pages Censorship Sparks Free Speech Debate". The Washington Post. Retrieved May 10, 2009.
96. Farrell, Nick (April 29, 2010). "Misplaced Pages denies child abuse allegations: Co-founder grassed the outfit to the FBI". The Inquirer. Retrieved 9 October 2010.
97. ^ Metz, Cade (April 9, 2010). "Wikifounder reports Wikiparent to FBI over 'child porn'". The Register. Retrieved April 19, 2010.
98. "Misplaced Pages blasts co-founder's accusations of child porn on website". The Economic Times. April 29, 2010. Retrieved 29 April 2010.
99. ^ "Misplaced Pages blasts talk of child porn at website". AFP. April 28, 2010. Retrieved 29 April 2010.
100. "Wikimedia pornography row deepens as Wales cedes rights". BBC News. May 10, 2010. Retrieved May 19, 2010.
101. Fernanda Viégas, Martin Wattenberg, Kushal Dave. "Studying Cooperation and Conflict between Authors with history flow Visualizations" (PDF). MIT. {{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
102. "Martin Luther King Day". Misplaced Pages. 2006-05-22.
103. Sujay Kumar (2007-04-13). "Oh, the wonderful world of Misplaced Pages". The Daily Illini. Retrieved 2007-10-04.
104. Reid Priedhorsky, Jilin Chen, Shyong (Tony) K. Lam, Katherine Panciera, Loren Terveen, John Riedl, "Creating, destroying, and restoring value in wikipedia", Proc. GROUP 2007, doi: ACM.org
105. Metz, Cade (2009-01-22). "TheRegister.co.uk". TheRegister.co.uk. Retrieved 2010-03-31.
106. Goss, Patrick (2008-09-15). "Techradar.com". Techradar.com. Retrieved 2010-03-31.
107. Pershing, Ben. "WashingtonPost.com". Voices.washingtonpost.com. Retrieved 2010-03-31.
108. See "Legal Issues in Employee Privacy" by Thamer E. "Chip" Temple III for further discussion
109. ^ James Donnelly and Jenifer Haeckl (2001-04-12). "Privacy and Security on the Internet: What Rights, What Remedies?". MCLE.
110. See "Libel" by David McHam for the legal distinction
111. Misplaced Pages's Hive Mind Administration, November 9, 2005 (copy of original text at Google Blogoscoped)
112. "Misplaced Pages Becomes Internet Force, Faces Crisis". Agence France-Presse. 2005-12-11. Archived from the original on October 6, 2007. Retrieved 2007-12-26.
113. "Tron dispute". Misplaced Pages Signpost. Misplaced Pages. 2006-01-16.
114. Heise Online: "Court overturns temporary restraining order against Wikimedia Deutschland, by Torsten Kleinz, 9 February 2006.
115. ^ Emigh & Herring (2005) "Collaborative Authoring on the Web: A Genre Analysis of Online Encyclopedias", Proceedings of the Thirty-Eighth Hawai'i International Conference on System Sciences. (PDF)
116. Andrew Orlowski, "Wiki-fiddlers defend Clever Big Book", The Register, July 23, 2004.
117. "Professor James Fetzer Exposes Misplaced Pages.org". Video.google.com. Retrieved 2010-03-31.
118. ""Misplaced Pages:Autobiography". Misplaced Pages. Retrieved 2007-05-03.
119. Arthur, Charles (2005-12-15). "Log on and join in, but beware the web cults". The Guardian. London. Retrieved 2010-03-27.
120. Thompson, Bill (2005-12-16). "What is it with Misplaced Pages?". BBC.
121. Orlowski, Andrew (2005-12-06). "Who owns your Misplaced Pages bio?". The Register.
122. Lu Stout, Kristie (2003-08-04). "Misplaced Pages: The know-it-all Web site". CNN.
123. "Misplaced Pages:Research with Misplaced Pages", Misplaced Pages (March 28, 2005).
124. "Misplaced Pages:Sockpuppetry", Misplaced Pages. Retrieved on 2007-01-27.
125. Misplaced Pages isn't about human potential, whatever Wales says. The Guardian. Published September 25, 2008.
126. Why you should care that Jimmy Wales ignores reality. The Register. Published March 6, 2008.
127. ^ Schiff, Stacey. "Know it all: Can Misplaced Pages conquer expertise?", The New Yorker, July 24, 2006.
128. Finkelstein, Seth (March 8, 2007). "Read me first". Technology. London: The Guardian. Retrieved 2007-08-01.At some point, Essjay claimed 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."
129. "Archived copy of Essjay's Misplaced Pages user page". The Internet Archive. Archived from the original on 2006-01-11.
130. "Talk:Five solas". Misplaced Pages. 2005-06-11. Retrieved 2007-06-18.
131. Orlowski, Andrew (March 2, 2007). "Bogus Misplaced Pages Prof. was blessed then promoted". The Register. Retrieved 2007-03-18.
132. Staff (2007-03-06). "Fake professor in Misplaced Pages storm". BBC. Retrieved 2007-03-08.
133. Bergstein, Brian (March 25, 2007). "Sanger says he co-started Misplaced Pages". The Washington Post. Associated Press. Retrieved 2007-03-26. 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.
134. Meyers, Peter (2001-09-20). "Fact-Driven? Collegial? This Site Wants You". New York Times. Retrieved 2007-08-01."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.
135. David Mehegan (February 12, 2006). "Bias, sabotage haunt Misplaced Pages's free world". The Boston Globe. Retrieved 2007-07-30.
136. Larry Sanger (1 March 2007). "Misplaced Pages firmly supports your right to identity fraud". Citizendium Blog. Larry Sanger. Retrieved 2007-03-02.
137. "User talk:Jimbo Wales".
138. Larry Sanger (3 March 2007). "Jimmy Wales' latest response on the Essjay situation". Citizendium Blog. Larry Sanger. Retrieved 2007-03-03.
139. "Essjay's Wikia user page". Retrieved 2007-09-19.
140. 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 2007-05-17. Retrieved 2007-03-07.
141. Wales, Jimmy (2007-03-19). "Making amends". The New Yorker. p. 24.
142. Cohen, Noam (2007-03-05). "A Contributor to Misplaced Pages Has His Fictional Side". The New York Times. Retrieved 2007-03-05.
143. "ABC News broadcast on Essjay". Retrieved 2007-03-08.
144. Bergstein, Brian (March 7, 2007). "After flap over phony professor, Misplaced Pages wants some writers to share real names". USA Today. Associated Press.
145. Williams, Martyn (2007-03-09). "Misplaced Pages Founder Addresses User Credentials". IDG News Service.
146. Misplaced Pages Credentials
147. Welham, Jamie; Lakhani, Nina (2009-06-07). "Misplaced Pages 'sentinel' quits after using alias to alter entries". London: Independent.co.uk. Retrieved 2010-03-31.
148. ^ Glyn Moody (2006-07-13). "This time, it'll be a Misplaced Pages written by experts". The Guardian. London. Retrieved 2007-04-28. Larry Sanger seems to have a thing about free online encyclopedias. Although his main claim to fame is as the co-founder, along with Jimmy Wales, of Misplaced Pages, that is just one of several projects to produce large-scale, systematic stores of human knowledge he has been involved in..." saw that I was essentially looking for employment online and he was looking for someone to lead Nupedia"...Career: 1992–1996, 1997–1998 Graduate teaching associate, OSU; 2000–2002 Editor-in-chief, Nupedia.
149. "Toward a New Compendium of Knowledge (longer version)". Citizendium.org. Retrieved 2006-10-10.
150. B. Bergstein, Citizendium aims to be better Misplaced Pages, USA Today, Posted 3/25/2007 3:00 PM.
151. ^ Mary Spicuzza (February 13, 2008) Misplaced Pages Idiots: The Edit Wars of San Francisco SF Weekly
152. Wales, Jimmy (2005-12-05). "WikiEN-l Experiment on new pages". Retrieved 2005-12-30.
153. Besiki Stvilla, Michael Twidale, Linda Smith, Les Gasser. "Information Quality Work Organization in Misplaced Pages" (PDF). Florida State University. Retrieved 2007-10-05.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
154. Martin Hickman and Genevieve Roberts (2006-02-13). "Misplaced Pages – separating fact from fiction". The New Zealand Herald. Retrieved 2007-04-17. 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.
155. Kleinz, Torsten (2005). "World of Knowledge" (PDF). Linux Magazine. Retrieved 2007-05-12. 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 news}}: Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help)
156. "Misplaced Pages: Three revert rule".
157. Frank Ahrens (2006-07-09). "Death by Misplaced Pages: The Kenneth Lay Chronicles". The Washington Post.
158. "Onoff and Swedish Misplaced Pages". IDG.se. Retrieved 2010-03-31.
159. ^ J. Angwin and G.A. Fowler, Volunteers Log Off as Misplaced Pages Ages, The Wall Street Journal, 27 Nov 2009. Read the article from Resource Shelf.
160. "Misplaced Pages: Civility".
161. "Misplaced Pages: No personal attacks".
162. Anja Ebersbach, Markus Glaser and Richard Heigl. "Wiki: Web Collaboration, Chapter One: "The Wiki Concept", p. 28-29" (PDF). Springer Berlin Heidelberg, 2006 ISBN 978-3-540-25995-4. Retrieved 2007-01-28.
163. Shankbone, David (2008). "Nobody's safe in cyberspace". The Brooklyn Rail. Retrieved 2008-07-10. {{cite web}}: Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help)
164. ^ Lanier, Jaron (May 30, 2006). "Digital Maoism: The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism". Edge Foundation. Retrieved 2007-04-30.
165. Clay Shirky (2006-06-07). "Reactions to Digital Maoism". Many2Many. Retrieved 2007-05-01.
166. Steve Smith (2006). "When The Wiki Hits The Fan". Computer Power User. Archived from the original on 2008-01-07. Retrieved 2007-10-27. {{cite web}}: Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help)
167. Antone Gonsalves (2006-04-17). "Misplaced Pages Protest Site 'A Hoax' – Founder". InformationWeek. Retrieved 2007-10-27.
168. http://en.wikipedia.org/search/?title=User:Jimbo_Wales&oldid=370807626
169. Hafner, Kate (June 17, 2006). "Growing Misplaced Pages Refines Its 'Anyone Can Edit' Policy". New York Times. . Retrieved June 25, 2010.
170. Forte, Andrea; Larco, Vanessa; Bruckman, Amy (June 2009). "Decentralization in Misplaced Pages Governance". Journal of Management Information Systems 26 (1): 49–72. ISSN 0742-1222. "Despite the traditional division between technical and social powers on the site, administrators are beginning to step into more authoritative roles and are making more and more interpretive and "moral" decisions about user behavior.".
171. ^ Bongwon Suh, Gregorio Convertino, Ed H. Chi, Peter Pirolli (2009), "The Singularity is Not Near: Slowing Growth of Misplaced Pages". Proc. WikiSym’09.
172. Millard, Mike (February 20, 2008). "Wikipediots: Who are these devoted, even obsessive contributors to Misplaced Pages?". Salt Lake City Weekly. http://www.cityweekly.net/utah/article-5129-feature-wikipediots-who-are-these-devoted-even-obsessive-contributors-to-wikipedia.html. Retrieved June 25, 2010.
173. ^ Wilson, Chris (February 22, 2008). "The Wisdom of the Chaperones: Digg, Misplaced Pages, and the myth of Web 2.0 democracy." Slate. Retrieved June 25, 2010.
174. ^ Jenny Kleeman (2007-03-25). "Wiki wars". The Guardian. London. Retrieved 2007-10-04.
175. Cade Metz (2007-12-04). "Secret mailing list rocks Misplaced Pages". The Register. Retrieved 2007-12-04.
176. "Misplaced Pages black helicopters circle Utah's Traverse Mountain". The Register. 2007-12-08. Retrieved 2008-05-02.
177. Misplaced Pages:List of Wikipedians by number of edits
178. ^ Who Writes Misplaced Pages? (Aaron Swartz's Raw Thought)
179. ^ "Plagiarism by Misplaced Pages editors". Misplaced Pages Watch. 27 October 2006.
180. "The amorality of Web 2.0". Rough Type. 2005-10-03. Retrieved 2006-07-15.
181. "Technical solutions: Wisdom of the crowds". Nature. Retrieved 2006-10-10.
182. "Misplaced Pages Celebrates 750 Years Of American Independence". Theonion.com. Retrieved 2010-03-31.
183. Caroline McCarthy (2006-08-01). "Colbert speaks, America follows: All Hail Wikiality!". c-net news.com.
184. "Misplaced Pages satire leads to vandalism, protections". Misplaced Pages Signpost. 2006-08-07.
185. "Fox Broadcasting Company recaps: American Dad – Episode 13: Black Mystery Month". 2007-02-18. Archived from the original on March 1, 2007. Retrieved March 8, 2007.
186. Katie Cheeseman (12 December 2007) "Misplaced Pages's bust idea ever" The Sun
187. Charlie Barratt (June 25, 2008). "The WTF World of Misplaced Pages". Future Publishing. pp. 1–5. Retrieved February 20, 2009.
188. Jonathan Dee (2007-07-01). "Misplaced Pages". New York Times Magazine. Retrieved 2007-11-19.
189. "Freedom of Speech through Misplaced Pages". U.S. Department of State. 2006-05-19. Retrieved 2007-10-04.
190. Keen, Andrew (2007-06-16). "Does the Internet Undermine Culture?". Npr.org. Retrieved 2010-03-31.
191. Yeda.info

• Misplaced Pages as a media topic
• Critics of Misplaced Pages
• Internet critics
• Criticisms of companies
• Criticisms of software and websites