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Prozium_Addict
Hummingbird
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05 Feb 2007, 6:11 pm

I love how so many people get even the elementary facts about wikipedia wrong... and yet, speak with an air of authority about it.



ElliottHird
Tufted Titmouse
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07 Feb 2007, 5:38 am

doordoctor wrote:
hmm, odd, i have a feeling it is people who are runing virtual machine. i think this because wasnt wikipedia made using freeosb or gnu?? i really dont know if a windows machine can hack a server running linux. but since i dont use linux i suppose its possible 8O
load of crap...

Besides, it's hardly hacking. It's paying people to try and force POV on WP.



Quest_techie
Deinonychus
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07 Feb 2007, 9:01 am

I read the article, I don't think microsoft did anything wrong, and I will say right now I hate microsoft

I will also, in the spirit of disclosure state that I do not trust wikipedia, or anyone involved with wikipedia in an official standing, it is full of propoganda, and lies, and any professor or teacher who allows it to be used as a source should be stuffed with his own christmas goose this coming year, give them enough time o put their affairs in order and feel the inexorable hands of time wringing their life



Run
Hummingbird
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07 Feb 2007, 10:49 am

You can't say that wikipedia is biased without first reading it (which is impossible considering it's size). However, one can also argue that with millions of topics and authors, it will contain biased articles. I would not be surprised if some of those articles were about the closed-source (microsoft) versus open-source.

Nevertheless, I've used wikipedia a lot and it really contains a LOT of useful information that you cannot easily find elsewhere. I mostly find the content to be clearly written by experts in the field whose only motivation to write something is correctness. Moreover, if an article is clearly biased, then you have to realized that EVERY reader who comes along can change it, and it will be changed in that case. The result is automatically that an article only becomes stable when it gives hard, and correct facts, without being biased.

I'd be very interested to know (and read) the article that Microsoft wanted to see changed, so I can judge myself if it is biased, or that it just contains facts that Microsoft doesn't like to be public.

The big problem in this case seems to be the fact that the to-be editor was PAID. That means he WOULD be biased towards Microsoft per definition ;)
If this guy decides to independently still edit the article, then I think it would be accepted. As long as an article contains opinions however, it's likely to
be changed again and again... They'll have to stick to facts.



ScratchMonkey
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07 Feb 2007, 5:01 pm

I don't think payment automatically makes you biased. The author was paid in advance, with no promise of recurring business, so he didn't have a lot of incentive to bias the article. Certainly no more so than an author with an interest in an article he was editing, like a hobbyist writing about his hobby, or a fan of some fictional work editing the article about that work.