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cory doctorow
of its entries.” [fn: see http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/ar-
chives/000675.html for more] Not a complete win for Wikipe-
dia, but hardly “outrageous,” “repugnant,” and “dangerous.” (Poor
Fasoldt — his idiotic hyperbole will surely haunt him through the
whole of his career — I mean, “repugnant”?!)
There has been one very damning and even frightening in-
dictment of Wikipedia, which came from Ethan Zuckerman, the
founder of the Geekcorps group, which sends volunteers to poor
countries to help establish Internet Service Providers and do
other good works through technology.
Zuckerman, a Harvard Berkman Center Fellow, is concerned
with the “systemic bias” in a collaborative encyclopedia whose
contributors must be conversant with technology and in posses-
sion of same in order to improve on the work there. Zuckerman
reasonably observes that Internet users skew towards wealth,
residence in the world’s richest countries, and a technological
bent. This means that the Wikipedia, too, is skewed to subjects
of interest to that group — subjects where that group already has
expertise and interest.
The result is tragicomical. The entry on the Congo Civil War,
the largest military conflict the world has seen since WWII, which
has claimed over three million lives, has only a fraction of the
verbiage devoted to the War of the Ents, a fictional war fought
between sentient trees in J. R. R. Tolkien’s
The Lord of the Rings.
Zuckerman issued a public call to arms to rectify this, challeng-
ing Wikipedia contributors to seek out information on subjects
like Africa’s military conflicts, nursing, and agriculture and write
these subjects up in the same loving detail given over to science
fiction novels and contemporary youth culture. His call has been
answered well. What remains is to infiltrate the Wikipedia into
the academe so that term papers, Masters and Doctoral theses
on these subjects find themselves in whole or in part on the Wiki-
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