It seems that you can't open a newspaper or look at a news site (or browse the House of Commons, actually) without stumbling across yet another item on Wikipedia. In this week alone we've covered Jimmy Wales coming to Australia in April and the emergence of Conservapedia. Previous posts illustrate that we're always tapping away at our keyboards about the good, the bad and the just plain scary in wiki-based online encyclopedias.

Yesterday the Sydney Morning Herald covered the ongoing controversy of a former college student who posed on Wikipedia under the name of "Essjay" as a professor of theology. Further problems emerged when a "high-ranking member of the Wikipedia bureaucracy" (can we be more specific please?) vouched for "Essjay"'s false credentials. See it here.

I think it's safe to say that, of the commons and copyright-related content that we cover here at the House of Commons, Wikipedia attracts the most attention from the media and the general community. The Copyright Amendment Act held its own last year, but now that's passed and we're all too busy format-shifting CDs onto our iPods to pay it much attention anymore. Creative Commons appears every so often - however, you are much more likely to find criticisms of Creative Commons in academic journals and literature as opposed to the public, general media-based airings of the problems with Wikipedia.

Late last week, I was sent a link to another Herald piece, this one about the Associated Press banning stories on Paris Hilton, "barring any major events", which I guess means the usual trio of pregnancy, marriage, or, um, death. Perhaps here at the House of Commons we should impose the same ban on posts about Wikipedia for a while...barring the usual trio of potential plagarism, spoofs or new wikis of course.

Labels: catherine, wikis