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WIKIPEDIA GROWING PAINS - PART TWO

A few days ago, this story about a disputed entry at Wikipedia was posted here (third item down). The saga not only continues, but has become quite a bit more intriguing.

The controversy started with a commentary by John Seigenthaler Sr. at USA Today:

First, in a Nov. 29 op-ed piece in USA Today, a former administrative assistant to Robert Kennedy lambasted the free online reference work for an article that suggested he may have been involved in the assassinations of both Robert F. Kennedy and John F. Kennedy.

In today's New York Times two new characters enter:

A man in Nashville has admitted that, in trying to shock a colleague with a joke, he put false information into a Wikipedia entry about John Seigenthaler Sr., a former editor of The Tennessean in Nashville.

Brian Chase, 38, who until Friday was an operations manager at a small delivery company, told Mr. Seigenthaler on Friday that he had written the material suggesting that Mr. Seigenthaler had been involved in the assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy. Wikipedia, a nonprofit venture that is the world's biggest encyclopedia, is written and edited by thousands of volunteers.
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Mr. Chase also found that he was slowly being cornered in cyberspace, thanks to the sleuthing efforts of Daniel Brandt, 57, of San Antonio, who makes his living as a book indexer. Mr. Brandt has been a frequent critic of Wikipedia and started an anti-Wikipedia Web site (www.wikipedia-watch.org) in September after reading what he said was a false entry about himself.

Using information in Mr. Seigenthaler's article and some online tools, Mr. Brandt traced the computer used to make the Wikipedia entry to the delivery company in Nashville.

So, Mr. Brandt is successful in uniting Mr. Seigenthaler, the protagonist in our story, and his nemesis, Mr. Chase, bringing to a conclusion the mystery of how and why Mr. Seigenthaler's reputation was tarnished.

But what of the new antagonist, Mr. Brandt?

On his anti-Wikipedia site there is this opening salvo, where it becomes clear what motivates him:

This two-page site will eventually become a larger site that examines the phenomenon of Wikipedia. We are interested in them because they have a massive, unearned influence on what passes for reliable information. Search engines rank their pages near the top. While Wikipedia itself does not run ads, they are the most-scraped site on the web. Scrapers need content — any content will do — in order to carry ads from Google and other advertisers. This entire effect is turning Wikipedia into a generator of spam. It is primarily Google's fault, since Wikipedia might find it difficult to address the issue of scraping even if they wanted to. Google doesn't care; their ad money comes right off the top.

And one particular item in Wikipedia's vast data collection is particularly bothersome to Mr. Brandt, as he makes clear in this open letter to Wikipedia's main man, Jimmy Wales:

I sent you an email a couple of hours ago requesting deletion of the article at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Brandt and am following that email with this fax. I ask that this page be permanently deleted. It was started as a stub by SlimVirgin on September 28, apparently acting as an authorized agent of Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. This anonymous person started the stub without my knowledge, and cited sources for information on me without vetting these sources.

Clearly the letter did not have the desired effect, as the Daniel Brandt page at Wikipedia now contains a plethora of information. Here we learn that Mr. Brandt is also closely watching Yahoo!, Google, and the six-figure salary of template spammer Chris Beasly:

As well as maintaining an anti-Yahoo! website called Yahoo Watch, Brandt in October 2005 spun off a new website, Wikipedia Watch, with criticism of Wikipedia, as a direct response to his inability to delete the article that was made about himself, which he stated was an invasion of privacy, and the inability of Wikipedia founder Jimbo Wales to respond to his facsimile requesting for this article to be deleted. As a direct result of the creation of Wikipedia Watch, Brandt was banned indefinitely from Wikipedia.
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In reaction to Google Watch, Chris Beasley created google-watch-watch.org in July 2003. Beasley claims that Brandt was motivated to start Google Watch as revenge for the low PageRank that his Namebase website received. Brandt argues that Beasley himself is not a disinterested party, describing him on Google Watch as a "template spammer"[6] who makes a six-figure income[7] from the websites that he owns, which in many cases benefit from using Google's AdSense advertising service.

Farhad Manjoo in a 2002 Salon article said of Brandt, "Because he has a personal stake in the squabble, he's pretty easy to dismiss: He doesn't like his Google rank, so it's not surprising he doesn't like Google... Brandt has spent a lifetime questioning the secret machinations of people in positions of authority, and he's taking on Google in that same spirit."[8] This echoes Brandt's own description of his work against Google as the "cyber equivalent of my draft resistance days".

Not surprisingly, today's New York Times article is included in the Wikipedia entry - ever vigilant they are.

THIS WEEK'S ECONOMIST CARTOON


FINANCIAL TIMES TWO-FER

There is no question that the world is noticing gold. The Financial Times has two articles of interest, made accessible much more easily through the GATA Yahoo! Groups site.

In this piece, the Financial Times notes a 'significant buyer' of gold, may be a central bank:

Paul Merrick, vice president commodities at RBC Capital, said the strength in the gold market has raised the possibility of central bank buying.

"There is concerted buying by a significant buyer, and it could be a central bank," said Mr Merrick. Central banks have been net sellers of gold for the last 40 years, although there have been occasional purchases. However, recent positive comments on gold by officials from Argentinian, Russian and South African central banks have given bullion traders hope that some banks may start buying again.

Mr Merrick said the 10 per cent rise in the gold price in the past three weeks has not been accompanied by a significant lift in buying of Comex gold futures in New York. Turnover in gold futures on the Tocom exchange in Tokyo was 7.5m ounces, exceeding Comex in New York by nearly 3m ounces. Normally, Tocom volumes are only one third of those traded on Comex.

"This suggests that there could be another large buyer out there, as there is a concerted effort to buy on any dips in the prices," Mr Merrick said.

In Lustrous Gold Outshines the Big Currencies, this pearl of wisdom is found:

At this point, an intelligent critic would point out that the technology of finance has made enormous progress since the inflation and financial crises of the 1970s. There are far better ways to hedge against a wide range of financial risks than buying gold.

All true. Financial risk analysis is far better understood, statistical models of credit and interest rate risk are light years ahead of where they were. Guess what? It doesn't matter. The effect of advanced financial analysis, data gathering and computation has been to build ever larger inverted pyramids of debt and promises teetering on ever smaller bases of tangible assets.

The gold price in the major currencies may soon correct from the rapid rise of the past two weeks. After that, though, it will continue a fitful but dramatic increase over the next several years.