This article from The Register is more evidence of the necessity for serious HUMAN control over at Wikipedia. After I checked out all the links from the article to wikipedia, I was dumbfounded.

Wikipedia is supposed to be a collectivist repository of knowledge, but the moderators have become so overwhelmed with duties and power that they are regulating their daily activities to the machines themselves...thereby alleviating themselves from a primary function, to think. In fact, the bot that Betacommand created on Wikipedia utilized the files created by humans to restrict human thought and behavior, the total antithesis of Wikipedia and academia.The sysop bot was editing Wikipedia and deleting members at breakneck rates. Their monitoring system did work to catch and eliminate the bot, but what is being done to correct any errors in judgment it may have had? Can they even determine what errors were made?

In the midst of all this, we are being repeatedly told by Jimmy Wales that academia NEEDS wikipedia, much like the military was told they NEEDED Skynet in the Terminator trilogy. I'm sorry, but I believe that people should think and computers should simply be tools.

I have one question for Tango.....if I write a bot, and that  bot creates a script to create another bot, can the bot implement the new bot? And can you have Essjay [or the resident Essjay bot] get back to me on that?

I ran across this parody of Wikipedia from somethingawful.com today. It pretty much encapsulates many of the problems faced by "the wikipedia problem" with SA's typical humorous bent.

A few examples include the lack of an entry for the term "girlfriend," "citation needed" for common knowledge (i.e. Cat babies are also known as kittens), edit wars, personal attacks, blatant inaccuracies and irrelevant commentary. Of course, the sources are none other than the SA forum goons.

Middlebury College's Department of History made headlines at the end of January when they announced a ban on the use of Wikipedia as a reference. Later in February, a Classics course at Oberlin College was required to use Wikipedia for a research assignment. These stories are but two of many that have prompted educators across the country to debate the value of Wikipedia as an educational tool. What are it strengths, its limits? When, if ever, is it appropriate to use Wikipedia for research? Should we be using it in the classroom at all?

This coming Thursday (29 March 2007), the first Language Lab Unleashed! of the spring will feature Don Wyatt (chair of the Department of History at Middlebury College), Elizabeth Colantoni (Professor of Classics at Oberlin College), Laura Blankenship (Senior Instructional Technologist at Bryn Mawr), and Bryan Alexander (Director of Research at NITLE) for a discussion on the potential uses and abuses  of Wikipedia in the educational arena.

The show will begin promptly at 8pm ... for details on how to join the  live conversation, please visit:
http://www.languagelabunleashed.com

--via Language Lab Unleashed