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"I'm a strong believer in social media as well as the precepts of democracy. That's probably why a headline from a recent article on ZDnet's Managing L'Unix gave me pause: \"Do problems with Wikipedia presage social networking's end?\" In it, ZD blogger Paul Murphy talks about the issues that are rearing their ugly heads within the anything goes publicly editable repository for knowledge Wikipedia, and in so doing makes some indictments of both the service as well as democracy itself:\n\nWikipedia\u2019s central premise is that inviting anyone and everyone to scrutinize and correct encyclopedia information is the best guarantee of honesty and completeness - it\u2019s a very democratic idea and broadly similar to Raymond\u2019s comment about no bug being invisible to a million eyeballs.\nLike democracy itself, this ideal assumes that the participants are both educated and honest: educated enough to understand the issues, and honest enough to fairly report facts and consequences separately from speculation and opinion.\n\nHe then goes on to quote and analyze a situation that is all to familiar to me - a fellow who went in to correct some inaccuracies in the Wikipedia article for Global Warming.\u00A0 Every time the individual in question (Lawrence Solomon from the National Review) attempted to make a correction to the article, it was immediately reverted:\n\nI made the changes again, and this time confirmed that the changes had been saved. But then, in a twinkle, they were gone again. I made other changes. And others. They all disappeared shortly after they were made.\nTurns out that on Wikipedia some folks are more equal than others. Kim Dabelstein Petersen is a Wikipedia editor who seems to devote a large part of his life to editing reams and reams of Wikipedia pages to pump the assertions of global-warming alarmists and deprecate or make disappear the arguments of skeptics.\n\nThere are similar instances I've seen personally on Digg and even in the general wilds of the blogosphere where dissenting opinion is disappeared or relegated to fanaticism simply because it is highly unpopular. A close friend of mine had one of the shortest lived careers on Digg I've ever seen - he commented on a grand total of two articles (the topic escapes me, but it was something controversial) representing a conservative viewpoint.\u00A0 Not only were his comment buried in under fifteen minutes, his account was somehow suspended by the end of the day. \nThe suspension of the account is certainly not typical for those who post controversial opinion on Digg, but being buried for conservative opinion certainly is. I'm fairly certain for those that are familiar with the community on Wikipedia aren't particularly shocked that there's some close-mindedness going on, either.\nTo liken it to modern democracy in general though is a bit disingenuous.\u00A0 Modern democracy, at least in the form practiced commonly on websites like Wikipedia tend to include what can basically be likened to 'super-delegates.' There are editors in charge that will often over-rule the consensus opinion as well as roving mobs will look for articles created by large communities with little influence within the ecosystem of Wikipedia who will exert their sway to remove documentation (the entire tree of RantMedia and Sean Kennedy related articles were subject to this effect a year or two ago).\nThis social structure is more akin to something slightly more organized than anarchy (tribalism, perhaps). In any event, this isn't pandemic to all social media and democraticly crowd-sourced websites.\u00A0 Digg, for instance, is constanly tweaking their algorithms. Sites like RSSMeme and ReadBurner diffuse the mob mentality and don't really allow for retractions, punishments, or buries (aleviating the mob-style censorship inherent to some of these systems).\nAnd other systems, like YouTube, are in most cases so anarchy-ruled that only in cases where governemental request and legal issues arise do these 'super-delegates' ever exert their power of censorship.\nI don't necessarily disagree with the assessment of Lawrence Solomon and Paul Murphy if the indictments are limited to Wikipedia's social structure, but their accusations break down quickly when they're extended to all of social media and democracy as a whole."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://mashable.com/2008/07/15/social-media-doomed/>