by Playfuls Staff |
17th March 2007
Wikipedia was again the victim of a prankster, who this time
vandalized the profile of
US
entertainer Sinbad. He posted a entry according to which Sinbad had died of a
heart attack on the morning of March 14. [more]
"Somebody vandalized the page," Wikipedia spokeswoman
Sandra Ordonez said Friday, quoted by Reuters. "Whoever did this was
obviously a prankster. I don't think they did this because they thought he [was
dead]." The false entry was caught, and removed, by a volunteer
administrator about 30 minutes later, Ordonez said.
Sinbad, whose daughter called him about it, was amused and
brushed it off as a "commonplace" occurrence on the easily accessible
Internet. "Saturday I rose from the dead and then died again," the
Los Angeles-based entertainer told The Associated Press in a phone interview.
Sinbad's page on the free online research tool now carries
the message: "This page has been temporarily protected from editing to
deal with vandalism."
Wikipedia, which was launched as an English language project
on January 15, 2001 as a complement to the expert-written and now defunct
Nupedia, has grown into one of the biggest virtual communities in the world,
with faithful and enthusiastic members, all driven by the noble purpose of
making information accessible freely to any one at any time.
Unfortunately, not everyone shares the same noble ideas and
vandalism started to affect posts on Wikipedia right after its online debut.
Posts that contained racist, untrue or religiously-fanatic comments began
pouring in, without a viable way from Wiki officials to strengthen control over
users’ opinions or claims.
A few days ago Wikipedia was in a center of a controversy
involving a false-eminent theology professor. A 24-year old college dropout,
Ryan Jordan, deceived the trust of Wikipedia users by portraying himself as a
prominent theology professor, thus becoming one of the most respected members
of the Wiki community, with more than 20,000 pages of information edited under
the pseudo “Essjay”. He described himself in an online profile as a
"tenured professor of theology" and said he taught both undergraduate
and graduate courses in the subject. He also said he held a bachelor of arts in
religious studies, a master of arts in religion, doctorate in philosophy in
theology and a doctorate in canon law. It was later discovered that he actually
used Catholicism for Dummies to write his “influential” work.
In February this year, pro golfer Fuzzy Zoeller has started a lawsuit
to identify the person who posted a defamatory paragraph about him on
Wikipedia. The lawsuit has been filed against Josef Silny & Associates, a Miami education
consulting firm, because it seems that someone used a computer from this
company to post the allegedly defamatory remarks. The defamatory comments about
Zoeller were posted for the first time in August last year and then again in
December and were removed in January this year.
In December 2005, John Seigenthaler, founder of the First Amendment
Center and chairman
emeritus of The Tennessean, found out that his bio was modified by Brian Chase
who created an entry about him, alleging that he was involved in assassinations
of John and Robert Kennedy.
