Friday, April 13, 2007
Anderson Ashby Lecture, or why to be alert on wikipedia
The Anderson Ashby Lecture on April 12th presented some concerns that impact the Internet community. The lecture focused on the open ended encyclopedia Wikipedia, which allows for anonymous entries on anything. The CEO of Wikipedia has defended the rights of anonymity of posters. At the same time the speaker has been attacked numerous times by libelous comments about quite objectionable acts. The only recourse that is currently allowed is to delete the material, but it remains in historical archives, and be reinserted again. I disagree with removing anonymity from sites like Wikipedia. Instead I would think a democratic way to preserve freedom would be for a mechanism for the person who is the subject of an entry to identify themselves to Wikipedia's governance and be given access to a portion of the title of the article in which they could mention that this article has been sabotaged and contains erroneous information. This would still allow anything to be posted, but a potential reader would be alerted to the nature of the irregularities in Wikipedia. This type of system is already in place in open source projects, where build team managers monitor code submissions. They also have the ability of maintaining several different versions of the code. This helps to keep viruses and other destructive activities from harming the users of the open source software.
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Kris,
On WFSU this morning, there was a discussion of malls as private, semi-private, or public spaces. The law, as you discussed before, supports seeing the mall as private space, where freedom of speech is not protected. However, there is debate that malls should be viewed as open/public spaces, where freedom of speech is protected, because it has largely replaced downtown as a meeting and gathering place. To encourage civic debate, malls are an important place to acquire petition signitures, for example. By excluding malls, a major, seemingly public place where people meet, interact, and exchange ideas, is excluded from civic activity.
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