[lbo-talk] Disinfopedia, wikis (was Isikoff Goes afer Saudis)

Lance Murdoch lancemurdoch at lycos.com
Tue Apr 6 01:32:10 PDT 2004


From: Brad Mayer <Bradley.Mayer at Sun.COM>


>It quotes "prominent Saudi dissident" Ali Al-Ahmed. Turns
>out Al Ahmed is a buddy of our old friend Stephen Schwartz:
>http://www.disinfopedia.org/wiki.phtml?title=Ali_Al-Ahmed

Ah, Brad, I see you quoted from Disinfopedia. Cool, I just started playing around with wikis like Disinfopedia a few months ago. A wiki is a web site with many web pages that anyone can edit. This collaborativeness allows lots of neat stuff. Disinfopedia is a wiki based on seeing who is tied to who, who funds what industry group and so forth, it's quite handy. I am the one who did the entry for the AFL-CIO's American Institute for (soi disant) Free Labor Development. Anyone can add to it, or do the entry for its bastard child, the American Center for International Labor Solidarity. Researching this entry made me hate the labor lieutenants of the AFL-CIO even more, the former AIFLD people after Sweeney booted them were all working along with Otto Reich in Latin American sweatshops before Bush brought him back in the fold.

Anyhow, wiki's are a handy resource to look up information, and you or anyone can also contribute. Everything is licensed under the GNU FDL so you can just grab pages and use the content as you wish. You might wonder how it avoids vandalism, but with enough eyeballs and vigilance, things hold up pretty well (and persistent vandals are usually banned).

There's also a Wiki on "moral purchasing", Consumerium ( http://www.consumerium.org ), but it is under development and doesn't want boycotts and the like printed yet, so that is all going on Consumerpedia ( http://www.channel1.com/users/dkesh/consumerpedia ) until it is imported into Consumerium.

There's also the left wingish Recyclopedia ( http://www.recyclopedia.info ), but currently that's so popular that it overloads for long periods.

Then there's Wikipedia, but that is run by a right-wing "libertarian" cabal which you shouldn't even really bother with - I got them to change the definition of East Germany from "The DDR was a Communist satellite state of the former Soviet Union" to something slightly more neutral, but it's like pulling teeth, the deck is stacked against you, and it's not even worth the effort.

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