By Mike Sutton.
Such is the pervasive success of Wikipedia that if you enter almost any search term into the world’s leading search engine, Google, Wikipedia’s page on the topic will be top of the first ten pages returned. Therefore, any official policies operated by Wikipedia’s army of official editors that might be returning unreliable information warrant serious scrutiny.
Last week I learned, for the second time, that a Wikipedian ‘master’ editor had taken my unique myth-busting research from the sole site where the information is published and used it to correct Wikipedia’s own myth spreading, without making any reference to the site from where it came. Worse, that Wiki editor then deleted the reference that another Wikipdeian had included to cite my original article on the myth busting site. That citation was deleted on the grounds that the site was not citable under Wikipedia’s rules. Consequently, Wikipedia has self-servingly stealth-plagiarized the fruits of several weeks of my research, and all its published results, and has passed that original work off as its own, while concealing its own role in spreading the original myth.
Wikipedia’s practice of stealth plagiarism is designed to ensure that originators of important myth busts are not attributed with busting pernicious myths that orthodox scientists, their publishers, and Wikipedians have been involved in spreading. In effect, Wikipedia’s sanctioned policy on stealth plagiarism makes it look as though Wikipedia is busting the myths it was responsible for spreading.
Wikipedian official editors have published their reasons for engaging in this self-serving institutional stealth plagiarism on two disgraceful grounds: (1) That Wikipedia will take unique information from Websites and plagiarize it on the grounds that while the unique newly discovered information is reliable and valid, the site they got it from is note deemed by them to be so. And (2) That the originators of that unique work should not be cited because Wikipedia’s philosophy is that “all experts are scum”.
If that sounds simply too psychopathically outrageous to be true, then please visit the site where the fully evidenced (with hyperlinks) story is available: here on the Best Thinking Website that Wikipedia is currently raiding as part of its official stealth plagiarism policy. I highly recommend that you to read the comments section of that article on Best Thinking where you can see one of the key Wikipedian ‘master’ editors muddle-headed attempts to rationalize Wikipedia’s plagiarizing policy.
I currently have a triple A-Z of busted pernicious myths that I was entering into the public domain, to speed up the war of veracity over fallacy. Now, due to Wikipedia’s officially sanctioned plagiarism of my work in this area, that important information will not enter the public domain for at least a year because I will have to publish it in traditional print publication books, because – like most rationally motivated hard working scholars – I value my self enough to wish to be attributed with priority, if not payment, for my unique discoveries.
We have known for years that Wikipedia is an unreliable source of information. Now we learn that it is also engaged in hiding that unreliability by engaging in practices that keep veracious new information out of the public domain for longer than is necessary. In effect, Wikipedia’s success in exploiting internet technology is deterring myth busters from using that same technology to release important information into the public domain.