The WSJ reports that the number of Wikipedia editors (real editors—not you) declined by nearly 50,000 in the first three months of this year alone. The trend is attributed to the fact that whereas in the past you used to be able to just hop in and edit shit, now you have to have your work "approved" by some superlayer of supereditors, many of whom take joy in shooting down the Wikipedia aspirations of the unapproved masses. Horror stories abound. So who are these Gatekeepers to all the internet's knowledge?

A survey the foundation conducted last year determined that the average age of an editor is 26.8 years, and that 87% of them are men.

As you suspected: nerds.

If you want to hit the Wikipedia founder back, you can flip the card over for his contact information. Or you can just do what Assme did: wonder if he's a creepy while digging the "smoky" look Wales gives from the front side, sitting in "what appears to be Masterpiece Theater headquarters.". But remember: just because he bedded Fox News hottie Rachel Marsden and plotted to change her Wikipedia entry, is rumored to have slept with a married lady, maybe had sex with Wikipedia's executive director, and purportedly circulated racy pictures of a girlfriend without her consent — just because there's all these rumors dogging Wales doesn't mean he's out to bone you.

Not necessarily, at least.

MIT instructor and alumni Philip Greenspun has floated a theory as to why women are underrepresented in high-end scientific professions: Science is generally a terrible career choice, but it contains a dysfunctional status hierarchy that tends to appeal the male egos.

A lot more men than women choose to do seemingly irrational things such as become petty criminals, fly homebuilt helicopters, play video games, and keep tropical fish as pets (98 percent of the attendees at the American Child Association convention that I last attended were male). Should we be surprised that it is mostly men who spend 10 years banging their heads against an equation-filled blackboard in hopes of landing a $35,000/year post-doc job? ...Young men strive to achieve high status among their peer group. [Yet] men tend to lack perspective and are unable to step back and ask the question "is this peer group worth impressing?"

Greenspun's female students, meanwhile, "are more discriminating about choosing those peers," and tended to wisely divert to more rewarding professions like medical school.

So it is with Wikipedia. Why invest your free time wrangling with a politicized Wikipedia bureaucracy of infighting editors and bitter story subjects, all for the honor of creating a free resource for other people and paying out of your own pocket to go to high-level meetings for the Wikimedia elite? If you're a man, for the honor of being near the "top" of something, no matter how fruitless. The prominent women associated with Wikipedia, meanwhile, tend to be famous for getting Jimmy Wales to do various things on their behalf. Smart.

(Pic: Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales receives a Quadriga Award in the "Mission of Enlightenment" category on October 3, 2008, the anniversary of German unification, in Berlin. Getty Images.)

Harvard's Nieman Foundation obtained an internal AP memo showing the wire service plans to ape Wikipedia, the user-written reference that dominates many Google searches. But instead of writing its own concise summaries, like Wikipedia, AP will simply generate "landing pages" automatically, compiling basic links to its own content, and then having its members link to those pages. Robot spam! Felix Salmon of internet-loving Reuters doesn't think this will work, since Google's algorithms are pretty smart; we don't think that matters. Technical cluelessness doesn't seem to have ever sidelined an AP initiative before.

(Image via)

The Rorschach Test is a series of standard inkblots that crazy people are supposed to look at. When they describe what they see to a trained specialist, the answers will reveal the secret to their malady, which usually involves a wartime experience where some lady had to smother her crying baby to prevent the North Koreans from finding them, but the crazy person remembers it as a chicken because it was just too painful and no it wasn't a chicken it was a baby! A baby!

For many years, psychiatrists kept a tight lid on the "correct" answers to the Rorschach Test—that is, the answers that most sane people tend to give—because crafty people can game the system and slip by the rigorous diagnostic standards that psychiatrists who rely on inkblots have established. But now that someone has posted the ten inkblots and the most commonly given answers on Wikipedia, the whole Rorschach regime is threatened, and psychiatrists who rely on the process fear that they may have to resort to methods that involve science. From the New York Times:

"The more test materials are promulgated widely, the more possibility there is to game it," said Bruce L. Smith, a psychologist and president of the International Society of the Rorschach and Projective Methods, who has posted under the user name SPAdoc. He quickly added that he did not mean that a coached subject could fool the person giving the test into making the wrong diagnosis, but rather "render the results meaningless."

Because the inkblots were created nearly 90 years ago, they're no longer copyrighted, so the Rorschach community can't do much about the leak. Here's the standard test, with commonly given answers as reported in Wikipedia, in gallery form. We don't really get what the big deal is: They all look like vaginas with teeth to us.

Bat, butterfly, moth

Two humans

Two humans

Animal skin, massive animal

Bat, butterfly, moth

Animal hide, skin, rug

Human heads, faces

Animal (pink portion)

Human (orange portion)

Crab, lobster, spider (blue portion)

How did breaking the rules finally net Wales some good press? The Times disclosed Sunday that Wikipedia helped actively suppress news that a Times journalist had been captured in Afghanistan. If the capture was widely publicized, the paper worried, the reporter would be more valuable to his captors.

Wikipedia editors actively froze out edits reporting the capture, and allowed Timesmen to do the same. The reporter eventually escaped. The ethics of the censorship are debatable. The benefits to Wales are not: The Times depicts him leading the suppression effort, even though a woman named Sue Gardner actually runs Wikipedia. Wales thus re-cements his image as the face of Wikipedia and gets another round of lucrative speaking engagements (he has historically pocketed the fees).

Better still for Wales, he can point his critics to the Times situation as an example of how Wikipedia rules should not be absolute. When you're busy saving journalists, who cares if you bend the rules for some nice young ladies while you're at it?

UPDATE: Wales wrote in to dispute an earlier version of this article, which stated he "nearly lost his job," citing a January Valleywag report that his Wikipedia board seat was renewed just three days before it expired. Wales said "I was never 'almost out of a job' last December" and that there was never "a board struggle and a struggle between me and Sue Gardner."

(Pic by Re: Publica)

Anderson referred to a certain town as "Crescent City (New Orleans)," and the reference caught VQR's Waldo Jaquith, who was reviewing Free, off guard. As he told Fishbowl NY:

At first, I was thrown off. I thought that maybe that before it was called New Orleans it was called Crescent City and I was mad at myself for not knowing that.

But Wikipedia's entry for New Orleans only had Crescent City as a nickname, not as the original monicker for the town. So Jaquith ran a Google search using some of Anderson's specific language and — boom! — up came a Wikipedia article describing the origin of the term "Free Lunch," which Anderson had obviously copied from.

I figured that what had happened was that whoever had written it wanted to be cute and call it Crescent City, but also wanted to link to the New Orleans article [on Wikipedia]. So they put it in parentheses,

Then Jaquith remembered Anderson had once, in Free, weirdly put the word "currency" in quotes, so he ran that section through Google too, and found another chunk of text had been copied from the Web. The rest is history.

Anderson might be a plagiarist, but at least he has what poker players refer to as a "tell." And how appropriate, for the editor of Wired, that it's his reluctance to remove hyperlinks.

[Fishbowl NY]

(Pic by Pieter Baert)

Like so many plagiarists before him, Anderson claims his act was unintentional. The Virginia Quarterly Review first reported his copying, and the explanation he gave us is that he and his editors decided to kill Free's footnotes "at the 11th hour;" though much attribution was restored within the body text, Wikipedia sources were not. This was due, according to the statement he sent to VQR, to "my inability to find a good citation format for web sources (I resisted the time stamp proposal)."

The upshot: Print authors like Mike Pollan were cited for "intellectual debts" Anderson owed them, while many of the forward-thinking, freely-contributing writers Anderson champions in the book got no attribution. As it happens, this is violates the copyright license governing Wikipedia.

Anderson told us, "this is my screwup... I feel terrible about it." The lifted work was "mostly historical asides and nothing central to the book." But history is hardly simple to document, and it would seem a book on free products would be significantly diminished without its passages on the famous "free lunch" of the 19th-century saloon, or the origin of the phrase "there's no such thing as a free lunch."

Like Maureen Dowd before him, Anderson promises to fix everything on the Web:

We'll have the original notes that were supposed to accompany the book, which includes all these, online by publication date

Update: Hyperion, Anderson's publisher, has gave a statement to VQR backing his mistake-not-plagiarism spin:

We are completely satisfied with Chris Anderson's response. It was an unfortunate mistake, and we are working with the author to correct these errors both in the electronic edition before it posts, and in all future editions of the book.

As Evgeny Morozov wrote on the Foreign Affairs website, the ban marked the first time an entire social group was banned from contributing to Wikipedia. As such, the cult can now credibly argue it has been censored and repressed

We'll see a dozen anti-Wikipedia web-sites set up by Scientology to promote its own version of "censored truth". Unfortunately, Wikipedia's decision would only make their claims of unjust persecution easier to believe; after all, how else to explain that they were banned from a web-site that "anyone can edit"?

...The Wikipedia admins definitely need a primer on the Streisand effect.

A Columbia law professor, Tim Wu, told the Associated Press Wikipedia's decision should be closely examined.

"Wikipedia has more power over speech than many governments," he said. "We have to make sure that they're being reasonable."

Of course, things look quite different for those up against what one ex-Scientologist described as the group's "machine" of Web warriors, each creating a host of virtual identities from which to launch online campaigns. Wikipedia's arbitration committee voted in its ban unanimously, 10-0. Winning the war with determined Scientologists was presumably more important to Wikipedia than losing any one PR battle.

(Pic via)

Reports The Register:

The muzzling of Scientology IPs marks the first time Wikipedia has officially barred edits from such a high-profile organization for allegedly pushing its own agenda on the site.

The Church of Scientology has not responded to our request for comment.

According to evidence turned up by admins in this long-running Wikiland court case, multiple editors have been "openly editing [Scientology-related articles] from Church of Scientology equipment and apparently coordinating their activities." Leaning on the famed WikiScanner, countless news stories have discussed the editing of Scientology articles from Scientology IPs, and some site admins are concerned this is "damaging Wikipedia's reputation for neutrality."

The article goes on to explain how the Church Of Scientology operates their little internet spin operation, thanks to testimony provided by a former insider turned informant.

A former member of Scientology's Office of Special Affairs - a department officially responsible "for directing and coordinating all legal matters affecting the Church" - says the Office has organized massive efforts to remove Scientology-related materials and criticism from the web.

"The guys I worked with posted every day all day," Tory Christman tells The Reg. "It was like a machine. I worked with someone who used five separate computers, five separate anonymous identities...to refute any facts from the internet about the Church of Scientology."

This is all fine and good but sooner or later the Scientologists will learn out that all they need to do is send over Leah Remini or Jenna Elfman to give Jimmy Wales a blowjob and all of this will go away. Surely they'd take one for the Xenu team.

Or they could just go to the Apple Store and use their computers. That's what we do whenever we've got shady shit to conduct on the internet anyway.

Wikipedia Bans Scientology [The Register]

I still remember the day I called you up and tried to recruit you to Valleywag — only to learn that that sneaky rapscallion Nick Denton had beaten me to the punch by one whole day in offering you the night shift at Gawker. It all worked out in the end — and perhaps better than I could have imagined back in 2007. But the main lesson I take away from that is that you can get Denton to do pretty much whatever you want if you're patient enough.

Denton, who has a weakness for idle truisms, likes to say that gossip is a young man's game. But you're old enough to remember the first dotcom bubble, and how it popped. That's going to be key in the next few years. We may escape a depression, but Silicon Valley is facing a reckoning nonetheless. Too much venture capital chased too few idea for far too long — and a buoyant economy can no longer hide the startup factory's mistakes.

The biggest mistake you can make is getting too close to your Valley sources and fall for their groupthink in order to ingratiate yourself. (You know how I've scolded you for gullibly buying the hype that Twitter is an amazing source of real-time news. Okay, perhaps it was — for five seconds, before the blowhards, spammers, and self-promoters found it.) At least your schooling will help you remain an outsider: As a Berkeley grad, you'll have an instinctive dislike for the Valley's Stanford in-crowd.

At the same time, don't forget that your years living, studying, and working in the Bay Area give you a better understanding of your beat than anyone can have from 3,000 miles away. Gabriel and Nick, though well-intentioned, have the Manhattan media habit of confusing proximity with relevance. Gawker is much more than New York now — and Valleywag's unique place therein must be firmly grounded in northern California's shaky soil.

Remember: Love is far more powerful than hate. Keep a clear-eyed passion for the Valley. Most tech reporters here secretly loathe their subjects, but try to disguise it with a supine gladhandery as they beg for scoops about new startup website features. They hate themselves and the people they write about. Sad, right? By loving the Valley, you can write about it more honestly than any of them. Just prepare to have your heart broken again, and again, and again. To truly love something, you must love it with all its failings.

For example, the Valley's Alice-in-Wonderland economics — why is Twitter worth more than most startups precisely because it has no revenues to speak of? But the thing you must love most about Silicon Valley — the part of the story the local press corps always skips over in favor of buzzwords, punditry, and lazy analysis — is its people.

The Valley's story is not one of chips and code. It is not a tale of technology. It is the always-running tragicomedy of the people who make technology.

Here are a few characters to watch. I hope it helps — but I can't wait to see who you add to the list.

Marissa Mayer Valleywag's first story remains its best. The public face of Google, Mayer also runs search, the only business that matters there. The cupcake frosting of her girly image — one she assiduously advances at every opportunity — may humanize the otherwise robotic computer scientist. But it is a distraction. The real question to ask about Mayer: Does her spreadsheet-ridden management style scale to new problems beyond search? Are her strengths now turning into limitations?

Mark Zuckerberg Ignore the nerd façade. Facebook's 25-year-old CEO is headstrong and ruthless. Here's the grand irony of Zuckerberg's revolutionary venture: He claims to be all about openness and sharing. But his imperious, my-way-or-the-highway management style has created a fractious culture of dishonesty, delusion, and disillusionment at the social network. His underlings either learn to say things they don't believe, or they move on. This is why Sheryl Sandberg is exactly the wrong COO for Zuckerberg. The veteran of the Clinton Administration has forgotten her Google training and reverted to Washington-player form, where staying on message is all that counts. Facebook's best hope is that Zuckerberg learns from his mistakes — but first he has to recognize them as mistakes.

Carol Bartz Yahoo's CEO swears like a sailor. At last, a boss who has found the right language to describe Yahoo's plight! Bartz brings a refreshing frankness to Yahoo. But the already demoralized troops she inherited will need to start seeing results. Otherwise, Valleywag will continue to be a steady recipient of leaks from Sunnyvale.

Elon Musk The CEO of Tesla Motors and SpaceX is living the geek high life, playing with fast cars, rocket ships, and other people's money. It's wonderful that Musk has realized even a small part of his childhood fantasies. But he risks destroying his dreams by refusing to reconcile them with reality. Factcheck everything Musk says. For example, was he actually running either Zip2 or PayPal, the previous dotcom successes he likes to cite in his bio, when they were sold?

Owen Van Natta Everyone is going to give MySpace's new CEO a pass, because the so-called "social portal" is so clearly troubled. If the former Facebook executive succeeds in a turnaround, it will be viewed as an astonishing achievement; if he fails, people will say no one could save MySpace. That's not fair. Hold his feet to the fire, and judge this disturbingly tan rock-star boss like anyone else on the list.

Peter Thiel Thiel, the PayPal cofounder, likes to brag about how he recruits only the best brains from the best schools to work at Clarium Capital, his hedge fund. Oh, really? Take a look at their résumés on LinkedIn. Like so many of this outspokenly harebrained libertarian's theses, the claim sounds good on paper but doesn't stand up to inspection. Valleywag, alone in Silicon Valley, can take a keen look at Thiel's rhetoric without being dazzled by his inflated wealth.

Tim Armstrong Like Van Natta at MySpace, Armstrong, a Google golden boy now charged with running AOL, will be enjoying a honeymoon. Don't worry: There are plenty of disgruntled AOLers who will gladly help you break up the lovefest.

Jimmy Wales Remind me: What does Wikipedia's founder actually do to earn his keep, besides give speeches? In all this time, I was never able to figure that out. Maybe you can!

Eric Schmidt When did Google's CEO turn into such a raging egomaniac? When the blogosphere was the only corner of the Internet that criticized him, he dismissed it as a "cesspool." But now everyone from Hollywood to the New York Times to the Federal Trade Commission is looking askance at his online empire's practices. "Don't be evil" has turned into "don't get caught." He will, though. Be ready when he does.

Larry Page and Sergey Brin Google's wonder twins have achieved geek nirvana, creating a cloistered campus with free food, lava lamps, and exercise balls to spare. They have a fleet of jets to transport them to rocket launches or rendezvous with Richard Branson and Bono. They've even managed to get married and reproduce. Just one question: Are they still sane? Were they ever?

There are many people who will help you — many of the same people who helped me so much, I hope. They include:

• Nick Denton, for putting up with three years of playing hard to get — and then putting up with much more besides.
• Brian Lam, Choire Sicha, Noah Robischon and Lockhart Steele, for tag-teaming me into taking the job.
• Gabriel Snyder, for expertly steering Valleywag into Gawker's welcoming arms.
• All the Valleywaggers: Paul Boutin, Nick Douglas, Megan McCarthy, Tim Faulkner, Mary Jane Irwin, Jordan Golson, Nicholas Carlson, Jackson West, Melissa Gira Grant, and Tim Woolery. You guys, we've been through so much together!
• Richard Blakeley: We made sweet Photoshop magic together.
• Everyone at Gawker Media: How much do I love you? Far more than just five milligrams.
• Sarah Lacy, Kara Swisher, and Peter Kafka: My peers and fellow purveyors of Valley gossip, you constantly inspired me.
• Countless sources, tipsters, and fellow scribes: Please understand that I esteem you none the less for not naming you here. In fact, your continued anonymity is the best sign of my abiding affection.

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.Good luck, Ryan. I'll be reading eagerly.

Don't screw it up.

Yours,

Owen
The Valleywag

(Photos by Brian Solis and Scott Beale/Laughing Squid)

A piece on Japan's bullet trains published today by John Glionna is datelined "Nagoya, Japan." Some of it, though, could have shared a byline with the world's greatest collection of trainspotter trivia. Compare Wikipedia's entry on Japan's high-speed Shinkansen trains to Glionna's description of the advanced rail system:

Designed to traverse Japan's mountainous terrain, the trains use tunnels and viaducts to go through and over obstacles rather than around them. They travel on elevated tracks without road crossings and apart from conventional rail. An automated control system eliminates the need for signals.

Wikipedia:

In contrast to older lines, Shinkansen are standard gauge, and use tunnels and viaducts to go through and over obstacles rather than around them. With a minimum curve radius of 4,000 meters (2,500 meters in the oldest Tōkaidō Shinkansen), the system was built entirely from the ground up on elevated tracks without road crossings and separate from conventional rail. It employs an ATC (Automatic Train Control) system, eliminating the need for signals.

Glionna:

Officials boast that on average the trains are less than half a minute late each year, which includes delays caused by earthquakes, typhoons and snow. During the line's 45-year history and transport of 7 billion passengers, there have been no deaths from derailment or collisions.

Wikipedia:

During the Shinkansen's 44-year, nearly 7 billion-passenger history, there have been no passenger fatalities due to derailments or collisions, despite frequent earthquakes and typhoons.

The Wikipedia article has a note from the site's volunteer editors that the article's "sources remain unclear." We'll give Glionna, who became a foreign correspondent the Times last year, some credit on that count: At least it's obvious what his source was.

(Photo via Lassie, Get Help)

Not that we blame Berners-Lee for these things ... okay, okay, we do. The 20 worst things about the World Wide Web:

• 1. Julia Allison
• 2. Twitter
• 3. Jason Calacanis
• 4. Wikipedia
• 5. Henry Blodget
• 6. Dave Winer
• 7. Blogs
• 8. Dead newspapers everywhere
• 9. Congressman Jared Polis
• 10. Robert Scoble
• 11. The Pets.com sock puppet, and Michael Ian Black's subsequent career
• 12. Digg
• 13. Perez Hilton
• 14. /b/
• 15. Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales's love life
• 16. Oversharing
• 17. Mark Zuckerberg
• 18. Chris Crocker
• 19. Internet commenters
• 20. Kevin Rose

We realize they weren't in your original spec, Timbo, but you should have anticipated them. Really.

According to Klein, Jerusalem bureau chief for the extreme-right-wing website, he is not "Jerusalem21," the Wikipedia user whose rejected edits to the Obama article formed the centerpiece of Klein's reporting. Wired and other publications raised questions about Jerusalem21's identity when a blogger noted that Jerusalem21's sole contributions to the free online compendium were edits to the Obama page and Klein's own Wikipedia article.

"I am not 'Jerusalem21,' but I do know the Wikipedia user (he works with me and does research for me), and I worked with him on this story," Klein writes, adding that he "personally" oversaw "Jerusalem21"'s edits. In other words, Klein masterminded the creation of the supposed scandal he wrote about.

Klein doesn't see things quite that way. He claims our article was "defamatory." But the truth cannot defame. Klein himself freely admits that he was intimately involved in the creation of the supposed news event he wrote about. Here's Klein having his say:

Mr. Thomas —

I demand an immediate retraction of your Gawker article today, which is defamatory. (http://gawker.com/5167585/right+wing-writer-invents-his-own-obama-wikipedia-scandal)

Your headline states as fact, "Right-Wing Writer Invents His Own Obama Wikipedia Scandal." You then quote from Wired.com, which, you relate, stated that one Wikipedia user cited in my article is "almost certainly Klein himself." "Almost certainly" is not enough to justify your very certain, defamatory title.

First, I am not "Jerusalem21," but I do know the Wikipedia user (he works with me and does research for me), and I worked with him on this story, which focused on investigating allegations I had received from others of Wikipedia scrubbing Obama's page. I wanted to personally oversee whether indeed criticism of Obama was being deleted. For your information, often investigative journalists engage in exactly this kind of testing – like seeing if they can bypass mandatory disclosures while donating to a candidate (several newspapers did this prior to the November election), or if they can register a dog to vote in Illinois. Thus, even if I had personally edited Obama's page as a test to investigate allegations of scrubbing, this is entirely legitimate journalistic practice.

Second and more importantly, your article is entirely misleading; it paints a picture that my piece from yesterday was reliant simply upon "Jerusalem21" being barred from entering information on Wikipedia that is critical of Obama, suggesting the controversy was both "invented" and based on that one account.

But my article from yesterday notes that "multiple times, Wikipedia users who wrote about the eligibility issues had their entries deleted almost immediately."

The article further notes that WND monitored Obama's Wikipedia page for one month and observed as criticism on all kinds of issues (Ayers, Wright, etc) was scrubbed. This can easily be confirmed independently by simply going through the tens of thousands of attempted edits to Obama's Wikipedia page and seeing how a large number of critical edits are erased, including edits seemingly backed up with third-party media references.

Further, WND published a follow-up today noting many users were still being blocked from attempting to add key issues to Obama's Wikipedia page and other pages, quoting some users. See: http://www.worldnetdaily.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=91257. Indeed, WND has been flooded the past two days with e-mails from readers with their own "Wikipedia stories" of how they were barred from entering what they claim is legitimate, backed-up criticism on Obama's Wikipedia page.

My article from yesterday noted what is clearly a major trend at Wikipedia and is a very legitimate piece. I demand your Gawker article be immediately corrected. The title must be changed, the false accusations about "Jerusalem21" must be updated and the article should note the wider trend on Wikipedia outlined above, instead of wrongly claiming the controversy is limited to one user. Do not simply and misleadingly update your article just by stating that I know "Jerusalem21" and leaving in the defamatory portrayal that I somehow invented a controversy, when indeed there is indisputably a much wider, documented trend.

Sincerely,
Aaron Klein
Jerusalem bureau chief, WorldNetDaily.com

Aaron Klein, WorldNetDaily's Jerusalem bureau chief and a frequent Fox News interviewee, took a break from covering the Middle East to fixate on the question of why Wikipedia's volunteer editors were supposedly censoring edits to Obama's Wikipedia page. According to Klein, "one user" was rebuffed when he tried to add the following paragraph to the page:

There have been some doubts about whether Obama was born in the U.S. after the politician refused to release to the public a carbon copy of his birth certificate and amid claims from his relatives he may have been born in Kenya. Numerous lawsuits have been filed petitioning Obama to release his birth certificate, but most suits have been thrown out by the courts.

That same user, Klein added, was given a three-day suspension after trying to add other material to the page. (Wikipedia editors, who are longtime users given extra authority, often reverse edits that they deem "fringe theories.")

Fox News picked up the tale of supposed Obamaniac censorship yesterday. But they never bothered to ask questions about the identity of "Jerusalem21," the suppressed Wikipedian. Turns out it was almost certainly Klein himself someone working for Klein (see below) who made the offending edits, Wired notes:

Curiously, it turns out that Jerusalem21, whoever he or she might be, has only worked on one other Wikipedia entry since the account was created, notes ConWebWatch. That's Aaron Klein's entry, which Jerusalem21 created in 2006, and has edited 37 times.

Update: Klein emailed us to demand we retract this story (we're not) because he's not actually Jerusalem21—his researcher is. He writes:"I am not 'Jerusalem21,' but I do know the Wikipedia user (he works with me and does research for me), and I worked with him on this story, which focused on investigating allegations I had received from others of Wikipedia scrubbing Obama's page." You can read his whole letter over here.

It's worked out well for Wikipedia, after all, having amateurs post Kennedy-killer hoaxes and fake celebrity death reports. And many who have tried to get falsehoods corrected on Wikipedia have run afoul of its tyrannical volunteer editors, who wield rulebooks as skillfully as any government bureaucrat.

Wales thinks that using software that lets anyone edit a webpage will lead to better governance. Except it won't really, he explains:

Don't just throw up a wiki and hope that something miraculous will happen. A successful wiki requires a clear vision, a clear and achievable goal. I think there are great possibilities for the use of wikis to help citizens help each other. I recommend to try and fail, try and fail, try and fail, but to never give up on the objective of the political process becoming more rational and less prone to hidden pressure group agendas.

And he practices what he preaches! Wikia, a for-profit Wikipedia spinoff, is littered with wiki projects Wales has started and abandoned.

Wales's term was set to expire on December 31, along with two other trustees. The board of the Wikimedia Foundation, Wikipedia's parent organization, is supposed to have 10 board members, half appointed and half elected. It currently has two elected members — Kat Walsh, a Virginia law student, and Ting Chen, a gay Chinese programmer working for IBM in Germany — and two temporary appointees. According to the foundation's bylaws, it requires a quorum — at least five trustees — to take any action other than appointing new members. On December 28, with days left to go, the board announced the reappointment of the three expiring board members on an obscure mailing list — a move that the board's chair, Michael Snow, only saw fit to make public on the foundation website's nearly a week later (after the publication of an earlier version of this post, and followup reporting by CNET News). Five of the ten board seats remain empty or filled by seatwarmers.

How did Wales come to this embarrassing pass? The former porn merchant and options trader, who has traded sex and money for his help in getting Wikipedia entries edited, has met his Machiavellian match, in the form of Sue Gardner, a Gothy, spider-tattooed Canadian pop-culture expert who now runs the site he helped start as Wikimedia's executive director.

Incompetence and infighting are endemic to nonprofits, of course. But Wikipedia's bureaucracy is distinctly, fearsomely awful. The site, which dictates the online reputation of countless living people and companies, itself operates by rules that are completely incomprehensible, determined by a self-appointed group of volunteer editors who can seldom stop arguing over obscurities to explain their ways to outsiders.

No one should be surprised, then, that Wikipedia's overseers are so hobbled that they can't even fill vacancies on the board — a situation Gardner has exploited expertly.

The Wikimedia Foundation is celebrating the fact that it has just badgered Wikipedia users with a sitewide telethon — featuring Wales — into filling its $6.1 million budget. Donors have just handed a blank check to Gardner.

She has a cushy job: The former Canadian journalist has $6 million to spend, with no functional supervision. And Gardner managed to get herself on the board's nominating committee, so she gets to pick her own bosses — a conflict of interest so ridiculous it beggars the imagination.

Wikipedia is now running ads thanking Wales for his help with Wikipedia's fundraising. Wales has held onto his special "community founder" board seat all his own, now that the board has gotten around to reappointing him — but the move required Gardner's consent.

(Photo of Wales via Wikipedia Commons; photo of Gardner via Seattle Times)

If so, Wales makes for an unlikely Jerry Lewis. The nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation is trying to raise $6 million to fund its operations — chief among them Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia anyone with more time than sense can edit. Wikipedia does not run ads, instead relying on contributions from Wikipedia's users.

But Wales has had more luck drumming up donations from wealthy venture capitalists scheming to make money off of Wikipedia volunteers' articles than from ordinary users. Of the $3.9 million that has come in, $2.6 million came from already announced donations; half that amount has come from the fundraising drive.

We have to wonder: Is the problem Wikipedia's pitchman? Wales profits handsomely from his Wikipedia connection, parlaying his status as the site's cofounder into a lucrative speaking career. And he's also used his sway over Wikipedia's volunteer editors to get himself laid, most notably by Rachel Marsden, the Canadian political commentator who some say is the Great White North's answer to Ann Coulter. The junkets, paid for by sponsors, suit his taste for jet-setting, but conflict with the man-of-the-people image he needs to beg for money.

Unfortunately, he's the best Wikipedia has got. The Wikimedia Foundation's executive director, Sue Gardner, a Canadian pop-culture journalist with a thin resume, is actively scheming to supplant him as Wikipedia's public face, but she's embarrassed herself by defending Wales's sleazy sex hijinks and hasn't otherwise made much of a public impact.

So here's a notion: Why not have Marsden, Wales's former paramour, give it a try? She's a proven television presence with a knack for driving controversy. (Sure, she was escorted out of Fox's offices, but she says that was all a misunderstanding!) And she's proven herself to be very interested in what Wikipedia has to say about her — to the point that she was willing to bed Wales to get her entry edited. That's the kind of passion Wikipedia's fundraising needs!

Free-speech zealots among Wikipedia's volunteer editors have insisted that the original cover of Virgin Killer, a 1976 album by German heavy metal band the Scorpions — shown here with a teddy-bear bowdlerization — must run alongside the site's page for the album. Their stubbornness has landed the Wikipedia page on a list of porn sites maintained by Internet Watch, a British group, whose censorship recommendations many British ISPs follow.

The ban seems like overkill, since it covers the album page, not just the image in question. But the fact that Wikipedia has let matters get this far speaks to the site's screwed-up culture. Erik Möller, the deputy director of the Wikimedia Foundation, Wikipedia's nonprofit parent, has defended child pornography in the past. His extremist stance is mirrored by an outspoken minority within Wikipedia's ranks of editors.

The Wikipedian child-porn fetish is disturbing. But it's a sign of a much deeper problem. Wikipedia editors love to make up bureaucratic rules. It's part of what makes the site so intimidating to new users, and why bias and misreporting so often go uncorrected on the site. Knowledgeable people are scared away by the need to engage in time-wasting arguments with bored teenagers and obsessive Internet users for whom enforcing these rules is a source of cheap entertainment. Why Internet providers are banning Wikipedia pages instead of Wikipedia editors is beyond me.