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Digital despots of Wikipedia guard pages and routinely censor opposing viewpoints

BombThrowers Wikipedia, the open-source online encyclopedia of everything, has deemed The Peoples Cube website by political satirist Oleg Atbashian too non-notable to be counted as a part of everything anymore.

Last week, they purged the Cubes Wikipedia entry.

How does Wikipedia make such judgment calls? Not by using amateur stuff like algorithms. Or, math.

Instead, they allow gangs of politically motivated computer geeks to descend on a wiki page they are targeting for destruction and harass the other contributors until everyone sane leaves the room. Then they vandalize the text into incoherence; claim they have subjected it to a rigorous process of collaborative editing, and recommend that it be purged.

Such behavior is the computer-programming version of anarchist stunts with names like participism, sociocracy, or consensus-based decision-making. In other words, its like when the lunatics of Occupy Wall Street took a break from defecating on police cruisers and crouched on street corners twinkling their fingers up and down until a critical mass twinkled in unison that they wanted to order pizza, or purge all the white men, or ask Katie Couric if they could use the Today Show bathrooms again.

Its probably more or less the same people, too.

Wouldnt it be far more ethical for the mandarins of Wikipedia to acknowledge that they removed The Peoples Cube entry because they dont like Atbashians brand of politics? Of course, doing so would force them to acknowledge that they censor content politically, which wouldnt sit well with Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales carefully curated public image as the rare Internet mogul who defends Internet freedom even when it puts him at odds with Communist Chinese officials.

Thus the tap dance of collaborative editing and the pseudo-scientific finding of insufficient notability.

What, one might ask, is the basis for Wikipedias measurement of notability? For a political comedy website like The Peoples Cube (website link), audience share seems an obvious choice. And here, the Wikipedia folks have no argument. According to Ranking.com, The Peoples Cube is the 28,724th most visited website. That certainly makes The Peoples Cube seem a tad obscureuntil one looks at other political comedy websites that are not considered too obscure to have their own Wikipedia pages.

The (terribly unfunny) left-wing political comedy website Daily Howler is ranked the 287,343rd most popular website, yet it has a Wikipedia page.

Free Wood Post, ranked as the 146,176th most popular website, not only has a Wikipedia page but is also included on Wikipedias List of Satirical New Websites.

I could go on, but left-wing political humor is pretty thin on the web. Perhaps thats why Wikipedia unleashed its editorial mob to break some knee-caps over at The Peoples Cube.

Excerpt from:
Why did Wikipedia purge The People's Cube? - Canada Free Press