Wikipedia: The Encyclopedia For Childish Morons Desperate For Self-Worth-Validation
As news organizations reported Michael Jackson's hospitalization on Thursday afternoon, Wikipedia editors were wrestling with the problem of whether to allow an unverified report of the singer's death to appear on the online encyclopedia.
The entertainment site TMZ.com reported at 2:20 p.m. PDT that: "We're told when paramedics arrived Jackson had no pulse and they never got a pulse back."
Some Wikipedians repeatedly deleted references to Jackson's alleged demise, saying in separate comments that "This is not yet verified," "He's not dead," "Premature edits," and "ONCE AGAIN, HE IS NOT DEAD, JUST STOP.
LOL!
Rest of the story here: http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-10273277-93.html
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Psychologist finds Wikipedians grumpy and closed-minded
* 01:00 03 January 2009 by Peter Aldhous
* For similar stories, visit the Mental Health Topic Guide
Disagreeable and closed to new ideas - that's the picture that emerges of contributors to community-curated encyclopaedia Wikipedia from a survey of their psychological attributes.
Led by Yair Amichai-Hamburger of the Sammy Ofer School of Communication in Herzliya, Israel, a team of psychologists surveyed 69 Israeli contributors to the popular online encyclopedia, comparing them with a sample of 70 students matched for age and intensity of internet use.
All were given a short questionnaire called Real-Me, which tries to determine whether people prefer to express themselves in the real world or online, and a personality survey that gave ratings for five traits: openness to experience and ideas, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism.
Internet living
As Amichai-Hamburger expected, the Wikipedians were more comfortable online. "They feel the internet is a more meaningful place to them," he says. But to his surprise, although Wikipedia is founded on the notion of openly sharing and collecting knowledge as a community, they scored low on agreeableness and openness. ...
Amichai-Hamburger speculates that rather than contributing altruistically, Wikipedians take part because they struggle to express themselves in real-world social situations. "They are compensating," he suggests. "It is their way to have a voice in this world."
This is consistent with previous research on online communication, says Scott Caplan of the University of Delaware in Newark, who suspects that heavy users of sites such as Digg and Twitter may have similar characteristics. "People who prefer online social behaviour tend to have higher levels of social anxiety and lower social skills," he says.
No way, really? Rest of the story here.