Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2009-12-28/In the news

In the news

Criticism from climate change sceptic, decade in review

Climate change sceptic attacks Wikipedian

In the wake of Climategate, journalist Lawrence Solomon has an opinion column on "Wikipedia's climate doctor", alleging that User:William M. Connolley "turned Wikipedia into the missionary wing of the global warming movement." The article accuses Connolley of a long-term campaign of biased editing in global-warming related articles, including abuse of his administrator status. Solomon, a global warming sceptic who has chronicled climate change denial and related viewpoints on the part of scientists in the 2008 book The Deniers, previously published a series of opinion columns criticising Wikipedia's climate change coverage and some of the editors involved in maintaining it.

Wikipedians have been discussing the column on the talk page of the Wikipedia article on Connolley, noting how misleading it is with respect to Connolley's history as an editor and administrator. Although Connolley lost his administrator status after a recent arbitration case, his editing and administrator activities related to climate change have on the whole been supported by other Wikipedians, despite unusually close scrutiny because of Connolley's focus on controversial topics.

Summing up the decade

Wikipedia has been appearing in many end-of-the-decade columns:

A press release in Dawn, a Pakistani English language newspaper, mentioned Wikipedia in the list of 50 things that changed people’s lives in the previous decade: "the open-source encyclopedia, used the masses to police its entries and keep the information (mostly) (sometimes) accurate"
An article on guardian.co.uk mentioned Wikipedia in its summary of the decade. The article, which discussed the transition to cloud computing, gave Wikipedia as an example of why the previous decade was "a period of liberation and creativity".
PC World lists the "Top 15 Tech Events of the Decade", including #6 "The User Takes Control", with Wikipedia as a prime example.
Livemint.com discusses Wikipedia as a prominent part of "A decade of digital explosion".
Emirates Business 24-7 puts Wikipedia on "Our round up of the top tech trends that ruled the decade".
TechCrunch's NSFW column by Paul Carr rants about Wikipedia and other technology topics.