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Open
Season on Domainers and Domaining - Overtly
Biased L.A. Times Article Leads Latest Assault
on Objectivity and Accuracy
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Is
there a full moon this week or
something?
In the wake of Wikipedia's
indefensible bonehead
decision to redirect
searches for "domaining" to a
page on cybersquatting comes a |
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remarkably
slanted article at the Los
Angeles Times website today. In
a piece by David Sarno about the arrest of the New
Jersey man who stole P2P.com,
the "reporter" begins
his article by writing these words:
"In a strange series of events
befitting the shady world of domain
name speculation..." What!?
I hate to
sound like an old fogy but not many
years ago any so-called journalist that
wrote |
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anything like that in a "news"
article would have been
given the bum's rush to the nearest
exit. Whatever happened to objectivity
and accuracy in
reporting? These seem to lost arts
in mainstream media today. |
The Times
writer obviously knows NOTHING about the
domain business yet he writes something like
that, smearing an entire industry and
everyone in it? I’ve watched this ongoing
deterioration in journalistic standards at major
papers for years now but never would have
dreamed it would reach the dismal state
it has today. The professionals have
apparently all left the building. Joe
Isuzu had more credibility than a
lot of the inexperienced and under skilled
writers that are all that's left in many
newspaper offices (the modern day equivalent of
ghost towns) - offices that once housed media
giants and real reporters who actually
did silly things like fact-checking and
delivering unbiased accounts of the news.
And newspapers wonder why new media is cleaning
their clocks? This isn't the only reason but
it is certainly one of them.
Today you will get
more accurate and reliable news about
specialized topics (like domains) from experts
who write blogs about the business than you will
ever get from the typical reporter in mainstream
media. Michael Berkens wrote about the L.A.
Times article on his blog
today and one of his commentators, Johnny,
summed up the current state of traditional
journalism very well. He wrote, "I always
knew news stories were incomplete and biased
quite often, but having been a domainer for 15
years and reading all these stories has jaded me
into thinking almost nothing reported
is as it seems. Only experts, most often,
can write a good report on the subject matter in
which they are experts. The rest are amateurs
writing poor articles on subjects they know
nothing about." That's a bingo
Johnny, take the stuffed animal of your choice.
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So
what is Wikipedia's excuse? Well for
one, they are not even pretend
journalists so objectivity and fairness
are apparently not part of their
lexicon. The way they are grossly
mishandling subject matter related to
domaining is just the latest of many
examples of serious missteps that are
destroying the credibility of the once
high flying user edited online
encyclopedia. In fact New
Scientist Magazine just wrote an
article about their travails called After
the boom, is Wikipedia heading for bust?
Veteran
domainer Max Menius from North
Carolina has been spending endless
hours
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trying to
get Wikipedia to stop allowing heavily
biased admins to paint all domainers
as cybersquatters. In a post at the NamePros
forum Max summed up the
unwarranted damage Wikipedia is doing to
the reputation of the many good people
and companies in this industry. |
In a letter to
administrators at Wikipedia Menius wrote, "Due
to the despicable decision to redirect
domaining and domainers to the Wiki page on
"cybersquatting",
it is now indexed very highly in all the major
search engines. This is extremely unfortunate
and will be very difficult to reverse. This
alone should illustrate the unnecessary damage
which can occur when someone is allowed to commandeer
an entire industry and trash its
community on Wikipedia. Wikipedia is often
considered an authoritative resource so in this
instance Wikipedia was being exploited and
used to defame thousands of people in
the domain community by labeling them as
cybersquatters.
Never again should something like this be
allowed. And in the future, there should be a much
more expedient process in place for undoing
improper redirects. Someone one can call in
urgent situations. This wasn't an innocuous or
laughable situation. Very, very serious.
Thank you Wiki admins for your time."
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Today the
redirect and the grossly inaccurate
impression it gives Wikipedia readers remains
in place. Those who read our new monthly
newsletter about his issue
wanted to know how to reach someone at
Wikipedia to complain. Wikipedia
apparently has no email service
for users to contact them, however
Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales is
on Twitter (http://twitter.com/jimmy_wales)
where you may be able to send him
a direct message (he does not have
messaging turned on but the following
procedure should work).
Go to his
Twitter page and highlight any one of
his posts. You will see a gray arrow
appear in the lower right corner. Click
on that arrow and it will open a reply
screen on your home page filled in
with @jimmy_wales. Change the @
sign to a d (for direct message)
and hit the space bar once to separate
the d from jimmy_wales. You can then
write your message (140 character limit)
and hit the Send button (if the
button says Update instead of
Send you did not put a space after the d).
Let's hope Jimmy will stop letting a few
bad inmates run (and ruin) the asylum. |
Wikipedia
Founder Jimmy Wales |
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