The demise of the ubiquitous door-to-door encyclopedia salesman and the subsequent rise of the electronic version of the books has brought with it unintended consequences for those wishing to learn the truth on a variety of extremely important topics, information that should be common knowledge to the masses. In a series of damning emails exchanged with this writer, the predominant Internet-based website Wikipedia admitted they subjectively censor material they deem to be controversial, in reference to the September 11, 2001 attacks, although their censoring is not limited to 9-11. The reason this admission is so significant is due primarily to Wikipedia’s reach. According to its entry of itself: “It is the largest and most popular general reference work on the Internet, ranking seventh globally among all websites…having an estimated 365 million readers worldwide.” Alexa, the online company that ranks websites according to their traffic, lists Wikipedia as the sixth most popular website in the world, in its “top 500 sites on the web.” Only Google, Facebook, YouTube, Yahoo! And Baidu rank higher. Launched on January 15, 2001, the name “is a portmanteau of wiki, from the Hawaiian word meaning ‘fast’ or ‘quick’ and encyclopedia,” the free website is edited collaboratively by volunteers around the world, and contains “30 million articles in 287 languages,” where “almost all of its articles can be edited by anyone having access to the site.” While this is true, what is not mentioned is that the edits to sensitive entries will be removed.
Posted on: Mon, 02 Sep 2013 22:10:04 +0000
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