WikipediaClassaction.org: Continued

Tuesday, December 13th, 2005

Well, I should have known better than not to consult Wikipedia on the stuff I mentioned in article on QuakeAID, OfficialWire and their parent company BAOU, Inc.. Fun reading material.

One and the same

Also in my latest post I said someone at OfficialWire was probably behind wikipediaclassaction.org. Turns out I was indeed right. A whois on http://www.baou.com reveals this administrative contact:

Administrative Contact:
  Management, Domain  email@baou.com
  PO Box 998
  Long Beach, NY 11561-0998
  US
  +1.8668712289    Fax: +1.8777656948

and this registrar:

Registrar of Record: TUCOWS, INC.

Whois on http://www.wikipediaclassaction.org reveals this:

Sponsoring Registrar:Tucows Inc. (R11-LROR)
Registrant Organization:WikipediaClassAction.org
Registrant Street1:PO Box 998
...
Registrant City:Long Beach
Registrant State/Province:NY
Registrant Postal Code:11561-0998

Same registrar, same PO Box, same address, same company.

…only after four months

Baou Inc’s grudge against Wikipedia started with the QuakeAID fiasco mentioned above. Another news report about Wikipedia told of misinformation being spread on Wikipedia.org about a journalist by the name of John Seigenthaler. The ‘news’ article on OfficialWire about this case claims:

After four months, Seigenthaler was finally able to get Wales to remove the offending piece from Wikipedia and from the other online ‘resources’ that simply copy from Wales’ pool of data, but not before it had been read by tens of thousands of people, who may or may not have repeated, copied or stored the nonsense.

This might be accurate, but it makes it sound like it took Wikipedia four months to remove the false information. So which is it? Did it took four months to remove the information from Wikipedia, or from BOTH the sites? In that case, how long did it take to remove the information from Wikipedia? Also, according to this blog post, Siegenthaler’s original piece doesn’t say how long it took to remove the offending information from Wikipedia after Seigenthaler contacted them, only that the information had been up there for four months in total.

Yet another re-cap

So.. let’s see. OfficialWire is trying to start a classaction suit against Wikipedia.org because they believe they’re spreading misinformation and cannot be held accountable, except that OfficialWire itself is spreading misinformation too? Strange.

PS

Fun quote from the OfficialWire’s contact page: As hard as it may be to believe, some people disagree with us sometimes. If you are one of them feel free to Email us if you’d like. We get a lot of hate mail and answer very little of it.

Doesn’t really surprise me much.