Wikipedia Review is an

Internet forum An Internet forum, or message board, is an online discussion site where people can hold conversations in the form of posted messages. They differ from chat rooms in that messages are often longer than one line of text, and are at least temporar ...

and

blog A blog (a truncation of "weblog") is a discussion or informational website published on the World Wide Web consisting of discrete, often informal diary-style text entries (posts). Posts are typically displayed in reverse chronological order s ...

for the discussion of

Wikimedia Foundation The Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., or Wikimedia for short and abbreviated as WMF, is an American 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization headquartered in San Francisco, California and registered as a charitable foundation under local laws. Best know ...

projects, in particular the content and conflicts of

Wikipedia Wikipedia is a multilingual free online encyclopedia written and maintained by a community of volunteers, known as Wikipedians, through open collaboration and using a wiki-based editing system. Wikipedia is the largest and most-read refer ...

. Wikipedia Review is a Wikipedia watchdog website, scrutinizing Wikipedia and reporting on its flaws. It provides an independent forum to discuss Wikipedia editors and their influence on Wikipedia content. At its peak, participants included current Wikipedia editors, former Wikipedia editors, users banned from Wikipedia, and people who had never edited.

Background

The site was founded in November 2005 by "Igor Alexander", and hosted by ProBoards. On 19 February 2006 it moved to its own

domain name A domain name is a string that identifies a realm of administrative autonomy, authority or control within the Internet. Domain names are often used to identify services provided through the Internet, such as websites, email services and more. As ...

using

Invision Power Board Invision Community is a brand of forum software developed in 2002 and originally marketed as Invision Power Board. The current version of the software was written in PHP and uses MySQL MySQL () is an open-source relational database mana ...

software. The site required registration using a valid e-mail address to post and blacklisted email providers that allowed anonymity so as to discourage the operation of multiple accounts by a single user. Wikipedia Review was cited for its discussion of

wiki A wiki ( ) is an online hypertext publication collaboratively edited and managed by its own audience, using a web browser. A typical wiki contains multiple pages for the subjects or scope of the project, and could be either open to the pub ...

-editing concepts and its participation in the evaluation of the Palo Alto Research Company's WikiDashboard.

Commentary

Seth Finkelstein wrote in ''

The Guardian ''The Guardian'' is a British daily newspaper. It was founded in 1821 as ''The Manchester Guardian'', and changed its name in 1959. Along with its sister papers ''The Observer'' and ''The Guardian Weekly'', ''The Guardian'' is part of the Gu ...

'' that Wikipedia Review has provided a focal point for investigation into Wikipedia-related matters such as the "

Essjay controversy The Essjay controversy was an incident in which Ryan Jordan, a Wikipedia editor who went by the username "Essjay", falsely presented himself as a university professor of religion from 2005 to 2007, during which time he was elected to top position ...

". Cade Metz, writing for ''

The Register ''The Register'' is a British technology news website co-founded in 1994 by Mike Magee, John Lettice and Ross Alderson. The online newspaper's masthead sublogo is "''Biting the hand that feeds IT''." Their primary focus is information te ...

'', credited Wikipedia Review with the discovery of a private mailing list that led to the resignation of a Wikipedia administrator; he also wrote that a Wikipedia proposal called "BADSITES" intended to ban the mention of Wikipedia Review and similar sites on Wikipedia. ''

The Independent ''The Independent'' is a British online newspaper. It was established in 1986 as a national morning printed paper. Nicknamed the ''Indy'', it began as a broadsheet and changed to tabloid format in 2003. The last printed edition was publish ...

'' noted that "allegations against certain administrators came to a head on a site called Wikipedia Review, where people debate the administrators' actions." The Irish technology website Silicon Republic suggested visiting Wikipedia Review in order to "follow disputes, discussions, editors and general bureaucracy on Wikipedia". Philip Coppens used posts made on Wikipedia Review to help construct a report, published in '' Nexus Magazine'', on

WikiScanner WikiScanner (also known as Wikipedia Scanner) was a publicly searchable database that linked anonymous edits on Wikipedia to the organizations where those edits apparently originated. It did this by cross-referencing the edits with data on the ow ...

and allegations that intelligence agencies had been using Wikipedia to spread

disinformation Disinformation is false information deliberately spread to deceive people. It is sometimes confused with misinformation, which is false information but is not deliberate. The English word ''disinformation'' comes from the application of the L ...

Content and structure

Wikipedia Review's publicly accessible forums are broken up into four general topic areas: # Forum information; #

Wikimedia The Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., or Wikimedia for short and abbreviated as WMF, is an American 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization headquartered in San Francisco, California and registered as a charitable foundation under local laws. Best know ...

-oriented discussion, which contains subforums focusing on editors, the Wikipedia bureaucracy, meta discussion, articles and general Wikimedia-focused topics not fitting elsewhere; # Media forums containing a news feed and discussion about news and blogs featuring Wikipedia/Wikimedia; and # Off topic, non-Wikimedia related discussion.

References

External links

* * * {{Wikipediahistory Critics of Wikipedia History of Wikipedia Internet forums Internet properties established in 2005