I just today learned about an organization called SourceWatch—they have an article on the tobacco connections of the well-known sociologist Peter Berger. Beyond the inherent interest of the topic, I was fascinated by the way that the Sourcewatch webpage mimicked Wikipedia:
This is a smart move, I think: for better or worse, Wikipedia is generally considered to be authoritative.
But then I was thinking . . . is this the beginning of the end for Wikipedia. I don’t know anything about Sourcewatch, if they’re good guys or bad guys or whatever—but if they can mimic Wikipedia, I’m sure lots of other organizations could do so too. And, when they do it, all of a sudden there will be a lot of authoritative-looking Wikipedia-like pages floating around, a sort of counterfeit money devaluing the “real” ‘pedia, which will then have to respond by branding itself—”100% real Wikipedia, accept no imitations”—and so on. Not a bad thing, perhaps, but not what we have now.
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I think Wikipedia will maintain its brand relative to those folks. It has more widespread appeal as authoritative and NPOV. Conservapedia is an attempt to compete with them and its an absolute joke. SourceWatch is no Conservapedia, but it will be similarly be of limited use when preaching outside the choir.
Well, Wikimedia licences its self-developed MediaWiki engine freely for anyone – so its not particularly hard to set up a spoof website (like Uncyclopedia or Encyclopedia Dramatica) or some more biased alternative (like Conservapedia or RationalWiki) that has exactly the same look and feel as the original.
Sourcewatch (aka Disinfopedia) is actually one of the oldest and most reputable MediaWiki sites. It’s been online close to seven years now; so I’m quite surprised that you as a political scientist haven’t come across it.
This is the most fun and hilarious Wikipedia knock-off:
http://encyclopediadramatica.com/Main_Page
Pretty wild stuff. Check this article out on Michael Moore:
http://encyclopediadramatica.com/Michael_Moore
LOL! Sorry to all the Monkey Cage Michael Moore fans (which is 95% of you).
As Morton notes, it’s not “mimicking” anything. That’s just the way the Wikimedia CMS displays things. It doesn’t make it a knock-off, and unlike some other sites linked above, it doesn’t even try to look like Wikipedia in the surrounding material.
There’s also a Spanish language website “Encyclopedia Libre” founded way back in 2002, out of fears that Wikipedia would solicit ads. They just took Wikipedia’s (spanish language) content AND Wikipedia’s software and grew from there. In fact, it was even more popular than the Spanish-language version of Wikipedia for a few years, although Wikipedia caught up in 2004.
http://wikileaks.org is a really interesting organization that imitates wikipedia.
Simon
yeah, it’s the domain, not the layout. People use wikis for all purposes – I believe our University offers to set up course wikis, I’ve planned dinners with a wiki (new years, people were all over the place while planning), used it to coordinate work and exchange information in small political groups, to summarize answers to FAQs on a popular alumni mailinglist etc…
I wasn’t trying to imply anything unusual about Sourcewatch’s use of the look and feel of Wikipedia. I was just pointing out that the Wikipedia format gives the Sourcewatch pages an air of authority, and I wonder if, as such formatting becomes more and more common, that it will ultimately tend to dilute Wikipedia’s perceived authority as an accurate and nonpartisan source.
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