Wikipedia, once the bane of college humanities professors who had students treating it with the respect once reserved for the Encyclopedia Brittanica and the Oxford English Dictionary, has a secret.  Now, even those college professors are using it.  Or at least reading it.  Because everyone is.  It’s really pretty amazing. 

More people use Wikipedia than Amazon or eBay-in fact it’s up there in the top-ten Alexa rankings with those moneyed funhouses MySpace, Facebook, and YouTube. Why? Because it has 2.2 million articles, and because it’s very often the first hit in a Google search, and because it just feels good to find something there-even, or especially, when the article you find is maybe a little clumsily written. Any inelegance, or typo, or relic of vandalism reminds you that this gigantic encyclopedia isn’t a commercial product. There are no banners for E*Trade or Classmates.com, no side sprinklings of AdSense.

When teaching high school and college students in the last decade, I’ve found it hard to teach them to use real books in real libraries, mainly because the internet is right there and real fast and looks to have the same kind of information.  ”Why can’t we use the internet?” they ask.  And I say, “Books are edited by professionals.  Journals are reviewed by professionals.  All this means we can trust that a lot of people believe that that bookish and journalish information has verity.  There’s something to it.  It’s published.”  But the internet changed that, and there’s no going back.  And now, when I need to do a quick check of the facts, I find myself using Wikipedia as one of my references.  Just one, mind you. 

This article at The New York Review of Books tells the story, and it’s not a bad one.  Heck, I was sold on it when I’d discovered that I’d made it on Wikipedia, too.  Wow.  I’m a star.

Two muckracking websites are attracting controversy. WikiLeaks.org enables anonymous dissidents to post documents revealing government corruption, and a California judge just shut it down. JuicyCampus.com enables anonymous college students to post grubby gossip like “Top ten freshman sluts” and so far, the site still stands.

WikiLeaks, still available by IP address, allows whistleblowers to safely post documents exposing government and corporate misdoings. Leaks include a document outlining standard operating procedures for Guantanamo Bay and a 2,000 page document presenting “nearly the entire order of battle for US forces in Iraq.”

Bank Julius Baer was the first to fight back when someone posted documents alleging that the Swiss bank laundered money and evaded taxes. The bank demanded that the courts close the site and Judge Jeffrey White complied, ordering WikiLeaks to disable its address and stop disseminating disputed documents.

FreePress.net argues that WikiLeak must survive “because it has the potential … to be a potent force for more transparent—and therefore more accountable—government.” In a righteously indignant editorial, the New York Times decried White’s injunction as unconstitutional: “That was akin to shutting down a newspaper because of objections to one article.”

It was also akin to providing free WikiLeak advertising. Now WikiLeak documents are popping up on other websites, and the court has a First Amendment battle on its hands.

If WikiLeaks provides a “global defense of sources and press freedoms,” JuicyCampus.com provides a forum to sate people’s lust for salacious gossip. Paralleling the new TV show Gossip Girl, the site allows students to anonymously target their classmates by name. The site is unregulated, horrifying and, Dan Belzer writes in the Duke Chronicle, mesmerizing:

One look and I was unknowingly sucked into an addiction. I wanted more. More names, more dirt, more hate. I knew it was wrong, and I couldn’t morally justify adding to the hateful insanity, but I also couldn’t and can’t stop reading.

Saboteurs have hacked the website but unlike Bank Julius Baer, students with slashed reputations have little legal recourse. The First Amendment and Communications Decency Act protect the site, according to Carnegie Mellon’s The Tartan. Students who post libelous statements could be subject to prosecution, but the site’s anonymity shields them.

JuicyCampus.com and WikiLeaks.org both have a right to cruise the information highway. But when whistleblowers crash and gossipmongers thrive, shouldn’t it provoke some thought on how our culture values truth?

The internet isn’t the most intellectual, dispassionate place in the world.  It’s tribal, not academic.  Peter Hopkins, a recent college graduate, is hoping to change that with an idea that might change the internet for some of us, or might not.  It’s called Big Think.

Big Think () mixes interviews with public intellectuals from a variety of fields, from politics, to law to business, and allows users to engage in debates on issues like global warming and the two-party system.

The main page is impressive, and this could be a genius way to advance American discourse in a “hyper-partisan” age.  It impressed the former president of Harvard enough to compel him to take a meeting with Hopkins and invest his own money.  Browse the site for a second and let us know: can it work? 

If you make an offensive comment on WMB, Lynn may threaten you with a bonk on the head with her scepter or, at worse, banishment from the blog, but that’s nothing compared to what happened to a Milwaukee teacher commenting on a Wisconsin political blog. He was arrested.
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Do you read this blog, but rarely comment?  Do you linger and observe, but rarely participate?  Are you a lurker?

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I’m usually too busy to catch regular TV shows before they go into syndication. And with a busy family and movie tickets selling at nearly 10 bucks a pop, we don’t get to the multiplex much. That’s why I never dreamed that a strike among film and television writers would affect me.  But, alas, producers searching for a screenwriter for one of my books are now stymied by a Writers Guild of America strike.

Labor talks that began in July stalled, mainly over writers’ demands that they receive more compensation when their work is reproduced or distributed on the Web. Governor Ahnold has stepped in to help negotiate a settlement. Meanwhile, late-night talk shows are already in reruns, and most scripted comedies and dramas are expected to shut down by November.

Not a big deal for those of us who don’t catch much TV. But on a food-and-rent level, production crews and support staff — lots of them — are suddenly finding themselves out of work.

I know we have a lot of writers who blog here. Is the strike affecting you at all? And have you seen unfair use of your work on the Internet?

After Stephanie Lenz video recorded toddler son Holden bouncing and swaying to Prince hit “Let’s Go Crazy,” she posted the short video on YouTube for relatives to enjoy. But then she received an e-mail from YouTube informing her that her video was a  copyright infringement and that it had been removed at the request of Universal Music Publishing Group.

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What do Mozy.com, StumbleUpon.com, Last.fm, Weebly.com, and Etsy.com have in common? They all landed in the top five of Time Magazine’s picks for the 50 best websites of 2007. The list, which you can view here, honors “sites with exceptional style and smarts, sites that offer new and improved ways to access and share content, generate our own and otherwise enrich the online (and off-line) experience.” Time also assembled a slideshow highlighting the 25 websites we can’t live without, such as Amazon.com, Craigslist.org, and eBay.com.

 Do you have any favorite web hangouts that you’d add to either list?

Last week police and FBI arrested 41 people in New Jersey and charged them with sending child rape photos and videos over the Internet.

The 41 people, who range in age from 14 to 71, were charged with child pornography possession and distribution. They face 18 months to 10 years in jail. They have jobs ranging from elevator repairman to car salesman to security guard to landscaper to deli owner to auto mechanic.

The arrests come as police and the FBI continue to search nationwide for Chester Arthur Stiles, 37, who allegedly videotaped himself raping a 3-year-old Las Vegas girl. The girl, now 7, was found safe at home.

The two high-profile incidents show how the Internet has been a boon both to pornographers and law enforcement. It has proven to be an effective tool for tracking down child pornographers and traffickers, but it also makes their product more widely available. Shared Hope International, an organization that fights sex trafficking, reports that the number of child pornography images on the Internet has increased by 1,500% since 1997.

Row Potter, a project coordinator for Youth with a Mission’s, uses the Internet to track information on human trafficking: “Type in human trafficking (in a search engine) and you’ll get tons of hits.” She’s right: Type it in Google and you’ll get 2,710,000. But Potter notes that “the bad guys can use it, too… It allows individuals to post images from the quiet of their own homes.” (With reporting from the AP.)

A group of engineers at Intel have declared today “Zero E-mail Friday,” encouraging everyone in the company to either use the phone or get up out of their chairs and walk across the hall to communicate with co-workers. Others are declaring e-mail bankruptcy, deleting their entire in-box and starting over. Have we in our corporate and personal lives become too e-mail dependent?