(Photo: Wikipedia)

Oh, the curious case of Gibraltarpedia.

Last September, CNET reported that a well-placed Wikipedian named Roger Bamkin was using his influence at nonprofit Wikipedia to promote the British territory of Gibraltar—whose government was the client of a public relations firm run by Mr. Bamkin.

The upshot was, Gibraltar was showing up an awful lot in the "Did You Know" section of Wikipedia's home page—17 times in the month of August. And while it is interesting to ponder how hungry you'd have to be to eat your shoes, as Gibraltar's inhabitants are said to have done during a siege of the fortress city in 1333, 17 times seems a little excessive.

Excessive, and quite likely, damaging to Wikipedia's reputation as a source of unbiased information. In October, Wikipedia cofounder Jimmy Wales, who proposed a five-year moratorium on Gibraltar-themed DYKs. Alas, Mr. Wales may be Wikipedia's spiritual leader, but sole rule-maker he is not, and while Wikipedia editors did agree on a vetting policy for Gibraltar-related nominations, the new process hasn't don't much to stem the tide.

According to the Register, Gibraltar showed up in Wikipedia's Did You Know box nine times in December, 11 times in January, and six times so far this month. What's more, the paper's readers are apparently obsessed with spotting Gibraltar-themed DYKs: They've been asked to stop alerting editors every time a new entry shows up.

(Photo: Blogger)

Homeopathy, an alternative form of medicine employed by free-spirited aunts everywhere, has just made a very potent enemy. On his newly-minted Quora blog, Wikipedia cofounder Jimmy Wales voiced his disapproval for the method, which has been systematically proven to be an ineffective pseudoscience.

While suffering from a cold, Mr. Wales asked a pharmacist in London to suggest a remedy. The pharmacist suggested Oscillococcinum, a French homeopathic remedy that he claimed would "disrupt the DNA of the virus before it could make [him] ill." Unfortunately for this poor pharmacist, he had no idea who he was talking to.

Mr. Wales politely declined the recommendation and instead purchased some cough drops. But his hatred for homeopathy was reignited.

The flu, Mr. Wales argues, is a dangerous virus that kills people every year, and yet some people may eschew a life-saving vaccine in order to take homeopathic remedies that are falsely marketed as being effective. "What I want to know is this: why is this legal?" Mr. Wales wondered. "Or, if it is not legal, then what can be done about it?"

Since the Wikipedia cofounder is a little busy at the moment, he asked who he should contact to help fight the good fight against homeopathy. "This is not my primary area of interest and so I am not the right person to lead it myself," he wrote. "But I would like to help."

Mr. Wales is not alone: Many technologists, scientists, Singulatarians and skeptics have also voiced their anti-homeopathy stance. Last year, Singularity University's VP of academics Vivek Wadha came under fire for allegedly spreading the dark art of "pseudoscience" when he let a homeopath speak to students.

(h/t Carl Franzen)

Mr. Wales (Photo: Quora)

It's a widely-accepted adage passed down from class to class that citing Wikipedia in a paper is not just lazy, it's unacceptable. This reporter had a high school teacher who insisted she'd outright fail us if she found us even using Wikipedia to glean information about a paper topic. Granted, back then Wikipedia wasn't the well-respected bastion of crowd-sourced facts it is today, but still: citing the Internet's favorite encyclopedia was--and is--frowned upon.

It seems that even Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales agrees with this nugget of wisdom. In a recent Quora thread asking what Mr. Wales thought of professors saying Wikipedia isn't a "viable source," Mr. Wales cut the BS and agreed with your crochety 10th grade teacher. Sorry, kids.

Mr. Wales wrote:

if the Professor has a more nuanced view that Wikipedia should not be cited "as a source" by university students then I agree completely!  I think the same thing about citing Britannica or any other encyclopedia.  Citing an encyclopedia for an academic paper at the University level is not appropriate - you aren't 12 years old any more, it's time to step up your game and do research in original sources.

To be fair, Mr. Wales is speaking specifically about university papers, so maybe you lucky high schoolers still have a few good years of Wikipedia sourcing ahead of you.

Mr. Wales also clarified that telling students to not use Wikipedia at all is " silly and naive," as the service provides great preliminary information.

"Once you've read a few relevant Wikipedia entries on a topic, you should be well armed to start digging in to primary materials," Mr. Wales concluded.

Primary materials. He means Google, right?

Mr. O'Dwyer, right, and Mr. Wales (Photo: Twitter/richardasaurus)

In the two years since U.S. customs and immigration officials came knocking on his dorm room door, Richard O'Dwyer has become something of a representative figure in the fight between Hollywood heavyweights and the Internet.

But a new ally has stepped foward to support the "unlikely poster boy for a culture war." Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales has decided to intervene on Mr. O'Dwyer's behalf, launching a campaign on Change.org this weekend to stop the U.S. from extraditing him on copyright allegations.

If extradited, Mr. O'Dwyer faces up to ten years in prison. His alleged crime? Copyright violations related to developing a site called TVShack.net, a search engine that linked to online sources to watch TV shows and movies. Mr. Wales is careful to note that TVShack hosted user-submitted links, not copyrighted content. And when Mr. O'Dwyer received requests to remove copyrighted content, he complied.

In fact, as Mr. Wales told The Guardian, Mr. O'Dwyer sounds less like a criminal and more like the next Zuck.

"When I met Richard, he struck me as a clean-cut, geeky kid. Still a university student, he is precisely the kind of person we can imagine launching the next big thing on the internet," Wales wrote in a comment article for the Guardian.

In his petition, addressed to UK Home Secretary Theresa May, Mr. Wales calls Mr. O'Dwyer "the human face of the battle between the content industry and the interests of the general public." Saving Mr. O'Dwyer, he argues, would be tantamount to the next "big victory" for "the public," after successfully defeating SOPA and PIPA.

O'Dwyer is not a US citizen, he's lived in the UK all his life, his site was not hosted there, and most of his users were not from the US. America is trying to prosecute a UK citizen for an alleged crime which took place on UK soil.

The internet as a whole must not tolerate censorship in response to mere allegations of copyright infringement. As citizens we must stand up for our rights online.

The petition already has 29,627 out of the 35,000 signatures Mr. Wales is seeking. Thanks to a well-chosen hoodie, Mr. O'Dwyer may soon have other Internet denizens on his side.