Wikipedia, Scientology, And Google News

The Interweb is rumbling today ...

Wikipedia has banned IPs that can be traced to the Church of Scientology from editing articles due to not being able to keep up with the edits that were being made (and the self-serving nature of said edits).

My opinion on this is: okay. I understand the reasoning. Wikipedia would like to remain a reliable source and they frequently ban select IPs. While it might seem extreme to ban an entire organization, let's remember that this is NOT the government regulating free speech -- this is an organization trying to maintain credibility and solve some problems for its employees. Perhaps it's setting an interesting precedent, but again -- it's an organization. They can do what they want or need in these cases.

Apparently there was some serious arbitration required before they could officially do this, but it's done and now the CoS is out.

That's not what I find funny about this. As a result of this ban, the Google news feed's top link for the story has crashed due to a server overload. Thanks to Wikipedia, the servers at an online news source are dead.

Yep.

[The original story -- not the crashing one -- can be found here.]

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