Misplaced Pages

Revision as of 11:25, 26 September 2014

Since its launch in January 2001, Misplaced Pages's open nature has led to various concerns, such as the quality of writing, the amount of vandalism, and the accuracy of information on the project. The media has covered a number of controversial events related to Misplaced Pages and its parent organization, the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF). Common subjects of coverage include articles containing false information, public figures and corporations editing articles for which they have a serious conflict of interest, and hostile interactions between Misplaced Pages editors and public figures. The 2012 scandals involving paid consultancy for the government of Gibraltar and potential conflicts of interest have highlighted Misplaced Pages's vulnerabilities. The presence of inaccurate and false information, as well as the perceived hostile editing climate, have been linked to a decline in editor participation. Controversies within and concerning Misplaced Pages and the WMF have been the subject of several scholarly papers. This list is a collection of the more notable instances.

Overview

The nature of Misplaced Pages controversies has been analyzed by many scholars. For example, sociologist Howard Rheingold says that "Misplaced Pages controversies have revealed the evolution of social mechanisms in the Misplaced Pages community"; a study of the politicization of socio-technical spaces remarked that Misplaced Pages "controversies... become fully fledged when they are advertised outside the page being debated"; and even one college discusses Misplaced Pages as a curricular tool, in that "recent controversies involving Misplaced Pages as a basis for discussion of ethics and bias."

Editing restrictions

Despite being promoted as an encyclopedia "anyone can edit", the ability to edit controversial pages is sometimes restricted due to "edit wars" or vandalism. To address criticism about restricting access while still minimizing malicious editing of those pages, Misplaced Pages has also trialed measures such as "pending changes" that would open contentious articles up for more people to edit, then subject their contributions to approval from more established members of the site.

2002

• February 2002 – In late February 2002, the Spanish Misplaced Pages community decided to break away ("fork") from Misplaced Pages to protest against plans by co-founders Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger to sell advertising on Misplaced Pages sites. The fork, set up by volunteer Edgar Enyedy, was hosted at the University of Seville under the name Enciclopedia Libre Universal en Español. Most of the Spanish volunteers followed Enyedy, producing over 10,000 articles within a year. As a result the Spanish Misplaced Pages was virtually inactive until mid-2003. Since this incident, the question of advertising has been a sensitive subject on Misplaced Pages. In an interview with Wired in January 2011, Wales categorically denied having supported the plans for advertising, prompting a public dispute with Sanger. "The suggestion that I demanded ads and that Jimmy Wales was opposed to them is, I am afraid, yet another self-serving lie from Wales", wrote Sanger. As late as 2006 Wales refused to deny that there would ever be advertising on Misplaced Pages. In January of that year he told a reporter from ClickZ that "the question is going to arise as to whether we could better pursue our charitable mission with the additional money . We have never said there would absolutely never be ads on Misplaced Pages."

2005

• September 2005
  • The Seigenthaler incident, was a series of events that began in May 2005 with the anonymous posting of a hoax article in the online encyclopedia Misplaced Pages about John Seigenthaler, a well-known American journalist. The article falsely stated that Seigenthaler had been a suspect in the assassinations of U.S. President John F. Kennedy and Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy. Additionally, the article erroneously stated that Seigenthaler had lived in the Soviet Union for thirteen years beginning in 1971. Seigenthaler, who had been a friend and aide to Robert Kennedy, characterized the Misplaced Pages entry about him as "Internet character assassination". The perpetrator of the hoax, Brian Chase, was identified by Misplaced Pages critic Daniel Brandt and reporters for the New York Times. The hoax was removed from Misplaced Pages in early October 2005 (although the false information stayed on Answers.com and Reference.com for another three weeks), after which Seigenthaler wrote about his experience in USA Today.
  • Professional book indexer Daniel Brandt started Misplaced Pages criticism website wikipedia-watch.org in response to his unpleasant experience while trying to get his biography deleted.
• November/December 2005 – The IP address assigned to the United States House of Representatives was blocked from editing Misplaced Pages because of a large number of edits comprising a "deliberate attempt to compromise the integrity of the encyclopedia." According to CBS News these changes included edits to Marty Meehan's Misplaced Pages article to give it a more positive tone. The edits to Meehan's article prompted a former director of the United States Office of Government Ethics to say that "hat kind of usage, plus the fact that they're changing one person's material, is certainly wrong and ought to be at a minimum the focus of some disciplinary action".
• December 2005 – Misplaced Pages co-founder Jimmy Wales was caught editing his own Misplaced Pages entry. According to public logs, he had edited his biography 18 times, seven times altering information about whether Larry Sanger was a co-founder of Misplaced Pages. It was also revealed that Wales had edited the Misplaced Pages article of his former company, Bomis. "Bomis Babes", a section of the Bomis website, had been characterized in the article as "soft-core pornography," but Wales revised this to "adult content section" and deleted mentions of pornography. He said he was fixing an error, and didn't agree with calling Bomis Babes soft porn. Wales conceded that he had made the changes, but maintained that they were technical corrections.

2006

• February 1, 2006 – The Henryk Batuta hoax was uncovered by editors on the Polish Misplaced Pages. Batuta, an entirely made-up person, was claimed to be a Polish Communist revolutionary who was an associate of Ernest Hemingway. The article was published for 15 months and referenced in seventeen other articles before the hoax was uncovered. The hoax article was written by a group of Polish Misplaced Pages editors calling themselves the "Batuta Army." One of the group's members, who called himself "Marek", told The Observer that they had created the hoax article in order to draw attention to the ongoing use of the names of Soviet officials for streets and other public areas in Poland. Marek stated that "Many of these people were traitors and murderers who do not deserve such an honour".
• March 2006 – Misplaced Pages critic Daniel Brandt discovered 142 instances of plagiarism in Misplaced Pages articles. Brandt told the Associated Press after his discovery that "hey present it as an encyclopedia. They go around claiming it's almost as good as Britannica. They are trying to be mainstream respectable."
• Early to mid-2006 – A series of U.S. Congressional staff edits to Misplaced Pages were revealed in the press. These mostly involved various political aides trying to whitewash Misplaced Pages biographies of several politicians by, e.g., removing undesirable information (including pejorative statements quoted, or broken campaign promises), adding favorable information or "glowing" tributes, or by replacing articles in part or whole by staff-authored biographies. The staff of at least five politicians were implicated: Marty Meehan, Norm Coleman, Conrad Burns, Joe Biden and Gil Gutknecht. In a separate but similar incident the campaign manager for Cathy Cox, Morton Brilliant, resigned after being found to have added negative information to the Misplaced Pages entries of political opponents.
• July 2006 – MyWikiBiz was founded by Gregory Kohs and his sister to provide paid editing services on Misplaced Pages. Although Kohs, after some research, concluded that there were no Misplaced Pages policies forbidding this activity, his Misplaced Pages account was blocked shortly after the August publication of a press release announcing the establishment of the business. The salient Misplaced Pages policies were soon edited to forbid the kinds of activities in which MyWikiBiz was engaging. Jimmy Wales defended this decision and the permanent exclusion of Kohs from Misplaced Pages, even as he acknowledged that surreptitious paid editing occurred consistently, saying that "t's one thing to acknowledge there's always going to be a little of this, but another to say, 'Bring it on.'"

2007

• January 2007
  • In January 2007 English-language Wikipedians in Qatar were briefly blocked from editing, following a spate of vandalism, by an administrator who did not realize that the entire country's internet traffic is routed through a single IP address. Both TechCrunch and Slashdot reported that Misplaced Pages had banned all of Qatar from the site, a claim that was promptly gainsaid by co-founder Jimmy Wales.
  • It was revealed that Microsoft had paid programmer Rick Jelliffe to edit Misplaced Pages articles about Microsoft products. In particular, Microsoft paid Jelliffe to edit, among others, the article on Office Open XML. A spokesman for Microsoft explained that the company thought the articles in question had been heavily biased by editors at Microsoft rival IBM and that having a seemingly independent editor add the material would make it more acceptable to other Misplaced Pages editors.
• February 2007
  • On February 13, 2007, American professional golfer Fuzzy Zoeller sued the Miami foreign-credential evaluation firm of Josef Silny & Associates. The lawsuit alleged that defamatory statements had been edited into the Misplaced Pages article about Zoeller in December 2006 by someone using a computer at that firm.
  • Barbara Bauer, a literary agent, sued Wikimedia for defamation and causing harm to her business, the Barbara Bauer Literary Agency. In Bauer v. Glatzer, Bauer claimed that information on Misplaced Pages critical of her abilities as a literary agent caused this harm. The Electronic Frontier Foundation defended Misplaced Pages and moved to dismiss the case on May 1, 2008.
  • Taner Akçam, a Turkish academic who was one of the first to acknowledge and openly discuss the Armenian Genocide, was detained in Canada at the airport in Montreal for nearly four hours after arriving on a flight from the United States. He was due to give a lecture at the invitation of the McGill University Faculty of Law and Concordia University. In explaining his detention, Taner Akçam says that Canadian authorities referred to an inaccurate version of his biography on Misplaced Pages from around December 24, 2006, which called him a terrorist.
• March 2007 – The Essjay controversy was sparked when The New Yorker magazine issued a rare editorial correction saying that a prominent English Misplaced Pages editor and administrator known as "Essjay", whom they had interviewed and described in a July 2006 article as a "tenured professor of religion at a private university" who held a "Ph.D. in theology and a degree in canon law", was in fact a 24-year-old who held no advanced degrees. Essjay had invented a completely false identity for his pseudonymous participation in Misplaced Pages. In January 2007, however, Essjay became a Wikia employee and divulged his real name, Ryan Jordan; this was noticed by Daniel Brandt of Misplaced Pages Watch, who communicated Essjay's identity to The New Yorker. Jordan held trusted volunteer positions within Misplaced Pages known as "administrator", "bureaucrat", "checkuser", "arbitrator", and "mediator". Responding to the controversy, Jimmy Wales, travelling in India at the time and perhaps not in full possession of the facts, stated that he viewed Essjay's made-up persona like a pseudonym and did not really have a problem with it: "Essjay has always been, and still is, a fantastic editor and trusted member of the community ... He has been thoughtful and contrite about the entire matter, and I consider it settled." The incident caused wide-ranging debates in the Misplaced Pages community, and saw Misplaced Pages co-founder Larry Sanger return to Misplaced Pages to challenge Wales: "Jimmy, to call yourself a tenured professor, when you aren't one, is not a 'pseudonym'. It's identity fraud. And the full question is not why you appointed Essjay to ArbCom, but: why did you ignore the obvious moral implications of the fact that he had fraudulently pretended to be a professor – ignoring those implications even to the point of giving him a job and appointing him to ArbCom – until now?" As a result of the controversy, Wales eventually invited Jordan to relinquish his responsibilities on Misplaced Pages, which he did; Jordan also quit his job at Wikia.
• June 2007 – In June 2007 a statement regarding Nancy Benoit's death was added to the Chris Benoit English Misplaced Pages article fourteen hours before police discovered the bodies of Benoit and his family. This seemingly prescient addition was initially reported on Wikinews and later on Fox News Channel. The article originally read: "Chris Benoit was replaced by Johnny Nitro for the ECW World Championship match at Vengeance, as Benoit was not there due to personal issues, stemming from the death of his wife Nancy." The phrase "stemming from the death of his wife Nancy" was added at 12:01 a.m. EDT on June 25, whereas the Fayette County police reportedly discovered the bodies of the Benoit family at 2:30 p.m. EDT (14 hours, 29 minutes later). The IP address of the editor was traced to Stamford, Connecticut, which is also the location of WWE headquarters. After news of the early death notice reached mainstream media, the anonymous poster accessed Wikinews to explain his edit as a "huge coincidence and nothing more."
• August 2007 - It became known that Virgil Griffith, a Caltech computation and neural-systems graduate student, created a searchable database that linked changes made by anonymous Misplaced Pages editors to companies and organizations from which the changes were made. The database cross-referenced logs of Misplaced Pages edits with publicly available records pertaining to the internet IP addresses edits were made from.

  

  Griffith was motivated by the edits from the United States Congress, and wanted to see if others were similarly promoting themselves. He was particularly interested in finding scandals, especially at large and controversial corporations. He said he wanted to, "create minor public relations disasters for companies and organizations I dislike (and) to see what 'interesting organizations' (which I am neutral towards) are up to." He also wanted to give Misplaced Pages readers a tool to check edits for accuracy and allow the automation and indexing of edits. Most of the edits Wikiscanner found were minor or harmless, but the site was mined to detect the most controversial and embarrassing instance of conflict of interest edits. These instances received media coverage worldwide. Included among the accused were the Vatican, the CIA, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the US Democratic Party's Congressional Campaign Committee, the US Republican Party, Britain's Labour Party, Britain's Conservative Party, the Canadian government, Industry Canada, the Department of Prime Minister, Cabinet, and Defence in Australia, the United Nations, the US Senate, the US Department of Homeland Security, the US Environmental Protection Agency, Montana Senator Conrad Burns, Ohio Governor Bob Taft, Prince Johan Friso and his wife Princess Mabel of the Netherlands, the Israeli government, Exxon Mobil, Walmart, AstraZeneca, Diebold, Dow Chemical, Disney, Dell, Anheuser-Busch, Nestlé, Pepsi, Boeing, Sony Computer Entertainment, EA, SCO Group, MySpace, Pfizer, Raytheon, DuPont, Anglican and Catholic churches, the Church of Scientology, the World Harvest Church, Amnesty International, the Discovery Channel, Fox News, CBS, The Washington Post, the National Rifle Association, News International, Al Jazeera, Bob Jones University, and Ohio State University. Although the edits correlated with known IP addresses, there was no proof that the changes actually came from a member of the organization or employee of the company, only that someone had access to their network. Misplaced Pages spokespersons received WikiScanner positively, noting that it helped prevent conflicts of interest from influencing articles as well as increasing transparency and mitigating attempts to remove or distort relevant facts. In 2008 Griffith released an updated version of WikiScanner called WikiWatcher, which also exploited a common mistake made by users with registered accounts who accidentally forget to log in, revealing their IP address and subsequently their affiliations. As of March 2012 WikiScanner's website was online, but not functioning.
• September 2007
  • Auren Hoffman was noted by VentureBeat in 2007 as having edited his own Misplaced Pages profile under a pseudonym. Hoffman responded that he was editing his profile to remove inappropriate comments.
  • One thousand IPs were blocked in Utah in order to prevent further edits from a highly active user who had been banned from editing Misplaced Pages.
• October 2007 – In their obituaries of recently deceased TV theme composer Ronnie Hazlehurst, many British media organisations reported that he had co-written the S Club 7 song "Reach". In fact, he hadn't, and it was discovered that this information had been sourced from a hoax edit to Hazlehurst's Misplaced Pages article.
• December 2007 – In December 2007 it became known that the Wikimedia Foundation, which runs the Misplaced Pages website and accepts donations for Misplaced Pages, had failed to do a basic background check and hired a woman, Carolyn Doran, as its chief operating officer who had criminal records in three states, for theft, drunken driving and fleeing a car accident. According to The Register, Doran left her position after yet another arrest for DUI; the Wikimedia Foundation lawyer, Mike Godwin, was quoted as saying, "We've never had any documentation of any criminal record on Carolyn Doran's part at all. As far as I'm concerned, I have no direct knowledge of yet...We have, in our records, no evidence of any such thing."

2008

• February 2008 – A group of Muslims started an online petition demanding that Misplaced Pages remove images of the prophet Muhammed from Misplaced Pages articles about him since some followers of Islam believe that such images violate the precepts of the religion. Protesters also organized an email campaign to pressure the English Misplaced Pages into removing the offending images. By February 7, approximately 100,000 people had signed the petition and the article had been protected from editing by non-registered users. Jay Walsh, Wikimedia Foundation spokesman, told Information Week that "Noncensorship is an important tenet of the user community and the edit community" and Mathias Schindler, of Wikimedia Deutschland, said in response to efforts to have the images removed from the German language Misplaced Pages that "Misplaced Pages is an encyclopedia, not a venue for an inter-Muslim debate."
• March 2008
  • Misplaced Pages co-founder Jimmy Wales used Misplaced Pages to end a relationship he was having with Rachel Marsden, by adding a single sentence to his own Misplaced Pages user page stating "I am no longer involved with Rachel Marsden." This was interpreted as a wider Misplaced Pages controversy because of the suggestion (from released private chat logs purportedly between Marsden and Wales) that Wales had previously edited Marsden's biographical article on Misplaced Pages, at the request of Marsden (before they were romantically involved).
  • Jimmy Wales was accused by former Wikimedia Foundation employee Danny Wool of misusing the foundation's funds for recreational purposes. Wool also stated that Wales had his Wikimedia credit card taken away in part because of his spending habits, a claim Wales denied. Then-chairperson of the foundation Florence Devouard and former foundation interim Executive Director Brad Patrick denied any wrongdoing by Wales or the foundation, saying that Wales accounted for every expense and that, for items for which he lacked receipts, he paid out of his own pocket; in private, Devouard upbraided Wales for "constantly trying to rewrite the past".
  • It was claimed by Jeffrey Vernon Merkey that Wales had edited Merkey's Misplaced Pages entry to make it more favorable in return for donations to the Wikimedia Foundation, an allegation Wales dismissed as "nonsense".
• April 2008 – Phorm deleted material related to a controversy over its advertising deals.
• May 2008 – A long-running dispute between members of the Church of Scientology and Misplaced Pages editors reached Misplaced Pages's arbitration committee. The church members were accused of attempting to sway articles in the church's interests, while other editors were accused of the opposite. The arbitration committee unanimously voted to block all edits from the IP addresses associated with the church; several Scientology critics were banned too.
• June 2008
  • In 2007, Jim Prentice, then member of the Parliament of Canada for Calgary and Minister of Industry, introduced copyright protection legislation, which was compared by many to the DMCA. The legislation was controversial and Prentice withdrew it in December 2007. By June 2008 there was a great deal of speculation in the Canadian press that Prentice would eventually succeed Stephen Harper as Prime Minister of Canada. Michael Geist, professor of internet law at the University of Ottawa, discovered that a series of anonymous edits to Prentice's Misplaced Pages article had been made in late May and early June from an IP address owned by Industry Canada, Prentice's ministry. The modifications removed critical mentions of Prentice's involvement with the copyright legislation and added generic positive claims about the minister. Geist announced on his blog his findings about the modifications, which one Canadian commentator called "hagiographic palaver extolling Prentice".
  • Australian press stated that American law firm Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft had threatened the Wikimedia Foundation on behalf of then-Telstra-CEO Solomon Trujillo. The letter allegedly contained: "If Misplaced Pages and Wikimedia do not remove the improper language by that time (7pm on March 7), and take the steps necessary to block its being reinserted, Mr (Trujillo) intends to commence litigation ..." and reportedly demanded that the editor responsible for the defamatory material be blocked. Jimmy Wales denied that any such threat had been received, stating that "It is sad to see a media so irresponsible as to make it seem that Misplaced Pages would cave to a few lawyers letters objecting to legitimate criticism. It is even sadder to see Mr Trujillo attacked by that same irresponsible media for something he did not do."
• August 2008 – Republican senator and then presidential candidate John McCain was accused of plagiarizing elements of a speech he gave on the Republic of Georgia from Misplaced Pages. The Congressional Quarterly found that McCain's speech contained two passages which were substantially identical to passages in the Misplaced Pages article on the country and that a third passage "bore striking resemblances." McCain's speech was written by speechwriters rather than by the candidate himself. After the Congressional Quarterly's report was released, McCain's aides released a statement that contained: "there are only so many ways to state basic historical facts and dates and that any similarities to Misplaced Pages were only coincidental".
• September 2008 - There were suspicious updates to Sarah Palin's biography after the announcement that she would run for the vice-presidency.
• November 2008 – New York Times reporter David Rohde was kidnapped by the Taliban while reporting in Afghanistan. The Times feared that reporting of the matter would endanger Rohde's life, so they didn't mention it in their pages. Statements about Rohde's kidnapping were edited into Misplaced Pages during the voluntary news blackout, however. Representatives of the Times called Jimmy Wales and asked him to suppress the information. He agreed to take care of it, but in order to avoid the scrutiny which attends his edits to Misplaced Pages, Wales asked an unnamed administrator on the site to delete the information instead. Wales told Times media reporter Richard Pérez-Peña that “We were really helped by the fact that it hadn’t appeared in a place we would regard as a reliable source. I would have had a really hard time with it if it had.” The Christian Science Monitor reported that Wales's actions were the subject of much criticism from bloggers and journalists, who argued that information suppression undermined the credibility of Misplaced Pages.
• December 2008
  • In early December, the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) added the Misplaced Pages page about the album Virgin Killer to its blacklist of online material potentially illegal in the United Kingdom because it contains an image of a naked prepubescent girl. The IWF's blacklist is voluntarily enforced by 95% of British Internet Service Providers. The issue eventually left most British residents unable to edit any page on Misplaced Pages. The Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) protested the blacklisting of the page even though, as the IWF stated at the time, "the image in question is potentially in breach of the Protection of Children Act 1978," and, in an "unprecedented" move, the IWF agreed to remove the page from its blacklist.Further information: Internet Watch Foundation and Misplaced Pages
  • Professor T. Mills Kelly conducts a class project on "Lying About the Past", which results in the Edward Owens hoax. A biography was created about "Edward Owens" who was claimed to be an oyster fisherman that became a pirate during the period of the Long Depression, targeting ships in the Chesapeake Bay. It was revealed when media outlets began reporting the story as fact.Further information: George Mason University's historical hoaxes

2009

• January 20, 2009 – The Misplaced Pages article for West Virginia senator Robert Byrd was briefly edited to state, incorrectly, that he had died. Senator Edward Kennedy's article was also changed at this time to reflect his notional death. Shortly thereafter Jimmy Wales was quoted by Fox News as saying "This nonsense would have been 100% prevented by Flagged Revisions".
• February 2009 – Scott Kildall and collaborator Nathaniel Stern created Misplaced Pages Art, a performance art piece as a live article on Misplaced Pages. Site editors quickly concluded that the project violated Misplaced Pages's rules and opted to delete it 15 hours after it was initially posted. A month later, Kildall and Stern received a letter from a law firm representing the Wikimedia Foundation, claiming the domain name, wikipediaart.org, infringed on their trademark. The ensuing controversy was reported in the national press. Misplaced Pages Art has since been included in the Internet Pavilion of the Venice Biennale for 2009. It also appeared in a revised form at the Transmediale festival in Berlin in 2011.
• March 2009
  • Mere hours after the death of French composer Maurice Jarre, Irish student Shane Fitzgerald added a phony quote to Jarre's Misplaced Pages article. The quote said "One could say my life itself has been one long soundtrack. Music was my life, music brought me to life, and music is how I will be remembered long after I leave this life. When I die there will be a final waltz playing in my head, that only I can hear." The quote was quickly copy/pasted by journalists and incorporated into numerous obituaries of Jarre published in newspapers around the world, including The Guardian and The Independent.
  • In early March 2009, conservative website WorldNetDaily published a report by staffer Aaron Klein which claimed that liberal editors routinely whitewashed US President Barack Obama's Misplaced Pages article. Klein's report claimed, e.g., that "ultiple times, Misplaced Pages users who wrote about the eligibility issues had their entries deleted almost immediately and were banned from posting any material on the website for three days." It was revealed within days that there was only one such editor, called "Jerusalem21," and that that editor's only other edits were to Aaron Klein's Misplaced Pages article. Under questioning from journalists, Klein stated that "I am not 'Jerusalem21', but I do know the Misplaced Pages user (he works with me and does research for me), and I worked with him on this story," thus undermining the credibility of his report.
• May 2009 – Wikipedian David Boothroyd, a Labour Party member, created controversy in 2009, when Misplaced Pages Review contributor "Tarantino" discovered that he committed sockpuppeting, editing under the accounts "Dbiv", "Fys" and "Sam Blacketer", none of which acknowledged his real identity. After earning Administrator status with one account, then losing it for inappropriate use of the administrative tools, Boothroyd regained Administrator status with the "Sam Blacketer" sockpuppet account in April 2007. Later in 2007, Boothroyd's Sam Blacketer account became part of the English Misplaced Pages's Arbitration Committee. Under the Sam Blacketer account, Boothroyd edited many articles related to United Kingdom politics, including that of rival Conservative Party leader David Cameron. Boothroyd then resigned as an administrator and as an arbitrator.
• June 2009
  • Chris Anderson, editor of Wired, was accused by the Virginia Quarterly Review of plagiarizing material for his book Free: The Future of a Radical Price from Misplaced Pages. Anderson claimed that he had originally attributed the material properly but that due to disagreements with his publisher over formatting it had ended up in the published work without quotation marks. He took responsibility for the error, saying “That’s my screw-up.” Anderson announced that the attribution errors would be corrected in the online version of the book and in future publications. Anderson's book is a defense of the notion of free content exemplified by Misplaced Pages, so the fact that he plagiarized material for it was seen by at least one commentator as "riddled with savage irony."
  • James Heilman, a Canadian doctor, uploaded to Misplaced Pages copies of all 10 inkblot images used in the Rorschach test, on the grounds that copyright to the images had expired. Heilman was widely criticized by psychologists who used the test as a diagnostic tool, because they were worried that patients with prior knowledge of the inkblots would be able to influence their diagnoses. In response to Heilman's posting of the images, a number of psychologists registered Misplaced Pages accounts to argue against their retention. Later that year two psychologists filed a complaint against Heilman with the Saskatchewan medical licensing board, arguing that his uploading of the images constituted unprofessional behavior.
• July 2009 – The National Portrait Gallery in London issued a cease and desist letter for alleged breach of copyright against a Misplaced Pages editor who downloaded more than 3,000 high-resolution images from the gallery's website to upload them on Wikimedia Commons. Main article: National Portrait Gallery and Wikimedia Foundation copyright dispute
• November 2009 – Convicted German murderers Wolfgang Werlé and Manfred Lauber sued the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) in German courts, demanding that their names be removed from the English Misplaced Pages's article on their victim, Walter Sedlmayr. German laws force compliance with such requests for suppression. Alexander H. Stopp, the two men's lawyer, succeeded in forcing the German Misplaced Pages to remove their names. Mike Godwin responded on behalf of the WMF, stating that the organization “doesn’t edit content at all, unless we get a court order from a court of competent jurisdiction. f our German editors have chosen to remove the names of the murderers from their article on Walter Sedlmayr, we support them in that choice. The English-language editors have chosen to include the names of the killers, and we support them in that choice.”
• December 2009 – Actor Ron Livingston, star of the 1999 film Office Space, filed a lawsuit in Los Angeles County Superior Court against a John Doe who had repeatedly edited Livingston's Misplaced Pages article to include statements that Livingston was gay and in a relationship with a (possibly notional) man named Lee Dennison. The lawsuit also claimed that the John Doe defendant had set up phony Facebook profiles for Livingston and his putative partner. The suit named neither Misplaced Pages nor Facebook, but was evidently intended to give Livingston the power to subpoena identifying information from the two organizations about the anonymous defendant. The lawsuit was followed by a manifestation of the Streisand effect as Livingston was targeted with accusations of homophobia. Jay Walsh, then head of communication for the Wikimedia Foundation, said that "This is a serious issue. We take it quite seriously. We understand real people are reflected in these articles. ... Articles about living people are tough articles to manage. Someone who is a fan or an enemy might try to attack or vandalize those articles. This isn’t a new scenario for us to witness."

2010

• April 2010 – Misplaced Pages co-founder Larry Sanger informed the FBI that a large amount of child pornography was available on Wikimedia Commons. Sanger told Fox News: “I wasn’t shocked that it was online, but I was shocked that it was on a Wikimedia Foundation site that purports to be a reference site.” Co-founder Jimmy Wales responded by claiming that a strong statement from the Wikimedia Foundation would be forthcoming. In the weeks following Sanger's letter, Wales responded by unilaterally deleting a number of images which he personally deemed to be pornographic. Wales's unilateral actions led to an outcry from the Wikipedian community, which in turn prompted Wales to voluntarily relinquish some of his user privileges.
• July 2010 – Following the football World Cup the FIFA president Sepp Blatter was awarded the Order of The Companions of O R Tambo for his contribution over the World Cup. The South African Government's webpage announcing the award referred to him as Joseph Sepp Bellend Blatter, the nickname having been taken from his vandalized Misplaced Pages article.
• September 2010 – Right-wing radio presenter Rush Limbaugh broadcast a discussion of an upcoming hearing in the United States District Court for the Northern District of Florida courtroom of judge Roger Vinson of the case Florida et al v. United States Department of Health and Human Services, one of the cases brought by US states challenging the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (Obamacare). Limbaugh told his audience that Vinson had previously killed three brown bears and mounted their heads over the door of his courtroom in order, according to Limbaugh, to "instill the fear of God into the accused." This, stated Limbaugh, "would not be good news" for supporters of Obamacare. However, the story was not only false, but had been edited into Vinson's Misplaced Pages article a scant few days before the broadcast. The bear-hunting information inserted into the Misplaced Pages article was sourced to a nonexistent story in the Pensacola News Journal. A spokesman for Limbaugh told the New York Times that a researcher for Limbaugh's show had found the information on the News Journal website, but that newspaper's managing editor told the Times that no such information had ever been published there.

2011

• June 2011
  • Potential candidate for US President Sarah Palin described American Revolutionary War hero Paul Revere as "he who warned the British that they weren’t going to be taking away our arms, by ringing those bells." This description, characterized by US News and World Report (USN&WR) as "flummoxed ramblings," kicked off a battle over the contents of the English Misplaced Pages's article about Revere. Palin's remarks and various interpretations were added by supporters to the Misplaced Pages page and just as quickly removed by detractors, although at least one commentator opined that "in some cases people appeared to be attributing the claims to Ms. Palin in order to mock her." In the 10 days following Palin's remark, Revere's Misplaced Pages page received over a half million page views and led to extensive and inconclusive discussion on the article's talk page and in the national media about whether the episode had improved or harmed the article. Robert Schlesinger, writing in USN&WR, summarized the episode by saying that "t used to be said of conservatism that it stood athwart history and yelled 'stop.' Increasingly it seems to stand beside reality while hitting the 'edit' button."
  • PR Week reported on a 'fixer', a known but unnamed London-based figure in the PR industry who offered services to 'cleanse' articles. Misplaced Pages entries this person was accused of changing included Carphone Warehouse co-founder David Ross, Von Essen Group chairman Andrew Davis, British property developer David Rowland, billionaire Saudi tycoon Maan Al-Sanea, and Edward Stanley, 19th Earl of Derby. According to PR Week, 42 edits were made from the same IP address, most of them removing negative or controversial information, or adding positive information.
• September 2011 – British writer and journalist Johann Hari admitted using Misplaced Pages to attack his opponents by editing the online encyclopedia's articles about them under a pseudonym. Using a sockpuppet, Hari engaged in a six-year trolling spree where he would repeatedly paint himself in a flattering light while also inserting fabrications in the entries for people he considered enemies, such as Francis Wheen, Nick Cohen, Niall Ferguson, and Christina Odone, who he falsely said had been fired from her job at the Catholic Herald. Odone also suspects Hari of having made anonymous edits calling her an antisemite.
• November 2011 – After the South African government passed the Protection of State Information Bill, a law which criminalized certain forms of speech in that country, the Misplaced Pages article about the ruling African National Congress (ANC) party was altered in protest. The protesters deleted phrases on the page which were critical of the ANC, presumably suggesting that they would be illegal under the new law. This was denied by ANC spokesman Keith Khoza, who stated that the edits were "conduct ... not consistent with a civilised society."

2012

• January 2012
  • British MP Tom Watson discovered that Portland Communications had been removing the nickname of one of its clients' products ("Wife Beater", referring to Anheuser-Busch InBev's Stella Artois beer) from Misplaced Pages. Chartered Institute of Public Relations (CIPR) CEO Jane Wilson noted, "Stella Artois is on the 'wife-beater' page because it is a nick-name in common currency for that brand of strong continental lager. The brand managers who want to change this have a wider reputational issue to address, editing the term from a Misplaced Pages page will not get rid of this association." Other edits from Portland's offices included changes to articles about another Portland client, the Kazakhstan's BTA Bank, and its former head Mukhtar Ablyazov. Portland did not deny making the changes, arguing they had been done transparently and in accordance with Misplaced Pages's policies. Portland Communications welcomed CIPR's subsequent announcement of a collaboration with Misplaced Pages and invited Jimmy Wales to speak to their company, as he did at Bell Pottinger. Tom Watson was optimistic about the collaboration: "PR professionals need clear guidelines in this new world of online-information-sharing. That's why I am delighted that interested parties are coming together to establish a clear code of conduct."
  • It became known that during the 2008 US presidential race, changes made by both Barack Obama and John McCain's campaigns made the news.
• February 2012 – American labor historian Timothy Messer-Kruse, an expert on the Haymarket affair, published an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education describing his three-year struggle to edit the Misplaced Pages article on the subject. Messer-Kruse had discovered new primary sources which, in his professional opinion, cast doubt on the conventional view of the incident. In 2009, when he first tried to edit the article to include the new information, he was told by other editors that primary sources weren't acceptable and that he'd have to find published secondary sources. As he later said on NPR, "So I actually bided my time. I knew that my own published book would be coming out in 2011." When his book was published and he returned to insert his newly discovered material into the article, he was told that it was a minority view and could not be given "undue weight," even though he had proved in his book that the majority view was incorrect regarding major details of the case. Steven Walling of the Wikimedia Foundation told an NPR reporter that all of Misplaced Pages's rules had been followed, stating that "We do not rely on what exact, individual people say, just based on their own credibility." National security scholars Benjamin Wittes and Stephanie Leutert have used Messer-Kruse's experiences to illuminate the "broad question" of "whether Misplaced Pages’s policies are encouraging an undue conservatism about sourcing."
• March 2012 – The Bureau of Investigative Journalism uncovered that UK MPs or their staff had made almost 10,000 edits to the encyclopedia, and that almost one in six MPs had had their Misplaced Pages article edited from within Parliament. Many of the changes dealt with removing unflattering details from Misplaced Pages during the 2009 expenses scandal, as well as other controversial issues. Former MP Joan Ryan admitted to changing her entry "whenever there’s misleading or untruthful information been placed on it." Clare Short said her staff were "angry and protective" over mistakes and criticisms in her Misplaced Pages article and acknowledged they might have made changes to it. Labour MP Fabian Hamilton also reported having one of his assistants edit a page to make it more accurate in his view. MP Philip Davies denied making changes about removing controversial comments related to Muslims from 2006 and 2007.
• July 2012 – Wikimedia UK chairperson and administrator of the English Misplaced Pages Ashley van Haeften was banned from the English Misplaced Pages for 6 months for sockpuppeting and other violations of Misplaced Pages's norms and policies. He was only the ninth Misplaced Pages sysop to be banned. Wikimedia UK's board fully supported van Haeften following the case, until van Haeften resigned as chair in August.
• September 2012
  • Author Philip Roth published an open letter to Misplaced Pages, describing conflicts he experienced with the Misplaced Pages community while attempting to modify the Misplaced Pages article about his novel The Human Stain: although the character Coleman Silk had been inspired by the case of Melvin Tumin, many literary critics had drawn parallels between Silk and the life of Anatole Broyard, and Roth sought to remove statements that Broyard had been suggested as an inspiration; however, Roth's edits had been reverted on the grounds that direct statements from the author were a primary source, not a secondary. Misplaced Pages administrator and community liaison Oliver Keyes subsequently wrote a blog post criticizing both Roth and his approach, and pointed out that even prior to Roth's attempts to modify the article, it had already cited a published interview in which Roth stated that the inspiration for Coleman Silk had been Tumin rather than Broyard. Keyes also pointed out that the edits had been made via an anonymous IP address, with no evidence provided to support the claim that Roth was actually involved.
  • The Gibraltarpedia project, where editors created articles about Gibraltar, came under scrutiny due to concerns about Roger Bamkin, a Wikimedia UK board member who was head of the project, having a professional relationship with the government of Gibraltar in connection with Gibraltarpedia. Of primary concern was that the site's main page "Did You Know" section was allegedly being used for the promotional purposes of Bamkin's clients. Bamkin, under pressure, resigned from the board.
• October 2012 – Asian soccer's governing body was forced to apologize to the United Arab Emirates soccer team for referring to them as the "Sand Monkeys"; the spurious nickname had been taken from a vandalized Misplaced Pages article.
• November 2012 – Lord Justice Leveson wrote in his report on British press standards, “The Independent was founded in 1986 by the journalists Andreas Whittam Smith, Stephen Glover and Brett Straub...” He had used the Misplaced Pages article for The Independent newspaper as his source, but an act of vandalism had replaced Matthew Symonds (a genuine co-founder) with Brett Straub (an unknown character). The Economist said of the Leveson report, "Parts of it are a scissors-and-paste job culled from Misplaced Pages."

• December 2012 – A discussion took place on the Misplaced Pages user talk page of Jimmy Wales about his connection with WikiBilim and the repressive government of the Republic of Kazakhstan. Wales unilaterally shut down the conversation when other Misplaced Pages editors questioned him about his friendship with Tony Blair, whose company provides paid consultancy services to the Kazakh government. Wales stated that the line of questioning was "just totally weird and irrelevant" and told Andreas Kolbe, a moderator at Wikipediocracy who edits Misplaced Pages under the username "Jayen466": "please stay off my talk page."

2013

• January 2013 – The discovery of a hoax article on the "Bicholim conflict" caused widespread press coverage. The article, a meticulously crafted but completely made-up description of a fictitious war in Indian Goa, had been listed as a "good article" – a quality award given to fewer than 1 percent of all articles on the English Misplaced Pages – for more than five years.
• February 2013 – Prison company GEO Group received media coverage when a Misplaced Pages editor using the name "Abraham Cohen" (who was, at the time, also GEO Group's Manager of Corporate Relations) edited the company's entry to remove information on its past controversies, following the announcement that it had obtained naming rights to Florida Atlantic University's new stadium.
• March 2013 – Controversy arose in March 2013 after it emerged that large segments of the BP article had originated from a corporate employee who was a Misplaced Pages editor.
• April 2013
  • A Wikipedian threatened with arrest by the French secret service used his administrative privileges over the French Misplaced Pages to delete the article about the Pierre-sur-Haute military radio station. The French government was accused of attempting to censor Misplaced Pages, even though much of the information considered as confidential by France was sourced from a documentary that had aired on a local TV station.
  • It was confirmed by a spokesperson for the Federal Service for Supervision of Communications, Information Technology and Mass Media that Misplaced Pages had been blacklisted over the Russian Misplaced Pages's article about cannabis smoking. Being placed on the blacklist gives the operator 24 hours to remove the offending material. If the website owner refuses to remove the material then either the website host or the network operator will be required to block access to the site in Russia. The New York Times had reported in March that Russia had begun to "selectively" block internet content that the government considered either illegal under Russian law or otherwise harmful to children.
  • The Sun alleged that Labour Party MP Chuka Umunna, in 2007 before his election, used the Misplaced Pages username "Socialdemocrat", to create and repeatedly edit his own Misplaced Pages page. Umunna told The Daily Telegraph that he did not alter his own Misplaced Pages page, but the paper quoted what they called "sources close to Umunna" as having told the newspaper that "it was possible that one of his campaign team in 2007, when he was trying to be selected to be Labour's candidate for Streatham in the 2010 general election, set up the page." On April 11, 2013, the Evening Standard alleged that an edit in January 2008 was made on a computer at the law firm at which he then worked. Umunna said that he had "no recollection" of doing so.
  • An edit war on the Misplaced Pages article of Canadian politician and leader of the New Democratic Party (NDP) in British Columbia, Adrian Dix, was widely reported in the Canadian press. Dix, while employed by Glen Clark, then premier of British Columbia, had falsified a memo related to a scandal involving casinos in which Clark was implicated, leading to Dix being fired from his post. The Misplaced Pages editor who led the effort to keep mention of the incident out of Dix's article was identified by Global News and the Vancouver Sun as Mike Cleven, who edits Misplaced Pages under the username Skookum1. Cleven denied that he was associated with the NDP, stating that "I am the editor who’s spent the most energy on keeping the people pushing an inflammatory and undue-weight account of this. Whitewashing the article to prevent mention of this is not the aim here, it is to prevent articles being used for defamatory purposes … the BC Liberals have pulled this kind of crap on Misplaced Pages before; they can say it’s not them, sure uh-huh, but the agenda of those claiming NOT to be them is too much like theirs to be worth explaining further."
  • Amanda Filipacchi wrote an op-ed for the New York Times on April 24, 2013, titled "Misplaced Pages's Sexism Toward Female Novelists", in which she noted that "editors have begun the process of moving women, one by one, alphabetically, from the 'American Novelists' category to the 'American Women Novelists' subcategory." She suggested the reason for the move might be to create a male-only list of 'American Novelists' on Misplaced Pages. The story was picked up by many other newspapers and websites and feminists said in response that they were disappointed and shocked by the action. Misplaced Pages editors initiated various responses soon after Filipacchi's article appeared, including the creation of a category for 'American men novelists' along with an immediate proposal to merge both categories back into the original 'American novelists' category. The 'American men novelists' category was criticized because the two categories together would have the effect of emptying the 'American novelists' category. When the 'American men novelists' category was first created, its only entries were Orson Scott Card and P. D. Cacek (who is female). A few days after the op-ed, Filipacchi wrote in the New York Times Sunday Review about the reaction to it, which included edits to the Misplaced Pages article about her that she suggested were retaliatory. In an article in The Atlantic responding to accounts that the edits she had initially complained of were the work of one rogue editor, Filipacchi detailed edit histories identifying seven other editors who had individually or collectively performed the same actions. Andrew Leonard, reporting for salon.com, found that Filipacchi's articles were followed by what he called "revenge editing" on her article and articles related to her, including that of her father, Daniel Filipacchi. Leonard quoted extensively from talk page comments of Misplaced Pages editor Qworty, who, e.g., wrote on the talk page of Filipacchi's article: "Oh, by all means, let’s be intimidated by the Holy New York Times. Because when the New York Times tells you to shut up, you have to shut up. Because that’s the way 'freedom' works, and the NYT is all about promoting freedom all over the world, which is why they employed Judith Miller."

• May 2013
  • Andrew Leonard, writing in salon.com, revealed Misplaced Pages editor Qworty's real life identity to be Robert Clark Young, a novelist and writer. Qworty first drew attention to himself through his "revenge editing" on the Misplaced Pages article of novelist and Misplaced Pages critic Amanda Filipacchi. Young routinely made negative revisions to the pages of authors with whom he disagreed. Leonard was aided in his investigation by members of Misplaced Pages criticism site Wikipediocracy. According to Washington Monthly columnist Kathleen Geier, "The Qworty case reveals the Achilles’ heel of the Misplaced Pages project. Anyone possessing enough time and resources, and who is obsessed enough, can post information on the site that is false, misleading, or extremely biased." Shortly after the publication of Leonard's article Qworty/Young was indefinitely blocked from editing Misplaced Pages and a sockpuppet investigation was opened in order to determine the extent of Young's editing with multiple accounts. Writing about the episode on his talk page, Misplaced Pages co-founder Jimmy Wales quoted Leonard's original article: "For those of us who love Misplaced Pages, the ramifications of the Qworty saga are not comforting." and went on to write that "That sums it up for me. More thoughts soon. I would have banned him outright years ago. So would many others. That we did not, points to serious deficiencies in our systems." Leonard's continued investigations into Young's editing revealed a years-long crusade against articles about topics and people related to modern paganism. Leonard reported that one of the pagans whose article Young had nominated for deletion in 2012 nominated Young's article, in an act of revenge, for deletion after Young's revenge editing came to light. However, the pagan editor told Leonard "that he was unlikely to be successful in getting Young’s page deleted, because Salon’s series of articles on the Qworty affair had enshrined the entire saga as a notable moment in Misplaced Pages history."
• June 2013 – Jimmy Wales, co-founder of Misplaced Pages, asked other editors to post their suspicions about Edward Snowden's activities on Misplaced Pages to Wales' talk page, arguably violating Misplaced Pages's strict "outing" policy. No evidence of Snowden's editing was uncovered.
• August 2013 — On August 22, 2013, Bradley Manning announced a desire to live as a woman and be known as "Chelsea" instead of "Bradley". Shortly thereafter, Manning's Misplaced Pages page was moved from "Bradley Manning" to "Chelsea Manning", and the page was rewritten to reflect Manning's new gender "with remarkably little controversy" at first. Within a day, however, a long move request had begun which found no consensus for the move, resulting in the page being returned to "Bradley Manning" until a second long move request in October found consensus that it should indeed be "Chelsea Manning". The same month (October), Misplaced Pages's Arbitration Committee heard a case about the disputes about the article, which resulted in several editors being topic-banned from editing transgender-related pages for either making transphobic remarks or accusing others of making such remarks. This led Trans Media Watch to criticize the Committee for implying that accusations of transphobia were as bad as actual transphobia. “We feel that Misplaced Pages's banning of certain editors for calling people transphobic reflects a wider cultural problem whereby identifying someone is prejudiced is seen as worse than being prejudiced,” they said in response to the bans.
• September 2013
  • Lawyer Susan L. Burke who had represented Iraqi civilians against the private military company Blackwater Inc (now known as Academi) sued to discover the identity of two Misplaced Pages editors who allegedly inserted misleading information into the Misplaced Pages article about her and whom she alleged were associates of Blackwater Inc.
  • Croatian newspapers reported that the Croatian Misplaced Pages had been taken over by a clique of fascists who were rewriting Croatian history and promoting anti-gay sentiment. The Croatian Minister of Education, Science, and Sport, Željko Jovanović, made a public statement saying that the country's students should not rely on the Croatian Misplaced Pages: "e have to point out that much of the content in the Croatian version of Misplaced Pages is not only misleading but also clearly falsified." In an interview with Croatian news agency HINA, Snježana Koren, a historian at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb, judged the disputed articles "biased and malicious, partly even illiterate", adding that "These are the types of articles you can find on the pages of fringe organizations and movements" and expressing doubts on the ability of its authors to distinguish good from evil.
• October 2013
  • Wikimedia Foundation Executive Director Sue Gardner expressed concerns that too much money from Misplaced Pages donations was flowing to the various Wikimedia chapters around the world, funding bureaucracy rather than benefiting the encyclopedia. She also expressed concerns that Wikimedia's Funds Dissemination Committee process, being "dominated by fund-seekers, does not as currently constructed offer sufficient protection against log-rolling, self-dealing, and other corrupt practices."
  • Rand Paul was accused of quoting Misplaced Pages in some of his speeches. Specifically, Jeremy Peters of The New York Times accused Paul of plagiarizing the Misplaced Pages article on Gattaca when Paul was giving a speech about eugenics. The Gattaca article was semi-protected for a week as a result.
  • An investigation by Wikipedians found that the Wiki-PR company had operated "an army" of sockpuppet accounts to edit Misplaced Pages on behalf of paying clients. The company's website claimed that its "staff of 45 Misplaced Pages editors and admins helps you build a page that stands up to the scrutiny of Misplaced Pages’s community rules and guidelines." The company's Twitter profile stated: "We write it. We manage it. You never worry about Misplaced Pages again." The Wikimedia Foundation subsequently sent Wiki-PR a cease-and-desist letter.
  • Australian Environment Minister Greg Hunt made headlines in Australian media in an interview with the BBC World Service stating that he had "looked up what Misplaced Pages says about bushfires" and read there that bushfires were frequent events that had occurred in hotter months prior to European settlement at the same time as meteorologists funded by the federal government, other scientists and politicians expressed concerns that increasing extreme fire and flood events are linked to scientifically accepted climate change. According to the Sydney Morning Herald, Misplaced Pages's article about Hunt was edited to state that he uses Misplaced Pages for important policy research, and editing of the article was then disabled for new or unregistered users due to vandalism.

2014

• January 2014 – The Wikimedia Foundation announced that Program Evaluation Coordinator Sarah Stierch was "no longer an employee of the Wikimedia Foundation", after evidence was presented on a Wikimedia mailing list that she had been editing Misplaced Pages on behalf of paying clients, a practice the Wikimedia Foundation said was "frowned upon by many in the editing community and by the Wikimedia Foundation".
• March 2014 – Wikimedia Foundation employee and former English Misplaced Pages administrator Ryan Kaldari admitted to using a sockpuppet to attack a fellow Wikipedian, simultaneously relinquishing his administrative rights.
• April 2014
  • The Misplaced Pages page about North Carolina Senator Jim Davis was edited to state, incorrectly, that he had died of a heart attack. Davis, who was on vacation with his family in Virginia at the time, received a phone call soon afterward (on April 18) from the Macon County Commissioner, who told Davis he had heard three times that Davis had died of a heart attack.
  • There was concern that the Misplaced Pages article on the Hillsborough disaster had been vandalized with offensive comments from computers within various UK government departments.
• July 2014
  • The Daily Telegraph reported that IP addresses belonging to the Russian government had edited articles relating to Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 to remove claims that it helped provide the missile system used to shoot down the aircraft. Among the pages edited was the Russian Misplaced Pages's article listing of civil aviation incidents, to claim that "the plane was shot down by Ukrainian soldiers".
  • The Wall Street Journal reported on a controversial article-writing program called Lsjbot that has created millions of articles on Swedish Misplaced Pages and several other language editions.
  • The 5-year-old Amelia Bedelia Cameroon "accidental hoax" about Amelia Bedelia, main character of its eponymous popular children's book series, was revealed by journalist EJ Dickson. Dickson, who authored the fabricated statements with a friend when they were "stoned", only rediscovered the hoax after it had been propagated tens of times by blogs, journalists, academics, as well as Amelia Bedelia's current author, causing debate about Misplaced Pages, the usage made of it, as well as responsibility regarding online sources in general. After the hoax was identified, the IP address which had been used to insert it was banned from Misplaced Pages.
• August 2014 – Photographer David Slater sent a copyright takedown notice to the Wikimedia Commons over a photograph of a Celebes crested macaque taken on one of his cameras, which at the time was being operated by the macaque, resulting in a "selfie". The Wikimedia Foundation dismissed the claims, because under United States law, the photograph, having been taken by a non-human animal, is in the public domain rather than copyrighted by Slater.
• September 2014 - Sean Davis in the Federalist questioned why Misplaced Pages editors had repeatedly removed references to his previous Federalist articles, in which he accused Neil DeGrasse Tyson of fabricating quotes.

See also

• Criticism of Misplaced Pages
• Censorship of Misplaced Pages
• Conflict of interest editing on Misplaced Pages
• Litigation involving the Wikimedia Foundation
• Reliability of Misplaced Pages
• Misplaced Pages in culture

References

1. ^ Eric Goldman (October 5, 2012). "Misplaced Pages's "Pay-for-Play" Scandal Highlights Misplaced Pages's Vulnerabilities". Forbes.
2. Angwin, Julia; Fowler, Geoffrey (November 27, 2009). "Volunteers Log Off as Misplaced Pages Ages". Wall Street Journal. Retrieved April 16, 2013.
3. The Future of the Internet: Ubiquity, mobility, security, by Harrison Rainie (et al), Cambria Press, 2009, page 259.
4. Digital Cognitive Technologies: Epistemology and Knowledge Society, edited by Claire Brossard (et al), John Wiley & Sons, 2013, page 325.
5. Using Misplaced Pages, Gould Library of Carleton College, Using Resources guide.
6. Brodkin, Jon (January 11, 2011). "Misplaced Pages celebrates a decade of edit wars, controversy and Internet dominance". Network World. Retrieved April 17, 2013.
7. Beaumont, Claudine (June 15, 2010). "Misplaced Pages rolls out 'pending changes'". The Daily Telegraph. Retrieved April 17, 2013.
8. Frewin, Jonathan (June 15, 2010). "Misplaced Pages unlocks divisive pages for editing". BBC News. Retrieved April 17, 2013.
9. Andrew Lih (2009). The Misplaced Pages revolution: how a bunch of nobodies created the world's greatest encyclopedia. Aurum Press Ltd. pp. 136–138. ISBN 978-1-84513 473 0. Retrieved April 17, 2013.; also see Jimmy Wales, February 2002 post to wikipedia-l, and Larry Sanger, Misplaced Pages, a memoir, Slashdot
10. ^ Lih2009 p. 138
11. Tkacz, Nathaniel (January 20, 2011). "The Spanish Fork: Misplaced Pages's ad-fuelled mutiny". Wired (magazine). Retrieved April 17, 2013.
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27. See for example: this article on the scandal. The activities documented were:

    Politician	Editing undertaken	Sources
    Marty Meehan	Replacement with staff-written biography	Congressional staffers edit boss's bio on Misplaced Pages
    Norm Coleman	Rewrite to make more favorable, claimed to be "correcting errors")	"Web site's entry on Coleman revised Aide confirms his staff edited biography, questions Misplaced Pages's accuracy". St. Paul Pioneer Press(Associated Press). {{cite journal}}: Cite has empty unknown parameters: |month= and |coauthors= (help)
    Conrad Burns Montana	Removal of quoted pejorative statements the Senator had made, and replacing them with "glowing tributes" as "the voice of the farmer")	Williams, Walt (January 1, 2007). "Burns' office may have tampered with Misplaced Pages entry". Bozeman Daily Chronicle. Retrieved February 13, 2007.
    Joe Biden	Removal of unfavorable information	Congressional staffers edit boss's bio on Misplaced Pages
    Gil Gutknecht	Staff rewrite and removal of information evidencing broken campaign promise. (Multiple attempts)	On August 16, 2006, the Minneapolis-St. Paul Star Tribune reported that the office of Representative Gil Gutknecht tried twice — on July 24, 2006 and August 14, 2006 — to remove a 128-word section in the Misplaced Pages article on him, replacing it with a more flattering 315-word entry taken from his official congressional biography. Most of the removed text was about the 12-year term-limit Gutknecht imposed on himself in 1995 (Gutknecht ran for re-election in 2006, breaking his promise). A spokesman for Gutknecht did not dispute that his office tried to change his Misplaced Pages entry, but questioned the reliability of the encyclopedia. ("Gutknecht joins Misplaced Pages tweakers", Minneapolis-St. Paul Star Tribune, August 16, 2006. Retrieved August 17, 2006). Multiple attempts, first using a named account, then an anonymous IP account.

28. Information included the mention of an opponent's son's arrest in a fatal drunk driving accident, and the allegation of questionable business practices of another. Ralph Thomas (April 28, 2006). "Online postings changed; ex-Gregoire aide resigns". The Seattle Times.
29. MyWikiBiz.com (August 8, 2006). "MyWikiBiz press release: Misplaced Pages – Open For Business". 24-7. Retrieved April 17, 2013.
30. Brian Bergstein (January 25, 2007). "Idea of paid entries roils Misplaced Pages". USA Today.
31. Zittrain, Jonathan (2008). The Future of the Internet--And How to Stop It. Yale University Press. p. 140. ISBN 0300145349.
32. Jim Krane (January 4, 2007). "Ooops: Misplaced Pages blocks posts from Qatar". USA Today. Retrieved April 17, 2013.
33. Thomas Claburn (January 2, 2007). "Misplaced Pages Founder Refutes Claims That It Banned Qatar". InformationWeek. Retrieved June 15, 2014.
34. Catherine Elsworth (January 26, 2007). "Microsoft under fire in Wiki edit war". The Daily Telegraph. Retrieved April 16, 2013.
35. Dylan Bushell-Embling (February 26, 2008). "Bias claim on big Office vote". Sydney Morning Herald.
36. Brian Bergstein (January 25, 2007). "Microsoft in trouble over Misplaced Pages pay offer". Mail & Guardian. Retrieved April 16, 2013.
37. "Golfer Zoeller sues law firm for Misplaced Pages posting" (February 22, 2007), MiamiHerald.com
38. Golfer Sues Over Vandalized Misplaced Pages Page. (February 22, 2007), The Smoking Gun
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40. "EFF and Sheppard Mullin Defend Misplaced Pages in Defamation Case | Electronic Frontier Foundation". Eff.org. May 2, 2008. Retrieved April 13, 2010.
41. ^ Fisk, Robert (April 21, 2007). "Any political filth or personal libel can be hurled at the innocent" (PDF). The Independent. Retrieved April 16, 2013.
42. Jay, Paul (June 22, 2007). "A question of authority". CBC News. In Depth: Technology. Retrieved May 16, 2008.
43. ^ Andrew Lih (2009). The Misplaced Pages revolution: how a bunch of nobodies created the world's greatest encyclopedia. Aurum Press Ltd. pp. 195–197. ISBN 978-1-84513 473 0. Retrieved April 17, 2013.
44. Schiff, Stacy (July 24, 2006). "Annals of Information: Know It All: Can Misplaced Pages conquer expertise?". The New Yorker. Retrieved April 16, 2007.
45. Finkelstein, Seth (March 8, 2007). "Read me first". The Guardian. London. Retrieved April 16, 2007.
46. ^ Andrew Orlowski (March 6, 2007). "Farewell, Misplaced Pages? Bogus boy's departure puts trivia at risk". The Register. Retrieved April 20, 2013.
47. Special:Diff/140442953
48. Bachelor, Blane (June 28, 2007). "Web Time Stamps Indicate Benoit Death Reported About 14 Hours Before Police Found Bodies". Fox News Channel. Retrieved May 21, 2008.
49. "Anonymous poster comments on Wikinews".
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51. ^ Borland, John (November 17, 2005). "See Who's Editing Misplaced Pages – Diebold, the CIA, a Campaign". Wired.
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53. ^ "Misplaced Pages and the art of censorship". Belfast Telegraph. August 18, 2007. Retrieved March 14, 2012.
54. Poulsen, Kevin (August 13, 2007). "Vote On the Most Shameful Misplaced Pages Spin Jobs – UPDATED | Threat Level". Wired. Retrieved April 1, 2012.
55. "Did Vatican alter Misplaced Pages info on Adams?". Belfast Telegraph. Retrieved February 13, 2012.
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57. "CIA caught rewriting Misplaced Pages biographies". Daily Mail. August 15, 2007. Retrieved February 13, 2012.
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60. "Government buffing Prentice's Misplaced Pages entry". CBC News. June 4, 2008. Retrieved February 13, 2012.
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62. "PM's staff edit Misplaced Pages entries". Adelaide Now. August 23, 2007. Retrieved February 13, 2012.
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64. "PM 'not behind Misplaced Pages edits'". ABC News. August 24, 2007.
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65. "PM's staff sanitise Misplaced Pages – Technology". Sydney Morning Herald. August 24, 2007.
66. "`Wikiscanner' reveals source of edits". Taipei Times. August 20, 2007. Retrieved March 18, 2012.
67. Heffernan, Virginia (November 21, 2008). "WIKISCANNER". The New York Times. Retrieved March 18, 2012.
68. ^ "Behind the e-curtain". The Boston Globe. August 26, 2007. Retrieved March 14, 2012.
69. ^ "Misplaced Pages 'editors' have vested interests | The Columbus Dispatch". Dispatch.com. September 6, 2007. Retrieved February 12, 2012.
70. ten Wolde, Harro (August 31, 2007). "Dutch royal couple edited own Misplaced Pages entry". Reuters. Retrieved April 24, 2013.
71. "Dutch princess 'fixed' her Misplaced Pages entry". The Edmonton Journal. August 30, 2007. Retrieved April 24, 2013.
72. Books (August 20, 2007). "Misplaced Pages and the art of censorship – Lifestyle". Independent.ie. Retrieved March 23, 2012.
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108. Jesse Hogan (June 16, 2008). "Website ally for Trujillo". The Age. Retrieved April 17, 2013.
109. Alex Spillius (August 18, 2008). "John McCain accused of plagiarising Misplaced Pages for speeches". The Telegraph. Retrieved April 17, 2013.
110. Susan Duclos (August 12, 2008). "McCain Accused Of Plagiarism, Campaign Releases Internal Memo And Denies Claim". Digital Journal. Retrieved April 17, 2013.
111. Noam Cohen (September 1, 2008). "Editing – and re-editing – Sarah Palin's Misplaced Pages Entry". The New York Times.
112. Noam Cohen (August 24, 2009). "Misplaced Pages to Limit Changes to Articles on People". New York Times. Retrieved April 18, 2013.
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171. Joel Gunter (September 27, 2011). "Orwell Prize will not pursue Hari over failure to return money". journalism.co.uk. Retrieved April 16, 2013.
172. Thompson, Damian (June 30, 2013). "Johann Hari, Misplaced Pages and a porn site: an extraordinary new development – Telegraph Blogs". Blogs.telegraph.co.uk. Retrieved July 4, 2013.
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200. "The Leveson Inquiry. Hacked to pieces". The Economist. December 8, 2012. Retrieved December 26, 2012.
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204. "The war that never was: Most elaborate Misplaced Pages hoax ever as 4,500 word article on 'Bicholim Conflict' – a fictitious fight for Goan independence – fooled site for FIVE YEARS". Daily Mail. January 5, 2013. Retrieved April 19, 2013.
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206. Takei, Carl. "Private Prison Company Doctors Its Own Misplaced Pages Page and Fabricates Facts to Fight Bad Publicity". Aclu.org. Retrieved March 23, 2013.
207. Violet Blue, "Big Oil's Misplaced Pages cleanup: A brand management experiment out of control", ZDNet, March 27, 2013. Retrieved March 28, 2013
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210. "French secret service in censorship flap". United Press International. April 8, 2013. Retrieved April 24, 2013.
211. Sayer, Peter (April 8, 2013). "French government agency forced Misplaced Pages volunteer to delete entry". PC World. Retrieved April 24, 2013.
212. "Russian media regulator confirms Misplaced Pages blacklisted". Russia Beyond the Headlines. April 5, 2013. Retrieved April 18, 2013.
213. "Russia May Block Misplaced Pages Access Over Narcotics Article". Rianovosti. April 5, 2013. Retrieved April 18, 2013.
214. Andrew E. Kramer (March 31, 2013). "Russians Selectively Blocking Internet". New York Times. Retrieved April 18, 2013.
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216. Kember, Billy (April 12, 2013). "Flattering 'British Obama' edit on Misplaced Pages raises questions for MP Chuka Umunna". The Times. London. Retrieved April 12, 2013.
217. Hope, Christopher (April 7, 2013). "Labour star Chuka Umunna admits his aides probably set up and edited his own Misplaced Pages page". Daily Telegraph. Retrieved April 8, 2013.
218. Watts, Joseph (April 11, 2013). "Mystery deepens over who changed Misplaced Pages entry of Labour star Chuka Umunna". Evening Standard. Retrieved April 11, 2013.
219. ^ Jeff Lee (April 11, 2013). "NDP leader Dix at centre of Misplaced Pages editing controversy". Vancouver Sun. Retrieved April 22, 2013.
220. Luke Simco (April 10, 2013). "Partisan conflict erupts on Misplaced Pages ahead of B.C. election". Metro News. Retrieved April 22, 2013.
221. ^ Jeff Lee (April 11, 2013). "Misplaced Pages editors restore critical historical information about B.C. NDP leader Adrian Dix". Global News. Retrieved April 22, 2013.
222. Amanda Filipacchi (April 24, 2013). "Misplaced Pages's Sexism Toward Female Novelists". New York Times. Retrieved April 27, 2013.
223. Kevin Rawlinson (April 26, 2013). "Misplaced Pages in sexism row after labelling Harper Lee and others 'women novelists' while men are 'American novelists'". The Independent. Retrieved April 27, 2013.
224. Jen Doll (April 25, 2013). "Misplaced Pages's Boys Club of 'American Novelists'". The Atlantic.
225. Sarah Ditum (April 26, 2013). "Misplaced Pages wars: are there really novelists and 'women novelists'?". New Statesman.
226. Alison Flood (April 25, 2013). "Misplaced Pages bumps women from 'American novelists' category". The Guardian.
227. Filipacchi, Amanda (April 28, 2013). "Misplaced Pages's Sexism". The New York Times. Retrieved April 28, 2013.
228. Filipacchi, Amanda (April 30, 2013). "Sexism on Misplaced Pages Is Not the Work of 'a Single Misguided Editor'". The Atlantic. Retrieved May 1, 2013.
229. Andrew Leonard (April 29, 2013). "Misplaced Pages's shame". Retrieved May 16, 2013. Emphasis in original.
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231. ^ Andrew Leonard (May 17, 2013). "Revenge, Ego, and the Corruption of Misplaced Pages". Retrieved May 20, 2013.
232. Kathleen Geier (May 18, 2013). "The Unmasking of a Troll". The Washington Monthly. Retrieved May 18, 2013.
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234. Sockpuppet investigation on Qworty.
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236. "Misplaced Pages's Jimmy Wales Wants to Know If Edward Snowden Ever Edited the Site". News.softpedia.com. June 26, 2013. Retrieved July 4, 2013.
237. Nishtha Kanal. "Jimmy Wales causes trouble in Misplaced Pages paradise as he hunts for Snowden". Tech2.in.com. Retrieved July 4, 2013.
238. Khidr Suleman (June 26, 2013). "Misplaced Pages co-founder Wales asks for info on Snowden edits". IT PRO. Retrieved July 4, 2013.
239. – 4. Juli 2013, 15:01 –. "Whistleblowing: Jimmy Wales sucht Edward Snowden - Digital Nachrichten". NZZ.ch. Retrieved July 4, 2013.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: extra punctuation (link) CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link) CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link)
240. Scritto da: Francesco Lanza - mercoledì 26 giugno 2013. "Jimmy Wales viola le regole di Misplaced Pages vorrebbe scoprire se Snowden contribuisce". Downloadblog.it. Retrieved July 4, 2013.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link)
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242. Stern, Mark Joseph (August 22, 2013). "Misplaced Pages Beats Major News Organizations, Perfectly Reflects Chelsea Manning's New Gender". Slate. Retrieved March 18, 2014.
243. Hern, Alex (October 24, 2013). "Chelsea Manning name row: Misplaced Pages editors banned from trans pages". The Guardian. Retrieved March 18, 2014.
244. DC Weiss. DC lawyer pursues suit to unmask authors who changed her Misplaced Pages page ABA Journal 16 Sept. 2013 (viewed 21 Oct 2013)
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247. McHugh, Molly (October 17, 2013). "Where does your Misplaced Pages donation go? Outgoing chief warns of potential corruption". The Daily Dot. Retrieved March 5, 2014.
248. Andrew Orlowski (October 8, 2013). "Misplaced Pages Foundation exec: Yes, we've been wasting your money". The Register. Retrieved March 5, 2014.
249. "Senator Rand Paul Is Accused of Plagiarizing His Lines From Misplaced Pages". The New York Times. October 30, 2013. Retrieved November 4, 2013.
250. Protection Log for Gattaca
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260. Gallagher, Paul (January 10, 2014). "Misplaced Pages fires editor who enhanced entries for cash". The Independent. Retrieved January 10, 2014.
261. Mullin, Joe (January 10, 2014). "Wikimedia Foundation employee ousted over paid editing". Ars Technica. Retrieved March 5, 2014.
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263. Ball, Julie (April 18, 2014). "Misplaced Pages wrongly reports WNC senator's death". Asheville Citizen-Times. Retrieved April 21, 2014.
264. http://www.theguardian.com/football/2014/apr/24/hillsborough-disaster-inquiry-claims-government-computers-insult-victims-Misplaced Pages
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266. http://online.wsj.com/articles/for-this-author-10-000-wikipedia-articles-is-a-good-days-work-1405305001
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268. Bird, Elizabeth (August 1, 2014). "Misplaced Pages, Amelia Bedelia, and Our Responsibility Regarding Online Sources". SLJ Blog Network. School Library Journal.
269. King Kaufman (July 30, 2014). "A Misplaced Pages horror story: How attribution and verification can (usually) save the day". Bleacher Report Blog. Bleacher Report.
     Warning: Although the original story said so, the original hoax did not actually contain such a "typo" (missing the word "Africa").
270. John E. McIntyre (July 30, 2014). "Truth has not got its boots on". The Baltimore Sun.
271. Kang, Jay Caspian (August 8, 2014). "Misplaced Pages Defends the Monkey Selfie". New Yorker. Retrieved August 9, 2014.
272. Cavanaugh, Tim (September 22, 2014). "Neil deGrasse Tyson's Text-Burning Followers". National Review. Retrieved September 25, 2014. {{cite web}}: Italic or bold markup not allowed in: |publisher= (help)
273. Nazworth, Napp (September 25, 2014). "Why Is Misplaced Pages Removing References to Neil deGrasse Tyson Misquoting George W. Bush?". The Christian Post. Retrieved September 25, 2014. {{cite web}}: Italic or bold markup not allowed in: |work= (help)
274. "Cosmically Dishonest". The Weekly Standard. September 29, 2014. Retrieved September 25, 2014. {{cite web}}: Italic or bold markup not allowed in: |publisher= (help)

Further reading

Legal citations of Misplaced Pages

• Daniel J. Baker (2011). "A Jester's Promenade: Citations to Misplaced Pages in Law Reviews, 2002-2008". I/S. 7 (2).
• Beth Simone Noveck (2007). "Misplaced Pages and the Future of Legal Education". Journal of Legal Education. 3.
• Lee F. Peoples (2009). "The Citation of Misplaced Pages in Judicial Opinions". Yale Journal of Law and Technology. 12.
• Amber Lynn Wagner (Winter 2008). "Misplaced Pages Made Law?: The Federal Judicial Citation of Misplaced Pages". The John Marshall Journal of Computer & Information Law.
• Ryan Singel (September 2, 2008). "Asylum-Seeker Rejected Based On Misplaced Pages, Appeals Court Reverts". Wired. Retrieved April 26, 2013.
• Hannah B. Murray; Jason C. Miller (November 10, 2009). "Misplaced Pages in Court: When and How Citing Misplaced Pages and Other Consensus Websites is Appropriate". St. John's Law Review. 84 (2).
• Misplaced Pages:Misplaced Pages as a court source

Misplaced Pages and juries

• Debra Cassens Weiss (December 14, 2009). "Jurors' Misplaced Pages Research, Friending at Issue in Two Md. Cases". ABA Journal.
• Andrea F. Siegel (December 13, 2009). "Judges confounded by jury's access to cyberspace: Panelists can do own research on Web, confer outside courthouse". Baltimore Sun.
• Brian Grow (December 8, 2010). "As jurors go online, U.S. trials go off track". Reuters.
• John Schwartz (March 17, 2009). "As Jurors Turn to Web, Mistrials Are Popping Up". New York Times.
• Brian Grow (January 19, 2011). "Juror could face charges for online research". Reuters.

External links

• Conn Ó Muíneacháin, "‘Monkey Selfie’ Photographer David Slater on his Fight with Misplaced Pages (Audio)," www.technology.ie/ August 14, 2014. —Audio file.

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