Wikipedia is a project to create a free on-line encyclopedia that anyone in the world can edit. This is both a good thing and a bad thing. The good thing is that this encyclopedia is immensely successful. The English-language Wikipedia has well over 800,000 articles in it (The Spanish-language Wikipedia isn't doing bad either, with over 80,000 articles). The Wikipedia is a very valuable source of many different kinds of information. For example, when I was recently looking at different web-based bulletin boards, the Wikipedia's guide to web forum software was very useful.

I also am a Wikipedia editor, and, in fact, am on a Wikipedia vacation that is about to end once I release MaraDNS 1.2 this Wednesday. Wikipedia editing can be very addicting.

That said, there are problems with the Wikipedia. One problem is that, with over 800,000 articles, it is not possible to have people monitor the content of all of these articles. For example, there were completely false accusations that John Seigenthaler was involved with the Kennedy assassinations which remained in the Wikipedia for months. (ref). Another time, an anonymous editor falsely accused Norway's prime minister, Jens Stoltenberg, of being a pedophile. Thankfully, this accusation was only in the Wikipedia for about a day.

This isn't Wikipedia's biggest problem, however. Wikipedia's biggest problems is what I call the "loud mouthed minority" problem. For example, while the DNS server BIND is far more popular than djbdns, the BIND article is smaller than the djbdns article. In fact, since I am a Wikipedia editor, the MaraDNS article is a good deal bigger than the BIND article, even though MaraDNS has a fraction of a percentage of the DNS server market.

These problems get worse, however. Wikipedia allows another "loud mouthed" minority to have significant control over some articles: Pedophiles.

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Now that I have said the word "pedophile", I need to clarify something. I am the last person to support witch hunts. People can become extremely emotional an irrational when it comes to the subject of pedophilia. For example, there was once passed around a bulletin here on Myspace where someone was telling people to see how many sex criminals were in one's neighborhood. I explained that the definition of a "sex crime" is very broad, covering everything from pedophilia to urinating in public, and that labelling people who urinate in public under the same banner as pedophiles is very dangerous. The myspace user in question responded by removing me from her friends list and not replying to my messages.

False accusations of pedophilia are very dangerous. For example, in 1984 the McMartin preschool was falsely accused of harboring pedophiles, resulting in the lives of many people being ruined. When I accuse someone of being a pedophile, I am very careful about the accusation.

Let me be very precise about what I define as being a pedophile: Someone who, because of a psychological disorder, has a sexual attraction to someone below the age of puberty. This does not mean they have ever acted on the desire. It does not mean they have ever abused kids. It merely means that they have a sexual desire to do so.

Wikipedia harbors pedophiles. How do we know this? Because the pedophiles themselves admit to being pedophiles. Look here, here, here, and here. Here are at least four self-confessed pedophiles who edit pedophile-related articles on Wikipedia. For example, the disgusting childlove movement article is frequently edited by pedophiles, who add false propaganda such as saying that sexual relations is damaging to children is a disputed notion (see this version of the "childlove movement" article). Because of the "loud-mouthed minority" dynamics of Wikipedia, their viewpoint is often the one being presented in these Wikipedia articles.

That said, there was a recently highly publicised article over at perverted-justice.com about Wikipedia haroring pedophiles which completely falsely accuses some administrators of being pedophiles.  In truth, only the four above users are known pedophiles. To the extent of Wiki's knowledge, not one administrator at Wikipedia is a pedophile nor advocates a pro-pedophile agenda. Many accusations on this linked page are as false as the McMartin accusations in the 1980s.

There is some speculation that the people who wrote this perverted-justice.com commentary on Wikipedia are part of a fraudulant organization whose crimes were exposed by Wikipedia, and wrote this press release in order to smear Wikipedia.

However, there is some truth to the perverted-justice.com article. It is very easy to set up an anonymous account on Wikipedia and edit the encyclopedia without being accountable. Some of these edits will, as a consequence, be done by pedophiles. Until Wikipedia, as a community, has the same intolerance for pro-pedophilia views as it has for spam, some Wikipedia articles will have a pro-pedophilia point-of-view to them.