Home -> Law Blog Directory -> Intellectual Property Law Blogs -> SIVACRACY .NET

Intellectual Property Law

: SIVACRACY .NET

Something Wiki This Way Comes

By Siva Vaidhyanathan

Another information literacy parable . . . In a summer of sequels, I guess I shouldn't be so surprised to see the controversy over Tactical Iraqi coming up again. Of course, the premise is a little tired, but so is Ocean's Thirteen, Shrek the Third, Spiderman 3, Pirates of the Caribbean At World's End, and Live Free or Die Hard. Nonetheless, I feel like I've been cast in some bad Rocky movie, in which I have been called up out of retirement long after giving variations of the same talk on three continents (call them Tactical Iraqi 1, Tactical Iraqi 2, and Tactical Iraqi 3) about computerized 3D simulations of Iraq and its citizens in a much publicized military-funded Arabic language-learning videogame for training soldiers. Normally I'd ignore a misleading Wikipedia article. After all, by and large, Wikipedia uses collective intelligence wisely, despite the occasional imposter among its editorial personnel. Mostly I look the other way when blatant advertisements or political propaganda appear in Wikipedia. Perhaps I'll say something, if an entry is clearly coming from a totally biased source, such as the friends and family of a soldier accused of murder and human rights violations, but mostly I take a live-and-let-live attitude toward the giant online encyclopedia. Like most academics, I even consult it from time to time, particularly if I need to check the dates of an historical figure or the meaning of some piece of computer jargon. Thus, when I saw the entry on the Tactical Language and Training System for the first time, I just chuckled. It was so obviously written by someone too close to the software development or testing team that its lack of scholarly integrity was simply comic.

Full post as published by SIVACRACY .NET on June 26, 2007 (boomark / email).