Facebook seems to land itself into trouble again and again, with lawsuits being filed against it from all corners.

The fight with 02138 ended in a fiasco with the ruling going against Facebook. Let us go back and see what happened. It all began with an article in 02318, an independent magazine geared towards Harvard alumni.

Mark Zuckerberg, as you would know, is the CEO of Facebook, which he founded in 2004. The controversy began when 02138 magazine published an article named “Poking Facebook,” giving a detailed profile of Facebook’s early days, which was the pet project of Mark Zuckerberg, who was then an undergraduate. The author, Luke O’Brien, who was also a Harvard alumnus, dug up old court documents, letters and web site content that painted a cold picture of Zuckerberg as arrogant and an individual with no qualms and willing to do anything to achieve his goals. The documents that were revealed to the public included a huge amount of personal information about Zuckerberg along with his parents’ address, his girlfriend’s address and his Social Security Number.

Even Zuckerberg’s personal journal was not spared. An excerpt from the journal that showed him in bad light was, “I almost want to put some of these faces next to pictures of farm animals and have people vote on which is more attractive,” wrote Zuckerberg, talking about some of the students’ pictures from Harvard. These comments showed him as harsh. (more…)

Wikipedia is a free online encyclopedia and the name is a combination of “wiki” meaning “quick” in Hawaiian and encyclopedia. It is updated in more than 100 languages and the English version has nearly 2 million articles.

Initially, Wikipedia was just an extension of Nupedia but when Nupedia’s advisory board rejected the idea of a public edited encyclopedia, Wikipedia overtook Nupedia with the quality of content and the number of visitors. In two years time, Nupedia was abandoned and all the content from there incorporated into Wikipedia.

The most unique concept of Wikipedia is that anyone, even under the cover of anonymity can make changes to the content by clicking on the “edit” button, making it a good source of information as it is continually updated with the latest developments. This uniqueness is also what causes the controversies. Many people, including several educational institutions do not take into consideration any references from Wikipedia, as they believe that allowing people to edit the content, makes it an un-authoritative source of information with a huge possibility of vandalized content.

A scientific publication has reported to have done a comparative study of Encyclopedia Britannica and Wikipedia, and the result was that, while Britannica suffered from fact omission, Wikipedia is reported to contain inaccurate information. (more…)