Andrew Orlowski

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

You have new messages (last change).
Orlowski at a going-away party in San Francisco.
Enlarge
Orlowski at a going-away party in San Francisco.

Andrew Orlowski (born 1966) is a British columnist for the online IT newspaper The Register.

Contents

[edit] Early career

In 1992, Orlowski started an alternative newspaper in Manchester, England called Badpress.[1] He has also written for Private Eye magazine.[2] In the late 1990s, he worked at Dennis Publishing, on the magazine PC Pro, and at Ziff Davis UK.[citation needed]

[edit] The Register

Orlowski became a columnist based in San Francisco, U.S. for The Register in 2000.

In April 2003, he coined the term googlewashing to describe the potential for well-linked weblogs to obscure the original meaning of a controversial expression (e.g., "the Second Superpower").[3]

Orlowski later classified this[4] along with "absurd intellectual property claims" as an example of an unwarranted assumption of power or authority to gain sociological advantage on behalf of a particular lobby group. This factor is the core of what makes a story "great", he argues.

In December 2004, he was invited to assemble a panel on techno-utopianism at Harvard Law School's Berkman Center for Internet and Society.[5]

Orlowski argues that Utopianism distracts attention and diverts capital away from solving real infrastructure problems.[6] "Technology can help us," he writes on his FAQ page.[4] "But we venerate the machines we have, which aren't very good, and worse, limit ourselves to seeing the world through this machine metaphor. Technology is useful when it makes something we already like to do easier. Technology can't tell us something we don't know. Technology cannot solve problems that don't exist."

On November 3, 2005, Orlowski was accused of having fabricated an email from Robert Scoble by blogger Thomas Hawk,[7] in an article posted July 29, 2005.[8] The article was a follow-up to another article in which Orlowski stated that some users noticed their Google and Yahoo! toolbars had vanished in Internet Explorer 7. When Scoble stated that he did not believe that he had seen this, Orlowski posted a follow-up article claiming that "a reader has stepped forward to volunteer this email. We've removed his name. It was sent yesterday evening Pacific Time, and this morning our source gave us permission to use it", and then published what he claims was an email that came from Scoble that stated that "Yup, trying to find out what's up on that one. It did it for me too. Wiped them out."

Both Hawk and Scoble dispute the veracity of the email, and have accused Orlowski of sloppy journalism.

[edit] Criticism of Wikipedia

Orlowski first criticized Wikipedia in The Register in mid-2004,[9] and what began as incidental mockery — often involving responses to reader's emails and characterised by his coinage of the neologism wiki-fiddler[10]  — soon became a regular subject of his journalism. To Orlowski, Wikipedia is "a hobby, a multiplayer game and a repository for fan trivia"[11] with the accuracy of articles varying "from the occasionally passable to the frequently risible, while its all-important readability is even worse — and deteriorating."

Orlowski's rhetorical vigour increased with the frequency of his Wikipedia-themed pieces. His epithet of choice became "(wiki)pediaphile", and he used pedophilia to "illustrate the shortcomings and dangers of the Wikipedia approach". By December 2005, several such articles were being published each week, with subject matter including the characterisation of Wikipedia's co-founder Jimmy Wales as a petty hypocrite and pornographer[12] and average Wikipedians as rebellious children ("He's 14, he's got acne, he's got a lot of problems with authority ... and he's got an encyclopedia on dar interweb."[13]), as well as a spoof article which announced that Wales had been shot.[14] In March 2006, he illustrated an article discussing comparisons of Wikipedia and Encyclopædia Britannica by Nature (magazine) with a collage — depicting former Iraqi Information Minister Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf standing in front of the Wikipedia logo — entitled "Wikipedia - Comical Ali?".[15]

Orlowski's comments indicate he believes Wikipedia is undergoverned (and thus of poor quality and morally hazardous[11]) and unnecessary (in that "expensive databases" of information will become publicly accessible in the near future — "The good stuff will just come out of a computer network"[13] — and well-capitalised enterprises will provide "much more attractive" alternatives[16]). In April 2006, Orlowski expanded on these themes in an article for The Guardian.[17]

[edit] See also

[edit] References

  1. ^ Andrew Orlowski, Badpress: Manchester 1992-93 contents, Badpress
  2. ^ Internet Porn: "Government report suppressed", PR Newswire, 6 September 1996
  3. ^ Andrew Orlowski, Anti-war slogan coined, repurposed and Googlewashed… in 42 days, The Register, 3 April 2003
  4. ^ a b Andrew Orlowski's FAQ
  5. ^ http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/is2k4/session_descriptions#orlowski
  6. ^ Andrew Orlowski, Six Things you need to know about Bubble 2.0, The Register, 7 October 2005
  7. ^ Thomas Hawk, "Andrew Orlowski and The Register = Bad Journalism", blog post, November 3, 2005
  8. ^ Andrew Orlowski, "Microsoft blogger: 'My toolbar vanished too!'", The Register, July 29, 2005
  9. ^ Andrew Orlowski, "Buckminster Fuller on stamp duty", The Register, July 14, 2004
  10. ^ Andrew Orlowski, "Wiki-fiddlers defend Clever Big Book", The Register, July 23, 2004
  11. ^ a b Andrew Orlowski, "Wikipedia science 31% more cronky than Britannica's", The Register, December 16, 2005
  12. ^ Andrew Orlowski, "Who owns your Wikipedia bio?", The Register, December 6, 2005
  13. ^ a b Andrew Orlowski, "There's no Wikipedia entry for 'moral responsibility'", The Register, 12 December 2005
  14. ^ Andrew Orlowski, "Wikipedia founder 'shot by friend of Siegenthaler'", The Register, December 17, 2005
  15. ^ Andrew Orlowski, "Unnatural acts at Nature", The Register, March 25, 2006
  16. ^ Andrew Orlowski, "$10m for a Wikipedia for grown-ups", The Register, December 19, 2005
  17. ^ Andrew Orlowski, "A thirst for knowledge", The Guardian, April 13, 2006

[edit] External links

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org../../../a/n/d/Andrew_Orlowski_20f6.html"