The academic world has been sceptical of Wikipedia since its launch in 2001. Now the controversial website is suspicious of academics, following a scandal in which a world-renowned computer scientist has been banned from editing the online collaborative encyclopaedia.
Carl Hewitt, associate professor emeritus in electrical engineering and computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is alleged to have disrupted Wikipedia for more than two years by using it for self-promotion, tampering with his own biography and manipulating computer science articles to inflate the importance of his own research. Senior academics in his field say the changes he made have rendered some entries in effect useless.
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All wikis are subject to the Law of Ultimate Syzygy: If you put a teaspoon of wine in a barrel of sewage, you get sewage. If you put a teaspoon of sewage in a barrel of wine, you get sewage.
I had this professor for a CS course at MIT. Back then (20 years ago) he was pretty much personally a flake, professionally I don’t know.
He wore a grimy fanny pack and track pants to every lecture and recitation I went to.
Associate professor emeritus? What’s next, Assistant Professor Emeritus?