Wikipedia Watch

Wikipedia Watch is a website created by a book-indexer named Daniel Brandt on 13 October 2005. The criticism site began after he read what he says was a false and unflattering Wikipedia entry about himself in order to warn users about the accuracy of information there. Daniel Terdiman of ZDNet described the site as "a sometimes paranoid, sometimes rational Web site that seeks to keep the project honest."

"The basic problem is that no one, neither the trustees of Wikimedia Foundation, nor the volunteers who are connected with Wikipedia, consider themselves responsible for the content," says Wikipedia Watch's Daniel Brandt.

The site has published supposed logs from Wikipedia Internet Relay Chat channels and has listed dozens of supposed examples of plagiarism by Wikipedia editors on the English version. It also served as a clearing house of information during the Essjay controversy.

In November 2006, the Associated Press reported Brandt's claim to have uncovered 142 examples of suspected plagiarism among the 12,000 Wikipedia articles he searched. He called for Wikipedia to conduct a thorough review of all its articles. According to the report, "Wikipedia editors have been reviewing the 142 articles in question and have declared a handful to be OK because copied passages came from the public domain. Editors found others where Wikipedia appeared to be the one plagiarised. But editors found extensive problems in several cases, with many still not yet fully checked."