Recently, a mass blitz was sent out from "The Dartmouth Wiki" asking students to register and help build a wiki (as in Wikipedia) for "Dartmouth University" [sic]. This website (as far as we are aware) is in no way associated with the College, Student Assembly, or any of its members and is instead an outside commercial venture. The Student Assembly and the Dartmouth Computer Science Department have been working to develop our own Dartmouth Wiki and will soon make it available for student use; however, this is not it.
This group has recently launched wiki sites for other schools (including the rest of the Ivy League and numerous others) and is selling advertisement space on its pages. The website seems to operate by allowing students to ask questions which are then emailed out on compiled mailing lists, much like spam. At the time of this writing, 175 students have already signed up. We advise that all students approach this website with appropriate care and recommend that those who wish to register with it consider using an email address other than their DND account.
We will be sending out more information about the upcoming official wiki in the near future.
Thank you and have a great weekend!
Student Assembly
Appearently the guys over at collegewikis.com weren't too happy with this blitz. They subsequently wrote the following letter to the editor published in The Dartmouth on April 5, which they also posted on the front page of their website:
To the Editor:
We launched the Dartmouth Wiki because several Dartmouth students e-mailed us asking for one. CollegeWikis.com is a team of current and recent students whose only intention is to provide other college students with a useful and informative resource. Our wikis have been well-received at schools like Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. We are not profiting from the website.
The Dartmouth Wiki creates a trusted network by using a facebook.com-like system of only allowing students with a @dartmouth.edu e-mail address to register and ask questions, thus ensuring accurate, high-quality, and relevant information.
There is value in both official and unofficial information. We’ve modeled our wiki after wikipedia, an unofficial yet extremely useful resource. We should welcome the diversity of both an “official” and “unofficial” wiki, especially when the official site plans to censor postings it doesn’t approve of and is still in the “formative” stages. (from the article: “this page will be approved by the administration and the information on the site will be filtered").
The Assembly telling students not to use a website is reminiscent of a government that tries to censor its citizens, and I hope Dartmouth students won’t stand for it. CollegeWikis.com purposely allows students to post about whatever they want, not to be monitored by others who decide what information to allow.
If I were a student, I'd be disappointed that the Assembly 1) thought they could dictate what websites I should go to, and 2) told me not to use something that could be of great value when they have no viable alternative. I would be even more disappointed if my classmates followed that order.
Joe DiPasquale
Founder, CollegeWikis.com
Thankfully for Dartmouth, Joe isn't a student, although he does have a pretty good idea (but we thought of it first). This is the letter we were thinking of sending to The Dartmouth, but we deemed too harsh:
We would like to thank Mr DiPasquale for his letter in The Dartmouth yesterday and for finally recognizing that we are "Dartmouth College" and not "Dartmouth University." We are all glad to see that his commitment to "accurate, high-quality and relevant information" extends far enough to get the college's name right.
The purpose of the blitz the Student Assembly sent out a while ago was to make sure that students did not think that his wiki (which sent emails to all students asking them to sign-up under the name, "The Dartmouth Wiki") was not affiliated with the college and was not the wiki that Student Assembly has been quite publicly developing. As flattering as it for him to compare the Student Assembly to 'big government,' Dartmouth students are smart enough to know that we were looking out for their best interests and that they are free to use his website as they please. His attempts to criticize us in order to protect his own commercial interests are transparent.
Mr. DiPasquale ends his treatise on the proper role of government by saying that it was wrong of the Assembly to ask students to "approach this website with appropriate care" when there is "no viable alternative." He is wrong here because there is a good alternative to his website: it's called bored@baker.
The Student Assembly Executive Board
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