Linux Zealotry in Wikipedia

WikipediaRunsOnLinux™.

Yeah, it shows, alright. So, this article is Criticism of Linux, and yeah, you can guess, the Linux fans ain’t happy about it. It’s been nominated for deletion three times and has actually been deleted (and later restored) once.

There’s a lot of material to cover in this one, in the talk page, the history page and the article itself. A few points stand out, though:

• It was originally filled with weasel words and peacock terms that finally got removed only after some aggressive editing by folks who disputed the NPOV. Such examples include “the maturity of Linux” and, my favorite, “perceived lack of drivers”. That’s right, folks! When your hardware doesn’t have Linux support, it’s all about how you perceive it.
• The article has been vandalized on more than one occasion, often blanking out every section except the Microsoft one. Which leads to the next point:
• The Freedom brigade hates the fact that there’s a section devoted to Microsoft. It’s evil to present another point of view, especially when it’s “m$”.
• There are a few Linux fans who are totally smug jerks because they’re contributing to an article critical of their OS. Yeah guys, you’re sooo gracious and fair. Hurray for objectivity?

I found this comment sums it up nicely:

Are you serious about have an NPOV criticism page about Linux? There are a dozen articles about criticism of Microsoft and its individual products, and then you have this lame article that basically praises Linux with faint damnation. The reader of wikipedia is left to believe that Linux is a perfect piece of software and anything done by Microsoft is vastly inferior, neither of which is actually true.