Andrew Orlowski

This biographical article needs additional citations for verification. Please help by adding reliable sources. Contentious material about living persons that is unsourced or poorly sourced must be removed immediately, especially if potentially libelous or harmful. (May 2009)

Andrew Orlowski
Orlowski at a going-away party in San Francisco.
Born	1966
Occupation	Columnist for IT news and opinion website The Register.
Website
Andrew Orlowski

Andrew Orlowski (born 1966) is a British columnist and the executive editor for the online IT news and opinion website The Register.^[1]

Early career

In 1992, Orlowski started an alternative newspaper in Manchester, England called Badpress.^[2] He has also written for Private Eye magazine.^[3] In the late 1990s, he worked at Dennis Publishing, on the magazine PC Pro, and at Ziff Davis UK.^{[citation needed]}

The Register

Orlowski is the executive editor^[1] and a columnist for The Register. In April 2003, he used 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").^[4] Orlowski later classified this^[5] 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.

In December 2004, he was invited to assemble a panel on techno-utopianism at Harvard Law School's Berkman Center for Internet and Society.^[6] Orlowski argues that this form of utopianism distracts attention and diverts capital away from solving real infrastructure problems.^[7] "Technology can help us," he writes on his FAQ page.^[5] "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."^{[citation needed]}

In a number of articles, he has dubbed activists of the Open Rights Group, the UK Pirate Party, as well as any user of peer to peer services 'freetards'.^[8][9]

Orlowski's energy-related articles on The Register are in general highly pro-nuclear, pro-oil and anti-renewable.^{[citation needed]}

Criticism of Wikipedia

In a BBC article, Bill Thompson called Orlowski "scathing"^[10] in his criticism of Wikipedia. What began as incidental mockery — often involving responses to reader's emails and characterised by his coinage of the neologism wiki-fiddler^[11]  — soon became a regular subject of his journalism. To Orlowski, Wikipedia is "a hobby, a multiplayer game and a repository for fan trivia"^[12] with the accuracy of articles varying "from the occasionally passable to the frequently risible, while its all-important readability is even worse — and deteriorating."

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^[13] 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."^[14]), as well as a spoof article which announced that Wales had been shot.^[15]

Orlowski's comments indicate he believes Wikipedia is undergoverned (and thus of poor quality and morally hazardous^[12]) 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"^[14] — 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] in which he was the first^{[citation needed]} journalist to draw attention to a then-new web site, Wikitruth, critical of Wikipedia.

References

External links

• The Register
  • Search for Orlowski articles at The Register that mention Wikipedia