This Guardian piece titled Wikipedia’s School for Scandal…by Seth Finkelstein is worth reading, perhaps if nothing else to ponder the truth of the statement that “…one lesson from all these scandals is yet more evidence that Wikipedia fits a familiar pattern of idealism being vulnerable to exploitation”

Much of the culture of the Net has been built upon a kind of idealism, especially in relation to people offering their time to contribute content at no charge….

I should note that I came across this article today by getting recommended to it by one of the people I “follow” and trust on Twitter: Jason Calacanis. Another example of a type of “social graph search”,and something I will be discussing in some depth in the May issue of The Information Advisor.

On another note regarding whether idealism will and can work on the Net, I am attending a lecture later today by a professor in Media Studies in SUNY Buffalo, Trebor Scholz, who is giving a talk at the New School here in New York City that looks like it will be on a topic I’ve been wondering about recently: the labor implications when Internet users that contribute their time and efforts, at no cost, help firms “co-create” their products on the Net. The title of his talk is

“What the MySpace generation should know about working for free”