By Edwin Black Jay Leno probably said it best a few weeks ago when he joked that when Wikipedia's servers briefly went down for some three hours, it left the world without a source for false and erroneous information. But many in our information-driven society believe it is no joke. A growing community of the informed believes that Wikipedia, the constantly-changing knowledge base created by a global free-for-all of anonymous users, now stands as the leading force for the dumbing down of world knowledge. If Wikipedia's almost unstoppable momentum continues, critics say, it threatens to quickly reverse centuries of progress in the sharing of verifiable knowledge with its highest aspiration being genuine fact. In its place would be a constant cacophony of fact and falsity that Wikipedia's critics call a “law of the jungle.†By way of background, Wikipedia's 2.3 million-plus unvetted entries are contributed by anonymous users known only
<I>This article is drawn from Mr. Black's just released and updated German paperback edition. The new edition includes the discovery of hard evidence linking IBM to Auschwitz. The evidence, detailed here, will be appended to his English language editions at the next reprinting in the new future.</i><P>
The infamous Auschwitz tattoo began as an IBM number.</p><p>In August 1943, a timber merchant from Bendzin, Poland, arrived at Auschwitz. He was among a group of 400 inmates, mostly Jews.