The directory is available freely on the web as a Wiki, which means that any visitor to the site can edit existing articles and create new ones, and is maintained by a community of interested users worldwide. SourceWatch was started on 15 January2003 and publicly launched with 200 articles on 10 March2003. Conservative estimates put the number of articles in SourceWatch at over 5000 in July 2004, making it the 14th biggest WikiWiki in the world [1] (http://www.usemod.com/cgi-bin/mb.pl?BiggestWiki#Biggest_wikis_by_page_count_on_July_3_2004). Content in the directory is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License.
The SourceWatch policy for WikiWiki editors is "fairness and accuracy" rather than a neutral point of view policy, since the latter is difficult to achieve with subject matter covering "disinformation" [2] (http://www.disinfopedia.org/wiki.phtml?title=Disinfopedia:How_does_Disinfopedia_relate_to_Wikipedia%3F). Indeed, the directory is viewed by some as having a liberal bias in many of its articles. Though the project lacks an editor-in-chief in the traditional sense, project sponsors, the mediaresearch group Center for Media and Democracy list Australian journalist Bob Burton as SourceWatch editor [3] (http://www.prwatch.org/cmd/bios.php). Burton is the main contact for the project and provides a degree of oversight as an expert of public relations.
External links
SourceWatch (http://www.sourcewatch.org/)
Center for Media and Democracy (http://www.prwatch.org/)
Disinfopedia's message is that anyone who has received money from private companies and then defends the free market is a phony-baloney shill and that his arguments therefore do not deserve to be judged on their own merits.
Disinfopedia is run in a similar fashion, except that its moderators only keep "information" that serves its explicitly leftwing political agenda and refrains from publishing entries that contradict its biases.
Disinfopedia was founded by Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber -- the two-man team that comprises a leftwing advocacy outfit called the Center for Media and Democracy.
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