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The Battle Over Candidates' Wikipedia Entries
MrByte420 writes "The New York Times today has a story (stupid reg required) about the particpants of Wikipedia editing Bush and Kerry's entries in the days leading up to the U.S. Elections. With admins locked in philosophical debate over whether to lock the page down, others asked, "Could someone get rid of the middle-finger screen cap that's replaced the image above 'The Bush family watches tee-ball on the White House lawn'?""
This shouldn't be in the politics section; it should be in the "Laugh. It's Ironic" section.
(Spudley Strikes Again!)
Dear Bush Supporters,
Rewriting history doesn't change history. We know the truth, regardless of the shiny, happy propoganda you put forth.
History will be the ultimate judge. If you want a preview, ask the citizens who have been our allies for decades what they think of our President.
Thanks,
An Angry American
94% of Repubs and 21% of Dems voted to renew the Patriot Act
Without Wiki, most people would never know that President Bush's grandfather was the chairman of the United Negro College Fund.
Without wiki, no one would know that John Kerry's grandfather made a fortune in the opium trade.
"John Kerry's maternal grandfather, James Grant Forbes, was born in Shanghai, China, where the Forbes family of China and Boston accumulated a fortune in the opium and China trade. "
Tell it to the Carthaginians. The Romans wrote their history.
Troll or not, the parent raises a good point. Anyone can, and is encouraged to, write articles for Wikipedia. They are able to filter out obvious fake information (perhaps someone writing an article about cheese under the title 'Modern Transportation) through peer editing rather well, but subtle biases are easily ignored or even accepted. Fortunately for them, the competition is no better. Intentional or not, even the best commercial encyclopedias let some false information slip through. It's an unfortunate consequence of the media.
...
Or, at least that's my reasoning for keeping off that Brittanica set
The article mentions a comment someone made, saying,
"I envisage no obstacle to a constitutional amendment removing presidential term limits and President George W. Bush being re-elected again. And again and again. Then another amendment allowing foreigners to take the top job. And we'll be ready for Arnie."
Well, I must say... if this amendment does take form, that Clinton will be ready to run the President into the ground.
I know it seems hard to keep biases, especially subtle ones, out of the wikipedia entries, but it can and does get done -- I once wrote a section on dog adoptions that had an admittedly biased section on puppy mills, and within a day someone had rewritten it to present more than one side of the story. They did a terrific job with it, too.
The problem here is that wikipedia, and wikis in general, assume that the users all want the information to be as accurate as possible, and that any biases expressed or implied are unintentional, and therefore will be corrected over time.
Trouble is, with some topics, that's just not a correct assumption. Perhaps what is needed is the ability for any user to flag a given entry as "needing temporary editorial control", which automatically locks it to changes for 24 hours and summons a moderator who can either release the lock immediately, leave it be to expire naturally, or extend the lock for a fixed period of time.
Presumably there might be edits to make while the lock is in place, to restore or correct edited content, but only the moderator could make the fix.
Perhaps this might provide the balance necessary to maintain the basic premise of the wikipedia, without it collapsing under the weight of unusually strong biases. Or perhaps not. Hard to say until it's tried.
How does that matter in any way, shape or form? I suppose since Bush Jr. will not deny that he used cocaine, Kerry's grandfather is to blame. Sheesh.
Heck- commercial encyclopedias often PLANT false information on purpose. It's an ages old copyright protection technique in case they have to go to court over it. "So, young Johnny, you say that Angorra really does have a 0% unemployment rate? Oh, well it looks like you plagerized the CIA World Book for your school paper", that sort of thing.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
The so called "edit wars" which include both the "revert wars" and less common "deletion wars" are unfortunately quite common on Wikipædia. Please see the lamest edit wars ever:
Sincerely,
Pan Tarhei Hosé, PhD.
"Homo sum et cogito ergo odi profanum vulgus et libido."
This thread reminded me of this
stuff
The CIA World Factbook is a work of the U.S. government and therefore in the public domain. So there's most likely no false information in inserted for that reason.
I seem to remember an episode of ST:TNG where Worf is given the life of the son of Duras, to kill him for the dishonor Duras brought on Mog (Worf's father). And Worf decided not to kill the guy, even though it was the way of the Klingons to hold the son accountable for the sins of the father ("But it is our way!" "That may be.. but it is not my way").
So besides the point that what Bush's family did was way worse that what Kerry's family did... it was their families, not them.
Remember when slashdot was filled with quotes from science fiction instead of political tripe?
Please cite which enclopedias have done this.
Otherwise, mod this down -1 troll, false information.
It's surprising how hard it is to get them to update that thing.
--
Evan
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
Seems like some slashdotters may also be wiki battlers.
One from the Bush wiki entry http://politics.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=12926 0&cid=10782164
"George Bush's maternal grandfather, James Grant Forbes, was born in Shanghai, China, where the Forbes family of China and Boston accumulated a fortune in the opium and China trade. "
One from the Kerry wiki entry http://politics.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=12926 0&cid=10782206
Without Wiki, most people would never know that John Kerry's grandfather was the chairman of the United Negro College Fund.
this is definitive proof of why wikis are crap. people disagree - sometimes they REALLY disagree. wikis are therefore crap.
I disagree-- oh, wait a minute...
They only dug up Geronimo's skull, not the whole skeleton.
I spent a couple hours over a couple of days monitoring and fixing the Kerry entry. I got tired of the vandalism and let someone else take over, but it could have been a part-time job. That was in May 2004, so i can imagine the vandalism happening later was much more fast and furious.
I called the Chicago Kerry campaign HQ to alert them of the need for someone to do this, but the luddite answering the phone was unimpressed with the need to do this work. Alas.
--Kevin
Unitarian Church: Freethinkers Congregate!
1.) Trade with Nazis (during WW2)
2.) Launder money through charity (UNCF in this case)
3.) Earn public goodwill and charitable tax deductions.
4.) Profit!!! (off the misery of millions)
There are a huge number of yeast infections in this county. Probably because we're downriver from the bread factory.
Where's the part where Bush did business with the Nazis? or Prescott helped Hitler rise to power?
http://www.adl.org/Internet_Rumors/prescott.htm
The Anti-Defamation League in the US is supportive of Prescott Bush and the Bush family. In a statement last year they said that "rumours about the alleged Nazi 'ties' of the late Prescott Bush ... have circulated widely through the internet in recent years. These charges are untenable and politically motivated ... Prescott Bush was neither a Nazi nor a Nazi sympathiser."
So that one paragraph about how Dick Cheney turns into the Hulk when he gets angry was just childish vandalism?! Hmph!
What about the great injustice over the Wikipedia "Weird Al" Yankovic entry?
>Prescott Bush was neither a Nazi nor a Nazi sympathiser. Which is very different to someone who did business with them. I mean a lot of what we know now no one had a clue at that time what was going on. Even germans were somewhat out of the loop to exactly what was going on.
Wikipedia, maintained by users all over the world who write and edit the entries pretty much as they wish, is visited by hundreds of thousands of people daily and has an estimated 400,000 entries on everything from manga (Japanese comics) to strathspeys (Scottish dance tunes). There are no user fees and no advertising: the site is supported by the nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation, based in Florida, which maintains and develops free resources, including a dictionary and a collection of quotations.
To keep it all under control, contributors to the Wikipedia (Wiki is the software that allows for collaborative writing) are instructed to adopt a neutral point of view. Not everyone obeys, though. So certain trusted, regular contributors and editors become administrators who oversee what is going on. But each one has a different view of that job. And that is where the fun begins.
Collaborative history is a wild ride, as the recent presidential election demonstrated. In October readers were editing and re-editing the entries for President Bush and Senator John Kerry at breakneck speed. And some of it wasn't exactly editing. If you clicked on a picture of Bush in his National Guard uniform to get an enlarged version, you would see a picture of Hitler.
By the end of October, a Wikipedia administrator from New Orleans decided to put both candidates' entries under protection until after the election: no one could edit a page on either candidate without the changes' being vetted on a discussion page. Thus Senator Kerry and President Bush took their places next to the other untouchables in the Wikipedia: Ariel Sharon, Osama bin Laden, Rush Limbaugh and Salvador Allende.
It was some lockdown. On Election Day, a "Kerry for President" banner appeared over one of the photographs of President Bush. And when that was removed, a picture of Hitler appeared where the President's picture had been. And where there was supposed to be a note on the page saying that the page was protected, instead there was a note saying, "This page has been protected by a Republican." Readers were advised that if they wanted to protect their freedom of speech they should vote for Senator Kerry.
All this stimulated a flurry of soul searching, metacriticism and self-analysis on the discussion pages reserved for the candidates. Some Wikipedia administrators promised that the pages would settle down after the election. One administrator, a German computer programmer, wrote, "Hopefully once the elections are over this article won't be the prime vandalism target anymore."
Ha! Or as they say online, lol (laugh out loud).
The day after the election, a picture showing President Bush and his daughters flashed the sign "Kerry for President." One of Wikipedia's administrators, a man from Washington State, closed the entry again, with an explanation: "Given the recent spate of vandalism, and the number of extremely angry/frustrated people in the U.S. (and abroad) today, I'm locking this down against vandals right now."
Soon, though, another administrator, known as Frazzydee, stepped in and unlocked the Bush entry, promising, "I'll guard this page like a hawk."
The hawk, however, was not careful enough. "I don't know about the rest of you," a third administrator said, but having this page vandalised every minute (literally) is getting very wearing."
One user didn't seem to mind: "Shows what people think of Bush." That comment was quickly shouted down: "No, it's juvenile idiocity - what's the point of taking your frustration out on Wikipedia?" And the vandalism continued. Late in the day an innocent question came in: "Could someo
Wikipedia has a problem with the truth in hotly debated issues; the article's opinion mostly has to do with the endurance of one side being more than the other.
The global warming article is one example; while it's a very slow "edit war", you can't put the truth in the article and expect it to stay. Wikipedia is based on consensus, not truth.
When a complicated scientific issue is raised, like fluoridation, the US's "scientific view" is mistaken for the scientific view of the world; wikipedia is american-like that way.
I have yet to see an article linking tabbaco to cancer on wikipedia, or anything substantial about propaganda.
Microsoft is pure dog-ma. FreeBSD is pure cat-ma.
It matters because for several years now, Bush's older relations were accused of collaborating with the nazis, like that mattered in any way, shape or form. Neither accusation is the fault of the younger, so yeah, it only matters to point it out in the interest of fair play.
from here
Let the two men America really wants to see run for president, run for president. Now, last week, our old buddy, Dana Rohrabacher, introduced a Constitutional amendment suggesting immigrants like, oh, I don't know, Arnold Schwarzenegger be allowed to run for president. And I say, "Fine. But then we get Clinton !" Each tribe gets its greatest warrior.
Why aren't we doing that anyway? Where is the twisted logic to the 22 nd Amendment which says you can't be president if you've done it twice? Reese Witherspoon has done two "Legally Blonde" movies. Next time, does it have to be Li'l Kim?
And in a nation of immigrants, we tell immigrants they can't run? Sorry, Arnie, you can take that, "What a country! Immigrants' dream, anything's possible" crap and put it where it belongs: in a speech nominating a former town drunk from Texas.
I mean, not to be cruel to the candidates we have, but why are we preventing ourselves from selecting from the top of our political gene pool? Even under general anesthesia, Clinton was more exciting than Kerry. This guy couldn't light a crowd on fire with napalm. But a debate between Bill Clinton and Arnold Schwarzenegger? You could put that on pay-per-view! Why, you could put that on the Spice Channel!
And that's the beauty of this match-up. They would have to stick to the issues, because the personal stuff would just be too devastating. The mudslinging would have to get way too nuanced. "I never lied under oath about the asses I grabbed!" We're talking about two dudes who've smoked pot and love cigars and hummers. It would be the "you don't want to go there" election.
So that's my proposal. The 22 nd Amendment for the Article Two. And then we can bring it on. The Terminator versus the "Sperminator." "Conan versus Onan." "Alien versus Predator."
The Anti-Defamation League in the US is supportive of Prescott Bush and the Bush family. In a statement last year they said that "rumours about the alleged Nazi 'ties' of the late Prescott Bush ... have circulated widely through the internet in recent years. These charges are untenable and politically motivated ... Prescott Bush was neither a Nazi nor a Nazi sympathiser."
Nice endorsement. You too can get that kind of endorsement if you shell out $3,000,000.00/year in taxpaer funded "aid" to Israel.
I have to admit that given recent articles on slashdot I looked at a wikipedia and ruled it out as a valid replacement for a real encyclopedias by looking at the entries for the candidates and former presidents. It's bad enough that intellectuals and idealists rewrite history as a regular slow process. I just seems it can happen a lot faster and wildly on wikipedia. Activists must love it.
Well, um, maybe if that was like a college thesis or something you could make that example, but the fact that young Johnny's essay contains a piece of information (false or not) from a book doesn't mean that he plagiarised it. :/
I guess you could make a better example if you said that like World Book ripped off Britannica's article on Angorra, but even then it's doubtful. Even without that 'planted' information you would be able to tell they ripped it off.