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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'?""
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.
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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.
After all they and their leaders, though acts of war, mass-murder and colonialism have managed to kill millions of people of the last 100 years.
Sounds amazingly like our own country! Millions dead in Korea, millions dead in Vietnam, crushed democracies, puppet governments, and support of ruthless killers such as Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein!
PS, You forgot Spain and Japan.
Although, I don't think the Germans have killed many people since Hitler was removed.
94% of Repubs and 21% of Dems voted to renew the Patriot Act