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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'?""
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.
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!
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."
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.
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