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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!)
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. "
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
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.
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 is definitive proof of why wikis are crap. people disagree - sometimes they REALLY disagree. wikis are therefore crap.
I disagree-- oh, wait a minute...
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."
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?
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.
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."