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'?""

Comments

Re:wikis are crap

[FlipmodePlaya]

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 ...

Unfortunately common

[Pan T. Hose]

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:

Cauliflower Is cauliflower nutritious? Is specifying what parts are usable POV? List of numbers that are always odd the number 3 was being considered as possibly being not odd. Page protection was needed to halt the heated debate. User:Wik's correction of a misspelling of hypochondriacs was re-reverted no less than 3 times. Supposedly as a means to illustrate the ludicrousness of the subject, various examples such as "the atomic numbers of gold and silver, but not their sum" and "the number of days in a year (except leap years)" were added to the list. Later in the edit war, no less than two thousand five hundred numbers of debated oddness (every second integer from 1 to 4999) were added and removed, four hundred ninety eight of them repeatedly before the edit war was solved by the article's deletion after a VfD vote. Wikipedia:Yet more bad jokes and other deleted nonsense#Edit conflicts the edit war on the Wikipedia:Edit conflicts page, preserved in Yet More Bad Jokes and Other Deleted Nonsense. Gdan zig edit wars have been occuring for most of a year as regards the exact name of this Polish German Prussian Eastern Central Northern European Baltic Baltijas city. Wikipedia:Requests for de-adminship Wik's nominations of 9 Wikipedia:Wikicops were moved; the wikicops page itself got in a move war about a week later and ended back at Wikipedia:Administrators. Sarah Edmonds Wik makes a correction, giving her middle name and month of birth. This gets lost through an edit conflict, and Danny and Alexandros add a paragraph worth of content. Wik reverts. Danny reverts. Etcetera. The only objection either had with the other's edits was that it reverted their own. Richard Neustadt Two months of edit war on whether the page should say "[[Harry S. Truman|President Truman]]" or "President [[Harry S. Truman]]" (plus the same with several other presidents). Wikipedia:Lamest edit wars ever edit war over what edit wars should be on this page. - see Recursion (http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Wikipe dia:Lamest_edit_wars_ever); see also tail recursion. Suncrest, Washington Constant reversion of Mark Richards's "vandalism" by original creator who seemed to think it was his page. See page history and