Slashdot Mirror
Wikipedia Entries 'Cleaned' By Political Staffers
worb writes "According to the Lowell Sun, U.S. Rep Marty Meehan's staff has been heavily editing his Wikipedia bio, among other things removing criticisms. In total, more than one thousand Wikipedia edits in various articles have been traced back to congressional staffers at the U.S. House of Representatives in the past six months."
"These edits range from benificial and informative to libelous and childish."
This isn't as bad as some profane articles I found some congressional aides/staffers writing about each other... which was confirmed by their senate IP addresses...
Wikipedia is open for potential abuses like these, but then again Wiki has always been a good reflection of society, and this is precisely what political agents do with the rest of society/PR outlets.
In short, this is another example of the old saw: ``Wikipedia is like a public toilet -- when you need it, you're sure glad it's there, but you never know who used it last.''
Oh, and here's Meehan's page on house.gov.
they've been busy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:143.231.249.141
Don't get me wrong, I think Wikipedia is a good idea, I use it all the time to find out tidbits of information on various subjects.
Yet Wikipedia is seriously flawed! I really wish Wikipedia could be used as an academic reference. I really wish the edit wars would stop. I really wish I could truly trust the information posted there. I really wish the POV could be fixed so that various viewpoints could be accurately and fairly be included.
It could be done. The current system is just too open for the kind of abuse described in the article.
Some say he is made with ascii, others that he is eyeballed daily by millions. All we know is, he is known as the Sig
this is what you have to accept with a democratic ideal like Wikipedia. Much like a real democracy, you might not like what you see, but you have to live with it. Wikipedia is a similar process, except that individuals get a WHOLE LOT more say in the process. And if you bring in guards, who will guard the guards? (and don't say meta-guards, PLEASE!) If this bothers you, do some research, edit the article yourself and play the editing war with that politician's staff.
An old-timer with old-timey ideas.
Coming up after the break, we'll have the weather, and Tom will present his special report, "Are All Politicians Scumbags?" The answer may surprise you. But first, is your computer rotting your brain? You may be dead and not even know it yet.
--------- (I apologize if this is too high concept. I sick, and my head is floaty. It feels right, but right now I have terrible judgement.)
Slashdot - where whining about luck is the new way to make the world you want.
Yeah! Who cares if the DMCA has absolutely nothing to do with this? Or if civil suits don't lead to prison time? Or if you have absolutely no idea what you're talking about?
Democrats and Republicans are basically the same today. The Republicans don't represent conservatives, and the Democrats don't represent liberals. They represent the various corporations and industries of America, or the best interests of foreign nations. With perhaps the exception of Ron Paul, they do not stand for the people of America. They are both morally deficient, and it's quite obvious to anyone who sees the American system as it truly is that both parties participate in the same sort of nonsense.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
It can be edited by everybody. Including the "Congressional staffers". Why is it "censorship"?
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Well. I'm not suprised. But really if you found a page about yourself in the wikipedia full of critisisms you would think about changing them. Really with a world where comments can be changed they probably will be.
Although having people doing this for seems a bit of misuse of resourses.
Could you honsitly say you wouldn't be tempted to change things critisising about you if you could.
With the power to change things to the way one would want them one would.
With Members of Congress like this about information on themselves, is it any wonder nobody there disclosed information on the warrantless wiretaps?
Did I just hear someone say "FOIA"?
I give up, really I do. But it was only a matter of time before political machines corrupted Wikipedia I guess. How long before it starts being less true than is true? Good idea, ruined by humanity once again.
Help me, help you. - Jerry McGuire
As flawed as the Wikipedia system might be, at least it is known to all what sort of errors are being made.
Anyone with an ounce of intelligence could use the list you posted a link to to their advantage. Chances are that if Republicans are adding material to an article, such information is likely a lie. Likewise, if they're removing information, it is probably truthful information they wish to hide from the public. Likewise for the Democrats.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
I realize some information is a lot more sensitive than others, but exactly, then, WHO is supposed to edit this information? Isn't this the point of the whole wikipedia excercise? I mean, it is hardly a headline when musicians edit entries about musical intruments, even when a violinist edits an entry adding a comment about the 'harsh tone' of brass instruments. The brass players need to come in and correct their own entries.
By the same model, politicians are probably going to be the ones editing the entries about politics. If a politician doesn't like his own entry, he should get in there and fix it (or tell his staffers to). If entries become too volitile, they will trigger other wikipedia policies.
Frankly, I think the 'meta moderation' of these entries is interesting political infotmation itself. I think the article itself should have some header or hilighting ranking its volatility - I would be more likely to 'trust' stable entries.
Though I dare say it's as ironic as fuck-all that the weaknesses in the democratic nature of Wiki are epitomized via our own supposedly democratically elected government.
But you do know who used it last, and what specifically they changed. It's extremely easy to compare different versions of the same article. You can even be shown exactly what text differs between the two, for instance.
So rather than suggesting it's a flaw that anyone can change the most recent copy of the information, we need to realize that it's beneficial that we can see past edits, and who performed them.
Indeed, if we see a trend of certain information being edited out of articles about Republicans, it could be quite safe to assume the information that was removed is completely valid, and is being removed because it is the unfortunate truth. The same would go for the Democrats, or basically any other group, for instance. At least, however, we can see what was changed, and what it was changed from. That's just as beneficial as the information itself.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
...when directly interested parties are involved. This is the problem with Wikipedia. In a jury trial, great pains are taken to assure that the juries consist only of people without any personal interest or attachment to the outcome; this seems to be an inherently time-consuming and expensive process.
/., Wiki, and all the other attempts at what ruleset allows a productive, participatory, democratic system that results in the best knowledge interesting - nobody has hit upon the right answer yet, but we are learning and getting better by watching what does and doesn't work. If only we could apply this to something like voting! Unfortunately, WAY too many overinterested parties are already assuring that almost any change to the voting system that gets implemented will make it worse from the voter's point of view.
Up until recently, Wikipedia has relied on the fact that it was relatively unknown outside the geek population, and so the odds were that highly agendized individuals were not drawn to it as a priority. This, unfortunately, has changed with Wikipedia's popularity.
This is what makes
Many people say things like "well, people shouldn't be allowed to put crap like this on Wikipedia. We should do something about it". What nobody has done is advance a clear picture of how this can be done, aside from "put a cabal in charge", which raises the question of "who keeps the cabal from putting crap in?"
Wikipedia accepts that problems will arise, and it has mechanisms in place (like the edit history) to mitigate the effects. When a slashdot story goes up saying "House staffers screw around with articles", that's a victory for the Wikipedia system.
Nothing worth doing is worth doing today.
http://milkshake.dexy.org
WTF does this have to do with the story? The story is about abuse of Wikipedia, not repsonsiveness of politicians to the people's needs.
> As flawed as the Wikipedia system might be...
I don't see the the rationale for being critical
of Wikipedia due to this political manipulation.
In fact, I think it's a strong feature of
Wikipedia that the changelog is stored, and
provides some kind of papertrail, providing
far more transparency and accountability than
other forms of media/information.
In a sense, nothing can ever be deleted from
Wikipedia, merely removed from the main branch.
Who ever said that getting the whole picture was easy or quick? It's your whole attitude of consulting some other "trusted" source, rather than investigating the matter on your own, which leads to people being easily manipulated.
Unfortunately, that happened to many Americans during the run-up to the ongoing war in Iraq. Most Americans didn't investigate the claims made by politicians and the media, and thus were ignorant to the fact that they were being seriously mislead.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
Once again, Wikipedia has proven that quantum information isn't worth the paper it's not even printed on. Wikipedia is 100% accurate, when taken from the standpoint of hindsight... all the information is accurate, depending on at what point in time the information is accessed. The information on your screen could be wrong at the moment you read it, but it could be right moments later. This is quantum knowledge, and it is only as flawless as the beings who designed it.
I like to place meaningful quotes in my sig, so people will know that I know what meaningful quotes are.
About half of the pages look like press releases. On the other hand, a lot of the pages acquire a lot of unsubstantiated rumor mongering, and I don't have a problem with the Rep's staffs keeping an eye on people making false or unsubstantiated claims on the site.
What's so awesome about wikipedia is that even after editing, the original information is still available. That being the case, part of one's research (especially when dealing with people of the political persuasion), should include past versions. At least this way, those seeking information can get the whole story, regardless of any sanitizing efforts by those in office.
Here is the talkpage of the article.
I usually check the discusion of a wikipedia article to check if it biased. Usually there is a group of editors dedicated to the subject who pay a lot of attention to the article, along with vandals and stray people who just felt like adding some of their knowledge. Pretty interesting to have people with opposing views edit an article. I am not saying they are all like this, just the good ones. When they disagree enough a flag will go up. When there isn't an opposing view there is a problem, no one would question what goes in.
Something interesting, the wikipedia article on google is way more critical of google than the microsoft article is of microsoft.
What really gets me is that they're apparently as dumb as they are immoral. They weren't even bright enough to use a proxy to mask their IP address, leaving their greasy fingerprints all over wikipedia for the world to see. Aside from this, I wonder how many other astroturfing operations have gone completely unnoticed by the public.
Working in a DevOps shop is like playing in a band made up entirely of keytarists.
From TFA
Recently, a user wrote in a Wikipedia bio that Virginia Congressman Eric Cantor "smells of cow dung." Another wrote that Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist is "ineffective." These statements were traced to the House Internet-protocol (IP) address.
So this is what politics is now? Insults not worthy of a 5-year-old intellect? How much more can it possibly take to get voters to throw these people out of office?
I came here for a good argument
It is worth pointing out as well that the Lowell Sun is a rabidly right-wing rag ranking right up there with the Washington Times and the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. It doesn't suprise me that they would want to manufacture a scandal out of every single action of Rep. Meehan and his staff however reasonable.
From the article:
...I cannot tell you that". I'm just waiting to see George Bush in February state that he cannot tell people the US budget (or deficit to be accurate) "for security reasons".
"For security reasons, Brandt declined to say to whom the address is assigned."
It must be great being the US government in this day and age, any question which they do not want to answer they simply cite "For security reasons
I was completely unaware of Meehan's weaseling out of his term limits pledge until this. Screwing around with Wikipedia has brought this issue to the fore. Hope his opponents point out that he's way past his self-assigned Sell-By date in office.
FTFA...
Evan Lehmann's e-mail address is elehmann.com.
Good luck emailing her at that address...
And is it really any surprise that a congressman was outed as a liar? Isn't that the one thing that politicians do best?
Just the same, I am satisfied not only that this issue came to light, but that, at least with Wikipedia, there is a record of it. That strange sensation Vogel is dealing with- I know it's very rare in political circles, but I think it's referred to everywhere else as accountability.
If the edits in question had been made by the staff of a Republican, does anyone doubt that fact would be omitted from the summary? Had a Republican done this, we would have been informed of his party and had to suffer inane comments about the stifling of freedoms under the Bush administration. Just sayin'.
Open it to the world, people will make changes.. Be the entries right or wrong.
Isnt that what the WIKI is all about, and why ultimately its doomed to fail?
---- Booth was a patriot ----
wouldn't it be easier to just write a script for slashdot that would copy all the stories from digg.com, after a 12-24 hour delay? This seems to happening for the majority of stories now. I'm not flamebaiting, just pointing out the obvious.
"Is this just useless, or is it expensive as well?"
According to the Lowell Sun, U.S. Rep Marty Meehan's staff has been heavily editing his Wikipedia bio...
But, since Meehan is a Democrat, expect this to get absolutely no mention in any news outlet. Nor will there be any huge outrage on Daily Kos, Slashdot, or any other website with a decidedly large portion of liberal-leaning (and thus Democrat-leaning) users. On the other hand, had Meehan been a Republican, there would be no end to diatribes condemning this as an assault against Free Speech, a symptom of the corruption of the Republican Nazis, part of the grand imperial planning of Emperor Bush, usual liberal ranting, etc. etc.
Go ahead and mod me down for saying this, but everyone knows this is the is the absolute truth. Democrats get a free pass for this kind of behavior, but Republicans get called everything but a child of God for the same kind of actions.
Disclaimer: I'm a card-carrying Libertarian, not a Republican, so take your conspiracy theories elsewhere. I call 'em as I see 'em.
In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The system seems to be working: PR inappropriately inserted gets news headline exposing it and more attention directed at the subject being concealed.
This requires the introduction of a new concept to the encyclopedia called "Wikipedization", which would mean, the process of entries up entries in wikepeida with the intent of influencing public opinion. This could be expanded in general to mean any act of using intenet including blogging, ediding wikis, spamming, etc to influcence public opinion in one's favour.
The energy ones are edited by oil company representatives or lobbyists too. They edit a pro-oil message all day long in every energy topic. Put links to it in every other energy topic.
p ment
It's quite subversive, they set up pages of false claims, then edit them in to wikipedia as facts.
This one,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_energy_develo
is edited by a guy Ultramarine who is also the same guy as SillyBilly. Try editing some of the junk in that topic and you'll get an instant revert.
Its kind of funny, if you look up the admin's page, one of the people who is putting temp bans on the IP is a 15yr old. Its nice to see that the house has been stopped by him. And they say youths can't do anything right.
SimonTek
Everybody go view the wikipedia entry on the Slashdot Effect, and it will be a victim of the very topic it is about.
Table-ized A.I.
All .gov addresses should be banned from editing in Wikipedia. The US Government has no mandate to update public Web sites, and should be banned by their internal IT staff. Gov computers are banned from accessing such things as Gmail, game sites, bulletin boards and many other things deemed inappropriate use of government resources, in an effort to ensure that government property is only being used to conduct government work. As such, Wikipedia would be doing us all a favour by banning any gov addresses from editing, thereby reminding government employees that they should stop editing wikis and get back to spending our hard-earned money running the country.
-- Religion is not an exact science
...that my tax money is supporting literature, not going to something questionable like nuclear weapons or new torture cells in Guantanamo...
Are we upset because the entires were "cleaned"?
Or are we upset because the entries were biased to begin with?
I'm not suggesting that the new entries are better, but if the original entries were bias because they were created by other people with an agenda, then cleaning them up (or at least offering another prospective) is a Good Thing.
And that is why Wikipedia is still awesome. Because anyone can create an entry, dispute it, edit it, and everything is logged for the world to see. People need to stop looking at Wikipedia as comparitive to a traditional encyclopedia. It's a collective of information from all different perspectives and allows the reader to decide which of those perspectives to believe.
-David
Although it happens in discussion every day in real life, it is not a valid reasoning to attack the person who brings a message, except factually. A bunch of monkeys on typewriters could write Shakespears, and a madman may bring about a totally valid point of discussion that nobody had previously considered, but everyone disagrees with. To say it isn't true because it was said by a madman is the same as saying everything Einstean said is true just because he's really smart.
If the "White House Staffers" are doing this on Govt paid hardware/bandwidth, or "the clock" so to say, this is expressly forbidden and illegal, it would be even better to drum up if their bosses told them to.
Bush has already been taken to the mat over illegal contributions to Radio stations in what amounts to Propoganda, whats next WikiGate ?
" Yeah! Who cares if the DMCA has absolutely nothing to do with this?"
So, just like all the other uses of the DMCA, then?
I'm sorry, but this simply has to be said. This guy was the same scumbag who vowed to step down after his last term and then broke his promise to do so. He has NUMEROUS other ethics problems to include his campaign finances all of which were things being covered up by his staff (for obvious reasons).
I know I'm looking for a flame war here by saying this but... As much as you Mass. Libs don't understand how Bush was reelected by the Red States, I'm at a loss to see how you could continue to support someone like this (or Ted Kennedy for that matter). They are simply embarrassments to your state.
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
After seeing the article running in The Lowell Sun, I was the one who combed through the entire history of wikipedia contributions. I was surprised to see that there were hundreds (pretty close to 1000 entries).
Though I was pleased to see that there were a fair amount of edits updating dates and facts to be current (everyone switching from the 108th to the 109th Congress), I was shocked to see that there was a large propaganda and misinformation campaign as well.
Some were personal attacks saying things like "He is generally not a good person," and childish things like adding Scott Mclellan (Bush's press secretary) to the entry for Douche; other were of a much more serious nature. The entry for Ralph Neas (Director of a the liberal People for the American Way) was edited to say he was a Socialist, and the more subtle but equally effective changing the description of MoveOn (a progressive political organization) to be categorized as "left-wing."
Many Congressional offices were removing any negative inormation or simply replacing the entire article with their official House bio. Emily Lawrimore (Communications Director Congressman Joe Wilson, emily.lawrimore@mail.house.gov) posted, on the discussion page for her boss "I work for Congressman Joe Wilson (listed as Addison Graves Wilson). Could you update his bio with information from the following official bio too?"
Some political officials like Congressman Jim Ramstad (R-MN 3rd) just wanted to remove any references to the word "liberal". The articles for Congressman Trent Franks (R-AZ 2nd), and Rick Renzi (R-AZ 1st) were completely erased and replaced with official House biographies.
Getting even worse Congressman Richard Pombo (R-CA 11th) and Governor Bob Taft (R-OH) removed references to their ties with Jack Abramoff (who in a recent Washington scandal pled guilty to three felony counts, conspiracy, fraud, and tax evasion). Congressman Mark Green (R-WI 8th) removed any mention of his ties with the recently indicted Tom DeLay and generally removed any unflattering or scandal related information. A full list of the effected articles is available.
The possible most egregious entry was editing the article "2003 Invasion of Iraq." Erasing legitimate information, adding knowingly false information and generally purporting that there were links between Iraq and al Qaeda.
This appears to be a somewhat serious problem as this is one IP address of who knows how many. See the discussion page for this IP address at Wikipedia to see some of the known staffers who have been editing articles.
I am a Wikipedia editor and am personally going through all edits that have come through the U.S. Congress IP range. It's mildly entertaining, like a made-for-TV horror comedy, as I look through these. The government is spreading propaganda into Wikipedia. There are edits that seem to be useful, and true, but there is a majority of vandalism that disturbs me. Edits range from articles to articles like the ones on the Superfriends and the Pope, to inserting the name of the White House press secretary in odd places, and what appears to be an extremely puerile form of libel against certain senators.
Here's a test case...
If I post on a Wiki entry about a senator saying I feel they are too biased on some issue and then the Senator's staff changes my post...is that a violation of my civil rights? Is that an example of the government violating the First Amendment? The staffers are paid from federal funds and are part of the government. It seems to me like the act of changing the wiki might be unconstitutional on the grounds that 1)it abridges freedom of speech and 2)it is a case of congress overstepping it's authority. Congress is not authorized to take direct action, that's for the police and military which are controlled by the executive branch.
But! IANAL
If Kurt Vonnegut or one of his assistants edited his wiki-bio, would anybody complain? I would suggest that congressmen and their staff know themselves better than others, and are thus uniquely qualified to write on the topic. The removal of criticism is a non-issue, as wikipedia is supposed to be a repository of facts and interpretation, not opinion of partisan political smearing.
People who think they know everything really piss off those of us that actually do.
Hurray for politicians, lawyers, and people in their employ with too much time on their hands!
If it ain't broke, it needs more features!
This wikipedia news, along with the PATRIOT ACT makes Orwell's 1984 a reality, unfortunately.
Many people think that Wikipedia is freely open for editing, this is not the case.
Wikipedia is meant to be a Encyclopedia in eternal progress of completion. Every entry needs to have the bias and unfactual points shaved out to a NPOV as well as adding additional factual support.
As Wikipedia exists on the web more and more it's catalogue of articles becomes increasingly more full and any POV or bias is shaved down slowly with an effective moderation team.
People think that wikipedia is free for editing and unreliable, however this is not the case.
Wikipedia needs moderation. Perhaps Slashdot-like moderation. I am all for having a freely edited encyclopedia; I am even all for contributions being shown immediately without editorial oversight, but it's just downright ridiculous that their Anonymous Cowards have just as much power as their excelent-karma'ed, long-time contributors/editors.
Well, at least it'll get the sheep to support the war.
The real justification for that war is far too complex for the average person, never mind a 5-second sound bite.
I don't think the explanation would fit in a few Slashdot posts either, even assuming you are smart enough to follow it. I'll give you a few hints though. It has to do with very long-term world strategy and stability. It has to do with much more than oil or terrorism.
Wait a minute, you're saying our House of Representatives is beneficial and informative?
Completely open systems vulnerable to abuse. News at eleven!
Didn't the wikipedia guys ever have a subscription to "Duh!" magazine?
So, when Seigenthaler complained about inaccuracies in his bio, you were all shouting "so, why didn't he fix them? That's what Wikipedia is all about!" When Marty Meehan does it, you jump down his throat. Nice job! You're setting new standards of hypocrisy. [Disclaimer: I've known Marty Meehan, though not closely, for 25 years, and I've voted for him. He's a moderate Democrat - 20 years ago, folks might even have called him a conservative Democrat; nowadays, people would call him a wild-eyed liberal, as anything remotely to the left of Atilla the Hun is seen as socialist. I seriously doubt he directed his staff to do this - I don't think a Wikipedia article would be worth his time to worry about.]
This is exactly what philosopher Harry Fankfurt fretted about in his short book "On Bullshit." The problem with political discourse today is not that we have liars, it's that we have bullshitters--people that don't care about the truth at all. You can see that dangerous thinking with Meehan's chief of staff admitting that he had no objection to deleting facts for PR purposes; Vogel essentially valued Meehan's image over the truth.
Wikipedia is a project that presumes that all parties care about the truth. Sure, people will disagree about the implications of and inferences from the facts, and that can lead to back-and-forth editing. That's good, because multiple editors are more likely to arrive, via peer-review, at a neutral point of view. But editing out known facts is recklessly disregarding the truth, and that goes against the spirit of Wikipedia. Again, the point of allowing anyone to edit is not to allow revisionist history, but to allow neutral interpretation of facts.
PR should never conflict with the truth. You can spin facts, explain them away, downplay them--that's acceptable PR. But you have to acknowledge them. I'm even willing to say that lying about them is better than pretending they don't exist: at least the liar acknowledges there is an objective truth and has the same understanding of facts as the rest of us, even if he chooses to manipulate the game. Vogel didn't even care to acknowledge the facts and that makes his actions quite dangerous to public discourse.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
Transparency is ambiguity.
Or you really believe there is an entity called Truth?
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
That's what happens when anyone can edit anything. At least they didn't edit his article to try to implicate him in the Kennedy assassination.
The Ad hominem fallacy relates to the source of arguments rather than evidence.
E.g. A lawyer may argue that "the victim was shot, and the defendant was the only person in the basement with a gun, hence the defendant was guilty". In this case claiming that the lawyer is baised is a fallacy, of course the lawyer is biased but the strength of an argument is independant of who presents it.
OTOH, if the witness was biased, they might have been lying, so we would be unable to trust their testimony.
An encyclopedia primarily asserts facts rather than arguments. Hence an an hominem attack against the authors is almost always a valid argument.
Cameron B, Makhlouf T, 2004, Prostate Cancer, Wikipedia, availiable http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prostate_cancer#2004
As it is, with everything constantly changing, you really wouldn't want to cite Wikipedia from an academic article. (If authors typically used proper citations, that would also be nice).
Perhaps there could be a flag to warn that an edit war was occuring.
Actally the so much touted review system of Wikipedia can be bypassed by an automatic updater. So if I want to say that E=mc^3 not E=mc^2 I could write a cron job that updates the Wiki page if it was reverted. The chances are when someone looks at the page, they will see my version not the correct one.
I looked up this IP on ipspotting.com (which Slashdot did a story on a few days ago) and got this:
Your IP address as a poker hand:
Four of Diamonds
Three of Hearts
Four of Clubs
Ten of Hearts
Four of Diamonds
Play proper poker at Poker.com
You cheat! You have 2 identical cards! (-2)
Hear recorded Slashdot headlines on your phone! New service beta testing. Just call (248) 434-5508
Anything I ever do in wikipedia gets a POV or NPOV attack from someone with opposite views. So to me, this is not news. Everyone has its own facts about what's going on (even about optical vs old school mice). POV/NPOV flames are the reason why wikipedia can't go beyond being a quick-check-reference-point.
Uh, mod down, please. These are not real headlines. This is pure speculation. Talk about a straw man.
That illustrates the problem with any cooperative system in which the entire world's population is explicitly trusted.
The unfortunate truth is that there always has been and always will be a percentage of the worlds population who are assholes. It's just a fact that anything given to the world, no matter how good, will be ruined by these assholes unless measures are taken to protect it.
The race isn't always to the swift... but that's the way to bet!
But that's precisely what Wikipedia is, the "discussion" tab is adjacent to the "article" and "history" tabs. The real battle consists of convincing the general public to understand that you can't always believe everything you read on the Internet at face value; you have to dig deeper.
I second what another poster here said about always checking the discussion page associated with an article if the information one is seeking is of more than trivial importance.
The Internet enables the general public to do this fact-checking easily and repeatedly, and makes errors and misinformation easy to expose. This practice is contagious; earlier today I checked a questionable fact which I read in a New York Times article by spending 5-10 minutes digging up multiple original sources. The fact turned out to be true (at least as far as I could ascertain). Had it been incorrent, there would have been hell to pay for that reporter as the fraud would have been exposed.
Of course with the Times, you have a handful of editors and a reputation based upon good fact-checking which allows you to put some confidence in believing what you read without further research. With wikipedia, it's different, not better, not worse, but different, and it should be regarded as such.
it's a blue bright blue Saturday hey hey
When certain viewpoints get consistenly modded down is that part of a conspiracy or just a few folks in the herd acting on their own? Hard to tell sometimes. Metamoderate regularly and a pattern starts to emerge. But each side can be equally oppresive against the other. No one really wants to hear anyone else's opinion no matter how well reasoned their argument is.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
I suspect they'd hesitate more in doing this if the article history showed the reverse dns ....senate.gov rather than just some ip address.
We've secretly replaced Slashdot with new Folgers Crystals - let's see if it notices.
There was actually a news article on Slashdot a couple weeks back about this! A paper was released by John Hopkins University that reported the very same thing you are bringing up.
I believe this is my government's goal, and I trust my government that this is their plan. It's unfortunate, however, that governments simply cannot be trusted ever, certainly not when they try to suck up personal liberties. The people still have FAR more control over the US than the government has, even in light of recent events, much to the contrary of what is commonly believed and regurgitated by so many people.
This certainly isn't meant to be a troll.
The moonies, rajneeshis, and the scientologits also put some serious effort into whitewashing the entries on their cults and leaders. They usually win, since they can assign a full-time zombie to each page, just about.
The quacks who push "Therapeutic Touch", "Psychic Surgery", and Chiropractic aren't quite as diligent, but you still need to take those entries with a grain of salt, too.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Lets repost this story, except lets have it be about Linus or RMS, or Alan Cox, or any of the other OSS heros editing their own bio. Then we can all compare the comments denouncing the politicians for editing their bios to the flurry of comments that would be sure to follow about how the OSS heroes are only making factual corrections. The only reason anyone cares about this is because it supposedly exposes more evils of the politicians. Not to say they aren't a bunch of shady bastiges as a whole, but come on...wikipedia entries? This is hardly the next Watergate, Iran Contra, War on Drugs, War on Terrorism, or other insanely corrupt event...its a wikipedia entry. Can we please keep focused here on things the questionable politicians do that make a real difference?
The only change I can believe in is what I find in my couch cushions.
My TAX dollars are going to political staffers to mess up a wiki system that is supposed to be as unbiased as possible due to a check and balance. A source of information that should be at the very least, semi-credible. If he wants to spread lies and cover his ass, that's fine. Don't go F**king up wikipedia with my tax dollars. It's a waste of time #1, and it's a slap in the face to plenty of citizens who have worked their asses off to build that site. Anyone that edits a wiki with malicious intent, whether childish or politically motivated, needs the crap slapped out of them.
Of all those defacements, I see only about 4 entries about non-Republicans, and those involve specifically the addition of libel. As for the rest of the entries, they are either about sensitive Republican issues (Iraq war), or Republican political figures (removing damaging information). The one item that I can't see as extremely important either way was the defacement of "podcasting". But then again, my ignorance may be chiefly to blame there.
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
Tm
Support TBI Research: http://www.raisinhope.org
Too many politicians are like that. That's probably why kimvette always votes against incumbents.
"The use-mention distinction" is not "enforced here."
Humans don't even express our world in mutually exclusive pure truth/falsity, except in the most abstract discussions of philosophers like Aristotle and Boole. When we started making machines to operate according to those kinds of expressions, we found they only roughly corresponded to our world except in cases of extreme simplicity and wide error tolerance. And even our most precise and accurate descriptions of our world are statistical: ambiguous, uncertain. Binary depictions of our world don't survive beyond the ideal confines of our minds.
--
make install -not war
Shouldn't this article have opened with: "Follow Adam Curry's lead..."
"A dollar equals an X of gold. So if the British pound is nominally worth two dollars then a BP is also equal to X/2 of gold."
:)
What a great invention! Currency should be redeemable for the inverse of its value in gold!
The "Powers That Be" are reverting the entries back to what they should be and blocking the IPs of those who are carrying out the action.
George Orwell knew it would come to this...rewriting history as you need it.
guess they never heard of TOR. It is incredible that people don't realize everything is logged nowadays. I tell people this all the time at work, where firewall logs / email tape backups / proxy logs have all been mined as evidence for lawsuits, proof of wrongdoing for terminations, and all of the other things you would expect. They have even pulled card key usage logs to terminate people they wanted gone, "our records indicate that your first entry in the building was after x time for x days, you are hereby served warning, next infraction will result in termination". In one hilarious incident though, someone took precautions for all of these measures and sent a spoofed email to the entire company (1000 + ) people through an anonymizer taking the CEO to task for using the company as a platform to hawk his books, etc. It was funny watching the network and server guys scramble to do something as this guy sent not one but three messages in succession. Not only did the messages reach everyone's mailbox, but it was written about in the media (it followed on the heels of a major internal revolt, which many thought it was related to .. it wasn't) and he was never caught. No, it wasn't me. If you are going to do some devious shit, do your homework at least... Think I'll post this anon through TOR...
Oh, don't worry. You won't have to worry about the value of your dollar increasing if they print more of them. Quite the opposite occurs. Simple supply and demand there. That's the real problem with any monetary system not based on a relatively fixed supply of something like gold. Central bankers can just print to their hearts delight and make your savings worthless. When the US dropped the gold standard in 1971, gold was worth $40/oz. Now, it's worth $550/oz. If you had $10000 in the bank then, it was worth 250 oz. of gold. Now it's only worth about 18 oz. Needless to say, 250 oz of gold then is still worth 250 oz of gold today. Why would anyone save in greenbacks? They just keep printing more, making your savings worthless. So much so, that they are going to stop printing the M3 report. Can we say "Print money day and night, as fast as you can." Good... I thought you could.
WP's diff system is nice -- I think that the reason that a lot of vandalism gets caught is because the average Joe out there still doesn't understand the concept of an SCM with version history and diffs. This leads to a technocracy by the WP "good guys", who understand how WP works. Average Joe doesn't realize that it's easy to roll back blatant vandalism. That won't last -- Joe's going to get more subtle. I think that the first thing that amazes every WP contributor is how stupid and childish most of the vandalism is at the moment -- it's very easy to identify and remove.
I'd still like to see improvements, though.
It would be nice if WP understood the concept of a "revert". Currently, reverts are *really* ad-hoc things that can be done by aid of looking at some diffs and copy-pasting, but they aren't that great. Given how common of an operation reverts are, it'd be awfully nice to make it easier to make WP grok reverts.
Right now, you could probably write some clever frontend to WP to do reverts, but there's still benefit to making WP understand reverts
Basically, what I'm talking about is the ability to check a checkbox next to a history log entry to add a revert that backs out those changes. WP adds a history entry for you saying "backed out vandalism from N", colors it differently, etc.
There are a bunch of reasons that I'd like to see this. First, sometimes a page gets vandalized, some positive contributions are later made, and it's a real pain in the ass and a waste of precious time to undo the vandalism and then re-apply the positive contributions manually. It would be easy for WP (at least when later changes don't overlap) to just eliminate one diff from the middle of a history. If the later changes overlap...well, oh well, the revision will have to be manual.
Second, it would ensure that it isn't extra work to nicely mark up history entries as "reverted change from Foo from version Bar" -- WP could automatically do this for everyone.
Third, it would allow a number of important abuse-related things to be automated. If an IP/account's changes are being reverted with a high degree of frequency, it would be easy to automatically flag that account to make it easy for editors to examine any other possibly bogus changes. It would also allow revert wars to be easily detected (though, of course, someone could be manually applying revisions). It would allow the gathering of more data useful for research purposes ("How long does typical vandalism last before being reverted? How does our most recent policy/feature change improve this?")
Fourth, at least in theory, it could allow more efficient storage of the change history of WP -- there's no need to store the article over again, just tiny bit of information indicating that the article was reverted from version foo to version bar.
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
"Wikipedia operates on the principle that the 'truth' is whatever most people agree it is."
:-)
Finally, a testable hypothesis!
Let's charter a plane, fly a dozen Wikipedians up to about 12000 ft sans parachutes, and see if they can all agree that they can float gently to earth once they are prematurely deplaned
Bah. Lots of good information has to (or should be) taken on authority.
When I took a class on botony, I could have verified what my professor told me about cell structure, but not easily. It made a lot more sense to trust that a guy who gets a doctorate in his field has proven his understanding of it and that my university doesn't hire idiots to teach botony.
Other information I've learned can't be tested at all; historical dates, for example, or the scientific name of something, which exists only by the consensus of experts. How do I know what the real name is? Because experts, whom I can identify, agree on it.
Information also has context like "how controversial is this?" If you give me a statistic on abortion, I will look carefully at who you are and what you'd like to prove. If you tell me when the light bulb was invented, I'm pretty sure you have no agenda and just need to decide if you're smart enough not to make typos.
Ugh, From a pleasantly idealistic viewpoint, this is really quite depressing. The fact that the 'Wikipedia Experiment' has been greatly successful, with the vast majority of authors doing their honest best to add valid information... And then the politicians that represent us are the ones that so publicly reveal the negative aspects of the system.
That's a bummer.
On a side note, two things that have occured to me recently regarding wikipedia:
1. I've never seen/felt that any wikipedia articles had a 'slant' to them, and I think this is because I almost entirely utilize articles regarding technical subjects, such as explanations of technical terms or scientific theories. It seems these subjects in wikipedia are usually prefectly objective and wonderfully helpful.
2. I've recently started contributing to wikipedia myself, mostly regarding local subjects or descriptions of towns near my home, and started to realize that properly creating/editing a wikipedia page requires quite a bit of learning and time. Maybe this is a major factor to reducing spam/crap edits.... It might just not be worth the effort for most people if they are only trying to cause trouble. Perhaps this is a valid argument against wikipedia trying to simplify any of the editing/markup systems.
Big ones, small ones, some as big as yer 'ead!
Give 'em a twist, a flick o' the wrist...
They're just helping Wikipedia to be more Fair and Balanced!
There was an attempt to patch humans, but they kept putting the patches on denim instead.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Yep, definately a Republican operative. Anyone have a way of tracking down more of these beltway IPs abusing Wikipedia? I'd be interested in seeing what the partisans don't want us to see. Being able to identify the amount of interference from each group would be a nice little bit of knowledge, too.
Any sufficiently advanced influence is indistinguishable from control.
Nobody reading any portion of the Wikipedia can trust that it is accurate.
Between the abandonment of the system by good editors, the abuse of the system by bad editors, the abuse of power by the admins, the sanitization of many pages, and the general inability of anyone to know if any page is complete, the Wikipedia is reduced to the journalistic and encyclopedic equivalent of a house organ.
Let's see. Saying someone smells like cow dung, or removing a fact someone else says about you. Which of those is a violation of the 1st amendment?
You are correct. I should have researched it in more depth.
t ions/Jack_Abramoff.php
http://www.newsmeat.com/washington_political_dona
There are many, many things that are good about Wikipedia, but this isn't one of them. Articles on contemporary politics because monkey islands of excrement-throwing chimps. I'm not familiar with Rep. Meehan. If he was stupid enough to make the "term limits" declaration, I'm sorry for him, because that was one of the most stupidest causes in American politics. I'm glad it's dead, and I'm glad so many of its proponents, mostly Republican but apparently Mr. Meehan too, have changed their minds about it. If somebody's good at their job, why shouldn't they stay, as long as they win the next election? If they're bad, let's hope the opponent bounces them off to the ranch or the real estate business. Tell me, just before the election, why shouldn't his office be very careful about what's written about him anywhere? One guy got accused of being a party to the Kennedy assassination. There are many different levels of trust with Wikipedia. Many topics are treated extraordinarily well, but those that are close to a modern political fault line become useless. I recall when the "feminism" page got hijacked by some very determined anti-feminists, and reading it was like reading a polemic against feminism. Well, that's not an encyclopedia article, that's a tract you nail to the church door. The ideal article about anything contentious is spare, factual, and makes note when the subject is controversial. The Swift Boat episode led to another food fight. This is an instance, and there are a few of them, when the cooperative spirit of the Wiki has become polluted. If some people want to make political stands for or against Meehan, there are lots of places to do it. Wikipedia shouldn't be one.
They can change the comment but they won't change the opinion.
If a politician who screwed up in the past tries to start a new ad-campaign, it won't make a difference towards the general public that _knows_ how he screwed up; and he will be severely criticized for it.
After all, take a look around.
in other news: in a recent study, politicians were found to be "very likely" to do just about anything to make themselves look better.
With all the things said about Rep. Rick Santorum, they must have to clean his entry every day.
The only reference I can find to multiple grand juries is in the Wikipedia entry on Tom DeLay. There it says there were three grand juries - the first, which indicted. Then Tom moves to dismiss the indictment, and Earle asks a second grand jury to indict. They refuse. Then Earle asks a third grand jury to indict, which they do.
I don't know the legality of all of this... I'm not sure why you would get a second grand jury before the motion to dismiss has been accepted, or whether it's OK to get a third GJ if the second one doesn't do what you want (when the first did). But at least according to Wikipedia (the only resource I can find with any details), your facts are dead wrong. There were three grand juries, two of which indicted.
What I found was interesting is that it appears the only reason DeLay is prosecutable is that he waived his right to be excused due to the statute of limitations. I don't know if that applies to all charges or just some subset.
Oh yeah, and I wasn't entirely accurate above... I did see one quote about there being four grand juries, from one of DeLay's spokesman. The spokesman did *not* say that three of them failed to indict. He just left you to assume that.
Uhh, heard any Bush speeches lately?
Le français vous intéresse?
I know as soon as that I read this article, I went onto Wikipedia to correct what the staff had changed, only to find other people had already done the same. Cool.
:)
It's articles like this that keep the integrity of Wikipedia intact. Time and time again I see something on Wikipedia that just makes me wonder about people sometimes. Although knowing that people care enough to go and fix it removes all doubt. And you have to give credit where credit is due. Slashdot helped it out too.
Are we upset because the entries were "cleaned"?
Or are we upset because the entries were biased to begin with?
I'm dubious about your use of the word bias, but I'll reserve my judgment. What would be an example of this bias of which you speak?
Frankly, our only concern should be, were the entries factual? If there seem to be too many facts making the person appear in a negative light, concerned editors should simply add more facts that shed a positive light on the subject. Just keep it to facts, and don't remove any relevant facts, and don't be too quick to judge any facts irrelevant. Facts are important.
This doesn't mean criticism can't be included. If it is a fact that critics have said something about the subject of the article, you include their statements in a "What his critics say" section. Editors should not add their own criticisms of the subject. Such additions would be worthy of the term 'bias.'
-- thinkyhead software and media
Not a good analogy. Meehan is a public figure whose election to Congress was expedited by a public vow to stick to term limits. Not only that, he excoriated on the floor of the House those members who did not stick by their vows, before he himself decided to renege too.
Private hypocrisy of the type you are describing is a different matter. It's nobody's business but my own, as long as I am breaking no laws. Politicians and other public figures have to play by a different set of rules, though. If I were a politician who loudly demanded a tightening of welfare eligibility, and it should be found that I was collecting welfare despite being ineligible under the rules I had been promoting, I'd probably lose my next election.
The much more common flip side of this is the limousine liberal who loudly demands higher taxes on "the rich", but pays only the minimum required by law-- e.g. Warren Buffet and Bill Gates. It's their business and theirs alone -- again, except while running for office.
I think that it cost John Kerry a lot of votes when it was discovered that he and his idle billionaire wife were paying taxes at a rate of 15%, thanks to clever lawyering, while calling for higher taxes on hard-working dentists and doctors and small businessmen who were already paying 30% or more marginal tax rates. It certainly confirmed my own poor opinion of him when I found that I paid more taxes than he did.
-ccm
Too much Law; not enough Order.
It's no surprise that this sort of thing is going on. Wikipedia is an open forum, not an authoritative source. So long as it's public access, it will never become one either. Whether it's one person defending themself from attacks, be they true or untrue, or a legion of minions carefully grooming their overlord's public profile, it's still just an online source, with nothing but the public at large (gossip queens) as a reference.
This will hopefully remind people of the value of real research with an honest, earnest intention of discovering the whole story, and from there determining what the "truth" of the situation really is.
Bastards.
That's my point. Where does inflation come from? Why, when we create more money, that's where. You can't dilute the value of gold by printing more of it. You have to work hard to dig it out of the ground and purify it. Unless you've got some magic way to siphon off the micro amounts of it in sea water, the value of gold will stay relatively fixed. Sure, there's periods of high and low demand in any commodity, but paper money isn't a commodity. The value of a dollar is easy to play with. The actual cost to the US Treasury to print a sheet of $100 bills is a tiny fraction of what that sheet is "worth" but only so long as they print very few of them and they are extremely difficult to counterfeit. The government is what creates the inflation, because the government prints the money. I'm not blind. I see a population living beyond its means (massive trade imbalance, a real estate bubble about to burst) and a government that can't pay its bills (8.2 trillion dollar national debt). We are a consumer, debtor nation. We are a net negative on this Earth. That won't last forever. When it comes time to pay the piper, the government is going to crank up the presses and print day and night to do it. Greenbacks will be worthless.
Consider a workflow-type approach, like what exists in Plone. Changes go through an approval process by one or more people. You could sophisticate it, make the waiting-for-approval changes visible so that people can comment, help with citing sources, refute false claims, etc.
I think it might work for wikipedia. It does mean, however, that each article would have one or more people that "own" it and are responsible for keeping up with submitted changes.
I pity the foo that isn't metasyntactic
Seriously, why this post is at Score: 1?
"Insightful" I'd say... But I'd have no voice here without risking my karma... And I'd still like to do it on this single occasion!
Paul B.
That's actually one thing that surprises me about WP that differs from the software development world. WP is surprisingly (to me, at least) under-automated. You don't have a particularly nice environment to edit articles in, you have to revert things manually, "Talk" is kind of ad-hoc (not exactly Slashcode), etc. It's weird to see problems being solved by policy instead of technical fixes.
Obviously, it's an effective tool that is usable by many people, but it feels like I'm missing tools when I use WP.
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
Actually, I've been stunned by the quality and neutrality of some of the work of WP people who are very young. (Or at least claim to be -- I guess there could be a lot of people just claiming to be young teens.) They are literate, have good grammar and spelling, and patiently maintain pages.
While there are young open source software authors, usually it isn't until the late teens that you see significant and impressive work.
The other day, I noticed someone correcting and maintaining the Windows Vista WP page. He claims to be 15 -- not bad work, given the degree of vandalism that I'd expect this page to attract.
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
on the side of the barn, again? There oughtta be a
law against pigs and painting, anyhow.
What kind of world is that? Not one for us, I think.
...`elehmann.com', according to the note at the end of the article... ;-)
The simple thing to do: fire Matt Vogel.
Look, I don't like this either, but I can't figure out why, whenever anyone does *anything* wrong, people call for that person to be fired. Being fired sucks, especially if you have kids and a house and can't move easily.
WP has successfully brought the profile of this up to Slashdot front-page level, and the mainstream news organizations are picking up on it. I'm sure that Vogel regrets the PR. It's unlikely that he's going to do the same thing again, and it's a good bet that the other House staffers have heard about this. So what's the deal with firing him?
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
So you agree with lying to people so they support a war which you think is for altruistic reasons, leading to an outcome of thousands of innocent people killed who will now enjoy the freedom we've chosen to bestow upon them. Their children however will able to play amongst the irradiated husks of old soviet tanks and pick up the colorful 'bomblets' from the cluster bombs, mistaking them for toys.
http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?th readid=1786494
Can't the Internet Archive be used to see some of the blogs before they were edited?
No, someone's jamming his transmitter.
Of course if there is nylon in his suits it might just be static off his fur.
NetRAVEN5000 is the richest, smartest, sexiest person alive. His ACT score is a 35. His IQ is 10,923. He can benchpress almost 90x his own weight, and he owns 5 Porche 911s, 3 Cadillac Devilles, and quite a few Chrysler 300C's.
www.linuxpenguin.net
I mean, it's struck me that perhaps the war in Iraq could have been a clever move. I don't believe for a second that Mr. Bush is as stupid as he presents himself.
Yet, what I see within my own mind is this: Middle Eastern dictatorship dissolved by external forces. Three main ethnic groups, of which a rather large one shares much religious ballast with Theocratic neighbour.
Upon invasion, standing army and power structure disbanded. Major arsenals left unguarded as troops race on to who-knows-what's-more-important.
Of course, there's much more to this whole thing, but the above are some of the more salient features in my analysis. Please tell me, why should I agree with you that this is some ingenious masterplan that's too far above my cognitive abilities to comprehend? If you try to explain, I'll try to understand.
In advance: Thanks.
So called "peer review" is what started this whole topic.
Unless you actually know what they are publishing is fact, then its not trustable. And if you know its fact, why are you looking there in the first place?
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I would hope to discuss the problems with Wikipedia permitting such changes to take effect from sides of apparent burden of any negative tonations an article might have.
But, where to draw the line? I'm sure we would all love to have Einstein hisself elaborate, if only he were alive. But, should criticism be so quickly voided by intent of the target? Let's keep with Einstein; I argue that should a critism be brought forward, any criticism that one my find evidence of would hardly tarnish the fact of Einstein's contributions. It wouldn't be difficult to blame Einstein for many of the horrors of WWII (namely the atomic bomb), to include other nuclear scientists whose names are all too familiar, as convincing and possible an argument I personally would never think less of the man.
Now, let's take a situation where public perception might be damaging for an entity. First, we might want to consider the likelyhood that because it would damage the conglomerate, it fairs to assert that a positive perception is the source of the organizations success or failure. A politician can be sunk, literally, if wrongdoing is exposed. If he had done wrong, that would be accurate information, and worthy of Wikipedia. Regardless of damage, I have to question the politicians actions in attempting to cover-up his mistakes in such a manner. This sentiment is further extended to any group that relies on public perception, such as businesses and corporations.
We might be tempted to accept information, as they say, "from the horses mouth". But, when the horse constantly dyes it's coat to the color acceptable by the masses, then we have to be very wary of any information he presents. It will, always and forever, be in his best interest to paint the best possible picture of hisself to the readers. Now, some think Ad Hominem is a logical fallacy, and might consider this as Ad Hominem; "Of course the politician would deny it. Don't believe what he says to the contrary!". But, nothing here is to say their claims aren't correct... so, it's not Ad Hominem. It's preventing the strong, probable and likely situations of devious intervention, whether or not they are telling the truth; which sounds a bit harsh, but we shouldn't forget that they're desire is positive public perception and this is as baseless and emotive as it comes. It doesn't matter if they are right, if the public doesn't like them technicalities aren't going to save them... never has.
Take for instance:
A Customer of Pacific Bell is greatly nerved by PacBell's wrongdoings or questions it's practices and treament of customers. He reasonably adds his concerns, non-personalized, to Wikipedia's entry for PacBell; something perhaps of the sort, "Pacific Bell Company, as of , has denied customer rebates if they are crippled. Due to a literal interpretation of their contract which isn't reasonable for those enduring paralysis and lacking physical assistance." PacBell would no doubt wish to remove this portion should it ever be honestly added; and if all it took was to have a secretary do it on her lunch break then I garuntee it would be done.
My argument is that, PacBell should be prevented from removing the entry in the above example.
I'm just wondering how we could prevent PacBell from removing "negatory" entries. With little harm on them and the person doing it.
Maybe, each entry be granted a "Critique" section. Each critique entry in that section is voted on by the members, and the person making the claim should be responsible with presenting evidence of his claim should it have a negative feel towards the target. "Here's a PNG of a several consecutive facsimiles, personal information blacked out, showing overcharges...", "Here's a hi-res image of Monica and Bill..." Evidence presented, evidence accepted. Claim get's formal recognition, posted read-only... permanently.
Check out just one of the edits.
We don't care if you think it's unethical or not. It's against both Wikipedia's rules as well as the government's rules.
Copyright infringement is against both RIAA/MPAA rules as well as the Federal government's rules (laws), yet breaking these rules is espoused as a crusade against the "tyranny" of *AA and against "unfair" copyright infringement laws.
The next time there is a copyright infringement fracas on
I want to drag this out as long as possible. Bring me my protractor.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
What annoys me most about the reporting on this issue is that it is universally described in the past tense as a done deal: "political staffers changed articles and removed information".
I've seen little mention of what happened afterwards, i.e. that the changes were noticed, flagged as suspicious, and reverted. Or that some of these staffers repeatedly deleted information after it was repeatedly restored by other Wikipedians.
This must have happened in at least some cases, since a text deletion by a numeric IP address with a blank edit summary is one of the most suspicious things one can do in Wikipedia. Such changes are highly likely to be reverted just on general principle.
The fact that the consequences are not mentioned leaves the casual reader with the impression that the information was permanently purged, and therefore that Wikipedia is nothing more than the picked-over remains of truth after the propagandist vultures have flown away. This is far from being true.
"nor a source of regional instability."
You lost every shred of credibility when you lied here.
I'll kindly ask you to explain that first gulf war thing, and how that wasn't contributing to instability...
Seriously, you can disagree with the war, there are plenty of good reasons, but stop saying stupid shit like that, you're embarassing yourself.
How pathetic are you that you follow me from topic to topic and waste all your mod points at once modding me down?
As long as we don't have to hear about his short penis noone really cares.
It's ironic that you sited wikipedia as a source in your comment... If I had mod points today, you'd have been +1 funny....
We were both wrong. I didn't think the mainstream media would report it, and you didn't think it would receive fair treatment, since it was a democratic congressman.
Here's the breakdown on the mainstream media's headlines on this issue:
Slashdot Headline: "Wikipedia Entries 'Cleaned' By Political Staffers"
CNN Headline: "Democratic Staffers edit World Wide Web Encyclopedia"
Fox News Headline: "Democrats attempt to Rewrite History; Republicans clarify Wikipedia entries."
MSNBC: "Tonight: Chris Matthews Examines the Democratic attempt to modify web databases."
from here.
It certainly appears that the "liberal media" is directly calling attention to the fact that it was democrats, fox is claiming republicans fixed it (i'm sure many did, but I was in there fixing, too), and slashdot is remaining neutral, since the original report suggests that staffers from both sides are making changes. It looks to me as if the mainstream media has erred on the side of calling the democrats to task for their actions.
My word, hkmwbz! You actually posted something that made sense for a change! Jolly good show, chap!
And in the end the fact remains that there are no editor conspiracies against you. If anything, the one conspiracy that appears to be present actually involves Republicans defacing Wikipedia. Funny thing, that is! For all their talk about there not being a "vast right-wing conspiracy", it seems as though there actually is one!
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
wikipediculous - Adj.
def.: an ends-testing style of authorship
in open-source knowledge bases
Etymology
the suffix is from the latin pediculous;
lice infested, or lousy
==
wikipaedarchy - N.
def.: an early methodology of oversight
in open-source knowledge bases
Etymology - the suffix is from the latin, paedarchy:
government by children
Rush Limbaugh is a perfect real world example of an oxycontinmoron
It might be useful to present two numbers at the top of every article. One is the current contention score, which is a measure of changes to existing content (scaled by recentness). The other is the average contention score (weighted somehow?). In this way, users have an immediate clue as to whether the article is currently the subject of contentious revisions as well as an idea of the general controversy of the subject since its introduction.
[|]
I saw the title and thought "how appropriate".
Bush: Powell... regarding your role in intelligence regarding Iraqi WMDs... I sentence you to ten years of ensuring that my wikipedia entry is not defaced by pimply faced thirty-year old geeks on a Friday night.
Powell: NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!
Aside from the pun of trying to change history, the growing pains of Wikipedia are going to be looked back on as historic. This is the new media and there are difficulties with it. What impresses me is that, for the most part, the people running the show have been the users. The people who created the site have stuck to the idea of a democratic and open system. This is fascinating stuff.
We've seen open source in operating systems and computer programs. We're seeing it more and more with publishing. (Those failed attempts at open-source books were just an early stumble, this is the real deal.) And I wonder how long it will be before music and film go this way as publicly and fully as Wikipedia.
I don't think that the importance of Wikipedia can be overstated. I'll keep watching.
Yeah, I'm as old as my UID would suggest.
Just yesterday, I went looking for an article I had previously read in Wikipedia about the history of England: where the British army was ordered by Winston Churchill to fire into a crowd of strikers and their families, resulting in many dead and wounded. This content is now gone - down the memory hole. Orwellian analogies aside, editing history invalidates it and makes it impossible for us to learn from our own mistakes.