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."
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.''
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.
> "These edits range from benificial and informative to libelous and childish."
That pretty much sums up Wikipedia
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.
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?
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.
That pretty much sums up our house of represenatives.
(me thinks its just an underlying meme of the human condition)
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.
It's the censorship of the loudest voice, drowning out all others. A Babel of infinite loudhailers, shouting so many points of view you don't know up from purple any more. The truth is out there - unfortunately you can no longer tell the truth from the spin, the spin from the distortions or the distortions from the downright lies. If Congressional staffers are being paid to remove criticisms, how can you win an edit war against them?
> It can be edited by everybody. Including the "Congressional staffers". Why is it "censorship"?
Because THEY weren't supposed to edit it, it was for US to bloviate. Yea right. The typical slashdot/DailyKos types think they own the Internet and
The Internet is changing a lot but don't expect the old power structure to simply vanish overnite. If Wikipedia is going to stick to their claim of being open they have to expect people to remove the more nasty bits from their entries.
Democrat delenda est
You have time to dig through page histories and whatnot? I'd rather just go consult a source I already trust.
That said, I do use Wikipedia quite a bit... but only because I have the time to waste.
...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
> 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.
By reading the page history, and encouraging other users to do so. I think Wikipedia should have a little notation in the heading that shows the number of edits in the past little while, and allows you to quickly view them - perhaps merged into the same document.
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 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.
People will pass up steak once a week, for crap every day.
To me, the problem is that wikipedia is presented in "traditional mode" where the user assumes that the current article to be the best of the best, like traditional encyclopedias.
I think wikipedia would be better understood, and therefore a better tool, if it were presented as multiple concurrent articles, instead of the latest winner of a revision war posing as a proper encyclopedia entry.
Some physics entry might have one branch, whereas a controversial subject like abortion would have multiple branches.
The trick is to present the branches to the user so that they understand immediately that there is contention. Otherwise, there is no reason for them to think that Wikipedia should be questionable, since it does *look* like a traditional encyclopedia.
Yes, I am aware that there are mistakes in traditional encyclopedias. However, you are certainly not going to find flames and 0-day trolls in Brittanica. Wikipedia's current interface does a poor job of helping non-technical users understand this.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
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
Yeah, yeah, but is there life beyond snarky post-modernist cynicism?
Not so much you, Jeff; the whole modern age seems just a little too pouty over the fact that the Information Age brought more ambiguity than transparency.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
That may be true, but the Lowell Sun has just called attention how widespread this problem could be. This article has now been posted on both Slashdot and Digg. All the House and Senate pages will likely get a good looking over by many members of the net-savvy public with particular attention paid to IP addresses from house/senate staffers. It will backfire from a rabid right-wing point of view, if it turns out that lots of Republicans are also engaged in this practice.
it's a blue bright blue Saturday hey hey
The system seems to be working: PR inappropriately inserted gets news headline exposing it and more attention directed at the subject being concealed.
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
The typical Congressman represents about 650,000 voters. Congressional Apportionment.
It ix fair to suggest that he has little to fear from a posting to Slashdot.
C'mon wikipedia is a brilliant ideia. The Repository os Human knowledge. If only human society could live up to it's greatness. The biggest flaw of wikipedia is the people. PS: I'm not affiliated with the Chinese goverment or Wikipedia staff .
What law? This is just how Wikipedia operates. It's what the founders wanted -- a page editable by anyone. Lots of people spend lots of time keeping entries about themselves free from vandalism, removing incorrect statements, or inserting all sorts of puffery. The only difference this time is that a politician was doing it, instead of Jane Doe. What law did he or his staff violate that no one else has?
-- I'm old enough to have lived through six different meanings of the word "hacker."
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.
It is the case for Wikipedia though - and exactly why I no longer use it.
Each page is *only* as accurate as the last person to edit it. The idea of the 'community' deciding what is right is a sham - anyone who is quick on the edits becomes the current 'correct' source.
Politicians are quick to realize this... Expect a *lot* of political edits in the future - they probably have paid staff keeping articles saying their idea of 'truth' 24/7 already.
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.
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.
As I see it, there is no point in this kind of evaluation of the speaker's personality. Good information should stand in its own two feet, and it should be easily verifiable. If it's not easily verifiable, then we should take it as a matter of taste.
If the information is of the kind that would cause you to significantly alter your opinion based on who was saying it, then you should reject such information in the first place, even, and especially, if it is said by a character that is pleasant to you.
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.
>> "These edits range from benificial and informative to libelous and childish."
>
> That pretty much sums up our house of represenatives.
Except for the beneficial and informative part.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
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?
What law? This is just how Wikipedia operates. It's what the founders wanted -- a page editable by anyone.
And it's worth noting that this story, and the controversy surrounding it, can be seen as part of the corrective mechanism of such a site. Sure, any public figure can modify a Wikipedia page to distort the truth in their favor (or any non-public figure can modify a page to slander someone else), but when the transgression is serious enough, someone points it out, the story becomes public, and then everyone knows what they're up to. I think we can all agree that these particular attempts to rewrite history have blown up spectacularly in the perpetrators' faces.
I think that should be considered in all of the debates raging right now about the validity of Wikipedia as a source of information.
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."
We should be equally outraged when an elected representative does this, regardless of what party they're in. Excusing it now just means it's that much easier for them to excuse it when/if they ever regain power.
In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
given the minimization of every single Republican scandal
That's not a "given", by any means. Both wings of the ruling party try like hell to amplify any hint of scandal on the other side, and minimize any on their own side. Think Whitewater was flogged to death? Tom DeLay was indicted after a very persistent DA empanelled four grand juries. The first three refused to indict!
The long and short of it is, both the republicans and the democrats fight dirty, with every tool at their disposal.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
As I see it, there is no point in this kind of evaluation of the speaker's personality. Good information should stand in its own two feet, and it should be easily verifiable. If it's not easily verifiable, then we should take it as a matter of taste.
Unh, I don't understand what you are saying. Any project seeking to expand human knowledge necessarily depends upon contributions from multiple sources; and those sources must be interrogated, evaluated and ranked. Evidence depends upon provenance, in law and arts and humanities and sciences alike. Have you heard the Newton quote, "If I have seen a little farther it is only because I have stood on the shoulder of giants"? The personages of the giants is important in the quote -- Newton does not say, "If I have seen a little farther it is only because I command a vast store of previously-established, easily verifiable knowledge." Rather, Newton judges the individuals whose work he builds upon as "giants" -- worthy of trust.
"Easily verifiable" information is not all that interesting; that would seem to me to rule out all theoretical work, much astro-physics, most quantum physics, any high-order neurological study, all philosophy, lots of psychology, and pretty much everything in historical study. Plus, it would require all intellectual projects to start de novo, from scratch. While that is occasionally a good idea (break down orthodoxy by starting from scratch!) it seems unnecessarily limiting and atomistic. Is there no one from whom you can learn? Do you have no criteria by which to judge some research better than others? Can you not evaluate methodology, preeminance, the critical faculties of other humans?
It's over now. That, or it's go time. One of the two. acts of gord
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
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.
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...
Don't be naive.
Thanks for the suggestion. I was thinking about becoming naive, but on further reflection I think I'll avoid it.
Your "corrective mechanism" works in both directions.
I'm not quite sure what you mean by this. The system certainly has its flaws, and I completely agree with the sentiment that Wikipedia should be used as a rough guideline, supplemented by multiple other sources, rather than a definitive source. Probably its biggest weakness is that, like all "democratic" systems, it is subject to the whims of mob rule. So, for example, if Wikipedia were limited to the state of Alabama you wouldn't want to use it as a source of information on evolutionary theory. But the one thing that it is very robust against is a small minority with an agenda trying to dominate an issue -- which is exactly what this was about.
All this means is that those who are looking to manipulate Wiki for their own ends will learn how to hide their IP address behind proxies or whatever and obfuscate their connections to the interested parties in question.
In which case we wouldn't have any definitive evidence telling us who was behind the revisions, but we would know that they happened and be able to easily correct them. Which is what really matters.
The only lesson learned here is the oldest lesson of all: don't get caught!
Which is irrelevant. Whether the culprit is caught or not, his attempts to wipe the public record are not likely to get anywhere.
All of this once again helps us answer the truely ultimate question of life: If the opposite of pro is con, what is the opposite of progress?
What day is it? Could you please tell me?
Your biases are showing.
"left wing" and "progessive" in the American political lexicon are pretty close to synonymous. Certainly "progressive" IS "left" however else you may want to characterize it. Getting upset about that characterization is pretty bizarre.
Oh, and there is lots of evidence showing links between the Saddam's government and Al Qaeda. You may choose not to believe them (it's called "confirmation bias") but it certainly is not a silly or incorrect thing for people who *do* believe them to put them in! But let's not start a thread about whether my assertion of that is true or not, because few who care enough to post are open minded enough to change their opinion based on whatever anyone says on Slashdot.
Political controversies simply cannot be neatly settled. There are legitimate difference of opinion over what seem to be settled facts. Few situations are simple enough that both sides have the same view.
So if it is political, it will be disuputed. Count on it. And telling us which interpretation is right is rather silly, unless it is about something relatively simple and solidly established in fact. I could give you a zillion examples, but that would start a huge thread of people disaagreeing with me, and name calling, and all sorts of tripe.
Get used to it. People honestly and dishonestly disagree. And some people will use whatever power they have, be it a political staff or an powerful constituency (such as that of the Democratic Underground) to fight it out in a Wiki.
The only good weather is bad weather.
But, since Meehan is a Democrat, expect this to get absolutely no mention in any news outlet.
Right, like the way they raked Colin Powell over the coals for presenting false and plagiarised information to the U.N.? Oh wait, that's right. There was a total media blackout about that incident.
You really need to pay more attention. The media is not "liberally biased." It is biased towards its own ends, which means selling high-end advertising, toadying up to the corporate elites, and fomenting fake controversies whenever possible to stir ratings. The big corporate outlets very infrequently deal with anything of substance.
If the media appears to you to be giving the Dems a free pass, more likely it's because they rarely cover anything the left wing does, unless it's particularly showy or the right wing makes noise about it in their thousands of media outlets, consummate showmen that they are.
Put down your Ayn Rand novel and visit Media Matters on a daily basis to get a deeper picture of what's going on.
-- 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.
Seeing as how I edit Wikipedia all the time and have never had any problems, I'd say the problem is likely with you.
Wikipedia, by its nature, forces you to do this. And that is a good thing!
Clever signature text goes here.