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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...
It can be edited by everybody. Including the "Congressional staffers". Why is it "censorship"?
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Busy, but banned :)
"This IP has been blocked It belongs to Information Systems, U.S. House of Representatives Has vandalised many times."
Looks like some pretty serious stuff they're trying to get away with, if you take a look at the list
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
I know you're joking, but you should go look into what Ron Paul has written, especially if you are an American. Notice how vastly different his thoughts are compared with those of the other politicians in the US today. It'd be a good exercise for any American to do. It's the closest you'll get to what America truly stands for.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
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
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 a funny reflection of the world (or at least the US) today; politicians meddle with something that belongs to the public, making it worse, using it to their own advantage, and the public has to kick them out.
If only that can work for the real senate and government and not just the senate's IP address.
What time is it/will be over there? Check with my iPhone app!
Seeing that it was used before you doesn't tell you anything useful about who the person was who did the editing (unless their nick or IP is one you recognize as someone you know outside of Wikipedia).
In real life, when we see a bunch of conflicting claims about something, we look at those speaking, and ask questions such as:
In Wikipedia (as in Slashdot -- but no one is claiming Slashdot's comment section is a valuable source of unbiased reference information) this information is not available. Instead, we get a bunch of conflicting quasi-anonymous edits, and no information to help us decide which are more valid.
The problem with that argument is, while it's true from the perspective of the Wikipedia reader, alternately from the standpoint of a taxpayer, there is some question as to whether paying an elected official's staff to edit their online bio may be illegal. If you are a Massachusetts taxpayer, you are probably paying for his staffers. If his staffers have enough time to ponder his Wikipedia bio, then he's probably overstaffed, and you're paying for it. And, even if you are opposed to that elected official, you have to pay for his staffer to blow sunshine up people's arses in his bio.
-- "In order to have power, I must be taken seriously." -Mojo Jojo
I'm sure you're aware that Ron Paul was a Libertarian. He jumped to the Republican Party because he felt he could accomplish more change within the party than from an external third party. Which tells you a sad state of affairs in the US when someone simply changes their label to a major party and has magically gets elected.
Can't say I blame him for trying really.
"The bass, the rock, the mic, the treble. I like my coffee black, just like my metal" - Mindless Self Indulgence
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
See, way back when I first heard of Wiki, I knew better than to look to it for these things. I grew up in South LA; I know all about graffiti. Blocks of useless stupid tagging punctuated by the occasional breathtaking work of art. If you closely examine a tagged-up wall, you'll notice half the paint is there to scratch out a rival faction's tag. In other words, every wall has an "edit war" going on. Same with any surface that anybody and everybody can write whatever they want on. Only the best art or most profound words stay untouched - tribal respect.
We have the rest of the internet for accredited news and information sources. The Wiki is just one more place to read and write.
Granted, the Republicans were still pretending to be fiscally conservative at that point, so they claimed some credit, but the second they didn't have to get it past a Democratic president, suddenly balancing the budget went out the window, and it was unneed tax cuts for upper incomes at the same time as a war they decided we needed, something we've never tried in history.
And, no, I'm not just looking at this in hindsight. The second Bush started handing out 'future tax rebates' or whatever that shit was in 2001 at the start of his first term, I said 'What the hell? How about we use the extra money to reduce the deficit? Like the 'tax-and-spend' liberal was doing with his surpluses.'.
I used to be like some people, thinking both parties were equally bad. My opinion of the Democratic party has not gone up any, and in fact has slightly dipped with their inability to get on message and take as stand.
My option of the Republicans, however, is slightly below...I actually have no political comparisons that can go that low. They consist of the most incompetant, greedy, vicious, petty, amoral bastards in the history of politics.
That said...editing Wikipedia to remove bad facts about yourself is just incredibly stupid behavior, no matter who does it, because if you knew anything about Wikipedia that is a good way to get your ass kicked, PR-wise. However, the staff of politicians is large and often does PR stuff without their knowledge, and many of them are young idiots.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
The interesting thing about a wiki is that while it can be changed it keeps a history so that you can see what was changed. That means you are free to recover what was removed and can actually back up your paranoid theories that someone is trying to bend the truth to the way they want it to be.
What wiki really needs is a control structure like big open source projects have. All sections owned by somebody that has to verify edits and pass them up the chain to owners of bigger sections, etc until you reach the top and the project maintainer stamps the edit as okay. Anyone in charge along the way should be able to revert the changes but not get rid of the record of the changes they turned down. Also it'd be cool if alternate reversions could be viewed alongside each other and modded up and down by the community. Karma like Slashdot has would be good too so anonymous and new user's changes are automatically trusted less than experienced users. On Slashdot I have high karma so my posts start off at a higher level than someone logged into a dummy account and overall that seems to be a good system for weeding out a lot of the garbage. Maybe even do a sort of eBay thing where people that have filed an offical id with their account get an extra mod point too by default since you can easily track who is making what changes and ban them if they are abussive.
They've been working on some of this stuff but it seems it has a ways to go before it works as well as the Linux kernel project or something like that. In general their code that wiki is based on could use some improvement with more flexibility added.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
Only if you weren't paying attention, or had a short memory. Listening only to the official sources of news, I knew that the war was a scam. They, essentially, out and out said it was. They had announced the war before the election...I didn't take them seriously (my fault, I suppose, but I wasn't supporting them anyway...so I didn't see any cause to investigate). More problematic are the stories where the news is laundered by the "official sources" before anyone else ever sees it. This was brought home to me clearly by 9/11. Something happened then, I know a person who worked as a rescue worker. For just what happened...well, we MUST trust the official sources, because they are the only source of information. But to what degree must we trust them? I did notice that the next day legislation of a restrictive nature was entered into congress, and quite quickly we ended up with the P.A.T.R.I.O.T.(sic) act. Did they just have this ready ahead of time? Did they know what was happening ahead of time? Did they only know that something major was about to happen? (It's clear that if they didn't know that something major was about to happen, they should all be fired for incompetence.) Did they plan the whole thing? All we have to judge by is their word of honor (to which they refuse to swear under oath), because ALL the sources of information were cleared through the executive branch before they were released to the public. If you trust them to tell the truth, though, you get a nice, clear, easy to comprehend, story. Is it true? Maybe. And that's the only honest answer. Maybe. We have their word that it's true, and certainly they wouldn't be evil enough to lie to the public.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Could you honsitly say you wouldn't be tempted to change things critisising about you if you could.
Doesn't mean you should, though - not if they're true. If you do it on Wiki somebody will just revert your edit anyway, then it compounds your original problem by making you look like you're trying to cover something up.
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.
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.
But let me guess, you stop the whole IP block, buy why hot the whole ISP, then another ISP and keep blocking ISPs, well why stop there, block the whole internet.
Oh, but you can protect the pages. How many? How about all of them?.
The point here is that if people are allowed to do whatever they want to an encyclopedia, it might end up being a very inaccurate source. I wouldn't reference it in a paper to be published, that's for sure.
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.
who the hell would reference ANY encyclopedia in a paper to be published??
This space available.
I don't think 3RR is automatic, though. If it's obvious that the person doing the edits is the one causing the problem, rather than the one doing the reverts, for example, then the appropriate person gets banned.
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.
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