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."

Comments

Wikipedians expose the "congressional edits"

[worb]

You can have a look at how some of them were revealed in the talk page for rep. Marty Meehan (D). There's even a big list of entries edited by a specific IP address, with the comment:

"These edits range from benificial and informative to libelous and childish."

Re:Wikipedians expose the "congressional edits"

[vought]

So, it looks like representatives from both parties are editing Wikipedia articles. Let's take a look at how the "liberal" media might treat this story.

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."

Contrast this to the "bipartisan" Abramaoff bribery scandal, where no money was given to Democrats and Abramoff's clients decreased their giving to Democrats at Abramoff's direction.

*sigh* I know it's a hypothetical, but given the minimization of every single Republican scandal in the past several years, do you really think it's far off base?

Mudslinging

[BMIComp]

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...

That's the power and the weakness of Wikipedia

[mi]

It can be edited by everybody. Including the "Congressional staffers". Why is it "censorship"?

Re:not just him....

[Shadyman]

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

best line in wikitalk pages for this (House) IP

[fiddlesticks]

It's a sad day when we have to treat a House IP the same way we treat an AOL one.

Read down, from the beginning of the talk for that IP. It's like a sad soap opera. Noone there knows anything about how they're being observed/tracked, or IP addresses, or wikipedia, or NPOV, or, really, anything.

Wikipedia's system works

[Aqws]

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.

Re:not just him....

[netsharc]

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.

Re:It's easy to see the edits.

[neocon]

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.

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:

• Is the speaker likely to have knowledge of the matter they are discussing?
• Is the speaker someone whom we generally trust to be of sound mind?
• Does the speaker have a vested interest in our believing one thing or another?

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.

funny

[simontek2]

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.

Re:It's the done thing.

[MikeFM]

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.

So it's POV or NPOV?

[towsonu2003]

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.