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Wikipedia vs Congressional Staffers [Update]
There has been quite a bit of recent reporting on the recent troubles between Wikipedia and certain Congressional staffers. In response, abdulzis mentions that "an RFC, Wikipedia's mediation method to deal with 'disharmonious users', has been opened to take action against US Congressional staffers who repeatedly blank content and engage in revert wars and slanderous or libelous behavior which violates Wikiepdia code. The IP ranges of US Congress have been currently blocked, but only for a week until the issue can be addressed more directly."
And now Congress will vote to make freely-editable online encyclopedias illegal. Freedom of speech loses in a landslide. :D
Or perhaps we can come to an agreement where no one edits other entries for the purpose of skewing information. That would make me smile.
Do we need any further evidence that congress people and their staff have too much time on their hands? I hope in the contentious atmosphere that plagues Washington these days that people from all sides of the political spectrum can agree that Congress is given too many resources to accomplish too little.
Next they'll be wasting all their time on Slashdot.
I'm a big tall mofo.
No, it's called a FOLLOW-UP. This article contains more information than the previous one.
I mean, the editors screw up enough, why call them out even more than we have to?
Well children if you cannot play nice we are just going to have to take this away
Congressional trolls. This idea amuses me deeply.
I wonder if any of the trolls we've got on here are working for Congress.
Perhaps, somehow, Natalie Portman is a matter of national security.
xkcd.com - a webcomic of mathematics, love, and language.
--[insert congresscritter's name here]
Just look at this past entry for "Beaver" (now corrected, but Wikipedia's history allows us to see it in the full glory)
Beaver
"Beavers explosively attack people with their menacing teeth. They are the most deadly animals alive."
Test your net with Netalyzr
And the people who removed that line are trying to suppress the truth about beavers.
William of Ockham had no beard. The most likely explanation is that it was chewed off by squirrels every morning.
so, does this mean the cia will sooner or later deploy botnets for distributed editwars?
wikipedia might end up as the surprisingly unglamorous battleground of the long-awaited "cyberwarfare"... i mean it's such an inviting target for groups who are out to mess with people's opinions and there's no group that fits that description as good as a gouvernment at war.
[i have an opinion and i am not afraid to use it]
DC underlings all hang out together, drink together, live together and brag incessantly to each other about who is the most important. My guess would be that this has nothing to do with the legislators themselves and everything to do with with interns generating ammunition for trash-talking at Lulu's. The Senators themselves aren't organized enough to be doing this in such large numbers, nor do they know what Wikipedia is. It's the 19-year-olds doing it.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2005/12/16
The main offending IP in question is no longer blocked as of 30 January, this morning:
06:36, 30 January 2006 Michael Snow unblocked User:143.231.249.141 (Not consistently used by the same person; we shouldn't block people just because they work for Congress, and some people using this IP address are making commendable efforts at complying with our culture and policies)
Maybe instead of banning them outright, the ip's involved in this matter (or any serious breach of the rules) should not just be banned, but silently rerouted to a server running a different copy of wikipedia. They could make all kinds of 'mistakes' etc there, but only similarly banned ip's would ever see that content. They keep wasting time (and taxpayers money) while the rest of the world would have a chance to do without their contributions to humanity.
Does anybody know of such a system implemented in any forum/community software? I think it would be quite effective.
This space is intentionally staring blankly at you
Look, I think the political creatures in Washington are essentially pork-feeding, selfish, backbiting wh0res generally, but let's be honest - they are not alone.
The IP ranges of US Congress have been currently blocked, but only for a week until the issue can be addressed more directly.
This is simply WRONG. I'd wager that a HUGE number of people posting in Wiki are self-interested, or are grinding some sort of political axe.
Just because John Smith isn't actually EMPLOYED by the DNC doesn't mean his revision about President G.W. Bush is automatically based on an altruistic desire to post the truth. One minute reading any intarweb forum will tell you that much.
Roberta Johnson could be posting a revision to the Ted Kennedy article because she's an ardent Republican that hates him. Her edits are somehow more 'valid' than that of a staffer in Cheney's office?
Wikipedia is an open document. The revisions are clear and publicly visible. Why is it all right to censor and prohibit posters whose motivations are obviously suspect, while completely (naively?) ignoring the gazillions of posters whose motivations are probably no less base, but not obviously so?
This is wrong.
-Styopa
I'm particularly amused by the note in subscript after that remarkable claim:
'Citation needed.'
Which gives me a mental image of a wikipedia editor like some genial dusty old university professor saying 'Not that we don't believe you about the deadly beavers, you understand, just that you haven't properly cited a source for this claim of yours...'
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
Some would disagree with you that the tragedy of the commons applies in this case:
"When people reflexively apply this model to open-source cooperation, they expect it to be unstable with a short half-life. Since there's no obvious way to enforce an allocation policy for programmer time over the Internet, this model leads straight to a prediction that the commons will break up, with various bits of software being taken closed-source and a rapidly decreasing amount of work being fed back into the communal pool.
In fact, it is empirically clear that the trend is opposite to this. The trend in breadth and volume of open-source development can be measured by submissions per day at Metalab and SourceForge (the leading Linux source sites) or announcements per day at freshmeat.net (a site dedicated to advertising new software releases). Volume on both is steadily and rapidly increasing. Clearly there is some critical way in which the ``Tragedy of the Commons'' model fails to capture what is actually going on." -- Eric Raymond
Between this article and previous articles concerning the locking of Wikipedia pages, I can't help but wonder if what is happening amounts to some kind of evolution. Depending on how Wiki solves this, what we may see is the system evolving to include some form of the old fashioned, but sometimes maligned model of peer review. Maybe I'm wrong, but it is an interesting process to watch -- especially for somebody (like me) who thinks peer review is good thing.
The first principle is that you must not fool yourself - and you are the easiest person to fool. -Richard Feynman
Republican hatchetman Ken Mehlman's entry had a picture of a flaccid penis on it when I looked him up. Interestingly, the page was locked to edits. When I mentioned on the discussion page that it seemed to be a more figurative likeness than most Wikipedia readers were expecting, both the picture and my G-rated comment disappeared.
"Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery?" - Patrick Henry
No one died. Senator Charles Sumner was caned into unconsciousness on the floor of the Senate Chamber, but recovered and continued to serve thereafter. Additionally, it's worth noting that the senator in question was attacked, not for speaking against slavery, but for his personal (very personal, and fairly ugly) verbal attacks against the other two Senators.
I'm sure that you would love to be able to point to this as being an example of how rabid Southern senators were about keeping slavery, but really it's an example of the fact that some people can only be insulted so much before they react irrationally. Seriously - I don't think it matters whether you're a senator or not, I think that if you call enough people "noise-some, squat, and nameless animal . . . not a proper model for an American senator" that sooner or later one of them (or one of their friends) is going to beat the shit out of you. Does that excuse the attack? Of course not. But it wasn't about slavery, it was about pride - and no one died.
Ce n'est pas un vrai mouvement de robot!
Am I the only person who avoids Wikipedia like the plague because of these skewed entries and slanderous edit wars? I know I'm missing out, but after an entry I collaborated was "attacked" by someone who held a different opinion (read: blanked the article until Wiki delete minions got at it) I lost faith in its general ability to harbor legitimate information. I know it's there, but I don't want to have to sift through it. That's what the internet is for.
I added a contentious bit of information to an extremely contentious article once. It was outright deleted, reverted, spell checked, deleted, grammer fixed, reverted, opened up an enormous discussion with rabid opponents on both sides. Eventually it was split into a separate article that was renamed a few times, with the original article linking to it.
The quality of the article improved quite dramatically over time, and the POV portions that I didn't even realize I was bringing to the table were quickly killed off. The facts were *heavily* cross-checked and what's left now, despite being nothing like what I originally posted, is a satisfying contribution, even though none of what I wrote exists today.
Wikipedia rules.
Glad I'm not the only guy to think the blocking could back-fire. Theoretically (and I'm sure someone will correct me), now members of Congress have standing to sue Wikipedia for an equal rights violation (you give everyone rights to edit information, to even possibly slander the politicians, but do not give those people who are theoretically best able to judge the accuracy that right.)
If they don't watch out, they could find themselves in a free-speech shoot-out with Congress passing laws that wiki owners are responsible for all content posted online, or that hey have a responsibility to get rid of "slanderous" information within a certain period of time.
So far the whole ISPs being protected because they're only allowing the info to go through them protection is, AFAIK, common law and if Congress starts passing laws saying "nope, that's not true... passing along 'bad content' is just as bad as posting 'bad content', printing it in a pamphlet, going on TV and spreading false information..." and then, if you believe in slippery slopes (I don't, but some people do) then before you know it allowing pirated media to pass through your Wifi connection makes you subject to copyright infringement suits because the argument gets made that you're responsible for whatever harm you allow to go live. Yeah, right now it's got protection in the courts, but passing a law could kill that protection.
I'm not saying steps shouldn't be taken, but how about a compromise with perhaps an Official Content seal? The Congressman and his aides are able to add a little icon or whatever to indicate that their changes came from them and is accurate or at least endorsed by them. Then the burden is back on the public: Trust what 3rd parties are saying or trust what the politician says it true. It's not going to change anyone's beliefs one way or the other, but at least the politicians will be happy knowing they can put on a PR campaign warning their knowledgable constituants not to trust Wiki content without their endorsement
It's a sad state of affairs when we have to block our own goddamn house of government for vandalising public property.
It's not that they have too much time on their hands. They consider this a big enough priority to spend time on it instead of other tasks. A politician's first priority is usually their public image. Legislative tasks come second. That's the real problem.
Developers: We can use your help.
This gonna sound kinda sappy, but reading this RFC, or an EFF suit, or a book by Lessig, or even the GPL, really makes me feel like I'm observing a "Founding Fathers Moment," like when the Constitution was drafted. I'm glad there are large, DIVERSE, collectives of rational people trying to define fair rules.
https://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
There was some news story where the mainstream sources mostly had the wording of some critical quotation wrong in various ways (which is actually generally true of mainstream news quotations, since they come from reporters quickly writing something down when it's said, not recordings; they usually get the right meaning, but rarely the right words). Surprisingly, Wikinews almost alone had the quotation exactly right (i.e., perfectly matching the available audio recording of the event). But the weather map that day was a picture of some guy's butt, a mistake that none of the other media sources made.
The trouble with wikipedia is that it only works in reality, not in theory.
I suspect they've heard a lot about this and have learned their lesson!