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Congress Made Wikipedia Changes
Dr Occult writes "BBC news is reporting misuse of Wikipedia by politicians for 'polishing' their images. The article on President Bush has been altered so many times - not just from within Congress - that Wikipedia's volunteer monitors have had to block further 'editing'." From the article: "Wikipedia says the controversy raises questions about whether it is ethical for those with a vested interest in the subject to edit entries about it. It said the Congressional computer network has been blocked from editing for brief periods on a number of occasions in the last six months due to the inappropriate contributions."
Imagine a Venn Diagram with two overlapping circles. One circle is truth, the other is opinion and fiction. Now, any statement made by an individual fits in one of these two circles but is it in the overlapping area?
... but bad-mouthing politicians is all too easy so I'll leave that to someone else.
... say, why not do a webpage instead (even cheaper) and have Wikipedia send a liaison to Congress to record it?
Wikipedia needs to decide whether it should accept those which fall in the middle overlapping area or reject them outright. It seems that for some issues Wikipedia allows the overlapping area (like String Theory) to remain as long as there is a footnote or notation that this is opinion, theoretical or possibly untrue. So perhaps they should make it clear that if a piece of information lies in the overlap, you need to state so or it will be deleted.
Many people put fogs over their past and history is hard to verify. For these people, their biographical entries in Wikipedia may need to be covered with disclaimers saying that very little is verifiable about their background because of the individual's actions and unclear testimonials from people surrounding them. It's a shame that the majority of these people are politicians
Since our political system is divided in a very childish way (two parties), I have always dreamed to see the day that the GPO releases two volumes one year after each president has left office. Each volume would be an account from either side of congress commenting on the actions of the president. The preface could be all public documents proving actions taken by the president while in his presidency. These two books could be made available very cheaply (as a type of public service) and the public could enjoy that for free
My work here is dung.
Maybe some kind of /. mod system can be used to aprove edits.
The edit wont be added until some score is reached. If the edit is declined then you can extract keywords from that edit and use them to lower the score for future similar edits automaticly ala lame filter.
The best test environment is production. - Me
chrome://browser/content/browser.xul
1) always double-check everything. I know that this has been stated before in every discussion concerning Wikipedia, but it is worth repeating. 2) The formula for accuracy that has always existed for Wikipedia still applies. The more people looking at an entry, the better the chance for false statements to be identified as such and corrected. 3) Vandals will always exist -- whether they are 12 year-olds getting giggles or Congressional staffers applying spin. The difference is that they will get bored and leave while people who care about Wikipedia will stay. If anyone thinks that this is a Wikipedia issue, you should go back and read yesterday's story about censorship on NASA's website.
The war in Iraq is about WMD.
The war in Iraq is a part of the global war against terror, it was never about WMD.
The war in Iraq is about liberating its people, it is about democracy and nothing to do with terrorism.
Actually that's a good example of a shallow understanding of a historical event, a politically biased statement. In other words something that would be worthy of an edit on the Wiki, and invariably such edits would be labeled as politically biased by those of the opposite political bias who preferred the original politically biased text. In reality the War in Iraq was about all of the above and more. The "WMD" angle was merely what was used to sell the war to the UN. That was an intense high profile effort and it's natural for people to focus on this one motivation even when they have no political bias. However when honest unbiased historian sit down some day to write the history of war the motivations will be far more complex.