Censored Wikipedia Articles Appear On Protest Site

Gregory Rider writes "According to a recent article in The Guardian, a group of disenchanted Wikipedia administrators has been going through back channels on Wikipedia and retrieving articles deleted by Jimbo Wales or other higher-ups. Now they're putting them back up on a website for everyone to see. This includes articles on Justin Berry, Paul Barresi, and, most strangely, Brian Peppers, which has been solicited for deletion off of Wikipedia 6 times with mixed success and is now banned from being edited on for a whole year."

Comments

Brian Peppers

[Ignorant Aardvark]

For what it's worth, I am an administrator on the English Wikipedia, and I did disagree with the decision to delete Brian Peppers. But there's lots of much more important things to worry about, and I've agreed with Jimbo Wales on a number of other situations, so life goes on. By the way, any Administrator has access to all deleted pages (except ones that have manually been deleted from the database, which are few and far between). And the reason Justin Berry was deleted and rewritten was because it was originally written by self-identified pedophiles and could've potentially gotten Wikimedia into trouble because it was a biography of a living person and did not cite everything properly, thus possibly leaving Wikipedia open to libel lawsuits.

Re:Brian Peppers

[Ignorant Aardvark]

You don't seem to know what "censorship" means. Censorship refers to when the government prevents publication of materials, not a private website. Wikipedia is a private website, and it "censors" things all the time: vandalism, factually incorrect statements, attack pages, etc. The point of Wikipedia is to be an encyclopedia, not a free webhost where any random crap can be posted. To the end of being a useful encyclopedia, Wikipedia does "censor" out the nonsense. And that's their right.

And as for your statement that Wikipedia is banned from use in undergraduate writing, do you have a source? I know, at least at my university, that's not true, and I haven't heard it elsewhere either.

Re:Brian Peppers

[Ignorant Aardvark]

There's actually a proper way to cite Wikipedia. You need to click on the "Cite this article" link in the Toolbox. It will cite the article in MLA, Chicago, whatever format you use, and it will also generate a permanent link to the specific revision you used.

Re:Censored or edited?

[mindspillage]

Well, I answer some of the mail that Wikimedia gets, and I can assure you that most complaints are simply dealt with in a normal fashion and you never see them. It's only the ones where there is genuine reason to think we may be in the wrong and where normal editing processes have not done their job that the office steps in. (But thanks for playing, do troll again.)

Re:Journalism 101

[user9918277462]

Brian Peppers is a paraplegic man who has had his disfigured photograph sent around the internet as a meme of sorts. He lives in a nursing home and one day allegedly groped one of his nurses (he claims he was trying to get her attention and ripped her skirt). Consequently he was given 5 years probation and is forced to register as a sex offender (the photo in question is his booking/registration mug shot).

Making fun of the handicapped is not the role of an encyclopedia, and screaming 'censorship' when that worthless Wikipedia entry was deleted is shameful.

http://allenpeppers.ytmnd.com/
http://www.wikitruth.info.nyud.net:8090/index.php? title=Uncensored:Brian_Peppers

Re:What a bunch of FUD (not really)

[Gregory Rider]

Its no big secret. Jimbo deletes articles all the time.

Not very

[ggvaidya]

Both the MediaWiki software as well as the database itself are freely available.

Re:Journalism 101

[TubeSteak]

Justin Perry was recently featured in a NY Times article about how the internet is not safe for your kids. He started out webcamming (for guys no less) and ended up with his own website & traveled around the country to be groped and whatnot by men old enough to be his father... all while he was underage.

After the NY Times article, he ended up testifying before Congress. Congress (both Dems and Repubs) is currently pissed off at the Dept of Justice for not actively pursuing the kid's case.

Peppers is a guy with a deformed skull & a charge of sexual assault against him.

Maybe they didn't include basic information on purpose so that you'd RTFAs they linked to.

Wiki isn't Google

[Shihar]

The Wikipedia is not a glorified message board. It does indeed have standards. When those standards are violated, they edit the content such that the basic standards are met. The standards that fit in these three cases is that bio articles must be on 'known' people, and they must have been covered by reliable sources. This is just a basic bare bones standard.

Now, can it be argued that these three articles might have met those criteria? Sure. They are subjective criteria for sure. Does it matter? Not really. The fact that these three people have had their bios deleted isn't going to cause me to lose any sleep at night. If these are the worst examples of editorial abuse that the Wikipedia has to offer, I consider that pretty damn good.

Look, the Wikipedia is good at what it does. The Wikipedia is a great place to start if you want to get an overview of a particular subject without too much pain. The Wikipeida is NOT something to cite in a scientific journal or to get detailed and exact information that is critical to some endeavor simply because that information could be wrong. Nor is the Wikipedia trying to achieve all information in exists. Wikipedia isn't Google, it isn't a hard scientific reference, it isn't even an encyclopedia. Wikipedia is its own beast, and trashing a few irrelevant articles that might or might not have met their guidelines is no great tragedy.

Someone give me a call when the editor's rewrite the Bush page with their own personal opinion and lock it, then I'll take note.

This article is full of crap

[silsor]

At the time the article was originally published, I read that it says "It's a pseudonym the 30-year-old Silicon Valley IT professional uses as he documents the inner machinations of the project, along with a dozen other Wikipedia administrators, on a site called WikiTruth (www.wikitruth.info)." So I went over to the wikitruth site and called up the Special:Listusers page. Surprise surprise, there were only 8 registered accounts on the wiki, only one or two of which were active. I would be genuinely surprised to find more than one "Wikipedia administrator" on the entire site, rather than a group of disgruntled trolls and banned Wikipedia users (the makeup of every other anti-Wikipedia site to date).

Re:Censored or edited?

[orthogonal]

I've had "excellent karma" here since, what 2001?

How interesting that my posting above, which asks a top Wikiipedia bureaucrat about out-of-process Wikipedia policies in a story about out-of-process Wikipedia censorship, had been modded flamebait in only fourty-five minutes.

There's a certain fanaticism about wikipedia groupies that lends itself to the suppression of opinions that question the wikipedia group-think or the cult of personality surrounding its founder.

But don't take my word for it: read the transcript of a lecture by Jason Scott The Great Failure of Wikipedia". It covers the mysterious deletion of these articles, and a lot more. Here's one telling bit, I urge you to read the entire transcript:

The Wikipedia people then vote. Does the majority win? No! Many times,
Wikipedia works off of a consensus policy. Consensus essentially means
when the administrator shows up, he makes a decision, based on the voices
of what people have said. This is how houses are destroyed, using eminent
domain. You have everybody say "this is a bad idea", and then the guy
sitting in the seat goes "hmmm, but man, they're giving us some cash," and
that's the end of that house.

In Wikipedia you will have 75-to-45 votes, in which the 45 win simply
because of the quality or because of the number of neutrals. You have
this enormous amount of weight that can be pushed around by an
administrator. It is also possible to vote for the adding and deletion of
administrators, and (in what I consider to be insane) there is something
called the "Miscellany For Delete," and what this means is you can
actually reach consensus on what other people on Wikipedia are allowed to
do. All of this shouldn't be surprising in the case if there was a
politic vacuum -- the fact that people allowed to kind of reach a
consensus on everything started saying "well, I can do this". So the
notability debate becomes an issue.

Re:Journalism 101

[the pickle]

Whether he wanted it or not, he has achieved widespread Internet notoriety and his name is known by hundreds of thousands of people the world over.

Dude, I'm sorry, but if Slashdotters are asking about the identity of a so-called "Internet celebrity", this claim is extremely dubious. If there's anything Slashdotters are known for, it's being total Internet geeks, but if more than one has to ask this question -- and if the OP hadn't posted it, I was going to -- the guy clearly isn't THAT famous. "Thousands" of people the world over might be accurate; "hundreds of thousands" is almost certainly not.

It's extremely unlikely that any of these individuals meets Wikipedia standards for notability.

Re:Journalism 101

[GizmoToy]

Ohio is stupid when it comes to sexual predator laws. In Cincinnati, a man cannot be in public without a shirt on. If he gets arrested for it, he has to register as a sexual predator for the rest of his life. While one could probably argue that discouraging 200lb overweight men from walking around without a shirt on is a good idea, how's that for a fair punishment?