Slashdot Mirror
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."
Who are these people and why should I care? No, really. Who are Justin Perry and Bryan Peppers? You could at least give me a hint so I know what the articles are about before I go read them.
Just because a system allows for changes by anyone doesn't make those changes valid. I don't have any idea about the specific content of the entries, because those are subjects I know nothing about. But SOMEONE has to ultimately make a decision about what is appropriate or legitimate in a piece of written material. It sounds as though the people with ultimate authority at Wikipedia are exercising their functions as editors. It MIGHT be that they're being overly aggressive about editing changes. I don't have an opinion about that. But to say that they're censoring is silly. They're just being editors. Censorship is when someone outside of a publication or organization requires changes. This is NOT censorship.
David
I don't know that those pages were censored so much as they violated policy (Wikipedia articles are only written about topics already covered by reliable sources), or they were the subject of a lawsuit threat.
What can I say but "wow"?
Apparently the person who submitted this story thinks "delete" and "censor" are synonomous - they are not. Things get deleted from Wikipedia all the time; that doesn't mean it was censored.
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
So:
.info domain and fill the site with violently uninteresting second-hand information, while dressing themselves as rebels. Good for them. /. community would treat this non-event as they do other non-events: that is, by composing witty comments. ./ crowd undaunted, because who clicks those blue underlined words anyway - all they do is undercut the wittiness.
/. effect is not caused by any conscious action, it just happens.
1. People with too much time on their hands get an
2. Someone thinks that
3. The site is slahdotted, so the initial problem (if it was that) solves itself;
This leaves only one question: who did click on the links? And the answer: it was not necessary;
I can assure you, the best way to get rid of dragons is to have one of your own.
That's just great. Not only is the latest "pick on the ugly guy" meme picked up by every forum I can think of, now it's been brought to slashdot. Why was that necessary? Honestly.
but they violate it's license.
They don't provide attribution (I.e. article history), they claim the content is under CC-By-SA-2.5 rather than the GFDL.
Whomever is an administrator has abused their position by providing content which increases Wikipedia's effective legal liablity.
All for the sake of creating drama.
It's shameful.
This may be your definition. It is not the definition of the word in English:
censoring: to examine in order to suppress or delete anything considered objectionable (Merriam-Webster)
censoring: To examine and expurgate. (American Heritage)
Most television networks have their own censor (yes, with that title) who decides what is allowed on the air. Censorship has a precise definition, and it requires no government intervention to be practiced.
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
Wikipedia isn't an academic source by any stretch of the imagination, and should never be used as a reference in any remotely serious writing. It's a great resource to use to explore a subject, but you'd be crazy to cite it in a paper.
LOAD "SIG",8,1
So, I'm a Wikipedia admin, and a volunteer for the mail room, and here's a semi-rant. It is neither Jimbo Wales's interest, nor the Foundation's interest, nor any other decent editor's, to damage an article or to abandon the openness of Wikipedia. And I can speak with complete confidence that for every WP:OFFICE protection, there are loads upon loads of "sorry you're unhappy with this article, can you tell us what's incorrect to help us fix it?" mails that no one gets much bothered about and most of the community never hears about. Sometimes they are very angry, sometimes they are from wealthy and powerful people, and we don't get too fussed about them until there is a serious concern that we may be doing wrong, and something needs to change, and that something hasn't happened via the usual community processes. That's what office actions are for.
Wikipedia is huge; one of the top 20 websites, and publishing there is like publishing in the '''New York Times''. Except that we're on the web and searchable without registration. There is actually serious damage to be done by having false information and rumors up on articles, and if our community processes have failed to get that right then it's clear some intervention is needed. It's done to save the project, not to destroy it, and I imagine that Jimbo would rather chew his own toenails off than face the resulting shitstorm without good cause.
When it happens, everyone who ''does'' have good, verifiable, neutral, cited information to add, should be writing temp versions. And they are replaced, though without the blog rumors or anything we can't verify. (Except for Brian Peppers, which, face it, was more trouble than it was worth. The year holding off on that? Big deal. It's one year, in a project that will be around... well, as long as anyone wants to keep it around, Wikimedia Foundation or no, thank you copyleft licensing.) Complaining on the talk page doesn't help do that. Bitching and moaning on other sites doesn't help do that. Researching does. Without whitewashing, contrary to some opinions, without censoring, ''with'' the neutral and verifiable truth, but nothing that isn't, no matter how much you may be dying to share the nasty email you got from Jack Thompson. Sorry.
We like criticism. We invite criticism. And when we see *good* criticism we take it to heart and respond to it (see our responses to The Guardian's analysis of a few articles, or to the errors the Nature study found). But there's nothing to respond to here. If "wikitruth" wants to take the liability of having libel up on the site, well, that's their problem, though it's IMO not a bright move. (Especially if they're trying to draw publicity to themselves.) Wikipedia will continue to attempt to be neutral and accurate... and, you know, maybe try to be decent and work with people, too, who have every right to be upset about false information published about them.
Way past my two cents now, Kat (User:Mindspillage)
Wikipedia is licenced under the GFDL, removing any possibility of a copyright complaint, and the critics have the safe harbor of protected free speech (commentation about a corporate entity) for libel. Please stop screaming LAWSUIT! at every intersection and learn about the legal system of your country. Thanks.
You know, I always wondered why the handful of disgruntled WP people out there are so incredibly vocal.
Then I thought about their characteristics:
*) They probably are literate and write well, or they wouldn't be working on WP.
*) They probably have lots of free time, or they wouldn't be working on WP.
*) They probably like politics, or they'd do what I do and just contribute a little to the occasional article and have nothing to do with any of the politics in WP's running.
*) They are probably willing to go to a good deal of effort to support things that they feel strongly about (or they wouldn't have been trying to build policy on WP in the first place).
So you have a group of people with plenty of time to be bitter about WP, and proclaim that it is going to collapse, who are good about writing things about it.
I don't really have any sympathy for them. WP is entirely free content. If your ideas are correct, you are capable of expressing them, and you want to produce something rather than garner attention by complaining and spearing people, great. You can just fork WP to "myWP" *today*, and most folks will come with you, and the problem will be resolved. If you're just engaging in groundless whining, then the folks won't come with you. Linus Torvalds has said this about himself many times -- that he doesn't have any authority but that which the contributors give him. They choose to work with him. If everyone decides that they want different decisions made, then they'll go with someone else, on a different fork. Nobody is forcing you to work on the Torvalds tree, except for the fact that he does a good job, and people are happy with the situation.
Heck, a couple of forks might even be a good thing. They'd let some alternate ideas be tried out.
As far as I can tell, Jimbo Wales got fed up with all the organizational problems the Pepper article was causing -- far out of proportion to the value of the article. This is not JFK assassination theory. Rather, it's a particularly ugly picture that will probably float around the Internet for a month and then vanish. There are *hordes* of Web fads like this, and while someone writing a book on Web fads might still find this useful in a couple of years, I personally doubt that most people will ever think about it again after two years. So you have a not-particularly-valuable article that is causing problems for people trying to get work done. Solution? Just put a block on it for long enough for everyone to cool down, and possibly for the fad to go away. Is that the best fix? No, but any kind of administrative action is going to piss someone off. And people can Google for it, or put up webpages about it, or if it turns out that the Peppers article really matters in a couple of years, someone can re-add it.
I think that Jimbo Wales was less interested in making a judgement about whether something was valuable or not and more interested in keeping WP functioning. So he made the call that he felt resolved the WP organizational issue and caused the least damage. I can't personally think of a better solution to the problem. If someone does come up with a better solution that hasn't been proposed yet, doubtless it can be adopted instead.
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
Andrew "tempests? in MY teacup?" Orlowski. Go read a couple of his articles on The Register. You'll see what particular subtype of blog whor^H^H^Hanker this person is. (People on The Other Site may recognize the term link whore.)
My opinion? He's become so enamored with the idea of blogging and personal fame that he is willing to whip and spank up any controversy as long as it results in his name being pasted everywhichwhere. Many of his latest articles in the reg, ordinarily a halfway respectable tech site (though not as much as the inquirer), are based wholesale on blog entries scratched from out of the Debian planet aggregator for crying out loud!
Yeah, I'm gonna stop this here. Anything that gets advertised by Andy O. is most likely crap, until I hear from it again from a non-slashdot influenced source.
According to this article, it was written by Andrew Orlowski of The Register. Why do we take Andrew Orlowski seriously when he has complained(http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/03/23 /britannica_wikipedia_nature_study/), trolled(http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/12/17/ji mmy_wales_shot_dead_says_wikipedia/), taken things out of context(http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/12/06/wi kipedia_bio/) and just generally spouted idiocy(http://www.google.com/search?as_q=Wikipedia &num=10&hs=Znz&hl=en&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozi lla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial&btnG=Google+Search&as_epq=& as_oq=&as_eq=&lr=&as_ft=i&as_filetype=&as_qdr=all& as_occt=any&as_dt=i&as_sitesearch=www.theregister. co.uk&as_rights=&safe=off) regarding anything related to Wikipedia and supporters. If WikiTruth is run by "dozens" of Wikipedia administrators, then tell me why there are only a few user accounts there? Besides, if they want to gripe, fine. Perhaps they should first voice their complaints on Wikipedia FIRST, though.
And? Why should there be an article about this website in Wikipedia? You wouldn't expect to find one in Britannica or Encarta.
Jimbo's creation isn't anywhere near as freewheeling as he would have people believe. There are bills to pay, (hardware upgrades, bandwidth costs, and so on) and he doesn't want to alienate those who might otherwise be willing to pay them. That includes members of such groups as Amway, and there is also a particularly strict group of thought police attached to the article about Richard Stallman. When the slogan talks about a free encyclopedia which anyone can edit, they should really clarify it by saying that anyone can edit it so long as their edits don't include anything politically incorrect, or which might offend people who would otherwise possibly donate.
The other thing to realise is that the neutral point of view policy is generally applied *extremely* inconsistently. There are very often miniature communities which will attach themselves to various articles, (the GNU/Stallman articles are probably the best example of this that I know of) and they generally have a consensus about what they will or will not allow in an article. Said consensus also doesn't necessarily have anything to do with genuinely factual information, although one hopes that it normally does. I personally believe that the entire idea behind the NPOV policy is broken, simply because it isn't realistically possible. The only real reason why they attempt to maintain it is because they want to try and achieve a level of encyclopedic legitimacy which again, isn't really possible. I also don't believe that not having encyclopedic legitimacy in certain people's minds doesn't detract from Wikipedia's genuine usefulness; especially given that the people who are skeptical about the idea are likely to remain so, and it therefore makes a lot more sense to be realistic about what is or is not possible, rather than maintain something unworkable in order to try and impress people whose opinion is unfavourable anyway.
I've said it before, and I'll say it again. Although Wikipedia genuinely is extremely valuable when it comes to many topics, politics and people are the two main areas where it is severely flawed, and where given human nature, it probably can't help being flawed.
Wikipedia is as much subject to the Golden Rule as anything else these days; that is, that whoever has the gold makes the rules.
Bull. Just because an article is going to be inherently unflattering to a person by telling the truth, doesn't mean that we should self-censor. That's really what you're saying; in fact you're not just implying self-censorship, but the censorship of other people as well, so that they don't disparage some third person BY TELLING THE TRUTH.
Here's something that I think ought to be engraved in the minds of every person who has ever written anything for public consumption: The truth is an absolute defense.
Not necessarily in the legal sense -- although it should be -- but at the very least in the moral and ethical. If you did something, you have no right to prevent other people from discussing it, provided that they stick to what's true. And no one, I repeat no one, has any right to keep others from repeating the truth, regardless of how unflattering or damaging it may be to someone.
The best way to combat the spread of lies and misinformation is by spreading truth: we can argue whether or not Wikipedia does that well or poorly (I think it does it fairly well, actually; at the very least it gives you a good cross-section of what a significant population of individuals believes is true at any given time), but there is no place for censorship simply to protect people from "ridicule," if that ridicule stems from truth.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Regardless of whether or not you think his definition is "corrupted" or "meaningless," it's widely accepted by many people, therefore in the context of the English language, which is a moving target, it's a correct definition.
To say that it's only a government official that can censor is ridiculous; anyone can censor within the bounds of their own authority. A parent can censor information within their own household, a corporation can censor its employees internet access, the State Council censors any number of information sources in China, and apparently Jimbo Wales censors Wikipedia.
You are of course free to use whatever narrow definition you personally want to use, but I think you are in the minority here, and it will only cause confusion when talking to others. You can tell people that they're wrong and you're right all you want, but given that the definition of words is established predominantly by general consensus, I think you're always going to be wrong.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
I'm sure your completely unfounded assumptions are much more accurate than a judge and jury.
They're there affecting their effect.