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

Journalism 101

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

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: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.

Re:Journalism 101

[Hogwash McFly]

He has achieved notoriety because he ended up being a convenient subject of ridicule. The only way a wikipedia article about him will be used is to subject him to more ridicule.

So you believe the article about Star Wars Kid should be deleted as well? Sorry, just because you're famous for the wrong reasons, be they stupidity, ugliness, crime or whatever, you can't expect special exemption status from information outlets. Or at least that's my opinion.

Re:Journalism 101

[Mr. Slippery]

So you're saying it is inappropriate to make fun of a convicted sexual offenders?

I don't know the specifics of this case; but if a man accidently ripped a woman's skirt and is therefore branded as "sex offender", we should be making fun of the legislature for passing such a law, the executive for arresting anyone under it, and the judiciary for convicting anyone under it.

People have been turned into "sex offenders" for mooning, for taking photos of their toddlers with pants around their ankles, and similar harmless acts. While removing rapists and the like from our company, or putting them under close supervision, is a darned good idea, many "sex crimes" are minor, or not justly crimes at all. (Check the laws of your state - if your sex life is at all interesting, you're probably violating some law that's on the books.)

Re:Journalism 101

[Dutch_Cap]

"So you're saying it is inappropriate to make fun of a convicted sexual offenders?"

For an encyclopaedia it is inappropriate, yes.

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?

Re:Journalism 101

[July 21, 2006]

"Welcome to the justice system in the real world, where innocent people sometimes get convicted and even executed."

That's not the point. In discussing legal matters, once someone has been found guilty in a court of law, saying that they allegedly did something is no longer appropriate language. They are convicted of the crime, not alleged to have perpetrated the crime.

Re:Journalism 101

[aussie_a]

how else are you going to decide who's guilty and who's not

By reviewing what facts you know and deciding for yourself. The ruling of a jury is for the legal system. Free thinking human beings shouldn't supplant their own judgment for that of the legal system's.

Censored or edited?

[DavidinAla]

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

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:Censored or edited?

[orthogonal]

Well, I answer some of the mail that Wikimedia gets,

Hey, great to see you here, and thanks for giving us the straight dope.

Maybe you could clear up something else. You were appointed to Wikipedia's "Arbitration Committee" a quasi-judicial body, and afterward won your seat as top vote-getter.

Three other editors who ran for seats on that committee lost with significant community disapproval, including one who -- arbitrarily and without prior discussion -- deleted (censored?) portions of many editors' personal pages.

But despite those three failing to receive the community's trust, you and the rest of the Arbitration Committee then created novel and previously unheard of official positions for them as "clerks" -- a role approximately that of prosecutor. The creation of these new positions was done apparently without any discussion or community consensus.

Why did you and your fellow arbitrators create positions without anyone's input, and staff them with three persons whom the community, just a few weeks before, had unequivocally rejected as not having the trust of the community, one of whom had engaged in massive vandalization of users' personal pages?

Why were these novel positions created without any transparency or community consensus?

As the top vote-getter in the race for the Arbitration Committee seat, did you have any qualms that doing so might be seen as an abuse of the trust placed in you by the voters?

Do you think the lack of transparency harms wikipedia?

Do you now regret doing this without community consensus?

Re:Censored or edited?

[orthogonal]

Why is this relevant to this thread? I'll happily answer, and even post it publicly to avoid accusations that I'm hiding anything, somewhere else. Try the talk page of the arbcom page or the clerks page

This Slashdot story is about a lack of transparency at Wikipedia -- had the articles been deleted normally, through community consensus, the "rogue admins" wouldn't have set up a site to complain about the deletions.

But the deletions were not done by process, but instead by the fiat of a heretofore unheard of "Front Office", an end-run around the community consensus that wikipedia presents as its public face.

The Arbitration Committee has, at the least, created the appearance of a similar end-run, by creating a special and heretofore unheard-of office for editors whom the voters -- by an over 2 to 1 margin -- rejected as trustworthy.

Besides, if you post your answer on wikipedia, most slashdot readers won't see it. And I see that page where you promise to post your explanation is "archived" more frequently than most, and there are already accusations that's done to hide things.

As I'm sure your explanation is convincing, and as you say yourself you don't want to hide anything, why not just explain here, where Slashdot reads?

It's lack of transparency that is causing this mistrust of Wikipedia, so why add to it by posting your response elsewhere?

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.

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.

Brian Peppers article

[Russ Nelson]

Thank God the Brian Peppers article is now available. I don't know how I could have lived for another minute without being able to read about him. Damn those Wikipedia editors for deleting this article about the most famous Brian Peppers, whom I hear about every day, and simply live for to hear about. Famous people like Brian Peppers NEED to have their own Wikipedia articles, don't you see? It's a requirement.

Could somebody explain to me why I should care about this "issue"?

Linkage

[c0l0]

The uncensored and unspoiled Wikipedia-spinoff is available here. Truth and facts, at last!!

Re:What a bunch of FUD (not really)

[Gregory Rider]

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

Re:Well, why do these articles matter?

[vidarh]

Which is a pointless argument. In a paper based encyclopedia this matters because there will be limited space and the "important" people and subjects needs to be covered. In Wikipedia it doesn't - if people care enough to write it, they will. If people care enough to look someone up, then it belongs there. The only real reason to be restrictive is for common names where the amount of disambiguation might get too large.