Slashdot Mirror
See Who Is Whitewashing Wikipedia
Decius6i5 writes "Caltech grad student Virgil Griffith has launched a search tool that uncovers whitewashing and other self-interested editing of Wikipedia. Users can generate lists of every edit to Wikipedia which has been made from a particular IP address range. The tool has already uncovered a number of interesting edits, such as one from the corporate offices of Diebold which removed large sections of content critical of their electronic voting machines. A Wired story provides more detail and Threat Level is running a contest to see who can come up with the most interesting Wikipedia spin job."
I was fascinated by the CIA's edits... mostly adding details... and this:
"One CIA entry deals with the details of lyrics sung in a Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode."
Nerds.
You can't talk about Wikipedia's flaws on Wikipedia
Those company stuff should be ashamed of removing wikipedia articles. :-P
BTW. If I every encountered anyone publishing about him/herself on wikipedia, I will personally contact him and keep him/her busy....
just wonder why there are so many anonymous cowards in this world....
Mediawiki has already added the capability to look at the Special:Contributions for an IP range. I'm not sure if it's been enabled yet on EN.
What did you expect? Everyone has different truths.
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
How long before the savy ones start hiding? On another note I could also see this as a tool companies use to find wiki whistleblowers.
An I.T. motto in the hands of an idiot is a dangerous thing...
Yet another case of anti-Wikipedia prejudice. Diebold has been editing the content of Encyclopedia Britannica since at least the 7th edition, but the mainstream press never even bothers to report on *that* kind of thing!
Slashdot: providing anti-social weirdos a soapbox, since 1997.
Hmm...an online reference source that any dope with an internet connection can change as they see fit. I can't imagine how any problems could arise.
One of the pages on my watchlist is Adrian Smith (R - Nebraska, third district). About once a month, an anon IP or recently-created user account tries to whitewash his WP article by removing unflattering sourced details about his campaign contributors.
If you want to follow along in the fun, view the article history.
Well that didn't take long... and I was just starting to enjoy myself.
A couple of 30-somethings embark on the ultimate roadtrip
It's a bit of a pity that the more successful a source of information like Wikipedia becomes, the more likely it is that some twat is going to try and adopt it for their own ends.
Peter
A tool that allows you to edit from work ... but uses your home (probably dynamic) IP address.
:)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I know it's easy.
And that's the point. The smarter groups have probably already taken steps to hide their edits.
That they thought they could get away with it. What's next, Whitewashing using proxies so they can't be traced? Ugh.
Corporate IPs are too distinctive, so I must use the home IP, proxies or Tor. Oh wait, I'm not important enough to have anything to whitewash.
technical writing / development
Just another example of how the despised "folk media" can do things the traditional media can't, and probably wouldn't even if they could.
http://www.wired.com/print/politics/onlinerights/n ews/2007/08/wiki_tracker
On November 17th, 2005, an anonymous Wikipedia user deleted 15 paragraphs from an article on e-voting machine-vendor Diebold, excising an entire section critical of the company's machines. While anonymous, such changes typically leave behind digital fingerprints offering hints about the contributor, such as the location of the computer used to make the edits.
In this case, the changes came from an IP address reserved for the corporate offices of Diebold itself. And it is far from an isolated case. A new data-mining service launched Monday traces millions of Wikipedia entries to their corporate sources, and for the first time puts comprehensive data behind longstanding suspicions of manipulation, which until now have surfaced only piecemeal in investigations of specific allegations.
Wikipedia Scanner -- the brainchild of CalTech computation and neural-systems graduate student Virgil Griffith -- offers users a searchable database that ties millions of anonymous Wikipedia edits to organizations where those edits apparently originated, by cross-referencing the edits with data on who owns the associated block of internet IP addresses.
Inspired by news last year that Congress members' offices had been editing their own entries, Griffith says he got curious, and wanted to know whether big companies and other organizations were doing things in a similarly self-interested vein.
"Everything's better if you do it on a huge scale, and automate it," he says with a grin.
This database is possible thanks to a combination of Wikipedia policies and (mostly) publicly available information.
The online encyclopedia allows anyone to make edits, but keeps detailed logs of all these changes. Users who are logged in are tracked only by their user name, but anonymous changes leave a public record of their IP address.
Share Your Sleuthing!
Cornered any companies polishing up their Wikipedia entries? Spotted any government spooks rewriting history? Try Virgil Griffith's Wikipedia Scanner yourself, then submit your finds and vote on other readers' discoveries here.
The organization also allows downloads of the complete Wikipedia, including records of all these changes.
Griffith thus downloaded the entire encyclopedia, isolating the XML-based records of anonymous changes and IP addresses. He then correlated those IP addresses with public net-address lookup services such as ARIN, as well as private domain-name data provided by IP2Location.com.
The result: A database of 5.3 million edits, performed by 2.6 million organizations or individuals ranging from the CIA to Microsoft to Congressional offices, now linked to the edits they or someone at their organization's net address has made.
Some of this appears to be transparently self-interested, either adding positive, press release-like material to entries, or deleting whole swaths of critical material.
Voting-machine company Diebold provides a good example of the latter, with someone at the company's IP address apparently deleting long paragraphs detailing the security industry's concerns over the integrity of their voting machines, and information about the company's CEO's fund-raising for President George Bush.
The text, deleted in November 2005, was quickly restored by another Wikipedia contributor, who advised the anonymous editor, "Please stop removing content from Wikipedia. It is considered vandalism."
A Diebold Election Systems spokesman said he'd look into the matter but could not comment by press time.
Wal-Mart has a series of relatively small changes in 2005 that that burnish the company's image on its own entry while often leaving criticism in, changing a line that its wages are less than other retail stores to a note that it pays nearly double the minimum wage, for example. Another leaves activ
When you have the ability to add to Wikipedia like this, it's clearly eventually going to become the most reliable source of information in a few decades.
Naturally this is going to require other similar discoveries and additions, but those are a given, since it's so popular.
If you can read this, I forgot to post anonymously.
in many ways the wikipedia vs britannica debate is a lot like open vs closed source. One you know what changes are being made and can decipher intent, the other is anyone's guess. Wikipedia may have its shortcomings-- but at least we can see them.
How about instead of going after corporate IP addresses, a study of the corrupted power structure, administrator abuses, and Linda Mack/Jayjg? The problems are not from IP address on the outside. The problem is that there are not and have never been any objective criteria for delegating power to accounts, and while I don't know if it's a majority or not, a very good plurality of administrators believe their purpose is to use their power to ensure articles reflect only their point of view, and anyone that tries to change that, even with multiple citations and sources, find themselves personally attacked wikilawyered, and often blocked. There is no system separate from the administrators to handle this kind of abuse, so it almost never is addressed. Sure, edits from organizational IP addresses can be annoying, but they wield no power in the system, and cannot hurt anyone. Administrators and bureaucrats, they have a bad habit of supporting vandals and trolls that are later banned by Wikipedia, and harassing users that have not been able to protect themselves by becoming administrators, as being elevated to administrator largely depends on the desires of the current administrators, who are very adept at gaming the system. It is almost impossible to become an administrator unless you have the same character flaws as those in power. It's the iron law of bureaucracy; those that seek power and only power, to the detriment of the organization, seize and hold power. Wikipedia is a failed experiment, it failed a long time ago due to structural deficiencies, and the attention it continues to receive is like a bad addiction on the part of internet users.
Slashdot: Playing Favorites Since 1997
Huh? TFA still works for me. Both the regular and the 'Print View' link, in fact.
I'm sure somebody will post the article text if it starts to go under, though.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
For example, when that whole "worlds largest hog" hoax happened and it was revealed that the hog in question was actually a domesticated hog named "Fred" who was someone's pet sold off to a game farm, the guy who watches over the "largest wild pigs ever caught" refused to allow updates to reflect this fact. I tried quite a few times to get the FACTS added to the wikipedia entry and he overrode them every time. Unfortunately very few people pay attention to entries like that so people who have a lot of time and are very committed to presenting the world a certain way will almost certainly win out in the end on Wikipedia. It works well for popular articles, but very poorly for marginal ones.
Someone at Case Western Reserve University in Ohio apparently considers the place "prestigious". I'd go more with "overpriced".
I suspect many of these edits are made by employees not acting on official instructions. Many of these people like where they work, or otherwise feel the need to defend their employer when the opportunity arises. These could just be well-intentioned but short-sighted employees acting unilaterally. If your company is large enough, you're bound to have at least one person able and willing to do something like this. You can't entirely fault the company for it.
Though I imagine there will be some Wikipedia guidelines appearing at some companies in the near future.
Having suffered through edit wars on Wikipedia with the hordes of partisans chopping out anything that could be remotely considered "uncomplimentary" (even when 100% true and backed up by references), I can attest to this wholeheartedly.
What REALLY disheartened me though, was the fact that the PTBs watching these actions regarded the whitewashing as "NPOV"
Wikipedia's okay until it comes to real, living people.
Then everything goes completely out the window with regards to factuality and referential reliability.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
. . . their own truthiness?
Who has whitewashed their wikipedia entry the most:
Diebold
Rumsfeld
Any article dealing with "Islam in country x"
Cowboy Neal
Or, more politely, I think you're mistaken.
There's no magical incantation that makes an "open, transparent" information editing environment inheirently better. You just get a different bias, and it's more difficult to figure out where that bias is coming into play.
With Brittanica, you have a (known) establishment bias. With a Boeing sales brochure, you have a (known) "areospace is the ultimate industry" bias. What you generally see on Wikipedia are astounding examples of groupthink. Wikipedia's NPOV is a bias, make no mistake. And just because you can "see" the bias of article editors, that doesn't mean that the bias of the "Wikipedians" is easier to find, define, or overcome. All this does is make one type of bias more obvious. That doesn't solve the problem.
All content contains a bias. Knowing that is a good starting point for interpreting the content. This project is fine, as far as it goes. But implying (as you seem to) that somehow Wikipedia wonks are more trustworthy and less biased than other editors is, well, silly.
There's no "bonus" here
Interested in a Flash-based MAME front end? Visit mame.danzbb.com
Interesting. I assumed administrators at Wikipedia had that ability, but always assumed they did it via regular logs.
The Help:CheckUser page is a lot more informative, if you're not a WP admin (in which case you'll be denied entry to the parent's link).
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
or the political bias at times that persists in Wikipedia?
Their top level admins are no where near as impartial as they claim to be. Obvious subjects to avoid on Wikipedia are those which are based on religious, political, or environmental, concerns. People have taken "maintaining" those types of entries to ridiculous levels that whole pages of discussion exist behind the page where the various factions bitch at each other. The best way to see the bias is to watch what they require to have accredited links and what they do not, let alone what sites they consider credible sources for disputed information.
While it has much useful information there are just certain subjects to avoid
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Warning: mysql_connect() [function.mysql-connect]: Too many connections in /jizz4/web/wikipedia/docs/name2ip.php on line 154
?!?!?!
Sony ha
I was fairly amused by the Tom Green Show and associated co-star articles this weekend. It just goes to show that things do slip through the cracks.
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
It would be desirable to have a process/system that could verify that between two a,b consecutive versions of wikipedia (the whole GB files) 'b' (the later) is really 'a' (the previous) plus the editions after the 'a' snapshot creation.
That way it would not be possible to edit the whole file 'inside'wikipedia, (let's go paranoic, i know..)
What's in a sig?
When I was in college, I took a history course in which we read three different books on slavery in the United States — one from the 1860s, one from the 1950s, and another from the 1990s. Obviously, they all had completely different spins on the reality of slavery. The goal of the assignment wasn't so much to learn about slavery as it was to learn about the three different time periods perception of slavery.
I think that these "edits" can provide us an interesting insight into the real issues, and how the public perceives them, and how various invested parties would like the public to perceive them. As long as there is transparency to the edits (and clearly, there is), I think a lot can be learned from the edits themselves.
—brian
about dropping down to the local cafe and doing it on their wireless?
I'm glad someone added the slashdotliberalwhining tag.
I can't tell you how much it bothers me when some whiny liberal drags out another tinfoil-hat theory about how "Big Business" is trying to manipulate public opinion by obfuscating facts, or how some (ooh!) big, scary police state is abusing its powers.
We're an established first-world country with a tradition of freedom, and it's not as if we're ever going to slip into fascism like the Germany or Italy of last century, or into a police state like modern China or Russia, or into a gilded age aristocracy like every country in the Americas except the United States and Canada.
So relax, whiny liberals. Such dangers are unheard of. If we seem to be slipping in any of those directions, just shut up and take it like a conservative - silently and complacently, without a doubt in your mind that no matter how badly things seem to be going, our superiors have things well in hand. Only losers whine about truth and decency. If you're a winner, you'll cheer for the winning side, no matter how repugnant its aims.
Step into a huge movement. Don't Tread In Me.
I submitted it to the Wired blog, but it's worth sharing here: in March, I caught two SCO editors whitewashing Wikipedia. One did a massive chop-and-run on the SCO article. The other was complaining about the article on SCO's CEO, Darl McBride. I have checkuser - the ability to find the IP addressed used by logged in users. I found out that both of those users originated from SCO corporate IP addresses.
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
...and for the record, everyone in Germany from 1939-1945 was out on holiday.
It's important to get the word out about this kind of thing, and it seems you are trying to downplay the importance of it. Maybe we aren't surprised it is happening, but we still want to know the specifics. Your cynicism and moral relativity do nothing but attempt to excuse those who disseminate propaganda. You lump them in with people trying to make honest contributions. You use the word truth as if it were not related to objective, external reality. I don't find that insightful at all.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Good reply. I think every point within it is worth analyzing.
What did you expect? Everyone has different truths.
The above, written by another poster, summarizes the difficulty with any democratic information system like WikiPedia. How do you objectively define truth, and assign power to people who won't abuse it, in a volunteer system?
My favorite example of a good resource is the Oxford English Dictionary. Yes, it costs money, and a fair amount of it, but it is also the singularly best resource on the English language. It succeeds because its editors got together, agreed on what truth is, and then agreed to work toward that and so skipped all of the infighting and power struggles of a WikiPedia.
It's something Wiki might keep in mind.
technical writing / development
Move along. These aren't the web pages you are looking for.
If at first you don't succeed, call it version 1.0.
Now this was just silly . . .
I'm not tense. I'm just terribly, terribly, alert.
Libraries are great because recognized experts in their respective fields write books in their respective fields and get published by book companies because - guess what - since they are recognized experts in their respective fields, their results can be, for the most part, trusted to be accurate and worthy of study.
...
Kinda sounds a bit more like Citizendium than Wikipedia to me
Let's look at a few facts about Wikipedia: 1. Virtually anybody can edit most articles in their encyclopedia. 2. Wikipedia is widely known, popular, and many Internet users regularly visit the website for information. Rather than a conspiracy to manipulate information, likely many of these edits were done by employees without official authorization. It is likely that somebody connected to a company, organization, or political compaign casually ran into the Wikipedia entries and decide to make "corrections" based upon their own point-of-view. Even the Slashdot article in Wikipedia has had quite a bit of so-called whitewashing to remove criticism, which I presume to be by slashdotters. Personallly, edits become of concern when they are attempts to manipulate, mislead, or contain false information. Or, if the edits were done to harm or deface a rival Wikipedia entry (i.e. a Repubilican candidate editing a Democratic candidate's entry).
This is why i dont even bother with it at all?
Unless you know the answer, you cant trust what you read. And if you already know, why are you reading it?
---- Booth was a patriot ----
(or do the spaces screw with regex?)
Yes, you need to escape the spaces when using sed; not sure about other regex implementations, although I expect them to be similar.
E.g., sed 's/of\ a\ pity/foreseeable/g' would work, as would sed 's/"of a pity"/foreseeable/g'.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
well its good to know abut this new edit section of wikipedia. I'm happy if ever i need to feel like changing anything useful, i would have a right to make this instantly. efact paperless office
Check up on Autonomy and its offshoots, including Blinkx.
I don't think it's a pity at all. Wikipedia was designed with this sort of editing in mind. Everything is logged. Draw attention to yourself by hiding from anyone trying to shine a light on you, and you run the risk of an even BIGGER light. Or, do the work and source your research saying you're the victim of a smear campaign, and that will show on the log, too. In the end, the truth may not out, but that log will at least make it as likely as it can.
I also suspected that the more some pattern of behavior was exhibited on Wikipedia, the more likely someone would figure out a way to uncover it automatically with software - and sure enough, there's this search now.
With Britannica, you wouldn't be able to see all of this. Their information is controlled by gatekeepers, whose credibility is unknown (albeit admittedly excellent on the whole), so corrections are deliberate, not current, and obscured.
Lately democracy seems to be based on the skybox, the Happy Meal box, the X-box, and the idiot box.
By what standard?
It has, in fact, become a generally useful source of information. It's useful as a starting point for real research. It is, in short, not at all a bad encyclopedia.
It's influenced by its own organizational culture and editorial bias. Welcome to the story of every publication on the planet.
Tweet, tweet.
"Everything's better if you do it on a huge scale, and automate it," [Virgil Griffith] says with a grin.
Why do we do what we do?
Because We Can.
Do Or Do Not, There Is No Spoon, There Is Only Zuul. Everything in the above post is probably opinion.
Does anyone happen to know the IP address range used by the Discovery Institute? They're constantly complaining about Wikipedia's Intelligent Design article, and related articles. I'd love to find out if they've been editing.
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
... D - Nebraska bullshit.
Which is why you don't use Wikipedia to research anything about living people. There's just too much at stake.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
Just about every Wikipedia article has a spin to it. People feel that it is unbiased only when it shares their bias. Even if it is 100% factual odds are that the author will present those facts the way that he or she sees them.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
It's possible that many of the edits are NOT deliberate corporate acts. Rather, I would imagine a prideful employee may see some controversial items in the article and would rather see them removed. I can see a situation where I uncover a defamatory comment about my company in wikipedia. I would likely interpret it as sensationalism or determine it to be minor compared to the accomplishments of my company. After all, why focus on a few minor negatives when the positives should shine through? Some may call it spin, but I could argue the "controversy" sections fit into the same category. So how does this relate to the article? Even dedicated employees need 15 min. break to browse wikipedia once in a while. So a random employee edits at work without any real company input and voila, slashdot labels the company as corrupt for having whitewashed the article.
Could Wikipedia be deemed an experiment in Anarchism?
Has it succeeded or failed?
Discuss.
Can we get a "-1 Wrong" moderation option?
Most of the more controversial articles have reliable outside references that you can check. Just like any encyclopedia, Wikipedia is merely a starting place for research and not the end all/be all.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
Transparency is not a bonus it is a flipping requirement.
t #Wikipedia_is_not_a_soapbox
Without it, wikipedia is nothing more than a discussion board and needs to refrain from calling itself an encyclopedia.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_wikipedia_is_no
Yeah I blew that by putting the regexps in single-quotes (which is my habit but isn't what the OP was asking)
Where you'd need to be sure to escape the spaces is if you didn't put the whole regexp in quotes already:
Either sed s/of\ a\ pity/foreseeable/g somefile or sed s/"of a pity"/foreseeable/g somefile works, while
sed s/of a pity/foreseeable/g somefile gets you an unterminated command error (as it should).
That's the distinction I was trying to make.
I'm just so used to putting my regexps in single quotes as a preventative that I did it automatically in my examples. (sed 's/"of a pity"/foreseeable/g' somefile is valid, but it includes the quotes as part of the string to be replaced.)
Time for lunch, I must be getting hungry and not thinking straight...
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Read the parent while you can, it wont last long
--
Why, let's just say I do the dirty work for the other side, no matter what side you're on
... that the article is in fact, bullshit, and article squatters will not let anyone fix it.
Propagandapedia.
Oh wait, I do that all the time. Now I feel like I was just being a dick, and I apologize.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Wow. You make that sound almost as bad as the Anonymous Coward's on slashdot...
A search for "whitewashed" in the Wikipedia Talk pages yields 2253 hits. I suppose that might be one rough indicator of whitewashing problems (that have been found and/or claimed). It might also provide a starting point or additional filter for anyone looking for spin jobs for the Wired contest.
How about instead of going after corporate IP addresses, a study of the corrupted power structure, administrator abuses, and Linda Mack/Jayjg?
When I quickly scanned this, I first read "Linda Mack/Jayjg" as "Linda McCartney/Mick Jagger". I was like, wha??? Is there some conspiracy from the 70s I didn't know about?
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
in the world of Wikipedia people can figure out who's doggy you are!
(i.e. a Democrat candidate editing a Republican candidate's entry).
but there is such a thing as differing levels of bias, from barely there, to blatant propaganda
so you can still fight bias, in the name of fighting bias, for the good cause of fighting bias, without seeming like you don't understand that there is no such thing as no bias
here's an allegory: you're never going to completely rid your house of garbage. therefore, should you stop taking out the garbage every thursday? of course not. the fight against bias in media, in all media, not just wikipedia, is the same sort of fight: it's a war that will never be fully won, but not fighting the war is worse
the fight against bias, never to be won, nonetheless must always and forever be fought
as an aside though, i'd also like to point out that a lot of people fighting bias are actually fighting against one form of bias... only to be in favor of their own bias. this applies to both liberal and conservative points of view
and so what do you have? the reality of human discourse and ideology: a constant vicious fight, never to end, with both sides claiming to have a lock on "the truth"
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Sure, but so are scandal sheets. You don't rely on them for accuracy or reliable information.
Not a brilliant comparison, since Wikipedia, by and large, is in fact useful for a large number of knowledge domains.
What if this example, Wikipedia, has a particularly deleterious organizational culture, and an extremely rampant and calcified editorial bias? The problem is not the existence of an organizational culture or editorial bias, but to the degree that it is existent.
I'm skeptical because the results I see don't suggest this is a crippling problem. I'm familiar with some of the problematic stories about the organization, but the bottom line is that nearly everything I've been in a position to verify has turned out to be defensbile at worst, and usually factual or accurate.
Tweet, tweet.
The biggest shark has the most remorae.
Of course we have all heard Stephen Colbert talk about wikipedia in a comedic way, but in one of his interviews where he was out of his usual character, he explained the term he uses, "truthiness". He said, "truthiness" differs from truth in a way that is, it seems true to most of the populous regardless whether it's true or not.
I'm not trying to bash wikipedia or anything and I don't think that was Colbert's idea either, but he does have a point. When everyone is given the liberty to edit or add material to wikipedia, things like these are bound to happen. I for one, use a lot (and by a lot I mean... almost everything i have to look up :P) of information from wikipedia, but if it's about history or a historical event I always take it with a pinch of salt.
In Walmart's eyes the truth for them is that they "pay double the amount of the minimum wage" while in a former employees or a Wallmart hater, it would be a very small wage they pay.
This is what I mean by truthiness.
*****************Diploma mills are frauds who give out realist looking university diplomas, complete with grade and course itemization, to anyone who will pay for them. No need to have any real knowledge or take any real courses, just as long as you can pay.
Many of them try to justify it by saying that they evaluate the persons "life experience" to judge whether the person is worthy of the diploma, but in reality most of them just give the diplomas to anyone who pays the fees.
It is pretty obvious that the diplomas are used by their buyers to get jobs for lying about their abilities, i.e. pretty much plain fraud.
I noticed that the articles of diploma mills are frequent targets of whitewash (see fx this). I don't know for certain who the whitewashers are, but I assume it is either the diploma mills themselves (most like), or people holding the diplomas and afraid to be exposed. Many of Wikipedia's articles rank highly in Google, so they are an important target.
I have a number of diploma mills in my watchlist, and sometimes I have to revert whitewashing every day...
edit 1
edit 2
The IP addresses can be confirmed to be from BBH with whois: -molo
Using your sig line to advertise for friends is lame.
Who added the tag "slashdot liberal whining"? I am asking because I don't understand why someone would tag this story with that. My guess is that the tagging system will be removed because of abuses like this.
I'm not surprised that the character traits of people who would make good CIA employees would also be attracted to Wikipedia.
The first 3 edits listed are as follows:
Harry Potter: They let everyone know Snape is the Half Bllod Prince and kills Dumbledore
They create a page for Cheese sandwiches
They let us know that the US Forces are liberating Iraq and not occupying it in the Baath Party Page.
If you have something that you dont want anyone to know, maybe you shouldnt be doing it in the first place -Eric Schmidt
Mod up! Mod up!
Computers help make the world go round, but it first takes a human to say 'what if' to get anywhere worthwhile.
Somebody sounds unappreciated in their sysadmin job ;-)
This just in ... mysterious edits to Wikipedia entries for Diebold, Wal Mart, and Halliburton are now originating through anonymous web proxies.
Ok let's think about this for a minute. I edit Wikipedia. I'm editing an article on ... which is a likely title
A. Legend of Zelda
B. The mating habits of beetles.
C. The list of solar systems that begin with B discovered in 1945.
Well A. is the most likely, and that's my point. The people editing these articles HAVE interest in them. So Diebold got caught? No let's look at the edit and decide if it was acceptable (and likely it wasn't) but just because someone removes something that is related to them doesn't mean it's not a correct edit.
It's not ok for Diebold to remove the offensive article's text, but if an employee of Diebold who got fired "unfairly" put it there that's ok? Are we now going to decide that a person having an interest in a topic is wrong. If all I edit is information about lockpicking does that mean I work at a lock manufacturer and thus can't be trusted?
The whole point I'm trying to make is we need to look at the EDIT not the editor to decide if changes are fair. Wikipedia is community edited and some people are trying to say that if you're involved with the article's target you're not able to edit. So really should wikipedia be "community edited except for people who work with the article" or should we reevaluate the standards by which we point out "partisanship".
Btw if you choose the second choice above that means we can't have any experienced people talk about the article which is the problem. If I own an iPhone I can't write about in wikipedia so all we then have is second hand experience with products and PR postings. Like I said the solution is to stop worrying about WHO edits wikipedia and instead focus on edits being done to wikipedia.
It could just as easily mean Picasso didn't think computers could give you "art".
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
People like you usually started out with trying to add their favorite person, business, music band or political or pseudo-scientific theory to Wikipedia, only to be rebuffed, repeatedly. Did that happen to you? If so, ask yourself: is your pet topic covered more neutrally and in more detail in Encyclopedia Britannica than in Wikipedia? In all likelihood, your pet topic isn't covered at all in any encyclopedia; so why don't you complain about the bias and rotten structure of all the other encyclopedias? Because with the other encyclopedias you would never even have dared to try to get your pet topic covered: deep down you know it to be uncencyclopedic.
And neither do most of you. It's over.
If the concept of a community-edited 'encyclopedia' makes sense, you only had to wait until so many editors began to insert their own subjective rants into articles intended to be factual and objective.
We will need to overhaul Wikipedia:
- A front-page, factual, objective wiki, intended to be so, and carefully moderated. Editors will wait to see their contributions be checked and verified by the 'community', a group that gains reputations as fair and objective.
- A back-page, no-holds-barred, subjective wiki, intended to permit editors to wax on about whatever they can make stick. No fairness here.
Of course, the 'back-page' wiki will really jut be a blog, but that's what's happened to Wikipedia anyways.
The defacing of articles in Wikipedia will either force Wikipedia to go even further than they have to control editing, or give up.
And the most important feature of an 'encyclopedia', be it the World Book, Britannica, or Wikipedia, is the reputation of the editors (and by extension the authors of articles). Without a reputation for quality work, why bother to reference any such work(s), not knowing of you're reading genuine data, or someone's own subjective rants?
I cannot rely on Wikipedia for much right now. Many articles are in small part factual, and then devolve into long exposes of *all* sides of issues, statements, and 'facts'. As an example, most articles on religious matters add so many different viewpoints and contradicting opinons that getting the bare facts can be hard, if not impossible. In particular, it wasn't long ago that virtually all articles on the Bible turned into determined efforts to discredit the Bible. Not helpful when most failed to offer any support for veracity of the Bible. And my first complaint resulted in rejecting my request for more supportive material - justified by one editor as immaterial, the Bible was, in his words, 'a known and proven fraud'. So much for objectivity. I hear it's better now, but I go to various Bible societies and publishers instead. I get better info.
It's just over. Kinda sad, but inevitable.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
Oh I do agree but to lay the blame for all bias on corporations is a bit silly. I think people can overcome at least a lot of their own bias. The first step is to understand what your own bias is. Please save me from anyone that claims that they are totally unbiased.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Wow, you didn't respond to a single point of the GP, and you conducted an ad hominem attack on him without using any real facts. You just made everything up.
You might has well have said: "Oh yeah? Well, your mother wears army boots!"
have the worst possible bias of all possible biases
when you are blind to your own shortcomings, you are capable of committing the worst sort of crimes
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Did you know there's an xkcd panel about you?
This will only lead to the use of proxies to edit entries. Especially for companies that sell the service to keep the internet clean for anyone who is paying.
Now that the cat's out of the bag, so to speak, they'll be editing wiki entries from home and coffee shops and anywhere there is a truly anonymous internet connection.
I remember reading about Microsoft and SCO on Wikipedia, now there there is not one mention of SCO and Linux parts are watered down... any guess which IPs were used?
The article appears to take (and having read some of them, does not appear to screen) submissions. Please rectify this disparity with the examples with which you're familiar.
I'm sure all the information altered was completely true, and not posted by zealots with agendas.
Copyright infringement is "piracy" in the same way DRM is "consumer rape"
I've been paying attention to the event, and read many survivor accounts. I don't think there's credible evidence available showing that student protesters were killed in the night of June 3 1989. You statement would be fine in a casual conversation, but it'll make a very bad wikipedia statement of fact. The Chinese government knows very well the symbolic importance of the Square, and semantics confusion it creates. I've seen too many arguments on this specific point (whether anybody died in the Square) that people are distracted from discussing the overall event. If I can take a guess, the government probably made it clear to the soldiers that nobody should killed in the Square. As far as wikipedia is concerned, the Tiananmen Square must literally refer to the Square itself within the reasonable definition of physical boundary, and statement of death must be accompanied by references, as well as accompanied by the rebuttal and its references.
It is pretty obvious that the diplomas are used by their buyers to get jobs
Why would the diploma's themselves matter? I've never even heard of an employer wanting to see the paper. Or do they pretend that they're a college when the employer calls? If that's the case, then I still don't see why it matters. If the employer is willing to accept someone from a college they never heard anything about, then who cares if they went at all? Or is it more about people just lying to their friends (like anyone who actually went to college would hang a diploma on their wall)?
> whitewashing and other self-interested editing of Wikipedia.
That would be all of it. Seriously. One person's truth is another's spin. Even the science.
And one person's correction is another's censorship. Feel free to embark on that particular sinking ship.
The signal of consensus opinion is only strengthened by the noise of bias. Apply 'stochastic amplification' to behavior. It's less biased than the more common 'cognitive dissonance' but the result is the same. Those to whom a particular point is egregious enough will act on it.
I could have sworn the point was made when the subject came up a week or two ago. It's no less applicable just because someone made a widget that tells you the poo stinks. You won't step in it, and be happy; the flies will land on it, and be happy; someone else will stomp on the flies, and be happy. Let's all go get happy. That's what epoostimology is about.
Try a different direction if you prefer: "Deep and dark, yet within it is an essence. That essence is real and can be discovered. Therein lies truth." -- Ch. 21, Tao the Ching, Lao Tzu. That "essence" is in the deep content, and in the dark metacontent regarding the creation and changes of all the content. I'll take my essence from my reading of these, not from someone's widget, because it too has an agenda in its essence.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
This would be a killer feature!
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power lost.
What would really be interesting is to study who is systematically trashing people and groups.
How often do people from one party edit pages of politicians of another and defame them?
How often do bigots edit pages of their favorite scapegoats to defame then?
You can't blame someone for trying to keep the trash off of their own page, but to systematically wreak havoc on people, groups, or topics you have a problem with is another.
"Really, conspiracy theorists are just histrionic megalomaniacs. Rather myopic ones at that."
The only myopic people are those who swallow the line of the mainstream media verbatim, even when it contradicts itself and easily verifiable facts. The belief that only your government and media is much like believing that only your God is real and all the rest are fairy stories.
If I have seen further it is by stealing the Intellectual Property of giants.
They have the man power, they have the motive, they have the time and computers. If you look at any of the 9/11 truth stuff, and examine the science (See Stephen Jones, for actual scientific research), it's pretty clear that we are being lied to across the board, and of course wikipedia labels it all the propagandist "conspiracy theory" term. How architectural steel can melt from kerosene is an interesting entry point for those of you actually interested in scientific fact, as opposed to wildly emotional speculation and obvious mis-truths for political purpose. Also the electron microscope imagery is very conclusive that there was thermate in the rubble, which can not be explained other than by controlled demolition, and an actual conspiracy.
Good luck to us all.
rhY
I hold very few opinions. I hold information based on observation and fact. If you wish to disagree, please use facts.
For those who are interested, the author of the above comment (MSTCrow5429) has been blocked several times on Wikipedia for making personal attacks on other editors.
His current project appears to be shilling for Jim Inhofe (R-Oklahoma)'s position denying anthropogenic climate change by citing out-of-date and rejected journal articles. By so doing, he appears to be neglecting important Wikipedia policies demanding reliable sources and requiring material be presented from a neutral point of view.
Sour grapes much? While I certainly agree that there are aspects of Wikipedia that deserve both criticism and scrutiny, I am somewhat disinclined to trust the judgement of MSTCrow on this.
~Idarubicin
I'm sick and tired of you far left nutcases and your consipiracy theories. I bet you think we should just go out and change every aspect of how we live to protect against the boogeymen, right?
"Don't worry, we're not changing everything like the communists would! We're changing things in a completely different way! The state doesn't doesn't own and control everything, it just controls everything, and it's all for your protection against the capitalist pigdog -- erm, I meant to say the terrorists."
It's been a long time.
Not for his partisan political opinions, but for his explanation of "evil". He's perfectly correct. Evil is basically a religious construct, and deserves just as much of a place in our understanding of our world as other religious concepts, like creationism, and the will of God, etc, etc.
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
Considering the amount of slasvertising Ars Technica does, it is no wonder their own Wikipedia article has been self-edited, and whitewashed to remove all critical content. We already know that monetary interests will have the extra time and desire to edit Wikipedia for their own ends. As long as Wikipedia operates by mass rule, this cannot be eliminated. Ars Technica's article is a perfect example, where users and operators of the site have formed a protective coalition for the commercial nature of the article.
Once you have been screwed my a big corporation and left with no recourse thanks to having the Representative Branch in their pocket, you will be singing a different tune.
Its only a matter of time ...
Yes, people are using it as part of lying about their education, see fx this
If the employer is willing to accept someone from a college they never heard anything about, then who cares if they went at all?
Having any university degree should make a difference if a person used several years studying a subject, as a college degree implies. And if you pay extra for good grades, such as magna cum laude (really, this seems to happen!), then it also implies a good degree kind of mastery.
It doesn't seem unlikely that some employer would accept a diploma from a college they never heard of. You can't know every college. And the diploma mills go to great length to be able to look like a real university, to survive a glancing examination of their web site.
This kind of whitewashing should've been expected from the start, so there is nothing surprising there. A good way to manage such conflicts would be to add a user voting system to the edits. If the majority of the users think that an edit to an article is unfair it should not be committed. Although this is a very simplistic view of the solution I believe it is the right direction for wikipedia.
Someone at EA has an opinion on what "Cool" is:i d=108720271
i d=89326323
i d=85151497
i d=79943547
i d=78159261
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?diff=prev&old
Someone at EA doesn't think Joanie Laurer was hot:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?diff=prev&old
Someone at EA vandalizes "World Series" with an insult to someone named Noah:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?diff=prev&old
Someone at EA knows that the Spanish Armada didn't stop to eat at McDonald's:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?diff=prev&old
Someone at EA doesn't think "Scarcity" sucks:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?diff=prev&old
Now try viewing a RANGE of IP addresses, as I originally stated.
It seems you are still using it or trying to use it, just like Slashdot, which is "playing favorites" all its lifetime. That's a bit strange for systems that have failed so miserably, isn't it? The other day I tried to become director of the Encyclopedia Britannica. I failed miserably at it, I could not even remove one of their editors from their seats. Failed experiment in my view. It has been failing for over a century by now.
I must admit that you can write pretty well. It's only after careful analysis and research that your article starts showing its true colors (brownish). Making you a very dangerous person to have conversations with. If you ever tried to submit to wikipedia, or tried to become an admin, they did a very good thing by blocking it.
Well, that's better than vandalizing the Good Will Hunting wikiquote page.
Perhaps we should take this tool with a grain of salt. I did some investigation and there's a lot of non-company related submissions from some companies. I'm on my company network right now, I could go to wikipedia and mod Hitler's page to say he's the most lovable guy ever and he loves jews, such an edit could be tracked back to my company, but could you really hold my company responsible for the edit?
Obviously caution needs to be applied when using this tool, but i fear people will be blindly linking companies to changes in attempts to pull humor or mock a company / organization.
into the scientific framework since Dog would then be observable.
The wired article remarks:
The notion that the wikipedia social process is getting more sophisticated strikes me as silly -- Jimbo Wales, for one, is in denial that there's any problem.It's far more likely that there's a rise in "corporate Wikipedia policies", which is to say, (1) "don't do anything stupid that's going to look bad" and I would suspect (2) "leave the internet spindoctoring up to the expert team that knows how to hide it's tracks".
Or as I see MichaelR commented over at wired.com:
And I foresee that Jimbo Wales will buy the first explanation: "See! The problem has gone away!"
I've been waiting for this to happen. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Durova/The_dark_ side
I deal with this stuff all the time.
At the top of the wired blog comments right now is this one: Wikimedia Foundation employee removes source about Wiki Scanner funding by Anonymous Vishal-WMF, an employee of the Wikimedia Foundation, has removed evidence from a news story that uncovered that Virgil, the scanner's creator, was HIRED by the Wikimedia Foundation! News story that was removed by Wikipedia Employee (not admin, EMPLOYEE): http://english.ohmynews.com/articleview/article_vi ew.asp?at_code=428814 Backup archive link in case the WMF 'vanishes' the evidence: http://www.webcitation.org/5RAEP2kAl Link: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Virgil_G riffith&diff=prev&oldid=151814656 Yet Wired has claimed that this is a "false claim": "Update: 8/17/2007 A Wikimedia Foundation employee really did edit Virgil Griffith's entry today, but only to cut a false claim that Griffith was employed by the foundation to create the scanner. " So what makes Wired assume that it is a false claim? This is the same guy that brought us Wikipedia and the Intelligence Services, and he is stating something as fact, not as an opinion. "On July 26, OhmyNews alleged that Wikipedia may have been infiltrated by Intelligence Agencies. The story attracted more than 50,000 readers in just three days, was highly debated on the Web, and translated in several languages. Wikipedia quickly reacted to the news and hired Virgil Griffith, one of the best known American hacker, to investigate the matter." Yet Wikipedia claims its "unreliable". Wikipedia has used ohmynews as a source in 192 of their articles: and has been used in Google news 460 times: http://news.google.com.au/news?hl=en&ned=au&q=ohmy news&btnG=Search+News Virgil Griffith does claim that he wasn't paid by Wikipedia: http://virgil.gr/31.html and the Wikipedia staff went so far as to remove the links, and then ban the IP address of the person who had inserted them: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special: Log&type=block&page=User:123.2.168.215 Daniel Brandt claims that it is far too expensive for him to have done it himself: http://wikipediareview.com/index.php?s=&showtopic= 11853&view=findpost&p=43697 But perhaps he really did do all of this just to make himself popular. Spend a few thousand dollars, including the $349 to do the reverse IP lookups: http://www.ip2location.com/ip-country-region-city- isp.aspx , saved presumably through his time as an unemployed student and spent several hundred hours creating something that does nothing more than make him well-known. Perhaps it'll help him to get a job sometime in the future? And perhaps its all one almighty coincidence that all this has happened just a week after Wikipedia was reeling after the massive censorship about the SlimVirgin scandal. Oh, and also note that another IP that reverted edits to the article belonged to Jayjg, the person most closely related to SlimVirgin: http://wikipediareview.com/index.php?s=&showtopic= 11853&view=findpost&p=43641 Coincidence, coincidence, coincidence. And this over an issue in which we've proven that the CIA edits Wikipedia with a definite aim, as have many other industr