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."
What did you expect? Everyone has different truths.
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
As much as it may astound us, even CIA agents are real people with real feelings and interests. (Well, to the extent that Buffy epsidoe music lyrics can count as a "real interest"...)
Apology to Ubuntu forum.
Uhh, we should also remember that there are some people at these places that make legitimate edits to Wikipedia. Just because an IP changes one or two things controversial, doesn't mean that all of their edits are BS. Also it is reason for someone to watch that users edits in the future to check for NPOV
-nick
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.
Why is there nothing on the discussion page? If you're fighting someone on the main page, you need to document it on the discussion page.
You do realize that the 7th Edition came out in 1827, right? Its funny. Laugh.
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
Do you understand what TFA is about?
The whole point of a community resource like Wikipedia is to allow for multiple points of view, and by implication, multiple biases. As long as that's transparent and understood, it IS a bonus.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
Reality has a liberal bias. -Steven Colbert
Half the lies they say about me aren't true
Cute Rush
Call me cynical, but I fully expected companies to edit wiki entries that affect their public image.
IMHO, the scary part is how pathetically stupid this particular company goes about it. One would hope that a company like Diebold knows a bit more about IT security. Just send an employee with a laptop to your local wifi coffee shop already. Jeez.
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. The scary thing is I'm not 100% convinced this is satire.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
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.
Even evil people are human. That's what makes humanity so scary.
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.
Ok fair enough....
Does the fact that they like Buffy excuse any immoral actions they take? I think you are being disingenuous and trying to do a little propagandizing yourself. It looks as though you are trying to build sympathy for Big Brother.Wait, what? You just said....
Give it a rest. Implying that its not surprising for CIA employees to have interests outside of work.
I'm saying, why even mention that people in the CIA are real people? Do you really think we are all so childish as to completely demonize everyone we disagree with?Yes, absolutely 100%, I do believe that the average Slashdot user is childish enough to demonize people they disagree with. Are you new here? Peruse any political or Microsoft related topic for examples. Or how about the Novell thing? Or hell, the team working on Mono.
Hell, to some degree, dehumanization of those who differ from you is pretty common. See: racism, classism, nationalism, religion, etc. In that vein, I think its valuable to have reminders that if you prick them, they'll bleed just like you.
"I'm just saying, don't be surprised if the same guy who tries to manipulate the public's understanding, also likes Buffy." Why even point out the blazingly obvious like that? What is your motivation?His motivation was that someone thought that it was odd that the CIA had interests outside of the CIA, and this was silly.
If you want to dig deeper than that, don't you think its valuable to understand that these people are doing their jobs for some reason other than simply enjoying doing unethical things? Its not about building sympathy for people who do bad things, but challenging the whole "Well they're just different from us mentality. Its been pretty much bullshit ever since it was first used. People are complex, and its far too often that people simplify them and dehumanize them as a way of coping with the lack of understanding and empathy. People also like to think that people that do bad things are simply different than them on some fundamental level, because otherwise they have the potential for evil within them.
"Criminals are just bad people." "Republicans are greedy and evil!" "They deserved to get bombed because they support terrorism." And so on, and so on. Hell, even Hitler wanted to help his country, yet most people just assume he was satan incarnate. This may seem obvious to you, but to a lot of people, like many Slashdot users, its not.
You're reading a hell of a lot into his post that just isn't there. What's your motivation?
> Do you really think we are all so childish as to completely demonize everyone we disagree with?
Judging by the typical traffic on slashdot, yeah, pretty much.
Done with slashdot, done with nerds, getting a life.
Before wiki-anything can be considered more than just another biased source of info, the attitude that it is unethical for people to edit information about themselves (including companies) will have to change.
> The only checks and balances in place are reviews by scientific peers!
As opposed to the alternative, which has no methodology and no review whatsoever. Show me one case where science has been wrong where it was corrected by something not science.
Done with slashdot, done with nerds, getting a life.
I don't think Batman was trying to say that the methodology of science was wrong, but trying to draw parallels between that methodology and that of Wikipedia.
I'm not sure if its an apt comparison, however. My mother could edit an article on computer programming that I wrote, but she is by no means my peer in this area. In science, the people reviewing you generally have the background required to be able to accurately and meaningfully judge your results. The same isn't necessarily true of Wikipedia. In the same way, however, its better than the alternative. Wikipedia isn't perfect, but not much in life is.
Scientists perform experiments.
The experiment is the be all and end all of science. I think the reason that scientists get a lot of flack like the parent post nowadays is because there are so many pseudo-scientists around that claim to be using the scientific method but really aren't. Psychologists, sociologists, eugenicists, data miners, etc, etc. There's a lot of news articles these days claims that "scientists" have conducted an "experiment" supposedly proving some claim. Nine times out of ten, it turns out that cargo-cult scientists have performed another ritual with the appearance, but none of the substance of a proper experiment.
I've ranted long enough. The answer to your question is that scientists subject their theories to experimental verification/falsification. Peer review doesn't even enter into the equation. Freud was peer reviewed.
May the Maths Be with you!
Besides missing the point (WHOOSH!), experiments have to be interpreted. Who interprets the results of the experiments? Scientists and their peers. There *is* a framework in place that science is supposed to follow. That's why no one can successfully claim that "I lit a match, therefore it's cold fusion." But at the end of the day, it's the people committed to following that framework that make it work.
Freud wasn't the only one who was peer reviewed. Einstein, for example, was also peer reviewed. And there was a lot of resistance to his theories in the day. The key is that his peers held themselves to the ideals of the scientific method. They poked, prodded, and tested his theory (both logically and empirically) until they were forced to accept it.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Evil is a crutch to avoid understanding. Why did person X do deed A? Because their evil. See, no need to think about what their motivations are, why they might see their deeds as beneficial to society. As a citizen of "The Great Satan" you would think we would understand that more than we do.
If Bush had taken the time to understand Al Queda's and Hussien's motivations instead of just declaring them insane and evil, we might not be mired as an occupying force in Iraq today. Surprisingly, the CIA did understand this, it took months of browbeating to get them to come up with an implausible senario to suit a myoptic president set on upstaging his father...
The experiment is the be all and end all of science.
Reality and physics doesn't care what the results of the experiment are, but the groupthink comes from sciences interpretation on the results.
As in... "I put leaches on my scurvy patients and they get better so it must have been the leaches kind" of thinking.
In itself, trying the leaches isn't wrong, but I've failed to noticed other issue due to pre-conceived notion such as the fact that the eating of lemons and limes had nothing to do with my patients getting better.
The scientific method usually tries to minimize this as much as possible, but often times we are still left with the debate of "Does dark matter exist?" or "Can we prove black hole exists?"
Right now, its still groupthink and anyone who would say "There are no blackholes!" would get shunned even if he had a compelling argument. Those in the community that had an open mind would of course review his material in a peer review.
As it is now... The things that have the hardest time with controlled experiements (like black holes) are the ones that groupthink gets applies to since we can't create a black hole in a lab and see what it does.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
Evil is a crutch to avoid understanding
"Evil is a crutch to avoid understanding" is a crutch to avoid understanding.
The term "Evil" can be such a crutch, but it is something much more. It is a simple way of describing a particular person or activity in shorthand. (And that's the context in which it was intended here, I believe)
I'd go nuts if I couldn't say "Evil people drink milk too", and instead had to say "Among the people who drink milk are those whose childhoods were so difficult they never learned to build supporting relationships and ended up isolating themselves outside the norms of human interaction in such ways that they no longer recognized murder, rape, and torture as things that were in and of themselves bad, as well as those who became so deeply angry because a fundamental belief they had was shown to be invalid that they could not deal with it and had to try to force the rest of the world to conform to their reality, and mimes"
I'm not only familiar with the Factbook, it was the source I consulted upon hearing that we were invading Iraq. It took about 5 minutes of reading to realize that the best possible outcome of the war was to turn Iraq into a mirror image of Iran, thus destroying the only check (other than Israel) on Iranian power in the Middle East. In other words, according to the CIA, Iraq war=dumb.
And yes, I'm a conservative.
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.
The problem is, everyone has a personal definition of evil, and it looks ridiculous to people who don't agree. You can't just use a shorthand if it isn't completely common. This isn't to argue about your particular definition, I'm just saying it's a touchy thing on a site where the term is applied equally to George Bush, Google, and anyone who thinks RMS is a cosmic joke.
Slashdot - where whining about luck is the new way to make the world you want.
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.