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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."
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...
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.
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
But as this guy's project goes to show, in an open, transparent environment it doesn't matter... as a bonus it also serves to show who you can and can't trust.
Insisting on "correct" English is like saying that there is only one, definitive recipe for chili.
tinfoil hat on - Well of anyone doing self interested edits, you would imagine the CIA would be covering their ones with a lot of noise. That is what those innocent edits are.
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
Almost as funny was someone at the NSA (the security organization) adding the "National Softball Association" to the disambiguation page for "NSA" :-)
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
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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.
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
Or they are really code for something. Perhaps its a kind of Kryptos for the new millennium. A code spread over the internet.
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
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
The RfAs are not a good procedure for elevating anyone to administrator, as the most actively involved are administrators, I'm not entirely certain it's a straight majority vote (all votes may not be equal, if administrators are given more weight, the power of the oligarchy increases), and an infinitely small percentage of users vote on RfAs. It is extremely uncommon for an abusive administrator to be stripped of powers. The system is not designed to remove abusive administrators via any established procedure or independent third-party mechanism. I can count the incidents where abusive administrators have been punished on one hand, two at most.
Slashdot: Playing Favorites Since 1997
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.
The RfA process is not just a vote, but a discussion of possible issues that might disqualify a candidate. Nonetheless, very few candidates with less than 75%-80% approval are ever appointed.
You are also misinformed about the removal of admin privileges: In the English Wikipedia alone, there have been 37 cases of it, and the Arbitration process is designed to deal with such abuses and has the authority to penalize them.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
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...
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The IP addresses can be confirmed to be from BBH with whois: -molo
Using your sig line to advertise for friends is lame.
Not really. Anarchism wouldn't have a near all powerful elite sitting on top of a very large mass of editors. I don't think anarchism would work either, but I wouldn't call Wikipedia anarchist in style. I think it's a failed largely unstructured bureaucracy.
Slashdot: Playing Favorites Since 1997
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.
If I want to look at say the last 100 edits of a page, doing so manually clicking in the history page would be way too much work and too cumbersome to the point that I would never do that. If on the other hand it was possible to download the history and use a local version control tool to get a list of the last 100 edits shown as a continuous list of patches it would be easy to look through all changes and I would do so often I guess.
More transparency of editing history can only be good, and I think such a tool is much needed.
When you are sure of something, you probably are wrong (search for "Unskilled and Unaware of It").
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.
Not to mention that one IP can cover a LOT of people.
My work IP is currently banned from wikipedia for vandalism. I've investigated this, and it was apparently some idiot in another building that's not even in the same zip code but who happens to work at another subsidiary under the same parent company that shares my IP. There are probably more than 10,000 people that share this same IP spread across New York City. Some of us work at the same company he does, some of us don't.
You really cannot take any of the IP's on this list and directly connect it to anyone at any company or organization, any more than the RIAA can take an IP of an alleged music pirate and say they individually are the ones that did it.
My IP, for example, says I work at a completely different company than the one that signs my paychecks. That's the way it is in the age of conglomerates.
more importantly, it seems the CIA has a lot of free time when the guys are at their desks and have nothing to do but edit wiki. On the other hand, they are the business of intelligence and well someone has to add entries to the damn thing.
Balderdash!