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
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
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.
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.
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.
They don't need Tor, they could just create sockpuppet accounts like everyone else who trolls Wikipedia, and hide their IP that way.
Checkuser anyone?
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
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
. . . their own truthiness?
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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?!?!?!
Sony ha
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
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.
Now this was just silly . . .
I'm not tense. I'm just terribly, terribly, alert.
The above comment is a troll, but I'll bite anyway. TOR is a huge time waster for Wikipedians. It basically gives vandals an unlimited stock of IP addresses from which to vandalize. The proximate reason that caused me to block TOR was that one particularly tenacious vandal (Enviroknot) was cycling through ranges of TOR IPs, vandalizing the Arbitration Committee page.
Roger Dingledine (the guy who invented TOR) came to Wikimania '06 and I was luckly enough to have dinner with him. We had a long talk about TOR - he explained the technical underpinnings of TOR to me and what he's doing next (to get around the Chinese firewall). His position was that he's not happy that TOR is blocked, but he understands why we do it, and he thinks we're going in the right direction. He also thinks that we need a trust metric - at which point, editing Wikipedia through TOR will become possible.
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
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.
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.
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
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.
Whose "objective, external reality" are you referring to? Our wonderfully objective media? All of the oh-so objective Slashdotters?
There is no such thing as an "objective, external reality". All things viewed and/or reported by a human being are subjective.
"Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote."
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
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
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.
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)
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.
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
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.