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
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.
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.
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.
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.
...and for the record, everyone in Germany from 1939-1945 was out on holiday.
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
Second of all, the value of this quote helps a person to understand a commonly misunderstood by computer geeks. Computers are basically abacuses. They do boolean logic. They create answers. However, intelligence asks questions. We don't have a tool yet that can ask a question, and until we do, the only intelligent system in the universe that know of will be the human mind. Too often, people, both programmers and non-programmers alike, think that a computer can solve all the problem. However, that doesn't reflect reality. Human intellect needs to perceive and pose the question, and then use a tool to solve that problem, such as progamming a computer to solve that problem. But back in the working world, practical answers to real questions are quite valuable You have just shown exactly what Picasso was trying to enlighten you to. You need to have a good question first, in order to get a good answer. Or any answer, for that matter. That quote just strikes me as one of those pseudo-intellectual sayings that seems brilliant until subjected to a moment of rational thought. So you have no use for questions? That tells me you haven't spent a moments time thinking about the implications of this quote.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
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.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."