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ESA, EA Caught Editing Their Own Wikipedia Entries
With the whitewashing of Wikipedia now an easily-reviewable record, it's been noted that games-related organizations are not above tweaking their public image online. Joystiq notes that EA, for example, is unabashed about removing founder Trip Hawkins from their entry. More ominous edits from the Entertainment Software Association are reported by GamePolitics. The organization, which you may recall backing the recent raids on mod chippers, has made a concerted effort to cast mod chips in a negative light. " In one paragraph, someone at ESA deleted a nuanced discussion of mod chip legality, replacing it with a flat assertion that mod chips are illegal. Less than a minute later, a lengthy section on the positive uses of mod chips was deleted, as was a notation that the US Supreme Court has not yet dealt with the DMCA. Finally, a sentence stating that mod chips are legal in Australia was removed."
...I thought that we were now subject to any anti-modchipping clauses that might be present in the DMCA?
Using the holy grail of OSes...
listing all the individuals, organizations, and businesses who are caught doing this. The name of the individuals, along with whom they represent should be posted clearly on a wiki page.
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
Now that we've caught these people exploiting the part of wikipedia that NO ONE should exploit simply because it undermines the very principle of this community-based system, who will change these entries back? WILL these entries be changed back?
It seems kind of limp to blow the horn on them but not remove the erroneous edits they made. Even if this information is subjective, if a company edits this info to benefit said company, that doesn't seem fair. As a slave/consumer in this country, it makes me cringe every time a large corporation gets away with this kind of bullshit. When is enough, enough?
http://www.shacknews.com/onearticle.x/48482
This exposes an issue I have with Wikipedia - who edits last wins.
If these people had used IP anonymisers, they'd never have been picked up and the edits would have looked just like arguments back and forth until someone gave up. The problem is that a company can be far more tenacious than any one person, even paying marketing people to make sure Wikipedia has the 'right' information.
The answer I see from Wikipedia fans is "just edit the page when you see an error." That's great, but if someone's determined enough, they'll edit right afterwards, making the entire thing pointless.
The greatest strength of Wikipedia is the reason I believe it must ultimately fail.
to discover that companies edit their own wikipedia entries...
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
And if you use Tor, your exit node's IP address gets blocked unless you log in.
Or at least a new registered Democratic voter.
Entity edits freely-editable online encyclopaedia. "News at 11" as I believe the cliche goes.
Just because the IP belongs to the company doesn't mean it's a company decision. I've made plenty of edits from school/work. It doesn't mean those edits were endorsed or even known to the company.
With Wikipedia, you edit the topics you're interested in. If you work in a certain industry or a certain company, you'll most likely edit pages related to it.
Wheel in the sky keeps on turnin'.
You can't dismiss another persons concerns about the world simply by tagging their arguments as "teen angst". That in itself is an imature perspective.
I'm 30, and as I watch my country slip into a sick pit of capitalistic facism, I think speaking out about it is the best way to show concern and encourage others to act as well. I live in america where our whole world is controlled by entities such as these. I have every right to be irate about the level of dishonesty and corruption in the corporate world. They slight us all on a personal level every time they pull something like this. If you really feel that's being overdramatic, then as a member of "the real world" I implore you to not care about my angst. Please.
Some self editing can be helpful. For example, certain timelines, company historical info, etc., might be well documented within the company, and an interesting read for those looking for info on the subject. However, removing other critical edits is often the primary purpose of some self-editors.
Take for example, Ars Technica (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ars_Technica). Completely whitewashed, and now also sadly lacking any depth or real content. It's the same reason there are so many Ars articles linked from Slashdot, even though many are just press releases covered by Ars. They have a small mob of editors and writers and fans who continually submit those "stories" to Slashdot, and the same mob takes turns monitoring the Wikipedia entry, removing not only critical information, but other information that may be interesting to someone interested in the site's history.
Also sad to note is the media using Wikipedia to find "tech experts" to comment on stories. Disturbingly, I heard an empty piece on NPR, mostly composed of quotes of Ken Fisher, owner of Ars, regarding modern music distribution. He was put forth as an "expert". I would have much rather heard the enlightened commentary of a Lawrence Lessig, for example.
The strange thing is that the grandparent normally posts very informative and insightful posts. I'm guessing he/she hasn't gotten to the coffee yet.
"Little is much when little you need."
I see nothing inherently wrong with a company editing its own entries...in fact it could often help improve information. The problem is that they'll likely try to censor aspects of the entry. Still, that's what everybody else is for. I've considered proposing at the organization I work at that we edit our Wikipedia entry. Right now, it has a couple of paragraphs (and they are accurate), but we certainly could make it more informative.
...also known as citizendium.
Wikipedia is a great idea, and a great interface, but leads to exactly this sort of behaviour. If a company edits their entry to reflect their side of the story, is it editing or abuse?
He who edits last, wins. Over the long run, that doesn't work. That's why one of the founders of wikipedia (Larry Sanger) decided to take the idea of wikipedia and add in some accountability. The project was named citizendium, and was started just about a year ago. It is based on three fundamental differences from wikipedia:
* all contributors must apply for membership in the project under their real names, which are then visibly associated with all articles
* all articles are reviewed by experts in their particular fields, offering suggestions and criticism as the articles evolve with the goal for each article to be "approved"
* that vandals, trolls, and disruptive editors are quickly and permanently banned from further work on the project.
It's MUCH smaller than wikipedia at present , but also not loaded with garbage and editorial pissing matches. Take a look, join the community, and help make the next generation online encyclopedia better.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
If anytime someone does this, people catch it and then we all make a big stink about it, maybe they'll stop doing it. And we'll have a better idea about which entities do or do not play well with others, which matters to some of us when making purchasing decisions. Perhaps you want us to just shut up and be good little consumers?
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Why should someone try to list this? Who cares, and why?
Of course people from various companies or organizations edit the Wikipedia entries for those organizations. They're likely to be more knowledgeable and more interested in the subject matter than the average contributor. That's normal.
If someone created a Wikipedia page about me, and claimed that I cheated on a Geology paper at Harvard, I would probably edit the page and remove it - seeing as how I never went to Harvard or took Geology. Are you telling me that's unfair or unethical of me? That I should wait patiently for someone else knowledgeable and motivated to go make that correction for me? That principle seems absurd to me.
If the edits they make are untrue, if they're trying to give a falsely positive impression of themselves, then fix it. Correct it. Revert it. The fact that they want to do so is neither surprising nor any worse than if some random third party wanted to post falsely positive (or negative) information about the organization in question. If I'm some random crazy jerk and I decide to vandalize Linus Torvalds' entry to say terrible things about him, how is that better than if he himself edited it to say untrue but positive things about himself? Either way it's just someone posting false information to Wikipedia, and either way you should just correct it to the best of your ability and move on.
There shouldn't be some sort of blanket principle or policy that an organization can't update its own Wikipedia page. I'd imagine there are IBM employees who know more about IBM than you do. I'd expect there are EA employees who know a lot about EA. They should be free to contribute that knowledge. If they're lying, correct their lies like you would anyone else's.
I'm glad to see that Citizendium has adopted a more realistic policy on the expertise requirements by moving to approval instead of pre-vetting. I still think the barriers to entry for "trivial" editing are going to be a problem. Most of the barriers are a function of the MediaWiki software, which is really not well-suited for the type of workflow changes that would be needed to support it. I think something working like a distributed SCM system would be more appropriate, where diffs could be pushed upstream as patchsets instead of just blindly saved into the head branch. I'm not holding my breath that Mediawiki will ever make this happen though.
Done with slashdot, done with nerds, getting a life.
Wikipedia rules are lame, particularly rules about "experts" editing pages (including the person/entity who is the subject of the article). Not only does this often lead to dumbed down and incorrect articles, it can also lead to very one-sided articles. In cases where there is contention, such as this, why should biased outsiders be allowed to say whatever they want, while biased insiders are banned? Anyone should be able to edit, or everyone except actual professional/expert editors should be banned from editing. There are hundreds of examples where someone had a bone to pick and wrote hurtful, incorrect and crazy things in a wikipedia article, because it gives them a platform to hurt others or stand on an unassailable soapbox (see the Greater Internet Dickwad Theory if you don't get what I mean). Editors should be required to pass some scrutiny by wikipedia before editing is allowed, and anonymity should be removed. Moreover, wikipedia should be about facts, not opinions or whatever the latest news articles say in lieu of actual facts.
I fully support anyone, even the bad guys mentioned in this article, in editing articles about them or things that are important to them. Otherwise it's life out of balance, tilted quite unfairly.