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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."
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
54th. England is 51, Saudi Arabia is 52, Iraq is 53.
I say we should be promoted to 50th, ahead of New Jersey (which according to our American-saturated television stations, nobody likes)
Admit it. You post strawman arguments as AC so you get modded Insightful for refuting them, rather than Troll
to discover that companies edit their own wikipedia entries...
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
Of course they were changed back. The whole point of this article is that people found out and weren't pleased with the disinformation being spread. Would they then allow those edits to remain? Besides, I've been checking, and I've found that yes, the redacted information has been restored. So don't worry. :)
Please check out the change history. In most of the cases, the changes were reverted within minutes. It doesn't matter who makes the edits, if the edits are wrong or uncalled for, they will be reverted.
Constantly changing back would lead to the article being locked. Being tenacious does not matter one bit if the article can't just be changed anymore.
If you doubt the information in a Wikipedia article, check out its history. It's there for a reason.
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.
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.