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US Government Caught Manipulating Wikipedia

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the your-tax-dollars-at-work dept.

surfi writes "As The Inquirer points out, someone with a House of Representatives IP address has been feeding propaganda into the 'invasion of Iraq' article on Wikipedia." Well at least they are in good company with trustworthy institutions like the CIA and the Vatican.

2 of 471 comments (clear)

  1. Except that this is old news by CodeShark · · Score: 5, Informative
    as most of the edits took place in 2005 and were just recently noticed, and most of the edits are apparently fairly minor. Adding some "it is claimed" phraseology etc. here and there, where the underlying fundamentals of the article remained basically unchanged.


    What I found more interesting is that apparently the Register doesn't like Wikipedia because they refer to it as "whackypedia", and the statement that the edits were made by a "Bush friendly" source inside the House. Maybe the Bush friendly angle is true -- the Register article asserts it to be so without quoting the edits or commenting, but there is no way to tell by an IP address.


    Which tells me that the Register article is basically shoddy journalism. No fact digging, no fact checking, polemics instead of the who what when why where that journalism is supposed to accomplish. So -- with all due respect to GOOD journalism, and while not a Bushie or US Govt. fan, I have to say that this tidbit is yellow all under.

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    ...Open Source isn't the only answer -- but it's almost always a better value than the alternatives...
  2. Re:They're not that stupid by jackpot777 · · Score: 4, Informative

    Looking at the top two hits on this Google search, it looks like people in Government don't even know the basic functions of Microsoft Word.

    Those that do not learn the mistakes in File ---> Versions history are doomed to repeat them.

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    Shiny. Let's be bad guys...