Guantanamo Officers Caught Modifying Wikipedia

James Hardine writes "Wikileaks reports that US armed forces personnel at Guantanamo have conducted propaganda attacks over the Internet. (The story has been picked up by the NYTimes, The Inquirer, the New York Daily News, and the AP.) The activities documented by Wikileaks include deleting Guantanamo detainees' ID numbers from Wikipedia, posting of self-praising comments on news websites in response to negative articles, promoting pro-Guantanamo stories on the Internet news focus website Digg, and even altering Wikipedia's entry on Cuban President Fidel Castro to describe him as 'an admitted transsexual' (misspelling the word 'transsexual'). Guantanamo spokesman Lt. Col. Bush blasted Wikileaks for identifying one 'mass communications officer' by name, who has since received death threats for 'simply doing his job — posting positive comments on the Internet about Gitmo.'"

Comments

Re:Minor gripe

[Wordplay]

I wouldn't. Propaganda just means tilting public opinion towards positive through use of the media and other mass communications, with an implication (but not requirement) that it's less than honest. That could be adding positive info, that could be deleting negative info, given access. Wiki is unusual in that it would actually let you do the latter, oversight considerations aside.

Enough people don't understand that Wiki's only -really- valid as a collection of other cites and take it at face value that this sort of thing could be very effective if it's not outed.

the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit

[TopSpin]

That's the slogan which appears on the Main_Page of Wikipedia. The provided link leads to Wikipedia:Introduction which states:

anyone can edit almost any page, and we encourage you to be bold I presume the "almost any page" refers to that tiny subset of pages that are locked at any one moment. No criterion for who is and is not permitted to edit Wikipedia are provided.

Now, Wikipedia does maintain a NPOV policy that one might consider relevant to the case at hand. However, NPOV applies to the nature of contributed content, not the nature of the contributor. When he's not ordering political opponents assassinated, Putin is free to work to his own page, as long as the contributed content maintains a NPOV.

The Wikileaks page linked from our /. story lists the 60 edits in question. If you actually examine these edits you'll find they appear to have no general focus. Edits include grammar and spelling corrections, elaborations on pop culture topics and other matters. Since the vast majority of these edits lack any obvious political agenda, Wikileaks helpfully "highlights" the 5 controversial edits, otherwise you might miss them:

1. Remove one sentence containing a gitmo detainee ID number. Remainder of topic unmodified
2. Remove one sentence containing a gitmo detainee ID number. Remainder of topic unmodified
3. Remove one sentence containing a gitmo detainee ID number. Remainder of topic unmodified
4. Alter one word to characterize the current Afghanistan conflict as a "war" instead of an "invasion".
5. Add the sentence "Fidel Castro is an admitted transexual."

Having read all of the same edits myself I can confirm that these 5 edits constitute the complete propaganda attack. I can only speculate why someone from Gitmo might feel the need to remove detainee ID numbers; perhaps the practice is obsolete. Who knows? The detainee topics themselves weren't harmed in any substantive way by the lack of ID numbers. The petty "war" verses "invasion" thing; they're both wrong. The only NPOV word that comes to mind for me is "conflict". As for the transsexual bit; puerile crap like this appears at a frequency of several Hz on Wikipedia, and is removed almost as quickly by various bots and many diligent editors. Ascribing this to some propaganda machine when it could just as easily have been some twit among the 3000+ active duty troops in Gitmo is a real stretch.

There you have it; 3 unexplained detainee ID removals which failed to significantly propagandize anything, a single word edit war in which both sides are guilty of violating NPOV and some vandalism.

Wow.