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Wikipedia Blocks Suspicious Edits From DoJ
kylehase writes "The release of Wikiscanner last year brought much attention to white-washing of controversial pages on the community-generated encyclopedia. Apparently Wikipedia is very serious in fighting such behavior as they've temporarily blocked the US Department of Justice from editing pages for suspicious edits."
Overrules? That word makes as much sense in this context as 'penguinates'.
The captcha is donkeyballs (kidding).
DOJ, You got served!
Disclaimer: The opinions and actions of the US Gov't are in no way representative of those held by this author or its ci
Seems as if the tables have turned.
Someone stands up to them. Now I think if the RIAA ever comes after me I will overrule them...I guess what I'm trying to say is I for one welcome our Self overruling overlords.
I believe thats what is generally called "rattling the bushes"...
..but what will come out? a paper tiger or a man eater? I cannot see the DOJ taking this lying down.
they've temporarily blocked the US Department of Justice from editing pages for suspicious edits.
Because, y'know, the DOJ only has a single point of entry to the internet, and couldn't possibly get around this block by, say, having people doing it from their home PCs...
Although I'm really not sure what the big deal is, except perhaps the fact that "suspicious" edits were occuring from the DOJ's networks.
Until Wikipedia is served a court order requiring them to remove or alter certain information, they can do whatever the hell they want with their own web site(s) so long as they are law abiding.
Israel does it on Palestinians, and Wikipedia does it on the DoJ.
I know Wikipedia is the Internet's best example of groupthink (truth by consensus!) so I shouldn't be surprised.
The big problem with the Wikipedia comes down to one of opinion.
As long as it is just facts then it seems too work pretty well. When it comes to opinion then things get into trouble.
One persons white washing is somebody elses setting the record straight.
What is funny is bias and opinion can creep into the strangest articles.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Wait, your Department of Justice?!? was suspected of unethical or immoral actions? As a non-US citizen this speaks volumes to me. Not that I'm saying the rest of the world is any better.
Place goes up 'n' down faster than an intern in the Clinton White House... Ddos attack? Server misconfigured?
Best Slashdot Co
Governmental Wikipedia editing around the world:
Japan: "The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam"
USA: "The defense department is in charge of Gitmo"
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
Wikiscanner appears to have nothing to do with the department of justice. Besides, If an IP from the DOJ tries to erase a particular scandel from wikipedia or wiki-whatever, doesn't that, in a way, verify the accuracy of the report?
Meet stone.
...and the Wikinews article on the same story.
Should the government have the right to even be on Wikipedia making edits? Isn't that similar to them controling any other media outlet?
Or does the 'openness' of wiki mean that the government is justified in making changes to whatever articles they want?
I personally don't want them even touching it, or influencing any media outlet.
No comprende? Let me type that a little slower for you...
Once a certain kind of edit results in an IP ban, I would guess that the editors of wikipedia would keep an eye on similar edits and anyone trying to make similar edits, irrespective of their location, would get a warning or possible ban. Of course the edit would be reverted.
I really don't see any point in an organization getting someone to push views similar to the ones that caused an IP ban in the first place.
This is exactly the sort of reason ALL conservatives need to be thrown out of government.
I think the real story here isn't that Wikipedia has temporarily suspended the DOJ from article edits. The real story, at least to me, is that the DOJ has demonstrably been involved in a systematic effort to rewrite history. Many of us have been suspecting that the administration was doing that, but this is the kind of damning evidence that we've been looking for.
This needs to be the straw that breaks the PNAC's and neo-conservatism's back, and we can only hope that the Republican party rises from the ashes better and more rational for having done so. They're already making solid progress by picking the McCain horse, if only he would stop selling himself out to the fundies and stick to his old center-right positions. The time of the Religious Right's domination of American politics needs to come to an end, and if we can show their more moderate colleagues just how bad they really are I think there's a solid chance that they'll kick the monkey off of their back for good.
Try not to take me more seriously than I take myself.
The DoJ (and all govt entities) are creations of law,NOT any sort of corporation or moral person and are not entitled to any sort of opinion. Any expression of opinion seriously undermines the democratic process since it generally favors incumbents.
There is a clear line between answering questions and trying pro-actively to shape opinion. And they've crossed it. As they have many other lines. :( worst is they appear not to understand why what they've done on these occasions might be wrong and generally justify it as "safety" which is not theirs to decide.
I would have thought that technically, the DOJ can kick Wikipedia's ass on this one, if they were serious enough about it. Are we going to reach the stage where Wikipedia has to roll over or find some kind of safe haven for its servers, a la Pirate Bay?
Maybe there's a market for some small country to become a haven for unpopular websites - I kind of internet equivalent of the Cayman Islands or Monte Carlo.
Of course, if Wikipedia did have to do that, the first amendment is basically busted.
Maybe the DoJ and all other government agencies should be permanently banned. Not as a punishment, but as a matter of appropriateness. Think of the recent upset when it was discovered that the "military analyst" on most news shows was just a Pentagon mouthpiece. Why was that bad? Because in order for a democracy to function well, the people need access to clear unbiased information. While most everyone knows that various News programs have a slant, Wikipedia wants to (and should continue to) maintain as balanced a voice as possible. The more that Wikipedia become the first place many people go for information, the more important it becomes in having a well informed public. After all a well informed public is what things like "freedom of the press" is about, right?
We are all just people.
BEGIN Irony
Phew! This is such a relief! Why in the world should we expect any credible information to be provided by anyone who works at the DOJ? Obviously everyone at the DOJ knows absolutely nothing about anything. Everyone knows that the most accurate information comes from out-of-work autoworkers. Next, I'm looking forward to Wikipedia blocking any edits on computing articles that come from IBM. My neighbor's 12-year-old son is a much more accurate source than any of those biased IBM geeks.
END
Like a (non-subscription) site ever even needs a reason to ban anyone. If you get banned and think you didn't deserve it, too bad it's not your site. You can complain to the powers that be, but in the end it's wiki's decision to ban whoever the hell they want.
Wikipedia -- the encyclopedia anyone can edit... as long as Honest Jimbo and his Admin Regime agrees with you. All else is vandalism and must be dealt with harshly.
Also, Wikipedia recently got a grant from the Sloan Foundation. On the board of the Sloan Foundation are several General Motors execs. So... hands up anyone who is naive enough to think that Wikipedia's General Motors pages will be 100% POV.
4 legs good, 2 legs better.
I've no iterest in whether Wikipedia shows you in a favourable or defamatory light. As such, i'm willing to edit your posts for you, as you require.
I'll obviously be billing you for "consultancy", and do not guarantee any level satisfaction from this service.
I look forward to hearing from you,
Jimmy Wales.
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
The Department of Justice has almost 130,000 employees, and as much as some conspiracy theorists would like to believe otherwise, I seriously doubt that they're able to keep track of the individual actions of every single one of them. As even the article has pointed out, these questionable edits are most likely the action of an individual employee making edits on their lunch break, a personal effort instead of an organized one. If this were a coordinated and malicious conspiracy by the government, don't you think they'd be a little more creative in covering their tracks, especially after all the exposure from Wikiscanner last year?
I find the ban on the DoJ's IP address more humorous than anything else. If there's some sort of action in DoJ over the incident, it'll probably be a crackdown on Internet usage for productivity purposes.
As for whether or not "the government" is qualified to edit Wikipedia, who is? Nearly everyone will have some sort of conflict of interest, whether due to their employer, religious creed, or civic affiliation. I don't see why any of over fourteen million Federal civil servants and contractors, let alone the tens of millions of state and local government employees, should be less qualified to edit Wikipedia than any other netizen.
Wikipedia can take this as a compliment. The wiki can be useful or dubious, but it appears to be playing an important role in this new information age. I fully welcome the gubment to make use these tools, since the enemy already is.
Bearded Dragon
I wonder if their definition of "suspicious edits" is "Edits that don't reflect our view".
That seems to be their speed.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
The Reg did a good job of summarizing the issue. The Slashdot "article" does not.
The main dispute regarding CAMERA's lobbying campaign is summarized on Wikipedia. That effort did not involve DoJ. (CAMERA, the "Committee for Accuracy in Middle-East Reporting", is an advocacy organization for Israel. CAMERA sometimes claims to be neutral, but even the Israeli press says they're pro-Israel.)
After the CAMERA lobbying effort had been detected, and edits related to CAMERA were being closly scrutinized, someone using a DOJ IP address made an somewhat suspicious edit which deleted information about CAMERA's Wikipedia lobbying effort from the CAMERA article. As I wrote at the time, IP address [149.101.1.130] resolves to "wdcsun30.usdoj.gov". A whole series of "wdcsun*.usdoj.gov" machines appear in various logs, so it's probably an outgoing web proxy. If you try a traceroute, you get a "destination unreachable" at exit from QWest's network. That machine seems to be a source of miscellaneous browsing traffic by DC employees; "wdcsun30.usdoj.gov" comes up in blogs for Mini Cooper owners. --John Nagle (talk) 20:29, 24 April 2008 (UTC)
So either it's a DoJ employee browsing from work, or DoJ's proxy servers are open and can be abused from the outside. Probably the former. It would be interesting to make a Freedom of Information request of DoJ for the user information associated with that use of the proxy server. After all, DoJ is taking the position that ISPs should be required to retain such information, so it would be useful to see whether DoJ does so for their own servers when they're acting as an in-house ISP.
wikipedia can't "overrule" the DOJ since it's their own fucking website. who is going to rule against them, santa claus? maybe Elvis?
how about we try dropping the sensationalist headlines for a day ok.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
Government by wiki? who would have ever thought? Oh wait... http://www.metagovernment.org/
You can't really be so paranoid as to think that screwing around in Wikipedia was a serious policy initiative by DOJ.
All this means is the bored interns who were pushing their politics have to stop now, and get back to collating and stapling memos like they should have been doing in the first place. I assure you, major branches of the US Government are not sitting around making policy decisions regarding unflattering press in Wikipedia. They get a lot more flak from much bigger players, and they *do* take it lying down because that's their job.
The actual article's about a little witch-hunt they've been having, because the resident anti-semite core on Wikipedia is deathly afraid of people coming in to fix and undo their little hatefest.
I mailed proof positive (full emails + screenshots) of malfeasance by editor AGK acting in league with anti-semitic editors after he emailed me gloating; Wikipedia's arbcom response was two "fuck you" emails and one "we don't care" email from their arbitration committee members, showing me what a bunch of anti-semitic people they really are.
If you can read this sig, congratulations, you have your glasses on!
They're taking a big risk here, going up against the DoJ. After all, the number of Departments of Justice has tripled in the past six months.
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
This looks like a classic case of "nobody new comes to wikipedia" corrupt behavior on the part of wikipedia's admins.
I've dealt with AGK and other admins, they're classically anti-semitic as well as usually friends with a bunch of anti-semitic people. It's no surprise any article involving Israel or the middle east has such a problem, they have people for whom the whole purpose of editing is to make "the Jews" look as evil/bad as possible.
I have no surprise this was the response parent poster got from their arbitration committee, either. Corruption on wikipedia flows from the top down, not the other way around. And the last thing they want to do is investigate malfeasance on the part of an admin, because that would set precedent to investigate their own behavior as well.
Self-defining government is a real possibility, now that we have Web 2.0.
I can't believe someone didn't come up with that sooner.
You're almost there. Just get rid of the representatives altogether: let people vote on whatever interests them. Their level of interest determines their participation, meaning people will specialize in areas of government they care about. (This is basically an extension of open source mentality.)
Now that we have sophisticated computer networks and the idea of open content, all we need is some good software and we can have real direct democracy without anything like mob rule.
And that software is being developed right now as part of the metagovernment open content project, already mentioned elsewhere in this thread.
http://littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/?entry=26670&only&rss
Wikipedia EditGate: United Nations Edits Fallaci: 'Racist Whore'
I am somehow quite sure that if a DoJ account was used to describe Obama as a 'a sociopatic halfbreed', there would be repercussions.
Is the United Nations enjoying repercussions?
Not from Wikipedia obviously.
Maybe the DOJ stopped donating to the Wikimedia Foundation.
that 90% of politicians are idiots. If this were not the case, either people CAN choose wisely or the select themselves (which is not a democracy then, is it).
off their own back and we think rationally about this, why should any DoJ IP address be editing ANYTHING on Wikipedia?
a) They are using gov property, if they want to edit as individuals, they should go to their own PC or a library PC.
b) The DoJ has a PR department for putting information out, they can use that.
So, thinking rationally, why shouldn't DoJ machines be blocked?
Because colorful commentary like "pariah" and "ass-covering" are important POV verifiable facts that should be in biographical articles about living people. Censorship oh noes.
What's your wikipedia username? This looks an awful lot like the usual wikitroll canned response.
Of course, I'm not saying you're a wikipedian, but the evidence certainly points that way.
Of course, if you look at the history of the abuser in question's talk page (warning: he's a serial "archiver" to make it harder to trace things) you get a pretty good sense: constant pushing to have the complainer removed by POV-pushers Tiamut and Jd2718, who have a long history of pretty biased edits and who were edit-warring to try to remove Hebrew language references and Israeli culture references from food articles along with a string of nasty and abusive sockpuppets at their disposal.
AGK goes along with it, continually verbally abusing the poor person who was trying to keep the articles neutral under the barrage of anti-semitic editing and sockpuppetry attacks (which wikipedia claims to be against, except when it's to push a point of view supported by a certain admin...), and eventually bans the user entirely for exposing the sockpuppets and insisting wikipedia's procedures be followed.
Looks a heck of a lot like this typical wikipedian admin-abuse playbook, doesn't it?
I don't doubt that AGK sent the gloat email. Part of the underlying joke of wikipedia is the number of blatantly biased, aggressive, asshole-ish people who've been made admins just to POV push with authority to ban. In the Register article Slashdot links above, they now claim people were trying to be "stealth" admins to push pro-Israeli POV - and yet there have been dozens of admins coined over and over again for all sorts of POV-pushing reasons, usually because they "helped against vandals" (read: drove away newcomers and bit the newbies fast enough to prevent a consensus change) on topics that certain admins wanted to keep slanted a certain way.
No. Simply allowing people to propose and vote on legislation won't work because people will then push through all sorts of unfunded mandates. We've seen this in California, where the initiative system was gamed by special interests who pushed through mandates forcing the government to provide all kinds of services. At the same time, though, none of the voters acted to support the tax increases needed to fund the initiatives. The state was then faced with the double bind of being legally required to provide services, but being unable to raise taxes in order to pay for them.
We all know what to do, but we don't know how to get re-elected once we have done it
On a serious note (IANAL), laws have to be much more carefully written than source code. In a program, you can limit, control, validate and sanitize the inputs, and the operations performed on them if necessary. Those are basically all you have to worry about to prevent disaster. In a law, every single word has the potential to be a wide-open vulnerability that will exploit at least a large part of your "program" with disastrous results. Imagine you wrote a simple program that appears bulletproof, but because you, say, chose to use a while loop instead of a do-while loop, someone finds a way to turn your little number crunching app into a self-propagating rootkit. Of course this example is absurd, but it conveys the attention to detail required. For examples, see any discussion involving the U.S. Constitution.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
is asking where he should post evidence. You should probably respond to him. That is, if you're serious at all and your "please provide evidence" wasn't just wikitrolling.
Let's see... "hearsay" is telling a court of law something that you overheard. In this case, the person has direct written correspondence that can be transmitted.
YOU, meanwhile, are trolling trying to discredit it. Based on that and based on your ignoring their request for an acceptable method by which to send the info, I don't buy your claim that you're not a wikipedian.
I hope everyone realizes that it is individuals from with in the DOJ editing WP, not the DOJ as an entity, or as policy.
All over the 'net sites are spreading misleading propaganda by assigning blame to an institution rather than to the crappy individuals employed by or working withing the institution.
It's irresponsible of Slashdot to repost this entry without such disclaimer.
...articles delete YOU!
Have gnu, will travel.
"Wikipedia Overrules DOJ"
No Judiciary, the Wikipedia is not the Constitution of the U.S.A.
Get it?
Surest sign of a wikitroll - Ahabswhale signed out to swear and troll, so he wouldn't lose karma by being modded for the troll he is.
Amazing how many posts there are after this one, when this one depicts a currently-active project which clearly does not suffer from all the "obvious" problems that people seem to think are inherent in direct democracy.
Yes, pure direct democracy is not viable on a large scale. That is long established. But what has changed is that now -- only just now -- we can moderate democracy with software instead of with representatives.
This changes everything. Now it is just an engineering issue to get it to work. And it looks like the distributed community model of this project is well on its way to solving all the problems that people find in direct democracy.
you may be a foul-mouthed jerk but here you go anyways. http://i279.photobucket.com/albums/kk149/M1rth/agk.jpg Text of what he sent me: That's it. I am ridding wikipedia of your muslim-hating racist ass. It's apparent that you are getting in the way and your mere presence is disrupting good editors who are trying to stop Jewish POV-pushing. You obviously haven't learned your place in the pecking order. Try making a new account once you can figure that out and stay the hell off of articles you don't belong in. -AGK
If you can read this sig, congratulations, you have your glasses on!
And note that this idea fixes more than our "national nightmare." It scales down to the smallest community and up to the entire world. Or larger, should humanity ever escape this planet.
Seriously, this needs a mod-up.
They don't even have to be partisan hacks. While some of the cases mentioned in the Register's article appear to be, some can be making legitimate, well-intentioned well-sourced, unbiased edits, but they all show up on wikiscanner because basically all it does is count edits from various subnets and attempt to determine who the subnets are licensed to. Not only is wikiscanner utterly unable to determine the accuracy or intent of these edits by itself, it's not even guaranteed to peg the right group.
As our fearless leader would say, for all we know, Osama bin Laden has hacked into the DoJ computers to make the edits to make the government look bad.</cheeky>
You do realize that your hero Barry Goldwater fought for segregation and against civil rights, don't you? Barry was as much a pandering racist regressive dreaming of bringing America back to slave ownership and ending sufferage as any "good conservative".
We've had to suffer under a conservative-driven agenda for over 30 years... and we are far worse off for it. Time to get back to the liberal form of government which has ushered in more economic prosperity than any other government in history, and served as the good example for all the governments which are currently operating far, far, far better than the USA (like all those evil socialist governments in Europe, with their low unemployment, public health care, and civil rights).
First thing we need to do is defund the entire military. Ever since WW2, at least one out of every two dollars collected in taxes went to the military... and it's destroying our country. There aren't enough funds to rebuild a city destroyed by conservative neglect (New Orleans), there isn't enough money to maintain our roads and bridges, and our entire manufacturing base is either gone, or working on machinery which is decades out of date.
Military spending is a parasite. It produces zero money for our economy, and actually takes money away from things which would improve our nation. Like public education, like heath care, like emergency response. America isn't an empire... it's time to stop acting like one.
Wikipedia overulling the governement? OMG!
signature is pants
/. is about spewing one's opinion, not paying attention to anyone else's.
$9.3 trillion and growing, brought to you by sober, enlightened representatives.
While that is an important email, and pretty damning as well, what were the changes being pushed that caused that response?
To be honest, I probably will forget to come back and check a reply, I'm just saying that there are two sides here and seeing both may give more information (or as seems likely, prove the email is completely unwarranted and there's a real problem with Wikipedia).
I think your post should be modded up as relevant.
You write source code in the way you do because it has a specific audience that is intended to be able to understand it and behave according to that understanding. That audience is a computer.You write laws because there is a specific audience that is intended to be able to understand them and behave according to that understanding. That audience is a citizen.These facts being true, which they are, I have two questions for you:a) What makes you think it's impossible to craft laws in a way that the citizen can understand when it's possible to craft programs that a hunk of silicon can understand?b) What makes you think it's important to dedicate such efforts to creating programs that a computer can understand, and yet not worth the trouble to make sure the laws that govern your behavior are understandable to you?
College-Pages.com - Online Colleges, Degrees, and Programs
Anybody notice that wikipedia org is down? Alertra is showing no connectivity at this time from anywhere. Maybe the US DOJ is trying to have the last laugh on this one?
It's telling. I suppose, that the geek sees his audience as the machine and not the user.
Moving on...
The programmer's audience is more likely to be a compiler.
It is rare these days to be less than one, two or three steps removed from the machine itself - and that distance is growing.
It is equally rare for a programmer to understand and participate in more than a tiny fraction of the development of a non-trivial program - and a program is always more than the code.
It's everything that sums up the difference between the tech demo that is Doom 3 and a game like Grand Theft Auto.
What makes you think it's impossible to craft laws in a way that the citizen can understand when it's possible to craft programs that a hunk of silicon can understand?
That hunk of silicon understands nothing.
It responds to a very narrow range of inputs in [easily?] definable ways. It is wholly unaware and disengaged from the actions it performs. It exists in a single moment of time. It has no past and no future.
It has no goal or purpose in life.
It does not know or comprehend "the other." It cannot understand conflicts in ideas or values. It is not a social being.
The life of the law has not been logic; it has been experience. The law embodies the story of a nation's development...it cannot be dealt with as if it contained the axioms and corollaries of a book of mathematics. - Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Interesting idea. This, and other schemes, could be tried by nongovernmental organizations (cooperatives, unions, etc.) to see whether they work on a fairly small scale.
My version would be to have "districts" consisting of a random, rather than geographical, subset of the voters. No more pork!