Wacky Wikipedia Editing Controversy
Published February 10, 2006
Propaganda battles in Washington D.C. have reached a new high-tech level with the revelations that staffers have been altering the Wikipedia profiles of politicians.
Wikipedia is the online encyclopedia written and edited by volunteers. But the strength of its open source style has also become its weakness as staffers have taken advantage of its vulnerabilities.
Appropriately Wikinews, an outgrowth of Wikipedia, has an item up about its investigation into aides altering Wikipedia profiles.
Among the alleged changes:
- References to Joe Biden's plagiarism scandal were removed, presumably by his supporters.
- Remember when Senator Conrad Burns referred to Arabs as "ragheads"? Well, his office apparently doesn't want you to remember that because that reference was removed from his Wikipedia profile. A spokesman for Burns told The Washington Post that this a non-story since "there is no sanctity in Wikipedia."
- The office of California Senator Diane Feinstein said Thursday that a staffer "independently" removed comments from her Wikipedia profile that could reflect poorly on her.
- A paragraph about Senator Tom Harkin's having falsely claimed to have flown combat missions over North Vietnam was removed. Mention of his stance on Israel was also removed.
- And my favorite change: Senator Tom Coburn was listed as having been voted "the most annoying senator."
Investigators are tracking down what computers were used to make the alterations by examining the IP addresses. However, that can't be done as easily for the House of Representatives since they all use a proxy server.
This isn't the first time Wikipedia has come under fire, as Bill Wallo of BlogCritics wrote in a piece last year.
The site's founder, Jimmy Wales, has not helped matters by admitting he has edited his own profile from time to time. He said doing so was "in bad taste."
- Wacky Wikipedia Editing Controversy
- Published: February 10, 2006
- Type: News
- Section: Politics
- Writer: Scott Butki
- Scott Butki's BC Writer page
- Scott Butki's personal site
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Comments on this articleComments
So?
It's a work "in progress" if anyone is taking everything in Wikipedia as gospel then they need some medication to bring them back to reality...
Who gives a crap about what goes on in Wikipedia anyways; does anyone go about substantiating every thing that is written in it?
I would venture NO......
Then of what importance is it, other than for entertainment purposes????
I know people who take seriously the content of the site and assume it's factually correct.
So yes it is a big deal if people are adding false info or taking out important contextual information.
Hopefully, those folks will learn that anything Wiki should be taken with a ton of salt. It's sad to hear this: The plagiarism incident is important in knowing who Joe Biden really is, for instance. Same with the other edited facts.
In any case, Wikipedia's open-source status allows all of the excised material to be re-added to the defiled entries.
The days of these staff hacks being able to influence us is rapidly coming to an end. And the fact that they are getting caught so easily trying to use old PR tactics is really quite funny. They've gone from controller to clueless.
funny...I read up on mozart and his last words in the german wiki it said under "last words" : *Der Geschmack des Todes liegt mir auf der Zunge, ich fühle etwas das nicht von dieser Erde ist!
So i thought I go ahead and translate it and paste in the americano wiki. 2 Hours later came the so called "Stewart" and asks me on what grounds I made this edit. He deleted my edit, because he's a professional composer and thinks Mo's last remark was about a soprano vocalist.
Now that's a funny thing if a system does not recognise it's own
"validated" comments from it's own. So I suggest wiki lickedme is good for a quick fix on Cicero and other unqualified footnotes of history.
Enjoy!
(*the taste of death is upon my tongue, I feel something...not of this earth)
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(Or ping: http://blogcritics.org/mt/tb/43428)
don't congressional staffers have something better to do with
their time than play online?