See Who's Editing Wikipedia - Diebold, the CIA, a Campaign

[babsbunny]

http://www.wired.com/politics/onlinerights/news/2007/08/wiki_tracker

On November 17th, 2005, an anonymous Wikipedia user deleted 15 paragraphs from an article on e-voting machine-vendor Diebold, excising an entire section critical of the company's machines. While anonymous, such changes typically leave behind digital fingerprints offering hints about the contributor, such as the location of the computer used to make the edits.

In this case, the changes came from an IP address reserved for the corporate offices of Diebold itself. And it is far from an isolated case. A new data-mining service launched Monday traces millions of Wikipedia entries to their corporate sources, and for the first time puts comprehensive data behind longstanding suspicions of manipulation, which until now have surfaced only piecemeal in investigations of specific allegations.


Hey! Where's Walden? where did he go? Where's the Litigation???????

http://www.bradblog.com/?p=2150

DIEBOLD CEO WALDEN O'DELL RESIGNS! FRAUD LITIGATION IMMINENT!
Controversial, Partisan Head of Voting Machine Company Steps Down Citing 'Personal Reasons'
Fraud Securities Litigation --- as previously reported in a BRAD BLOG Exclusive --- is Imminent! Most likely to be filed on Tuesday!
Diebold, Inc. (stock symbol: DBD) CEO Walden O'Dell has resigned due to what company officials describe in a press release as "personal reasons". Reuters is reporting that O'Dell will be replaced by the company's president and chief operating officer, Thomas Swidarski.

As The BRAD BLOG reported exclusively late last week, the filing of a securities fraud class action litigation against the company, O'Dell and other current and former members of their Board of Directors is now imminent. The BRAD BLOG has learned that the case may be filed in Ohio Federal District court as early as today or tomorrow. We will, of course, have more details when that occurs.

[Ian David]

1. Duplicate

Duplicate

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=389&topic_id=1584192&mesg_id=1584192
See Who's Editing Wikipedia - Diebold, the CIA, a Campaign

[Peace Patriot]

2. Some questions this raises....

1. Did the criticism of Diebold get put back in the wikipedia article?

2. Is there no protection against this kind of data-mining program? How does it work? They data-mine, find something negative on a corporation, then pass the info on to the corporation, which takes care of removing or editing it?

3. Can anyone just go into wikipedia and remove info? Maybe the protection would be to leave all changes visible, to shut-down any permanent removals/edits; or, alerts to any contributor whose info has been changed. But this could get crazy, with election reform activists ever replacing the missing criticism, and Diebold ever removing it. It's got to stop at some point--especially since the corp would have more resources with which to outlast the truthtellers. So the solution would be to leave it ALL up, and visible. No?

[RFKJrNews]

3. Fascinating

Hadn't heard about this - thanks!:)

Good to see this lawsuit is moving forward now...

If you haven't already done so, I recommend checking out RFK Jr.'s excellent article from Rolling Stone, "Was the 2004 Election Stolen?"

read it here: http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/10432334/was_the_2004_election_stolen




* Please SIGN THE PETITION to draft Robert F. Kennedy Jr. into the race for the White House!
http://RFKin2008.com

[Jim Lane]

4. Some answers

Yes, anyone in the world (except a few people who've been banned) can edit Wikipedia, including edits that remove information. All changes are indeed visible and all prior versions can still be accessed, so another editor can come along and restore deleted information. I think that happened with the Diebold article but I haven't checked the details. (There are a few exceptions to the foregoing. Some stuff that's removed is no longer publicly accessible, such as material that was removed after being judged a copyright violation, because somebody cut-and-pasted copyrighted material into Wikipedia. Still, I'd guess that more than 99% of all edits can be viewed and reversed.)

Any contributor who creates an account (which is free) can create a watchlist of articles. Your watchlist can include any articles you want, whether or not you've edited them. Then you can open your watchlist to see if there've been any recent changes to any of the articles you selected. If there have been, you can go to the article history and look at the changes one by one or cumulatively. In some instances, you might choose to scan the history to see who made each change, and decide whether to look at it based on whether you know and trust the user.

I don't agree with you that the corporation would have more resources than the truthtellers. Experience has demonstrated that, in the overwhelming number of cases, clear vandalism (such as the reported Diebold edits) doesn't last. There are probably several people who've watchlisted the Diebold article. Any contributor, corporate or not, who keeps deleting information in violation of community policies would be banned.

The big problem isn't blatant vandalism of the type attributed to Diebold, but the more subtle attack of biased edits. There are several right-wing editors who push their point of view at every opportunity. A few such "POV warriors" have been banned -- including some progressives who didn't respect the community's standards and who made their own biased edits -- but getting someone banned is fairly difficult. The project has a strong commitment to open editing and to the theory that errors made by one editor will be corrected by another. In articles where the activity by right-wing editors predominates, the text will reflect their point of view.

[GreenTea]

5. Kick!