US Government censors Wikipedia

[BushOut06]

http://www.theinquirer.net/gb/inquirer/news/2007/12/11/bush-censors-wikipedia

<snip>
THE gospel of truth according to fake penis experts and nerds with chips on their shoulders, Wikipedia, has been edited by a Bush friendly member of the US House of Representatives.

Apparently the person was so concerned that people no longer bought the story about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq that he or she took to tampering with the Whackypedia entry.

The entry was edited by someone with a House of Representatives IP address to make the bizarre claim that there was a link between the terrorist organisation al Qaeda and the Iraq government.
<snip>

This is why I don't use Wikipedia as a source for anything, it's too easy to manipulate. How many times over the past year have we heard reports of corporations changing entries for their own benefit? Given the level of corruption in this administration, this should probably come as a surprise to nobody.

[BootinUp]

1. Usually

edits like that get rolled back or marked controversial pretty quick though. I have found it a very good reference source (less than highly reliable but very good).

[madokie]

2. sure enough

when I first went online and found out about wikipedia I checked it out and somewhere or something I did was going to give me, someone who don't know shit, to edit info there. haven't trusted it since. maybe I'm just dreaming that I don't know.

[TechBear_Seattle]

3. It is easy to manipulate, yes. But it is easy for EVERYONE to manipulate

When you have dozens, even hundreds of experts watching changes in an article and keeping an eye out for untrue or biased information, you end up with something that is far more accurate than a printed encyclopedia. If the government were to put pressure on the publishers of, say, Encyclopedia Americana, there is absolutely nothing we can do about it. If the government starts rewriting entries in the Wikipedia, we can correct these attempts to revise facts.

I trust the Wikipedia far more than I trust any news source.

[Chulanowa]

4. Thus I cross-reference all "Current topics" I read on Wikipedia

However it's still pretty useful for random bits of trivia about stuff. Wikipedia: For when you absolutely, certainly, gosh-darned MUST know the history of Andalusia in five minutes or less!

[begin_within]

5. Ah, Wikipedia - the world's most trusted and reliable source of misinformation.

If Wikipedia is hacked, then where will I get my misinformation?

[havocmom]

9. more to the point, how would you know?

;)

[begin_within]

13. Just by the fact that something is on Wikipedia means that it is extremely doubtful.

[havocmom]

19. nah, ... How would you know if it was hacked?

Hacks edit it all the time ;)

[Deja Q]

6. The theinquirer.net - isn't that the tabloid newspaper outlet?

[RaleighNCDUer]

7. Wiki can be a great resource as long as you recognise that

the articles are only as good as their links.

[Selatius]

8. Wikipedia's problem is that anybody can write or edit entries. That's conversely its strength as wel

If you're looking up political information, its accuracy is probably less stellar than if you were looking up dry scientific information on cancer or any host of diseases. There is no political conflict with those kinds of entries. There is with entries dealing with, say, George W. Bush or Dick Cheney. Those entries get defaced all the time.

[begin_within]

14. Wikipedia's real problem is their vast army of two-bit editors who delete and purge stuff at will.

These are volunteers who are given a little bit of power and then proceed to abuse it to distort and censor anything that they don't personally like. It's not the public that screws up Wikipedia, it's Wikipedia's own enormous staff. They do this under the cloak of authority but nobody questions their actions or motives. It's they who screwed up Wikipedia, not the random graffiti artists all over the internet.

[Selatius]

15. Actually, I think it's a bit of both, but I would lay most of the blame on defacers.

Especially defacers with a political axe to grind.

[begin_within]

16. True, but the defacers are dealt with and their crimes erased, while the crimes of

the editing staff go on for years undetected. Sort of like a certain presidential administration...

[Selatius]

17. I am unaware of major incidents of tampering by administrators. Got any URLs on it? n/t

[begin_within]

18. Just my own personal battles with them...

[hunter]

10. Wikipedia is not trustworthy as an information source...

... but it is a treasure trove of links, especially if you are interested in perspectives that are a little "outside the box."

For the vast majority of subjects there is no definitive truth.

[L. Coyote]

11. Check out the edit war on the Lurita Doan page

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Lurita_Doan&action=history

This is just one of the battlefields of political disinformation and personal aggrandizement. Quite a few pages have been edited from White House IPs too.

[Jim Lane]

12. "US Government" is inaccurate

This was only the latest incident of Congressional staffers editing Wikipedia to make their bosses look good, to make an enemy look bad, or to spin the truth. Staffers from both parties have done it. For a while all the House of Representatives computers were blocked from editing Wikipedia because so much of it was going on.

This is not, however, "censorship" by the government, which would involve use of the power of law.

As others have pointed out in this thread, the Wikipedia approach to accuracy is to make it easy for errors to be corrected. For example, this fall the National Republican Congressional Committee tried to cleanse the Wikipedia article about it to remove embarrassing (but accurate and well-sourced) information about the NRCC's phony robocalls, involvement with Jack Abramoff, etc. Those of us who monitor the article promptly restored the information. After a couple attempts, the Republicans gave up. They realized that we would outlast them. You can see the edit history here: <http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=National_Republican_Congressional_Committee&action=history>

That's generally the outcome unless the article subject is so obscure that few Wikipedians are paying attention to it. If the article has some prominence, the protection is good; vandalism will usually be reverted within a few hours. During the 2004 campaign, the Bush and Kerry articles were both repeatedly vandalized but corrected within minutes.

Most of the people trying to spin Wikipedia find that enough of us care about the articles that they can't get away with wholesale deletions or false assertions. Like the NRCC, they give up. As Wired magazine put it, "Given enough eyeballs, all thugs are callow." (This is a pun on a well-known axiom of the software community: "Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.")