Censored Wikipedia Articles Appear On Protest Site

Gregory Rider writes "According to a recent article in The Guardian, a group of disenchanted Wikipedia administrators has been going through back channels on Wikipedia and retrieving articles deleted by Jimbo Wales or other higher-ups. Now they're putting them back up on a website for everyone to see. This includes articles on Justin Berry, Paul Barresi, and, most strangely, Brian Peppers, which has been solicited for deletion off of Wikipedia 6 times with mixed success and is now banned from being edited on for a whole year."

Brian Peppers

[Ignorant Aardvark]

For what it's worth, I am an administrator on the English Wikipedia, and I did disagree with the decision to delete Brian Peppers. But there's lots of much more important things to worry about, and I've agreed with Jimbo Wales on a number of other situations, so life goes on. By the way, any Administrator has access to all deleted pages (except ones that have manually been deleted from the database, which are few and far between). And the reason Justin Berry was deleted and rewritten was because it was originally written by self-identified pedophiles and could've potentially gotten Wikimedia into trouble because it was a biography of a living person and did not cite everything properly, thus possibly leaving Wikipedia open to libel lawsuits.

Re:Censored or edited?

[mindspillage]

Well, I answer some of the mail that Wikimedia gets, and I can assure you that most complaints are simply dealt with in a normal fashion and you never see them. It's only the ones where there is genuine reason to think we may be in the wrong and where normal editing processes have not done their job that the office steps in. (But thanks for playing, do troll again.)

Re:Journalism 101

[user9918277462]

Brian Peppers is a paraplegic man who has had his disfigured photograph sent around the internet as a meme of sorts. He lives in a nursing home and one day allegedly groped one of his nurses (he claims he was trying to get her attention and ripped her skirt). Consequently he was given 5 years probation and is forced to register as a sex offender (the photo in question is his booking/registration mug shot).

Making fun of the handicapped is not the role of an encyclopedia, and screaming 'censorship' when that worthless Wikipedia entry was deleted is shameful.

http://allenpeppers.ytmnd.com/ [ytmnd.com]
http://www.wikitruth.info.nyud.net:8090/index.php? title=Uncensored:Brian_Peppers [nyud.net]

Re:Brian Peppers

[Ignorant Aardvark]

You don't seem to know what "censorship" means. Censorship refers to when the government prevents publication of materials, not a private website. Wikipedia is a private website, and it "censors" things all the time: vandalism, factually incorrect statements, attack pages, etc. The point of Wikipedia is to be an encyclopedia, not a free webhost where any random crap can be posted. To the end of being a useful encyclopedia, Wikipedia does "censor" out the nonsense. And that's their right.

And as for your statement that Wikipedia is banned from use in undergraduate writing, do you have a source? I know, at least at my university, that's not true, and I haven't heard it elsewhere either.

Re:Journalism 101

[Anonymous Coward]

Brian Peppers is this guy. [snopes.com] I'm not sure who the other two are.

Re:What a bunch of FUD (not really)

[Gregory Rider]

Its no big secret. Jimbo deletes articles all [wikipedia.org] the [wikipedia.org] time [wikipedia.org].

Not very

[ggvaidya]

Both the MediaWiki software [sourceforge.net] as well as the database itself [wikipedia.org] are freely available.

Re:Journalism 101

[TubeSteak]

Justin Perry was recently featured in a NY Times article about how the internet is not safe for your kids. He started out webcamming (for guys no less) and ended up with his own website & traveled around the country to be groped and whatnot by men old enough to be his father... all while he was underage.

After the NY Times article, he ended up testifying before Congress. Congress (both Dems and Repubs) is currently pissed off at the Dept of Justice for not actively pursuing the kid's case.

Peppers is a guy with a deformed skull & a charge of sexual assault against him.

Maybe they didn't include basic information on purpose so that you'd RTFAs they linked to.

Wiki isn't Google

[Shihar]

The Wikipedia is not a glorified message board. It does indeed have standards. When those standards are violated, they edit the content such that the basic standards are met. The standards that fit in these three cases is that bio articles must be on 'known' people, and they must have been covered by reliable sources. This is just a basic bare bones standard.

Now, can it be argued that these three articles might have met those criteria? Sure. They are subjective criteria for sure. Does it matter? Not really. The fact that these three people have had their bios deleted isn't going to cause me to lose any sleep at night. If these are the worst examples of editorial abuse that the Wikipedia has to offer, I consider that pretty damn good.

Look, the Wikipedia is good at what it does. The Wikipedia is a great place to start if you want to get an overview of a particular subject without too much pain. The Wikipeida is NOT something to cite in a scientific journal or to get detailed and exact information that is critical to some endeavor simply because that information could be wrong. Nor is the Wikipedia trying to achieve all information in exists. Wikipedia isn't Google, it isn't a hard scientific reference, it isn't even an encyclopedia. Wikipedia is its own beast, and trashing a few irrelevant articles that might or might not have met their guidelines is no great tragedy.

Someone give me a call when the editor's rewrite the Bush page with their own personal opinion and lock it, then I'll take note.

Re:Journalism 101

[Holangisus]

I don't know if you realize this or not, but that Allen Peppers bit on YTMND turned out to be another hoax.

http://allenpeppersfinal.ytmnd.com/

Keep watching. It turns out this Allen Peppers fellow was just taking the "meme" to a new level.

For those who despise YTMND, the gist is that "Allen Peppers" claims Brian died at 4:59 AM 2006-02-03, but if you keep watching the gif changes frames and says Brian left in a time machine, then turns to a Photoshopped image of Brian Peppers in a time machine wheelchair, with various other YTMND fads scrawled in the background. Just making sure more people aren't taken in by the lies surrounding this issue.

Re:Brian Peppers

[Ignorant Aardvark]

There's actually a proper way to cite Wikipedia. You need to click on the "Cite this article" link in the Toolbox. It will cite the article in MLA, Chicago, whatever format you use, and it will also generate a permanent link to the specific revision you used.

You're mistaken...

[DavidinAla]

censorship |?sens?r? sh ip|
noun
the practice of officially examining books, movies, etc., and suppressing unacceptable parts : details of the visit were subject to military censorship.

This article is full of crap

[silsor]

At the time the article was originally published, I read that it says "It's a pseudonym the 30-year-old Silicon Valley IT professional uses as he documents the inner machinations of the project, along with a dozen other Wikipedia administrators, on a site called WikiTruth (www.wikitruth.info)." So I went over to the wikitruth site and called up the Special:Listusers page. Surprise surprise, there were only 8 registered accounts on the wiki, only one or two of which were active. I would be genuinely surprised to find more than one "Wikipedia administrator" on the entire site, rather than a group of disgruntled trolls and banned Wikipedia users (the makeup of every other anti-Wikipedia site to date).

WP:OFFICE

[Geoffreyerffoeg]

This is a facet of the WP:OFFICE [wikipedia.org] policy. I think it's just something where you have to trust Wikimedia. Obviously they're getting a lot of legal threats, so they have to make some controls on the encyclopedia so that the whole thing doesn't get shut down due to a slashdotting of lawsuits. It's not transparent, and I wish they would say exactly what's happening, but they say that they can't say, so...oh well.

Good luck to Wikitruth. Keep these pages up for as long as you can without being sued. (I'm not being sarcastic. There needs to be a refuge for these banished pages. But Wikitruth shouldn't expect not to get sued.)

Re:Brian Peppers

[MilenCent]

You're not very bright, are you?

If you're trying to convince someone, it's best not to flame them right off the bat....

Re:Journalism 101

[hackwrench]

This is Ohio, and having lived in an Ohio nursing home for a few months, at the end of which they insisted my mom in Indiana come and get me, I can see how he might have been wrongly incriminated. The nursing home I was in, was in Milan, OH, just outside of Sandusky.

Re:Censored or edited?

[orthogonal]

I've had "excellent karma" here since, what 2001?

How interesting that my posting above, which asks a top Wikiipedia bureaucrat about out-of-process Wikipedia policies in a story about out-of-process Wikipedia censorship, had been modded flamebait in only fourty-five minutes.

There's a certain fanaticism about wikipedia groupies that lends itself to the suppression of opinions that question the wikipedia group-think or the cult of personality surrounding its founder.

But don't take my word for it: read the transcript of a lecture by Jason Scott The Great Failure of Wikipedia" [cow.net]. It covers the mysterious deletion of these articles, and a lot more. Here's one telling bit, I urge you to read the entire transcript:

The Wikipedia people then vote. Does the majority win? No! Many times,
Wikipedia works off of a consensus policy. Consensus essentially means
when the administrator shows up, he makes a decision, based on the voices
of what people have said. This is how houses are destroyed, using eminent
domain. You have everybody say "this is a bad idea", and then the guy
sitting in the seat goes "hmmm, but man, they're giving us some cash," and
that's the end of that house.

In Wikipedia you will have 75-to-45 votes, in which the 45 win simply
because of the quality or because of the number of neutrals. You have
this enormous amount of weight that can be pushed around by an
administrator. It is also possible to vote for the adding and deletion of
administrators, and (in what I consider to be insane) there is something
called the "Miscellany For Delete," and what this means is you can
actually reach consensus on what other people on Wikipedia are allowed to
do. All of this shouldn't be surprising in the case if there was a
politic vacuum -- the fact that people allowed to kind of reach a
consensus on everything started saying "well, I can do this". So the
notability debate becomes an issue.

Re:Censored or edited?

[mindspillage]

http://slashdot.org/~mindspillage/journal/133684 [slashdot.org]

There, happy? Oh, and WP is much more public than /., actually. And no, I'm not replying further about arbcruft in this thread.

-Kat

Wikitruth has some good moments

[Animats]

Look up "RC Patrol" on Wikitruth. It's funny, and they have some good points. RC patrollers are the Junior Woodchucks of Wikipedia. But really, Wikitruth is tiny. If you ask for "Random article", you'll see the same articles coming up within a few tries.

A big problem with Wikipedia itself is that fixing vandalism and keeping out junk is incredibly labor-intensive. It takes a large, active volunteer staff to clean up the junk, and the cleanup backlog is increasing.

Much of the junk is fancruft; articles bands, albums, movies, and games. Most of that stuff is in databases elsewhere, and in better forms. For movie info, go to IMDB, not Wikipedia. Wikipedia is the wrong tool for database-like material; all those album to song to band to performer links have to be updated manually, and many of the links are missing or inconsistent. This is a job for a database, not people.

Of the "million articles", a sizable fraction fall into those categories. Games generate vast numbers of entries; there are individual Wikipedia articles for each and every Pokemon character from #1 to #386. Just about every character, location, and object in Star [Wars|Trek|Gate] has an article. Most of them start life badly formatted and without verifiable information, again increasing the cleanup backlog. Really, in any given day, very few new articles about serious subjects are added to Wikipedia.

On serious subjects, the problem is length and lack of coherency. Someone writes something reasonable, others add to it, with or without enough knowledge to do so, and over time the article becomes long and repetitive. On subjects where books can be, and have been, written, this is a real problem.

It's amazing that the Wikipedia process works as well as it does.

Re:Journalism 101

[the pickle]

Whether he wanted it or not, he has achieved widespread Internet notoriety and his name is known by hundreds of thousands of people the world over.

Dude, I'm sorry, but if Slashdotters are asking about the identity of a so-called "Internet celebrity", this claim is extremely dubious. If there's anything Slashdotters are known for, it's being total Internet geeks, but if more than one has to ask this question -- and if the OP hadn't posted it, I was going to -- the guy clearly isn't THAT famous. "Thousands" of people the world over might be accurate; "hundreds of thousands" is almost certainly not.

It's extremely unlikely that any of these individuals meets Wikipedia standards for notability.

Re:Is this a violation of GFDL?

[Bruce Perens]

Wikipedia has no invariant sections, so this would not be an issue.

Re:Journalism 101

[GizmoToy]

Ohio is stupid when it comes to sexual predator laws. In Cincinnati, a man cannot be in public without a shirt on. If he gets arrested for it, he has to register as a sexual predator for the rest of his life. While one could probably argue that discouraging 200lb overweight men from walking around without a shirt on is a good idea, how's that for a fair punishment?

Re:Journalism 101

[Anonymous Coward]

are you nuts?! a court deciding someone is guilty means the state, federal, or local governement believes they are guilty and will treat them as though they are guilty. Being found guilty/innocent in court does not necessarily mean either. The legal system certainly does make mistakes/ have shortcomings - every individual is entitled to his opinion on whether someone is guilty or innocent - you can't try to strip the validity of someone's opinion away just because it is contrary to a court ruling. I for one sometimes question the innocence of OJ despite the rulings of our justice system.

Re:More important censorship of Wikipedia

[Anonymous Coward]

You should be more careful what you say, people that actually know about Wikipedia that aren't mindless zealots post here too.
For example, you state that mentions of the http://www.wikipediareview.com/ [wikipediareview.com] are not blocked, and yet until Eric Moeller removed it from [[m:Spam_blacklist [wikimedia.org]]] recently it was impossible to add a link to the site. You obviously know about [[m:Spam_blacklist]] as you are a bureaucrat and an admin on en: [wikipedia.org] as well as an admin on meta [wikimedia.org]. In fact just today you added [wikimedia.org] Daniel Brant's sites to [[m:Spam_blacklist]] with an invalid reasoning.

Were these domains used to spam Wikipedia so much so that they cannot be dealt with by blocks and reverts? No, but you added them anyways without regard for the blacklist's purpose.

--An anonymous admin

Re:Journalism 101

[raju1kabir]

One word for you:

.nyud.net:8080

I was easily able to read the linked articles. There's probably even a Firefox extension for this, though it's easy enough to type with a slap of the keyboard so I've never looked.

Re:More important censorship of Wikipedia

[br00tus]

This is incorrect.
Nothing I said is incorrect.

The ArbCom has nothing to do with how articles are edited unless subject to a complaint.
I mention "Arbitration Committee members", but this turns into the entire ArbCom when you answer what I supposedly said. "Subject to a complaint" is about as vague and subjective as you can get (just how "the cabal" likes the rules), you might as well say they can't be edited unless they flip a coin and it comes up one way or another.

The page is locked because it was being vandalized.
If you consider linking to the main web site critiquing Wikipedia on the Criticism of Wikipedia vandalism, then it is. This is not how Wikipedia defines vandalism however.

Plus, we don't block any mention of Wikipedia Review. To do so would be stupid and have a pro-Wikipedia bias. Unless you can prove these claims, then I would ask that you do your homework a little more before accusing.
Here's just one link of an ArbCom member removing mention of Wikipedia Review [wikipedia.org]. He has locked the Criticism of Wikipedia page, the Criticism of Wikipedia discussion page, and has blocked many, many users who have inserted the link. I myself added the link weeks ago, before it was removed, I didn't even know at the time that this particular deviation from the Wikipedia party line was verboten and all mention of it was removed, with violators blocked at the time. I think you're the one who needs to do your homework.

Re:Brian Peppers

[AxelBoldt]

Wikipedia isn't an academic source by any stretch of the imagination, and should never be used as a reference in any remotely serious writing.

Some people disagree. [wikipedia.org]

For someone calling itself Journalism 101...

[Naruki]

You sure do know how to fuck up simple communication. Maybe that's an apropriate name, after all.

"Allegedly is not appropriate. That word is not used to denote that someone has been accused of a crime but not convicted. There is a widespread acceptance of its usage in that context."

So the word that is inappropriate because it is NOT used that way is accepted to be used in that way? I'm pretty sure that you meant to type something different (because hopefully you aren't trying to shoot yourself in the foot).

But the fact is that you typed something retarded when wrongfully trying to correct someone else, and being an utter ass about it. Way to go! That's a double bogey.

By the way, one perfectly acceptable definition of "alleged" is "Questionably true or asserted to be true."

And since courts of law are fallible, there may often remain questions as to the veracity of their proof of guilt. Therefore, Mr. F. Dickhead, his usage was apropos.