Censored Wikipedia Articles Appear On Protest Site 589
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."
Journalism 101 (Score:5, Insightful)
Censored or edited? (Score:5, Insightful)
David
policy (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Censored or edited? (Score:5, Insightful)
If you don't like the system you're working with (or if you think it's a good idea for an organization to fight EVERY threatened lawsuit), start your own Wikipedia-like project. Good luck with the lawsuits. I know from experience as a newspaper editor that you have to decide which threats are worth fighting and which are not. Sometimes, the people threatening lawsuits are actually correct on a factual level. I have no idea in this case, so I'm not arguing that. I'm just saying that someone has to exercise reasonable editorial control. There will always be disagreements about where to draw the line. But it's easier to cry "censorship" and want to fight lawsuits to the death when you're not the one who's going to be facing the consequences.
David
Most biased summary in the history of slashdot (Score:3, Insightful)
Apparently the person who submitted this story thinks "delete" and "censor" are synonomous - they are not. Things get deleted from Wikipedia all the time; that doesn't mean it was censored.
Re:Journalism 101 (Score:2, Insightful)
Great job (Score:4, Insightful)
1. People with too much time on their hands get an
2. Someone thinks that
3. The site is slahdotted, so the initial problem (if it was that) solves itself;
This leaves only one question: who did click on the links? And the answer: it was not necessary;
Why was the Peppers link relevant (Score:3, Insightful)
They claim to care about Wikipedia... (Score:1, Insightful)
They don't provide attribution (I.e. article history), they claim the content is under CC-By-SA-2.5 rather than the GFDL.
Whomever is an administrator has abused their position by providing content which increases Wikipedia's effective legal liablity.
All for the sake of creating drama.
It's shameful.
Re:Brian Peppers (Score:2, Insightful)
This may be your definition. It is not the definition of the word in English:
censoring: to examine in order to suppress or delete anything considered objectionable (Merriam-Webster)
censoring: To examine and expurgate. (American Heritage)
Most television networks have their own censor (yes, with that title) who decides what is allowed on the air. Censorship has a precise definition, and it requires no government intervention to be practiced.
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
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. It's a great resource to use to explore a subject, but you'd be crazy to cite it in a paper.
Re:Journalism 101 (Score:4, Insightful)
About WP:OFFICE (Score:4, Insightful)
So, I'm a Wikipedia admin, and a volunteer for the mail room, and here's a semi-rant. It is neither Jimbo Wales's interest, nor the Foundation's interest, nor any other decent editor's, to damage an article or to abandon the openness of Wikipedia. And I can speak with complete confidence that for every WP:OFFICE protection, there are loads upon loads of "sorry you're unhappy with this article, can you tell us what's incorrect to help us fix it?" mails that no one gets much bothered about and most of the community never hears about. Sometimes they are very angry, sometimes they are from wealthy and powerful people, and we don't get too fussed about them until there is a serious concern that we may be doing wrong, and something needs to change, and that something hasn't happened via the usual community processes. That's what office actions are for.
Wikipedia is huge; one of the top 20 websites, and publishing there is like publishing in the '''New York Times''. Except that we're on the web and searchable without registration. There is actually serious damage to be done by having false information and rumors up on articles, and if our community processes have failed to get that right then it's clear some intervention is needed. It's done to save the project, not to destroy it, and I imagine that Jimbo would rather chew his own toenails off than face the resulting shitstorm without good cause.
When it happens, everyone who ''does'' have good, verifiable, neutral, cited information to add, should be writing temp versions. And they are replaced, though without the blog rumors or anything we can't verify. (Except for Brian Peppers, which, face it, was more trouble than it was worth. The year holding off on that? Big deal. It's one year, in a project that will be around... well, as long as anyone wants to keep it around, Wikimedia Foundation or no, thank you copyleft licensing.) Complaining on the talk page doesn't help do that. Bitching and moaning on other sites doesn't help do that. Researching does. Without whitewashing, contrary to some opinions, without censoring, ''with'' the neutral and verifiable truth, but nothing that isn't, no matter how much you may be dying to share the nasty email you got from Jack Thompson. Sorry.
We like criticism. We invite criticism. And when we see *good* criticism we take it to heart and respond to it (see our responses to The Guardian's analysis of a few articles, or to the errors the Nature study found). But there's nothing to respond to here. If "wikitruth" wants to take the liability of having libel up on the site, well, that's their problem, though it's IMO not a bright move. (Especially if they're trying to draw publicity to themselves.) Wikipedia will continue to attempt to be neutral and accurate... and, you know, maybe try to be decent and work with people, too, who have every right to be upset about false information published about them.
Way past my two cents now, Kat (User:Mindspillage)
Re:Censored or edited? (Score:2, Insightful)
YOU don't seem to understand the meaning of the word censored. Censorship is the suppression of material considered objectionable or deemed a security risk. I am no judge or police officer, but I censor materials for my children all the time.
Re:Journalism 101 (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Journalism 101 (Score:5, Insightful)
And as of this post wikitruth.info [wikitruth.info] is Slashdotted. Just now I had to go search Google because I'd never heard of the guy before.
This is why we have summaries: to summarize the story. A quick mention of who he was wouldn't have hurt.
Re:Censored or edited? (Score:3, Insightful)
Have you ever heard of self-censorship? Your definition of censorship seems to be dangerously narrow.
Before someone screams, WIKIMEDIA SUES WIKITRUTH! (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Censored or edited? (Score:5, Insightful)
David
Disgruntled Wikipedia people (Score:5, Insightful)
Then I thought about their characteristics:
*) They probably are literate and write well, or they wouldn't be working on WP.
*) They probably have lots of free time, or they wouldn't be working on WP.
*) They probably like politics, or they'd do what I do and just contribute a little to the occasional article and have nothing to do with any of the politics in WP's running.
*) They are probably willing to go to a good deal of effort to support things that they feel strongly about (or they wouldn't have been trying to build policy on WP in the first place).
So you have a group of people with plenty of time to be bitter about WP, and proclaim that it is going to collapse, who are good about writing things about it.
I don't really have any sympathy for them. WP is entirely free content. If your ideas are correct, you are capable of expressing them, and you want to produce something rather than garner attention by complaining and spearing people, great. You can just fork WP to "myWP" *today*, and most folks will come with you, and the problem will be resolved. If you're just engaging in groundless whining, then the folks won't come with you. Linus Torvalds has said this about himself many times -- that he doesn't have any authority but that which the contributors give him. They choose to work with him. If everyone decides that they want different decisions made, then they'll go with someone else, on a different fork. Nobody is forcing you to work on the Torvalds tree, except for the fact that he does a good job, and people are happy with the situation.
Heck, a couple of forks might even be a good thing. They'd let some alternate ideas be tried out.
As far as I can tell, Jimbo Wales got fed up with all the organizational problems the Pepper article was causing -- far out of proportion to the value of the article. This is not JFK assassination theory. Rather, it's a particularly ugly picture that will probably float around the Internet for a month and then vanish. There are *hordes* of Web fads like this, and while someone writing a book on Web fads might still find this useful in a couple of years, I personally doubt that most people will ever think about it again after two years. So you have a not-particularly-valuable article that is causing problems for people trying to get work done. Solution? Just put a block on it for long enough for everyone to cool down, and possibly for the fad to go away. Is that the best fix? No, but any kind of administrative action is going to piss someone off. And people can Google for it, or put up webpages about it, or if it turns out that the Peppers article really matters in a couple of years, someone can re-add it.
I think that Jimbo Wales was less interested in making a judgement about whether something was valuable or not and more interested in keeping WP functioning. So he made the call that he felt resolved the WP organizational issue and caused the least damage. I can't personally think of a better solution to the problem. If someone does come up with a better solution that hasn't been proposed yet, doubtless it can be adopted instead.
Geez, Orlowski strikes again. (Score:1, Insightful)
My opinion? He's become so enamored with the idea of blogging and personal fame that he is willing to whip and spank up any controversy as long as it results in his name being pasted everywhichwhere. Many of his latest articles in the reg, ordinarily a halfway respectable tech site (though not as much as the inquirer), are based wholesale on blog entries scratched from out of the Debian planet aggregator for crying out loud!
Yeah, I'm gonna stop this here. Anything that gets advertised by Andy O. is most likely crap, until I hear from it again from a non-slashdot influenced source.
Re:Journalism 101 (Score:5, Insightful)
So you believe the article about Star Wars Kid should be deleted as well? Sorry, just because you're famous for the wrong reasons, be they stupidity, ugliness, crime or whatever, you can't expect special exemption status from information outlets. Or at least that's my opinion.
Re:Journalism 101 (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't know the specifics of this case; but if a man accidently ripped a woman's skirt and is therefore branded as "sex offender", we should be making fun of the legislature for passing such a law, the executive for arresting anyone under it, and the judiciary for convicting anyone under it.
People have been turned into "sex offenders" for mooning, for taking photos of their toddlers with pants around their ankles, and similar harmless acts. While removing rapists and the like from our company, or putting them under close supervision, is a darned good idea, many "sex crimes" are minor, or not justly crimes at all. (Check the laws of your state - if your sex life is at all interesting, you're probably violating some law that's on the books.)
Re:Censored or edited? (Score:5, Insightful)
She posted here.
She even told us she did so because criticism that "goes through channels" usually isn't publicly seen. I applaud her attempt at transparency. (And I'm sure she can fight her own battles.)
She said she had nothing to hide and wanted to answer the question.
So why shouldn't she reply here, to those you've called the "Slashdot hordes"?
Re:Journalism 101 (Score:5, Insightful)
For an encyclopaedia it is inappropriate, yes.
And we take Andrew Orlowski seriously because...? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Journalism 101 (Score:5, Insightful)
But, of course, by discussing these people on Slashdot now, we are increasing those articles' right to life.
Re:Wikitruth.info will be deleted (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Journalism 101 (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Journalism 101 (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Journalism 101 (Score:5, Insightful)
By reviewing what facts you know and deciding for yourself. The ruling of a jury is for the legal system. Free thinking human beings shouldn't supplant their own judgment for that of the legal system's.
Not surprising (Score:3, Insightful)
The other thing to realise is that the neutral point of view policy is generally applied *extremely* inconsistently. There are very often miniature communities which will attach themselves to various articles, (the GNU/Stallman articles are probably the best example of this that I know of) and they generally have a consensus about what they will or will not allow in an article. Said consensus also doesn't necessarily have anything to do with genuinely factual information, although one hopes that it normally does. I personally believe that the entire idea behind the NPOV policy is broken, simply because it isn't realistically possible. The only real reason why they attempt to maintain it is because they want to try and achieve a level of encyclopedic legitimacy which again, isn't really possible. I also don't believe that not having encyclopedic legitimacy in certain people's minds doesn't detract from Wikipedia's genuine usefulness; especially given that the people who are skeptical about the idea are likely to remain so, and it therefore makes a lot more sense to be realistic about what is or is not possible, rather than maintain something unworkable in order to try and impress people whose opinion is unfavourable anyway.
I've said it before, and I'll say it again. Although Wikipedia genuinely is extremely valuable when it comes to many topics, politics and people are the two main areas where it is severely flawed, and where given human nature, it probably can't help being flawed.
Wikipedia is as much subject to the Golden Rule as anything else these days; that is, that whoever has the gold makes the rules.
Re:Journalism 101 (Score:4, Insightful)
Why?
And why do you assume that girls who cam are straight? Do you have more of a problem if lesbian girls do it for straight men? I just don't see the relevance of sexual preference here. A camwhore is a camwhore. A pedophile is a pedophile.
Re:Journalism 101 (Score:3, Insightful)
It doesn't matter; it's intended to be an encyclopedia.
There was an edit to the entry for John Cena, the wrestler recently. In the middle of his bio someone had written "FUCK CENA".
We've been over this discussion on Slashdot several times though, so either you're a troll, not paying attention, or new here.
Re:Journalism 101 (Score:2, Insightful)
Geez, one wonders if certain people were raised by wolves.
The truth is an absolute defense. (Score:3, Insightful)
Here's something that I think ought to be engraved in the minds of every person who has ever written anything for public consumption: The truth is an absolute defense.
Not necessarily in the legal sense -- although it should be -- but at the very least in the moral and ethical. If you did something, you have no right to prevent other people from discussing it, provided that they stick to what's true. And no one, I repeat no one, has any right to keep others from repeating the truth, regardless of how unflattering or damaging it may be to someone.
The best way to combat the spread of lies and misinformation is by spreading truth: we can argue whether or not Wikipedia does that well or poorly (I think it does it fairly well, actually; at the very least it gives you a good cross-section of what a significant population of individuals believes is true at any given time), but there is no place for censorship simply to protect people from "ridicule," if that ridicule stems from truth.
Censorship (Score:3, Insightful)
To say that it's only a government official that can censor is ridiculous; anyone can censor within the bounds of their own authority. A parent can censor information within their own household, a corporation can censor its employees internet access, the State Council censors any number of information sources in China, and apparently Jimbo Wales censors Wikipedia.
You are of course free to use whatever narrow definition you personally want to use, but I think you are in the minority here, and it will only cause confusion when talking to others. You can tell people that they're wrong and you're right all you want, but given that the definition of words is established predominantly by general consensus, I think you're always going to be wrong.
Re:Journalism 101 (Score:3, Insightful)
No. A publisher rejecting a manuscript is not censorship. A website deciding an article is inappropriate for it's particular site is not censorship.
An entity saying "this information should not appear anywhere" is censorship. An entity arresting someone for what they say is censorship.
The wiki software is available for download. Anyone unhappy with what appears on wikipedia can setup their own site. Wikipedia isn't saying no one can have info on these people on their own sites, they are saying they don't want it on their site.
Bollocks (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Censored or edited? (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't know what the Userboxes are good (or bad) for myself. That's not the point.
The point is, many editors slave away adding content to wikipedia, working hard to adhere to a Neutral Point of View, working hard to add citations, etc, all for free. They enjoy having a space on their own userpages to say what they want, to blow off a little steam.
The problem is, their userpages were without warning or discussion or even a "by your leave", altered by an administrator on a self-imposed "mission". As it happens the administrator at the time served on the highest quasi-judicial hearing board on wikipedia, a position of much power -- and, we would hope, responsibility.
That board is called, ironically, the "Arbitration Committee", but this arbitrator couldn't even be bothered to ask -- much less arbitrate with -- the "little people", the people who do the actual editing, if they minded having their personal pages vandalized. Rather than arbitrate, she just went ahead and crapped on everyone's personal work, because she thought it best.
That's just not polite.
In the aftermath, the administrator wasn't sanctioned -- when the community tried to make a "Request for Comments", they were told that the damage could be undone, but the administrator herself couldn't be held responsible. In other words, "too bad, you lose".
The community responded by giving the Arbitrator vandal a vote of "no confidence" when she ran for re-election to the Arbitration Committee. They didn't trust a hothead on a mission to be a calm and impartial arbitrator, and no wonder.
After her 2-1 loss, she further disparged the average worker bees, in harsh and personal language.
But rather than heed the community's vote of no confidence, the Arbitration Committee decided to create a wholly novel office, previously unheard of, of "Clerk" -- essentially a chief prosecutor -- and appointed the vandalizing ex-Arbitrator chair of the "Clerks".
That's just a slap in the face of the hard-working people who work hard day in and day out, to contribute to wikipedia.
And it speaks of a great disconnect between the "average" worker-bees and the Administrative queen bees of wikipedia.
Re:Journalism 101 (Score:2, Insightful)
Before hammer hits gavel, all that is known to be fact is that there is an allegation. So you keep "alleged" in the description.
After the hammer falls, you also know as a fact that there's been a conviction, and therefore you may legitimately say he's a "convicted sex offender".
However, just because someone is arrested for sex offenses, and convicted therefor _does not make him a sex offender_.
You're confusing knowledge with facts - the epistemic with the alethic.
If you believe the knowledge to be incomplete, then you should feel obliged
to limit yourself to the facts - either describe him as the recipient of the allegation, or the recipient of the conviction. Either is formally correct.
You might say that this (choice of wording such that you accept the possibility that the facts may differ from the conclusions the conviction was based on) shows lack of disrespect for the system. However, the system has proved itself time and time again to be capable of egregious errors.