See Who Is Whitewashing Wikipedia 478
Decius6i5 writes "Caltech grad student Virgil Griffith has launched a search tool that uncovers whitewashing and other self-interested editing of Wikipedia. Users can generate lists of every edit to Wikipedia which has been made from a particular IP address range. The tool has already uncovered a number of interesting edits, such as one from the corporate offices of Diebold which removed large sections of content critical of their electronic voting machines. A Wired story provides more detail and Threat Level is running a contest to see who can come up with the most interesting Wikipedia spin job."
TOR (Score:2, Interesting)
I battle this from time to time (Score:5, Interesting)
One of the pages on my watchlist is Adrian Smith [wikipedia.org] (R - Nebraska, third district). About once a month, an anon IP or recently-created user account tries to whitewash his WP article by removing unflattering sourced details about his campaign contributors.
If you want to follow along in the fun, view the article history [wikipedia.org].
Victim of their own success (Score:3, Interesting)
Peter
Re:The encyclopedia ANYONE can edit. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:TOR (Score:5, Interesting)
Checkuser [wikipedia.org] anyone?
Re:TFA Interesting (Score:2, Interesting)
It's the iron law of bureaucracy, not outside IPs (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:TFA Interesting (Score:1, Interesting)
That's ridiculous (Score:4, Interesting)
There's no magical incantation that makes an "open, transparent" information editing environment inheirently better. You just get a different bias, and it's more difficult to figure out where that bias is coming into play.
With Brittanica, you have a (known) establishment bias. With a Boeing sales brochure, you have a (known) "areospace is the ultimate industry" bias. What you generally see on Wikipedia are astounding examples of groupthink. Wikipedia's NPOV is a bias, make no mistake. And just because you can "see" the bias of article editors, that doesn't mean that the bias of the "Wikipedians" is easier to find, define, or overcome. All this does is make one type of bias more obvious. That doesn't solve the problem.
All content contains a bias. Knowing that is a good starting point for interpreting the content. This project is fine, as far as it goes. But implying (as you seem to) that somehow Wikipedia wonks are more trustworthy and less biased than other editors is, well, silly.
There's no "bonus" here
How are they different from groupthink? (Score:3, Interesting)
Their top level admins are no where near as impartial as they claim to be. Obvious subjects to avoid on Wikipedia are those which are based on religious, political, or environmental, concerns. People have taken "maintaining" those types of entries to ridiculous levels that whole pages of discussion exist behind the page where the various factions bitch at each other. The best way to see the bias is to watch what they require to have accredited links and what they do not, let alone what sites they consider credible sources for disputed information.
While it has much useful information there are just certain subjects to avoid
Meta-encyclopedia (Score:5, Interesting)
When I was in college, I took a history course in which we read three different books on slavery in the United States — one from the 1860s, one from the 1950s, and another from the 1990s. Obviously, they all had completely different spins on the reality of slavery. The goal of the assignment wasn't so much to learn about slavery as it was to learn about the three different time periods perception of slavery.
I think that these "edits" can provide us an interesting insight into the real issues, and how the public perceives them, and how various invested parties would like the public to perceive them. As long as there is transparency to the edits (and clearly, there is), I think a lot can be learned from the edits themselves.
—brian
Re:TFA Interesting (Score:1, Interesting)
I caught SCO whitewashing their article (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:TOR (Score:5, Interesting)
Roger Dingledine (the guy who invented TOR) came to Wikimania '06 and I was luckly enough to have dinner with him. We had a long talk about TOR - he explained the technical underpinnings of TOR to me and what he's doing next (to get around the Chinese firewall). His position was that he's not happy that TOR is blocked, but he understands why we do it, and he thinks we're going in the right direction. He also thinks that we need a trust metric - at which point, editing Wikipedia through TOR will become possible.
Re:That's ridiculous (Score:3, Interesting)
which brings me to the second point: student protesters. what were they protesting? you only protest if something is wrong, right?
your "bias-free" sentence, which states nothing but the facts, absolutely has the underlying message: the chinese government [which is controlled by the opressive communist party] killed [innocent] student protesters [who wanted a better life] at Tiananmen Square in 1989 [and they were wrong for doing so]."
of course, that's probably because the facts themselves carry a bias.
Discovery Institute (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:How are they different from groupthink? (Score:2, Interesting)
Think about it.
Re:RfA? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:TOR (Score:1, Interesting)
A webhosting package is the best way to go as you can get those monthly and thus you can switch IPs/locals quite rapidly (or have many on the go at a cost of less than $10/month each), where as a collocated machine is much more costly and more time consuming to setup.
One of the individuals that first perfected this technique was a Wall Street message board addict Gary Weiss [antisocialmedia.net] who brought the technique to Wikipedia a couple years ago. It's fairly common knowledge within some communities (such as WikipediaReview.com [wikipediareview.com]) and is understood as the preferred way to get around Wikipedia administrator hassles.
It is all spin. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:RfA? (Score:2, Interesting)
You are also misinformed about the removal of admin privileges: In the English Wikipedia alone, there have been 37 cases [wikipedia.org] of it, and the Arbitration process is designed to deal with such abuses and has the authority to penalize them.
National Softball Ass'n (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Meta-encyclopedia (Score:3, Interesting)
Diploma mill article are subject to a lot of this (Score:5, Interesting)
Many of them try to justify it by saying that they evaluate the persons "life experience" to judge whether the person is worthy of the diploma, but in reality most of them just give the diplomas to anyone who pays the fees [wikipedia.org].
It is pretty obvious that the diplomas are used by their buyers to get jobs for lying about their abilities, i.e. pretty much plain fraud.
I noticed that the articles of diploma mills are frequent targets of whitewash (see fx this [wikipedia.org]). I don't know for certain who the whitewashers are, but I assume it is either the diploma mills themselves (most like), or people holding the diplomas and afraid to be exposed. Many of Wikipedia's articles rank highly in Google, so they are an important target.
I have a number of diploma mills in my watchlist, and sometimes I have to revert whitewashing every day...
Brown Brothers Harriman (Score:5, Interesting)
edit 1 [wikipedia.org]
edit 2 [wikipedia.org]
The IP addresses can be confirmed to be from BBH with whois: -molo
Re:Experiment in anarchism? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:How are they different from groupthink? (Score:2, Interesting)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anton_van_Leeuwenhoe
Re:How are they different from groupthink? (Score:3, Interesting)
Still, the difference between the wiki editor community and the scientific community is that the scientific community is made up of actual experts (at least in a vastly larger proportion) with verifiable credentials. There's also a little more professional tone going into most journal publications as well.
Every group has bias and groupthink -- we're more or less wired for it. But it turns out that despite that, they can still be right most of the time on the subjects they actually know about.
Re:It's the iron law of bureaucracy, not outside I (Score:2, Interesting)
People like you usually started out with trying to add their favorite person, business, music band or political or pseudo-scientific theory to Wikipedia, only to be rebuffed, repeatedly. Did that happen to you? If so, ask yourself: is your pet topic covered more neutrally and in more detail in Encyclopedia Britannica than in Wikipedia? In all likelihood, your pet topic isn't covered at all in any encyclopedia; so why don't you complain about the bias and rotten structure of all the other encyclopedias? Because with the other encyclopedias you would never even have dared to try to get your pet topic covered: deep down you know it to be uncencyclopedic.
Re:How are they different from groupthink? (Score:2, Interesting)
Not to belabor the person's point, but testing the theory implies that the peers saw that it correponds to reality. There is actually only 'interpretation' when something is unclear or not yet really known - when one speaks of the probability of something or an uncertainty. Science as a whole is a knowledge by causes, which means that once one has established that a certain effect is related to another (its cause), the matter is proven - interpretation has very little to do with actual science, but rather with hypotheses and the application of a scientific theory to other branches of knowledge (for instance the philosophical implications of the Heisenberg principle).
JJ +
Re:The Free Encyc. Any Schmo Can Edit! (Score:3, Interesting)
If I want to look at say the last 100 edits of a page, doing so manually clicking in the history page would be way too much work and too cumbersome to the point that I would never do that. If on the other hand it was possible to download the history and use a local version control tool to get a list of the last 100 edits shown as a continuous list of patches it would be easy to look through all changes and I would do so often I guess.
More transparency of editing history can only be good, and I think such a tool is much needed.
Re:TFA Interesting (Score:5, Interesting)
Not to mention that one IP can cover a LOT of people.
My work IP is currently banned from wikipedia for vandalism. I've investigated this, and it was apparently some idiot in another building that's not even in the same zip code but who happens to work at another subsidiary under the same parent company that shares my IP. There are probably more than 10,000 people that share this same IP spread across New York City. Some of us work at the same company he does, some of us don't.
You really cannot take any of the IP's on this list and directly connect it to anyone at any company or organization, any more than the RIAA can take an IP of an alleged music pirate and say they individually are the ones that did it.
My IP, for example, says I work at a completely different company than the one that signs my paychecks. That's the way it is in the age of conglomerates.
Re:TFA Interesting (Score:2, Interesting)