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."
The encyclopedia ANYONE can edit. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:The encyclopedia ANYONE can edit. (Score:2, Insightful)
--Naz
Re:TFA Interesting (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:TFA Interesting (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:TOR (Score:2, Insightful)
Also, most of the Tor endpoints are banned from editing Wikipedia (anonymously) due to abuse anyway.
open (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:I battle this from time to time (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:BS (Score:5, Insightful)
You do realize that the 7th Edition came out in 1827 [wikipedia.org], right? Its funny. Laugh.
Re:That's ridiculous (Score:5, Insightful)
Do you understand what TFA is about?
The whole point of a community resource like Wikipedia is to allow for multiple points of view, and by implication, multiple biases. As long as that's transparent and understood, it IS a bonus.
Re:slashdotliberalwhining (Score:3, Insightful)
Zug-zug (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:TOR (Score:3, Insightful)
IMHO, the scary part is how pathetically stupid this particular company goes about it. One would hope that a company like Diebold knows a bit more about IT security. Just send an employee with a laptop to your local wifi coffee shop already. Jeez.
Re:slashdotliberalwhining (Score:5, Insightful)
I can't tell you how much it bothers me when some whiny liberal drags out another tinfoil-hat theory about how "Big Business" is trying to manipulate public opinion by obfuscating facts, or how some (ooh!) big, scary police state is abusing its powers.
Failed? (Score:5, Insightful)
It has, in fact, become a generally useful source of information. It's useful as a starting point for real research. It is, in short, not at all a bad encyclopedia.
It's influenced by its own organizational culture and editorial bias. Welcome to the story of every publication on the planet.
Re:The encyclopedia ANYONE can edit. (Score:5, Insightful)
Second of all, the value of this quote helps a person to understand a commonly misunderstood by computer geeks. Computers are basically abacuses. They do boolean logic. They create answers. However, intelligence asks questions. We don't have a tool yet that can ask a question, and until we do, the only intelligent system in the universe that know of will be the human mind. Too often, people, both programmers and non-programmers alike, think that a computer can solve all the problem. However, that doesn't reflect reality. Human intellect needs to perceive and pose the question, and then use a tool to solve that problem, such as progamming a computer to solve that problem.
Re:TFA Interesting (Score:3, Insightful)
Company Pride (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:TFA Interesting (Score:5, Insightful)
Ok fair enough....
Wait, what? You just said....
Give it a rest. Implying that its not surprising for CIA employees to have interests outside of work.
Yes, absolutely 100%, I do believe that the average Slashdot user is childish enough to demonize people they disagree with. Are you new here? Peruse any political or Microsoft related topic for examples. Or how about the Novell thing? Or hell, the team working on Mono.
Hell, to some degree, dehumanization of those who differ from you is pretty common. See: racism, classism, nationalism, religion, etc. In that vein, I think its valuable to have reminders that if you prick them, they'll bleed just like you.
His motivation was that someone thought that it was odd that the CIA had interests outside of the CIA, and this was silly.
If you want to dig deeper than that, don't you think its valuable to understand that these people are doing their jobs for some reason other than simply enjoying doing unethical things? Its not about building sympathy for people who do bad things, but challenging the whole "Well they're just different from us mentality. Its been pretty much bullshit ever since it was first used. People are complex, and its far too often that people simplify them and dehumanize them as a way of coping with the lack of understanding and empathy. People also like to think that people that do bad things are simply different than them on some fundamental level, because otherwise they have the potential for evil within them.
"Criminals are just bad people." "Republicans are greedy and evil!" "They deserved to get bombed because they support terrorism." And so on, and so on. Hell, even Hitler wanted to help his country, yet most people just assume he was satan incarnate. This may seem obvious to you, but to a lot of people, like many Slashdot users, its not.
You're reading a hell of a lot into his post that just isn't there. What's your motivation?
Re:slashdotliberalwhining (Score:2, Insightful)
It isn't, per se, even if it's original intent was to be. It's not so much a liberal vs. conservative issue, but there are a lot of untenable conspiracy theories floating around. Almost anything that deals with Big (pharma, business, gov. etc.) is bound to be a crock of shit. Most conspiracy theorist don't recognize the extreme scales they are talking about (i.e., thousands of people being closed-lipped), nor do they recognize that half the time they are talking about a non-entity (i.e., Big Pharma doesn't even exist. It's just a bunch of independent companies and academic researchers).
Then throw in the fact that most agencies, be them government or business, have to be attributed with extreme evil genius to carry out their plots, yet on the other must be so simple minded and prone to errors that "Some Dude" can see through their schemes.
Really, conspiracy theorists are just histrionic megalomaniacs. Rather myopic ones at that.
Re:TFA Interesting (Score:5, Insightful)
Judging by the typical traffic on slashdot, yeah, pretty much.
Re:The encyclopedia ANYONE can edit. (Score:4, Insightful)
While you can call truth "unattainable" it is also infinitely approachable. Truth does not rely on anyone's perception of it; only our understanding relies on perception. If you convince yourself that truth does not exist, you have given up on the approach to truth and the gradual perfection of your own understanding. "Accepted truth" has very little value. Raw experience has very little value. The gradual eternal approach to Truth through reason, perception, revelation and humility has great value. And Truth itself has infinite value.
Re:TOR (Score:5, Insightful)
Before wiki-anything can be considered more than just another biased source of info, the attitude that it is unethical for people to edit information about themselves (including companies) will have to change.
Re:How are they different from groupthink? (Score:5, Insightful)
As opposed to the alternative, which has no methodology and no review whatsoever. Show me one case where science has been wrong where it was corrected by something not science.
Re:How are they different from groupthink? (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm not sure if its an apt comparison, however. My mother could edit an article on computer programming that I wrote, but she is by no means my peer in this area. In science, the people reviewing you generally have the background required to be able to accurately and meaningfully judge your results. The same isn't necessarily true of Wikipedia. In the same way, however, its better than the alternative. Wikipedia isn't perfect, but not much in life is.
Re:How are they different from groupthink? (Score:5, Insightful)
Scientists perform experiments.
The experiment is the be all and end all of science. I think the reason that scientists get a lot of flack like the parent post nowadays is because there are so many pseudo-scientists around that claim to be using the scientific method but really aren't. Psychologists, sociologists, eugenicists, data miners, etc, etc. There's a lot of news articles these days claims that "scientists" have conducted an "experiment" supposedly proving some claim. Nine times out of ten, it turns out that cargo-cult scientists have performed another ritual with the appearance, but none of the substance of a proper experiment.
I've ranted long enough. The answer to your question is that scientists subject their theories to experimental verification/falsification. Peer review doesn't even enter into the equation. Freud was peer reviewed.
Re:That's ridiculous (Score:3, Insightful)
What if someone was part of the perpetrating "Chinese government"? Could they not interpret the same sentence as follows?
"the chinese government [which is controlled by the glorious people's communist party] killed [treasonous and criminal] student protesters [who wanted to undermine and likely overthrow our glorious leaders] at Tiananmen Square in 1989 [and they were entirely justified and indeed heroic for doing so]."
While you and the GP (and I, and the vast majority on /.as well) read the original statement with the bias you noted, it is certainly not inconceivable that the statement could be interpreted with precisely the opposite bias, which I think was the GP's point.
Re:How are they different from groupthink? (Score:5, Insightful)
Freud wasn't the only one who was peer reviewed. Einstein, for example, was also peer reviewed. And there was a lot of resistance to his theories in the day. The key is that his peers held themselves to the ideals of the scientific method. They poked, prodded, and tested his theory (both logically and empirically) until they were forced to accept it.
Re:TFA Interesting (Score:3, Insightful)
Evil is a crutch to avoid understanding. Why did person X do deed A? Because their evil. See, no need to think about what their motivations are, why they might see their deeds as beneficial to society. As a citizen of "The Great Satan" you would think we would understand that more than we do.
If Bush had taken the time to understand Al Queda's and Hussien's motivations instead of just declaring them insane and evil, we might not be mired as an occupying force in Iraq today. Surprisingly, the CIA did understand this, it took months of browbeating to get them to come up with an implausible senario to suit a myoptic president set on upstaging his father...
Re:I expect that people will talk about this (Score:2, Insightful)
Or contemplate "This statement is false" as a mind bender.
Cheers.
Re:How are they different from groupthink? (Score:5, Insightful)
Reality and physics doesn't care what the results of the experiment are, but the groupthink comes from sciences interpretation on the results.
As in... "I put leaches on my scurvy patients and they get better so it must have been the leaches kind" of thinking.
In itself, trying the leaches isn't wrong, but I've failed to noticed other issue due to pre-conceived notion such as the fact that the eating of lemons and limes had nothing to do with my patients getting better.
The scientific method usually tries to minimize this as much as possible, but often times we are still left with the debate of "Does dark matter exist?" or "Can we prove black hole exists?"
Right now, its still groupthink and anyone who would say "There are no blackholes!" would get shunned even if he had a compelling argument. Those in the community that had an open mind would of course review his material in a peer review.
As it is now... The things that have the hardest time with controlled experiements (like black holes) are the ones that groupthink gets applies to since we can't create a black hole in a lab and see what it does.
Collecting and organizing facts (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:TFA Interesting (Score:3, Insightful)
"Evil is a crutch to avoid understanding" is a crutch to avoid understanding.
The term "Evil" can be such a crutch, but it is something much more. It is a simple way of describing a particular person or activity in shorthand. (And that's the context in which it was intended here, I believe)
I'd go nuts if I couldn't say "Evil people drink milk too", and instead had to say "Among the people who drink milk are those whose childhoods were so difficult they never learned to build supporting relationships and ended up isolating themselves outside the norms of human interaction in such ways that they no longer recognized murder, rape, and torture as things that were in and of themselves bad, as well as those who became so deeply angry because a fundamental belief they had was shown to be invalid that they could not deal with it and had to try to force the rest of the world to conform to their reality, and mimes"
Re:TFA Interesting (Score:3, Insightful)
And yes, I'm a conservative.
Who ISNT interested in what they edit? (Score:5, Insightful)
A. Legend of Zelda
B. The mating habits of beetles.
C. The list of solar systems that begin with B discovered in 1945.
Well A. is the most likely, and that's my point. The people editing these articles HAVE interest in them. So Diebold got caught? No let's look at the edit and decide if it was acceptable (and likely it wasn't) but just because someone removes something that is related to them doesn't mean it's not a correct edit.
It's not ok for Diebold to remove the offensive article's text, but if an employee of Diebold who got fired "unfairly" put it there that's ok? Are we now going to decide that a person having an interest in a topic is wrong. If all I edit is information about lockpicking does that mean I work at a lock manufacturer and thus can't be trusted?
The whole point I'm trying to make is we need to look at the EDIT not the editor to decide if changes are fair. Wikipedia is community edited and some people are trying to say that if you're involved with the article's target you're not able to edit. So really should wikipedia be "community edited except for people who work with the article" or should we reevaluate the standards by which we point out "partisanship".
Btw if you choose the second choice above that means we can't have any experienced people talk about the article which is the problem. If I own an iPhone I can't write about in wikipedia so all we then have is second hand experience with products and PR postings. Like I said the solution is to stop worrying about WHO edits wikipedia and instead focus on edits being done to wikipedia.
Re:TFA Interesting (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:National Softball Ass'n (Score:2, Insightful)
Just imagine the National Softball Association receiving black folders through the "top secret" mail (or something like that).
Re:Who ISNT interested in what they edit? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:slashdotliberalwhining (Score:3, Insightful)
Those academic researchers don't even exist either. They're just a bunch of atoms.
Collective behavior can arise even when the pieces are not actively working together; that behavior can be given a name, whether it's "Joe Smith the biologist" or "Big Pharma".
Re:TFA Interesting (Score:2, Insightful)
Actually woefully few of them are. The VAST majority of CIA employees aren't what anyone would call spies. And even those that are aren't. CIA employees who gather intelligence are "Officers", those foreign nationals they recruit are "Agents."
It's the guys that spy on us that are spies in the CIA vernacular.
Re:TFA Interesting (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:That's ridiculous (Score:2, Insightful)
I'm not implying the government, I explictly said it. I think you need to learn what bias is, because its not about splitting hairs. Goverment includes the military, I belive that's obvious. If I had said the Chinese military had killed them, its also likely they weren't under orders from the government.
which brings me to the second point: student protesters. what were they protesting? you only protest if something is wrong, right?
A group only protests if they believe something is wrong, yes. Does that automatically mean the protesters had valid points? No, not at all.
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]."
Did I write the parts in brackets? No? Then you're interjecting your own bias into my statement. YOU think that's what I said. Its not. There is a reason I didn't include those words. For whatever reason people today feel there's always something between the lines when there isn't. It really needs to stop.
of course, that's probably because the facts themselves carry a bias.
Facts don't have a bias; people add their bias when interperating facts.
Re:TFA Interesting (Score:1, Insightful)
rewind, play, rewind, play (Score:2, Insightful)
That would be all of it. Seriously. One person's truth is another's spin. Even the science.
And one person's correction is another's censorship. Feel free to embark on that particular sinking ship.
The signal of consensus opinion is only strengthened by the noise of bias. Apply 'stochastic amplification' to behavior. It's less biased than the more common 'cognitive dissonance' but the result is the same. Those to whom a particular point is egregious enough will act on it.
I could have sworn the point was made when the subject came up a week or two ago. It's no less applicable just because someone made a widget that tells you the poo stinks. You won't step in it, and be happy; the flies will land on it, and be happy; someone else will stomp on the flies, and be happy. Let's all go get happy. That's what epoostimology is about.
Try a different direction if you prefer: "Deep and dark, yet within it is an essence. That essence is real and can be discovered. Therein lies truth." -- Ch. 21, Tao the Ching, Lao Tzu. That "essence" is in the deep content, and in the dark metacontent regarding the creation and changes of all the content. I'll take my essence from my reading of these, not from someone's widget, because it too has an agenda in its essence.
Re:TFA Interesting (Score:1, Insightful)
I think it's in the US's best interest to leave Iran completely alone. They aren't really harming the US, except via Iraq, which is a bad idea on our part anyway and we should bail out.
If Israel has some problem with Iran, and I know a lot of Israelis do say that, as do some of my more conservative American Jewish friends, then let them solve it on their own. One needless war at a time please; zero if possible.
I think what a lot of people forget in the US is that on September 11, the Iranian government condemned the attacks. We've been conditioned to hate Iran ever since they overturned the CIA-installed puppet government. It's a cold war kind of hate, the likes of which you see directed towards Cuba or the former Soviet Union, even to this day. I think that is very misplaced. We need to hate less people, and make friends instead of enemies. If we really want to serve the US agenda, we need to trade with these people, so that capitalism can drown out their government as they'll come to appreciate goods from the US, etc.
How does this get modded insightful? (Score:3, Insightful)
The only myopic people are those who swallow the line of the mainstream media verbatim, even when it contradicts itself and easily verifiable facts. The belief that only your government and media is much like believing that only your God is real and all the rest are fairy stories.
Mod Parent Up (Score:4, Insightful)