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."
TFA Interesting (Score:5, Funny)
"One CIA entry deals with the details of lyrics sung in a Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode."
Nerds.
Re:TFA Interesting (Score:5, Insightful)
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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. Surpr
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"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
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Mod Parent Up (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:TFA Interesting (Score:5, Funny)
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That's one possible assumption you could make as an explanation of his comment...
A more realistic assumption would be that he thought many people view opaque government entities as a faceless unit, and don't think about the fact that such an agency is made up of real individuals.
Even saying that he "disagrees" with them is a logical leap. I don't see any evidence of that in his original comment. The fact that yo
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:TFA Interesting (Score:5, Insightful)
Judging by the typical traffic on slashdot, yeah, pretty much.
Re:TFA Interesting (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Communism was just a red herring.
Re:TFA Interesting (Score:5, Informative)
have you checked out there Factbook? [cia.gov]
It's arguably one of the best country resources for years, alas with an US slant (i.e. illicit drugs are very mymy in just about every country).
Nevertheless, it would be a shame if such a resource was to be pulled for "security reasons").
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And yes, I'm a conservative.
Collecting and organizing facts (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:TFA Interesting (Score:4, Funny)
National Softball Ass'n (Score:5, Interesting)
Wikipedia can already do this (Score:4, Informative)
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If you click on the IP address in an anonymous change in a history, it takes you to a list of that IP address's changes. The URL it takes you to is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions /IP-address [wikipedia.org], where "IP-address" is the dotted-quad form of the IP address.
The encyclopedia ANYONE can edit. (Score:4, Insightful)
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--Naz
Re:The encyclopedia ANYONE can edit. (Score:5, Funny)
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.
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Well... we do... but the value of the questions the tool gives us is rather obscure.
Re:The encyclopedia ANYONE can edit. (Score:4, Funny)
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.
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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
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I don't buy that. I can say "the Chinese government killed student protesters at Tiananmen Square in 1989." There is no bias in that statement, its just a fact. Much of Wikipedia conforms to listing of dry facts, and areas that are speculat
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the Chinese government killed student protesters at Tiananmen Square in 1989.
actually, it can be said that statement has bias in it. first, you're implicating "the chinese government". who is that? the communist party as a whole? the military? the soldiers themselves who fired on the protesters?
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
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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
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.
Don't you mean . . . (Score:4, Funny)
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Whose "objective, external reality" are you referring to? Our wonderfully objective media? All of the oh-so objective Slashdotters?
There is no such thing as an "objective, external reality". All things viewed and/or reported by a human being are subjective.
TOR (Score:2, Interesting)
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Also, most of the Tor endpoints are banned from editing Wikipedia (anonymously) due to abuse anyway.
Re:TOR (Score:5, Interesting)
Checkuser [wikipedia.org] anyone?
Revealed next week... (Score:2)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I know it's easy.
And that's the point. The smarter groups have probably already taken steps to hide their edits.
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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.
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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.
What's so hard... (Score:3)
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.
BS (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:BS (Score:5, Insightful)
You do realize that the 7th Edition came out in 1827 [wikipedia.org], right? Its funny. Laugh.
Re:BS (Score:5, Funny)
No, I didn't and now I feel like an idiot. Its times like this that I'm glad my slashdot name isn't linked to my real identity
Re:BS (Score:5, Funny)
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].
Re:I battle this from time to time (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I battle this from time to time (Score:5, Funny)
/.'ed (Score:2)
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Victim of their own success (Score:3, Interesting)
Peter
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(or do the spaces screw with regex?)
Reminder to self: whitewash from home (Score:2)
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Yeah, only the really important people are allowed to have picket fences...
open (Score:4, Insightful)
It's the iron law of bureaucracy, not outside IPs (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
The Proof is in the Results (Score:3, Informative)
Not a brilliant comparison, since Wikipedia, by and large, is in fact useful for a large number of knowledge domains.
What if this example, Wikipedia, has a particularly deleterious organizational culture, and an extremely rampant and calcified editorial bias? The problem is not the existence of an organizational culture or editorial bias, but to the degree that it is existent.
I'm skeptical because the results I see
Re:It's the iron law of bureaucracy, not outside I (Score:4, Informative)
For those who are interested, the author of the above comment (MSTCrow5429) has been blocked several times [wikipedia.org] on Wikipedia for making personal attacks on other editors.
His current project appears to be shilling for Jim Inhofe (R-Oklahoma)'s [wikipedia.org] position denying anthropogenic climate change by citing out-of-date and rejected journal articles [wikipedia.org]. By so doing, he appears to be neglecting important Wikipedia policies demanding reliable sources [wikipedia.org] and requiring material be presented from a neutral point of view [wikipedia.org].
Sour grapes much? While I certainly agree that there are aspects of Wikipedia that deserve both criticism and scrutiny, I am somewhat disinclined to trust the judgement of MSTCrow on this.
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Not necessarily the company (Score:2)
Though I imagine there will be some Wikipedia g
Whitewash? Been saying this for several years... (Score:2)
What REALLY disheartened me though, was the fact that the PTBs watching these actions regarded the whitewashing as "NPOV"
Wikipedia's okay until it comes to real, living people.
Then everything goes completely out the window with regards to factuality and referential reliabili
What's with the path?!?! (Score:5, Funny)
?!?!?!
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
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slashdotliberalwhining (Score:5, Funny)
I'm glad someone added the slashdotliberalwhining tag.
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.
We're an established first-world country with a tradition of freedom, and it's not as if we're ever going to slip into fascism like the Germany or Italy of last century, or into a police state like modern China or Russia, or into a gilded age aristocracy like every country in the Americas except the United States and Canada.
So relax, whiny liberals. Such dangers are unheard of. If we seem to be slipping in any of those directions, just shut up and take it like a conservative - silently and complacently, without a doubt in your mind that no matter how badly things seem to be going, our superiors have things well in hand. Only losers whine about truth and decency. If you're a winner, you'll cheer for the winning side, no matter how repugnant its aims.
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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.
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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".
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.
I caught SCO whitewashing their article (Score:5, Interesting)
Wikipedia whitewashing won't matter... (Score:5, Funny)
Clarifying the NSA (Score:5, Funny)
Now this was just silly . . .
Discovery Institute (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Discovery Institute (Score:4, Informative)
then do a tracrt to the IP addresses found. Add and subtract one, and see if it tracert's to approximately the same place. You may be able to get a good idea that way of the names and locations with reverse DNS being returned on the tracert. You should be able to compile a good guess at the range(s) that way. Then use the article in question to see if you can find any correlation.
It is all spin. (Score:3, Interesting)
Company Pride (Score:5, Insightful)
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Please do not edit articles about the company though. You might think of them as defamatory. Maybe it would be better to show somebody else the problem and ask them to look into it. Or, even better, show it to the PR department and let them contact an editor about it. If you change the article, be honest
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
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.
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Aside from the point it is highly speculative that Wikipedia will be around "in a few decades," how and why do you believe it can or will eventually "become the most reliable source of information?"
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Maybe it is because I recall the last **AA lawsuit article in which Slashdotters asserted that an IP address is an entirely meaningless number as it relates to proving anything about anyone.
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 lin
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.
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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 c
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: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: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.
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Wow. You make that sound almost as bad as the Anonymous Coward's on slashdot...
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One tool that I am missing very much is to download the history of a given page into some version control format (git, svn, cvs, etc).
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 l