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theyithian said:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bobby_Brown
Can you spot the subtle changes?
Er, perhaps NSFW?
theyithian said:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bobby_Brown
Can you spot the subtle changes?
Ronson8 said:Cant believe it hasn't been cleaned up yet.
JamesWhitehead said:Can of worms really. The people who can debate all day and night about politically contentious issues on every website under the sun are all just lone nutters. Except those whose day-job it is. Anecdotal evidence from web-twonks on this kind of thing could drive one insane. Now here's what Wikipedia found . . .
BBC Report
They said news reports alleging Mr Adams's fingerprints and handprints were found on a car used during a double murder in 1971 were removed.
Sinn Fein said it was calling for more stringent regulation of the internet.
theyithian said:Talking of shooting messengers. The BBC have confessed that the tool they reported showed some less than glorious edits originating from their own computers.
Vancouver Mayor Sam Sullivan's staff have confirmed they deleted several unflattering, but true, items from the mayor's Wikipedia page -- including the fact the mayor was investigated by the police for giving money to addicts to purchase drugs.
Coun. Raymond Louie, one of Sullivan's political opponents, called the changes an attempt to "rewrite history" by a mayor obsessed with his public image.
But Sullivan's spokesman David Hurford said the deletions were "completely appropriate."
...The changes added information on the mayor's EcoDensity and drug-substitution initiatives.
But Sullivan's staff also deleted a lengthy passage describing how former police chief Jamie Graham had Sullivan investigated for giving addicts money for drugs and how, in a separate incident, Sullivan had Graham investigated for leaving a shooting target on the city manager's desk.
Both incidents were widely reported at the time.
"To me it's not about suppressing information," said Hurford. "It's about people trying to maintain some type of control about the way they're being represented. And I think that's fair."
Example?
Sometimes, people with an agenda log in and edit all kinds of crap into the text. I've encountered one or two oddities like this.
Hamid as scholar
For the last 20 years he spent his days writing and researching books. He wrote six books on the Northern Areas, the politics of independence and the Pakistan army, and an autobiography. His last book - the first volume of an intended three-volume work, Pakistan and its Early Years - was published only last week. Shahid Hamid had numerous friends in England, where he invariably spent the summer, while a visit to 'Shaigan', his home in Rawalpindi, became essential for any foreign diplomat, journalist, scholar or military man. British cabinet ministers, US secretaries of state and Russian scholars were frequent visitors. In recent months he had been thrilled by the opening up of central Asia to Pakistanis for the first time and he was planning a trip there to discover more about his forefathers.[2]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syed_Shahid_Hamid
I'm constantly checking biographical references for WW2 British military history and Wikipedia is, frankly, useless owing to omission, inaccuracy and screeds of opinionated bias for anything but the most obvious of subjects. The bibliographies and references - a sine qua non for research in the humanities - are laughably incomplete and don't reliably cite work clearly paraphrased in the text or major biographies of the subject. If I had no job and a secure income, I'd take a year or two revising the lot of them, but then some know-nothing would probably append a double-length article to each explaining why whomever is in discussion wasn't as bold as Patton, couldn't manoeuvre like Guderian or was clearly an anti-semite.
I'm constantly checking biographical references for WW2 British military history and Wikipedia is, frankly, useless owing to omission, inaccuracy and screeds of opinionated bias for anything but the most obvious of subjects. The bibliographies and references - a sine qua non for research in the humanities - are laughably incomplete and don't reliably cite work clearly paraphrased in the text or major biographies of the subject. If I had no job and a secure income, I'd take a year or two revising the lot of them, but then some know-nothing would probably append a double-length article to each explaining why whomever is in discussion wasn't as bold as Patton, couldn't manoeuvre like Guderian or was clearly an anti-semite.
THE GREAT WIKIPEDIA TITTY SCANDAL
This is the story of a Wikipedia administrator gone mad with 80,000 boob pages — and an unhinged trial that would dictate the site’s NSFW future
As midnight neared on the night of November 5, 2015, an anonymous user on Wikipedia submitted a report that would rock the internet behemoth to its core. Apparently, one of its high-ranking administrators, Neelix, had gone rogue and was quietly amassing thousands upon thousands of entries dedicated to titties. ...
If approved, administrators are granted the ability to block disruptive editors as well as view, edit and restore pages that had been previously deleted and create, edit and publish pages without approval from a higher power. Though a large portion of administrators operate under pseudonyms, they’re a tight-knit, tireless group of volunteers who take their responsibility of maintaining Wikipedia as an accurate, neutral resource very seriously.
Chief among them was Neelix. “His user page has boxes that say that he’s ranked 10th on the list of Wikipedians by number of articles created, that he’d created over 5,000 articles,” Kohs observes. “It seemed that was definitely a source of pride for him.”
So when the anonymous user charged Neelix with “chronic, intractable behavioral problems,” the Wikipedia community found itself in shock. Was one of its greatest administrators a fraud? ...
In Neelix’s case, he was charged with creating unnecessary “redirects,” which automatically send visitors to the “main” article for that topic. These typically have to do with plural versions of a word or different permutations of a topic — searching “testes,” for example, automatically takes you to the Wikipedia article for “testicle.”
Digging into Neelix’s history, however, his fellow administrators couldn’t believe what they found. He hadn’t just created a handful of redirects, as the original report described; he’d quietly created thousands upon thousands of new redirects, each one a chaotic, if not offensive, permutation of the word “tits” and “boobs.” For example, he created redirects for “tittypumper,” “tittypumpers,” “tit pump,” “pump titties,” “pumping boobies” and hundreds more for “breast pump.” In fact, for seemingly every Wikipedia article related to breasts, he did something similar. ...
https://www.vice.com/en/article/pkgbwm/chinese-woman-fake-russian-history-wikipediaPosing as a scholar, a Chinese woman spent years writing alternative accounts of medieval Russian history on Chinese Wikipedia, conjuring imaginary states, battles, and aristocrats in one of the largest hoaxes on the open-source platform.
The scam was exposed last month by Chinese novelist Yifan, who was researching for a book when he came upon an article on the Kashin silver mine.
It was one of 206 articles she has written on Chinese Wikipedia since 2019, weaving facts into fiction in an elaborate scheme that went uncaught for years and tested the limits of crowdsourced platforms’ ability to verify information and fend off bad actors.
“The content she wrote is of high quality and the entries were interconnected, creating a system that can exist on its own,” veteran Chinese Wikipedian John Yip told VICE World News. “Zhemao single-handedly invented a new way to undermine Wikipedia.”
One of her longest articles was almost the length of “The Great Gatsby.” With the formal, authoritative tone of an encyclopedia, it detailed three Tartar uprisings in the 17th century that left a lasting impact on Russia, complete with a map she made. In another entry, she shared rare images of ancient coins, which she claimed to have obtained from a Russian archaeological team.
One article she tampered heavily with was on the deportation of Chinese in the Soviet Union in the 1920s and ’30s. It was so well-written it was selected as a featured article and translated into other languages, including English, Arabic, and Russian, spreading the damage to other language editions of Wikipedia.
That reminds me; must alter @catseye's wiki page and put her 'correct' birthdate in.A Bored Chinese Housewife Spent Years Falsifying Russian History on Wikipedia
https://www.vice.com/en/article/pkgbwm/chinese-woman-fake-russian-history-wikipedia
I wasn't going to take the mick that much.NOBODY will believe that I'm really 104! NOBODY!