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Wikipedia Manipulation (Sabotage; Censorship; Editing Battles; Etc.)

Ronson8 said:
Cant believe it hasn't been cleaned up yet.

I think it has now. What was wrong with it that it needed to be cleaned up?
 
I had a look in the history. Some of the photographs were replaced by porn. A very immature thing to do, and not clever at all.
 
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

Last Updated: Wednesday, 15 August 2007, 17:46 GMT 18:46 UK

Wikipedia 'shows CIA page edits'

By Jonathan Fildes
Science and technology reporter, BBC News

The tool detected changes to a page about Mahmoud Ahmadinejad

An online tool that claims to reveal the identity of organisations that edit Wikipedia pages has revealed that the CIA was involved in editing entries.

Wikipedia Scanner allegedly shows that workers on the agency's computers made edits to the page of Iran's President.

It also purportedly shows that the Vatican has edited entries about Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams.

The tool, developed by US researchers, trawls a list of 5.3m edits and matches them to the net address of the editor.

Wikipedia is a free online encyclopaedia that can be created and edited by anyone.

Most of the edits detected by the scanner correct spelling mistakes or factual inaccuracies in profiles. However, others have been used to remove potentially damaging material or to deface sites.

Mistaken identity

On the profile of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the tool indicates that a worker on the CIA network reportedly added the exclamation "Wahhhhhh!" before a section on the leader's plans for his presidency.

A warning on the profile of the anonymous editor reads: "You have recently vandalised a Wikipedia article, and you are now being asked to stop this type of behaviour."

It is claimed the entry was changed by a CIA computer user

Other changes that have been made are more innocuous, and include tweaks to the profile of former CIA chief Porter Goss and celebrities such as Oprah Winfrey.

When asked whether it could confirm whether the changes had been made by a person using a CIA computer, a spokesperson responded: "I cannot confirm that the traffic you cite came from agency computers.

"I'd like in any case to underscore a far larger and more significant point that no one should doubt or forget: The CIA has a vital mission in protecting the United States, and the focus of this agency is there, on that decisive work."

Radio change

The site also indicates that a computer owned by the US Democratic Party was used to make changes to the site of right-wing talk show host Rush Limbaugh.

The changes brand Mr Limbaugh as "idiotic," a "racist", and a "bigot". An entry about his audience now reads: "Most of them are legally retarded."

We really value transparency and the scanner really takes this to another level

Wikipedia spokesperson

The IP address is registered in the name of the Democratic National Headquarters.

A spokesperson for the Democratic Party said that the changes had not been made on its computers. Instead, they said that the "IP address is the same as the DCCC".

The DCCC, or Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, is the "official campaign arm of the Democrats" in the House of Representatives and share a building with the party.

"We don't condone these sorts of activities and we take very precaution to ensure that our network is used in a responsible manner," Doug Thornell of the DCCC told the BBC News website.

Mr Thornell pointed out that the edit had been made "close to two years ago" and it was "impossible to know" who had done it.

Voting issue

The site also indicates that Vatican computers were used to remove content from a page about the Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams.

Wikipedia already collects the IP address or username of editors

The edit removed links to newspaper stories written in 2006 that alleged that Adams's finger prints and hand prints were found on a car used during a double murder in 1971.

The section, titled "Fresh murder question raised" is no longer available through the online encyclopaedia.

Wikipedia Scanner also points the finger at commercial organisations that have modified entries about the pages.

One in particular is Diebold, the company that supplied electronic voting machines for the controversial US election in 2000.

In October 2005, a person using a Diebold computer removed paragraphs about Walden O'Dell, chief executive of the company, which revealed that he had been "a top fund-raiser" for George Bush.

A month later, other paragraphs and links to stories about the alleged rigging of the 2000 election were also removed.

The paragraphs and links have since been reinstated.

Diebold officials have not responded to requests by the BBC for information about the changes.

Web history

The Wikipedia Scanner results are not the first time that people have been uncovered editing their own Wikipedia entries.

Wikipedia Scanner may prevent an organisation or individuals from editing articles that they're really not supposed to

Wikipedia spokesperson

Earlier this year, Microsoft was revealed to have offered money to experts to trawl through entries about the company and its products to make corrections.

Staff at the US Congress have also previously been exposed for editing and removing sensitive information about politicians.

An inquiry was launched after staff for Democratic representative Marty Meehan admitted polishing his biography

The new tool was built by Virgil Griffith of the California Institute of Technology.

It exploits the open nature of Wikipedia, which already collects the net address or username of editors and tracks all changes to a page. The information can be accessed in the "history" tab at the top of a Wikipedia page.

By merging this information with a database of IP address owners, Wikipedia Scanner is able to put a name to the organisation and firms from which edits are made.

The scanner cannot identify the individuals editing articles, admits Mr Griffith.

"Technically, we don't know whether it came from an agent of that company, however, we do know that edit came from someone with access to their network," he wrote on the Wikipedia Scanner site.

A spokesperson for Wikipedia said the tool helped prevent conflicts of interest.

"We really value transparency and the scanner really takes this to another level," they said.

"Wikipedia Scanner may prevent an organisation or individuals from editing articles that they're really not supposed to."
 
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

Whilst I'm not naiive enough to think this doesn't happen at this level, it is pretty worrying all the same.
 
Vatican computer 'edited Adams page'

A new internet tool shows how a Vatican computer was used to edit a web entry about Sinn Fein President Gerry Adams, American researchers have claimed.
Wikipedia Scanner developers said they could trace where changes to the online encyclopedia had been made.

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.

The Wikipedia edit removed links to newspaper stories written in 2006 about Mr Adams' fingerprints and handprints, the researchers said.

And a section, titled "Fresh murder question raised", has also been deleted from the online encyclopaedia.

The page now says it is "currently protected from editing until August 17, 2007 or until disputes have been resolved".

Experts say it may not even have been anyone at the Vatican who made the changes.

Dr Kevin Curran, a computer expert at the University of Ulster, said: "Either you were using their computer and you are an employee, or you had maliciously hacked, spoofing the IP address and having people believing that you were using their network.

"But nine times out of 10, we can almost say that yes, an employee of that company or organisation has been making the changes."

Wikipedia is a free online encyclopaedia that can be created and edited by anyone.

Wikipedia Scanner trawls a list of 5.3m edits and matches them to the net address of the editor.

As well as the Vatican, it says the CIA was involved in editing entries.

It allegedly shows that workers on the agency's computers made edits to the page of Iran's president.

BBC News website users contacted the corporation to point out that the tool also revealed that people inside the BBC had made edits to Wikipedia pages.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/northern_ireland/6949153.stm
 
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.


:roll: A case of "shoot the messenger" or should that be "bomb the messenger".....
 
Talking of shooting messengers. The BBC have confessed that the tool they reported showed some less than glorious edits originating from their own computers.
 
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.

I'm wondering whether this is the new 1984-version of researchers and sub-editors? It doesn't matter how factually incorrect a BBC piece might be, 'facts' elsewhere can be altered and 'tidied-up' afterwards to match the piece of writing.
 
Australian politicians 'doctor Wikipedia entries'

First it was the CIA, then the Vatican. Now Australian politicians are the latest interest group shown to have altered, deleted or massaged their entries on the online encyclopaedia Wikipedia.

Aides working for the prime minister, John Howard, made scores of edits to Wikipedia items relating to the government, including removing a reference to the treasurer, Peter Costello, as Captain Smirk. On the governments controversial policy of detaining asylum-seekers in island camps, an employee inserted the word allegedly into a statement saying that detainees were subject to inhumane conditions.

Changes were made to an entry on the 2001 so-called 'children overboard affair, when the Howard government falsely claimed that asylum seekers from a sinking boat had deliberately thrown their children into the sea so that they would be rescued by the Australian navy.

Modifications were also made to blunt claims that the governments tough policy on asylum seekers helped Mr Howard win the 2001 election.

Some amendments went beyond politics and were of a decidedly juvenile nature.

One employee of the prime ministers department changed an entry on a type of martial arts by adding the sentence poo bum dicky wee wee. Other bizarre alterations traced to the prime ministers department included the addition of the phrases Freemasonry is the work of Satan and Jesus is god to various entries.

The changes were detected by WikiScanner, a website which reveals the digital fingerprint of those who edit Wikipedia.

It has already shown that organizations as diverse as the US Democrats and Republicans, the Central Intelligence Agency and the BBC have altered their entries.

A free, internet-based encyclopaedia that anyone can add to, Wikipedia has been criticised as potentially unreliable because of the apparent ease with which anyone can add biased, incorrect or libellous information.

The Australian defence department was revealed as the most prolific source of Wikipedia changes, with more than 5,000 traced to its staff. Defence chiefs said they would block staff from editing Wikipedia after they made changes ranging from correcting information about the Australian military to removing negative comments about Mr Howards Liberal Party. It was found that [Wikipedia use] was exceeding our guidelines, particularly those that prevent personal comment from being confused as Defence comment, a spokeswoman said.

Staff working for the premier of New South Wales, Morris Iemma, were also caught out changing references to their boss.

They erased mention on his Wikipedia entry of a profanity-laden outburst last year, when he called the then head of Sydneys Cross City Tunnel corporation a f---wit', unaware that his microphone was switched on.

The leader of the opposition Labor Party, Kevin Rudd, who is tipped to unseat Mr Howard at a general election later this year, accused the prime minister of engaging public servants to go out there and re-edit history. A spokesman for Mr Howard said he had not asked his staff to edit any Wikipedia entries.

Telegraph link
 
Mayor's Wikipedia page gets flattering edit from his staff

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."

Anyhow, it looks like someone has promptly reversed the changes made by the mayor's cronies. So a lot of good that did him.
 
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.
 
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.

Oops, sorry. It's hard to tell, but the first line in the first post is also a link to a news story.

This is a link:
Wikipedia's Dark Side: Censorship, Revenge Editing & Bribes

Excerpt:
…several years ago I started to notice some things I didn’t like in the Wikipedia entry about me, so I took them out. To do that, I created a user-name that wasn’t my own. Using that user-name, I continued to edit my own Wikipedia entry and some other people’s too. I took out nasty passages about people I admire – like Polly Toynbee, George Monbiot, Deborah Orr and Yasmin Alibhai-Brown. I factually corrected some other entries about other people. But in a few instances, I edited the entries of people I had clashed with in ways that were juvenile or malicious: I called one of them anti-Semitic and homophobic, and the other a drunk. I am mortified to have done this, because it breaches the most basic ethical rule: don’t do to others what you don’t want them to do to you. I apologise to the latter group unreservedly and totally.
 
Last edited:
There is a twitter account that tracks and posts edits made from IP addresses corresponding to the US Congress.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CongressEdits

The BBC has covered edits originating from the US Congressional IP addresses.
http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-28481876

a notable quote from the BBC article: "The biography of former US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld was revised, describing him as an "alien lizard who eats Mexican babies"." :eek:
 
Wikipedia is a valuable resource, as a starting point. But it is really a form of media like a modern newspaper, and there is editorial slant to be allowed for in virtually every article.

A long time ago, media like the Times and the Encyclopaedia Britannica tried to keep factual pieces and editorial separate - they probably never fully achieved that, but these days no-one seriously makes the attempt.
 
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 whoever is in discussion wasn't as bold as Patton, couldn't manoeuvre like Guderian or was clearly an anti-semite.
 
Last edited:
How's this for a dreadful article?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syed_Shahid_Hamid

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

'In recent months' - he died eleven years ago! More widely, the whole thing reads like a gossip column written by a drunk who keeps wandering off and losing his train of thought.

The chap founded the ISI in Pakistan and this is the dross we have to research him?

The reference doesn't even supply publication details for the books cited in the text.
 
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 can remember when some well-meaning but hare-brained soul at Wikipedia "corrected" the definition of Balkenkreuz to "Balkan Cross".
 
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 tried editing some articles on an area I know a fair bit about, British railway accidents, even quoting the original accident reports (which are mostly available on the Web). But just as you found, they get edited or removed by people publishing unsupported opinions, or opinions supported only in books they've written themselves!

I don't have the time to keep going back and reinstating factual stuff , so I only use it as a quick reference or a starting point.
 
The autism article won an award of some kind and was, afaik, generally well thought of even if you didn't agree with all of it. One person came along and edited to reflect his particular mind set. Now it's locked down, or was the last time I looked, and he's semi-stalking the people who removed his personal views, anecdotal evidence and screeds on how he has been made a victim all his life.

I know him IRL and all I can say is that having autism is no bar to being a complete idiot OR being a psychotic of some description.
 
I've revised some articles, including one regarding a country artist which happened to cross over into other genres. The article was only about the country genre and I added info about her crossover music. Of course there was a very dedicated registered editor who just deleted the information instead of just editing it to fit better in the article. This kind of thing pisses me off.
 
Here's the story of how a high-level Wikipedia administrator went off the deep end and generated thousands of internal links about 'titties', as well as the long-term effects resulting from this bizarre incident.
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. ...

FULL STORY: https://melmagazine.com/en-us/story/boobs-tits-wikipedia-titty-trial
 
A Bored Chinese Housewife Spent Years Falsifying Russian History on Wikipedia
Posing 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.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/pkgbwm/chinese-woman-fake-russian-history-wikipedia
 
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