Who’s defacing Wikipedia? (updated)
There’s a new service around, that’s going to cause some red faces. Built by Virgil Griffith, it’s called the WikiScanner. It tracks user edits to the online “encyclopedia” to the organisation or location where they originate.
For one, Diebold seems to be burnishing its image. At least, so it appears. A whole section about the criticisms on its voting machines disappeared because of an anonymous editor (Wikipedia permits anonymous edits?!) whose location has been traced to the organisation.
But they’re not the only culprits. There are more worrying (and spectacularly puerile) defacements that originate, among others, at the New York Times. Guess what? They don’t like Bush much over there, and don’t mind a little crudeness in describing Condoleezza Rice, either.
One can understand why companies and individuals might want to change what Wikipedia says about them. But why would an apparent journalist deface entries about others?
Update: Yup, it caused red faces, all right. The BBC ran a report hammering, amongst others, the CIA for its Wikipedia edits on the Iranian president. It should have thought to check, before someone else — the Biased BBC blog, no less — discovered that BBC staff had edited the entry on the American president. Granted, they changed only one letter, but it was a fairly important letter in his middle name, ‘Walker’. Tony Blair was a victim of immature insults too. Proving that it doesn’t buy this “do unto others” nonsense, a note about a BBC Trust report, which found ‘trendy left-wing bias’, was also whitewashed by a BBC staffer.
My personal favourites are edits by the Muslim Brotherhood-inspired media group Al-Jazeera…
They may not be journalists at all. They may be any of a (probably) huge number of non-journalists working over there.
Anyway, I’m sure that journalists have their own opinions and obviously aren’t more ethical than the rest of us about getting them across.
I did qualify the term “journalist”. Some tracing, both by Kevin at Wizbang, and by a commenter at Dan Riehl’s blog point to a journalist as possible suspect, however.
Journalists are entirely entitled to their opinions, of course. It’s bad enough that so many seem happy to insinuate them into news reports. Wikipedia defacements strike me as beyond the pale. Those working at the self-described “paper of record” should know this better than most. Even if they’re not journalists themselves.
I completely agree (as I said) that they’re not acting ethically. In fact, I think it’s disgusting, no matter who does it. But I don’t think it’s MORE disgusting when someone does it anonymously while happening to get a paycheck from the NYT.
Journalists have a responsibility when they’re acting as journalists. When they’re acting anonymously, then I think there’s a different standard. To the degree that they’re supposed to be responsible members of society (as opposed to high school kids), I think they’re worse when they behave badly. But no more than that.
I accept that you may disagree!
Actually, you’re quite right. The private views of journalists are their own business.
That said, this did happen on New York Times computers. It rankles that someone there is expressing their simplistic partisanship on their employer’s time, when political bias is exactly what the New York Times claims to stand above.
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Government employees meddling with Wikipedia…
Shortly after a new tool was unveiled which allows people to track who has been editing Wikipedia entries, reports have surfaced about how at least one Statistics SA employee edited entries on Wikipedia including an entry on HIV/AIDS in South Africa. …