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The Battle Over Candidates' Wikipedia Entries

Posted by timothy on Wed Nov 10, 2004 05:52 PM
from the every-american-deserves-free-candy dept.
Democrats Government Media Republicans The Internet Politics
MrByte420 writes "The New York Times today has a story (stupid reg required) about the particpants of Wikipedia editing Bush and Kerry's entries in the days leading up to the U.S. Elections. With admins locked in philosophical debate over whether to lock the page down, others asked, "Could someone get rid of the middle-finger screen cap that's replaced the image above 'The Bush family watches tee-ball on the White House lawn'?""
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  • Politics secion? (Score:3, Funny)

    by Spudley (171066) on Wednesday November 10 2004, @05:54PM (#10781957) Homepage Journal
    This shouldn't be in the politics section; it should be in the "Laugh. It's Ironic" section.

    • Wikipedia has a problem with the truth in hotly debated issues; the article's opinion mostly has to do with the endurance of one side being more than the other.

      The global warming article is one example; while it's a very slow "edit war", you can't put the truth in the article and expect it to stay. Wikipedia is based on consensus, not truth.

      When a complicated scientific issue is raised, like fluoridation, the US's "scientific view" is mistaken for the scientific view of the world; wikipedia is american-li
  • http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prescott_Bush [wikipedia.org]

    Without Wiki, most people would never know that President Bush's grandfather was the chairman of the United Negro College Fund.

  • John Kerry's grandfather made a fortune in opium (Score:3, Interesting)

    by ugmoe (776194) on Wednesday November 10 2004, @06:21PM (#10782206)
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Kerry#Family_bac kground [wikipedia.org]

    Without wiki, no one would know that John Kerry's grandfather made a fortune in the opium trade.

    "John Kerry's maternal grandfather, James Grant Forbes, was born in Shanghai, China, where the Forbes family of China and Boston accumulated a fortune in the opium and China trade. "

  • Term limit repeal? (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    The article mentions a comment someone made, saying,
    "I envisage no obstacle to a constitutional amendment removing presidential term limits and President George W. Bush being re-elected again. And again and again. Then another amendment allowing foreigners to take the top job. And we'll be ready for Arnie."

    Well, I must say... if this amendment does take form, that Clinton will be ready to run the President into the ground.
    • Hard run for Clinton- last time he didn't have to deal with easily hacked diebold machines.

      • Re:Term limit repeal? (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward
        The last time he ran his party hadn't been taken over by rabic lunatics and conspiracy theorists that are cross-eyed with hate, either.

    • Well, I must say... if this amendment does take form, that Clinton will be ready to run the President into the ground.

      Only problem with that is I see more then a few obstacles to that amendment. Let me list them for you:

      • California
      • New York
      • Oregon
      • Washington
      • Michigan
      • Wisconsin
      • Illinois
      • Minnesota
      • Pennsylvania
      • Maryland
      • Delaware
      • New Jersey
      • Connecticut
      • Rhode Island
      • Massachusetts
      • Vermont
      • New Hampshire
      • Maine

      Gee I'm sorry. I guess that's more then the 12 states needed to shoot down an amendment. Do you se

        • If he were all style and no substance he wouldn't be accomplishing anything in California. As it turns out, he is accomplishing a great deal more than career politician Gray Davis ever did.

          Republican governors in Democratic states are excellent candidates because they are moderates who can appeal to the "blue states". Since Cheney will be lucky if he's even still alive in another 4 years, I think the Republicans would be hard pressed to find a candidate with more appeal than Arnold.

    • from here [safesearching.com]

      Let the two men America really wants to see run for president, run for president. Now, last week, our old buddy, Dana Rohrabacher, introduced a Constitutional amendment suggesting immigrants like, oh, I don't know, Arnold Schwarzenegger be allowed to run for president. And I say, "Fine. But then we get Clinton !" Each tribe gets its greatest warrior.

      Why aren't we doing that anyway? Where is the twisted logic to the 22 nd Amendment which says you can't be president if you've done it twice? Reese

  • What can be done re: biases (Score:4, Insightful)

    by DaveJay (133437) on Wednesday November 10 2004, @06:33PM (#10782315)
    I know it seems hard to keep biases, especially subtle ones, out of the wikipedia entries, but it can and does get done -- I once wrote a section on dog adoptions that had an admittedly biased section on puppy mills, and within a day someone had rewritten it to present more than one side of the story. They did a terrific job with it, too.

    The problem here is that wikipedia, and wikis in general, assume that the users all want the information to be as accurate as possible, and that any biases expressed or implied are unintentional, and therefore will be corrected over time.

    Trouble is, with some topics, that's just not a correct assumption. Perhaps what is needed is the ability for any user to flag a given entry as "needing temporary editorial control", which automatically locks it to changes for 24 hours and summons a moderator who can either release the lock immediately, leave it be to expire naturally, or extend the lock for a fixed period of time.

    Presumably there might be edits to make while the lock is in place, to restore or correct edited content, but only the moderator could make the fix.

    Perhaps this might provide the balance necessary to maintain the basic premise of the wikipedia, without it collapsing under the weight of unusually strong biases. Or perhaps not. Hard to say until it's tried.
    • The problem here is that wikipedia, and wikis in general, assume that the users all want the information to be as accurate as possible, and that any biases expressed or implied are unintentional, and therefore will be corrected over time.

      I agree that that is one problem, but that's not the only problem. People also have honest disagreements as to what is "accurate" or "unbiased".

      It can be a bit complicated:

      • Sometimes there are two very different points of view on a subject, and both of them are intellig

  • Unfortunately common (Score:5, Informative)

    by Pan T. Hose (707794) on Wednesday November 10 2004, @06:41PM (#10782385) Homepage Journal

    The so called "edit wars [wikipedia.org]" which include both the "revert wars" and less common "deletion wars [wikipedia.org]" are unfortunately quite common on Wikipædia. Please see the lamest edit wars ever [wikipedia.org]:

    Cauliflower [wikipedia.org]
    Is cauliflower nutritious? Is specifying what parts are usable POV [wikipedia.org]?
    List of numbers that are always odd
    the number 3 was being considered as possibly being not odd. Page protection was needed to halt the heated debate. User:Wik [wikipedia.org]'s correction of a misspelling of hypochondriacs was re-reverted no less than 3 times. Supposedly as a means to illustrate the ludicrousness of the subject, various examples such as "the atomic numbers of gold and silver, but not their sum" and "the number of days in a year (except leap years)" were added to the list. Later in the edit war, no less than two thousand five hundred numbers of debated oddness (every second integer from 1 to 4999) were added and removed, four hundred ninety eight of them repeatedly before the edit war was solved by the article's deletion after a VfD [wikipedia.org] vote.
    Wikipedia:Yet more bad jokes and other deleted nonsense#Edit conflicts [wikipedia.org]
    the edit war on the Wikipedia:Edit conflicts [wikipedia.org] page, preserved in Yet More Bad Jokes and Other Deleted Nonsense.
    Gdan [wikipedia.org] zig [wikipedia.org]
    edit wars have been occuring for most of a year as regards the exact name of this Polish German Prussian Eastern Central Northern European Baltic Baltijas city.
    Wikipedia:Requests for de-adminship [wikipedia.org]
    Wik's nominations of 9 Wikipedia:Wikicops [wikipedia.org] were moved; the wikicops page itself got in a move war about a week later and ended back at Wikipedia:Administrators [wikipedia.org].
    Sarah Edmonds [wikipedia.org]
    Wik makes a correction, giving her middle name and month of birth. This gets lost through an edit conflict, and Danny and Alexandros add a paragraph worth of content. Wik reverts. Danny reverts. Etcetera. The only objection either had with the other's edits was that it reverted their own.
    Richard Neustadt [wikipedia.org]
    Two months of edit war on whether the page should say "[[Harry S. Truman|President Truman]]" or "President [[Harry S. Truman]]" (plus the same with several other presidents).
    Wikipedia:Lamest edit wars ever [wikipedia.org]
    edit war over what edit wars should be on this page. - see Recursion [wikipedia.org] (http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Wikipe dia:Lamest_edit_wars_ever); see also tail recursion [wikipedia.org].
    Suncrest, Washington [wikipedia.org]
    Constant reversion of Mark Richards's [wikipedia.org] "vandalism" by original creator who seemed to think it was his page. See page history and

  • I did this (Score:3, Interesting)

    by justanyone (308934) on Wednesday November 10 2004, @08:14PM (#10783171) Homepage Journal
    I spent a couple hours over a couple of days monitoring and fixing the Kerry entry. I got tired of the vandalism and let someone else take over, but it could have been a part-time job. That was in May 2004, so i can imagine the vandalism happening later was much more fast and furious.

    I called the Chicago Kerry campaign HQ to alert them of the need for someone to do this, but the luddite answering the phone was unimpressed with the need to do this work. Alas.

    --Kevin
  • So that one paragraph about how Dick Cheney turns into the Hulk when he gets angry was just childish vandalism?! Hmph!

  • Dare to Be Stupid (Score:3, Funny)

    by WindFish (812433) on Thursday November 11 2004, @12:17AM (#10784786)
    What about the great injustice [onion.com] over the Wikipedia "Weird Al" Yankovic entry?

  • Kind of pointless to debate this stuff. (Score:3, Funny)

    by flyingsquid (813711) on Thursday November 11 2004, @03:35AM (#10785593)
    The only thing about a Bush victory I can think of to say is

    ...it's just Chinatown, Jake.

  • I have to admit that given recent articles on slashdot I looked at a wikipedia and ruled it out as a valid replacement for a real encyclopedias by looking at the entries for the candidates and former presidents. It's bad enough that intellectuals and idealists rewrite history as a regular slow process. I just seems it can happen a lot faster and wildly on wikipedia. Activists must love it.

    • Re:wikis are crap (Score:5, Insightful)

      by FlipmodePlaya (719010) on Wednesday November 10 2004, @06:23PM (#10782226) Journal
      Troll or not, the parent raises a good point. Anyone can, and is encouraged to, write articles for Wikipedia. They are able to filter out obvious fake information (perhaps someone writing an article about cheese under the title 'Modern Transportation) through peer editing rather well, but subtle biases are easily ignored or even accepted. Fortunately for them, the competition is no better. Intentional or not, even the best commercial encyclopedias let some false information slip through. It's an unfortunate consequence of the media.

      Or, at least that's my reasoning for keeping off that Brittanica set ...
      • Heck- commercial encyclopedias often PLANT false information on purpose. It's an ages old copyright protection technique in case they have to go to court over it. "So, young Johnny, you say that Angorra really does have a 0% unemployment rate? Oh, well it looks like you plagerized the CIA World Book for your school paper", that sort of thing.
        • This thread reminded me of this [techdirt.com]
        • The CIA World Factbook is a work of the U.S. government and therefore in the public domain. So there's most likely no false information in inserted for that reason.
          • It does have incorrect (or at least poorly updated) information. Water Island is not listed as one of the distinct units of the US Virgin Islands, something that officially occurred at the beginning of the year.

            It's surprising how hard it is to get them to update that thing.

            --
            Evan

        • Well, um, maybe if that was like a college thesis or something you could make that example, but the fact that young Johnny's essay contains a piece of information (false or not) from a book doesn't mean that he plagiarised it. :/

          I guess you could make a better example if you said that like World Book ripped off Britannica's article on Angorra, but even then it's doubtful. Even without that 'planted' information you would be able to tell they ripped it off.

          • World Book Encyclopedia is one that I know about that does this- it's well known by most teachers as well (or used to be, anyway, before the web) because it's in every library and it's easy to catch kids plagerizing this way. Usually it's in out of the way entries- like in my example pulled at random from a non-commercial one. Who the hell cares what the unemployment rate of Angorra is anyway?

    • Re:wikis are crap (Score:2, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      this is definitive proof of why wikis are crap. people disagree - sometimes they REALLY disagree. wikis are therefore crap.

      I disagree-- oh, wait a minute...

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