Tuesday, Jan. 31, 2006 11:26 a.m. EST
Congressional Aides Tampering With Wikipedia
Congressional aides have been tampering with the biographies of elected officials on the encyclopedia Web site Wikipedia to such an extent that three times Wikipedia has blocked the entire House computer network from accessing the site.
Wikipedia bills itself as "the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit.” That editing has often taken the form of enhancing some bios and sabotaging others, the Washington, D.C., publication Roll Call reports on its "Heard on the Hill” column.
When the site’s operators find posted information that is scurrilous or wrong, they remove it. But Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales calls the more than 1,000 changes made by House staffers "vandalism.”
In one example of tampering, aides to Rep. Marty Meehan, D-Mass., removed references to the congressman’s broken term-limits pledge, according to Roll Call.
A story in a local newspaper prompted Meehan to write an editorial blaming an intern in his office for "updating his biography.”
In other cases there has been no way to know for certain who did the tampering, since Wikipedia can trace changes only to the House Internet protocol address, not to any specific House office.
So Wikipedia simply lists the vandalism offenses in one section of the site.
In the case of Rep. Richard Pombo, R-Calif., someone removed references in his bio "to possible ties to Jack Abramoff and many other ... politically damaging items.”
The vandal who tampered with the bio of Rep. Sam Johnson, R-Texas, is accused of "removing unflattering quotes.”
Those quotes were about him wanting to "nuke” Syria, according to Roll Call.
Wales said the good thing about this "bipartisan scandal” is that "we get some press attention and they look like idiots.”
That sucks. It was only a month ago that I read a story about how wikipedia is/was as accurate as Encylopedia Britannica.
dick_grayson
02-01-06, 11:11 PM
newsmax!
:banana:
Nazgul
02-01-06, 11:29 PM
It was only a month ago that I read a story about how wikipedia is/was as accurate as Encylopedia Britannica.
Really?
Bill Needle
02-01-06, 11:31 PM
I liked this Wikipedia story:
NASHVILLE, Tenn. - A man who posted false information on an online encyclopedia linking a prominent journalist to the Kennedy assassinations says he was playing a trick on a co-worker.
Brian Chase, 38, ended up resigning from his job and apologizing to John Seigenthaler Sr., the former publisher of the Tennessean newspaper and founding editorial director of USA Today.
"I knew from the news that Mr. Seigenthaler was looking for who did it, and I did it, so I needed to let him know in particular that it wasn't anyone out to get him, that it was done as a joke that went horribly, horribly wrong," Chase was quoted as saying in Sunday editions of The Tennessean.
Chase said he didn't know the free Internet encyclopedia called Wikipedia was used as a serious reference tool.
The biography he posted, which has since been replaced, falsely stated that Seigenthaler was linked to the Kennedy assassinations and had lived in the Soviet Union from 1971 to 1984.
The entry motivated Seigenthaler to write an op-ed piece for USA Today blasting Wikipedia's credibility. He described himself as a close friend of Robert Kennedy and said he had worked with President Kennedy. He said "the most painful thing was to have them suggest that I was suspected of their assassination."
Seigenthaler said he doesn't plan to pursue legal action against Chase.
By Daniel Terdiman
http://news.com.com/Study+Wikipedia+as+accurate+as+Britannica/2100-1038_3-5997332.html
Story last modified Thu Dec 15 15:35:00 PST 2005
Wikipedia is about as good a source of accurate information as Britannica, the venerable standard-bearer of facts about the world around us, according to a study published this week in the journal Nature.
Over the last couple of weeks, Wikipedia, the free, open-access encyclopedia, has taken a great deal of flak in the press for problems related to the credibility of its authors and its general accountability.
In particular, Wikipedia has taken hits for its inclusion, for four months, of an anonymously written article linking former journalist John Seigenthaler to the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and John F. Kennedy. At the same time, the blogosphere was buzzing for several days about podcasting pioneer Adam Curry's being accused of anonymously deleting references to others' seminal work on the technology.
In response to situations like these and others in its history, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales has always maintained that the service and its community are built around a self-policing and self-cleaning nature that is supposed to ensure its articles are accurate.
Still, many critics have tried to downplay its role as a source of valid information and have often pointed to the Encyclopedia Britannica as an example of an accurate reference.
For its study, Nature chose articles from both sites in a wide range of topics and sent them to what it called "relevant" field experts for peer review. The experts then compared the competing articles--one from each site on a given topic--side by side, but were not told which article came from which site. Nature got back 42 usable reviews from its field of experts.
In the end, the journal found just eight serious errors, such as general misunderstandings of vital concepts, in the articles. Of those, four came from each site. They did, however, discover a series of factual errors, omissions or misleading statements. All told, Wikipedia had 162 such problems, while Britannica had 123.
That averages out to 2.92 mistakes per article for Britannica and 3.86 for Wikipedia.
"An expert-led investigation carried out by Nature--the first to use peer review to compare Wikipedia and Britannica's coverage of science," the journal wrote, "suggests that such high-profile examples (like the Seigenthaler and Curry situations) are the exception rather than the rule."
And to Wales, while Britannica came out looking a little bit more accurate than Wikipedia, the Nature study was validation of his service's fundamental structure.
"I was very pleased, just to see that (the study) was reasonably favorable," Wales told CNET News.com. "I think it provides, for us, a great counterpoint to the press coverage we've gotten recently, because it puts the focus on the broader quality and not just one article."
He also acknowledged that the error rate for each encyclopedia was not insignificant, and added that he thinks such numbers demonstrate that broad review of encyclopedia articles is needed.
He also said that the results belie the notion that Britannica is infallible.
"I have very great respect for Britannica," Wales said. But "I think there is a general view among a lot of people that it has no errors, like, 'I read it in Britannica, it must be true.' It's good that people see that there are a lot of errors everywhere."
To Britannica officials, however, the Nature results showed that Wikipedia still has a way to go.
"The (Nature) article is saying that Wikipedia has a third more errors" than Britannica, said Jorge Cauz, president of Encyclopedia Britannica.
But Cauz and editor in chief Dale Hoiberg also said they were concerned that Nature had not specified the problems that it had found in Britannica.
"We've asked them a number of questions about the process they used," Hoiberg said. "They said in (their article) that the inaccuracies included errors, omissions and misleading statements. But there's no indication of how many of each. So we're very eager to look at that and explore it because we take it very seriously."
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