US Congress staff sabotage Wikipedia

Tuesday January 31, 2006 18:21

by R. Isible

Paid trolls at work

Employees of members of the US Congress have been revealed to have been engaging in unethical behaviour on the collaborative online encylopedia "Wikipedia".

Wikipedia [1] is a Free online encylopedia whose content is generated by its users. As anyone can create, edit and modify an article it is inevitable that there are conflicts and disagreements on some controversial topics. Sometimes a cycle of destructive editing and counter editing takes place (known as a "revert war"), even though there are ways for the concerned parties to discuss the content and reach a resolution.

It has been revealed that thousands of entries mostly relating to inconvenient and/or embarassing details of elected representatives have been purged by people with IP addresses that have been traced back to people in the employ of members of the House of Representatives.

Wikipedia is dealing [2] with the situation and the exposure of this behaviour is a further embarassment to the guilty parties. It's instructive in showing how far the "people's representatives" will go in trying to maintain control of information -- and don't believe it's just limited to the USA.

1. http://en.wikipedia.org
2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_comment/United_States_Congress

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Comments (1 of 1)

its not so surprising

by @

Tue Jan 31, 2006 20:55

I remember once a now lapsed contributor (as in his/her pseudonym no longer appears here), who professed to be a "state employee", on a lengthy thread on indymedia ireland decided to attack wikipedia, declaring "well anyone can change those entries" ( on the gardaí and imc ireland )
S/He spent a day trying to edit the page on "indymedia ireland" which makes reference to the garda attack on the rts! event in Dublin in 2002. S/he repeatedly changed one sentance, in the process giving the wikipedia crew his/her isp address, something which is generally not available to the indymedia crew. So as "one of" those three "institutions", wikip. imc and rts, I took note and began to make a list of subjects on wikipedia which were or are "protected" disallowing edits, and of course since then the contributor requirements have changed.
A year ago it was possible to write indymedia documents (the ones which appear with approval by the editorial collectives on the feature or other sections of the national sites) using a "guest name" as too it was possible to contribute to wikipedia as a "guest". That helped those who wished their contribution to remain anonymous... to remain so. This is where translations and other things appear. Here's the link if you've never been there- http://docs.indymedia.org/
In the last months the most interesting "protected" articles which have appeared (for me) on wikipedia were -
Eamon De Valera (but not Franco) (35 years since both died) and Canada. the whole country. excluding Quebec (naturally).

Oh well when they throw so many spanners in your works, you must be getting up their noses. But at end this illustrates how a certain powerful and established "generation" really never understood the internet. Just as in Europe we are "led" by a sector of the population who are surprisingly sedentary and "non-European", we are led in "technological government" by people who don't understand the cyber world. They were only interested in increasing profits, sales or advertising not in what the tool could do to benefit human-kind. They approached it as type of "telly" or worse a type of "advert".
And that insecurity and inability to see the true potential of the internet and cybernetic age and the "open source movement" in all its forms shows them up for the hapless mediocrities they are as well as being of a "generation which is now historic and ought trundle off".
& we don't just speak of "state employees playing at Winston Smith" we also talk of commercial newspapers who to prop up their flagging profits give you free advertising rags in the morning.

Sure anyone can write a TV listings or Newspaper column or Encyclopedia. (¿can't they?) So why buy their shite anymore?

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US Congress staff sabotage Wikipedia

Comments (1 of 1)