 [images
added by this website] I
recognized the page at once... my biography in
the English-language edition of Wikipedia, the
online encyclopedia which anyone in the world
can modify at any time.
Monday, July 9, 2007
Cleansing
the Wikipedia swamp: more horror-stories from the
online-encyclopedia world Our increasing
reliance on Wikipedia changes the pursuit of
knowledge by Paul Jay, CBC News Online TURKISH historian Taner
Akcam arrived at Montreal's Pierre Elliott
Trudeau International Airport on Feb. 16, 2007,
expecting to be picked up by a colleague en route
to a lecture he was to give later that day.
Instead, he says, he was detained at the border for
more than three hours. For visitors to be temporarily detained at the
border is not in itself unusual but, Akcam told CBC
News, the evidence the security officers showed him
when he asked why they had detained him was: a page
containing a tampered Wikipedia entry from
December.  "I
recognized the page at once," Akcam would later
write on the website of the University of
Minnesota, where he is a visiting professor. "The
still photo and the text beneath it comprised my
biography in the English-language edition of
Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia which anyone in
the world can modify at any time. For the last year
-- most recently on Christmas Eve, 2006 -- my
Wikipedia biography had been persistently
vandalized by anonymous 'contributors' intent on
labelling me as a terrorist." [Full story
continues: A
question of authority | mirrored
here
Posted Jul 8, 2007 10:16
AM PST Category: COMPUTERS/SECURITY Long-time readers will recall how my entry at
Wikipedia contained numerous errors which I kept
correcting, and which kept getting reset back to
the incorrect versions, until Wikipedia simply
deleted my entry entirely. The last time the flawed
information was reinserted, the ability to edit
from outside Wikipedia was turned off, proving that
the bad information came from within Wikipedia
itself. 
To
all those concerned with historical
accuracy, a reader asks: What is the staff
of Wikipedia up to?
January
2006: Harassing
someone while hiding behind a screen name
is now a criminal
offense:
see panel at right
Wikipedia's
hive mind
John
Seigenthaler: A false Wikipedia
'biography'
|
mirrored
here |  The
brains behind Wikipedia
Jimmy Wales, born Aug 7, 1966:
guru/dictator; co-founder/administrator;
trustee of Wikimedia Foundation; lives
St.Petersburg, Florida, USA  Danny
Wool, born Sept 7, 1963 administrator;
resigned as Wales's executive assistant
Mar 20, 2007; lives St.Petersburg,
Florida, USA formerly lived in Brooklyn,
where he worked for the Museum of Jewish
Heritage in New York
| 
Tom
H.
comments, Sunday, July 8, 2007: "I have
tried on repeated occasions to remove the
loaded adjectives from the David Irving
page of Wikipedia. Those changes, too,
have been reversed and blocked several
times. The person in charge of the page
seems to be Jewish. The mediator seems to
be Jewish. It is unlikely that your page
will ever approximate neutrality! What
amazes me is the speed with which the
neutral language is reversed. It is as if
these folks have nothing to do all day but
monitor and manage the Wikipedia page.
Since I do not have to "get a life" yet, I
have given up. It is cowardly, I know, but
I just do not have the time to battle
their continuous hostility toward the
"facts."
Jorge
Marra,m
Jr adds
on Monday, July 9, 2007: "I had the same
problem with Wikipedia, I corrected some
information about the "fake" writer Paulo
Coelho, like: "His books have a lot of
grammatical errors, he was a user of
drugs, he had homosexual relationships and
he participated in a sect that adored the
devil. I live in Rio de Janeiro and a lot
of people know the real truth about him,
but Wikipedia does not want
publish." | January
2006: Harassing someone while hiding
behind a screen name is a criminal
offense A NEW federal law was signed on January
5, 2006 by President Bush. Section 113 of
the "Violence Against Women and
Department of Justice Reauthorization
Act" states that when you harass
someone on the Internet, you must disclose
your identity. Here's the relevant
language "Whoever
... utilizes any device or software that
can be used to originate
telecommunications or other types of
communications that are transmitted, in
whole or in part, by the Internet ...
without disclosing his identity and with
intent to annoy, abuse, threaten, or
harass any person ... who receives the
communications ... shall be fined under
title 18 or imprisoned not more than two
years, or both." The law is correct to target abusive
Internet behavior that hides behind
anonymity. Wikipedia's procedures should
be overhauled in light of this new law.
Every screen-name signature should always
show the originating IP address next to it
on Wikipedia, and those who open accounts
should provide a verified email address.
This is a minimum requirement for
Wikipedia if it ever hopes to restore its
good name. |
 We
invite our Readers' comments on the topic of
Wikipedia bias and errors 
|
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Irving