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3/29/2014
Yet more Wikipedia errors: "How Wikipedia's sloppy facts obscured reality in Apple vs. Samsung trial"
As anyone should know, topics of controversy invite all sorts of misleading claims to be posted on Wikipedia (also here). Apple Computer is apparently not immune from this treatment. From AppleInsider:
But as is the case whenever the free online encyclopedia ventures into a subject involving any sort of controversy, the side Wikipedia presents is the side of whoever has lots of free time and resources to devote to telling one.
A series of legal arguments and patent claims between Apple and Samsung that Wikipedia could have reported in factual depth is instead substituted with a slanted narrative flattering Samsung, a company that has, in its third year of legal wrangling with Apple, so far lost major infringement cases while winning no real significant legal recognition of any of its own patent infringement claims in any jurisdiction. . . . .
With a little searching, however, I found quite a detailed account on another web page. I do not know if it is accurate, although my guess on internal evidence is that it probably is. If so, it sounds as though their beliefs deviate from Islamic orthodoxy as much as Muslim beliefs deviate from Christianity and probably more than Muslim beliefs deviate from Judaism. They apparently believe that Ali was some sort of incarnation of God, reject the Koran, and believe in reincarnation for males but not females.
Which makes me wonder whether the absence of information in the Wikipedia page reflects a successful attempt to defend the identification of Alawites as Shia in support of Assad's alliance with (twelver Shia) Iran. . . .
At the very least, it is additional evidence that one should be very careful before trusting anything on Wikipedia.
Scientists analysed page edits in 10 editions to find topics fought over by contributors to the open encyclopaedia. . . .
Researchers from the University of Oxford and three other institutions analysed logs of the changes made to Wikipedia pages to identify those in the throes of an "edit war". Such a conflict involves editors of pages making changes that are almost instantly undone by another editor. . . .
For five years Wikipedia had posting about nonexistent war
An article that is among the "top 10" Wikipedia hoaxes.
An article about an obscure 17th Century war in India has been deleted from Wikipedia — after an enterprising editor discovered that despite being on the site for 5 years, it had never actually occurred. Started in 2007, the Bicholim Conflict article described a "period of armed conflict between the Portuguese rulers of Goa and the Maratha Empire" that ended in a peace treaty, as well as its effect on later regional politics and popular culture. When Wikipedia user ShelfSkewed looked for the sources cited, however, he found that they either didn't exist or made no mention of the conflict. "An online search for 'Bicholim conflict' or for many of the article's purported sources," likewise, produced "only results that can be traced back to the article itself." The Bicholim Conflict isn't the longest-running Wikipedia hoax, as The Daily Dot notes, but it still makes the top ten list. . . .
Yet more Wikipedia Problems, Doctored information put up for pay
It is nice to know that some people are able to get their wikipedia entries "fixed," that is for a fee. Was this a charge ever made against the Encyclopedia Britannica From Fox News:
Roger Bamkin is a trustee for the the Wikimedia Foundation UK, the group behind the open-source encyclopedia. He is also a paid consultant, according to a CNET report, and has reportedly been using his position within Wikipedia to forward the cause of his clients.
The country of Gibraltar, which Bamkin has been representing, was featured in Wikipedia’s coveted “Did You Know” main page section seventeen times in August. Most other entries appear just once (with the exception of the Olympics), giving Gibraltar access to an enviable hundred million page views per month -- and really annoying some of the site's editors. . . .
Wales admitted he didn’t know all the details of the case, but concluded that if the facts were true, Bamkin should resign from his post or sever ties with his client. . . .
Wikipedia won't let Novelist Philip Roth correct error in post about his book
This is not surprising. Wikipedia is a cesspool that collects the worst things that are written on someone or something, and many times the errors are impossible to correct. From Fox News:
Pulitzer Prize-winning author Philip Roth penned the book “The Human Stain” about a college professor deemed a racist for an innocent comment he made in class one day, despite the character's secret, African-American heritage. The Wikipedia entry for the book incorrectly noted that it was inspired by the life of writer Anatole Broyard.
But when Roth petitioned to have the mistake corrected, he was told he could not. Roth, the work’s author, wasn’t a reliable enough source.
“When, through an official interlocutor, I recently petitioned Wikipedia to delete this misstatement, along with two others, my interlocutor was told by the ‘English Wikipedia Administrator’ … that I, Roth, was not a credible source,” the literary lion wrote in an essay “An Open Letter to Wikipedia” in The New Yorker. . . .
A woman opens an old steamer trunk and discovers tantalizing clues that a long-dead relative may actually have been a serial killer, stalking the streets of New York in the closing years of the nineteenth century. A beer enthusiast is presented by his neighbor with the original recipe for Brown's Ale, salvaged decades before from the wreckage of the old brewery--the very building where the Star-Spangled Banner was sewn in 1813. A student buys a sandwich called the Last American Pirate and unearths the long-forgotten tale of Edward Owens, who terrorized the Chesapeake Bay in the 1870s.
These stories have two things in common. They are all tailor-made for viral success on the internet. And they are all lies.
Each tale was carefully fabricated by undergraduates at George Mason University who were enrolled in T. Mills Kelly's course, Lying About the Past. Their escapades not only went unpunished, they were actually encouraged by their professor. . . .
A Wikipedia page exploring the historical significance of the word “Forward” as a socialist rallying cry has made it the subject of dueling snarks from assorted would-be Wiki editors and vandals. Within hours of the Obama campaign’s slogan unveiling, the online page had its first edit since November 2011. ”Forward is the official slogan of the Barack Obama presidential campaign, 2012,” the simple entry read. But nothing in Wiki-land is simple, especially when the name “Barack Obama” is sandwiched between references to “Avante!, organ of the Portuguese Communist Party” and “Voorwaarts!, organ of the Communist Youth Movement (Netherlands).” Apples and oranges, a persnickety editor claimed around 1 a.m. Tuesday: “The Obama campaign is not a publication, socialist or otherwise.” And with the click of a mouse, the Obama connection disappeared — for nearly 14 hours, at least. . . . The next edit seemed earnest enough. . . . . Within four minutes, that, too, was gone. “Obama’s campaign slogan,” another editor sniped, “is irrelevant to an entry on Forward as a generic name for socialist publications.” . . .
Influential sections of the Israeli-right and Palestinians are set to clash in the virtual world of Wikipedia, the internet-based free encyclopaedia which depends on contributions by its readers.
Abed A-Nassar, chairman of the Association of Palestinian Journalists, has called on Palestinian institutions to prepare for the conflict, the Israeli daily Haaretz reported.
Mr. Nassar's call for a "public relations war" follows a report in the newspaper that Israeli settlers had organised a class to train supporters to register and edit Wikipedia pages, so that the "Zionist" viewpoint could be better projected in cyberspace.
The course had been launched in order to sway domestic and international public opinion in favour of the organisers by encouraging Wikipedia contributions in Hebrew and English.
"The idea is not to make Wikipedia rightist but for it to include our point of view," Naftali Bennett, the director of the Yesha Council of Settlements, was quoted as saying.
In 2008, Mr. Bennet had resigned as the chief of staff of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
"The Internet is not managed well enough, and Israel's position there is appalling. Take for example the Turkish flotilla [to Gaza]. During the first hours we were nowhere to be found. In those first hours millions of people typed the words Gaza-bound flotilla and read what was written on Wikipedia,"
Mr. Bennet observed. The Yesha Council has announced a prize for the "best Zionist editor", a person who would generate the most "Zionist" changes in Wikipedia over the next four years. The winner would receive a hot-air balloon ride over Israel, Haaretz said. . . .
Looks like the folks at Wikipedia were prepared for the worst when it came to Rush Limbaugh. Actually they were a little too well prepared.
Shortly after the news broke that the conservative political radio talk show host was hospitalized, Wikipedia updated his page – and pronounced him dead. . . .
Canada's Financial Post tries to correct a tiny fraction of the inaccuracies introduced at Wikipedia.
How Wikipedia’s green doctor rewrote 5,428 climate articles By Lawrence Solomon
The Climategate Emails describe how a small band of climatologists cooked the books to make the last century seem dangerously warm.
The emails also describe how the band plotted to rewrite history as well as science, particularly by eliminating the Medieval Warm Period, a 400 year period that began around 1000 AD.
The Climategate Emails reveal something else, too: the enlistment of the most widely read source of information in the world — Wikipedia — in the wholesale rewriting of this history.
The Medieval Warm Period, which followed the meanness and cold of the Dark Ages, was a great time in human history — it allowed humans around the world to bask in a glorious warmth that vastly improved agriculture, increased life spans and otherwise bettered the human condition.
But the Medieval Warm Period was not so great for some humans in our own time — the same small band that believes the planet has now entered an unprecedented and dangerous warm period. As we now know from the Climategate Emails, this band saw the Medieval Warm Period as an enormous obstacle in their mission of spreading the word about global warming. If temperatures were warmer 1,000 years ago than today, the Climategate Emails explain in detail, their message that we now live in the warmest of all possible times would be undermined. As put by one band member, a Briton named Folland at the Hadley Centre, a Medieval Warm Period “dilutes the message rather significantly.”
Even before the Climategate Emails came to light, the problem posed by the Medieval Warm Period to this band was known. “We have to get rid of the Medieval Warm Period” read a pre-Climategate email, circa 1995, as attested to at hearings of the U.S. Senate Committee on Environment & Public Works. But the Climategate transcripts were more extensive and more illuminating — they provided an unvarnished look at the struggles that the climate practitioners underwent before settling on their scientific dogma. . . .
Beware of using Wikipedia, CNN and MSNBC should be sorry they used it
At about 1:20 into the clip CNN's Rick Sanchez falsely claims that Rush Limbaugh said: "Slavery built the South. I'm not saying we should bring it back; I'm just saying it had its merits. For one thing, the streets were safer after dark." Of course, CNN uses a picture of Rush at what must have been his highest weight level ever, assuming that the picture wasn't also doctored.
MADDOW: When you get called racist by the guy who says the assassin of Martin Luther King, Jr. should get the Medal of Honor, consider yourself honored. Also, nauseated.
The above clip from MSNBC contains such statements as:
Rush Limbaugh is an unreconstructed racist. They don't want an owner who has said that slavery was a good thing because it made the streets safer.
[Limbaugh's] open publicly stated contempt for people with dark skin.
The media's source for these quotes? Wikipedia. The original posting has been corrected, but James Taranto has pointed to this site which recorded them.
African Americans
I mean, let’s face it, we didn’t have slavery in this country for over 100 years because it was a bad thing. Quite the opposite: slavery built the South. I’m not saying we should bring it back; I’m just saying it had its merits. For one thing, the streets were safer after dark.[3/14/03]
Now this just blows me away
Was there any excrement, any shamelessness in any form, above all in cultural life, in which at least one African-American would not have been involved? As soon as one even carefully cut into such an abscess, one found, like maggots in a decaying body, often blinded by the sudden light, an African-American. [2/21/03]
James Earl Ray is the man who killed Martin Luther King Jr.
You know who deserves a posthumous Medal of Honor? James Earl Ray. We miss you, James. Godspeed. [4/23/98]
Arabs
As I said yesterday, truce is an old Arabic word. Goes way, way back in Islamic-Arabic culture, and it means, “We will get you later.” [4/16/04]
If Limbaugh were to sue CNN and MSNBC, his removal from the St. Louis Rams bid would let him claim some damages. Others who have attacked Rush over these false quotes include the Atlantic (here and here)
BILL O'REILLY: The reason that Limbaugh is not going to be able to buy into the NFL is because a bunch of made-up stuff became legend, and he got hammered.
WARREN BALLANTINE: OK, we won't look at the made-up stuff. Let's look at him playing "Barack The Magic Negro", and we're going to say that's just funny, that's just a joke, that's not racial either. It is racial to real black people.
JUAN WILLIAMS: Hey Warren, you were saying my argument was a red herring. Maybe you should do some research, go back and find out that it was an article written by a black person, headlined "Barack The Magic Negro."
BALLANTINE: He made it a song and played it on his show.
WILLIAMS: So what? He was making fun of it.
BALLANTINE: You can go back to the porch, Juan. You can go back. It's OK.
O'REILLY: All right guys: good debate, good-spirited debate.
In the latest series of errors at Wikipedia it posted claims that both Senators Ted Kennedy and Robert Byrd had died at Obama's post-inaugural luncheon.
This means that the content of these articles really matters. Wikipedia's standards of inclusion--what's in and what's not--affect the work of journalists, who routinely read Wikipedia articles and then repeat the wikiclaims as "background" without bothering to cite them. These standards affect students, whose research on many topics starts (and often ends) with Wikipedia. And since I used Wikipedia to research large parts of this article, these standards are affecting you, dear reader, at this very moment. . . .
Unlike the laws of mathematics or science, wikitruth isn't based on principles such as consistency or observa bility. It's not even based on common sense or firsthand experience. Wikipedia has evolved a radically different set of epistemological standards--standards that aren't especially surprising given that the site is rooted in a Web-based community, but that should concern those of us who are interested in traditional notions of truth and accuracy. On Wikipedia, objective truth isn't all that important, actually. What makes a fact or statement fit for inclusion is that it appeared in some other publication--ideally, one that is in English and is available free online. "The threshold for inclusion in Wikipedia is verifiability, not truth," states Wikipedia's official policy on the subject. . . .
Just so long as someone someplace makes a claim about something it counts as being valid.
Ever wonder how Al Gore, the United Nations, and company continue to get away with their claim of a “scientific consensus” confirming their doomsday view of global warming? Look no farther than Wikipedia for a stunning example of how the global-warming propaganda machine works.
As you (or your kids) probably know, Wikipedia is now the most widely used and influential reference source on the Internet and therefore in the world, with more than 50 million unique visitors a month.
In theory Wikipedia is a “people’s encyclopedia” written and edited by the people who read it - anyone with an Internet connection. So on controversial topics, one might expect to see a broad range of opinion.
Not on global warming. On global warming we get consensus, Gore-style: a consensus forged by censorship, intimidation, and deceit.
I first noticed this when I entered a correction to a Wikipedia page on the work of Naomi Oreskes, author of the now-infamous paper, published in the prestigious journal Science, claiming to have exhaustively reviewed the scientific literature and found not one single article dissenting from the alarmist version of global warming.
Of course Oreskes’s conclusions were absurd, and have been widely ridiculed. I myself have profiled dozens of truly world-eminent scientists whose work casts doubt on the Gore-U.N. version of global warming. Following the references in my book The Deniers, one can find hundreds of refereed papers that cast doubt on some aspect of the Gore/U.N. case, and that only scratches the surface.
Naturally I was surprised to read on Wikipedia that Oreskes’s work had been vindicated and that, for instance, one of her most thorough critics, British scientist and publisher Bennie Peiser, not only had been discredited but had grudgingly conceded Oreskes was right.
I checked with Peiser, who said he had done no such thing. I then corrected the Wikipedia entry, and advised Peiser that I had done so.
Peiser wrote back saying he couldn’t see my corrections on the Wikipedia page. I made the changes again, and this time confirmed that the changes had been saved. But then, in a twinkle, they were gone again. I made other changes. And others. They all disappeared shortly after they were made.
Turns out that on Wikipedia some folks are more equal than others. Kim Dabelstein Petersen is a Wikipedia “editor” who seems to devote a large part of his life to editing reams and reams of Wikipedia pages to pump the assertions of global-warming alarmists and deprecate or make disappear the arguments of skeptics. . . .
Thanks to Jim Purtilo for this link. For his collection of comments on Wikipedia see here.
