[lbo-talk] Wikipediia Monkey Business

[Gar Lipow]

A generalization about wikipedia: It is NOT necessarily true that
Wikipedia is unreliable specifically on left issues. What Is true is
that Wikipedia tends to have tremendous mechanisms in place to correct
honest errors and distortions due to unintentional bias. It works well
as long as everyone is honestly seeking accuracy, and even better if
most are seeking truth.  But as soon as you get serious efforts to
deliberately distort or deceive especially by organized groups without
equally strong countervailing groups, then all sorts of nonsense
happens.  You can see how that would effect many articles relating to
issues of interest to leftists, without being a one to one
correspondence. That is some articles about leftists or left issues
probably don't end up distorted , and this kind of distortion happens
to stuff that is not particularly left.  But of course it does happen
in stuff with obvious political significance most often. But the key
is it can happen in any article where there is a group (or sometimes
even one individual) with a strong interest in distortion or deception
and no group or individual with equally strong interest in
countervailing presentations.  There are wikipedia volunteers who are
interested in generally keeping it accurate, which provides
countervailing pressure where those interested in deception are not
well organized and persistent. But  those volunteers fail against
strong organized campaigns to change an article deceptively without
someone outside the normal volunteer circle providing backup for the
volunteers. Also secondarily become a "moderator" on Wikipedia is an
automated process based on participation which is practice means some
(by no means all)  of the "moderators" are  reactionaries interested
in promoting deception on certain issues.

On Tue, Jul 19, 2011 at 7:00 AM, Carrol Cox <cbcox at ilstu.edu> wrote:
> Perhaps I was a bit unclear. I know the text of the speech is correct. What
> I wonder about is the Wiki NOTE, in which the _subject_ of the speech is
> said to be the activities of three officers, rather than of the TR
> Administration. The note would leave one to absolve the U.S. and its high
> officials of guilt,  loading it all down on three officres who were, after
> all, court martialed.
>
> Carrol
>
> On 7/18/2011 11:37 PM, socialismorbarbarism wrote:
>>
>> The Wikipedia article for George Frisbie Hoar is here
>>
>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Frisbie_Hoar
>>
>> and the reference link for the long quote is here
>>
>> http://www.bartleby.com/268/10/25.html
>>
>> It looks OK. The Wikipedia entry has the correct words, at least
>> according to the cited source. The encyclopedia entry does not include
>> the entire text, but then, of course, it shouldn't. It's a relatively
>> long quote as is.
>>
>> On Mon, Jul 18, 2011 at 3:57 PM, Carrol Cox<cbcox at ilstu.edu>  wrote:
>>>
>>> Here is part of the Wikipedia entry on Senator Hoar. I have looked at
>>> this
>>
>> ...
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>
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