Wikipedia

One would expect that everyone associated with an outlet which characterizes itself as the be-all, end-all of online encyclopedias would be on board to make sure there is space for an entry on the person who may, when all is said and done, be shown to have been among the worst, if not the worst, mass murderers in U.S. history -- and maybe, if ABC's Terry Moran is correct, "the most successful serial killer in the history of the world."

Nope. It appears that earlier this week, an editor at Wikipedia proposed deleting an already-existing entry on Kermit Gosnell because, according to the relevant "Articles for deletion" page at the site, "His case has not received national attention. It is a local multiple-murder story in Pennsylvania, nothing more." As outrageous as this suggestion was, it should be noted that all but one of several dozen responses to the suggestion advocated keeping the entry. Excerpts from the Daily Caller's coverage follow the jump.

In a Tuesday evening dispatch at the Associated Press (saved here for future reference, fair use and discussion purposes) on the status of U.S. foreign policy in Egypt, Bradley Klapper and Julie Pace either displayed an amazing level of clairvoyance or indulged in a level of fantasy ordinarily reserved for trips to Disneyland. I'm betting that it's the latter, that this AP report will in short order come to be seen as a complete journalistic embarrassment, and that the Obama administration is drinking from the same koolaid jug.

The good news is that they at least finally acknowledged a linkage that most of the rest of the establishment press has studiously ignored, namely that "After winning U.S. and worldwide praise (for brokering an Israel-Hamas ceasefire), Morsi immediately cashed in on his new political capital by seizing more power at home." But it's all downhill from there (bolds and numbered tags are mine):

Wikipedia is the most popular source of written information in the world. It is the third most popular non-search engine site on the web, bested only by Facebook and YouTube. In other words, it can be a potent ideological force.

And it has been. The site's administrators recently banned 16 users from editing any article related to global climate change. One user, William Connolley - also an active member of the UK Green Party - had been editing misinformation and propaganda into Wikipedia articles since 2003.

Climate alarmists have put enormous pressure on the western media to suppress knowledge of facts inconvenient to their scientific arguments using a variety of methods to supress dissenting opinion.

Besides threatening journalists, promoting the use of Nazi-esque insults like the word "deniers," and bullying scientists who publish research papers critical of their near-religious beliefs, alarmists have taken to the web with aplomb, most famously exposed in the ongoing "ClimateGate" scandal.

Engaging in politicized science via email isn't the only cyber activity that left-enviro activists engage in however. Wikipedia is also a favorite target, particularly for a British global warming activist named William Connolley who seems to have made it his life's mission to censor climate realists in the online encyclopedia.

Update/Clarification [Nov. 10]: This issue is muddied a bit by redistricting and its effects on the geography of congressional representation. Swing State Project in June 2009 noted that "Almost two-thirds of the population of the current district (62%) live in territory" in the New York 23rd "that has not elected a Democrat since 1890 or earlier." However, a sizable part of the district (38%) includes parts of counties that as late as 1976 and 1978 voted Democratic in congressional races.

If you've heard it once, you've heard it 1,000 times: the New York 23rd Congressional District (NY-23) has had a Republican incumbent since the 1870s. It's a helpful talking point for mainstream media types bent on portraying the Hoffman loss in the district last night as evidence of how the Republican mainstream has moved away from conservatism.

The only trouble with the talking point is it is patently false and the New York Times can prove it. (h/t EyeBlast.tv's Stephen Gutowski)

From the 1990 obituary for one Samuel Stratton:

Call it the Press Conference From Hell.

Toledo mayoral candidate Ben Konop, an earnest young liberal, thought it would be a great idea to conduct a press conference in front of the home where his mother grew up. Little did Ben know that Maxwell the Heckler, the next door neighbor, would completely destroy his press conference and forever burn that incident into the public memory of Mr. Konop. To get the full hilarious flavor of how Maxwell destroyed the press conference, take a look at the video.

Most of the heckling consisted of "Boo! LIAR! BOOOOO!"

The first reaction of your humble correspondent when watching that video was that Maxwell the Heckler was some sort of anarchist bent on destroying Konop's press conference in a humorous way just for the sake of fun. However, upon investigation, it turns out that Maxwell the Heckler was actually "speaking truth to power," a favorite leftwing slogan.

Wikipedia can be a vehicle for tearing down barriers and democratizing information. Unless the New York Times is involved.

Just as the Times was able to keep 40 other media organizations from reporting on the capture of their own David Rohde, so too were they able to keep Wikipedia from reporting it. They also used his Wikipedia page to try to win favor with the Taliban.

Just three days after Rohde was captured, a user edited his Wikipedia page to reflect his capture, but that edit was quickly deleted, and with the help of Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales, news of Rohde’s capture was kept off the page until his release.

Starting July 1, the Associated Press will begin publishing articles produced by nonprofit organizations, all four of which are left-leaning.

I guess they couldn't find any conservative nonprofits.

As reported by the New York Times Saturday (h/t Paul Chesser):

Wikipedia users have scrubbed all references to homegrown terrorist William Ayers and the controversial Rev. Jeremiah Wright from Barack Obama's entry at the online encyclopedia.

Apparently, any information posted about Ayers or Wright in the text of the Obama biography is not only immediately taken down, but the offending user is banned for three days.

Such was revealed by WorldNetDaily moments ago:

(Wikipedia has now removed Obama's name from their "New Party" Wikipedia page. See update at bottom of this blog for details.)

I don't know how long Barack Obama's name will remain on the Wikipedia page for the New Party entry but it looks like it was added yesterday after a bit of struggle. By not so strange coincidence, your humble correspondent also provided evidence yesterday that Obama was a member of the socialist New Party. First the description of the New Party in Wikipedia:

On PBS's Web site today, ombudsman Michael Getler writes of complaints over an incident during last Sunday's pledge drive.  He describes the cheap shot taken by actor Mike Farrell against vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin:

According to Joseph Campbell, vice president of fundraising programs, here's what happened:

 On CNN's American Morning today, White House correspondent Suzanne Malveaux reported on Barack Obama's campaigning in Virginia.  Afterwards, anchor Kiran Chetry had a question:

CHETRY: All right. And Suzanne, what's on tap for the campaign today? And please tell me it's not lipstick again.

MALVEAUX: Let's hope not. He's going to be in Norfolk, Virginia. That is in southeast Virginia, and it's home to the world's largest Naval base. It's one of the most competitive areas that the Democrats and Republicans are fighting over. It's a critical piece of property, piece of land there with folks in Virginia, and they want those voters.

It remains to be seen whether this turns out to be Barack Obama's "Christmas in Cambodia" untruth, his Dukakis-in-tank hilarity -- or both.

Regardless, what follows is a pretty obvious "misstatement" that would not possibly be ignored if it were uttered by a conservative or a Republican.

In his hilariously titled post ("Mighta Joined If He Coulda Capped Some Cong") on Barack Obama's interview in a barn this morning (not kidding) on This Week with George Stephanopoulos, fellow NewsBuster Mark Finkelstein reported on Obama's answer to a viewer's question about whether he ever considered military service. You can read Mark's post for his overall thoughts, but I want to focus on something the Illinois senator said that several commenters at the post took exception to (photo courtesy DayLife):

You know, I had to sign up for Selective Service when I graduated from high school. .... But keep in mind: I graduated in 1979.

There are only two "little" problems:

In a "Leading the News" story primarily about Democratic Vice Presidential nominee Joe Biden's prior praise of John McCain, Susan Crabtree at The Hill noted previous posts made by yours truly about the alterations made to Biden's Wikipedia entries shortly before and after he was named by Barack Obama.

Those posts showed that at least these changes were made since I downloaded -- and kept -- Biden's main Wiki entry on Friday:

• (at NewsBusters; at BizzyBlog) The details of Biden's undergraduate grades went away, and other text in the related paragraph was worked over.
• (at NewsBusters; at BizzyBlog) The section relating to 2004 under "Presidential Campaigns" was deleted, and most of the text that had been contained there moved to a section before the 1988 campaign. It was if the idea that Biden campaigned for the presidency was true before Obama selected him, and not true after that.
• (at NewsBusters; at BizzyBlog) The footnote relating to the original entry's claim that Biden had only plagiarized British politican Neil Kinnock one time, which never related to that claim anyway, was removed. Further, no Wiki entries relating to Biden -- before or after -- adequately described the full extent of his 1987 plagiarism, which included Kinnock at least one and probably several other times, and other plagiarizing of John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy, and Hubert Humphrey.

What Ms. Crabtree wrote follows. It includes some follow-up she did, which is in bold:

Joe Biden's 1987 stump-speech plagiarism of Neil Kinnock likely occurred more than once. Additionally, according to contemporaneous New York Times reports, including an editorial, Biden's orations featured unattributed speech-lifting from John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, and Hubert Humphrey.

That's a lot more than Joe Biden's defenders and two of his Wikipedia entries have thus far revealed.

Previous posts (here and here at NewsBusters; here and here at BizzyBlog) noted "interesting" modifications to the main Wikipedia entry of Biden, who Barack Obama selected as his vice-presidential running mate this past weekend.

The first post reported that the detail of Biden's undergraduate grades (generally C's and D's, with two A's in phys ed and an F in ROTC) "strangely" disappeared between Friday and Saturday. The second ultimately noted that a section relating to Biden's involvement in the presidential campaign of 2004 had been deleted, but that its text had inexplicably been moved to before 1988. It was as if the idea that Biden had "campaigned" in 2004 was true before Barack Obama selected him, but no longer true after that.

But to get to the next example of Wiki whitewashing by Obama-Biden's busy bees -- the worst found thus far -- we need to go back 21 years to the New York Times.

The Friday evening version of Joe Biden's Wikipedia entry remains firmly ensconced in a Firefox tab on my desktop, so it can be compared to its current form as Obama-Biden's busy bees brush it up. I'm doing comparisons as time allows, and there isn't much of it at the moment.

One thing is quickly obvious -- a section heading for a whole year has disappeared:

Amazing. Where did 2004 go?

You'll just loooooove what got moved to a different and less logical section of the entry, while the section "2004" went away (Note: I originally believed that the text in the "2004" section had been deleted; also see my comment below):

Well, well.

The portion of Joe Biden's Wikipedia entry relating to his 1988 presidential campaign has been worked over a bit.

Specifics relating to his undergraduate grades have strangely disappeared. There are other subtle changes as well.

Comparison pics are after the jump.

Wikipedia, the community-edited encyclopedia that anyone can revise, is one of the Web's biggest success stories. What you may not know is that it also has become an important player in the political world.

Started in 2001 on a shoestring budget, Wikipedia now ranks as the ninth most popular Web site in the U.S., according to Internet ratings company Alexa.com, outpacing such "old media" stalwarts as CNN, ESPN and the New York Times. (It's even more popular worldwide, where it is currently the seventh most-read site.)

This popularity makes Wikipedia very interesting in a political context, particularly because its pages are highly regarded by most Internet search engines. Chances are, if you look up the name of most any state or national politician, the Wikipedia entry on him or her will be in your top three results. In some cases, such as those of President Bush or Vice President Cheney, Wikipedia's article actually beats out the official government biography pages.

The controversy over Wikipedia's censorship of any update regarding the alleged John Edwards scandal as chronicled by your humble correspondent yesterday has taken an interesting new turn. Wikipedia, in response to this controversy, has now made an announcement at the top of their John Edwards entry:

This page is currently protected from editing until July 30, 2008 or until disputes have been resolved. This protection is not an endorsement of the current version. See the protection policy and protection log for more details. Please discuss any changes on the talk page; you may use the {{editprotected}} template to ask an administrator to make the edit if it is supported by consensus. You may also request that this page be unprotected.

Wikipedia, which allowed verb tenses for their Tim Russert entry to be changed from present to past tense about a half hour before the official announcement of his death, is suddenly going ultra legal in its refusal to allow their John Edwards entry to be updated with mention of the alleged scandal which was reported in the National Enquirer with many of the details confirmed by Fox News. Suddenly Wikipedia has become a stickler for confirmation detail before the Edwards entry can be updated. To get an idea of how much Wikipedia is twisting itself into a pretzel to justify their refusal to update their John Edwards entry, one needs only to look at their pained, but comedically entertaining, discussions of this matter in their "Tabloid scandal accusations" section:

As many are aware, Edwards has been accused of scandalous actions by a supermarket tabloid. As per Wikipedia's policy regarding biographies of living persons, including information about the tabloids claims is inappropriate at this time because the tabloid does not qualify as a reliable source and current reports in more reputable news sources do not confirm the claims, only reporting the fact the tabloid has published claims about Edward's actions. The same policy that prevents inclusion of the accusations within the article also prevent details from being included on this talk page.

Two weeks ago, a parent-teacher council blamed the online research source Wikipedia for falling test scores in Scotland.

On Tuesday, Canadian columnist Lawrence Solomon blamed Wikipedia for helping to spread global warming hysteria around the world.

The connection? Oftentimes "inaccurate or deliberately misleading information" published by Wikipedia being taken as fact by unsuspecting readers.

In the case of climate change, such inaccurate or deliberately misleading information acts to solidify the myth being espoused by Nobel Laureate Al Gore as millions of people across the globe believe Wikipedia is a purely factual resource.

As the Scotsman reported on June 21, such an assumption carries risks (emphasis added):

More news from the front of the Wiki Wars, the ideological battle for the soul of Wikipedia: it seems left-wingers at the online encyclopedia site are angry that anyone would want to mention Absolut's reconquista controversy in the vodka maker's article.

How do we know this? From reading the "Talk" page for the Wikipedia entry "Absolut Vodka," where people can discuss the article and changes they'd like to see made to it. Apparently liberals there do not want the public to know that the company got in big trouble win consumers after it ran an ad in Mexico portraying that country as having taken over certain parts of the United States.

The discussion starts off with an anonymous person (apparently from Loyola University judging by their IP address) who asks that the Absolut entry be partially blocked from editing to prevent "vandalism:"

You may not be aware of it but Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia, is a virtual war zone, one of which most conservatives are blissfully unaware. Over at the New Republic, Eve Fairbanks explores this in the presidential campaign where supporters and critics of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton battle daily over their entries:

Back when we got basic information from encyclopedias instead of Wikipedia, politicians were at the mercy of the encyclopedia-writers' particular biases. Take the 1911 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica. Apparently controlled by smug British nationalists, it described the important Irish leader Charles Stewart Parnell as "not over-scrupulous," "repellent," "powerful for evil," and, owing to the "mental affliction of his ancestors," probably possessing a "mental equilibrium [that] was not always stable."

Wikipedia was supposed to fix this problem. Anyone can add, delete, or massage language in its online articles, and--boom!--refresh the page to see their changes appear instantly. These volunteer contributors ("editors," in Wikipedia lingo) discuss their changes on an article's associated "talk page," and eventually (or so the theory goes) merge their different perspectives on various subjects into something truly neutral. But, after you see what happens when two warring Democratic candidates are thrown to the mercy of the Wikipedians, you kind of yearn for the 1911 Britannica.

Did you know that "Fox and Friends" co-host Steve Doocy is a 61-year-old stripper who tragically died today? No, he is not, but according to a Wikipedia edit today he is. The November 26 edition of "Fox and Friends" discussed word of some school districts banning Wikipedia and the false information some readers add. As a result, some apparently angry viewers proved their point and added wild information to their pages.

Apparently, Steve Doocy died in a car accident today, is 61, and a stripper. Brian Kilmeade has been dead for ten years. Perhaps his ghost now hosts "Fox and Friends."

Several months ago, MRC President Brent Bozell warned of unreliability of Wikipedia. One internet user falsely claimed there is an ongoing feud between Bozell and famed media critic Bernard Goldberg.

On Monday, "Good Morning America" reporter John Berman ignored any role that journalists might have in the developing scandal of anonymous individuals altering Wikipedia entries. On the ABC program, Berman alerted viewers to the fact that companies such as Wal-Mart and Starbucks have changed sections in their Wikipedia bios. However, he skipped the recent revelation that both the BBC and New York Times have been linked to derogatory, childish alterations in President Bush’s entry. (CNN covered the story on August 16.)

Berman began the segment by asking viewers how they would feel if they knew "the entry on Wal-Mart was edited by someone inside Wal-Mart? The Starbucks entry? By someone inside Starbucks." He also noted that the CIA has changed its section. However, the ABC reporter failed to explain that a new computer program, which can determine who alters Wikipedia information, traced the culprit behind the addition of the words "jerk, jerk, jerk" to President Bush’s Wikipedia profile. The source? A New York Times computer. There was also no discussion of a similar incident involving the insertion of the word "wanker" to Bush’s entry from a BBC computer.

"American Morning" co-host Kiran Chetry, an alumna of Fox News Channel’s "Fox & Friends Weekend," gave her former colleagues at Fox a run for the money in highlighting a case of media bias. While "Fox & Friends" on Thursday morning was covering the earthquake in Peru, and featured several segments on the 30th anniversary of the death of Elvis, Chetry interviewed "Wired" magazine senior editor Nick Thompson towards the end of the 7 am EDT hour on a new website that traces who is editing different entries on Wikipedia. Chetry brought up an instance in December 2005 where the words "jerk, jerk, jerk, jerk" appeared on President Bush’s Wikipedia entry, and the new website traced the entry to the IP address of a computer at the New York Times.

The key excerpt from Chetry’s interview of Thompson:

In my experience, Wikipedia is often a good resource, especially for pop culture and computer tech terms. But since it is a fully community-operated enterprise, there are some pratfalls about relying on it for information, especially since some organizations use it as a marketing tool for themselves, attempting to control entries they're interested in.

This type of cybersquatting is quite widespread but up until now, difficult to track. That's changed however, with the creation of Wikiscanner, a search engine that allows you to see what organizations have been editing Wikipedia. You can, for instance, look up to see what Wikipedia users from different political groups, business, churches, and any other organization have been up to on the site. Early results are showing that many employees seem to have a habit of editing the entries of their own company/organization. You can also see that at least one person at the New York Times deliberately defaced Wikipedia's entry for George W. Bush with the words "jerk" inserted into the page repeatedly.

It's not completely foolproof, however, since Wikipedia only reveals your IP address if you edit a page without signing up for an account. Still, the data is interesting. Wikiscanner is being deluged with huge amounts of traffic right now but when things calm down, it should prove to be a very interesting research tool for us here at NB and for everyone in the blogosphere.

See below for an update in coverage:

The indicted former Newark Mayor and current NJ state Senator Sharpe James sure is mysterious. According to the New York Times, WNBC and via the AP, the Wall Street Journal, Yahoo, Philadelphia Inquirer and the UK's Guardian, among others, James seemingly does not belong to a political party. Maybe he belongs to the same non-party as Rep. William Jefferson who was indicted on corruption and bribery charges earlier this year (hat tip to a NewsBusters reader):

Strangely, after a little digging, I discovered that James is a Democrat and that according to the prosecution, some of his alleged expenses included costly trips to Jamaica, Rio de Janeiro and Puerto Rico on the taxpayer's dime, as well as letting a girlfriend buy city property at bargain-basement prices.

For some reason, the media seem reluctant to identify that James is a Democrat and even those articles which do, bury his affiliation up to 11 paragraphs down into the text as the AP did on ABCNews.com. Even Wikipedia. minimized James' connection to the Democrats.