Comments on: Microsoft tries to ‘edit’ Wikipedia

By: David

David — Wed, 22 Aug 2007 08:52:12 +0000

Apple also appears to have had their hand in the cookie jar:

http://www.graphicstart.com/viewarticle.php?articleid=18

By: George Gardner

George Gardner — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 13:35:33 +0000

I wonder if Microsoft will be editing “The Halloween Documents”

By: PJ6

PJ6 — Thu, 25 Jan 2007 07:12:47 +0000

Dan,

The Iraq War article in Wikipedia looks OK to me. Suspicious in that it sounds like one author (but I could be wrong), but it has the stuff I was looking for, like the 650K death toll statistic. Aside from mentioning the Manning memo, what’s missing? I’d probably add that the reason for the war was peak oil and the efforts of AIPAC (not my assessments, I can cite these if you like)… what would you add?

By: Erik

Erik — Wed, 24 Jan 2007 22:58:28 +0000

I have often wondered if this was possible. Assuming everything you’ve said to be true, why isn’t Microsoft employing the same tactics? The only thing I can think of is that it may be a lot more damaging for Microsoft to get caught doing it than for the Government, but that’s just an educated guess. Anyone else know?

By: Dan

Dan — Wed, 24 Jan 2007 22:00:33 +0000

Wikipedia is neither great nor good. It is simply a free-for-all propaganda machine masquerading as an encyclopedia. Both large companies and government organizations routinely subvert and take control of Wikipedia articles. Here’s one way it works…

Let’s say the White House wants to control the article on the U.S.-Iraq war (which, by the way, they do). They get a bunch of agents to work round the clock using several Wikipedia accounts with four or five agents per account so they have 24-7 coverage. This is not hard to do since Wikipedia will inform the agents via their accounts when an article has changed. The agents will only need to spend a little time each day making updates.

First the agents use their accounts to fix “vandalism”. Such vandalism can be created with other accounts going through rogue IP addresses. The agents’ accounts get administrator privileges for doing this repeatedly. They, in effect, build a false reputation as “good guys”. The agents’ accounts can then be used to censor any addition they don’t want the public to know. They use the excuse NPOV to keep news reports, video footage of actual events, and even references to the Manning memo out of the article. In effect, they white wash the coverage of the war.

If anyone tries to dispute the censorship imposed by one of the agents’ accounts, say account A, then the agents can control the outcome of the dispute by using accounts B, C, D, and E. It looks like more than one person is voting on the dispute, but it is actually the same person via different IP addresses or two people in adjacent desks working together.

How do I know this? I worked for the government and saw first this happening first hand. It’s a well-organized effort and is 100% effective. The people doing it are so arrogant that they think they are being patriotic by manipulating the trust of the general population. This kind of propaganda has been going on since the dawn of history, but Wikipedia takes it to a whole new level.

To put it in perspective, if Wikipedia had been around during the 1930s/1940s, all references to the holocaust would be deleted as NPOV.