"A Boston Globe article talks about crime novelist Patricia Cornwell, specifically a stalker she’s got, and the fact that earlier, she was sleeping with the wife of an FBI agent, and the FBI agent tried to kill his wife over the affair.
"I checked out the Patricia Cornwell article at Wikipedia, and found no mentioned of the FBI agent (Eugene Bennett) who tried to kill his wife / Patricia’s lover.
I found this odd, as I’d think that a crime writer having a murder plot against her lover would be noteworthy.
"So I checked the talk page, where I found that:
“This article is within the scope of WikiProject LGBT studies [ project ], which tries to ensure comprehensive and factual coverage of all LGBT related issues on Wikipedia.”
"Wow.
"So there’s self-acknowledged, organized spin, to make sure that certain bits of information go down the memory hole.
"Fascinating..."
Wikipedia is the politically sanitized rewrite of the national narrative.
As always, "progressives" lie by omission...Wikipedia and it's editing protocol are rife with "progressive omission".
Thanks for this, Kathy.
Public school boards work the same way. Their so-called "equity" policies are a cover up for "favour certain groups [blacks, Muslims, gays, aboriginals, etc.] at the expense of the rest". BTW, such duplicity is what the Charter's all about too. (And to think that most Canadians seem to be taken in by the words "rights and freedoms": they actually believe that the Charter bestows them with both. Fools!)
Until Canadians wake up and realize that the Charter, which looks like a lamb, is actually the Big Bad Wolf--state intervention, accusations, and punishment for non favoured groups, e.g., white, British, Christian traditionalists--we're, to mix my metaphor, sitting ducks. (Traditionalists from non-Christian faiths seem to be spared Charter scrutiny and cases. Equality, anyone?)
'Ironic, isn't it, that the "pacifists" of the left, who want to ban all handguns, are more than willing to use the jackboots and very big guns of the state to severely punish any who won't march lock-step to their utopian tunes. ‘Ironic too, that most of those being punished are the responsible adults of our society, while all kinds of ne’er do wells are given carte blanche to wreak havoc.
Poor Canada.
Luckily, as far as online open collaborative knowledge development projects go, there's a number of more morally accurate alternatives.
P.S. I'd like to make a clarification re my above post: I know very fine people who are blacks, Muslims, gays, and aboriginals. I believe they deserve rights. I have no problem with that.
My problem is when the SYSTEM elevates and expands the so-called rights of certain groups--a "right" to break the law in Caledonia?--at the expense of the rest of us. Individuals, not groups, should have rights.
WL Mackenzie Redux: Wikipedia is the politically sanitized rewrite of the national narrative.
By its very nature, you're free to "unsanitize" Wikipedia as much as you like.
Look out said: "'Ironic, isn't it, that the "pacifists" of the left, who want to ban all handguns, are more than willing to use the jackboots and very big guns of the state to severely punish any who won't march lock-step to their utopian tunes."
So true. During the Chretien-Rock era of official LPC anti-firearm hysteria, Canada saw the largest build up of militarized police in our history..tactics weapons and funtion mimicked military funtion...the police were "at war" with ideological dissenters to the government...they enforced policy not law and overal function became intimidation and control rather than to serve and protect.....it was the Liberals, who hate the American gun culture so much, who are so enamoured of ATF swat teams and special weapons response teams being called out on the slightest provocation.
During the LPC's 13 year civil tyranny, the number of armed police "raids" on private citizens homes rose by over 300%.
They really get wood when they have to means to totally goon ideological dissent...another "progressivist" personality trait: latent imperialists
1- 2- 3- 4-! I call a wikipedia editing war!
IMHO Patricia is a great writer...who cares if she is gay? Wikipedia is where wannabe PHDs go to freely submit whatever they want.
Lookout...unfortunately it is the system we vote for,or at least accept.We allow them to run/rule our lives through our own pacifity.
Holy shmolly...wikipedia actually showed up here to defend themselves?
"WL Mackenzie Redux: Wikipedia is the politically sanitized rewrite of the national narrative.
By its very nature, you're free to "unsanitize" Wikipedia as much as you like.
Posted by: Wikipedia at June 9, 2007 10:42 AM "
Been there,done that. If anybody,including me WLMR,Kate,Kathy,etc were "free" to "unsanitize" Wikipedia,it wouldn't exist. Posted by a pretender,maybe??
WIKI sez "By its very nature, you're free to "unsanitize" Wikipedia as much as you like."
Precisely...and it is routinely rewritten to reflect the revisionist views of the type of special interest activist who would use a public tool like wiki to do so.
Editing a wikipedia entry is a pure act of a revisionist and I have never been predisposed to revisionism.
In my ethical perspective if an article needs editing for accuracy and ommission then it never should have been published to begin with. If it is TOO truthful and needs editing by special interests to sanitize the truth, it should never have been allowed to be editied.
With the casual adherence to editorial accuracy wikipedia displays, it would be far more honest if it did not promote itself as an "encyclopedia" (insinuating it is an empirical source of info/knowledge)....more accurately it is a loose collection of subjective opinion from an unaccountable host of special interest publishers and editors.
With the casual adherence to editorial accuracy wikipedia displays, it would be far more honest if it did not promote itself as an "encyclopedia" (insinuating it is an empirical source of info/knowledge)....more accurately it is a loose collection of subjective opinion from an unaccountable host of special interest publishers and editors.
Exactley WLMR..just go to the site and search for Kate,or Kathy...it is funny in one way,scary in the other.
Don't throw out your old paper copies of Encyclopedia Britannica. They could be very useful and valuable in a few years. They should be guarded and protected like prized, antique photographs.
TRUTH is now a commodity whose value resides in the degree to which it is enhanced, tweaked revised and sanitized.
For instance, think of all the fat, mediocre, overpaid academics who TRUTH islam.
Kathy stumbled upon an example of TRUTHING homosexuality.
Justthinkin: Patricia is a great writer...who cares if she is gay?
TJICistan and KShaidle, for starters.
Been there,done that. If anybody,including me WLMR,Kate,Kathy,etc were "free" to "unsanitize" Wikipedia,it wouldn't exist.
Any visitor to Wikipedia is equally able to add, edit, and delete content (save for the occasion locked page). If your opinions are not reflected in Wikipedia entries, which again are open to revision by literally every person on the planet with access to the internet, then you may wish to think deeply about why this might be so.
Wiki: I just scanned the 3 most controversial "left wing" issues which attract the most leftist activists to these wiki entries...all were inaccurate...all had unsubstantiated innuendo used in context as a subtle personal smear of the entries subject. I looked at the editing histories and discussion and was pole-axed by the wiki editorial rejection of Corrective actions to unsupportable innuendo.
When I see Kate's (and the other Wiki entries I scanned which will remain nameless) clean of any unsupportable "racist" innuendo I will buy your free editorial mumblings...until that time wikipedia is just so much profane graffiti scrawled by special interest vandals.
Wiki: I just scanned the 3 most controversial political personalities issues which seem to attract the most leftist activists to these wiki entries...all were inaccurate...all had vast pertenent omissions and unsubstantiated innuendo used in context as a subtle personal smear of the entries subject. I looked at the editing histories and discussion and was pole-axed by the wiki editorial rejection of Corrective actions to unsupportable innuendo.
When I see the 3 Wiki entries I scanned (which will remain nameless to you) clean of any unsupportable innuendo and bearing the relevant omitted materials I will buy your free editorial mumblings...until that time wikipedia is just so much profane graffiti scrawled on a pubic cyber wall by special interest vandals.
I'll monitor them to see.
If your opinions are not reflected in Wikipedia entries
I think this says it all. Wikipedia is actually a collection of opinions; this is what WLMR has been trying to say - perhaps with other words. What most of us are looking for is a collection of facts. On this point, Wikipedia sometimes delivers and sometimes does not; it really is hit or miss.
For those who are fed up with vandalism on Wikipedia, there is a online encyclopedia out there that hopes to improve on wikipedia. It's called "Citizendium" and was created by one of the co-founders of Wikipedia. More information on Citizendium can be found at this link:
http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/Main_Page
This project only started up last Sept so it only has about 2,000 articles online so far. Haven't got a chance to really look at it, but one thing I do like is that you have to provide your real name! No nicknames. So, if you write a bunch of crap everyone we know who is responsible. Enjoy.
Makes sense to me. She just wanted their drugs. The army gets better drugs from Afganistan though.... she should sleep with the army and see what happens...
I'm drug free now (but not FBI free), unless this coffee is a drug, whoops...
Someone should start up a Wikipedia for fiction writers, then those who tend to lie, or at least fail to reveal their bias, can hack away to their heart's content, harming no no one, amusing many.
Brent said: " Wikipedia is actually a collection of opinions; this is what WLMR has been trying to say - perhaps with other words. What most of us are looking for is a collection of facts."
Bingo!! I thought I did say it was a collection of opinions :-)
At any rate, encyclopedias are supposed to be irrefutable fact meant to settle arguments , not start them...as conjectured opiion will.
From where I sit, much of any politicized historical/social/partisan revisionism I seen in wiki is conjectured opinion. Thus the vulgar arguments and vandalism on these entries.
Brent sez: "On this point, Wikipedia sometimes delivers and sometimes does not; it really is hit or miss."
Got that right...only entries that are not editied by partisan revisionism are subjects that escape the loony left cyber activist...like economics, math and engineering. ;-)
"you may wish to think deeply about why this might be so."
No need, twerp, we already know. Apparently anybody with a malicious agenda can post anything, no matter how inaccurate or harmful, and we're all obligated to check constantly if we want to correct it. Otherwise, it stays out there posing as the truth.
Wiki is not an encyclopedia, it is a burnt out amusement arcade.
You may wish to stuff your pretentious attitude up your memory hole.
Had an unpleasant exchange with an old friend who, after I sent him a piece by Melanie Phillips "refuted" it by sending me a Wikipedia entry in which her Jewishness was highlighted and in which it was prominently mentioned that she had received an "award" for "Islmophobia" by some Islamist group. Also highlighted was the fact that she was highly critical of "progressive" teaching methods (the replacement of actual content with faux self-estem) with the obvious suggestion that she was a reactionary.
I told him that for political/ideological matters, Wikipedia was worse than useless.
Kathy: I enjoyed your comment elsewhere about liberals talking with the assumption that everyone in the room agrees. Brava! Richard Landes at Augean Stables refers to this as "liberal egocentrism".
I don't have those conversations anymore, Me No Dhimmi. Most of the friends I'm still in touch with from university days are dyed-in-the-wool liberals, usually of the left variety. Their liberal egocentrism is alive and well, and I just don't have the energy to argue with them. So, we keep our relationships light--and about once a year around birthdays.
I call liberal egocentrism, liberal entitlement. Lib-lefties consider that they're entitled to their opinions, because they hear them and read them everywhere in the MSM; they get really hot under the collar when they're cornered, because they don't have many, if any, substantial justifications for them. They get particularly irate when you trump their skimpy arguments with facts which are irrefutable.
But factual arguments are very costly when it comes to old friendships.
Indeed, BATB: One old ex-friend was angry with me for over 20 years (I recently discovered during a dinner together) because after "losing" every argument to his "studies show" I told him that henceforth I will ask for the particulars of the "study". "Studies show" is of course a facile, empty phrase like, say, "American foreign policy". Shortly after the aforementioned dinner, after I expressed my extreme reservations about Stephen Lewis, he said that his "arguments were infintiely more sophisticated" than mine. I then asked for an example of such a "sophisticated" argument to no avail. Around the same time I provided, after a full morning of research, 40 quotes from leading Dems about their fear of WMD in Iraq (incl both Clintons) to get him to see that, whatever his failings, Bush didn't "lie".
Nada!
You are obviously much wiser than me! I keep thinking, "I'll get that missing fact, I'll present it, and ......"
Like you, my retired business partner (quite a bit older) has repeatedly cautioned me on the pointlessness of debating liberals. He summmed up beautifully: "You can't reason a person out of a position he didn't reason himself into". (pre-PC language, mine :). Come to think of it, Anne Coulter has written a book entitled: "How to Talk to Liberals .... if you must". I always forget that last part!
I need to smarten up. Liberals don't debate ... there merely emote.
batb and MND, I'm with you on this. I have to decide if my friendships with brainwashed--many very intelligent--lefty, entitled friends are worth deep sixing before having an intelligent conversation about a whole lot of issues.
"Freedom of expression"? What's THAT? In fact, to have an intelligent discussion in the public domain on a good many issues would cost me my job.
"Strong and free?" Canada's been neither since the jackboots of the Charter were let loose.
Hey you poor slobs with lefty friends...remember being a leftnot means never having to say you're sorry/wrong...and also the fact they worship diversity in everything but opinion.
It is, I think, rather unfortunate that the things that Wikipedia does so very well are sometimes ignored by those who are most annoyed by the things that it doesn't do so well. Wikipedia contains a very large number of excellent articles on various topics such as, oh, off the top of my head:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Newton
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasma_(physics)
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McCabe-Thiele_method
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Objectivism_(Ayn_Rand)
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grace_Jones
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_A_Gadda_Da_Vida
Notice the common feature those examples share. There is no significant current debate on the fundamentals of those topics. They are what they are. Reasonable encyclopedias will broadly agree on those topics. The farther you read into an article the more likely it is that you are straying from facts and getting into opinions. That's a given.
Now consider the case of the entries on, say, the Raj, in, say, the most famous British encyclopedia and the most famous Indian encyclopedia. Would you not expect there to be some differences in interpretation from the perspectives of the participants in the organizations involved thereto?
What does this mean? It means it up to you, dear reader, to be aware of and take into consideration the biases inherent in any source you use, be it left, right, up, down, front, or back. Caveat emptor. Otherwise, fool me twice, shame on me. Emptor culpa.
Returning to the example at hand, the referenced Wikipedia entry explicitly tells us about a source of bias we may want to take into consideration. And you are mad about it? I only wish that CBC and CTV and the socialists and the corporatists would be so honest in their disclosure of potential sources of bias.
I think Wikipedia is great, if you know how to use it. It is all well a good to debate the details of specific entries, but to paint all the entries with an indiscriminate brush based on some entries you disagree with is your problem, not Wikipedia's.
WLMR: "Bingo!! I thought I did say it was a collection of opinions :-)"
And I should have read all of your post instead of merely most of it... :)
I had noticed during the last Civic Election in Regina, the Looney Left had infiltrated Wikipedia and pushed content to the left, leaving conetnt in an obvious bias FOR one candidate.
See: http://www.iheartregina.com/regina-blog/wikipedia-leaning-left-or-perhaps-pushed.html
The entire episode showed me the lengths certain political parties would go to misrepresenting facts.
Watch, them, watch them CLOSELY!!
To Wikipedia:
You are quite wrong in what you say.
In my experience articles that cover for example political figures are usually patrolled by zealots who never cease until the article is slanted in the way they like.
I've tried to make some very sensible improvements to one or two articles on political figures, edits that are supported with facts. And time and time again my edits have been undone, often within minutes, by one zealot or another who wants the article to have a certain bias. I have even been accused of vandalism by these zealots for making the slightest change, no matter how carefully researched it was.
And it is also my experience that those who have the most time on their hands to undo edits are often the same people who want to revise an article to suit their politically correct agenda.
Wikipedia is a nice idea in concept, and some articles, especially those on science, are very well done. But certain parts of the encyclopedia are infested with politically correct types.
You can "edit" Wikipedia all you like, but if the thought police don't like what you write, they'll remove it. If you persist, they will label you a "vandal" and ban you.
Anyone can edit Wikipedia all they like, as long as they toe the party line.
You can "edit" Wikipedia all you like, but if the thought police don't like what you write, they'll remove it. If you persist, they will label you a "vandal" and ban you.
Anyone can edit Wikipedia all they like, as long as they toe the party line.
TJ: And time and time again my edits have been undone, often within minutes, by one zealot or another who wants the article to have a certain bias...And it is also my experience that those who have the most time on their hands to undo edits are often the same people who want to revise an article to suit their politically correct agenda.
Yes, that's one explanation. Another is that your edits were themselves (also) biased, and others considered you as much a "zealot" as you considered them to be. It's difficult to say without knowing which articles you're speaking of, but just because you deemed an edit to be "carefully researched" and "supported with facts" needn't make it so.
Accusing something -- Wikipedia, the MSM, the education system, society -- to be tainted with "liberal bias" (or "conservative bias," for that matter) is always a dangerous position to take, as it's ultimately a subjective argument. Sometimes it's true, that such a bias does indeed exist, but sometimes it's your own position that warping your view. When you argue from the "right," then everything -- even the stuff in the middle -- appears to occupy the "left" (and vice versa).
Vitruvius,
I just figure Wikipedia is going the way of MSM.
"Modern man is staggering and losing his balance because he is being pelted with little pieces of alleged fact which are native to the newspapers; and, if they turn out not to be facts, that is still more native to newspapers."
4/7/1923 (Illustrated London News) G.K. Chesterton
Google just about any subject and you will get a Wikipedia article at the top. Different package ... very similar content. Having said that, they are a good first step.
To Wikipedia:
Bias is not necessarily a subjective argument. Sometimes bias is very clear.
I long ago gave up trying to make edits on Wikipedia because of the nasty treatment I received from the various zealots who wanted to push their point of view, most often a politically correct point of view.
At one point out of curiosity I compared a few Wikipedia articles on political figures to what was written on those figures in more traditional encyclopedias.
In nearly every case the traditional encyclopedias had, to one degree or another, more balanced articles that were more neutral and more factual.
One of the tactics that the zealots employ on Wikipedia is to sneak in words that add a certain colour to an article, words that try to impart upon the reader a certain feeling toward the individual under discussion.
I would go as far as to say that the zealots have become quite good at what they do (and they seem to have plenty of time on their hands to carry out their activities). Not to mention some of them are extremely aggressive and intimidating.
In my view Wikipedia has peaked in terms of its contribution to the spread of high-quality knowledge. Wonderful idea. I applaud those who founded it. But it is slowly being overrun by people who have too much time on their hands, and who simultaneously have too little interest in the truth.
By its very nature, you're free to "unsanitize" Wikipedia as much as you like.
Posted by: Wikipedia at June 9, 2007 10:42 AM
============
I will differ with you there. Try to find a carefully constructed page referring to U.D.N.
[United Democratic Nations], an alternate to the corrupted United Nations.
Down the *Memory Hole*, no doubt.
Only leftist Liberanos concepts and schemes are permitted? = TG
Just fired off a short but polite Email to Wikipedia saying I respect their discussed opinion to axe the United Democratic Nations page but questioned the character attack.
I mentioned several here at SDA had discussed the alternate United Nations concept and I could understand their choice of barring the newer idea version.
Also mentioned having read some slams against Wiki and that they could read the latest here.
One Wiki editor, [ no names] said something like, ** Some nut who thinks his organization will be the new United Nations**.
I don*t *own* any organization and am only slightly odd, not quite a *nut*.
Wiki is generally a good outfit with volunteer editors so I guess there are bound to be a few emotional non-reasoning Al Gore, Donnely, Sheenan types in the ranks.
Hope Wiki attitudes become more tolerant and mature with reasoned decisions and no need for personal attacks. = TG