Wikipedia: See Who’s Editing Stephen Harper

58 Replies to “Wikipedia: See Who’s Editing Stephen Harper”

1. Facts are indeed facts, ET. And your continued attempt at either deliberately misstating the facts or not being able to properly read them tells us everything we need to know about what is wrong with our education system.
   In fact, you outright lie.
   ET: “your first fallacy is assuming that Wikipedia is a site of ultimate Truth.”
   Unless you have a severe problem with reading comprehension, you know perfectly well that I said the exact opposite. The point I was making was exactly opposite to that. eg: “I never said wasn’t biased. I said it just reflects the biases of the most recent editor and anyone can edit.” among many other statements.
   ET: “your other fallacy is that you are merging ‘government’ and PMO.”
   Another fabrication, ET. Shameful really. I’ve consistently said government, not PMO, made it clear to you over and over again that it is not the PMO. I even put “government” in square brackets because it is clearly not THE government but, in this article, conservative individuals who work at the government.
   You continue to make spurious and groundless remarks. Please, just once provide some substantiation to your ad hominem attacks.
   And you keep ducking challenges. You said: “Your Die-Hard hatred of Harper and Conservatives has led you into an illogical axiom – that any and all changes to Wikipedia text about Canadian political figures come from the PM’s Office. Wrong. Your data doesn’t support this.” I’ve asked you over and over and over to please prove or even give one single shred of evidence to support the following:
   1. My “Die-Hard hatred of Harper and Conservatives”. If it is indeed in “in all your posts to this blog, it should be easy to find this “die-hard hatred of conservatives”.
   2. “that any and all changes to Wikipedia text about Canadian political figures come from the PM’s Office.” I said absolutely nothing of the sort but you are the “logic” queen so let us all know out of what hat you pulled that rabbit.
   Still waiting. And waiting. And waiting.

2. Ted- you are moving into red herrings with your attempt to focus on ‘any and all’ and ‘all’. Try to remain focused on the content of your posts, which were hostile attacks against Harper.
   Again, you stated that changes to Wikipedia FACTS (ie. TRUTHS) come from the PM’s Office.
   ‘the government’s complicity in altering FACTS in Wikipedia” (my emphasis of ‘facts’).
   “I wrote PMO…I meant government offices…these days there doesn’t seem to be any difference”
   “including the PMO caught making changes – outright deletions of FACT” (my emphasis of ‘fact’).
   So, Ted – you did explicitly merge PMO and ‘government’. You said that there ‘wasn’t any difference’. You did assume that Wikipedia’s texts were truthful or factual – and that these truths were changed by nefarious individuals in the PM’s office=government offices.
   Cheers.

3. ET: “The logical error is an If-Then proposition of ‘IF there are changes in a Wikipedia item, THEN, this is an act of the PMO’. The logical error is linking ‘changes’ and ‘the PMO’.”
   The correctness or incorrectness of that proposition is a matter of fact rather than of logic. It is, of course, factually ridiculous, but I very much doubt that’s what he was saying.
   Oh, well, another piece of useless “dialogue”. I guess I’ll go to bed.

4. One more thing: There are various kinds of if … then statements. Just do some googling.
   The If … Then statement, ‘IF there are changes in a Wikipedia item, THEN, this is an act of the PMO’ would be a causal statement.

5. Run and hide, ET, run and hide.
   Next time, if you can’t support your attacks and over-generalizations, and knee-jerk reactions that produce silly and petty comments with a shred of evidence, then just resist the temptation to tap away at the keyboard.
   For what it is worth, though I did not accuse the PMO of anything (except in a typo that was immediately corrected) I have zero doubt whatsoever that the PMO does regularly change facts to lies in wikipedia in addition to changing outright lies inserted by others into truths just like every other politician and political supporter of every stripe.
   Obviously you are too obtuse to get it, but that was my one and only point. Wikipedia is what it is: text online that anyone can edit and everyone does. The information is marginally better than the information you get at the water cooler.
   Wikipedia is neither good nor bad, and I neither attack it or praise it. It is us, a reflection of how we each form our own opinions and also how we try to shape the opinions of others.
   It’s surprising that an ivory tower academic who specializes in sociology doesn’t get what Wikipedia is or has a typical knee-jerk reaction to its description as being partisan, but like I said, that says all you need to know about the state of our intellectual elite and how so many of them are neither intellectual nor elite.

6. “ET: “Your – yet again – logical error, is that you are assuming the item in Wikipedia was ‘right’ and ‘accurate'”
   It isn’t illogical to assume a statement to be true unless it contains a contradiction (and this one does not). This statement is obviously not true, but that is a matter of fact, rather than of logic.
   “All rabbits are blue” is not an illogical assumption, though it is incorrect.
   Incidently, I’ve seen some very right-wing entries on wikipedia and there was some talk in some far-left circles for awhile of setting up some kind of alternative.

7. What a load of sophist BS!
   Here’s a fact….. CBC domain IPaddresses produced over 1200 anonymous edits on Wikipedia … over 1000 of those came from the Ottawa offices!
   Correcting errors? Re-writing History? Or just being asshats?

8. OMMAG…I love how your comments skip right to the point.No puff, no fluff.
   Bottom line for me: what possible motive would greenpeace have for altering a site that is supposedly used for ‘reference’, not editorials?
   Wikipedia cannot be trusted.