Minnesota Republican Watch » Blog Archive » Norm Coleman’s Staff Attempts To Remove Facts From Coleman Biography In Encyclopedia

This is a consistant problem with Wikipedia. As a fun experiment, I would suggest going in and changing some insigificant value — adding a middle initial to a name, changing a date by day, changing a count by a subtle amount — and see how long it takes for it to get changed back. I would suggest doing this from a library or some other public terminal, though, because it will log your IP address.

Coleman’s staff has taken a slightly different tact towards Wikipedia — they’re changing Coleman’s biography to try to cover up his huge left-to-right pendulum swing and distance himself from Bush and Rove. Now — mark my words — the entry is going to have a bunch of edits which expose that pandering even more explicitly. And the war will erupt.

This kind of thing is already happening with the USS Liberty post (main post, more hotly contested “incident” post). The clearly identifiable American ship “USS Liberty” was attacked by Israeli forces after documenting their war crimes (including crimes committed by Ariel Sharon) and the ship was nearly sunk. The lifeboats that were launched from it were attacked, and antipersonnel chemicals were used on the deck. This, however, is not a popular story among Zionist groups, because it looks like an out-and-out attack on a United States vessel from Israeli forces in order to cover their own butt. So the result is that there’s a lot of controversy about it, with Zionist groups trying to downplay the travesty and researchers increasingly trying to get the story out. I highly suggest Bamford’s Body of Secrets for a well-researched account of the Liberty fiasco and the ensuing suppression and contention.

Back to the main point, though. You can see a war of edits going on at the history of the USS Liberty Incident page, with consistant fighting and tiny edits to make the incident read in a way that is better to that one person — and then the change back. Read the comments and take a look, and it’s clear to see that the history isn’t going through any kind of Hegelian evolution (as Wikipedia’s founders argue it will), but that it is simply being driven to extremes by people on either side and then dragged back to the other extreme by people who respond.

The fact of the matter is that Wikipedia has liberal leanings on the grounds that more of the people editting it are liberal. Making changes to it for political motivations are going to be strongly frowned upon, and are simply going to start a war of edits that you can’t win. This was a stupid move on Coleman’s part.

Edit: I love this entry in Coleman’s page’s edit history.

# (cur) (last) 12:38, 31 January 2006 NiftyDude m (→Recent Developments - added link to Coleman’s staff editing Wikipedia entry)

Edit2: Check out this response.

Hey, BHurt-AW, this might be worth a DailyKos post — I’d be curious to see what they’ve got to say over there about this maneuver.

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