Former Feinstein staffer edited Wikipedia entries
Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s office acknowledged today that a former staff member had edited the California Democrat’s entry on the Internet encyclopedia Wikipedia, as well as altered entries about her husband Richard Blum’s Chinese investments in 1997.
Other recent Wiki-tweaking was done on Rep. Richard Pombo’s bio from computers in the House of Representatives.
Wikipedia needs controls. There’s some excellent stuff there, but when anyone can edit an article, hoovering out information they don’t want public, then, over time, it’ll just become less reliable, won’t it? The open source movement does have such controls. You can write a modification to the Linux OS, but it doesn’t become part on the next version until it’s been ok’ed. Wikipedia has no such process. It needs one.
[tags] Wikipedia [/tags]
This is 100% correct. As one who comments on Richard Pombo and his staff, such manipulations are par for the course. In the words of one newspaper bureau chief “no one considers Wikipedia a serious source of information.” There is a process for review. I have seen it work re: entries about Father Coughlin, the radio preacher from the 1930’s. However, it takes too much to trigger it and there is just too much of this manipulation going on for these reviews to be timely or effective.