The trouble with Wikipedia

[Ian Pegler]

Parapsychologist Dean Radin's remarks on Wikipedia are worthy of note.

Also, if you've come across the definitions of things like dowsing etc. on Wikipedia, you'll notice that they're all policed by hard-line skeptics, i.e. groups with a negative agenda. These pages are full of inaccuracies and bias, and frankly Wikipedia is best ignored as far as dowsing is concerned. Don't waste your time. As Dean Radin says:

The most persistent editors on Wikipedia, by the way, largely seem to be 20-something students who are riding high on arrogance, because like all kids, they're suffering under the delusion that they know everything. (I recall this state of mind quite clearly from when I was 20-something.)

Been there, done that.

Ian

[Ian Pegler]

From the BBC:

An online tool that claims to reveal the identity of organisations that edit Wikipedia pages has revealed that the CIA was involved in editing entries.
Wikipedia Scanner allegedly shows that workers on the agency's computers made edits to the page of Iran's President.

It also purportedly shows that the Vatican has edited entries about Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams.

CLICK HERE to read the article.

Ian

[Ian Pegler]

As more and more netziens fish around with the Wikipedia Scanner (link broken), it's becoming more and more apparent just what a spin-job Wikipedia has become.

A US Army Employee censored the Roswell conspiracy pages, An employee of Dell, who make PCs, told people to "go buy an Apple" on Dell's own web-pages. Creationists in Tulsa edited an article on Darwin's Origin of Species, saying it was "mostly fictional". Companies promoting themselves, companies deleting non-flattering comments...

On it goes...

Wired(link broken) have been publishing the most scandalous and salacious edits and you can add your own or vote on the ones that are there.

Clearly Wikipedia is becoming a propaganda machine and cannot be trusted for anything where there is a potential for a "point of view" - which pretty much includes everything, when you think about it.

Incidentally some time in March 2007 somebody with the IP address 216.82.171.2 edited the Wikipedia page on Dowsing, edited the word "dowsers" and replaced it with "dicks".

CLICK HERE for more info.

Need I say more?

Ian

[simonwheeler]

Incidentally some time in March 2007 somebody with the IP address 216.82.171.2 edited the Wikipedia page on Dowsing, edited the word "dowsers" and replaced it with "dicks".

FWIW: That IP address is from around W.Broadway and Grand in New York City....

[Ian Pegler]

FWIW: That IP address is from around W.Broadway and Grand in New York City....

I make it Rockford, Illinois. Whatever.

Ian

[Ian Pegler]

As mentioned elsewhere, a programme was broadcast recently featured Professor Richard Dawkins which attacked dowsing.

The very next day the wikipedia page on Dowsing was edited by someone with the IP address 86.133.212.91. He added the sentence:

Richard Dawkins claims that dowsing is "utter rubbish".

see here

It was removed about 16 minutes later.

Ian

[Helen-Healing]

I'm afraid, as you say, Wiki is losing all street cred.

[Ian Pegler]

Wikiscanner has now been modified so you can do a search on a specific page and see what organisations have been editing it.

To see what organisations have been editing the Dowsing web-page on Wikipedia, CLICK HERE(link broken)

It doesn't reveal anything very interesting. It seems ironic that the named editors of Wikipedia web-pages have greater anonymity than the people who think they're posting anonymously.

Wikiscanner picks up on the latter but not the former, so it's not as revealing as it should be. So much for transparency.

Ian

[john23]

I spent 6 months on there and found it was completely controlled by Allopaths, there being about 178 of them as editors, each one patrols a given set of medical pages it seems. Virtually impossible to get any text even on thsoe pages, the way round I found was to create your own pages, which they then attempt to delete as I logged here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Whaleto

even if they fail they try again until they succeed. Glad to get off there, felt like an escape from a madhouse. They even banned any links to my websites using some spurious excuse that was just ad hominem, even though I have 20 original documents exposing smallpox vaccination.

http://www.whale.to/a/wikipedia.html

[Ian Pegler]

Google is launching a new project called the Knol, which aims to compete with Wikipedia.

According to the Daily Telepgraph article(link broken), Udi Manber, Googles' vice president in engineering, said:

We hope that knols will include the opinions and points of view of the authors who will put their reputation on the line. Anyone will be free to write. For many topics, there will likely be competing knols on the same subject. Competition of ideas is a good thing.

According to the BBC article...

Industry commentator Nicholas Carr said the knol project was a "head-on competitor" with Wikipedia. He said it was an attempt by Google to knock ad-free Wikipedia entries on similar subjects down the rankings.

Ian


Edited 17.12.07 by I.P. - deleted repetition

[john23]

google is big brothers search engine and uses one of his beast computers, so I don't hold out much hope it will be any different http://www.google-watch.org

Its computer speed is awesome, if you put a document on the net it will be in google the next day, not just the header but every word, so you can search for a phrase and it will find it in that document within a second, the next day. Not bad considering my computer takes about 5 minutes to just search all my document headers.

Matt Cutts, a software engineer at Google since January 2000, used to work for the National Security Agency. Keyhole, the satellite imaging company that Google acquired in October 2004, was funded by the CIA. Since 2000, Google has recorded your search terms, the date-time of each search, the globally-unique ID in your cookie (it expires in 2038), and your IP address. This information is available to governments on request. If your favorite site features a Google search box, ask them to install their own local site search. They could also use our site search for webmasters, which shows the same results without the tracking.

[Ian Pegler]

This report just in from Reuters...

Lawmaker apologizes for blocking Wikipedia

BERLIN (Reuters) - A member of parliament who got a court order blocking online encyclopedia Wikipedia in Germany for two days because of entries linking him to communist-era security police apologized on Tuesday for overreacting.

CLICK HERE to read the article.

Ian

[An Ri Rua]

google is big brothers search engine and uses one of his beast computers, so I don't hold out much hope it will be any different http://www.google-watch.org

Its computer speed is awesome, if you put a document on the net it will be in google the next day, not just the header but every word, so you can search for a phrase and it will find it in that document within a second, the next day. Not bad considering my computer takes about 5 minutes to just search all my document headers.

Matt Cutts, a software engineer at Google since January 2000, used to work for the National Security Agency. Keyhole, the satellite imaging company that Google acquired in October 2004, was funded by the CIA. Since 2000, Google has recorded your search terms, the date-time of each search, the globally-unique ID in your cookie (it expires in 2038), and your IP address. This information is available to governments on request. If your favorite site features a Google search box, ask them to install their own local site search. They could also use our site search for webmasters, which shows the same results without the tracking.

You could also use www.Scroogle.org (link broken)which claims to give out temporary ips and to 'scrub' your searches. But that could encourage you to search more openly in the false belief that such a search engine is not also compromised. A honey-net as it were.

[Ian Pegler]

A new version of WikiScanner is currently under development which claims to be "more powerful than you can possibly imagine".

A sneak preview(link broken) version is now available, along with some completely new tools.

Frustratingly, the link to WikiScanner classic no longer works, however I do rather like the logo on the home-page(link broken). Rather apt, I thought!

The trouble with all these tools is they are only as transparent as their programmers make/allow them to be....

Ian

[An Ri Rua]

Can any of you dowse whether Scroogle is compromised? i.e. is it a honey net to give the false illusion of no-holds barred searches or am I best to keep my flower-arranging and renovation of old Skodas offline?