[WikiEN-l] Koch brothers articles doctored says Think Progress

[Fred Bauder]

> On 09/03/2011 23:24, Tony Sidaway wrote:
>> Think Progress, a progressive blog run by the Center for American
>> Progress, today ran a story about a hired PR firm creating sock puppet
>> accounts to clean up Wikipedia articles for the Koch brothers.
>>
>> If true, this will only get messier as the Presidential election
>> campaign 2012 heats up.
>>
>>
>> http://thinkprogress.org/2011/03/09/koch-wikipedia-sock-puppet/
>>
> What is an "airbush"? I think we should be told.
>
> Seriously, a blog item so poorly written proof-read is hard to treat as
> authoritative. [[Charles G. Koch]] does apparently need work.
>
> Charles

Our article "Airbrush" does not include information on the use of
"airbrush" as a metaphor, although it has a section on the technique as
used to retouch photographs. In this context airbushing the Koch brothers
article, emphasizing the positive and de-emphasizing the negative, would
produce the kind of pablum point of view editors would like to serve us
up about other controversial figures and practices.

I'm surprised to see that our Wiktionary article also does not treat
airbrush as a metaphor. See
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wiktionary/en/wiki/airbrush We understand it
well, it is point of view editing. Airbrushing has a connotation of doing
so carefully and subtly. I'm afraid this editor failed in that respect;
he seems to have been quite bold, announcing his conflict of interest in
his first edit. He is now banned, and I cannot say there was not a good
basis for that, but he was hardly subtle. And a good deal of what he did
was on the talk page of the articles, which is what we ask.

Fred