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

[Stephanie Daugherty]

I think cases like this need to be handled publicly and transparently when
there is obviously a deliberate PR campaign or a concerted effort to bias an
article one way or another.

When this happens the articles could receive some sort of notice box similar
to the npov and disputed box, but designed specifically to identify targets
of political, nationalist, religious, or PR spin campaigns - and designed
NOT to be removed except through process. This notice should caution readers
that any particular version of the page is likely to contain bias despite
our best efforts, encourage the examination of historical versions of the
page and link to a discussion of why it is so tagged - basically a very
strong and persistent version of COI notices usually found on the talk page.

This has three major benefits. It makes it less likely readers will take the
article at face value, it makes it easier to tell which articles require
special scrutiny when RC patrolling,  and it discourages the behavior by
publicly taking notice of it.?
On Mar 15, 2011 6:41 PM, "Will Beback" <will.beback.1 at gmail.com> wrote:
> The article doesn't say that a conspiracy within Wikipedia tried to bias
> articles. It says that a prominent industrialist and political contributor
> paid professional writers to alter Wikipedia articles to change the
> descriptions of his involvement in a political movement.
>
> It's a situation where organized professionals are working against
> unorganized amateurs. If it takes conspiracies within Wikipedia to
> counteract that kind of influence then we perhaps need more of them.
>
>
>
> On Tue, Mar 15, 2011 at 3:17 PM, Ian Woollard <ian.woollard at gmail.com
>wrote:
>
>> The thing is, it takes a conspiracy within the Wikipedia's rank and
>> file to bias an article significantly over a long period; otherwise
>> normal editing and then RFCs and so forth will tend sort it out.
>>
>> If it remains sufficiently inaccurate then the target will kick up a
>> big fuss; initially within the Wikipedia, and then other places like
>> Wikipedia Review and eventually in the press. The more people that
>> look at the bias, the less sustainable the position of the conspiracy
>> becomes.
>>
>>
>> On 15/03/2011, Ken Arromdee <arromdee at rahul.net> wrote:
>> > On Mon, 14 Mar 2011, The Cunctator wrote:
>> >>> Oh, certainly, left wing blogs are attacking the Kochs. And awareness
>> >>> among
>> >> hard-core political activists and junkies is probably pretty high.
>> >
>> > There you go.
>> >
>> >> But we're talking a very small percentage of the US population.
>> >>
>> >> There are only a few thousand regular editors on en.wp. There really
>> >> aren't
>> >> that many people who edit Wikipedia. And [[David H. Koch]] for example
>> is
>> >> semi-protected. So we're talking about a handful of editors.
>> >>
>> >> There are big differences between the hypothetical potential pool of
>> >> people
>> >> capable of editing Wikipedia, the pool of people interested in doing
so,
>> >> the
>> >> people with the experience and ability to do so effectively, etc.
>> >
>> > It's true that only a certain number of people would bias a Koch
article
>> > against the Koch's. It's also true that this can be said for virtually
>> any
>> > article where there is danger of political bias. By your reasoning
>> nobody
>> > should ever have to worry about political bias anywhere on Wikipedia.
>> >
>> > Some people do like to believe that no outsider should ever worry about
>> > political bias on Wikipedia. If so, there's not much I can say to
>> convince
>> > you except to point out that you have an inflated idea of how well
>> Wikipedia
>> > works. But if there's ever any article which is a valid concern, surely
>> > the Koch article has to be one of them. It's a BLP on a subject that is
>> > routinely the target of the left; about the only way it could be worse
is
>> > to be about Obama or Bush (and those are so high profile that the
danger
>> is
>> > probably less, anyway.)
>> >
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>> >
>>
>>
>> --
>> -Ian Woollard
>>
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