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

[Ken Arromdee]

On Tue, 15 Mar 2011, Will Beback 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.

Getting rid of bias is not an action movie.  You don't try to give the other
side a fighting chance.  Professionals versus amateurs is perfectly legitimate
if they really are trying to stop the amateurs from introducing bias.  And of
course the assumption "they may say they're getting rid of bias but they
really want to add bias and they're lying about it" is just an assumption.

We went over the same thing with CAMERA.  A target of the left wing decided
to try removing bias against their side from Wikipedia and was treated like
they were trying to introduce it instead, with the main reasoning being
"they couldn't possibly really want to remove bias, after all, they're
too organized, and anyone who likes the cause that they like must be biased
anyway.  Besides, Wikipedia has no bias, so nobody could really want to
remove it".  CAMERA did make a few missteps (trying to become admins, for
instance), but that's far from all they were blamed for.