Monday, November 26, 2007
Wikipedia's bias?
On Wikipedia, I noticed that the blog entry for "Iraq and Weapons of Mass Destruction" had a factual error. It indicated that no weapons were found after the invasion. I edited this to correct the entry, using the declassified report of chemical weapons found in Iraq from the U.S. Congress released last year. I changed it to state that a small number of pre-1991 weapons had been found, including mustard gas and sarin nerve gas and the artillery shells used to deliver these weapons. I used an electronic copy of the U.S. Congressional report as a source, and sourced the entry correctly. The edit has been removed twice with a threat to ban me from the site.
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2 comments:
Did you try to contact anyone at Wikipedia to ask why you weren't allowed to post your comment?
Unfortunately, with the way Wikipedia works there is no one to contact because there really isn’t an organization to contact. As it is a publicly editable database, people are able to go into the system and edit any posts they want. They have standards of objectivity, an anti-bias policy, and sourcing requirements; however, these are enforced only by future individuals editing. Here, you have a few individuals who are working this hard to impugn the integrity of a particular article, they’re this committed to violating the anti-bias policy, and they’re this willing to replace an accurate and objective statement which is sourced against the Washington Post, Fox News, U.S. Congressional documents, and State Department documents with an inaccurate, biased statement which is not sourced. This makes it very difficult to enact a change because they’re watching it hawkishly, desperately trying to twist the tone of the article to their own editorial view. It would be a significant, major undertaking to try to “out edit” them so sometimes the best thing to do is realize that there are better ways of getting the information out.
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