Wikipedia: Quis Custodiet Ipsos Custodes? Part 2

When we go to an encyclopedia for information, we should be able to expect the best available information--free of petty bias and corruption. Unfortunately, the closer one looks at Wikipedia, the more petty bias and corruption of information one tends to find.

[William]Connolley is not only a big shot on Wikipedia, he's a big shot at Wikipedia -- an a dministrator with unusual editorial clout. Using that clout, this 40-something scientist of minor relevance gets to tear down scientists of great accomplishment. Because Wikipedia has become the single biggest reference source in the world, and global warming is one of the most sought-after subjects, the ability to control information on Wikipedia by taking down authoritative scientists is no trifling matter.

...Wikipedia is full of rules that editors are supposed to follow, as well as a code of civility. Those rules and codes don't apply to Connolley, or to those he favours.

"Peiser's crap shouldn't be in here," Connolley wrote several weeks ago, in berating a Wikipedian colleague during an "edit war," as they're called. In such a war, rival sides change the content of a Wikipedia page from one competing version to another, often with bewildering speed. (Two people, landing on the same page seconds apart, might obtain entirely different information.) In the Peiser case, a Wikipedian stopped a prolonged war by freezing a continually changing page, to prevent more alterations until the dispute was settled. As occurs on such occasions, readers are alerted that Wikipedians are warring over the page, and that Wikipedia was not endorsing the version of the page that had been frozen. To Connolley's chagrin, however, the version that was frozen cast doubt on claims of a consensus on climate change. Although this was done within Wikipedia rules, Connolley intervened to revert the page and ensure Wikipedia readers saw only what he wanted them to see.

Peiser is Benny Peiser, a distinguished U.K. scientist who had convincingly refuted a study by Naomi Oreskes that claimed to have found no scientific papers at odds with the conventional wisdom on climate change. The Oreskes study -- cited by Al Gore in his film, An Inconvenient Truth-- is an article of faith to many global warming doomsayers and guarded from criticism by Connolley et al. Peiser and other critics of Oreskes's study, meanwhile, get demeaned.

Connolley and his cohorts don't just edit pages of scientists actively involved in the global warming debate. Scientists who work in unrelated fields, but who have findings that indirectly bolster a critique of climate change orthodoxy, will also get smeared. So will non-scientists and organizations that he disagrees with. Any reference, anywhere among Wikipedia's 2.5-million English-language pages, that casts doubt on the consequences of climate change will be bent to Connolley's bidding. __Source

As we are rapidly learning by following climate research, the hypothesis so favoured by Connolley--catastrophic anthropogenic global warming (CAGW)--is rapidly becoming discredited by the data. Yet Connolley and his witless acolytes such as Kim Dabelstein Petersen, continue to enforce the party line on Wikipedia. Who is watching the watchers?

At Wikipedia, the petty warlords of corrupted information reign. While some will claim that Wikipedia has procedures that would prevent such info-tyranny, they make those claims out of ignorance of what goes on behind-the-scenes.

H/T IceCap

Wikipedia: Quis Custodiet Ipsos Custodes?

I made the changes again, and this time confirmed that the changes had been saved. But then, in a twinkle, they were gone again! I made other changes. And others. They all disappeared shortly after they were made.

Who watches Wikipedia to make sure that it is a democratic information source, not a fascist dictatorship of politicized paranoiacs? You will never really know the answer to that question until you "bump into a sensitive point" in the Wikipedia system of control. This story illustrates the problem:

As I'm writing this column for the Financial Post, I am simultaneously editing a page on Wikipedia. I am confident that just about everything I write for my column will be available for you to read. I am equally confident that you will be able to read just about nothing that I write for the page on Wikipedia.

The Wikipedia page is entitled Naomi Oreskes, after a professor of history and science studies at the University of California San Diego, but the page offers only sketchy details about Oreskes. The page is mostly devoted to a notorious 2004 paper that she wrote, and that Science journal published, called "Beyond the Ivory Tower: The Scientific Consensus on Climate Change." This paper analyzed articles in peer-reviewed journals to see if any disagreed with the alarming positions on global warming taken by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. "Remarkably, none of the papers disagreed with the consensus position," Oreskes concluded....

...When Oreskes's paper came out, it was immediately challenged by science writers and scientists alike, one of them being Benny Peiser, a prominent U.K. scientist and publisher of CCNet, an electronic newsletter to which I and thousands of others subscribe. CCNet daily circulates articles disputing the conventional wisdom on climate change. No publication better informs readers about climate-change controversies, and no person is better placed to judge informed dissent on climate change than Benny Peiser.

For this reason, when visiting Oreskes's page on Wikipedia several weeks ago, I was surprised to read not only that Oreskes had been vindicated but that Peiser had been discredited. More than that, the page portrayed Peiser himself as having grudgingly conceded Oreskes's correctness.

Upon checking with Peiser, I found he had done no such thing. The Wikipedia page had misunderstood or distorted his comments. I then exercised the right to edit Wikipedia that we all have, corrected the Wikipedia entry, and advised Peiser that I had done so.

Peiser wrote back saying he couldn't see my corrections on the Wikipedia page. Had I neglected to save them after editing them, I wondered. I made the changes again, and this time confirmed that the changes had been saved. But then, in a twinkle, they were gone again! I made other changes. And others. They all disappeared shortly after they were made. NationalPost

Go to the source and read the rest of this fascinating detective story. It is not an isolated circumstance.

If you want to understand what has happened to the university and the public information space, why the news media of 2008 may resemble the Ministry of Truth in 1984 more than you are willing to accept, you need to look at Wikipedia and understand how the good intentions of Wiki can be twisted to autocratic ends by ideologically driven--though deeply disturbed--individuals.

You do not have to go to China or back in time to the old USSR to find 1984-style information control.

H/T Jennifer Marohasy

While I've been writing this column, the Naomi Oreskes page has changed 10 times. Since I first tried to correct the distortions on the page, it has changed 28 times. If you have read a climate change article on Wikipedia -- or on any controversial subject that may have its own Kim Dabelstein Petersen -- beware. Wikipedia is in the hands of the zealots. Source

Update: Kim Dabelstein Petersen apparently edits several pages on climate change at Wikipedia. All of them are apparently administered with the same degree of mindless tyranical despotism as the Naomi Oreskes page. These are the guardians of public information. If you think I am going too far, then all you have to do is go to the sites and change them. Go ahead. Just do it. I dare you.
;-)