Wikipedia Edits - Government Goes Wild
One of the big stories this week has been about Fox News making edits to and scrubbing stories on Wikipedia that are not flattering to their organization. But what about the U.S. government? Tech Insider publishes a column today with the top 25 government agencies that have been editing / scrubbing Wikipedia - and the list is somewhat shocking…not just the agencies, but how active they are in this practice…
In the past week, it’s been revealed that organizations as diverse as Fox News, Diebold, and the CIA have been making edits and scrubbing entries on the online resource Wikipedia. Now comes word that the practice of eliminating info and rewriting history is even more prevalent than previously suspected. And the U.S. government is leading the charge:
News articles worldwide have searched the database to show how Wikipedia can be used to edit portions of Wikipedia entries for political purposes and to remove portions of entries that may criticize government programs or policies…
From the Toronto Globe and Mail about edits from Canadian government and political organizations:
…a significant number of edits were made to articles about politicians that removed criticisms, added positive comments and, in some cases, inserted negative comments to the pages of political rivals…
Want to know what agencies in the U.S. government are making changes to Wikipedia? Try this “top 25″ list on for size (from Government Executive Tech Insider):
1. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (nasa.gov) 6,846
2. Department Of Veterans Affairs (va.gov) 4,210
3. Forestry And Fire Protection (ca.gov) 4,148
4. Dept Homeland Security (dhs.gov) 4,081
5. Information Systems U.S. House Of Representatives (house.gov) 3,736
6. National Institutes Of Health (nih.gov) 3,019
7. U.S. Courts (uscourts.gov) 2,869
8. U.S. Dept. Of Agriculture (usda.gov) 2,435
9. City Of New York (nyc.gov) 2,404
10. Salem Public Schools (ct.gov) 2,398
11. U.S. Dept Of Justice (usdoj.gov) 2,189
12. Information Services Division (nd.gov) 2,140
13. U.S. Senate Sergeant At Arms (senate.gov) 1,809
14. Federal Aviation Administration (faa.gov) 1,706
15. NOAA Aircraft Operations Center (noaa.gov) 1,590
16. Dotrspavolpe Center (dot.gov) 1,566
17. Lawrence Livermore Laboratory (llnl.gov) 1,456
18. U.S. Department Of Labor/Employment Standards Admin (dol-esa.gov) 1,449
19. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (epa.gov) 1,449
20. Internal Revenue Service (irs.gov) 1,290
21. National Park Service (nps.gov) 1,214
22. Library Of Congress Information Technology Services (loc.gov) 1,142
23. Social Security Administration (ssa.gov) 1,134
24. U.S. Patent And Trademark Office (uspto.gov) 1,097
25. Virginia Information Technologies Agency (Vita) (virginia.gov) 1,047
Obviously, some of the changes being made were probably benign, in order to correct some factual error - but it’s easy to imagine that the vast majority of changes from government internet domains are being made to change perception. In other words, massaging the propaganda to fit a particular agency’s agenda.
I’ve always maintained that there’s a lot of good info on Wikipedia, but due to the open source nature of the site, it’s important to take what you find, and corroborate it through second and third sources. However, it’s interesting that government agencies have been sooooooooo active in altering entrys into on of the web’s most accessed information sites.
As with all things online, caveat emptor. Multiple sources are your friend.
Interesting that DoD is not in the top 25. I wonder if they’re in the mix anywhere?
Eh - NASA’s the largest and one of the ones I’d think of as most likely to have people making “good” changes (changes to formulae in math topics, posting new articles about new research, tweaks to articles about Mars, etc.) I’d like to see a breakdown of the changes they’ve made before judging.
OTOH - the VA is #2? DHS is #4? The House is #5? That’s out of whack, and I can’t see how the majority of those cases aren’t going to turn out to be people “correcting” the propoganda.
As an astronomer, I can tell you that more and more in the sciences we are using wikipedia (and other smaller, scattered wikis) as a way of publishing and informing. NASA has a huge number of scientists and engineers, and I’m sure many of them are actively playing the necessary role of informed expert.
foobar, I can buy the NASA explanation, and maybe the other “public interest” and scientific agencies publishing / updating on Wikipedia. DHS, DOJ, U.S. House of Representatives - hell, all of them have a hard enough time keeping their own sites up to date (and reasonably accessible). There’s little reason for any of those type of agencies to be playing anonymously on Wikipedia.
(Just as an aside, I recall reading somewhere on some tinfoil hat site, Rense maybe? that Wikipedia was a CIA-funded operation…)
No NASA does not have a lot of technical people on their staff. They are mostly paper pushers. That is what the second “A” in NASA stands for (Administration). They mostly contract out to get top notch technical expertise and building capacity. This seems to be the biggest misconception about NASA, and they would very much like to keep that misconception alive. Truth be told, most of the rocket scientist are no longer there. Instead you have buildings full of admin working hard at creating paper work and important positions for themselves. NASA’s true mission these days is to keep sucking dollars and not much more.
And in case you have not noticed they are leveraging the Internet to pump propaganda to all corners of the earth because they really do not have much more to offer than to devour tax dollars for the last 10 to 20 years. Heck, now they are trying to take over k-12 science education by becoming publishers of curriculum materials and using the Internet to stream it to all the schools. They are telling Congress and everyone in education that they are the math, science, geography, and technology education experts of the nation! They want each and every classroom to be an opportunity to indoctrinate students. It doesn’t matter that such roles are outside of those given to the US Federal Government by the Constitution, or that it is against Federal Law. They just don’t care, as long as it serves their needs.
Outside of the IRS, they are the worst Nazi’s we have in the US government. They want to be the galactic Uber Meisters that dictate to everyone having anything to do with airplanes, aeronautics, air traffic control, engineering, manufacturing, space, rockets, earth science, and now education. Their idea of a competitive market is having companies come to them and grovel for contracts.
Space Shuttle launches cost 1 to 2 billion a launch depending on how you account for their services. It is a bureaucrat’s wet dream. Whereas, an expendable launch vehicle only costs around 55 to 200 million a pop. Can’t have a big galactic empire with expendable rockets.
Do you see why they are so desperate to control information? If it wasn’t for them crushing everyone else, we could have had a competitive market for space business by now.
You can bet these guys are going after every chance and trick they can to spread propaganda and indoctrinate how important their agency is. Aggressively acting to seize control and subdue the truth is what despots do. Especially when they have little else to offer the public.
Yes, you are correct, when NASA has a critical on-orbit problem they run down the halls and grab 30 folks at random out of the offices then throw them in a mockup and give them the ISS and STS toolsets and make them work the problem until they fix it.
Put down the kool aid…
Actually…
I would bet the vast majority were not part of some sort of “operation”, but simply represent non-prohibited “limited personal use”. Feds, like everyone else, have diverse interests and knowledge, and like most everyone else, have Internet access at work.
Wikipedia is designed to be edited. It’s intrinsically open source, and anyone can edit it.
Oh, and most of the federal government has been around longer than the Bush administration. Believe it or not, most federal types would probalby balk at bona-fide propaganda operations against the public.
I’ve made changes to a Wikipedia article from my NASA office (unofficially and while on lunch break). It was to update information on a pending shuttle launch that had become inaccurate due to developments in the countdown period. I just hated seeing inaccurate information on the page. Wikipedia articles, by their very nature should change more often than old paperbound encyclopedias do - to ensure accuracy. That’s the power of wikipedia, isn’t it? If people inside the organization aren’t allowed to update the entries to ensure accuracy, who else should we depend on to do so?
“Space Shuttle launches cost 1 to 2 billiion (…) Whereas, an expendable launch vehicle only costs around 55 to 200 million a pop.”
This alone is enough to estabilish that he is an idiot or a troll. Certainly a paranoid woo.
Nice find and write, RB.
“Space Shuttle launches cost 1 to 2 billiion (…) Whereas, an expendable launch vehicle only costs around 55 to 200 million a pop.”
Do the math.
NASA shuttle budget is $4.5 billion per year.
Total of 9 launches scheduled for 2008 & 2009.
Average 4.5 per year.
Cost per launch $1 billion.
In previous years the launch rate has been much lower, so the cost per launch has pushed even higher. The program average is less than 5 per year. The best they ever did was 9 in 1985.
The fact people from the likes of NASA, NOAA, NIH and LLNL are contributing should be good news for wikipedia.
The other thing I haven’t seen mentioned in the hype is that if there was a serious, planned attempt to censor or whitewash stuff on wikipedia, it would be utterly trivial not to have it tied back to government agency domains. Do these people really think that if the CIA, as an agency, had an agenda to push they couldn’t come up with a few proxies on innocent looking domains ?
Any company with a NASA affiliation has nasa.gov on their domain name. It gives their affiliation away deliberately. If it was all “top secret conspiricy”, why on earth would they leave the domain on the edit?! It is most likely that these are people who know what they are talking about adding information to the public domain. The cost per launch is not just propellant, it’s all the other ground servicing, hire of overseas airfields for aborts, vehicle maintenance, staff, equipment, vehicles.. the list is endless. The money would be spent whether NASA launched Shuttles or not. This way, at least the US taxpayer gets a delivery for the money. It is still less than 0.1% of the US GDP.
I cannot say that I am surprised by this posting. Wikipedia is used as a way to inform people about any topic just like a print encyclopedia does. Why wouldn’t anyone who is interested in informing the public be involved in editing Wikipedia articles? There will be editors with intentions to inform and misinform. Since anyone can participate it is likely anyone in government, corporations or private citizens will be editing. Why is this a surprise?