US Department of Justice banned from Wikipedia Wikipedia has temporarily blocked edits from the US Department of Justice after someone inside the government agency tried to erase references to a particularly-controversial Wiki-scandal. Early last week, the Boston-based Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA) was accused of organizing a secret …
Wikipedia is good in math, bad in general relativity. Wikipedia editors are persistently
censoring attempts to add info about ECE theory, which adds torsion to GR and
exposes fundamental errors in the foundation of torsionless GR. No good words about
Dr. Myron Evans are permitted. This may be because Evans has demolished the
Heisenberg Uncertainty principle and a certain amount of work by T'Hooft who seems
to be an influential Wiki editor. See www.aias.us for the info which cannot be posted
at wiki.
Is there anyone within the DoJ's address range whose *job* involves updating wikipedia? If not, then I suspect the US taxpayer would be well served if wikipedia just left the ban in place. (On the other hand, the correct place to try to implement such a restriction is probably a firewall at the DoJ.)
The problem is not those of us who treat Wikipedia as what it is, but those in the mass of semi-ignorant humanity who regard it with the attitude "It says so on Wikipedia so it MUST BE TRUE." that are the problem. If Wikipedia IS to continue as a source of 'facts', then it must be protected from malicious re-writing done in order to distort the 'truth'.
Of course, the other old adage "history is written by the victors" is more like "history is (re-)written by those who would be victorious", as so many "government agencies" have a vested interest in telling us what they would have us take for the 'truth'.
Some more on the work of Myron Evans:
http://opensys.blogsome.com/2005/07/01/generally-covariant-unified-field-theory-myron-w-evans/
The link on this page to Gerhard Bruhn's website is also illuminating. It also seems that Evan's number of published papers is rather low (according to the aias website (http://aias.us/index.php?goto=showPageByTitle&pageTitle=Unified_Field_Theory_papers) three in /APPB/ and /Physica B/. The publications in /Foundations of Physics Letters/ have been contested (http://www.springerlink.com/content/l1008h127565m362/)). It seems Wikipedia in this case did a good job of keeping nonsense of its pages.
I thought it was better than that: CAMERA stands for 'Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America'. I remember a Yes (Prime?) Minister episode where they said that government departments were named for the opposite of what they do. In this case, it appears to be life imitating art, as usual...
You ask "If Wikipedia is right to ban someone who merely attempted to game the site, why hasn't it banned others who've actually succeeded?"
Simple. Once they become senior admins they are "respected contributors" and thus any attempt to expose or punish them for gaming the system and POV pushing is dismissed as harassment. The only difference between Gni and SlimVirgin, Jayjg, Jossi etc is that the latter three gamers and POV-pushers were successful at building social alliances and doing enough "useful" grunt work and were subtle enough initially about their POV pushing that they were able to have their more questionable behaviors dismissed for long enough that they were ultimately unchallengeable and had enough power to do what they want. If Gni hadn't been stupid enough to have an easily penetratable email list as his organizing device, and had he not openly revealed himself as a CAMERA operative online (or shed his Gni account and opened a new one after his initial problems) there's no reason he couldn't have succeeded. Indeed, he'd simply be trodding the exact same path that Jayjg followed to become an unchallengable superadmin, arbcomm and "checkuser"
A site with 'Infitada' the word most commonly associated with terrorist attacks across the world publishes a series of emails in which a group of people set out to "keep Israel-related entries on Wikipedia from becoming tainted by anti-Israel editors," which seems to me to be de-slanting articles because if they were slanting them they would be 'ensuring a pro-Israeli viewpoints prevail' and the wikists ban the entire IP range of the DOJ.
Yep, sound professional to me..... NOT!
I had a run-in with "Dr" Evans 4 years ago. He complained to Yahoo about a group I ran, and Yahoo deleted it without even notifying me.
We have a real problem when a mentally ill person can censor discussion so easily. I'm glad we have so many people watching Wikipedia and defending it from people like him.
There's a whole article on Criiticism of Wikipedia, and at least one separate article dedicated to a single incident (the time a libel on an American journalist went unnoticed for several months). There is a policy about not overly focusing on Wikipedia, but it's hardly an outright ban and has nothing to do with controversy.
'Intifada' originally meant 'uprising', or 'struggle'; it became linked with 'terrorism' only to the degree that the Israeli occupation defines any act of resistance or asymmetric warfare as 'terror'. Have you ever been IN the Occupied Territories - in a role other than as the 1984esque euphemistic 'settler'?
For NPOV to work, all sides have to agree to it. The marvel of Wikipedia is that, on so many topics, people have routinely performed acts of breathtaking sanity and humanity. Injecting those values into BOTH SIDES of the struggle in Palestine would go a long way towards resolving the problems there - and the blowback suffered by outside countries intimately tied to the struggle.
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