Congress Keeps Getting Banned From Wikipedia
Friday, August 22, 2014 - 10:09 AM
It seems that Wikipedia has a congressional problem. For the
third time this summer, the House has been blocked from editing
Wikipedia articles.
This particular ban stems from an edit on the article for the Netflix show Orange Is the New Black. An anonymous editor on the hill changed a reference to actress Laverne Cox as being a transgender woman to
"a real man pretending to be a woman," and linking to an article to
that effect from The National Review. And that's not the only edit from
this user regarding transgender issues. From The Hill:
For better or for worse, Wikipedia is where people go to get a broad overview on topics ranging from the banal to the politicized. It's great that there is a resource online that is frequently updated and peer reviewed on a number of topics, and for all its failures, it can be a nice starting point, especially if you know enough to follow the articles used for reference. Unfortunately, it's frequently vandalized, and often used to push political agendas. A few years ago, a conservative wikipedia editor (who has been banned numerous times for sockpuppeting and agenda pushing) tried to get the On the Media article removed from the site after objecting to a story we did about the number of people at Glenn Beck's rally.
I think of Wikipedia as like a conversation with a friend's smart older brother - I'm interested in what it has to say, but I take for granted it compresses details, drops certain information, gets certain things wrong, and is probably, in the end, pushing an agenda.
Earlier this week, the account had been used to edit pages for “tranny” — a derogatory term for transgender people — as well as the annual festival Camp Trans and transphobia, the opposition to people who are trans.The edit resulted in a month-long edit ban on Wikipedia from Congressional IPs
“An obvious transphobe is using this IP to edit the article on transphobia,” a Wikipedia user wrote earlier this month, urging administrators to block the account.
For better or for worse, Wikipedia is where people go to get a broad overview on topics ranging from the banal to the politicized. It's great that there is a resource online that is frequently updated and peer reviewed on a number of topics, and for all its failures, it can be a nice starting point, especially if you know enough to follow the articles used for reference. Unfortunately, it's frequently vandalized, and often used to push political agendas. A few years ago, a conservative wikipedia editor (who has been banned numerous times for sockpuppeting and agenda pushing) tried to get the On the Media article removed from the site after objecting to a story we did about the number of people at Glenn Beck's rally.
I think of Wikipedia as like a conversation with a friend's smart older brother - I'm interested in what it has to say, but I take for granted it compresses details, drops certain information, gets certain things wrong, and is probably, in the end, pushing an agenda.
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Alex Goldman
Alex Goldman is a producer for On the Media and the co-host/creator of TLDR. He is on twitter here. Subscribe to the TLDR podcast here.
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Unlike those other sources of information that never drop certain information, get certain things wrong, and are probably not, in the end, pushing an agenda, like...well...you know...those other places where you need not apply any critical thinking.
You know the ones I mean.