Free Republic

I was looking for some info on Sarah Palin this morning, and did a search for a wikipedia article using Ixquick.com. When I clicked on the link (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarah_Palin), I got a picture of Sarah and a bunch of racist and obscene stuff. I thought you fellow Freepers would want to know her Wikipedia posting is being messed with. Perhaps you know how to fix it. Thanks.

Voters do this and it needs work, so please forget your bias. The attacks against Palin are constant and sometimes nasty. You can do a little activism at home at your computer. The main Sarah Palin description of who she is at the moment isn’t too bad. But the sub categories are rather damaging. Such as this one: Political positions of Sarah Palin The whole pages is full of condescending and just very bias remarks such as this:”Endangered species she opposed the listing of polar bears as an endangered species, claiming that she had based her position on a comprehensive...

In the days leading up to Republican presidential candidate John McCain's running mate announcement, political junkies glued to broadcasts and blogs for clues of McCain's veep choice might have done better to keep a sharp eye on each candidate's Wikipedia entry. Just hours before McCain declared his veep choice of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, her Wiki page saw a flurry of activity, with editors adding details about her approval rating and husband's employment. Perhaps more tellingly, some of the same users editing her page were almost simultaneously updating McCain's Wiki entry, adding information dealing with accuracy, sources and footnotes to...

Broadway runs east of Seventh Avenue north of 45th Street. Donald Trump owns an office building on Sixth Avenue. Lee Brown, the early 1990s police commissioner who presided over the highest murder rate in the city's history, was a hero in the war against crime. In what otherwordly New York City can this be true? In the wacky world of Wikipedia, the engine of ignorance "compiled by volunteers" and masquerading as a legitimate reference work. Its unreliability is not exactly news - it's the bane of educators who must teach pupils not to trust it.

John McCain's campaign is denying a suggestion made yesterday that the candidate's lengthy response yesterday to the crisis in Georgia was lifted in part from Wikipedia. "We did not copy Wikipedia in Sen. McCain’s remarks," said spokesman Brian Rogers. Three portions of the GOP nominee's statement yesterday were seized upon by an editor for the online encyclopedia and sent to blogger Taegan Goddard with the claim that the words seemed to match the Wiki entry for Georgia.

HE LIT THE FUSE BY ACCIDENT, with good intentions serving as his matchstick. On June 8, 2005, at 10:50 a.m., a 26-year-old computer software engineer in Tehran created a seemingly innocuous entry on Wikipedia about Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, then a fringe candidate running for president of Iran. The minibiography was just 73 words long. Its author, Roozbeh Pournader, had no clue he was touching off an explosive war of words that would rage online for more than two years. "At that time," says Pournader, who now lives in California, "Ahmadinejad's running was considered a joke." Pournader is part of an army...

Wikipedia Ate My Homework by: Deborah Lambert, August 11, 2008 Wikipedia, the much-ballyhooed online information source, was recently blamed, along with other online research sites, “for Scotland’s falling exam pass rates,” according to Martyn McLaughlin in the NewsScotsman.com. To the dismay of students, this cut-and-paste info source has also caught the attention of eagle-eyed American professors. Some have decided to eliminate it from their classes altogether. Wikipedia itself reported that “Neil Walters, a history professor at Middlebury College in Vermont,” claimed that “vandalism of Wikipedia was used as a source in reports submitted to him.” Walters’ department adopted a policy...

Wikipedia is the free online encyclopedia, "launched in 2001 by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger," according to itself. They introduced a radical concept: an opportunity for knowledge about any and all subjects, developed and maintained in a quasi-organized, quasi-anarchistic structure by named or unnamed authors and editors. The concept has had its strengths and weaknesses. It takes advantage of the ubiquity and near-universal accessibility of the Internet. The model relies on volunteer participation by editors. It is based on simple principles to align all editors toward a common goal - that is, the creation of verifiable content from reliable sources...

The controversy over Wikipedia's censorship of any update regarding the alleged John Edwards scandal as chronicled by your humble correspondent yesterday has taken an interesting new turn. Wikipedia, in response to this controversy, has now made an announcement at the top of their John Edwards entry: This page is currently protected from editing until July 30, 2008 or until disputes have been resolved. This protection is not an endorsement of the current version. See the protection policy and protection log for more details. Please discuss any changes on the talk page; you may use the {{editprotected}} template to ask an administrator to...

Wikipedia, which allowed verb tenses for their Tim Russert entry to be changed from present to past tense about a half hour before the official announcement of his death, is suddenly going ultra legal in its refusal to allow their John Edwards entry to be updated with mention of the alleged scandal which was reported in the National Enquirer with many of the details confirmed by Fox News. Suddenly Wikipedia has become a stickler for confirmation detail before the Edwards entry can be updated. To get an idea of how much Wikipedia is twisting itself into a pretzel to justify their refusal to...

Ever wonder how Al Gore, the United Nations, and the media continue to get away with their claim of a "scientific consensus" confirming their doomsday view of global warming? Look no further than Wikipedia for a stunning example of how the global-warming propaganda machine works, says Lawrence Solomon, executive director of Energy Probe and author of "The Deniers." In theory, Wikipedia is a "people's encyclopedia" written and edited by the people who read it; so on controversial topics, one might expect to see a broad range of opinion. But on global warming, Wikipedia offers consensus, Gore-style -- a consensus forged...

Grilled cheese, World War II and fiduciary have one thing in common: if you “Google” them, each prompts a Wikipedia entry as the No. 1 result. Wikipedia is all too convenient, but of what value is it? What good is a stockpile of information if it’s unreliable and often incorrect, as many have said Wikipedia is? Since its launch in 2001, the “The Free Encyclopedia” has grown exponentially, offering a definition (or more) for almost every topic. Last spring the resource reached the 10 million article mark over a spectrum of 20 different languages in its attempt to “summarize all...

July 08, 2008, 6:00 a.m. WikipropagandaSpinning green. By Lawrence Solomon Ever wonder how Al Gore, the United Nations, and company continue to get away with their claim of a “scientific consensus� confirming their doomsday view of global warming? Look no farther than Wikipedia for a stunning example of how the global-warming propaganda machine works. As you (or your kids) probably know, Wikipedia is now the most widely used and influential reference source on the Internet and therefore in the world, with more than 50 million unique visitors a month. In theory Wikipedia is a “people’s encyclopedia� written and edited...

Digg.com and Wikipedia attack truth and promote anti Semitic hatehttp://avideditor.wordpress.com/2008/05/14/diggcom-and-wikipedia-attack-truth-and-promote-anti-semitic-hate/ When searching for something in a search engine wikipedia and digg.com stories are usually the first results. It looks as if anti-Semitic moderators at these two sites are trying to rewrite history with anti-Israeli lies. It is important to do what ever we can in order to prevent jihadi propaganda from brainwashing billions of internet users.

Wikipedia is billed as the world's largest encyclopedia, but is it also the world's largest propaganda tool for smearing conservatives and promoting leftist views?

Tyler Hurd, a 23-year-old junior at SCSU, hopes to be a special education teacher. Hurd spent the past month at Technical High School in St. Cloud, working toward completing the 50 hours of secondary field placement required to earn his teaching license. But student teaching, along with many other aspects of daily life, is not always simple for Hurd. When Hurd was 14, he sustained a head injury while playing hockey. The injury resulted in epilepsy, a neurological disorder causing chronic seizures. Because a seizure can take place at any moment, Hurd was matched with Emmitt, a 2 and a...

Next to Al Gore, William Connolley may be the world's most influential person in the global warming debate. He has a PhD in mathematics and worked as a climate modeller, but those accomplishments don't explain his influence ...~~snip~~ But Connolley is a big shot on Wikipedia ... William Connolley's opinions ... count for a great deal at Wikipedia, even though some might not think them particularly worthy of note. "It is his view that there is a consensus in the scientific community about climate change topics such as global warming, and that the various reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on...

Last week, in my column on Wikipedia’s zealots, I described how the website’s editors patrol the website’s pages to enforce the conventional wisdom on climate change. Anyone skeptical of the United Nations’ take on global warming gets swarmed — Wikipedia’s enforcers neutralize him and his comments or take him out completely. The Wikipedia site in this way has become a paragon of modern propaganda, operating under the illusion of Internet openness and respect for democratic process, while in reality inhabiting a fantasy world in which up is down and words mean whatever you want them to mean.

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.

More news from the front of the Wiki Wars, the ideological battle for the soul of Wikipedia: it seems left-wingers at the online encyclopedia site are angry that anyone would want to mention Absolut's reconquista controversy out of the vodka maker's article.How do we know this? From reading the "Talk" page for the Wikipedia entry "Absolut Vodka," where people can discuss the article and changes they'd like to see made to it. Apparently liberals there do not want the public to know that the company got in big trouble win consumers after it ran an ad in Mexico portraying that...

March 3, 2008 Jilted lover uses eBay to hit back at Wikipedia guru After being dumped by Jimmy Wales on his own website, Rachel Marsden put his clothes up for auction on eBay Philippe Naughton As of midday today, $102.50 could buy you a little piece of internet history: the T-shirt that Jimmy Wales was wearing when he met Rachel Marsden for what he insists was their one and only night of passion. There's nothing special about the T-shirt, except for a couple of stubborn stains that even Tide extra-strength could not remove. But it's not every day that a...

Did you know that Wikipedia, normally very scrupulous about maintaining strictly factual content, has a whole special project dedicated to promoting understanding for a completely imaginary country? WikiProject Palestine.

A couple of days ago I answered the call to show jihadis that we honor freedom of speech by reprinting the Muhammad cartoons. There is still more rioting in Denmark now as a result of the cartoons. It turns out that Denmark, and western publications, aren't the only victims of the jihadi effort to censor all references to the prophet Muhammad. Wikipedia also needs our support because they are under fire to remove all images of Muhammad ... to the tune of 180,000 complaints.

Wikipedia, the free online encyclopaedia, is refusing to remove medieval artistic depictions of the Prophet Muhammad, despite being flooded with complaints from Muslims demanding the images be deleted. More than 180,000 worldwide have joined an online protest claiming the images.... are offensive to Islam, which prohibits any representation of Muhammad. But the defiant editors of the encyclopaedia insist they will not bow to pressure and say anyone objecting to the controversial images can simply adjust their computers so they do not have to look at them.[snip]Muslims and argue the least Wikipedia can do is blur or blank out the faces....

How. Embarassing. The Vatican daily L’Osservatore Romano is reporting that 67 professors from La Sapienza University in Rome who wrote a letter opposing a visit by Pope Benedict XVI based their opposition on a quote taken out of context from Wikipedia.org. The professors portrayed themselves as defenders “of freedom of research and of knowledge.” “In the name of ‘freedom of research and of knowledge,’ they have taken false information to be true, accepting an assertion without checking whether it is factual,” the Vatican newspaper reported. - CWNewsIcing on the proverbial cake: “That Wikipedia in all likelihood is the source...

Online encyclopedia Wikipedia has again stirred up controversy — this time over a biographical entry on the prophet Muhammad. Nearly 100,000 people worldwide have signed a Web-based petition asking Wikipedia to remove all depictions of the Prophet from its English-language entry, viewable here.

An article about the Prophet Muhammad in the English-language Wikipedia has become the subject of an online protest in the last few weeks because of its representations of Muhammad, taken from medieval manuscripts. In addition to numerous e-mail messages sent to Wikipedia.org, an online petition cites a prohibition in Islam on images of people. The petition has more than 80,000 “signatures,� though many who submitted them to ThePetitionSite.com, remained anonymous. “We have been noticing a lot more similar sounding, similar looking e-mails beginning mid-January,� said Jay Walsh, a spokesman for the Wikimedia Foundation in San Francisco, which administers the various...

Once again the Cuba page of Wikipedia is under complete control of the left. Unfavored input has been blocked For over a month now the page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuba which had become far closer to reality has been turned around and now the former pro-Castro bias is being slowly restored ... It seems significant since many undergraduates take their information from Wikipedia that a general note of caution be inserted thank you for your time and attention El Jigue

Criticism Support of Venezuelan Dictator is Inconsistent With Proclaimed Values The consistency of Code Pink's antiwar credentials and its values as an antiwar group is criticized because while it publicly opposes President Bush and his policies in response to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, Code Pink's leaders have embraced Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez. Most notably, Code Pink's three highest profile members, Medea Benjamin, Jodi Evans and Cindy Sheehan, visited Hugo Chavez in January 2006. After returning to the United States, Cindy Sheehan stated in an MSNBC interview that she would rather live under Hugo Chavez than President Bush...

Sabbaticals for Dummies by: Malcolm A. Kline, January 16, 2008 Those of us who have long been curious about what professors do on sabbatical could glean one sort of an answer from Oregon University English professor Edwin Battistella’s tongue-in-cheek (we think) listing of “Twenty-Five things to do on sabbatical” that appeared in the Fall 2007 issue of The Montana Professor. Although Battistella was obviously in a whimsical frame of mind when he constructed the “to do” list, the suggestions look all too credible to some of us on the higher education beat. Some of us always thought that the answer...

The foundation that runs — and accepts donations for — the online encyclopedia Wikipedia neglected to do a basic background check before hiring a chief operating officer who had been convicted of theft, drunken driving and fleeing a car accident. Before she left in July, Carolyn Bothwell Doran, 45, had moved up from a part-time bookkeeper for the Wikimedia Foundation and spent six months as chief operating officer, responsible for personnel and financial management. In March, she signed the small nonprofit's tax return, which listed more than $1.3 million in donations. At the time, she was on probation for a...

Second Amendment to the United States Constitution From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Amendment II (the Second Amendment) of the United States Constitution’s Bill of Rights declares a well-regulated militia as "being necessary to the security of a free State" and prohibits infringement of "the right of the people to keep and bear arms." The meaning of the Second Amendment is one of the most misunderstood and disputed among the entire Bill of Rights.[1][2] One key controversy revolves around who is prohibited from infringement and why the Supreme Court has never ruled that the Second Amendment prohibits individual States from infringing...

<p>No where will you ever find Al-Qaeda, Hamas, Islamic Jihad and Hezbollah described as terror organizations by Wikipedia. Wikipedia will quote the US State Department or the United Nations Security Council as saying that they are terror groups, but Wikipedia itself will only describe these organizations as "militants."</p>

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Episcopal Life reports from Church Times: A suggestion that Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori ordered the removal of information from the Wikipedia website has been discredited, according to a report by Simon Sarmiento in the U.K.-based Church Times newspaper. The story, which originated on an American conservative website in May, resurfaced last Saturday in The Independent newspaper, which reported that Barbara Alton, personal assistant to Bishop Charles Bennison of Pennsylvania, "deleted information concerning a cover-up of child sexual abuse [by the bishop's brother], allegations that the bishop misappropriated $11.6 million in trust funds, and evidence of other scandals. When...

A new study out of California shows that Wikipedia isn’t a trusted source of information for college students. Instead most turned first to college resources such as the school library and databases, followed by trusted news websites and search engines. Only 3% of students surveyed, actually turned to Wikipedia for information. This is good news considering Wikipedia is notorious for being a bastion of liberalism, and shows little neutrality on political or cultural topics. Many of the editors on Wikipedia are actually recruited from the leftist website Democratic Underground. A quick perusal of the Wikipedia entry on Democratic Underground shows...

Someone pointed this site out to me, and it looks VERY interesting and useful for finding the source of anonymous edits on wikipedia.

An online tool that claims to reveal the identity of organisations that edit Wikipedia pages has shown the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was involved in editing entries. Wikipedia Scanner allegedly found that workers on the Agency's computers made edits to the page of Iran's president and also that the Vatican has edited entries about Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams. Wikipedia is a free online encyclopaedia where entries can be created and edited by anyone. Most of the edits detected by the scanner correct spelling mistakes or factual errors, but others have been used to remove potentially damaging material or to...

"American Morning" co-host Kiran Chetry, an alumna of Fox News ChannelÂ’s "Fox & Friends Weekend," gave her former colleagues at Fox a run for the money in highlighting a case of media bias. While "Fox & Friends" on Thursday morning was covering the earthquake in Peru, and featured several segments on the 30th anniversary of the death of Elvis, Chetry interviewed "Wired" magazine senior editor Nick Thompson towards the end of the 7 am EDT hour on a new website that traces who is editing different entries on Wikipedia. Chetry brought up an instance in December 2005 where the words...

For a few years the internet site Wikipedia has provided a research source that millions use and rely on. Some time ago, it became widely understood that just about anyone could provide information for Wikipedia’s database, and also edit it, which made it a site one relied on with a certain amount of caution. Just last week, however, just how unreliable Wikipedia is has become all too obvious.

A computer researcher has devised a way of tracking changes made to Wikipedia, the online encyclopaedia that anyone can edit, to expose organisations and individuals who tweak and airbrush their own entries. The sleuthing tool allows Wikipedia users to trace the source of millions of changes to entries on the popular website, even those done anonymously. So far the Wikipedia Scanner has unearthed a host of entry fiddling by organisations ranging from the CIA and the Labour Party to WalMart and the Mormon church. For example, employees of the intelligence agency have been found altering the biographical information on former...

Radio change The site also indicates that a computer owned by the US Democratic Party was used to make changes to the site of right-wing talk show host Rush Limbaugh. The changes brand Mr Limbaugh as "idiotic," a "racist", and a "bigot". An entry about his audience now reads: "Most of them are legally retarded." We really value transparency and the scanner really takes this to another level Wikipedia spokesperson The IP address is registered in the name of the Democratic National Headquarters. A spokesperson for the Democratic Party said that the changes had not been made on its computers....

They’re getting slammed with such immense traffic that it’s actually crippled their search function for the moment. But I’m going to link anyway, first and foremost so that you can bookmark it for use later when the wave subsides and second because the “Editor’s Picks” search terms in the sidebar do work — and some of them are tasty indeed. For example, select “Democratic Party” and it’ll bring up all the edits made to all Wikipedia pages from the range of IPs (allegedly) assigned to Democratic Party computers. Scroll down to the one for Rush Limbaugh and click the number...

What is "Islamo-fascism"? Jul 20, 2007 Bahman Aghai Diba - Persian Journal Islamo-fascism is a new name but the concept has a long history. It is clearly a combination between the ways of looking at Islam, with the policies of the fascist regimes of the twentieth century in Europe. (1) Although there are serious discussions about the exact meaning and extent of fascism (2), and the roots of the term (3) most of the sources agree that some characteristics are common in all fascist regimes such as: 1- Love of war and the acute need of the foreign enemies that...

Wikipedia: Israel Maintains Illegal Occupation, Brutal Apartheid By Joel Leyden Israel News Agency Jerusalem ---- August 3 ..... Wikipedia, the so-called free encyclopedia that anyone can edit, is again attacking Israel with libel and slander equal only to racist comments made by Iran, Syria, Islamic Jihad, al-Qaeda and Hamas. Wikipedia, which has been thrown out of almost every university and every major news organization as a credible source, states that the residents of city of Tayibe (Taibeh or Tayiba) live under "illegal Israel occupation and brutal apartheid control." What Wikipedia does not state is that the residents of Tayibe frequent...

"Andy Schlafly was appalled. He was teaching a history class to home-schooled teens and one student had just turned in an assignment that dated events as "BCE," before the common era - rather than "B.C." or before Christ. "Where did that come from?" he demanded. Her answer was "Wikipedia." Schlafly knew he had to act. In his mind, the popular online encyclopedia - written and edited by self-appointed experts worldwide - was riddled with liberal bias.......

ATLANTA — An anonymous blogger claimed Friday to be the person who posted a mysterious addition on the Wikipedia.org site that announced the death of Nancy Benoit to the world at least 13 hours before investigators in Georgia found her body, along with the bodies of her husband and son in what is believed to be a murder-suicide. The confession said the changes to Chris Benoit's page — first reported Thursday by FOXNews.com — was coincidental, and were based on rumors and speculation. The authenticity of the posting could not immediately be confirmed.

ATLANTA, Georgia (AP) -- Investigators are looking into who altered pro wrestler Chris Benoit's Wikipedia entry to mention his wife's death hours before authorities discovered the bodies of the couple and their 7-year-old son. Benoit's Wikipedia entry was altered early Monday to say that the wrestler had missed a match two days earlier because of his wife's death. A Wikipedia official, Cary Bass, said Thursday that the entry was made by someone using an Internet protocol address registered in Stamford, Connecticut, where World Wrestling Entertainment is based. An IP address, a unique series of numbers carried by every machine connected...

An anonymous user operating a computer traced to Stamford, Conn. — home to World Wrestling Entertainment — posted an entry to pro wrestler Chris Benoit's biography on Wikipedia.org announcing the death of his wife Nancy about 14 hours before police in suburban Atlanta said they found her body along with her husband's and that of their 7-year-old son, FOXNews.com has learned. Employees at Wikipedia.com said the posting went live on their site on Monday at 12:01 a.m. Eastern Standard Time. Police, however, said they found the bodies Monday at 2:30 p.m. EDT.

Wikipedia is a wildly popular online encyclopedia that anyone can edit – and in some cases, sabotage with misinformation and libelous or politically slanted content. Its co-founder, Jimmy Wales, has explicitly stated that he doesn't make any distinction between the contributions of an Ivy League professor and a bright 16-year-old, as long as the 16-year-old is doing good work. Whenever a student in the English-speaking world hears the name of an American politician for the first time, he or she is likely to run a Google search on the name. The first, second or third Internet page produced by such...

“Tired of the LIBERAL BIAS every time you search on Google and a Wikipedia page appears? Our study suggests that Wikipedia is 6 times more liberal than the American public. Now it’s time for the Conservatives to get our voice out on the internet!” So begins the rallying cry for Conservapedia.com, aspiring right-leaning rival to Wikipedia.org - the online encyclopedia project that now claims 7.2 million articles in 251 languages and traffic that ranks it among the world’s top 15 sites. Wikipedia is adamant about striving to maintain a “neutral point of view.” But because it is “written collaboratively by...