Practicum #7 - Kathryn Messenger

In checking back on the articles I previously corrupted, I was surprised to see that two pages already had warnings that the material may be false. The page on "Selma High School" had a immediate warning that the material needed additional references for verification of the material already listed. While on this page, I had initially referenced the school's website, I had fudged some minor facts so that they were incongruent with their reference. The other page that had a direct warning was "Danehill, East Sussex" and in this page, I did not list any references at all. I had added a significant amount of information from a reference but had not referenced the site. Again, I did change some of the information, and nothing had been taken down yet but the warning specifically stated, "Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed." Despite the false information still on the site, Wikipedia had very clear warnings that the material below may be false and was not credible. This was not the same however for the other three pages. "Edited Soundstage (TV Series)," "From Doon with Death," and "Union City Dodgers" did not have any kind of warnings on their pages about false material. The first page however, did not necessarily have false information, it was simply from an unreliable source (a blog comment). This is potentially frightening because individual opinions, especially from random observers should not be taken as fact. Because the information on the page was consistent with the reference, the material may have been taken at face value as fact. The next page "From Doon with Death" had two separate pieces of falsified information, one referenced and one without reference and both were not challenged. I found this particularly interesting because both pieces of information were clearly falsified and Wikipedia did not acknowledge it immediately. The last page I falsified was "Union City Dodgers" which was a very small page. In reviewing the three slides that went undetected (granted, after the first day) I concluded that they were all generally smaller pages that would not necessarily normally receive a lot of page views. In contrast, the other two articles were about a school and a place so they may attract more attention than a TV series, a book, and an old baseball team. After going through and comparing all of the pages, I corrected all of the pages that I had falsified so that my account would not be connected with falsifying Wikipedia pages. The only thing that I did not do was edit a much larger page, with a larger viewership. I decided to not edit one of these pages simply because they appeared to be monitored stronger than any of the other sites and I do not want to lose my Wikipedia account. In contemplating this, I did some research on what it takes to get deleted or lose editing privileges. In doing this, I discovered a huge controversy within Wikipedia involving organizations that had been editing pages, deleting information or framing information in order to give their page a more positive spin. Wikipedia's response was that "deliberate attempts to remove facts or reasonable interpretation of facts is considered vandalism" and the people behind these edits were charged based on their IP address through a program called Wikiscanner. While they admitted their current screening system was perfect, they noted that people were sometimes a lot more transparent than they realized and thus easy to spot. While the article did not specifically state what happened to those who committed these crimes, there seemed to be the implication that individuals were charged with crimes of some sort and their posts had been changed. The full article is located here:
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/wikipedia-and-the-art-of-censorship-462070.html