Editors with an agenda to re-write history at Wikipedia ? Who are they and what is going on? By Colin Andrews January 5, 2010. |
"The views expressed by others are not necessarily shared by me personally but consistent with the paradigm we have entered, all views and perspectives are respected and hold equal weight" |
Llyod Pye - Starchild Confirmation of my gripe against Wikipedia: For years I've engaged in a running battle with the nitwits who "edit" Wikipedia. They consistently trash any alternative subjects that challenge mainstream viewpoints. The hash they've made of my bio and of the Starchild's entry are both ludicrously wrong, and they refuse to change anything to the actual truth. Now we know why. If interested, check this new article about their well-deserved woes (Below). http://www.thunderbolts.info/thunderblogs/davesmith_au.htm Starchild eBook: www.starchildproject.com Starchild paperback book: www.amazon.com Everything You Know Is Wrong: www.iUniverse.com Mismatch (hi-tech spy thriller): www.iUniverse.com A Darker Shade of Red (football novel): www.amazon.com YouTube address: www.youtube.com/officiallloydpye http://www.facebook.com/#/pages/LloydPye/214837897032 ================================= Wikipedia Woes - Pending Crisis as Editors Leave in Droves by Dave Smith December 26, 2009 Observation: It is difficult to ignore the many complaints which we at the Thunderbolts Project receive about Wikipedia. The horror stories circulating recently about the way in which Wikipedia has been taken over, including experiences we can vouch for ourselves, really do suggest that the "people's encyclopedia" is moving rapidly toward a complete breakdown of confidence, particularly on subjects that challenge common theoretical assumptions or the "consensus" that underpins orthodox science. A recent physorg.com article cited a report indicating a ten-fold increase in the number of "editors" leaving Wikipedia between the first quarter of 2008 and the first quarter of 2009. Whilst Jimbo Wales was understandably quick to defend his encyclopedia, the figures speak for themselves and the hard question needs to be tackled. Why is Wikipedia in the wars? Jimmy "Jimbo" Wales' vision for Wikipedia: “Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That's what we're doing.” Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons [Click to enlarge] Let me first state that the concept upon which Wikipedia was founded is both noble and admirable, however the activity of some of its most prolific editors cannot easily be reconciled with the integrity of Jimbo's vision. It must be made clear that this article is NOT an attack on Wiklipedia, but an attempt to highlight the danger of collapse that this wonderful resource is likely to face if those running the show cannot curtail the actions of editors who have taken it upon themselves to exorcise any and all challenges to the present consensus. Challenges to the consensus are the lifeblood of progress in the sciences. (PhysOrg.com) -- The findings of a Spanish study claiming that Wikipedia's editors are leaving at an alarming rate have been refuted by the Wikimedia Foundation and by Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales. The report by Dr Felipe Ortega, a research scientist with Madrid's Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, was published in the Wall Street Journal on 26 November. It reported a ten-fold increase in the number of editors leaving Wikipedia at the beginning of 2009 compared to the number in the equivalent period of 2008. Wikipedia is open to contributions and relies entirely on volunteer contributors (editors), who create content, check the facts, correct errors and refine the entries in the online encyclopedia. Editors can contribute anonymously or can open a free account and become logged editors. It should be made clear that whilst someone with a "free account" becomes a "logged editor" they still remain anonymous if they choose to, through the use of pseudonyms and Wikipedia rules about not "outing" editors. That is, not revealing their true identity even if this is known and pertinent to the discussion. This is a big problem when one considers another finding of the study, that: ... There was also a growing inequality in contributions becoming more biased towards a core of very active editors. It is this bias which is a major concern, and could well account for editors leaving in droves. Quite simply, new editors are treated with contempt and discouraged from contributing if their edits are not consistent with the highly conventional beliefs of the editors who have seized control of particular topics. In the latest study Dr Ortega found a continuing decline [in the number of editors], with a net loss of 49,000 editors in early 2009, but only 4,900 in the same period in 2008 ... The Wikimedia Foundation responded to the latest report saying it was inaccurate and the number of editors is stable, but Wikimedia counts only those who have made five or more contributions, while Dr Ortega counts those who have made one or more. This means Wikimedia's number of editors is around one million, while Ortega's number is approximately three million. A BBC (UK) report on the same study, quotes Wikimedia UK as saying that it is seeking more expert contributors: “We're trying to engage a bit more at the moment with people who are very knowledgeable, people who are experts, so working with museums was the obvious next step,” said Michael Peel of Wikimedia UK. Yet we know of many instances of expert knowledge being ignored and editors being barred for attempting to improve articles on which they are knowledgeable, especially if the topic of discussion is something "alternative" and believe me, it doesn't have to sway much from textbook descriptions to be labelled alternative! Take Eric Lerner, author of The Big Bang Never Happened, (Wikipedia username Elerner) for just one example. His biography reads more like a debunking of his ideas than an explanation of his life's work. A check on the "history" of the page, will show that user ScienceApologist is responsible for a large number of the edits of this biography. In fact, of the last 500 edits to the page, around 150 are by ScienceApologist! What does Lerner have to say about ScienceApologist? Schoerder [sic] (scienceapologist) has been consisently attempting to make this article [Lerner's biography] as unfavorable to me as possible and eliminate anything favorable. He has a major conflict of interest because he is a graduate student in astronomy, working directly under astrophysicists who disagree with my work. He should be banned from editing this article. I would remind you that I was banned from editing the article on plasma cosmology because I work in that field. How can Scienceapologist be allowed to edit the article on me when he too now is in the same field, cosmology, and has made it his special task to attack anything that disagrees with what his professors think?Elerner (talk) 17:46, 30 March 2008 (UTC) [Emphasis added] Here we see that Lerner is banned from editing Plasma Cosmology, a subject in which he is very knowledgeable, and for which he is widely known. Yet at the top of the article is this notice: This article is in need of attention from an expert on the subject. It is very difficult indeed to reconcile this situation with the comment above from Michael Peel. An expert in the subject is barred from editing it yet another editor with a clear conflict of interest and who is no expert in Plasma Cosmology has had more input to the article than any other single editor! A quick look at one other topic. The biography of Halton Arp, famous for his Atlas of Peculiar galaxies and after whom a good number of same are named, includes a list of "categories" which the biography is said to belong in. I find it incredulous that someone in the categories of 20th-century astronomers, 21st-century astronomers, American astronomers, Harvard University alumni, California Institute of Technology alumni and Indianna University is also in the category of fringe physics, especially as the fringe physics category is within the category of pseudoscience, defined as topics that have “very few followers and are obviously pseudoscientific (such as the modern belief in a flat Earth).” What an insult to one of the preemninent astronomers of the twentieth century, clearly the leading authority on peculiar galaxies. Who was it that added the fringe physics tag to his biography? No prize if you guessed correctly. Please take our survey In an attempt to better understand why editors are leaving Wikipedia, we have developed a survey which we invite all readers to consider, and will only take a couple of minutes to complete. http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/66DSYZZ Please feel free to distribute this article broadly, so that we can gather as many responses as possible. Results will be published once a considerable number are to hand. Dave Smith. Survey results and weekly updates Remember you can keep in constant touch with everything that is happening on the Thunderbolts Project by subscribing to our free weekly updates. We will include selected survey results and link to comprehensive results as they come to hand. ============================= See Who's Editing Wikipedia - Diebold, the CIA, a Campaign By John Borland 08.14.07 On November 17th, 2005, an anonymous Wikipedia user deleted 15 paragraphs from an article on e-voting machine-vendor Diebold, excising an entire section critical of the company's machines. While anonymous, such changes typically leave behind digital fingerprints offering hints about the contributor, such as the location of the computer used to make the edits. In this case, the changes came from an IP address reserved for the corporate offices of Diebold itself. And it is far from an isolated case. A new data-mining service launched Monday traces millions of Wikipedia entries to their corporate sources, and for the first time puts comprehensive data behind longstanding suspicions of manipulation, which until now have surfaced only piecemeal in investigations of specific allegations. Wikipedia Scanner -- the brainchild of Cal Tech computation and neural-systems graduate student Virgil Griffith -- offers users a searchable database that ties millions of anonymous Wikipedia edits to organizations where those edits apparently originated, by cross- referencing the edits with data on who owns the associated block of internet IP addresses. Inspired by news last year that Congress members' offices had been editing their own entries, Griffith says he got curious, and wanted to know whether big companies and other organizations were doing things in a similarly self-interested vein. "Everything's better if you do it on a huge scale, and automate it," he says with a grin. This database is possible thanks to a combination of Wikipedia policies and (mostly) publicly available information. The online encyclopedia allows anyone to make edits, but keeps detailed logs of all these changes. Users who are logged in are tracked only by their user name, but anonymous changes leave a public record of their IP address. The result: A database of 34.4 million edits, performed by 2.6 million organizations or individuals ranging from the CIA to Microsoft to Congressional offices, now linked to the edits they or someone at their organization's net address has made. Some of this appears to be transparently self-interested, either adding positive, press release-like material to entries, or deleting whole swaths of critical material. Voting-machine company Diebold provides a good example of the latter, with someone at the company's IP address apparently deleting long paragraphs detailing the security industry's concerns over the integrity of their voting machines, and information about the company's CEO's fund-raising for President Bush. The text, deleted in November 2005, was quickly restored by another Wikipedia contributor, who advised the anonymous editor, "Please stop removing content from Wikipedia. It is considered vandalism." A Diebold Election Systems spokesman said he'd look into the matter but could not comment by press time. Wal-Mart has a series of relatively small changes in 2005 that that burnish the company's image on its own entry while often leaving criticism in, changing a line that its wages are less than other retail stores to a note that it pays nearly double the minimum wage, for example. Another leaves activist criticism on community impact intact, while citing a "definitive" study showing Wal-Mart raised the total number of jobs in a community. ============================== Politics : Online Rights See Who's Editing Wikipedia - Diebold, the CIA, a Campaign By John Borland 08.14.07 As has been previously reported, politician's offices are heavy users of the system. Former Montana Sen. Conrad Burns' office, for example, apparently changed one critical paragraph headed "A controversial voice" to "A voice for farmers," with predictably image-friendly content following it. Perhaps interestingly, many of the most apparently self-interested changes come from before 2006, when news of the Congressional offices' edits reached the headlines. This may indicate a growing sophistication with the workings of Wikipedia over time, or even the rise of corporate Wikipedia policies. Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales told Wired News he was aware of the new service, but needed time to experiment with it before commenting. The vast majority of changes are fairly innocuous, however. Employees at the CIA's net address, for example, have been busy -- but with little that would indicate their place of apparent employment, or a particular bias. One entry ( place this link on word entry: http://en.wikipedia. org/w/index.php?diff=prev&oldid=77017195 ) on "Black September in Jordan" contains wholesale additions, with specific details that read like a popular history book or an eyewitness' memoir. Many more are simple copy edits, or additions to local town entries or school histories. One CIA entry deals with the details of lyrics sung in a Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode. Griffith says he launched the project hoping to find scandals, particularly at obvious targets such as companies like Halliburton. But there's a more practical goal, too: By exposing the anonymous edits that companies such as drugs and big pharmaceutical companies make in entries that affect their businesses, it could help experts check up on the changes and make sure they're accurate, he says. For now, he has just scratched the surface of the database of millions of entries. But he's putting it online so others can look too. The nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation, which runs Wikipedia, did not respond to e-mail and telephone inquiries Monday. http://www.wired.com/politics/onlinerights/news/2007/08/wiki_tracker ========================= Crop Circles. Colin Andrews The fact that I invented the term crop circle and was therefor responsible for its inclusion as a new term in the Oxford Dictionary in 1990 was for some while accurately recorded on the crop circle page of Wikipedia until one day in October 2009 when both references suddenly were removed. Each attempt to remedy this was immediately squashed by immediate deletions. Eventually I received an email from Wikipedia telling me that what I was doing was self promotion and if I continued to edit this page I would be banned. I did not make any attempts to insert many new and useful historic references which were lacking nor correct the many errors on the page. All I felt strongly about was that the starting point of the subject should be accurately recorded for those who use Wikipedia. A professional colleague who works with my archive, the largest and most complete in existence on this subject and has seen all the evidence that supports my statement also tried to edit the page back to reflect the earlier information. His entries were also removed immediately. The editor running this page clearly has an agenda and that is not to record accurate historic facts, why? This was my final email to the appropriate invisible and unnamed editor, to which Ive received no reply to this date: Copy of your message to Russavia: Wikipedia e-mailFriday, October 02, 2009 8:58:37 AM From: XXXXXRemoved (Colin Andrews private e-mail address) My name is Colin Andrews and I would like to know how to dispute information presented on Wikipedia and important historical facts that have been removed. Ive researched this subject for nearly 30 years and my work has provided the basis for the majority of scientific results currently quoted on your site without being credited to me. I have tried many times to correct information or add specific items only to be told that I am self promoting, when it is my work being referenced without a source. It is a fact that I wrote the first book on the subject Circular Evidence with Pat Delgado in 1989, in which I first placed in writing the new term crop circle which I invented and which was added to the Oxford Dictionary in 1990. These are simply facts which are easily checked and not self promotion. As advisor to my Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and Queen Elizabeth and other prominent people around the world on this subject, it seems to me that these are important historic details which anyone wanting the history should be given. Its curious that references to people who claim to be hoaxers abound on your pages, yet it was my work that substantiated the actual facts that surrounded many of their claims. And so it is concerning to me as it should be to anyone that one side of this phenomenon is being given heavy bias on these pages. Bizarre that unsubstantiated claims of hoaxers are recorded as facts on your page, while I am now the only person alive that holds the evidence surrounding the beginning of modern day research into the crop circle subject and I have been edited off the page while those who have been the perpetrators of lies and deception are well represented by name and the deception and inaccuracies continue with Wikipedia's direct involvement. I am writing again to ask how readers of Wikipedia are to be given accurate historical data from the original and largest database in the world on this subject ? As one of four of the first researchers into this subject and owner of that knowledge I am willing to share it on your pages but am denied the ability because its seen as self promotion. I am not trying to sell anything. Just make available through your pages accurate information. I am happy to supply more supporting evidence but you can take a look at my bio or read my books or view the many early television programs I took part in to satisfy yourself about the validity of my entries. My telephone number is XXXXXXXRemoved Colin Andrews at www.ColinAndrews.net -- This e-mail was sent by user "CircularEvidence1" on the English Wikipedia to user "Russavia". It has been automatically delivered and the Wikimedia Foundation cannot be held responsible for its contents. The sender has not been given any information about your e-mail account, and you are not required to reply to this e-mail. For further information on privacy, security, and replying, as well as abuse and removal from emailing, see <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia: Email>. Final message from Wikipedia to attempt to re-place the source of the new term crop circle and also its entry into the Oxford Dictionary: Line 3: Line 3: [[Image:Information.png|25px]] Welcome to Wikipedia. One or more of the [[Wikipedia:External links|external links]] you added in <span class=" plainlinks">[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maya_calendar?diff=317407279 this edit]</span> to the page [[:Maya calendar]] do not comply with our [[Wikipedia:External links|guidelines for external links]] and have been removed. Wikipedia is [[Wikipedia:What Wikipedia is not#LINK|not a collection of links]]; nor should it be used for [[Wikipedia: Spam|advertising or promotion]]. You may wish to read the [[Wikipedia: Introduction|introduction to editing]]. Thank you. <!-- Template:uw- hugglespam1 --> [[User:Alexius08|Alexius08]] ([[User talk: Alexius08|talk]]) 03:08, 2 October 2009 (UTC) [[Image:Information. png|25px]] Welcome to Wikipedia. One or more of the [[Wikipedia: External links|external links]] you added in <span class="plainlinks"> [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maya_calendar?diff=317407279 this edit] </span> to the page [[:Maya calendar]] do not comply with our [[Wikipedia:External links|guidelines for external links]] and have been removed. Wikipedia is [[Wikipedia:What Wikipedia is not#LINK|not a collection of links]]; nor should it be used for [[Wikipedia: Spam|advertising or promotion]]. You may wish to read the [[Wikipedia: Introduction|introduction to editing]]. Thank you. <!-- Template:uw- hugglespam1 --> [[User:Alexius08|Alexius08]] ([[User talk: Alexius08|talk]]) 03:08, 2 October 2009 (UTC) + + == Self-promotion == + + Please do not use Wikipedia for self-promotion. If you continue to add references to yourself and your work you may be [[WP:BP|blocked from editing]]. <b>[[User Talk:JzG|Guy]]</b> <small>([[User:JzG/help|Help!]])</small> 06:38, 2 October 2009 (UTC) |
If any of you feel strongly enough to correct the historic facts related to crop circles or other subjects - go to Wikipedia, log into the crop circle page (or other) and make your own edits where you see details are needed. Just as in the case of the attempts of the British Government to re-write the history of the crop circles through the head of the UFO desk Nick Pope, its important we move together to ensure agendas within Wikipedia are not similarly biased - in their case by unseen editors with dubious agenda's. Look out the facts and make your own edits to the crop circle page here - they need to hear from 3rd party contributors like you: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crop_circle and select top tab marked EDIT. If the invisible editors at Wkipedia, be they CIA or people holding personal malice or agenda's are not held to some standards then once again history will be re-written as a lie. |
WIKIPEDIA |
HOME CONSCIOUSNESS UFOs PHOTOGRAPHY NEW POSTINGS CROP CIRCLE RESEARCH PRESENTATIONS FARM MONITOR STORE MEDIA BIOGRAPHY 2012 DEBATE CLIMATE CHANGE QUOTATIONS LETTERS BLOG CONTACT OBSERVATORY WELLNESS |
Important update October 15, 2015 See bottom of page. Regarding the findings reported here: I can vouch for the same findings of my own five years ago. |
Updated thanks to Dave Haith (UK) 15 October, 2015 |
CA: From personal experience in the pages of Wikipedia, the social engineering mafia has finally been nailed.An eye opening presentation on Astroturf and manipulation of media messages by investigative journalist Sharyl Attkisson at TEDx - University of Nevada. |
veteran investigative journalist shows how astroturf, or fake grassroots movements funded by political, corporate, or other special interests very effectively manipulate and distort media messages |
"There needs to be an independant investigation into Wikipedia. Who are they and who funds them ? - for whom are they re-writing history with lies??? Looks mighty like an arm of big brother's social engineering agenda" Colin Andrews |
"There needs to be an independant investigation into Wikipedia. Who are they and who funds them ? - for whom are they re-writing history with lies??? Looks mighty like an arm of big brother's social engineering agenda" Colin Andrews |