Wikibullies at work. The National Post exposes broad trust issues over Wikipedia climate information
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2009
UPDATED: see stats below the “read more” line.
Lawrence Solomon at the National Post writes about a topic that WUWT readers have known about for a long time: How Wikipedia’s green doctor rewrote 5,428 climate articles.
We’ve known for some time that Wikipedia can’t be trusted to provide unbiased climate information. Solomon starts off by talking about Climategate emails.
The emails also describe how the band plotted to rewrite history as well as science, particularly by eliminating the Medieval Warm Period, a 400 year period that began around 1000 AD.
The Climategate Emails reveal something else, too: the enlistment of the most widely read source of information in the world — Wikipedia — in the wholesale rewriting of this history.
He then focuses on RealClimate.org co-founder William Connolley, who has “touched” 5,428 Wikipedia articles with his unique brand of RC centric editing:
All told, Connolley created or rewrote 5,428 unique Wikipedia articles. His control over Wikipedia was greater still, however, through the role he obtained at Wikipedia as a website administrator, which allowed him to act with virtual impunity. When Connolley didn’t like the subject of a certain article, he removed it — more than 500 articles of various descriptions disappeared at his hand. When he disapproved of the arguments that others were making, he often had them barred — over 2,000 Wikipedia contributors who ran afoul of him found themselves blocked from making further contributions. Acolytes whose writing conformed to Connolley’s global warming views, in contrast, were rewarded with Wikipedia’s blessings. In these ways, Connolley turned Wikipedia into the missionary wing of the global warming movement.
The Medieval Warm Period disappeared, as did criticism of the global warming orthodoxy. With the release of the Climategate Emails, the disappearing trick has been exposed. The glorious Medieval Warm Period will remain in the history books, perhaps with an asterisk to describe how a band of zealots once tried to make it disappear.
William Connolley - Wikipedia image
Wikipedia suffers from the same problem that climate science in general suffers from now. A few determined zealots have influenced the vast majority of the published information.
Petersen
IMHO it is time for Connolley to step aside from Wikipedia, one person should not have so much influence over so many articles. At the same time, the number two person, almost as influential, is Kim Dabelstein Peterson. Here’s a National Review article on the kind of things Petersen has been doing in similar to the work of Connolley.
Additionally, there are many Wikipedia editors and contributors that do so anonymously, and I think that is terribly wrong. There’s no accountability, no quality control, and no recourse to people who falsify information, or mold it to fit a personal agenda. Wikipedia relies upon an honor system, and as we’ve seen from the Climategate emails, there’s no honor in some circles of climate science.
Here is another example:
The Opinionator
Posted: May 03, 2008, 2:53 AM by Lawrence Solomon
Connolley is not only a big shot on Wikipedia, he’s a big shot at Wikipedia — an Administrator with unusual editorial clout. Using that clout, this 40-something scientist of minor relevance gets to tear down scientists of great accomplishment. Because Wikipedia has become the single biggest reference source in the world, and global warming is one of the most sought after subjects, the ability to control information on Wikipedia by taking down authoritative scientists is no trifling matter.
One such scientist is Fred Singer, the First Director of the U.S. National Weather Satellite Service, the recipient of a White House commendation for his early design of space satellites; the recipient of a NASA commendation for research on particle clouds — in short, a scientist with dazzling achievements who is everything Connolley is not. Under Connolley’s supervision, Singer is relentlessly smeared, and has been for years, as a kook who believes in Martians and a hack in the pay of the oil industry. When a smear is inadequate, or when a fair-minded Wikipedian tries to correct a smear, Connolley and his cohorts are there to widen the smear or remove the correction, often rebuking the Wikipedian in the process.
Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales recently put out an appeal for donations here. He writes:
I believe in us. I believe that Wikipedia keeps getting better. That’s the whole idea. One person writes something, somebody improves it a little, and it keeps getting better, over time. If you find it useful today, imagine how much we can achieve together in 5, 10, 20 years.
In a perfect world, maybe. In a perfect world unicorns frolic in the park, free money falls from the sky, and people are honest and without bias 100% of the time. But when you have Wikibullies, such as Connolley and Peterson, your honor system goes up in smoke. Fact is Jimmy, your honor system is as corrupted as the peer review process is for climate science these days. In my view, don’t give Wikipedia another dime until they make some changes to provide for a more responsible information environment.
Making free reference information available to the public shouldn’t be a battle of wills between Wikibullies with an agenda and the rest of society.
Here’s where to write to complain to Wikipedia:
Wikimedia Foundation
Postal address
Wikimedia Foundation Inc.
149 New Montgomery Street, 3rd Floor
San Francisco, CA 94105
USA
Phone: +1-415-839-6885
Email: infowikimedia.org
Fax: +1-415-882-0495 (note: we get a large number of calls; email or fax is always a better first option)
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wattsupwiththat.com
More on Wikipedia and Connolley – he’s been canned as a Wiki administrator
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12
2009
WUWT reader Dennis Kuzara wrote to Wikipedia in response to our earlier article on Wikibullies prompted by Lawrence Solomon of the National Post. He has received an eye-opening reply. Emphasis mine – Anthony
=================
Wikipedia replies
notable excerpt:
> > 4. Has William Connolley been removed as a Wikipedia administrator? If so who has taken his place?
In September 2009, the Wikipedia Arbitration Committee revoked Mr. Connolley’s administrator status after finding that he misused his administrative privileges while involved in a dispute unrelated to climate warming. This has now been added to his article
().
Nobody has replaced him specifically, but there are more than a thousand other administrators with very varied backgrounds.
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wattsupwiththat.com
Coments of note:
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Karl Maki (20:02:16) :
I had been inclined to kick in a few bucks to Wikipedia. Then I read the Solomon piece.
I checked out several of the entries regarding global warming, skepticism thereof, the Medieval Warm Period, Climategate, Pat Michaels, etc. I was a bit shocked at how lopsided the entries were, and how many times William Connolley’s fingerprints were all over the editing.
No money from me until they clean up their act.
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seven (20:04:27) :
“Turns out that on Wikipedia some folks are more equal than others. Kim Dabelstein Petersen is a Wikipedia “editor” who seems to devote a large part of his life to editing reams and reams of Wikipedia pages to pump the assertions of global-warming alarmists and deprecate or make disappear the arguments of skeptics.
I soon found others who had the same experience: They would try to squeeze in any dissent, or even correct an obvious slander against a dissenter, and Petersen or some other censor would immediately snuff them out.
Now Petersen is merely a Wikipedia “editor.” Holding the far more prestigious and powerful position of “administrator” is William Connolley. Connolley is a software engineer and sometime climatologist (he used to hold a job in the British Antarctic Survey), as well as a serial (but so far unsuccessful) office seeker for England’s Green party.
And yet by virtue of his power at Wikipedia, Connolley, a ruthless enforcer of the doomsday consensus, may be the world’s most influential person in the global warming debate after Al Gore. Connolley routinely uses his editorial clout to tear down scientists of great accomplishment such as Fred Singer, the first director of the U.S. National Weather Satellite Service and a scientist with dazzling achievements. Under Connolley’s supervision, Wikipedia relentlessly smears Singer as a kook who believes in Martians and a hack in the pay of the oil industry. “http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/07/08/opinion/main4241293.shtml
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WeestHoustonGeo (20:12:14) :
That tears it. Wikipedia just became the “Web of Lies”, in my humble eyes. After tettering on the edge, they have fallen into the bottomless pit.
Perhaps they will find solace in the words “better to rule in hell than to serve in Heaven.”
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2009
Rereke Whakaaro (20:14:00) :
Y’know, I am convinced that the whole AGW troop have been using George Orwell’s 1984 as a text book.
I did a quick Google search, and the Medieval Warming Period did come up with a reference on Wikipedia, but the text explicitly limits it to “the North Atlantic”, and Western Europe.
I have just finished reading a book on Peru, where archeologists have recently discovered terraces on the Andes used for growing maize, at much higher altitudes than is possible now. The time period: circa 800 to 1350, by carbon dating.
There ain’t many places further away from Western Europe than Peru – it was GLOBAL.
Dipsticks.
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Xavier Itzmann (20:23:40) :
Guys, if you can only read the English wikipedia and weep because of the misinformation, be glad you do not read the Spanish, Portuguese, French or Italian versions.
By comparison, the English version is the very fountain of balance and truth. The romance language partisanship on all sort of historical and scientific subjects is beyond belief, and usually only tilts one way.
Yeah, no donation from me to wikipedia. Alas, I wish it were not so.
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photon without a Higgs (20:34:56) :
When Connolley didn’t like the subject of a certain article, he removed it — more than 500 articles of various descriptions disappeared at his hand.
What an incomprehensible bastard!
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2009
Bulldust (20:36:08) :
I have always maintained that Wikipedia is an excellent reference for any topic that is not in any way political or religious in nature. As soon as human belief systems (such as AGW) become attached to a topic the value of the content on Wiki becomes highly suspect. But for anything of a purely factual nature, and this would account for an extremely large number of pages, such as the decay series of U235, for example, I am sure Wikipedia is as useful as most other references.
I did come across this entry however:
¨Ian Rutherford Plimer (born February 12, 1946) is an Australian geologist, academic, businessman and fraud.¨
en.wikipedia.org
Nowhere in the Wiki article does it explain why it should be understood that Prof Plimer is a fraud. The discussion attached to the page indicates the interview between himself and Monbiot and the accusation that he misrepresented one of the scientific conclusions in his book ¨Heaven and Earth.¨
Without such an explanation for the accusation at the start of the entry, it is completely unsubstantiated. But apparently this is acceptable because Plimer clearly fights for the dark side…
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Grant Hodges (20:41:04) :
I recently logged on to wikipedia to look at the polar bear article. A year or so ago the polar bear articles seemed an accurate message on the facts that polar bear are growing in numbers in most of their habitats. But when I recently logged on, the article had been sanitized to toe the global warming line of endangered polar bears.
My sympathy for wikipedia evaporated. I think there is anti-Semitic bias in their coverage of MidEast issues (I’m not Jewish btw).
So, wiki is gone.
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Chris (21:09:40) :
Wikipedia should never be regarded as an authoritative source. It’s probably OK for basic factual information but is worthless for any topic tainted with controversy or politics. As you may be aware, congressmen routinely rewrite and edit wiki pages which put them in an unfavorable light. I long ago realized the wikipedia coverage of AGW was incredibly biased.
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Eduardo Ferreyra (21:13:36) :
This is a coincidence, because today I edited three times the Wikipedia article “The Medieval Warming Period”, at:
en.wikipedia.org
with highly referenced peer reviewed data, and my editing was erased and reverted in NOT MORE THAN TWO MINUTES by some Stephan Schulz, apparently a PhD. After three succesive editings (as shown in the log page:
00:34, 20 December 2009 Achuara (talk | contribs) (16,466 bytes) (Undid revision 332762415 by Stephan Schulz (talk)) (undo)
Mr Schults sent me this threatening message in Wikpedia “talk” page:
You currently appear to be engaged in an edit war according to the reverts you have made on Medieval warm period. Note that the three-revert rule prohibits making more than three reversions on a single page within a 24-hour period. Additionally, users who perform several reversions in content disputes may be blocked for edit warring even if they do not technically violate the three-revert rule. When in dispute with another editor you should first try to discuss controversial changes to work towards wording and content that gains a consensus among editors. Should that prove unsuccessful, you are encouraged to seek dispute resolution, and in some cases it may be appropriate to request page protection. Please stop the disruption, otherwise you may be blocked from editing. –Stephan Schulz (talk) 00:53, 20 December 2009 (UTC)
Retrieved from “http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Achuara”
Solomon is right about William “The Wiki” Connolley. He’s a the watchdog in Wikpedia, and have this guy Schultz as his aid. They are really the Black Pest.
However, I have several computers, several aliases, and several different IP addresses (and some dozens of friends that will be happy to bother these guys) so it is going to be difficult for them to keep their present missinformation on the web.
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Richard McGough (21:17:59) :
Wicipedia is in collusion with Google to censor information. Before climatgegate, wiki had this information on their page called “Censorship by Google” found here:
en.wikipedia.org
Google also censors its search suggestions in the United States. “Dirty” search suggestions end in an apostrophe, period, or hyphen. Suggestions containing the words “teen” or “teenager” are forbidden. “Child abuse” is notoriously blocked as well, but not “abused children”. Suggestions for “physical neglect” and “emotional neglect” are used as code words for “physical abuse” and “emotional abuse”. All queries containing “hate” are censored as well. For example, instead of “Why did Hitler hate Jews?”, a suggested query is “Why did Hitler hated Jews?”.
When folks began to notice that Google was censoring the keyword “climategate” from it’s autosuggestion list, someone added this information to the article:
More recently, Google has been censoring search suggestions skeptical of climate change, i.e. “Climategate” is forbidden, but “climate change” is ok. Also both “climategate” and “climate gate” search results went from over 12 million to around 6 million results for both. “climate gate” should always yield more than “climategate” as teh Google search algorithm should find all sites containing “climategate” and sites containing both “climate” and “gate”, but “climate gate” yields less results than “climategate”. This is pointed to as undeniable evidence of tampering since the results are violating the rules of their own search algorithm.
Now ALL THE INFORMATION quoted above has been CENSORED from the Wiki article.
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joshua corning (21:36:27) :
Wikipedia is a good place to find information on popular culture and entertainment. Comic books, cartoons, episode lists of TV shows etc.
But my experience with it with regards to history has been lack luster. Recently i found out information on I.F Stone from an article at Reason regarding his Stalinist apologist writings. I am not saying he wrote left wing material…i am saying he actually wrote materials that supported Joseph Stalin.
“If Stalin was the aggressive monster painted in official propaganda, his death should have cheered Washington. Actually the unspoken premise of American policy has been that Stalin was so anxious for peace he would do nothing unless Soviet soil itself were violated. With his death, the baiting of the Russian bear-the favorite sport of American politics-suddenly seemed dangerous…The cold war claque was critical of Nehru for calling Stalin a man of peace, but Washington’s own instinctive reactions said the same thing…Stalin was one of the giant figures of our time, and will rank with Ivan, Peter, Catherine and Lenin among the builders of that huge edifice which is Russia. Magnanimous salute was called for on such an occasion…It is difficult to pursue dignified and rational policy when official propaganda has built up so distorted a picture of Russia. Many Americans fed constantly on the notion that the Soviet Union is a vast slave labor camp must have wondered why the masses did not rise now that the oppressor had vanished.”
Any attempt to post material regarding I.F Stone as a Stalin apologist has been blocked and deleted.
reason.com
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