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Blogs aren’t the only front in the online wars. Since late December, multiple people have been changing Luke Ravenstahl’s Wikipedia entry to disparage his political connections — or even claim that he died.
“It looks like somebody is working through some personal issues,” says Chris Griswold of Friendship, a 27-year-old administrator of the Internet encyclopedia. Wikipedia entries can be written and re-written by anyone, no matter what their motives. “There’s this impotent rage, when somebody does something like this,” says Griswold. “It’s like when somebody goes out in the backyard and screams.”
“His father is a Justice of the Peace and his grandfather was a city firefighter,” reads one such change, “positions often associated with the blatant nepotism and cronyinsm [sic] so often attributed to government in Pittsburgh.”
That same sentence was added by a single user on Dec. 22, Jan. 8 and Jan. 22 from a computer employing a Texas-based Internet Service Provider (ISP) — something Griswold’s peer-elected post as administrator allows him to find out.
Someone else using a Comcast-owned ISP has changed Ravenstahl’s entry to read, “rather than speak up for the interests of the city, he cowed to the financial and political interests of Ed Rendell and Dan Onorato.”
And yet a third individual — or one well-traveled person — has repeatedly changed Ravenstahl’s birthday from Feb. 6, 1980 to Feb. 10, 1970, adding “He died on Nov. 10, 2006.” Griswold traced this user’s computer to ZoomInternet.net, an Armstrong County-based ISP serving small towns surrounding Pittsburgh, as well as neighboring states.
All three users have also simply blanked Ravenstahl’s page.
Another “editor” (as Wiki writers are called) registered under the name Henri Graves has also blanked the page, and began leaving a few local blog posts against the current mayor’s administration in August. He also edited the Wiki entry on Ravenstahl’s chief of staff, Yarone Zober, to read “He has been seen throughout the city, in, on and under state Sen. Jim Ferlo,” reflecting rumors that Ferlo has inordinate influence with the Ravenstahl adminstration.
All such changes have been undone by other Wiki users, and lately by Griswold. The site also employs anti-vandal bots to catch the simplest mischief, such as erased pages.
“I don’t know what any of these things are going to accomplish,” says Griswold, who can’t pinpoint the verbal hooligans involved, despite his privileged access to Wiki information. He now has a local group of Wiki editors policing the Ravenstahl site, and boasts of catching changes such as the “nepotism” entry in as little as one minute.
Ravenstahl is far from the only political target on Wikipedia. On Jan. 22, Philadelphia papers reported that Mayor John Street’s entry read in part that day: “Street worked for television station WPSG-TV and, for a four-year period, he played the character Bozo the Clown on Philadelphia’s Bozo the Clown children’s television show.” Stephen Colbert, fake talk-show host on Comedy Central, has enlisted his viewers to “save” the world’s elephants merely by upping their population count on Wikipedia — then displayed their success.
About every other day, says Griswold, “we have to remove [entries] that [say] Mr. Rogers was a sniper in Vietnam with 93 confirmed kills, or 73 confirmed kills or 52 …” It’s done by “a lot of people. They believe they know it. It’s not true that he wore sweaters to cover all the tattoos on his arms.” But the false additions have been so persistent that the Wiki page about Fred Rogers now lists the urban legends about him, as well as links that debunk them
“We’re making people think about how true things are,” Griswold says. “It makes you question how valid your source is. It strengthens people’s ability to process information and process things themselves — what is fact and what is reliable, what is gossip and what is myth.”
Griswold has now added details of Ravenstahl’s handcuffing incident to Wikipedia, including its origin in a blog. But the material quotes from traditional media.
“Blogs are not reliable sources,” he says. But he believes blogs will “absolutely” have influence over people’s opinions in the future. “For years, we had things like America‘s Funniest Home Videos. That’s just the televised version of YouTube. People are starting to feel the need to be more interactive with the entertainment they’re consuming — and the information.”
This article appears in Feb 8-14, 2007.
Some folks just need to vent, I guess. Bad boy behaviors are not new on the internet. Good, however, to see that you all know about the power of a wiki.
This is a typical example of Wikimedia Foundation’s anonymous administrators making policy on the fly, contrary to Wikipedia’s published pseudo-policies.
A year ago, when John Seigenthaler Sr. complained about misinformation in a Wikimedia Foundation publication about him, Foundation founder Jimmy Wales told media it would be contrary to the Foundation’s policies for Wikipedia to reveal the ISP of the person who worked with the Foundation to libel Seignethaler. A long-time investigator from Texas eventually revealed the owner of the IP number used to libel Seigenthaler – in this case when it was readily available from the non-secret portion of Wikipedia available to anyone with internet access.
Wikimedia Foundation’s administrators routinely block members for supposedly revealing personal information about Wikipedia’s volunteer administrators. (I say volunteer… they volunteer for the Wikimedia Foundation, but have made no promises as part of the administrator-selection process that they aren’t paid by an outside interest to use their unusual access to secret parts of the Wikipedia Web site to influence direction in favor of secret employers paying a person to influence Wikipedia as an administrator.)
But now this Chris Griswold, speaking to the press as a Wikimedia Foundation administrator, revealed to the press private information from secret logs maintained by Wikimedia Foundation.
Wikimedia Foundation could easily solve these problems by requiring contributors to register, to disclose at least privately their real identity and to agree to terms of service, as attorneys advising almost every other interactive Web site advise site owners to require. Instead, Wales and the new foundation president insist on enforcing their radical views of social networking then blaming their failure on the people they invited to participate in their network where participants are subjected to a system of ad-hoc pseudo-laws, an arbitration committee that claims to “litigate” infractions of laws that have never been endorsed by constituents in a well-governed election, and where the rules are pitted against long-standing advice posted on Wikipedia as a “guideline” that users should “ignore all rules.”
Wales has now moved on to projects that profit from Wikipedia’s extensive volunteer contributions and has virtually jumped ship from Wikimedia Foundation leadership at the very time Wikipedia’s financial troubles are becoming unmanageable. In his wake, we have a Web site where there are no rules, where laws are made up as one goes, and where all problems with the site are attributed to “bad users” the site attracts while the Foundation established to distance the site (and related liabilities) from its core personnel refused to acknowledge that its failed experiment in anarchy is the main reason libel is standard fare at Wikipedia.
Wikimedia Foundation’s stance expressed in Wikipedia is that users can fathom the trustworthiness of various “editors” (usually anonymous Wikipedia writers) by reviewing their edit history.
Let’s see if this Griswold is a generally cooperative guy who follows Wikipedia guidelines to improve articles by incorporating other contributions, or is prone to generate controversy by acting on his own preferences:
In this edit, he erased a donation because “I prefer it the other way”
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=The_Legend_of_Zelda:_Twilight_Princess&diff=prev&oldid=106890318
In this example, Griswold accused an anonymous donor of criminal vandalism for removing misinformation about Fred Rogers, the host of a popular children’s program. How did Griswold excuse his republication of a rumor that Rogers is a child molester? He called it an urban legand, and called a well-meaning donor a vandal for trying to remove the libel.
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Mister_Rogers&diff=prev&oldid=106786523
What does this say to the people offering Wikimedia Foundation libelous attacks against the mayor of Pittsburgh? Just call the libel “urban legands,” maybe expose the libel as lies on another rumor-mongering Web site such as the snopes.com site Griswold sited as a source for his debunked insults against Rogers. Without responsible editorial supervision, any person can be libeled in such a backwards manner.
Blog posting about this topic:
http://nullspace2.blogspot.com/2007/02/information-warfare-postscript.html
I want to make something clear: Though I am a Wikipedia administrator, I do not represent Wikipedia in any authoritative way; I merely represent myself and my own actions. I’m not going to address Mr. “John Bo’s” accusations against Wikipedia, Wikimedia, or Wales because I don’t feel it is my place to do so. I will, however, address his cowardly attacks against me.
Incidentally, I find it wonderfully hypocritical of Mr. “Bo” to rant about anonymous users on Wikipedia when he is doing the same thing here.
I didn’t reveal anything that the vandals hadn’t already made public themselves by editing with only their IP addresses. As an administrator, I can’t see registered users’ IP addresses, but anyone can see the IPs of users who post “anonymously”. Users are cautioned to register because of this. Contributors are not required to register because many unregistered users contribute positive work to the project, and a large number of these eventually register.
I use my real name edit when I edit Wikipedia because I stand behind my work there. You can, of course, pick out an edit or two and make them look bad by taking them out of context, which I see you have taken the time to do. The Legend of Zelda edit was in response to an editor who had added needless detail to a plot summary for a video game that had recently been condensed to better justify the material’s fair use. This had all been discussed in the appropriate arenas previously, and I dealt with the situation more comprehensively elsewhere. In general, I tend to prune and maintain articles more than I add to them. The articles need shape and cohesiveness, and that’s what I try to work on, in addition to general maintenance and organizational work — for instance, creating WikiProject Pittsburgh (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Pittsburgh).
With the Fred Rogers entry, as was mentioned in the City Paper article, the list of debunked myths is there because they are so persistent; it would be irresponsible for an article not to refer to them. Additionally, this does a great deal to prevent random users from adding these items to the entry as if they were true just because they “think” they are.
By comparing the debunking of the myths surrounding Rogers and insertion of attacks against Ravenstahl, you are creating a faulty analogy. The Rogers entry cites Snopes, which you call a rumor-mongering Web site, but which in reality does a public service by dispelling myths. Rogers is much more notable, and the myths are much more prevalent, than our young mayor and the angry opinions of hacks who can barely string a sentence together and won’t even stand by their own comments, and this is why they do not merit inclusion in the encyclopedia. They’re not even lies to expose so much as they are baseless derision impulsively typed out on a keyboard sprinkled with tears.
Your arguments are very clever, and I am sure you enjoyed sitting down with a dictionary and a guide to being an Internet crank to make yourself sound more knowledgeable than you actually are; unfortunately, because your accusations against me are based on taking my actions out of context to condemn me more easily, your argument is simply not very solid. I hope bluster works better for you in other aspects of your life, but it’s transparent here.
Good luck,
Chris Griswold
Best Guy Ever
Chris Griswold is no longer a Wikipedia administrator. He was forced from his position via an administrative action taken against him by the police of Wikipedia, its Arbitration Committee. It was found that he himself had been committing serious acts of disruption on Wikipedia while employing fake identities of his own creation, called “sockpuppets”, to carry out his dishonest acts.
The process of his removal is documented at:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Requests_for_arbitration&oldid=127708390#ChrisGriswold