Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2010-04-12/In the news

U.S. Supreme court hopeful suspected of COI editing
In a 12 April post titled (somewhat sarcastically) Obama Supreme Court Short-Lister Supports Right to Edit Her Own Wikipedia Page, U.S. media blog Gawker observed that the Wikipedia entry about US jurist Leah Ward Sears, who was recently reported to be on president Obama's short list of possible nominees for next Supreme Court justice, appears to have been edited by herself, using the account User:Lwsears1992. Gawker highlighted an edit from 6 March 2009 inserting a mention of "her highly regarded record" (which however had originally been written by another user).

On his "The Wikipedian" blog, William Beutler (User:WWB) examined the edits further, calling the conjecture plausible ("it usually turns out that this type of account is exactly that person"), but arguing that, all in all, the article had been improved slightly by her edits (for example, by providing a photo of her). "While some of her edits were self-serving, they were of a mild sort. At most this was a venal sin, not a cardinal one."

Beutler, an employee of the American PR and marketing firm New Media Strategies who works as a consultant "on matters of Wikipedia", also mentioned several recent publications on the general problem of conflict of interest editing, including:
 * An article by himself in this month's Politics Magazine ("It’s A Wiki World"), advising political campaign consultants how to edit or influence the Wikipedia article about their client to his or her benefit without risking negative publicity
 * A white paper titled Are You There Yet? UK Law Firms on Wikipedia, published last month
 * A March interview on PRWeek with Jay Walsh, (Head of Communications of the Wikimedia Foundation), in which he encouraged "PR pros" to "participate on Wikipedia in any way they like", as long as they respected Wikipedia's policies.

Victim of "IBM advocates" criticizes Wikipedia
In an article on web site The Cutting Edge News, entitled Wikipedia—The Dumbing Down of World Knowledge, U.S. author Edwin Black gave a lengthy overview of criticism of Wikipedia, including coverage of Larry Sanger reporting the Wikimedia Foundation to the FBI for allegedly distributing child pornography (see separate story). In the last part of the article Black describes his own unhappy experience with Wikipedia's coverage of himself and of the subject of a book of his. According to Black, "In recent days, IBM advocates on Wikipedia edited the “History of IBM” entry to gloss over, dilute, or outright delete the company's involvement. To accomplish this, coordinated revision on Holocaust history required deleting or vilifying my book, IBM and the Holocaust." One of his complaints about the article about himself appears to have been prompted by the simultaneous inclusion of the weasel words warning template and the Category:American Jews, which Black related as "such tags as 'weasel American Jew' being branded on my bio page", "which danced perilously close to hate speech". Black then mentions his efforts to uncover the real life identity of several Wikipedians, since he refused to deal with "an anonymous committee".

Black ends by posing the following question to his readers:
 * "As society careens into the unchartered roadways of the next rev of the Internet Age—called Web 2.0 by some—will mankind's itinerary be determined by the open vanguard of our best thinkers and writers democratized to include all who identify themselves or by the shouts and jeers of an anonymous, masked crowd operating in the shadows?"

Briefly

 * News Sites Rethink Anonymous Online Comments – The New York Times reports that news organizations are considering eliminating or relegating anonymous comments to sideline abusive and rude commenters. The piece also mentions Wikipedia's use of pseudonymity and user access levels to promote more productive comments.