thomas malloy wrote:
Richard C Hoagland was interviewed on C to C AM this morning. He
mentioned that a large number of changes to Wikipedia are made by
governmental agencies.
Most of the changes are innocuous or beneficial. And after all,
government agencies have the right to publish information. They
should not do so anonymously as some have done. This story came to
the fore recently when the Wikipedia Scanner went public this month. See:
http://www.wired.com/politics/onlinerights/news/2007/08/wiki_tracker
http://wikiscanner.virgil.gr/
This reduces Wikipedia anonymity which is a good thing. Bill Beaty
said that Wikipedia should not allow anonymous edits, and I agree.
The first thing that came to mind was Jed's complaints about the
LENR section of Wikipedia being tampered with.
These were not anonymous edits. Some skeptics used to boldly trash
the article. They were proud of their work and they had Wikipedia
homepages. I have not seen them around lately.
Richard didn't give any specific examples of tampering that NASA did.
I have not read any reports that NASA has added distorted
information. There are complaints about edits by Diebold, Exxon,
Wal-Mart and various senators and congressmen. The CIA has reportedly
been adding valuable information that appears to be correct. The CIA
maintains some excellent public information resources such as:
https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/index.html
- Jed
