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.
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.
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:
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: info
wikimedia.org - Fax: +1-415-882-0495 (note: we get a large number of calls; email or fax is always a better first option)
UPDATE: I’ve located Solomon’s source of information, an independent Wikipedia author tracker. Here is Connolley’s base statistics:
Click image for full report
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It seems all the dominos are falling, UEA, NASA, Wikipedia, UNIPCC, Google etc – how far will this go!
National Review…not National Post (Canada’s national newspaper),
REPLY: Solomon’s article in the link I provided above is in the National Post at this URL:
http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/fullcomment/archive/2009/12/18/370719.aspx
– Anthony
That is the problem with “electronic” media. It can be modified and what was said yesterday can be erased. Archives can be purged, articles can be modified to say things today that they didn’t say yesterday.
You can not edit a hard copy newspaper or book after it has been published. I suppose that is one reason why actual ink to paper publishing should never die. You can’t “unprint” it.
I have personally seen cases where the Washington Post, for example, edits stories after publication, publishes a story online that differs from the same story published in the newspaper, and seen articles purged from the archives that were published online but not in the print edition. Electronic “archives” are not to be trusted. They can be edited at any time and an article that says one thing today can disappear or say something completely different a year from now.
Wikipedia isn’t worth the paper it is printed on.
While a lot is being said about climate science and some bad apples doing some naughty things, and others have even touched on how this may effect the way science is conducted in future everyone seems to be ignoring the most money centric part of science, that is pharmaceutical research.
In recent years some of the dirty tricks that big pharma has gotten up to is very similar to what is now being exposed as a result of emails being aired publicly.
It seems where ever there is a LOT of money involved with science there should be a LOT more scrutiny of the results and players involved but this just doesn’t seem to happen.
Although one thing climate scientists haven’t done yet is make up their own journals to have their results published favourably, so they’re still behind their brethren at big pharma.
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.
I’d like to see a link to the original article, please.
REPLY: Its in my post at the top in bold
“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
oops. Sorry, didn’t see it in the article text itself. Disregard my last comment. 😛
Wikipedia = Minitrue RecDep.
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.”
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.
Apparently this parody site, Uncyclopedia, is closer to the truth than I realised:
http://uncyclopedia.wikia.com/wiki/Global_warming
Rereke Whakaaro, it would be nice to have a citation for that book. There are a long list of such anecdotes, but the cataloging citations is the tricky part.
Perhaps there’s a way to turn their tactics on them? Not a user of Wikipedia, due to this very type of thing, but maybe others here know how to use it, and which ‘articles’ to work on? This crowd always hates it when others use their tactics on them. Just a thought.
Just how deep is Connelley in Climategate? Check out Michael Mann trashing Soon and Baliunas in 2006:
Up to his neck.
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.
Off subject, but first day of winter is Monday, and winter is back to being like the ‘old days!’
From the data at: National Weather Service, National Operational Hydrologic
Remote Sensing Center
Dec 21st % Snow Coverage Ave. Depth
2009 [12/19 a.m. ] 48.6% 3.5″
2008 53.4% 4.4”
2007 42.3% 4.2”
2006 26.3 2.4
2005 44.8% 3.2
2004 18.6% 1.2”
2003 24.7% 1.7”
http://www.nohrsc.noaa.gov/nsa/index.html?region=National&year=2009&month=12&day=19&units=e
2009 numbers should be a lot bigger by monday!
They scrub political articles as well . But you get what you pay for ….
The quicker Wikipedia disappears the better IMHO. The Australian Tax Office was recently embarrassed when it was discovered that a Wikipedia entry was used as the basis of a judgement.
http://www.news.com.au/business/tax-office-relied-on-wikipedia-reference/story-e6frfm1i-1225811594544?from=public_rss
But the UN’s official verdict that the Medieval Warm Period had not existed did not erase the countless schoolbooks, encyclopedias, and other scholarly sources that claimed it had.
Thank God ‘global warming’ never got to the point of book burnings.
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.¨
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ian_Plimer
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…
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!
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.¨
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ian_Plimer
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…
(delete if this is a second entry – first did not appear to go through)
This is not the first time this has happened. This item was big news a few years back. Yes, another email incident.
http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article9474.shtml
Digg it
http://digg.com/environment/Climategate_Wikipedia_s_Climate_Doctor
Alan S. Blue (20:19:52) :
It is back at the public library.
I will try to find it again and post the citation here.
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.
I have been disgusted by this totalitarian version of “science” for a long time; I have read it and been repulsed for too long. Perhaps serious consequences are due for this kind of behavior. My mind first goes to a Western version of justice, but Jail time will do as well — for those who subvert reality, science, and truth.
I’ve been aware of this wikipedia bias for some time and am glad to see that it is getting publicity. I think that the corruption in wikipedia is so ingrained that the whole concept of an encyclopedia modifiable by everyone needs to be implemented in a totally different fashion.
Wikipedia appears to draw on the success of open-source software with one major difference. In a software project there are objective measurements of whether one persons code works better than another persons such as execution time/memory requirements, etc. In the area of personal preferences of hackers, if no agreement can be reached on a basic topic such as the structure of the filesystem to use for a new OS, then usually the project splits into two groups. Also in open source software all of the previous versions of programs are available and it is very clear on comparison of various versions what changes have been made. The most current program has the highest version number and the most stable program is usually a couple of versions back.
If wikipedia functioned in a true open source fashion then every single version of every article would be available on wikipedia. Once an article has been written, it should be treated as read_only and each article should be accompanied with the result of a hash-function which will let people know if the copy of the article they have differs from the one which was used to compute the hash. Creation of a new version would occur if _any_ change was made including punctuation. For trivial changes to the article, a non-alterable audit trail could be created so that one wouldn’t have to save thousands of copies of an article if some user decided to add and delete commas at random.
For subjects such as global warming, the encyclopedic equivalent of forking an open source software project would occur. For those of us who believe there is a MWP, the earth’s temperature history would include this and the warmists POV would be full of hockey-stick like graphs with no temperature variation before the present day. Also, every article and change should be signed by the person who wrote it or made the change. There are lots of opportunities for people to post anonymously on various blogs but for an informational structure that purports to be an encyclopedia, knowing the authorship of varous sections is essential. As every crackpot would be able to post on the new proposed encyclopedic information structure, some mechanism of separating out the usefull from crap would be essential. An objective measure of accesses to various versions of a topic or a transparent voting system could be used to rate multiple articles on various topics in terms of relevance to the majority of people. The other requirement would be that each topic have a mandatory inclusion of how many other articles there are on that particular topic and the ratings of the top 3-4.
One of the things I’ve noticed about Wikipedia is the notion that there is a _right_ way of documenting a particular topic and that all “incorrect” material is excluded. This type of thinking is isomorphic to the hacker ideal of the perfect program, but open-source software development leaves an audit-trail of incredible detail letting anyone else see what “wrong” ideas were pursued. Wikipedia uses this concept in a flawed manner in that wikipedia erases all trace of “wrong” ideas. Most people believe that their personal views are correct and that any dissent from these views is wrong. Even people who try to be objective display personal bias which is why one needs a means of enforcing objectivity in any future wikipedia like project.
I’ve emailed wikipedia to let them know that I won’t be contributing anything to their project and that, unless the process for creating wikipedia articles is changed, I will refuse to use wikipedia and counsel other people to do the same. I notice that wikipedia articles come up near the top of web searches and I make a point of avoiding clicking on these given the major problems that have been identified with wikipedia.
Wikipedia is just another example of the folk with the loudest voices calling the tune – perhaps we need a campaign to withold contributions from it until it stops anonymous editing. On the other hand, it could solve its funding crisis right now by carrying adverts; the problem is, if the silent majority stopped using Wikipedia because of its having been hijacked by thermofascists, advertising revenue would be witheld. Oh dear…
From these words alone…“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.”…would make me skeptical to ever donate a dime.
More like “WIMPipedia”
or LIMPipedia
or ***LICKipedia
Hey William…because of you and your ilk, as well as your association with public servant, taxpayer-funded Gavin at RC….you are precisely the reason why anything you publish, or allow to be published, will always ALWAYS be taken with a very skeptical, cynical, big-ass grain (rather CHUNK) of salt.
You may think you are getting away with it…but your whole little club is being watched with intense scrutiny…by rational minds.
Nor are we fooled….in the slightest bit whatsoever.
Your reign (if you can call it that) is over.
Long live the MWP. Hip hip hurray!
(LOL)
Chris
Norfolk, VA, USA
Advocates of global warming are showing their revisionist tendencies. Which leads to me to quote from a well known book:
“This, thought Winston, was the most frightening aspect of the party regime-that it could obliterate memory, turn lies into Truth and alter the Past. The Party slogan was “Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past.” ”
from 1984 by George Orwell
Anthony,
Thanks for spreading this message from the Great White North. Lawrence Solomon has been writing and lecturing on the environment for a long time. His perspective is well worth the wider exposure WUWT can provide.
I was hoping for something fun to read before bed-time, and what I find is another horror story.
However, on a brighter note, perhaps the offended skeptics can sue the likes of Connelley in an English Court of Law. The English have a very different view of libel that has caused numerous authors of scurrilous books and articles to alter versions available in England. For instance, I’m pretty sure Bill Clinton changed the tone of his attacks on Ken Starr in the English version of his autobiography, because Starr could have sued easily for libel if it had remained true to the American version. Anyway, Wikipedia is available in England in the same version it is in the U.S.? Perhaps trouble for bad boys.
I get lots of good info if it’s a non-controversial subject. I was needing some computational geometry basics last week, and wikipedia was a big help.
But AGW, with its charged atmosphere of science, politics, economics, environment, and journalism is just too much for wikipedia to handle in a meaningful way.
FWIW, we should be skeptical of a lot of what we hear, whether it’s on the internet, TV, books, radio, newpapers, magazines… Hmmm, I guess that doesn’t leave a lot.
I find Wikipedia quite useful on non-controversial subjects. What I find most useful, however is the standard wikipedia structure. Near the top of each article is a block called “contents”, and in that block is indexed a section called “further reading”. This section is almost always contains a link to a good tutorial on the subject. If it doesn’t the “external links” may, and this is often where any balance may be hidden.
And we are fortunate that the English language Wiki is edited by a large population no tonly from the English speaking world but from English-speaking experts from all over the world. That does not mean we monolingual types are limited to reading the English version however. If you can put up with automatic translation, you can often get useful information from other wiki sites, such as Germany:
http://www.microsofttranslator.com/bv.aspx?ref=SERP&br=ro&mkt=en-US&dl=en&lp=de_en&a=http%3a%2f%2fde.wikipedia.org%2fwiki%2fMittelalterliche_Warmzeit
History has always been rewritten by people with an agenda, who have something to promote for their own benefit or their peoples benefit, or by those who have something to hide.
Take for instance the Council of Nicaea who rewrote the message of Jesus in starting in 325AD. They subverted the true message with pagan Babylonian rituals, which is why we has the sun god ritual with Easter and all it’s machinations, as well as Christmas rituals that mimic the ancient Babylonian traditions surrounding the event.
Human nature has not changed in 5,000 years, and it’s not about to change any time soon.
William Connelly does get mentioned in e-mail 1108399027
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.
Rereke Whakaaro (20:37:22) :
It is back at the public library.
I will try to find it again and post the citation here.
I’m interested.
Who cares about your penny contributions to wike. Party time to all the AGW crowd. Just think of all the money being thrown around after the sucessful meetings and lobbying at Copenhagen. Its billions going international organizations and NGOs( something like 10 to 15% administration fees of the $10 billions promised per year), then most of it some ( 70 to 80 per cent will be for consulting fees, purchases of SUV vehicles justified by the conditions of the roads in developing countries, trainings seminars, regional consultative meetings, capacity building, study tours, report preparations, public consultations and hearings, banquets, design and supervisions of demonstration projects, information dessimination, documentation. etc.) Whatever small amount left is the one for the tangible demonstration projects. Not to mention in developed countries the huge amount of taxpayer’s funded research and development for clean fuel, sequestration, renewable energy, etc that goes to the big oil companies and energy generators. This is the real stimulus to the economies of the developed countries. The truth is irrelevant. Science is irrelevant. It is the golden rule. He who holds the gold rules.
This is a coincidence, because today I edited three times the Wikipedia article “The Medieval Warming Period”, at:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medieval_Warm_Period
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.
The best thing to do is boycott Wikipedia and set up a competitor who demonstrates the policy of acting without fear or favour of facts and the truth. Wikipedia’s reputation will diminish if they do not publish both sides of an issue.
[snip] When will the inquisition begin Bishop Connolly?
Wicipedia is in collusion with Google to censor information. Before climatgegate, wiki had this information on their page called “Censorship by Google” found here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_by_Google
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.
crosspatch (19:58:53) rightly said (inter alia)
Unfortunately, some reputable but lamentably imprudent publishers are now printing history books (for example) which, instead of appending copious notes and full lists of sources, merely refer readers to web-pages.
I am surprised that nobody has commented yet on the picture in his wiki page (now also on the WUWT).
To my knowledge that kind of picture counts as ‘Point of View’ pic on the Wikipedia. William Connolley, the Wikipedia administrator, should have found the photo that he uses on his passport a more suitable contribution to his wiki page than this sh*t.
Not sure whether he thinks that photo makes him look ‘hot’ or ‘cool’, but from my point of view, it looks as if he is running away after stealing a small teddy bear from a toddler. Shame, William, shame!
Margaret (21:16:13) says:
Well, I for one shall gladly help but, though willing to give time, lack the funds to establish such a site. Who will fund this?
This is a perfect example of why, when I was a physics TA, I would give no credit for references on papers that were turned in to me that had Wikipedia as a source, even if there were other sources. The information is not reliable and in many cases not verifiable.
I’m glad that many others are beginning to see what I knew 5 years ago. It’s an okay place to start research, but don’t start using it to support your arguments.
I don’t usually immediately send off an email when I see these sorts of revelations, I suppose the mere fact that there are so many would cause my fingers to freeze up once and for all. But I use Wikipedia and while I suspected the ‘fix was in’ after the East Anglia Emails were released, I dodn’t suspect the fix was quite as bad as described. I Immediately wrote an email telling them that while it is important to guard the credibility of their product, they should be most careful in guarding it from the guards.
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.
http://reason.com/blog/2009/05/07/internationalist-house-of-panc
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I._F._Stone
Wikipedia’s response to my letter RE: Lawrence Solomon: Wikipedia’s climate doctor and my reply.
Pierre
I understand there several processes and procedures intended to prevent someone from taking control of a segment of Wikipedia for their own benefit. I also understand that Wikipedia is huge and therefore cannot be micromanaged from the top, which is why the procedures and controls are in place.
What happened in this case was a successful conspiracy to take command of information (and history) by a not-so small group of co-conspirators, a la 1984, to serve their own means and ends.This is not a flash in the pan, but a long term (over a decade) coordinated effort to literally rewrite history. As you stated, Wikipedia … normally takes no stance in disputes about Wikipedia content or administration, but this situation is far from normal by anyones measure.
I think the Wikipedia concept has enormous benefits and Wikipedia is usually the first place I look when I need information. My greatest concern is the damage to Wikipedia’s credibility by something as massive as what was orchestrated by William Connolley and his band of cohorts. I think it would be prudent for Wikipedia to be proactive on this matter, if for no other reason than for damage control.
So, actually, your (apparently off the shelf) reply does not answer my question.
Let’s break it down into several parts:
1. Is the management at Wikipedia aware of the biased and dictatorial Wikipedia administration by William Connolley?
2. Is there any internal investigation being undertaken to verify the extent and the scope of this apparent hijacking of process.
3. What, if any steps are being taken to correct the bias injected into the 5,428 articles authored or edited by William Connolley?
4. Has William Connolley been removed as a Wikipedia administrator? If so who has taken his place?
5. Would it be prudent in this case to now have an administrator who is biased against AGW but closely monitored until this situation is fleshed out?
5. If the current controls failed in this situation (a successful coordinated attack by a group), then what steps are being taken to change the procedures and processes to keep such usurpation from happening in the future?
I await your reply.
Dennis Kuzara
Wikipedia information team wrote:
> Dear Dennis Kuzara,
>
> Thank you for your email.
>
> 12/19/2009 08:26 – Dennis Kuzara wrote:
>
>
>> I would like to know what will be done about this.
>> http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/fpcomment/archive/2009/12/18/lawrence-solomon-wikipedia-s-climate-doctor.aspx
>
> Thank you for contacting us with your concern.
>
> Wikipedia is a collaborative encyclopedia (as explained at
> ), and so anyone may edit its
> articles. Its policy, nonetheless, is that articles must be written from a Neutral
> Point of View, representing all majority and significant-minority views fairly and
> without bias, as is discussed extensively at .
>
> However, all matters relating to article content and project administration are
> not controlled by a central authority, but are decided through discussion and
> consensus of all collaborators. The nonprofit Wikipedia Foundation, which operates
> Wikipedia, does not intervene in the day-to-day operations of Wikipedia, does not
> make decisions about the content of articles or about administrative actions, and
> normally takes no stance in disputes about Wikipedia content or administration.
>
> There are several tens of thousands of contributors and more than a thousand
> administrators on the English Wikipedia alone, which normally ensures that no
> single editor or administrator can exert a commanding influence over the project
> or any particular aspect of it. There are also often disputes about content or
> administrative policy, but Wikipedia has solid procedures to resolve disputes and
> to make sure that every contested action, including the deletion of articles or
> the blocking of contributors, is subject to review in a community discussion or by
> an independent Arbitration Committee
> ().
>
> I hope that this addresses your concern.
>
>
> Yours sincerely,
> Pierre Grés
>
>
Eduardo Ferreyra (21:13:36) :
This is a coincidence, because today I edited three times the Wikipedia article “The Medieval Warming Period”, at:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medieval_Warm_Period
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:
Stephan Schulz – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Stephan Schulz is a German computer scientist working in the field of automated reasoning. He is best known for the development of the high performance … blah blah blah
It may be a different Stephan Schulz, but whatdya bet that a computer scientist is the resident Wikipedia expert on MWP. Perhaps Phil Jones can get the Wikipedia opening as expert on computer coding.
crosspatch (19:58:53) :
“Wikipedia isn’t worth the paper it is printed on.”
Don’t you mean, “Wikipedia isn’t worth the paper it ISN’T printed on.”?
Emails to me from W Connolley , the ever so balanced Wikipedia admin:
Junk:
Please stop adding skeptic junk to wiki climate articles William M. Connolley (talk) 07:37, 31 March 2009 (UTC)
3rr warning:
You need to be aware of WP:3RR and the consequences of breaking it William M. Connolley (talk) 17:36, 31 March 2009 (UTC)
Wait, wait! Where was the 3rd warning! The first email was a “thank you for the contribution” form email!
I have attempted to complain to Wikipedia, but there does not appear to be a direct way to do so.
crosspatch (19:58:53) :
You can not edit a hard copy newspaper or book after it has been published. I suppose that is one reason why actual ink to paper publishing should never die. You can’t “unprint” it.
You have my vote for quote of the week in the 2nd paragraph.
News print hardcopy is the key to restoring the USHCN.
I was always surprised how often replies in the comments at RealClimate would reference wikipedia, I guess that’s why.
Here is a flavour:
http://www.google.com/search?q=wikipedia+site:realclimate.org
Second link is of William Connolley’s “departure” from RealClimate (2007). I think one of the commenters there sums it up perfectly (#18):
“Sad news indeed William. Keep up the vigil at Wikipedia. The cyberworld needs qualified experts to monitor the kids! Good luck.”
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2007/12/goodbye-to-all-that/
Nice.
The corrupt practices surrounding AGW run deep.
While many AGW proponents are misguided or ignorant, many are intellectually dishonest.
Truly, the end justifies the means for these people.
Sadly, the end justifies the means is normal operating procedure for many in our civilization, today — and this mentality is a threat to our civilization’s very survival, a thousand times more dangerous than alleged AGW.
Yet another prediction by George Orwell coming true. History will be rewritten. Memory holes to come on every computer to suck the truth out of the Internet. Pretty obvious it has to happen so that governments can become more powerful. Funny though, I always thought the governments were for the people , not the other way around. Most people are too apathetic to do anything about it. I suppose in the end we get the government we deserve.
I think he needs hair cut.
Rereke Whakaaro (20:14:00) :
And publishing interpretations of Nostradamus that favor Global Warming.
Wow…
What area hasn’t this religion infested yet ?
It’s like a cancer…
This Wiki business is most disturbing.
For those who have never read 1984, the entire book is online:
http://www.george-orwell.org/1984/3.html
Part 1, Chapter 4
(Winston Smith was an “editor” in the Ministry of Truth….)
The messages he had received referred to articles or news items which for one reason or another it was thought necessary to alter, or, as the official phrase had it, to rectify. For example, it appeared from The Times of the seventeenth of March that Big Brother, in his speech of the previous day, had predicted that the South Indian front would remain quiet but that a Eurasian offensive would shortly be launched in North Africa. As it happened, the Eurasian Higher Command had launched its offensive in South India and left North Africa alone. It was therefore necessary to rewrite a paragraph of Big Brother’s speech, in such a way as to make him predict the thing that had actually happened. Or again, The Times of the nineteenth of December had published the official forecasts of the output of various classes of consumption goods in the fourth quarter of 1983, which was also the sixth quarter of the Ninth Three-Year Plan. Today’s issue contained a statement of the actual output, from which it appeared that the forecasts were in every instance grossly wrong. Winston’s job was to rectify the original figures by making them agree with the later ones. As for the third message, it referred to a very simple error which could be set right in a couple of minutes.
Can you say “Climategate”, “MWP” and Wikipedia in the same sentence? Apparently Wikipedia is unable to do so.
Wikipedia and Google do evil. Boycott them both.
See more by Solomon about Connolley from last year here:
The Opinionator: Solomon
Posted: May 03, 2008, 2:53 AM by Lawrence Solomon
http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/fpcomment/archive/2008/05/03/who-is-william-connolley-solomon.aspx
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.
REPLY: Thanks I’ve added this to the main body – Anthony
“Don’t you mean, “Wikipedia isn’t worth the paper it ISN’T printed on.”?”
No, I meant what I said. I meant that it was worth less than nothing. In other words, it is worse than useless, it is a hazard.
Someone asked about the extent of the Medieval Warm Period.
co2science.org has a lot of information about it.
junkscience.com frequently has a list of recent additions at c02science.org,
usually on Wednesday. Here is a recent example:
Medieval Warm Period Record of the Week:
Was there a Medieval Warm Period? YES, according to data published by 774 individual scientists from 459 separate research institutions in 42 different countries … and counting! This issue’s Medieval Warm Period Record of the Week comes from Northeastern Slope of the Cariaco Basin, Venezuela Coast. To access the entire Medieval Warm Period Project’s database, click here.
I’ve stopped contributing money to Wikipedia some time ago when it became apparent that it’s very partisan. I might just subscribe to National Post. I’ve been meaning to do that for a while now.
OT – Something to keep an eye on. Mayon volcano in the Philippines has seen an increase in SO2 emissions to 7,000 tons/day on Saturday from 4,000 tons earlier this week. Pinatubo, by comparison, was at 10,000 tons/day when it erupted.
Richard McGough (21:17:59) :
Don’t shout.
I’ve seen no credible evidence that Google is censoring climategate.
12 million matches for climategate – do you really believe that the number of people who read WUWT and other blog could write that many articles and have Googles spiders find them in a few days? Where’s your scientific skepticism? I wrote two or three times that despite the inflated number of hits estimated, Google really had only 700 or so articles indexed.
Read up on how the Google search engine works with its farm of smallish PCs, and then you might begin to understand why they use estimates like that instead of taking the time to find the actual count.
Your description of search terms is lost in ambiguity – Google behaves very differently when quote marks are used than when they aren’t. Any comparison with Google searches must include clearly specifying what the search expression is. For example (I didn’t know this until the first Google thread) searching for “climategate” (i.e. with quotes) matches only climategate, whereas searching for climategate matches climategate and also pages with both climate and gate. There are likely many other subtleties I’m not familiar with
The paragraph you offer had no business being in Wikipedia, any other Wiki, or any other web page – its presence here cheapens WUWT and lowers the respect for scientific inquiry at the heart of this blog.
You might notice on Wikipedia it’s always called the “scientific consensus,” rather than a theory. And that any bio of anyone questioning the theory smears them in some way. While advocates are never similarly smeared.
Just curious where would Solomon have got the stats about what Connolley had done? Is there a log of wikipedia changes we can look at or something?
Compare the wicked pedia entries of Naomi Oreskes to Fred Singer. Her selected awards and honours makes it look she’s about to receive a Nobel Prize while Singer is dismissed as a crank who believes in Martians. Any young student who reads this crap would be incredulous if they were told Singer is actually a great scientist while Oreskes owes her fame to the Goracle and her work has been thoroughly discredited.
“But, but, but I read it on wiki….”
Any student who cites wikipedia fails the course immediately.
Content of my email to Wiki
Gentleman
Your lack of editorial control in the area of climate has tainted all of your efforts to date. Connolley and Peterson have poisoned Wikipedia. Your “honor” system has been destroyed by your own hand.
Terry Bixler
Charles Higley (21:47:21) :
“I have attempted to complain to Wikipedia, but there does not appear to be a direct way to do so.”
There is zero accountability for wikipedia admins. There are a number wikipedia admins who are furry pedophiles who edit a lot of the various articles on sex and fetishes. Because the pedos hide in fursuits they are a protected minority at Wikipedia.
BTW Two days ago I wrote a letter to Wikipedia via their donation system, explaining why I wasn’t donating anything and never would until they drastically change their policies. So this piece by Solomon is welcome.
There is a conservative group launching their own wiki encyclopedia, btw, which will have better vetting of admins and peer review of contributions.
As for the googlegate issue, I’ve not seen the autosuggest list not have climategate on any of more than a dozen machines I’ve worked on in the past month. I believe that this issue is regional.
The bias charge is serious – and accurate.
Look up “Climategate” there if you doubt it. No one has been allowed to edit the article and provide an alternate viewpoint of its initial author, and a “lock” has been placed on the article to prevent this. Isn’t this contrary to the allegedly “open” editorial viewpoint expressed by Wikipedia founders? Where is the competing press when true censorship is taking place?
Proof of bias is evident in the slew of pro-AGW articles cited in the “reference” section of the article on “Climategate”. Damning or accusatory articles, however scientific in their stance, have been carefully pruned from the 80-article reference list (as of tonight). Almost all of those linked are apologists for UEA, the scientists, or the broader “science” of global warming. Many writers are simply journalists (Andy Revkin among them) reassuring their reading public in bold headlines, subheads, or “conclusions” that the central premise of AGW is unhurt by the content of the thousands of e-mails and data which were “hacked”. (The idea of a whistle-blower is not explored).
It’s curious how often skeptics were and are accused of believing that there is a “vast conspiracy” afoot – even as (is now clearly shown) they conspired to massage data, gatekeep the portals to legitimate scientific discourse, and ostracize dissenting critics and colleagues, and now, in their own defense rally with the following defense:
So they have their conspiracy “theorists” too. It’s a fitting conclusion to this chapter to say that after years of frustrated Freedom of Information Act requests, that need has been finally, embarrassingly, brutally, met. And about time.
Have a look at the Wikipedia entry on Lord Monckton. A nasty little piece.
It appears that Connolley’s effort to get elected to Wikipedia’s arbitration committee have failed according to the election results:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:ACE2009
He had 234 support votes, 284 neutral votes and 478 oppose votes for a net of -244. He came in 19th out of 22 and nine were to be elected.
Maybe someone is finally listening at Wikipedia.
anon (22:35:51) :
Just curious where would Solomon have got the stats about what Connolley had done? Is there a log of wikipedia changes we can look at or something?
Ahh, yeah, actually there is. Every Wikipedia article has four tabs. The first is the article. The second is the discussion among the editors about what to include, exclude and why, there is a tab to actually edit the page and then a history of edits. In the discussion tab, if you click on one of the editors, it will take you to the editor’s home wikipedia page. The tabs behind the article… any article.. are fascinating.
“crosspatch (22:14:52) :
“Don’t you mean, “Wikipedia isn’t worth the paper it ISN’T printed on.”?”
No, I meant what I said. I meant that it was worth less than nothing. In other words, it is worse than useless, it is a hazard.”
I nominated this as the best comment about Wiki, and might I just add,
It is a toxic waste land, fit to be put on the toxic waste cleanup supper fund.
Rich Day (22:43:07) :
I don’t fail them… Wikipedia is good for a first quick pass at something. It is NOT a primary source and should not be used or cited unless there IS nothing else… and always check the discussion tab…
Rich Day (22:43:07) “Any student who cites wikipedia fails the course immediately.”
The problem Rich, is that the bloody instructors are probably using Wiki as the final authority. Educators tend to be green and left of center and all over GW. Perfect marks for Wiki trash.
We have a local Ph.D. psychologist who is a university prof (now retired I think) left winger, greenie, failed political candidate and letter writer. He was quoting Wiki line, verse and chapter in a recent letter to the editor. He recently trashed Lindzen and yet relies on Wiki.
I know a green enviro teacher who almost certainly allows Wiki references at the college. He’d not blink at a Wiki reference is my guess. And what of the thousands of lefty Grade 6 teachers who are scientifically illiterate. We will soon be seeing a new generation of teachers in our K-12 schools who have been brainwashed now for ten or 15 years by Al Gore and Wiki and utterly brainwashed with scientifically false information. A whole generation of brainwashed greenie teachers is upon us.
Pretty sad. My kids are grown up, but I have grandkids. Worries me.
Perhaps the blogosphere should be allowed access to crowdsource the site in order to clean up the toxic waste that infests that cesspool.
Michael (23:05:48) :
“I nominated this as the best comment about Wiki, and might I just add,
It is a toxic waste land, fit to be put on the toxic waste cleanup supper fund.
Ahhh, no. I cleaned upa lot of pretty toxic suppers as a Boy Scout commiteeman. No one died. If there was a toxic waste cleanup supper fund, I’m sure my troop would have applied for the funds,
No real surprise here. The agenda driven editing on Wikipedia has been blatant for three years now. Just try looking up ‘Roman Warm Period’.
Link; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_Warm_Period
“Deleted by Andrew c”
“We’ve known for some time that Wikipedia can’t be trusted to provide unbiased climate information.”
Just more organized crime disguised as information access. I recommend using utility add-ons to delete wiki results from google/xyz searches. I have used one for 6 months and have far more balanced search results. Try Surf Clarity for Firefox.
The brilliant minds at Distilled in UK that built my add-on no longer list it – probably due to a visit from wiki jack boots. Allowing any info system with a one-man gateway to become acceptable is the height of stupidity IMO. Wiki and rc are obviously bedmates in grime and propaganda hearsay.
They’ve been rewriting history since reading and writing first began.
This is the final solution.
CROWDSOURCING!
Robert E. Phelan (23:09:22) : wrote
Michael (23:05:48) :
“I nominated this as the best comment about Wiki, and might I just add,
It is a toxic waste land, fit to be put on the toxic waste cleanup supper fund.
“Ahhh, no. I cleaned upa lot of pretty toxic suppers as a Boy Scout commiteeman. No one died. If there was a toxic waste cleanup supper fund, I’m sure my troop would have applied for the funds,”
I was a boy scout too.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_E._Mann
Just added to this part 🙂
Michael E. Mann (born 28 December 1965) is an American climatologist, and author of more than 80 peer-reviewed journal publications. He has attained public prominence as lead author of a number of articles on paleoclimate and as one of the originators of a graph of temperature trends dubbed the “hockey stick graph” for the shape of the graph. The graph received both praise and criticism after its publication in an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report.
My addition
Which has since been proven to be a fraud.
Wonder how long it`ll stay there lmao
Note to mods, how do i use [code][/code] or [quote] on this site?
“fit to be put on the toxic waste cleanup supper fund.”
Interesting choice of words. They will shove anything down our throats.
Actually, Wikipedia is one of the ways in which “conventional wisdom” becomes “fact” or how something that people want to believe becomes “fact”.
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.
Reply follows:
Dear Dennis Kuzara,
Thank you for your email.
12/20/2009 05:31 – Dennis Kuzara wrote:
> > Pierre
> >
> > I understand there several processes and procedures intended to prevent
> > someone from taking control of a segment of Wikipedia for their own benefit. I
> > also understand that Wikipedia is huge and therefore cannot be micromanaged
> > from the top, which is why the procedures and controls are in place.
> >
> > What happened in this case was a successful conspiracy to take command of
> > information (and history) by a not-so small group of co-conspirators, a la
> > 1984, to serve their own means and ends.This is not a flash in the pan, but a
> > long term (over a decade) coordinated effort to literally rewrite history. As
> > you stated, Wikipedia … normally takes no stance in disputes about Wikipedia
> > content or administration, but this situation is far from normal by anyones
> > measure.
> >
> > I think the Wikipedia concept has enormous benefits and Wikipedia is usually
> > the first place I look when I need information. My greatest concern is the
> > damage to Wikipedia’s credibility by something as massive as what was
> > orchestrated by William Connolley and his band of cohorts. I think it would be
> > prudent for Wikipedia to be proactive on this matter, if for no other reason
> > than for damage control.
> >
> > So, actually, your (apparently off the shelf) reply does not answer my
> > question.
> >
> > Let’s break it down into several parts:
> > 1. Is the management at Wikipedia aware of the biased and dictatorial
> > Wikipedia administration by William Connolley?
I’m not Foundation management, just an editor and volunteer who answers customer
e-mail, but my understanding is that while Foundation staff are probably aware of
this and other controversies, they leave their resolution to the community of
editors and its procedures.
> > 2. Is there any internal investigation being undertaken to verify the extent
> > and the scope of this apparent hijacking of process.
What you refer to as a “hijacking of process” is, as far as I can tell, an
entirely normal (for me) series of disagreements about article content. Thousands
of such disagreements occur every day on Wikipedia, and they are normally resolved
through our discussion-based dispute resolution process, as explained at
. This process may ultimately lead to
an Arbitration Committee investigation.
> > 3. What, if any steps are being taken to correct the bias injected into the
> > 5,428 articles authored or edited by William Connolley?
Wikipedia’s content is not centrally edited. Anybody may make any change to
Wikipedia, including undoing an edit by Mr. Connolley. But that change may be
undone in turn if others disagree, and any dispute has to be resolved through
discussion until a consensus is found. This is explained at
.
> > 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.
> > 5. Would it be prudent in this case to now have an administrator who is
> > biased against AGW but closely monitored until this situation is fleshed out?
Administrators are elected by the Wikipedia community, and require a supermajority
of about 70% for election. The community prefers to elect administrators who
display no bias in any respect, but are committed to upholding Wikipedia’s
principle of “neutral point of view” ().
> > 5. If the current controls failed in this situation (a successful coordinated
> > attack by a group), then what steps are being taken to change the procedures
> > and processes to keep such usurpation from happening in the future?
Should the community conclude that its processes were indeed subverted by anybody
(and I am not aware of any such consensus emerging currently), it may decide to
change its policies, as explained at
.
Yours sincerely,
Pierre Grés
— Wikipedia – http://en.wikipedia.org — Disclaimer: all mail to this address is answered by volunteers, and responses are not to be considered an official statement of the Wikimedia Foundation. For official correspondence, please contact the Wikimedia Foundation by certified mail at the address listed on http://www.wikimediafoundation.org
There is conservapedia: http://www.conservapedia.com/Main_Page
I had the same problems with phonics, reading, and dyslexia articles at wikipedia. (I tutor with phonics and have a phonics webpage.) Many of their pages have gotten a bit better recently, but their dyslexia page still is not where it should be.
There are many parallels between the reading wars and the climate wars, I have recently observed.
William Connolley is one of the most dishonest and reprehensible human beings I ever had an email contact with. This former small-time British Arctic Survey employee has turned Wikipedia administration into a personal Maoist-style censorship. Having failed in personal and professional life, Connolley sadistically exercises his editorial power over larger hearts and more knowledgeable minds in the virtual dreamland of Wikipedia.
Unfortunately, among Wikipedia admins Connolley has like-mindless followers, pushing the same ideology, censorship and bias. No reasonable statement of facts was ever allowed on Wikipedia pages dedicated to climate or global warming. Environmental disorder is in full bloom there.
@Kevin Kilty (21:03:25) :
I think your idea is very attractive and the best way to resolve this would indeed be to use the UK libel laws to fix Connelley. Unfortunately it won’t work.
The snag is that I doubt that Michaels, Plimer or any of the other skeptics that have been trashed have access to that kind of money, whilst I’m sure a true believer eco-fascist like Connolley could access hundreds of thousands of pounds for his defence. The greenies would set up a fighting fund for this in five minutes flat and they have supporters with very deep pockets. Why, just a fraction of a percent of the profits from the carbon trading scam would keep anyone out of jail.
The British libel laws are an absolute disgrace. Wealthy celebs and foreign tycoons can use them to safeguard their ‘privacy’ whilst the little guy can be crucified by the gutter press with very little chance of any protection.
I’m afraid we are the little guys here -unless you think Big Oil might come to the rescue. (Fat Chance. They are too busy giving big handouts to the alarmists!)
It appears that Mr. Connolley is currently up for election as a Wikipedia administrator and all registered Wikipedia users will have a say in this process according to the 19 December article at newsbusters.org.
Somewhat OT, but since it keeps coming up: Just another note on Google as to why it might show fewer hits on climategate (or any other term) than another search engine. Google has something called a “duplicate content filter.” The idea is to filter out multiple articles which are mostly the same.
An article on several sites that each have differing layouts and associated extra material (on the page that contains the article) will appear several times, but articles that are on what might be called “clone pages” won’t.
The greater the similarity between pages the more likely the article will be hit by the filter. If the article appears on the same site more than once (eg: home page, article page, tag page, category page) then it will probably only be listed once in G.
Google also likes links and authority. An article on Wiki, since it’s an “authority site” in the eyes of G, will get a lot more attention than the article on your new blog. An article on WUWT will also have more G juice than the same article most other places.
If you want a WUWT article (or your own blog article) to rank well in Google (and other search engines) then make lots of links to it, from your blog, social sites, etc. That is over-simplifying the case, but links are a big part of ranking and authority.
None of this is to say that G doesn’t have a political bias. I’ve seen some of their “news/editorial” videos and they’re quite liberal. They’re also a big donor to the Democrat party. Still, the actions of their search engine probably reflect their various duplicate & junk filters more than bias.
By the way, time how long it takes for a WUWT article to get listed in Google. I’ll bet it’s in the 20 minute range or less. Just search for the post URL.
I sent Lawrence Solomon’s article to Wikipedia and I received an incredibly lame response which is included below for your amusement. I wonder, do they think people are so stupid that they believe this kind of BS? I guess the answer is yes.
Here is the response:
Thank you for your email.
Wikipedia is a collaborative encyclopedia (as explained at ), and so anyone may edit its articles. Its policy, nonetheless, is that articles must be written from a Neutral Point of View, representing all majority and significant-minority views fairly and without bias, as is discussed extensively at .
However, since article content is not controlled by a central authority, we do not resolve content disputes via email. Instead, please follow the steps outlined at . These steps are designed to help you work with other editors and to draw upon the help of the wider community.
Thank you for your interest in Wikipedia.
May say a word on this site for the new leader of the Australian Opposition – The Honourable Tony Abbott:
http://www.aph.gov.au/house/members/pics/photos/EZ5.jpg
Please do not go to Wikipedia to learn about Tony. There you will read a lot about his “public image” and little about his community service and achievements. Go here:
http://www.tonyabbott.com.au/default.aspx
Tony is being likened to Spartacus who led a gladiatorial rebellion of slaves against the might of the Roman Empire:
Tony, along with a handful of his followers, put his career on the line when he led a revolt against a proposed Emissions Trading Scheme and deposed the compliant leader Malcolm Turnbull by a single vote. Turnbull had been frightened by the threat of an election caused by a double dissolution over the ETS when most of the media proclaimed that his Party would be wiped off the map.
Not only has Tony regained the grass roots of the Liberal Party and shell shocked the media, he has scared the living daylights out of the government who now would not dare call a double dissolution over the ETS as it is they who would be laughed out of office.
Other political leaders like David Cameron and members of the US Congress, take another look at the grass roots of your electorates. You will find that those against AGW are not “deniers” or “dinosaurs” but normal people that are just as concerned about the environment as anybody. These people also fully recognise that eventually we are going to run out of fossil fuels and will have to turn to technology for our energy requirements. But that doesn’t mean to say we have to be in a mad panic and blight our landscape with inefficient windmills.
Also have a very close look at the Copenhagen fiasco where it was evident that the AGW movement has very little to do with science and much more to do with an anti-capitalism redistribution of wealth. In many cases it was a blatant money grab by dictatorial states known for their waste and mis-use of funds. So thanks Mr Abbott for leading the way in Australia. When the government and the MSM try to crucify you, I will be proud to stand up and say ‘I am Spartacus’.
Years ago, I would try to help some sensible people in “edit wars”. For a while, I thought it made sense even though the sensitive pages ended badly and my status at Wikipedia was always threatened a bit.
However, I quickly realized how powerful Connolley has become within the internal Wikipedia machinery. Although people at the top may be neutral, they kind of allow the crystallization of ever more radical “cores” which bring additional left-wing bias at each layer. His powers couldn’t have been competed with – and after all, I decided that the content of 6th paragraph on Wikipedia about a global warming issue is just not so terribly important. But I did contribute hundreds of “positive” articles on other issues.
Otherwise, I think that there’s a lot of quality articles in Wikipedia and I frequently use it. It’s kind of obvious when an article becomes an asset of a dishonest editor or clique of editors.
The correct term is chekist
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheka
Wikipedia in fact is controllable by very small numbers of agenda-driven people. It takes only a handful of editors watching key articles at all hours of the day to simply revert any edits which don’t conform to their agenda. Wikipedia is NOT news and is a pathetic source of information for issues like global warming.
no, no. that one is reserved to Ian “Harry_Read_Me” Harris. 🙂
Nice hair! Most people grow out of their student days. But if the cap fits, wear it. How do such people live their lives as a complete lie? Or are they Jekyll and Hyde characters who can go home and turn off the deception side of their character?
In case your interest I just got done uploading a 12 part documentary titled;
The Lost Tomb of Jesus by James Cameron
Bookmark it for future viewing.
Here’s Part 1:
Here’s my channel:
http://www.youtube.com/user/Michaelwiseguy
@ Kevin Kilty :
PETERSEN and SCHULZ are CONNOLLEY watchdogs. I have a personnal experience of PETERSEN censorship in the MANN or hockey stik page.
When you make mention your superior academics and threathen these dogs from wikipedian punishment, they call their master who writes elusive arguments, smart when he has some, most often juste fake or even flawed, in favor of wikipedia content unreasonably and unequitily promoting his personnal views and friends, thus endowing his dogs keep censoring.
Mike Lorrey (22:48:33) :…. There is a conservative group launching their own wiki encyclopedia, btw, which will have better vetting of admins and peer review of contributions.
Ha! at last! competition to the WP monopoly! Please keep us informed Mike, if this is a usable alternative wiki platform for the real climate science, we surely want to bless it and use it. Democracy has been said to be the best of bad options – but at least when there is an opposition party, the worst excesses can be kept in check.
It has been mathematically verified that diverse opinions will finally find the best solution (cf. THE DIFFERENCE: How the Power of Diversity Creates Better Groups, Firms, Schools, and Societies(Page, Scott E.)); but, this theorem requires a very important assumption that the participants are sufficiently of high level (in terms of viewpoint and strategy).
Wikipedia should explore a way that guarantees the requirement of the above theorem on the diversity. Otherwise similar situation will happen again.
In the section on the MWP I’ve put a section on the talk page ‘Potential Conflict of Interest’ raising my concerns. For all the good that it will do.
Michael (23:17:42) :
They’ve been rewriting history since reading and writing first began.
This is the final solution.
CROWDSOURCING!
If you are going to do that then i suggest you start here.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medieval_Warming
I would start by using other temperature reconstructions besides Mann’s hocky stick that do show a distinct warming period then i would go through Soon’s paper and cite studies he used to show warming outside of Europe and north America. Furthermore i would not cite Soon’s paper. Only the studies he cites.
Anyway have fun. I think the whole Wikipedia experiment is fundamentally flawed. Any attempt to make an encyclopedia that is not biased, especially on controversial issues is a hopeless cause. People will always have a point of view and an agenda. Wikipedia tries to limit content and come to consensus on one point of view which is pointless. A better way would be to allow anyone to post anything.
Of course we already have that and it is called the internet.
I had no idea that it was so bad, I just had a look at Ian Plimmer’s entry. It was horrible, and on the top of the page was a link to the begging bowl.
Never never, if what I saw was an example of their editorial policy. If it were me, I would sue, no ifs no buts.
Dreadful, dreadful dreadful……………. shut it down.
And I’ve now read the fawning article about Connelly on Wiki too.
Wonder who wrote it.
Yuk!
I see the domain wikibullies.com has not been registered – or maybe a name like wikipediaclimatechange.com or wkipediagreenhousegases.com maybe used for putting up the censored articles with explanations about the censorship that has been taking place behind the scenes at wikipedia proper. Maybe anyone looking in google for wikipedia & climate change would get such a site near the top of a list. It might not take a lot of managment if it were simply a list of censored articles?
just a thought
Two Points:
I see the “fraud” reference to Prof Plimer has been changed on Wiki. Just another vandalism edit I presume. I don´t like Plimer´s approach at times but he does raise good points most of the time.
Climategate on Google:
I think the very lack of transparency on how Google estimates or delivers hits makes the results questionable. Also, Wikipedia is often the first link, and Wikipedia is hardly the most reliable resource on the internet.
I find it particularly interesting that the hits on Google for Climategate without the quotes went from 1,000s to 1,000,000s to peak at 32.3 million before coming down again in the next few weeks (only 10.8 million on US version now).
Bing on the other hand peaked at over 50 million hits and now shows a measily 3.96 million. That adjustment happened very abruptly a week or so ago.
Basically I think we can conclude that the “hits” statistic on both search engines is a fairly meaningless statistic. It is perhaps a relative measure at best.
I don´t buy the ClimateGate search delivers results containing either climate and gate argument. To illustrate I give here the estimated hits for a variety of searches on US Google:
Climategate = 10,800,000
Climate = 137,000,000
Gate = 135,000,000
+climate +gate = 16,100,000
All three of the latter are larger than climategate by itself, so it is impossible that a search for climategate includes all hits for climate, gate or climate and gate. The numbers simply don´t stack up.
Other results:
+climategate = 2,640,000
“climategate” = 2,640,000
So climategate delivers more results than the exact search “climategate”, but it is not clear to me why this might be the case.
What is abudently clear, however, is that Climategate used to autosuggest early in the escapade, then disappeared from view, then reappeared after a 2-3 week absence. For a Google employee to wave their hands in the air and say the search engine is a mysterious beast (basically what was said on the Google forums regarding the Climategate disappearance) is less than adequate.
Whether the reappearance of Climategate on autosuggest happened due to numerous “googlegate” articles is anyone´s guess. Only they know, and they certainly aren´t going to admit any tampering within the system if there has been any.
It has certainly raised questions in my mind as to how the search giant operates, especially given their domination of the search market.
(Again a second post – not sure why this system seems to struggle with the WUWT blog software. Delete if redundant.)
David Madsen (21:31:08) :
This is a perfect example of why, when I was a physics TA, I would give no credit for references on papers that were turned in to me that had Wikipedia as a source…
Unfortunately Wiki seems to be considered a good source by lazy students. My husband, who is a technical writer was editing a PhD thesis for a foreign student who wished to publish in English. He found much of the thesis had been cribbed directly from Wiki with no changes. Hubby sent the paper back with some pointed remarks about using reliable sources and plagiarism.
We know that an article in Wikipedia is written in sand and subject to change at any time but the current article on Fred Singer is pretty balanced and wouldn’t look out of place on the flysheet of his biography.
As a retired teacher I must report a long-term wariness about Wikipedia the veracity of much that appears in it. In its early years, students would hand in papers entirely based on stuff from Wiki and my standard reply was to reject their offering and have them do proper research from reputable hard-copy sources ie text books. Students do have access to libraries for the reason of learning proper study habits. It takes a little practice, maturity and experience to detect BS. Wikipedia can be a good place to begin a search for information but it should never be the only source for any serious seeker of knowledge.
James F. Evans (21:59:17) :
The corrupt practices surrounding AGW run deep….
Sadly, the end justifies the means is normal operating procedure for many in our civilization, today — and this mentality is a threat to our civilization’s very survival, a thousand times more dangerous than alleged AGW.
Boy is that ever the truth. John (20:02:13) : mentioned pharmaceutical research Well our favorite AGW poster boy Al Gore has his fingers in more than one pie. Back when he was VP he had the farming community in an uproar with his statement to a child when handing out FFA awards “There will be no more farming in America” (reference is my Ag extension agent and Billlings Mt Ag Journal) Given Waxman’s “Food Folly” bill he was not kidding.
I was just reading another article by Nicole Johnson The Festering Fraud Behind Food Safety Reform that frightened the heck out of me. Thanks to the same sort of censorship we see with AGW and Wiki, the FDA and USDA have been hijacked with impunity because of the silence of our regular news media.
“Had the New York Times’ Michael Moss looked at the history of this USDA/ConAgra cover-up, he would have found information that explained why Taylor’s brand of HACCP makes it inevitable that E. coli-contaminated hamburger will eventually make its way to the public, and why Stephanie Smith will not likely be the last person disabled by her dinner….
The Government Accountability Project’s investigative findings included evidence that the public was being exposed to E. coli O157:H7 for two years before the 2002 ConAgra recall finally happened…FSIS repeatedly discovered that ConAgra had been receiving products returned from its customers as E. coli O157:H7 positive. Each time the agency allowed the tainted beef to be cooked and reentered into commerce, without warning the public or imposing systematic corrective action.”
…The report also found that “The regulatory double standard is a microcosm why the integrity of HACCP is at risk. The ConAgra-USDA cover up sustains a pattern of using HACCP as a vehicle to obstruct its staff from enforcing food safety laws at big business, while bullying small business such as family firms.”…
Though the USDA denies this, Eisnitz points out that “They’ve gotten rid of the task codes that would direct the inspectors to actually monitor the slaughtering areas, and the handling as well, so basically, nobody’s watching what’s happening inside these operations. The USDA meat inspectors are completely powerless when it comes to enforcing their own regulations. They’re virtually prohibited from doing so.”
…Tom Devine of the Government Accountability Project has said that “Contempt for federal law has been systematic at these plants….”
Worse the “Food Folly” bill will take away our choice of buying direct from independent farmers, forcing us to eat risky MegaCorp food. Mike Taylor is alleged to be our new “Food Safety Czar” in charge of the “new improved food regulatory bureaucracy”
“These radical changes to the meat and poultry inspection process were spearheaded by none other than Michael Taylor, someone–it could be argued–who has done practically more than anyone to pervert regulatory law and legally permit the poisoning of our food supply. This is the same Michael Taylor who represented Monsanto while a lawyer at King & Spaulding, a law firm that attends to the wishes of the top pharma, chemical, agribusiness and biotech multinational corporations. The same Michael Taylor who had spent nearly a decade working to weaken the Delaney clause, a very good law designed to protect public health by prohibiting cancer-causing chemicals from being added to foods. The same Michael Taylor who had just finished implementing at the FDA the pseudo-scientific policy of “substantial equivalence” so that Monsanto’s patented genetically engineered bovine growth hormone could be unleashed on the market without undergoing any pesky safety tests proving it would not cause harm to human health or the environment – no matter that it sickens cattle and has been linked to human breast, prostrate and colon cancers.[9] And it’s the same Michael Taylor who subsequently went to work for Monsanto as its Vice President of Public Policy where he worked on long-term strategic planning. And now, the same Michael Taylor is the guy the Obama Administration has installed at the FDA to “fix” our food safety problems, no doubt here to put all that long-term strategic planning into action.” http://www.foodsafetynews.com/2009/12/the-festering-fraud-behind-food-safety-reform/index.html?p=2
Sorry for the off topic but as James said this whole thing runs very deep. AGW and Food Security are different heads of the same monster. To kill the monster we need to see the whole body. If we just try to chop off one head all that will happen is it will sprout another we must attack the whole monster.
Here is Wiki’s take on HACCP http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hazard_Analysis_and_Critical_Control_Points
On Food Safety: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hazard_Analysis_and_Critical_Control_Points
And a neutral take on Codex Alimentarius http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codex_Alimentarius
Peter (22:03:27)
Yet another prediction by George Orwell coming true. History will be rewritten. Memory holes to come on every computer to suck the truth out of the Internet….
The memory holes are a reality. The USDA/FDA uses them to accuse farmers of “disinformation” I have seen a government publication I was quoting disappear off the internet and then reappear with the quoted part missing AND the same date on the publication. What was truly funny is when I pointed this out as an example of the governments dishonesty, the quoted part reappeared!
Ronald Reagan said it best. “Trust but verify.” From now on we will have to take everything we see on Wikipedia with a grain of salt. It’s too bad that we will now have to verify from other sources information that we obtain from Wikipedia. It is no longer the “go to source.”
Collapse of the warming scam:
http://www.topix.net/forum/source/bennington-banner/TGF5KR1IA5IDMEAJB#lastPost
Perhaps OT but over on ICECAP is an article reference to the Cliff Mass Weather Blog.
http://cliffmass.blogspot.com/2009/12/climategate.html
“Let me start with my bottom line points:
Were some of the climategate emails inappropriate? Yes
Have some scientists exaggerated the implications of human caused global warming? Yes.
Are many global warming deniers unreasonable and expressing opinions that are not based in facts or rational thought? Yes.
Is the basic science of climate change now in question because of the climategate emails? No.
Has the whole business gotten too political? Surely.
Are scientists human and sometimes doing things out based on human emotion or group think? Yes.”
Global warming deniers? Substitute “men who beat their wives” and you get to
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loaded_question
“Is the basic science of climate change now in question ….”?
YES. Science is always “in question” because science is based on data. When experiments uncover new data that conflict with predictions of “our best theories” then those “best theories” change; or at least they are supposed to change. Politics is impervious to data. Remember that back in the nineteenth century Newton’s theory of gravity was as “settled” as science has ever gotten. Then Einstein came along and published his General theory of Relativity. Would today’s AGW “scientist” call Albert a fixed time denier?
The climategate e-mails show the existence of a conspiracy to manufacture the data. It is the data that drives the science. If the data is in question then the science is also in question.
Anthony undertook a project to track down the weather stations used by USHCN (http://www.surfacestations.org/). What has he found? “Unfortunately, the network has fallen into neglect, and the temperature data produced by it is suspect due to microsite biases. See what has been learned so far here in this slide show.
http://gallery.surfacestations.org/UCAR-slides/index.html “.
Moreover, these violations bias the data to the warmside. GISS algorithms average rural weathers stations with urban “heat sink” weather stations. The result? Warmer data.
Do you see a pattern here? The AGW “scientist” are committing fraud and the truth will out.
Mike Ramsey
Wikipedia administration by William Connolley and at Real climate.
I never heard his name before. This is the kind of publicity that needs exposure.
I have known for yearrs that wiki had a biased agenda. Apparently Connelly is attracted to the climate carbon crisis cartel cesspool. Gavin Schmidt would not friend honest people.
Russia and China censored from the top down. These people are not gubment officials but censor and smear with delight.
I am sure William connelly is on a head trip and googles his own name daily to see responses. He will know about this article.
Another example of ‘peer review’ that does not work.
I have seen some shockingly poor Wiki articles written on certain occasions where whole paragraphs are nothing more than published opinion. But this pointed attack must certainly take the cake: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_scientists_opposing_global_warming_consensus
But a look at the discussion is even more interesting:
[quote]
I’ve not paid this article, or subject matter really, any attention for some time. While I do think some sort of article like this is encyclopedic, the ‘scientist’ folks whose views are represented here come across as really misguided. I don’t know how to make the article better, but I will try to think on it. –Rocksanddirt (talk) 19:25, 18 December 2009 (UTC)
This is caused by the present, perverse categorisation scheme, intended to tell the public that, none of these scientists agree with each other, which is of course, just false. Alex Harvey (talk) 10:08, 20 December 2009 (UTC)
No, it is caused by the fact that their views really are misguided William M. Connolley (talk) 12:36, 20 December 2009 (UTC)
[/quote]
That there is even an edit war over such an article is ludicrous; with the perjorative title and categories, it should have been deleted long ago. The discussion on this particular article shows that Wikipedia’s above stated policy from email responses of encouraging editorial consensus is flawed in practice when an administrator like Mr Connelly can force his or her own opinions through strongarm tactics.
I agree with fellow posters above that until Wiki weeds out the Wikibullies and reviews and modifies its editorial policies, it cannot be trusted even for casual reference.
@Henry chance (05:52:12) :
“I am sure William connelly is on a head trip and googles his own name daily to see responses. He will know about this article.”
That’s so 2005, he’s probably got a google alert set-up so he probably knew about it long before most commentators did 🙂
Clive (23:06:53) :
Rich Day (22:43:07) “Any student who cites wikipedia fails the course immediately.”
The problem Rich, is that the bloody instructors are probably using Wiki as the final authority…
A whole generation of brainwashed greenie teachers is upon us.
Pretty sad. My kids are grown up, but I have grandkids. Worries me.
Unfortunately the brainwashing has been going on for far too long. In 1910 the bankers took control of the Economics departments at Universities and stuffed them with “their Professors” leading to the financial crisis we have today. The Phama/Ag corporations have done the same to biology with Monsanto scarfing up patents. The environuts have lead to Dr. Eric R. Planka, in a speech before the Texas Academy of Science, advocating a 90% population reduction. His method of choice EBOLA. My brother, a first year electrical engineering student at Clarkson in Potsdam NY, came back at thanksgiving spouting Marxism in 1964.
“… Over the last quarter-century, historians have by and large ceased writing about the role of ruling elites in the country’s evolution. Or if they have taken up the subject, they have done so to argue against its salience for grasping the essentials of American political history. Yet there is something peculiar about this recent intellectual aversion, even if we accept as true the beliefs that democracy, social mobility, and economic dynamism have long inhibited the congealing of a ruling stratum. This aversion has coincided, after all, with one of the largest and fastest-growing disparities in the division of income and wealth in American history….Neglecting the powerful had not been characteristic of historical work before World War II. ” http://hnn.us/roundup/archives/11/2005/3/#11068
Note the timing when “the role of ruling elites in the country’s evolution” was deleted from the subject matter – World War II – and look at this “group, called the Committee for Economic Development, was officially established in 1942 as a sister organization to the Council on Foreign Relations.”http://www.opednews.com/articles/History-HACCP-and-the-Foo-by-Nicole-Johnson-090906-229.html
AGW is just the tip of a nasty stinking mess we need to uncover fast.
For parents I always suggest home schooling. There are support groups in most communities to help with the teaching. My Husband has been a sub at the local school and I sometimes tutor. As far as I am concerned the US school system is a major hazard to the well being of children. Not only the brain washing but the candy bars and soda to hype the kids up and the teachers suggesting the kids be drugged to substitute for decent teaching methods.
“For 10 years, William Schmidt, a statistics professor at Michigan State University, has looked at how U.S. students stack up against students in other countries in math and science. “In fourth-grade, we start out pretty well, near the top of the distribution among countries; by eighth-grade, we’re around average, and by 12th-grade, we’re at the bottom of the heap, outperforming only two countries, Cyprus and South Africa.”
http://www.enterstageright.com/archive/articles/0804/0804textbooks.htm
The mailing address of Wikipedia is San Francisco CA?
It could have been worse, say the Peoples Republic of Boulder CO or the cg for liberalism, Madison WI.
Well, what do you know:
Connolley has worked on confronting the notion that “all scientists were predicting an ice age in the 1970s” (known as global cooling).[5][6][7] He authored extensive literature reviews, concluding that a majority of scientific papers in the 1970s actually predicted warming, not cooling.
In Wikipedia, of course (Connelly’s page)
By the way, there’s another of those nouns into verbs: authored. What the heck was wrong with “wrote”? What’s the Green Party policy on literary pollution?
On the other hand, he has ‘1970s’ correct so got to give him some credit.
Well, we all know what you find underneath a pony tail.
“Democracy has been said to be the best of bad options” — I believe that is said of Capitalism. Democracy is two lions and a goat voting on what’s for lunch… which pretty much describes wikipedia.
Kevin Kilty (21:03:25) :
The English have a very different view of libel that has caused numerous authors of scurrilous books and articles to alter versions available in England.
This has a downside too unfortunately
http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/law/article6962816.ece
I just made a post about Ian Plimer’s Wikipedia page. On the page itself, the words “…and fraud” are omitted.
Again, here is what you get if you search for Ian Plimer:
“# Ian Plimer
Ian Rutherford Plimer (born February 12, 1946) is an Australian geologist , academic, businessman and fraud. He is a critic of …
23 KB (3,256 words) – 02:29, 20 December 2009..”
This escapade also strongly suggests that the entire wiki phenom is readily corruptible. Hearsay-based knowledge systems without the benefit of fully balanced access to traditional encyclopedias is a one-way ticket to ignorance.
Minimally we will see the cultural biases that define a wiki article from a Brittanica or Encarta article.
FYI, the first word in the Hawaiian language for “quick,” is not wikiwiki – it is awiwi. But apparently Ward Cunningham felt Awiwipedia didn’t have the same ring to it…
And, looking up a word in the Awiwictionary might facilitate too much grade school hilarity for sober, progressive minds.
I think people are misinterpreting what Wikipedia is: it’s not intended to be an authoritative source, but merely a summary of verifiable sources… it’s not about truth, it’s about verifiability. As such, given that most of those ‘verifiable sources’ are actually from the Climategate Conspiracy(tm) any article which follows Wikipedia policy is going to end up biased towards the ‘global warmers’.
That said, I’d agree that any article which doesn’t have a simple factual basis is likely to be controlled by the wackos, because the mechanisms which are supposed to enforce these policies don’t work. I spent a while trying to bring some sanity to some controversial articles, but you’d have perhaps three or four people trying to enforce the policies vs a dozen or more wacko editors, many or all of which might well have been the same person under different names. Unless you were willing to revert every change by the wackos, and do it so often as to risk violating ‘too many reversion’ rules, the wackos would win as the sane editors got tired of the whole mess and gave up… hence you get articles which blatantly violate policy and can’t be fixed.
And while I found most administrators are on the ‘good side’, there were a few who seemed to be doing it just for the sake of exercising power or pushing their own agenda; when that happened, there was no effective means of getting action taken against them.
Man you don’t have to tell me this . When ClimateGate first broke last all most to the day last month , I jumped on it and began researching what terminolgy scientists in the Climate Change field used to better understand terms like
shortwave deviations , scatterplots , polynomial fits , Ap unit variations and geomagnetic modulations . While I was rsearching this , I read alittle about Global Warming on the page and I realized that what wiki was explaining as Global Warming was the same Pseudoscience that was being practiced at the CRU si I just assumed that wiki , like the most of the world , had goten their information at wiki . At the bottom of the wiki pages , it has the date of the last entries and on November 20th when ClimateGate broke ( the ClimateGate files were leaked as far as I know , as early as Oct. 12 , 2009 when weatherman Paul Hudson of the BBC was forwarded a copy ) the last entries on wiki was …. November 20 th . Could be a coincidence but I don’t believe in coincidences .
Man you don’t have to tell me this . When ClimateGate first broke last all most to the day last month , I jumped on it and began researching what terminolgy scientists in the Climate Change field used to better understand terms like
shortwave deviations , scatterplots , polynomial fits , Ap unit variations and geomagnetic modulations . While I was researching this , I read alittle about Global Warming on the page and I realized that what wiki was explaining as Global Warming was the same Pseudoscience that was being practiced at the CRU so I just assumed that wiki , like the most of the world , had goten their information at CRU . At the bottom of the wiki pages , it has the date of the last entries and on November 20th when ClimateGate broke ( the ClimateGate files were leaked as far as I know , as early as Oct. 12 , 2009 when weatherman Paul Hudson of the BBC was forwarded a copy ) the last entries on wiki was …. November 20 th . Could be a coincidence but I don’t believe in coincidences .
@ Ric Werme (22:28:59) :
I agree that the information concerning the differences between searches with or without quotes should have been edited out, but you failed to address the camel as you strained at that gnat. Wiki did not merely remove the errors, they removed ALL THE INFORMATION relating to Google’s censorship of their autosuggestion list, including the information that was there before they began censoring the term “climategate.”
Furthermore, you failed to address the fact that the algorithm automatically added the keyword “climategate” after the page estimation hit about 20,000 around the second day of the scandal. It was there for about three days, and then it was removed when the page estimations hit around 5 million (iirc). Are you saying you believe the Google algorithm was responsible for this irratic behaviour? If so, I’d like to see the harry_google_read_me file for that algorithm.
Censorship by Google is an indisputable fact since many extremely common terms do not show up in the suggestion list. Wikipedia gave a very reasonable explanation for this – Google did not want their suggestion list to offer anything that would be bad. This was noted in the Wiki article before it was censored:
You can check this out yourself – the string “teen” has no autosuggestion from Google. It seems pretty clear that their algorithm simply checks to see if a term is in an exclusion list. This is pretty obvious. Do you deny it? If not, then you admit that Google has the code in place to censor whatever they want from their autosuggestion list. Now consider the facts of this case: Google has the means, motive, and opportunity to censor the list, and we have irrefutable evidence that the term “climategate” was automatically added to the list, and then removed, and then added back in. It seems like the jury should have no trouble convicting in this case.
I wish that George Orwell had never written “1984”. I wonder if he appreciated that it would become regarded as guide rather than a warning.
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.
The summary by Solomon followed by my link to ClimateAudit was promptly deleted from the page about William Connolley.
I encourage others to repost this with a link to the two current WUWT posts and bring it up to arbitration.
Guerttarda argued:
“(rv, blogs and other low-quality sources should not be used for contentious material on BLPs)”
So bullying is ok but raising that problem is not?
Now although I feel as strongly about this bullying issue as anyone else, and as a teacher myself I know what it’s like to have a ‘wikireport” handed to me, I still feel that an overly negative view of the site has been given here.
Wikipedia is a fantastic source of information and reference provided the user understands how it works. In many cases, statements are linked with respectable sources that can be used for verification immediately. In other cases, the statements encourage the user to research for his or her self.
I agree with the person who stated wiki is actually very useful until it comes to a particularly controversial issue like GW. Then the problems begin.
“Neo (21:08:19) :
William Connelly does get mentioned in e-mail 1108399027
A good comparison of all of the reconstruction constructive by William Connelly, which
makes it clear that the take-home point is robust, is available here:
[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:1000_Year_Temperature_Comparison.png”
Yes, this is the canonical temperature plot which shows up on several Wikipedia pages pertaining to Global Warming, and was part of the CRU’s campaign to make the Medieval Warm Period go away. It shows a slight bump corresponding to the MWP, although much lower than temperatures measured recently, even though Briffa himself, in one of his E-mails states that he thinks the MWP was at least as warm, if not warmer than the present. Fully half of the data in that graph (according to the citations) are due to Mann, Jones, and Briffa. I have seen other reconstructions, which restore the MWP and the LIA as distinct and noticeable phenomenon in the worlds climate record.
Did anyone really trust Wikipedia anyay? I rate it as only marginally more trustworthy than Snopes.
Who was paying Connelly while he was doing all this?
I added: “Connolley had his administrative privileges revoked (desysopped) in Sept. 2009, and was “admonished not to edit war, especially not on arbitration pages.”[11]”
Will the truth be told or will connolley’s clique again hide the evidence?
I ask people to go to wikipedia as they are asking for donations. Demand an apology for this unbeleivable arrogance wiki has shown with its distortions of history
So that’s where Michael Bolton’s hair went!
Stephan Shultz is conducting an edit war to delete any discussion of Connolley’s bullying.
He has to sleep sometime…
Connolley’s dismissal will change nothing at Wiki – he’s had plenty of time to seed the whole process with his cronies.
No donation from me, Wiki.
We need to undo the damage by checking the sites and coordinating a repair job. Is that under way? I suspect Anthony is too busy. I’ve looked at Richard Lindzen’s page. Its pretty mild it may have been partly repaired but it doesn’t mention the lindzen & choi 2009.
How do we coordinate such an operation?
Very interesting. I just noticed that someone with the user handle ‘Andrew C.’ has seen fit to delete the page on the Roman Warm Period when I went back to research past global warm periods.
I wonder if they are related?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_Warm_Period
Gail Combs (06:23:17) : (and others on education):
A citation by a WUWT poster led me to the interesting on-line City Journal.
It’s worth looking at the article on teacher’s colleges and the long-standing push for indoctrination therein. (Don’t have a direct link. Sorry) Most people don’t realize how bad it is.
It’s perhaps relevant to a discussion on instant information and shaping the public perspective that there’s a much more concerted effort going on in the schools.
Hmmm … High-tech ‘book burning’?
Lovely …
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And look Gail, we are openly discussing this (or, at least you are anyway).
This would seem to totally discredit any ‘claims’ they were successful would it not?
The axiom “Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity” applies here and to much more ‘conspiracy logic‘ as well.
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From that opednews website ?
Perhaps even as credible as Wickedpedia huh Gail … without corrections being able to be posted to the original article however.
Maybe not as good as Wikipedia after all.
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Can you show me the ‘breach of contract’ (citing a specific clause) between you and Google, or between Google and mankind, occurred?
Unless you simply avail yourself of ‘remedies’ a free market system affords (using Bing, AltaVista etc.), I’m afraid your ‘dog’ isn’t going to hunt lest you vote in/for an all-powerful govt which will attempt to ‘right’ all wrongs at your expense.
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Pointed that out several days ago (as have others), but, there is a contingent who will not ‘believe’ that – sorry, will not accept that, nor any logical discussion of that or related concepts, who seem to think that Google is capable everywhere and always of determining with a high degree of certitude the number of ‘hits’ ANY given search term will render.
Don’t know how they arrive at such certitude for THEIR assertions, unless, as has been pointed out before: “Some people’s brains are just wired for conspiracies and conspiracy theories”.
Probably has more to do with errant pattern recognition than actually seeing Elvis or Big-foot when visiting Bohemian Grove, for instance, and old memories and dreams and wishful thinking may play a part too.
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(Wikipedia’s “Hockey stick controversy” should be checked. Recently it didn’t mentioned that all criticism by M&M was accepted by the expert panel, and in the Wegman report. Instead the impression on the page, where a quote is interpreted as if the hockey stick graph isn’t wrong.)
Also pages about Svensmark should be controlled, and probably improved…
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Btw: In the recent week a newspaper article about Svensmark has appeared, and where an old paper by Laut and Damon is mentioned. E g here:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/copenhagen-climate-change-confe/6807852/Copenhagen-climate-conference-sunspot-theory-for-global-warming-attacked.html
http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/climate-change/sunspots-do-not-cause-climate-change-say-scientists-1839867.html
Also point 1 and 2 in this New Scientist article:
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn18279-deniergate-turning-the-tables-on-climate-sceptics.html
I commented The Peter Laut Case here:
http://joannenova.com.au/2009/12/new-scientist-becomes-non-scientist/comment-page-2/#comment-20066
…but it seems as the Climategate people has decided to attack Svensmark again with this completely poor Laut & Damon paper (where they have an objection against one single value and a not-possible-to-understand claims that this means there’s no correlation, and also slander Svensmark and Friis-Christensen as a non-scientists, and also proves that CO2 cause global warming by using the MBH98 hockey stick graph (sic!). The …sickest paper I’ve seen, actually.
In an answer Svensmark proved he used the correct available value.
But this “joke” now seems to be used by the CO2-thug — among others Rahmstorf — in an attack against Svensmark. I think these people are too stupid (well, they may be so on purpose) and non-scientific to be in science, and should deserve a trail. Defamation?
It’s however interesting that they primarily attack something which they say is nothing. Of course they are aware of the strong results Svensmark consistently has had, and this just proves this. Why now? Maybe Svensmark will prove his findings also in CERN, and that they know this will — scientifically — be the nail in the IPCC coffin (which I think also is there because of Svenmark’s work already).
Well along similar lines to the Wikifollies, I “invested” a whole seven dollars in a book with the title “Climate”; The force that shapes our world and the future of Life on Earth, to quote the subtitle.
It is by Jennifer Hoffman, PhD and Tina TIN, PhD. Well Dr Laura has a PhD too.
Actually Hoffman is a marine biologist, and her PhD is in zoology. She’s a Professor at the Ocean Research College Academy in Washington ? and she is a World Wildlife Fund Consultant.
TIN is a WWF climate scientist and works in polar region climate. She an engineering (?) degree from Cambridge, and her PhD is in Geophysics from Uof Alaska, Fairbanks. Also works with Friends of the Earth, and the US Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC).
So both are heavy duty greens. Well they had a ghost writer, who also writes science fiction (other than this book. George Ochoa is his name.
Well I spent the $7 simply for the pretty pictures in the book. It’s regular price is $35US, or $48Can, and wouldn’t you know it, it is somehow connected to both NATURE and SCIENCE; so all of the usual rascals are present and accounted for.
So it covers the earth’s climate from the bi bang up till 2005 when the book was first published, and has all the usual greenie cliches in it from the disappearing snows of Kilimanjaro, to jungle pestilences, and horror storms, and extincting polar bears. It’s an AGW enthusiasts bible.
But it still has $7 worth of nice photos. Interestingly, I also paid $10 for another book called “Last Climb”. This is a National Geographic backed book on the history of the three British Everest Expeditions of the 1920s, the 1921, 22, 1nd 24 Expeditions to Mt Everest. Only one man was on all three of those expeditions; George T. Leigh Mallory, who perished along with Andrew Irvine on that 1924 Expedition.
Now what is interesting about this book, is that it includes darn near every single picture that exists from those three expeditions, and includes pictures of one of the major Glacier systems that was encountered by the 1922 expedition at altitudes of 23,000 feet, where the temperatures were -25 F, and the glacier surface melted in the direct sun, leaving weird sculpted ice statues that simply dwarfed the climbers. There were man dwarfing canyons cut through this ice mass by direct sun melting, in air temperatures that could never melt ice. Well it was probably due to soot spread all over the ice from Pachauri’s early coal fired Indian Trains; well maybe his grandfather’s.
Many pictures of dry rocky plains at altitudes that never get above freezing, yet were ice free in 1921, and 1922/4 when the expeditions returned to the same places.
Well it’s an enjoyable book, and if you are one of those who have followed the Mallory & Irvine story since boyhood, this is well worth the $10 I paid for it, and a lot more. The climate propaganda book I’m still not sure whether I got ripped off or not.
The same tatics are used all over the place.
For example, the Bilderberg meetings, where the most powerful and influencial people in the world meet every year, has been suppressed and censored sistematically. This year I tried to get enough information in a especific page and that was delete, under the pretext the page was not relevant. If the most important meeting of the year, which participants and minutes are secret, are not relevant, what is relevant, the xfactor series????
Check the details and help to change this censoring trend:
http://bigbrother-uk-1984.blogspot.com/2009/06/2009-bilderberg-meeting-wikipedia.html
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/turmel/message/3616 is my blog post titled TURMEL: Censors exposed at Wikipedia corrupted mine too
I’d also point out that someone made the UNILETS page disappear even though the UNILETS Resolution C6 to Governments to retructure the global financial archictecture is in the MIllennium Declaration.
What do they expect when people can change things without signing their real names. Tell when there’s a whateverpedia that does.
Actually Hoffman is a marine biologist, and her PhD is in zoology. She’s a Professor at the Ocean Research College Academy in Washington ? and she is a World Wildlife Fund Consultant.
TIN is a WWF climate scientist and works in polar region climate. She an engineering (?) degree from Cambridge, and her PhD is in Geophysics from Uof Alaska, Fairbanks. Also works with Friends of the Earth, and the US Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC).
http://www.onlineuniversalwork.com