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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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 .
@ur momisugly 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?