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Wikipedia Watch

 
 
RobertSieger
 
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Reply Fri 12 May, 2006 11:36 am
'RE: FISHIN
I did not say that all the editors on Wikipedia were Irish Catholics. That is absurd. What I said is that there is a small coterie of Catholic apologists and censors (mostly Irish, not Irish-American, remember there is a difference, however slight) who in fact are determined to delete or erase anything they do not like or do not agree with. They have their own lackeys (of whatever religious or ethnic background). I know because I have been battling them relentlessly over everything from Ante Pavelic and the Ustase to Pre-Code movies (ironically all about the Catholic censorship of movies starting in mid-1934) to Glasgow Celtic Football Club (I can't win that one) to Eamon de Valera's refugee policies during WWII to Adolf Hitler to Pope Benedict XVI (re Elizabeth Lohner's quote). I am forced to rely on third-party Wikipedians, who often have no idea what is going on.

The price of freedom is eternal vigilance (as someone, I forgot his name) once stated. It is true, and either one allows Wikipedia to be manipulated by special interest apologists and censors or one does not.
0 Replies
 
Not a Catholic
 
  1  
Reply Thu 15 Jun, 2006 01:13 pm
I've got to laugh at Sieger and his whining. Just look at the rubbish he wrote about users above and replace the word "Catholic" with "Jewish" and you'll get a measure of him. He is suffering from paranoiditis, with a touch of religious conspiracy thrown in.

He regularly posted paranoid ramblings about Catholics the way others posted paranoid ramblings against Jews, against Protestants, against Muslims, against gays, against women, against blacks, etc. Such bigots turn up on Wikipedia all the time and are banned for trying to turn articles into rants against their pet hate (whether motivated by religion, class, race, orientation or something else. Sieger was rightly banned for trying to force his Catholicophobia into articles where religion was irrelevant, much less personal bigotry crusades. His crap about Hitler was typical. So what if Hitler was born a Catholic. There is not the slightest evidence that it was anything but a word on his birth certificate. He was not a Mass goer. He did not listen to the Roman Catholic Church on anything. He did not do anything the Catholic Church told him to. If he was a practicising Catholic, for a start he would hardly have been "living in sin", as Roman Catholicism puts it, with his mistress. Making an big issue of his nominal Catholicism as though the Catholic Church was to blame is as farcical as holding the American people personally to blame for Bill Clinton's sex-life, blaming the English race if some English football fans riot or holding Sieger personally responsible for everything anyone else called Robert did.

Sieger couldn't produce any evidence for his rantings other than his personal prejudice. Anyone putting in islamophobia into articles without evidence would have had it deleted on sight. Anyone putting in anti-Jewish rants into articles without evidence to back up the claims would have had the claims deleted on sight. It is standard practice: no evidence, no inclusion.

Sieger throughout his editing history showed a combination of extreme bigotry, paranoid phobias and conspiracy theories gone mad. Wikipedia had users who are Catholic, Anglican, Protestant, Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu and people of no faith. No-one agreed with his antics any everyone, irrespective of their religious faith, saw him for what his rantings show clearly, a paranoid Catholicophobic bigot more in need of psychiatric help than a chance to post paranoid ramblings in an encyclopaedia. 2 Cents
0 Replies
 
Setanta
 
  1  
Reply Thu 15 Jun, 2006 01:16 pm
Wow . . . amazing . . . i just dropped by for a gander, and have stumbled into conspiracy rant central . . . how refreshing . . . well, if they've turned the water back on, i think i'll go wash my hair . . .
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Setanta
 
  1  
Reply Thu 15 Jun, 2006 01:29 pm
ebrown_p wrote:
Wikipedia is the best source for biographical and technical information. If you want to know when Galileo died, or what CORBA is there is not much better source than Wikipedia.

Current controversial topics are much more of a crap shoot, and often political bias is very evident. But then, if you are looking for objectivity, a mob is the wrong place to look.

But it is what it is. If you understand this, I think it is a valuable resource.


Bingo--it functions best as a card catalogue, which has much more to offer than literary publication citations. I go there to fact-check, and if anything looks suspicious, i look elsewhere. Very often, i'm fact checking before i post a comment on history, and i know the subject well enough that i'm just confirming dates or the spelling of names or place-names. It is significant that the Wikipedia articles contain links to other sources, and are "inter-linked" to other articles which also provide outside links.

I have yet to find anything there which i would be willing to assert is a factual error in the area of history. The most critical thing i could ever say about them is that i disagreed with their interpretation--and that is a cottage industry among historians and students of history.

You get what you pay for, and Wikipedia is free.
0 Replies
 
ehBeth
 
  1  
Reply Thu 15 Jun, 2006 01:32 pm
I find it useful to click on the 'history' tab on anything that seems hinky at Wikipedia.

for example ...

click
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Shapeless
 
  1  
Reply Thu 15 Jun, 2006 02:20 pm
From conspriacy theories to ideological wars:

Quote:
In "Digital Maosim"... computer scientist and digital visionary Jaron Lanier finds fault with what he terms the new online collectivism. He cites as an example the Wikipedia, noting that "reading a Wikipedia entry is like reading the bible closely. There are faint traces of the voices of various anonymous authors and editors, though it is impossible to be sure".

His problem is not with the unfolding experiment of the Wikipedia itself, but "the way the Wikipedia has come to be regarded and used; how it's been elevated to such importance so quickly. And that is part of the larger pattern of the appeal of a new online collectivism that is nothing less than a resurgence of the idea that the collective is all-wise, that it is desirable to have influence concentrated in a bottleneck that can channel the collective with the most verity and force. This is different from representative democracy, or meritocracy. This idea has had dreadful consequences when thrust upon us from the extreme Right or the extreme Left in various historical periods. The fact that it's now being re-introduced today by prominent technologists and futurists, people who in many cases I know and like, doesn't make it any less dangerous".


Wikipedia isn't the only culprit in Lanier's essay, but it's one of the prime suspects--"Exhibit A," if you will. The full text can be found here:

http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/lanier06/lanier06_index.html
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