back to article US Department of Justice banned from Wikipedia

Wikipedia has temporarily blocked edits from the US Department of Justice after someone inside the government agency tried to erase references to a particularly-controversial Wiki-scandal. Early last week, the Boston-based Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA) was accused of organizing a secret …

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  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Wiki editors don't like Dr. Myron Evans or his theories

    Wikipedia is good in math, bad in general relativity. Wikipedia editors are persistently

    censoring attempts to add info about ECE theory, which adds torsion to GR and

    exposes fundamental errors in the foundation of torsionless GR. No good words about

    Dr. Myron Evans are permitted. This may be because Evans has demolished the

    Heisenberg Uncertainty principle and a certain amount of work by T'Hooft who seems

    to be an influential Wiki editor. See www.aias.us for the info which cannot be posted

    at wiki.

  2. dervheid
    Black Helicopters

    The CAMERA...

    never lies!

    Is the old saying, I believe!

    Of course, in these days of digital imagery and image manipulation, can this still be held to be the case?

  3. Matthew
    Pirate

    PR Stunt

    I'm sure banning the entire DoJ IP range will have no publicity effects for the organisation that defines the world via the power of groupthink. I'm no network admin, but surely there is something a little more proportional to this?

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Uncertainty Principle

    Errr ... on the evidence you have posted above I too now believe in Dr Myron Evans, oh and the moon is made out of cheese.

    You know, if you pick them up by the ears it doesn't hurt them as much.

    wibble

  5. Ole Juul
    Paris Hilton

    mind-boggling

    It's not like Wikipedia is an authority, or that we know who writes the stuff. What kind of *.case would actually care what they say about these kinds of things?

    I'm with Paris on this one.

  6. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Re:Wiki editors don't like Dr. Myron Evans or his theories

    So you can't get your crap straight onto wikipedia so you're trying to do it by proxy.

    You need to accept the fact that you're not very bright and don't really know what you're talking about.

  7. DavCrav
    Stop

    Myron Evans - a quick Google...

    returns this:

    http://blog.brooklandsclinic.co.uk/?p=86

    I stopped looking at this character at this point.

  8. Ken Hagan Gold badge

    Does this matter?

    Is there anyone within the DoJ's address range whose *job* involves updating wikipedia? If not, then I suspect the US taxpayer would be well served if wikipedia just left the ban in place. (On the other hand, the correct place to try to implement such a restriction is probably a firewall at the DoJ.)

  9. dervheid
    Black Helicopters

    @ Ole Juul

    The problem is not those of us who treat Wikipedia as what it is, but those in the mass of semi-ignorant humanity who regard it with the attitude "It says so on Wikipedia so it MUST BE TRUE." that are the problem. If Wikipedia IS to continue as a source of 'facts', then it must be protected from malicious re-writing done in order to distort the 'truth'.

    Of course, the other old adage "history is written by the victors" is more like "history is (re-)written by those who would be victorious", as so many "government agencies" have a vested interest in telling us what they would have us take for the 'truth'.

  10. Michael
    Joke

    Americans dont DO irony .....

    "in camera" is latin for "behind closed doors"

  11. S
    Paris Hilton

    Myron Evans

    Some more on the work of Myron Evans:

    http://opensys.blogsome.com/2005/07/01/generally-covariant-unified-field-theory-myron-w-evans/

    The link on this page to Gerhard Bruhn's website is also illuminating. It also seems that Evan's number of published papers is rather low (according to the aias website (http://aias.us/index.php?goto=showPageByTitle&pageTitle=Unified_Field_Theory_papers) three in /APPB/ and /Physica B/. The publications in /Foundations of Physics Letters/ have been contested (http://www.springerlink.com/content/l1008h127565m362/)). It seems Wikipedia in this case did a good job of keeping nonsense of its pages.

  12. DavCrav

    @Michael

    I thought it was better than that: CAMERA stands for 'Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America'. I remember a Yes (Prime?) Minister episode where they said that government departments were named for the opposite of what they do. In this case, it appears to be life imitating art, as usual...

  13. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Why successful gamers aren't banned

    You ask "If Wikipedia is right to ban someone who merely attempted to game the site, why hasn't it banned others who've actually succeeded?"

    Simple. Once they become senior admins they are "respected contributors" and thus any attempt to expose or punish them for gaming the system and POV pushing is dismissed as harassment. The only difference between Gni and SlimVirgin, Jayjg, Jossi etc is that the latter three gamers and POV-pushers were successful at building social alliances and doing enough "useful" grunt work and were subtle enough initially about their POV pushing that they were able to have their more questionable behaviors dismissed for long enough that they were ultimately unchallengeable and had enough power to do what they want. If Gni hadn't been stupid enough to have an easily penetratable email list as his organizing device, and had he not openly revealed himself as a CAMERA operative online (or shed his Gni account and opened a new one after his initial problems) there's no reason he couldn't have succeeded. Indeed, he'd simply be trodding the exact same path that Jayjg followed to become an unchallengable superadmin, arbcomm and "checkuser"

  14. Tom

    So let me make sure I have this straight

    A site with 'Infitada' the word most commonly associated with terrorist attacks across the world publishes a series of emails in which a group of people set out to "keep Israel-related entries on Wikipedia from becoming tainted by anti-Israel editors," which seems to me to be de-slanting articles because if they were slanting them they would be 'ensuring a pro-Israeli viewpoints prevail' and the wikists ban the entire IP range of the DOJ.

    Yep, sound professional to me..... NOT!

  15. Anonymous Coward
    Joke

    "Wikipedia in this case did a good job of keeping nonsense of its pages."

    Freudian spelling mistake?

  16. Jared Earle
    Boffin

    @ Wiki editors don't like Dr. Myron Evans or his theories

    Nice post, Myron.

    The Blogosphere is the new care in the community. Nutters are well looked after there.

  17. tweell

    As Wiki slips below the waves...

    So Wikipedia sinks further into irrelevance. Who is dumb enough to use it as a reference source, anyways?

  18. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    irony,eh?

    @Michael

    "In camera" perhaps, but "camera" per se implies nothing about the doors. So until they tack on "Indignant National" or its equivalent onto the organization's name ...

  19. Mike Powers
    IT Angle

    Wait, how was that section even there?

    I thought that Wikipedia didn't allow you to discuss Wikipedia controversies in its articles...

  20. Frank Bough
    Alert

    @Tom

    Do you believe it's wise to take the likes of CAMERA at face value?

  21. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Yes minister

    Did not say dept were the opposite if their name, it said they were tombstones, marking the grave, for example, dept of industry marks grave of industry and so on.

  22. Phil Karn

    My run-in with Evans

    I had a run-in with "Dr" Evans 4 years ago. He complained to Yahoo about a group I ran, and Yahoo deleted it without even notifying me.

    We have a real problem when a mentally ill person can censor discussion so easily. I'm glad we have so many people watching Wikipedia and defending it from people like him.

  23. Spleen

    Re: Mike Powers

    There's a whole article on Criiticism of Wikipedia, and at least one separate article dedicated to a single incident (the time a libel on an American journalist went unnoticed for several months). There is a policy about not overly focusing on Wikipedia, but it's hardly an outright ban and has nothing to do with controversy.

  24. MarmiteToast
    Thumb Down

    Theorists are ten a penny

    Unfortunately a blind belief in their own theory is also just as prevalent. The number of people writing to universities, saying they're disproved the HUP or something similar , is staggering!

  25. Peter Fielden-Weston
    Paris Hilton

    I hope...

    that the Campaign for Real Ale doesn't read this.

    It'll take 4 or 5 pints of their local micro-breweries best foamy stuff to settle them down again.

    Paris, 'Cos she knows about calming men down.

  26. Anonymous Coward
    Joke

    @ Mike Powers

    "I thought that Wikipedia didn't allow you to discuss Wikipedia controversies in its articles..."

    The first rule of Wikipedia is: You don't talk about Wikipedia

    ?

  27. Richard Cartledge
    Unhappy

    Becks

    If anyone states that David Beckham is Jewish (he is) or that his Father was an installer of Kasjroet (Kosher) Kitchens (he was), this also gets removed.

  28. Jeff Dickey
    Boffin

    @Tom

    'Intifada' originally meant 'uprising', or 'struggle'; it became linked with 'terrorism' only to the degree that the Israeli occupation defines any act of resistance or asymmetric warfare as 'terror'. Have you ever been IN the Occupied Territories - in a role other than as the 1984esque euphemistic 'settler'?

    For NPOV to work, all sides have to agree to it. The marvel of Wikipedia is that, on so many topics, people have routinely performed acts of breathtaking sanity and humanity. Injecting those values into BOTH SIDES of the struggle in Palestine would go a long way towards resolving the problems there - and the blowback suffered by outside countries intimately tied to the struggle.

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