Wikipedia, And Who is Editing It

I haven’t commented on this before because frankly there wasn’t good enough evidence to comment on.  However, as it stands now there’s a good deal more in the way evidence, and I think it’s time I commented.

I’ll use Glenn Reynolds as the lead in:

LOOK WHO’S EDITING WIKIPEDIA! Various people, from Ace, to Charles Johnson, to Dan Riehl, are having fun tracking what’s going on. Turning Bill Frist into an African-American? Nice to see the New York Times’ fierce commitment to truth.

Ace, for his part, (at the link above) puts into words a suspicion it’s been floating around the back of my head since this story service to couple of days ago :

I see now why the NYT is so prone to comical errors. Those vaunted multiple layers of painstaking editorial oversight are apparently being employed to edit an online fake-encyclopedia in order to denigrate a competitor.

The staff of America’s Paper of Record (TM) are also busy dicking around on the internet all friggin’ day childishly vandalizing Wikipedia entries on George W. Bush and Tom Delay.

The electronic breadcrumb trail for this tampering, certainly leads right up to the firewall of the New York Times.  Don’t misunderstand; I am by no means attributing this tampering to official action by the Times.  This is not a defense of the Times,it’s more along the lines of the thought that they don’t have the ability to agreed on lunch, much less the ability to put together a coordinated attack of this level. it’s my view, that what we’re dealing with here, is an employee of the Times with a good deal of free time on their hands.

The pattern I’m seeing here, uniformly, is a concerted and coordinated effort, apparently on the part of leftists, in an attempt to discredit Wikipedia, or the subjects being edited.

My guess is, that even if the New York Times puts together any kind of an investigation on this, their IT folks are not going to be able to come up with evidence pointing to a particular individual.  certainly, the technology exists to do such tracing, but I have my doubts that it is employed there; most places don’t have it.. For the most part companies like that are more concerned about people breaking into the net than they are about abuse is from within.  Given that design parameter, it’s going to be difficult in the extreme to prove “Joe Smith’s” laptop was involved.

Even here, however, a trend is evident.  What is the biggest complaint coming from the liberal press these days?  It is the complaint that the “new media” isn’t up to the same standards as America’s “paper of record”.  Certainly, the official line about this from the various newspapers around the country would be logically reflected in the personal opinions of the rank and file of all those organizations.  So ask yourself:what possible reason would someone working at the New York Times have, in wanting to denigrate the reliability and accuracy of the new media?  This one would seem to be a no brainer.

The other half of this scenario, of course, is the overt denigration of republicans.  It’s no secret that the New York Times, and those working at the Times, are biased to the left.  Here, again, the connection seems a no-brainer.

As a bonus, we find the New York Times network involved in an editing of the entry for the Wall Street Journal.  Again, a no brainer as to why they’d want to do that.

Where things start taking a left turn, is when we start looking at pages that were edited by somebody outside the network of the New York Times.  For example, and it’s made from within the network of the Democratic party’s Congressional campaign committee , as Allah notes.

The pattern I’m seeing here, uniformly, is a concerted and coordinated effort, apparently on the part of leftists, in an attempt to discredit Wikipedia, or the subjects being edited. This strikes me as an attempt to control information. Information in the wrong hands will decidedly make life difficult for Democrats, you see.

Addendum:(Bit)

McQ notes apparent evidence of someone at Fox news doing the same thing, to Al Franken’s entry. As Bruce notes, why they would wish to do so, remains something of a mystery.

I admit to doing some legwork last night, and what I found is interesting:
Uniformly, the IP addresses listed as being the editors in these attacks, are forward facing firewalls, with, as you might expect, no INTERNAL ID. Say, a MAC address, for example.

Spoofing IP addresses… IE; making the receiving end think that you are on a network you are not on, is not all that unusual a trick. Being in information technology myself, I can tell you that I have seen it in play more than once… in particular in the banking environment.  (The attempts at access in that case were not successful.  )

But that that raises the question of what third party would be interested in causing all this uproar? The patterns of attack, thus far, would seem to suggest that the first targets for editing, were conservatives. They were also the most numerous.  The more recent, (and singular) attacks on a leftist entry…Al Franken’s entry, specifically… allegedly from inside the network at Fox news, could be taken as an attempt to muddy the water. My guess, based on those reported patterns, is some independent agent, or agents, with a leftist lean .  But it is exactly that; I guess.

No, I don’t know the answer.

And here’s the thing; and most IT departments …even the more knowledgeable ones …have no clue as to what the security data that their firewall is giving them.  And no idea how to read it.  I suppose we never will know what’s going on, therefore.