PROPAGANDA ALL AROUND US, EVEN WIKIPEDIA!

Damn, this is annoying. When I first heard about Wikipedia.org, I thought it was so "Star Trek." Not in a sense that it was science fiction, but in the sense that it was so progressively forward thinking. In the early years of Star Trek: The Next Generation they establish that famine is gone on Earth and that money is no longer used. It seemed like such a trusting future. As though the greed that creates famine (we Americans get all the food while Africans get little or none) would be eradicated by the 24th Century. One thing that is for certain is that said greed is still alive and well in the 21st Century. Wikipedia.org is proof of it.

See, because Wikipedia.org is an online encyclopedia that is written by anyone who visits the site who wants to help out. This trusts everyone to add the most truthful content. The catch is, you can't trust anyone these days. Check out a cutting from an August 15, 2007 article at http://guardian.co.uk (http://urltea.com/1aed) to learn more about it:

The Wikipedia Scanner, which trawls the backwaters of the popular online encyclopaedia, has unearthed a catalogue of organisations massaging entries, including the CIA and the Labour party.

Workers operating on CIA computers have been spotted editing entries including the biography of former presidents Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon, while unnamed individuals inside the Vatican have worked on entries about Catholic saints - and Sinn Féin leader Gerry Adams.

Meanwhile, an anonymous surfer from Labour's Millbank headquarters excised a section about Labour Students which referred to "careerist MPs" and criticisms that the party's student movement was no longer seen as radical.

And somebody from a computer traced to Democrat HQ edited a page on conservative American radio host Rush Limbaugh, calling him "idiotic", "ridiculous" and labelling his 20 million listeners as "legally retarded".

But the biggest culprit that the Scanner claims to have discovered is Diebold, a supplier of voting machines, which it says has made huge alterations to entries about its involvement in the controversial "hanging chad" election in the US in 2000. The company was criticised in the wake of the disputed results, but edits made by its employees on Wikipedia have included the removal of 15 paragraphs detailing the allegations.

The article goes on. The thing is, companies who owned privately maintained encyclopedias would still tweak entries if it suited them financially. The book The Plot to Get Bill Gates talks about how Microsoft bought Funk and Wagnals (sp?) encyclopedia, digitized it and called it "Encarta" but along the way jazzed up the encyclopedia's entry on Bill Gates. If memory serves, they added a bit that talks about how big a philanthropist Gates was. Back when Encarta came out, Gates was best known for donating free software and then claiming to have donated millions in cash because that's how much the software would cost if you bought it in stores.

Ultimately, there are two points to note, here. First, everyone has an agenda and most people seem to be unaware (or simply don't care) that everything they do goes to serve that agenda whether they mean it to or not. Second, Wikipedia is still a useful tool, despite the fact that it is easily propagandized. This is because it's not that hard to find out who is making these changes. Also, it's on the Internet and it always pays to confirm just about any story you read on the 'net before you take it as the truth.

Special thanks to TheJen for turning me on to this story.

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