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April 09, 2010
Wikipedia: Israelis, Notorious for Sexual Exploitation of Children, Traffic Haitian Organs
CAMERA has on a number of occasions commented on the problems with Wikipedia when it comes to articles about the Arab-Israeli conflict. See, for example, "How and Why to Edit Wikipedia" and "The Wild West of Wikipedia."
But a picture is worth a thousand words. (Especially a picture with words.) So here's a screenshot from Wikipedia that captures all that's wrong with the encyclopedia:
The screenshot (and this page) reflects how the article looks as of this writing. The actual article page, containing whatever the latest version of the article happens to be, can be found here.
According to the article's history page, it was created on April 4 by a Wikipedia account created that same day. Later that day, another Wikipedia user removed the reference to "israeli" perpetrators and added the word "alleged." But the creator of the article returned a couple of days later to undo those changes.
Posted by GI at April 9, 2010 03:02 PM
Comments
So what? Where's the problem? Bad information gets out for a days or a few minutes if it's high profile enough and then it gets fixed. That's one hell of a lot better than the main stream media which takes days or weeks to correct a story - and then the reader has to somehow connect the correction with the original story. On Wikipedia, all they get is the corrected version - unless they're interested in the edit history. So I say again, so what?
Posted by: Jack at April 9, 2010 08:16 PM
Bad or unsubstantiated information is never suitable for publication for one minute or one day.
Footnote corrections are always lost in the broader picture.
Jack, if your neighbor called you a pedophile for a weekend [example] how long would you have to add a footnote to your life?
Posted by: Sadie at April 11, 2010 11:44 AM
"T. West" is a conspiracy theorist who, inevitably, has his own Youtube channel through which he siphons his anti-semitic paranoid slander.
Also cited is "journalist" Alex Jones, whose favourite euphemism for Jews is 'the bankers' (which is the only way in which his oft-repeated phrase "the bankers invented communism" makes even a modicum of sense), famous for his own particularly shrill brand of toxic crackpottery, which includes his assertion that the swine flu was invented by the CIA for the sole purpose of silencing him.
Unsurprisingly, there is no mention of Israel in the Amanpour interview cited, except in the typically unhinged readers' comments appended beneath the text. Not that Amanpour has had any real problem with repeating unsubstantiated blood libels in the past.
Posted by: Robert H at April 13, 2010 02:11 AM
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