Tuesday 14 August 2012

Wikipedia Battle Over Paul Ryan

The Mitt Romney dream team is now complete now that his running mate is announced as Paul Ryan. Off to Wikipedia we go to find out about him and now that his name is out in the open we can expect to see his page at the encyclopedia to be the recipient of a robust editing and if we look at the View History on his page, we see that someone has indeed been busy, over 500 edits in 3 days.
Usual stuff about adding grandmothers name and how he is a Greenbay Packers fan and a very interesting removal on 12 August at 6.08 'Removed the Brown Noser reference as it is vulgar and not in line with the rest of the sentence'.
The absence of the brown-noser reference is questioned at 16.30 'noticeably absent is brown-noser' and at 3.00 on the 13th the brown-noser reference is put back in saying: 'it is relevant'.
At 5.19 it was taken out again and at the time of writing, the 'brown noser' is missing but what is this brown-noser reference that seems so contestable?
It seems that the man selected to be Mitt's running mate was once seen as a kiss-up in his younger years, earning the title 'biggest brown-noser' from his senior class in 1988 in high school.
Now i understand campaign staffers and Republicans wanting to clean up their choice's Wikipedia presence, it will be the first stop for many voters wanting to find out about the man Romney has chosen to run alongside him and there is nothing wrong with that, all part of the propaganda war in the digital age.
If the Republicans want to push the fact that he was elected class president, prom king and gained a seat on the school board representing his high school and hide the fact that his classmates voted him top boot licker then it is all fair but i will be watching the Early life and education section of his page on Wikipedia to see who wins the battle of the brown-noser.
As for the gaffe-prone Mitt, he scored another success by introducing Ryan as the 'next President of the United States' before correcting his error.
Doh!

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Geez Lucy,

4 years ago Obama introduced Biden as the next President... exact same gaff.

q

Anonymous said...

today Biden said that since Romney picked Ryan "...we can win North Carolina...". Only problem, he was in Virginnia.

q

david g said...

The fact that both the incumbent and the Republican nominee for President made the same mistake shows clearly the danger the world faces if either of them win in November.

I thought George W was the village idiot of world politicians but Romney shows promise of claiming this prize.

As for Obama, he shows clearly how easily the Americans people can be conned. He'll probably make the same promises again and they'll hail him as the Messiah!

Let's face it: neither of the candidates are much chop!

Anonymous said...

wikipedia has its place in the world but is often very inaccurate.

the wiki article for my company has data that is just plain wrong (for example, there is the data that was once right but is now outdated like former executives that are now working somewhere else), there are attacks by disgruntled customers (when you have millions there is always someone that is unhappy), attacks by competitors, and it is missing very significant information that is public but cannot be cited with a web link. This is my favorite, many things that were once supported by links to online articles are now broken because a web site name change, the company failed, etc. so on a regular basis people remove valid data because old online news articles are no longer online... STUPID.

Then there are the people that come along and say “this article is written like and advertisement and they change stuff.” They don’t have to prove it. They just have to say it. Then, if you try to change it back or if you revert their edits you are told, you have to convince everybody that the complainer is wrong... they don’t have to convince anybody they are right, but you have to convince them and everyone else that they are wrong – THAT IS JACKED UP...

q