Wikipedia

TARGET? CONSERVAPEDIA FAIL, GROKI

beware fluff brocHure self-promotion editing

also

see wiki edit war taLK

NO MERRI

cf baliunas talk on denier term: I have now been made aware of the Watts Up With That? article Climate Wars: Try Removing the Word “Denier” from a Wikipedia Entry where Eric Worrall says he started this as "an experiment". Oh. Then I shouldn't have taken it seriously. Unless others indicate support, I won't continue this particular argument. Peter Gulutzan (talk) 17:18, 15 July 2020 (UTC)

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MMA

Tucker Carlson complains that Wikipedia describes white genocide as a conspiracy theory

10/01/26

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MRC 11 25

How Wikipedia Infiltrated Colleges to Train New Radical Editors

Nov. 21, 2025 . Eric Scheiner

How Wikipedia Infiltrated Colleges to Train Next Generation of Radical Editors

Luis Cornelio

November 17, 2025

EXCLUSIVE: Wikipedia and its little-known ally, Wiki Education, have quietly enlisted and trained more than 140,000 college students to build an army of activists who have already edited thousands of pages on the site, reshaping its content to push left-wing narratives, the Media Research Center has learned.

Wikipedia’s activist editors have flooded the so-called online encyclopedia with millions of words that, among other things, explicitly promote radical leftist ideology across a wide range of woke topics, including transgenderism, feminism, critical race theory, environmentalism and more.

Framed as an educational initiative, the effort looks more like a coordinated campaign of ideological indoctrination. Its apparent goal: manipulate public perception and cement long-term political influence, with Wikipedia as the primary conduit for ideological narratives.

Behind this effort is California-based non-profit Wiki Education, a Wikimedia Foundation spin-off that openly recruits professors to put students to work editing Wikipedia articles. It proclaims to serve as “the bridge between academia and Wikipedia.”

The non-profit brags that since 2010, it has been responsible for 120 million words added on Wikipedia, spanning over 7,650 classes and impacting 145,000 students. These entries have collectively garnered millions of views.

Wiki Education attempts to conceal its politics by employing nuanced language in its advocacy. But MRC’s investigation found that the non-profit embraces radical left-wing ideology: prioritizing diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), fighting alleged “disinformation” and presenting a partisan version of supporting “democracy” in classes.

Its goals have paid off. Wikipedia has become a powerful weapon for the left. Among other clear biases, the Media Research Center exposed Wikipedia editors for effectively blacklisting right-leaning media outlets from being cited on entries and rushing to target and vandalize pages about Trump cabinet picks.

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Key Findings:

Classes that centered on left-wing topics like “queering religion” and crude gay sex are the norm at Wiki Education.

By Wiki Education taking advantage of provisions in the tax code and utilizing the vast resources of public universities across the country, taxpayers have largely footed the bill for this leftist agenda.

The remainder of the costs of this program have continued to be quietly covered by the Wikimedia Foundation, shaping its operations while avoiding blame for Wikipedia entries.

What Exactly Is Wiki Education?

The thousands of professors who collaborate with Wiki Education assign Wikipedia entries to their course requirements. Students earn course credits for each entry they edit. Wiki Education provides training and coordination to teach students how to edit Wikipedia.

In its own marketing, the group describes the collaboration this way: “You’ll bring your subject expertise, we’ll bring ours in Wikipedia, and together we’ll empower your students to fill in content gaps, enhance representation, and improve citations on the world’s largest encyclopedia.”

The Far Left Classes Being Embedded in Wikipedia

The MRC found that many courses hosted by Wiki Education are based on left-wing theory. Examples collected by the MRC include:

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"Queering Religion" (Skidmore College, Fall 2025). This class seeks to explore queer reinterpretations of Abrahamic religions, including American Christianity, while excluding Islam. The course concentrates on “rituals, gender identities, same-sex eroticism, embodiment, the divine, and textual traditions with a focus on American Christian, Jewish, and Indigenous traditions of the 20th century.”

“Queer of Color Critique” (UC Berkeley, Fall 2025). This class seeks to expand knowledge of topics related to “marginalized sexual communities and cultures.” Among the Wikipedia pages assigned was “LGBTQ Slang,” which explains gay terms like “bussy,” used to refer to the male anus, and “bottom” or “power bottom,” which refer to roles in gay sexual activities.

The fixation on social orientation and gender extends to classes like “Gender and Identity in STEM” (University of Oklahoma, Fall 2023), “Gender and Technology” (MacEwan University, Fall 2024), “LGBTQ Reproduction” (University of Michigan, Fall 2025), “Transgender Studies” (Western Illinois University - Quad Cities, Spring 2018) and “Gender and Sexuality in Latinx Pop Culture” (UC Berkeley, Spring 2023).

“Race” also appeared in Wiki Education’s classes. One class, “Critical Race Feminisms and Tap Dance” (Colby College, Spring 2020), uses tap dance to “understand and think critically” about critical race theory, black feminist thought and feminist performance theory.

In 2025, Wiki Education hosted “Race and Power in the Renaissance” (University of Toronto, Winter 2025) to explore the ties between race, imperialism and culture in the 14th-century movement.

Wiki Education’s activism runs so deep that it transforms seemingly neutral subjects into vehicles for left-wing narratives. For instance, take “Hidden Figures-Neuroscience through Diversity” (University of Virginia, Spring 2024), a class that describes itself as a neuroscience course but explicitly focuses on “bias in citation rates” and “tools to fight it.”

Another example is “Environmental Politics” (University of Michigan-Dearborn, Fall 2025), a course that trains student activists to inject political framing into environmental topics. A third class, “Asian Religions in America” (Skidmore College, Fall 2025), turns the study of faith into a project on “(mis)representation” and “racist caricatures.”

Additionally, “Environmental and Climate Justice” (University of Lynchburg, Spring 2025) proclaims to focus on the “disproportionate impacts of environmental decisions and underprivileged social groups.”

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Two classes studied so-called disinformation and how to counter it: “Media and Mis-Disinformation” (Methodist University, Spring 2023) and “TAS 223 DisInformation” (Nazareth College, Spring 2023), teaching students to identify and counter mis-, dis- and malinformation, and even “conspiracy theories.” Tellingly, the first class zeroed in on how alleged disinformation “breeds social mistrust, worsens public health outcomes, and disrupts political processes, among other social ills.”

What could be studies of science or faith are twisted into activism, with students rewriting Wikipedia to push policy narratives. The focus on left-wing topics has been evident in classes since 2013, according to Wiki Education's publicly available database.

Inside the Master Plan Behind Wiki Education’s Origins

Wiki Education began inside the Wikimedia Foundation in 2010 and spun off as a separate nonprofit in 2013. At the time, Wikimedia framed the move as putting the education program under volunteer controls.

“As part of Wikimedia’s goal to have the Wikipedia Education Program in the United States and Canada directed by volunteers, the program will formally move to a new nonprofit organization, the Wiki Education Foundation, beginning this month,” then-Wiki Education board member Mike Christie said in a statement Nov. 7, 2013. [Emphasis added.]

However, a closer look at statements from that period suggests a different motive. Wiki Education was born out of Wikimedia’s desire to steer Wikipedia’s radical content without taking responsibility for it.

By spinning off the non-profit, Wikimedia created a convenient way to influence Wikipedia while keeping its hands clean. This control was visible through direct funding, staffing and public endorsements, making it clear that Wikimedia's oversight of Wiki Education was significant.

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Such a tight connection was evident in 2017 when the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees unanimously approved a resolution to facilitate the funneling of tax-exempt donations to Wiki Education. The board affirmed that “for purposes of eligibility to submit funding requests,” it “should treat the Wiki Education Foundation as it would treat a Wikimedia-affiliated entity.”

Wikimedia Controls Wiki Education Through Staffing

Wikimedia's influence on Wiki Education extends directly into staffing and board appointments. Glancing at the staff roster, something unmistakably reeks of Wikimedia, as many Wiki Education staff and board members are former Wikimedia employees or operatives.

Frank Schulenburg, a German native and self-described Wikipedia writer, leads Wiki Education. According to his LinkedIn profile and a publicly available Wikimedia profile, he spent half a decade working at Wikimedia, directly reporting to embattled former Wikimedia Executive Director Sue Gardner.

He held various jobs within Wikimedia before landing the top job of Senior Director of Programs, overseeing the early implementation of the non-profit's education initiatives. He is now the first executive director of Wiki Education, earning over $200,000 a year, according to IRS documents reviewed by MRC.

Wiki Education Deputy Director LiAnna Davis was a top Wikimedia official who served as the communications manager for the initial pilot program that evolved into Wiki Education. She currently earns a six-figure salary.

Nearly 40 percent of Wiki Education’s board members have ties to Wikimedia. Gardner, the controversial former long-time Wikimedia executive director, sits on the board.

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Current Wiki Education board member Garfield Byrd previously served as Chief of Finance and Administration for Wikimedia and also served on the Wikimedia Funds Dissemination Committee.

Richard Knipel, another member of Wiki Education’s board, is the president of Wikimedia’s New York City chapter.

Sage Ross, Wiki Education’s chief technology officer, joined Wikimedia in 2010 for the same early development of the program. Kelly Doyle Kim, a project manager focusing on expanding equity, served for at least seven years as a board member of Wikimedia’s D.C. chapter.

How Wikimedia Controls Wiki Education Through Funding

Wikimedia’s operational support has been continuously augmented due to steady and substantial cash infusions to fund the core operations of Wiki Education. The first seed grant was provided in 2013, with millions more provided over the following 12 years, bringing the total to at least $3.9 million allocated for Wiki Education’s core operations.

These donations are mere supplements to the massive taxpayer subsidies provided by the public colleges and universities, which largely fund the professors who train students to become activists for Wikimedia.

While the total taxpayer contributions to this agenda are not known, the MRC has identified several grants from the Wikimedia Foundation to Wiki Education. These allocations are spread across multiple, at times confusing, grant pages. The funding appears to include the following:

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Funding requests and approvals included the following:

$1.4 million (2024-26) — General Support Fund

$1.03 million (2022-23) — General Support Fund

$400,000 (December 2019) — Annual Planning Grant

$400,000 (January 2018) — Annual Planning Grant

$25,000 (2018) — Tech contract (Q1 2018)

$99,996 (2017) — Simple Annual Plan Grant

These figures are non-exhaustive and were compiled from publicly available records reviewed by the Media Research Center. Wikimedia has not disclosed the full scope of its material support, including guidance, meetings or advisory input. The foundation operates multiple grant programs, which Wiki Education has tapped into.

Together, they have constructed an intricate system to achieve their goals. Wiki Education must show progress as part of its grant agreement with Wikimedia, creating a regular reporting loop between the two entities.

Wiki Education’s Donations to Democrat-aligned Campaigns

The partisan bias of Wiki Education staff is apparent in their campaign donations, which have been directed exclusively to Democratic candidates. According to Federal Election Commission disclosures reviewed by the Media Research Center, top staff and board members of Wiki Education contributed a total of at least $36,838.13 to Democratic politicians and liberal causes.

The largest combined contributions came from Wiki Education Senior Program Manager Helaine Blumenthal, who gave $13,276.25 to various campaigns and PACs from 2020 to 2024, and LiAnna Davis, who contributed $12,323.67 between 2015 to 2025, according to FEC disclosures. Their money flowed through ActBlue to the Senate Majority PAC, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC), and the presidential campaigns of former President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris.

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Other relatively unknown yet radical PACs also benefited. According to FEC disclosures, Sage Ross gave $5,000 to Swing Left in 2018 — the same PAC that helped Democrats win the House majority that year.

LiAnna Davis also contributed $2,000 each to Hillary for America and the Hillary Victory Fund, as well as $500 to Courage to Change, the super PAC launched by “Squad” member and self-described democratic socialist Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY).

Consequences

These findings expose a deep-seated ideological bias within Wikipedia, a site that once proclaimed to embrace neutrality but now functions as a gatekeeper for left-wing narratives while shutting down conservative viewpoints.

In February, the MRC uncovered that Wikipedia had effectively blacklisted right-leaning media from its source materials under the guise of “reliability.” Its “Reliable Sources/Perennial Sources” list, where editors decide which publications are acceptable, functions as a censorship tool, ensuring conservative perspectives are excluded.

Among the outlets effectively blacklisted are Breitbart, Fox News, The Daily Caller, Daily Mail, Newsmax and OANN.

The bias extends beyond media sources and plays out in real time.

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The MRC documented multiple cases where Wikipedia pages for Trump administration nominees were vandalized following their nominations, including those for Vice President JD Vance, FBI Director Kash Patel, War Secretary Pete Hegseth and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard.

These attacks reveal an activist editing culture that punishes dissent and weaponizes information against the left’s political opponents, and it has now been built into colleges and universities.

Wiki Education’s campus programs and Wikipedia’s editorial culture form a seamless pipeline of activism: courses instill left-wing narratives, students embed them into pages and Wikipedia cements them as alleged fact.

Backed by Wikimedia funding and staffing, the effort enables ideological actors to reshape public knowledge under the cover of academia and volunteerism.

MRC Free Speech America Intern Evan Redding provided crucial research for this report.

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npr interView w founder / heAD 11/3/25 LIBTARD? SAYS PAL ENSHITIFICATION

AN 10 25

SFGate columnist Drew Magary tested out Elon Musk's new "Wikipedia clone" known as Grokipedia and says he found it's full of racism, antisemitism and lies.

"There is nothing this man cannot make cheaper, wonkier and 20% more Hitler-y," Magary writes about Musk's latest foray into "his own optimized version of Wikipedia."

Groikpedia's entry on Adolf Hitler, for example, includes a “Debates and Intent on Functionality” section, "which is absent in Wiki’s entry on the man," Magary notes.

“The historiographical debate on the intent and functionality of Nazi racial policies, particularly the Holocaust, centers on whether the systematic extermination of Jews was the fulfillment of Adolf Hitler’s premeditated master plan or the unintended outcome of bureaucratic radicalization and wartime improvisation,"Magary quotes Grokipedia, boldfacing the most egregious part.

"You already know about people who deny that the Holocaust ever happened, so kudos to Grokipedia for introducing, 'The Holocaust was real, but also it was just a happy accident!' as a new means of discrediting Jewish history," Magary writes.

IFrame Content

While Magary says no one knows who wrote that passage, the entry links to the Associated Press, but sourcing still remains vague.

"Musk’s site uses an ambiguous mix of crowdsourcing and its owner’s proprietary AI software — which he already appended to Twitter/X to predictably virulent results — to compose its more than 850,000 entries. I never would have sorted this without Wikipedia, so thanks, Wiki!" Magary says.

While Wikipedia remains non-profit and written entirely by humans, Musk's version is the antithesis, Magary explains.

"Elon Musk is perhaps, second to Donald Trump, our greatest disseminator of bad faith," he writes, with his priorities remaining clear.

"So it makes sense that he would cobble together a half-assed competitor to Wikipedia that is motivated by profit, and by his own demented worldview. Grokipedia exists strictly as a reactionary product, and that was plainly evident when I took the site for a test drive," Magary says.

The site, he says, is a mess, and an "attempt to rewrite the bulk of history" to suit Musk's "own ends."

"That’s why, when I tried to search for a “Grokipedia” entry on Grokipedia, I found no entry at all," Magary notes, adding that it's "More like WOKE-ipedia. Am I right, fellow plantation owners?! Huh? Anyway, if you think these suggested results make sense, then you’re on more ketamine than Musk himself."

In response to Slavery, Musk's "slurbot is free to denigrate Black and mixed race folks any way it pleases. Or it ignores denigration of those people entirely; there is no Grokipedia entry for the N-word," Magary says.

Musk, he writes, catered the site directly to his audience. "I got the feeling that his pet project tweaked the hot button entries to tilt MAGA, and then just stole content for all of the normal s——," he writes.

"This is the whitewashing machine at work," Magary explains, whose intention is to spread racist lies.

"It has no real purpose other than to strategically plant lies into a reference manual. This renders it not only a malevolent product, but a lousy one. But hey, maybe Elon didn’t mean for his baby to be such a piece of s——. Maybe it was just the unintended outcome of bureaucratic radicalization and wartime improvisation," Magary concludes.

---

https://www.alternet.org/wisconsin-supreme-court-judge-wikipedia/

no lnx an 8 23

Right-wing Wisconsin Supreme Court judge’s edits to Wikipedia page may be 'conflict of interest': watchdog

Maya Boddie August 15, 2023

Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Rebecca Bradley recently logged into her personal Wikipedia page and made a few edits, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel watchdog columnist Daniel Bice reports.

According to the report, @arizonasunblock on Twitter last week wrote, "Conservative Wisconsin Supreme Court justice @JudgeBradleyWI is currently engaging in an edit war on her Wikipedia page under an anonymous username that she also uses in her personal email. You cannot make this stuff up."

Bice discovered the Twitter user was correct, with the username "rlgbjd," standing for "Rebecca Lynn Grassl Bradley, J.D."

The columnist writes:

In her email to the Journal Sentinel, Bradley said she had to make these changes because members of the media aren't doing their job.

"Clearly, the media has made no effort to report honestly so public officials have no choice but to correct the record for them,'" Bradley said.

"I hope this clears up the great Wikipedia issue facing our state and allows you to focus on the constitutional crisis created by my colleagues," she concluded, referring to actions taken by the new liberal majority on the court.

POLL: Should Trump be allowed to hold office again?

"Republicans have become the party of book banning, but as always, Rebecca Bradley goes one step further and wants to erase the Internet," Scot Ross, former executive director of the progressive group One Wisconsin Now told the news outlet.

Bice writes:

According to her Wikipedia page, in May 2020, Bradley "compared the state's stay-at-home orders to the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II," a case known as Korematsu v. the United States.

Here is what Bradley actually said, according to video of the teleconference of the May 5, 2020, oral arguments:

I'll direct your attention to another time in history, the Korematsu decision, where the court said the need for action was great and time was short and that justified, and I'm quoting, "assembling together and placing under guard all those of Japanese ancestry in assembly centers" during World War II.

Could the secretary (of the Wisconsin Department of Health Services), under this broad delegation of legislative power, or legislative-like power, order people out of their homes into centers where they are properly socially distanced in order to combat the pandemic? . . . The point of my question is, what are the limits, constitutional or statutory? There have to be some, don't there, counsel?

Bradley replaced the words from her original oral argument, writing, "Although headlines may sensationalize the invocation of cases such as Korematsu, the point of citing them is not to draw comparisons between the circumstances of people horrifically interned by their government during a war and those of people subjected to isolation orders during a pandemic. We mention cases like Korematsu in order to test the limits of government authority, to remind the state that urging courts to approve the exercise of extraordinary power during times of emergency may lead to extraordinary abuses of its citizens."

According to Bice, the judge made two additional changes, including editing "the description of her majority opinion in the 2021 redistricting case aimed at setting new political boundary lines in the state," and amending "a summary of her 2022 decision outlawing the use of drop boxes to cast absentee ballots in Wisconsin."

READ MORE: Wisconsin Republicans threaten to impeach newly elected Democratic State Supreme Court justice: report

The columnist notes Bradley received backlash from a Wikipedia editor who says the judge may have generated a conflict of interest.

Wikipedia informed Bradley, "Editors with a conflict of interest may be unduly influenced by their connection to the topic," noting the website's guidelines, "which suggested users 'avoid editing or creating articles about yourself, your family, friends, colleagues, company, organization, clients, or competitors.'"

READ MORE: Liberal victory in Wisconsin Supreme Court race is a 'five-alarm warning to Republicans': WSJ editorial board

Daniel Bice's full column is available at this link.

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http://redgreenandblue.org/2020/07/17/war-science-climate-change-denial-course-jeffrey-epstein/

wednesday, we talked about how complaints of controversial speech being censored is usually either little more than a request that the oppressed be quiet about their oppression, or a way for deniers to continue arguing against regulations. But there’s more to it than that, particularly when it comes to political correctness in science. For example, on Sunday the Wall Street Journal published an op-ed by Lawrence Krauss, bemoaning “the ideological corruption of science.”

By Climate Denier Roundup

Now, it does make sense that the complaint that science is getting too politically correct comes from Krauss, given that Krauss was “cancelled” after Buzzfeed revealed a litany of sexual harassment complaints.

But apparently his cancellation didn’t take, as his WSJ op-ed indicates he is once again president of the Origins Project, something that still exists despite revelations that the project took money from convicted child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.

Anyway, this (alleged) sexual harasser who has said he doesn’t “feel tarnished in any way by my relationship with Jeffrey,” but instead feels “raised by it,” just wrote in the Journal that it’s a very bad thing that “academic science leaders have adopted wholesale the language of dominance and oppression previously restricted to ‘cultural studies’ journals to guide their disciplines.”

Per Krauss,“there are strong reasons to think” that the claim that there’s systemic racism in science “is spurious.” Despite the fact that basically any Black person or honest scientist would tell you otherwise, Krauss remains unmoved.

He goes on to complain about complaints of sexism in science. Unsurprisingly, given his well-documented history of using his power to prey on young women, Krauss appears more worried about people like himself and fellow Jeffrey Epstein lunch companion and science conference on Epstein’s private island attendeeSteven Pinker being “stripped of his position” than he does the thousands of women who have been harassed out of science by people like himself.

To conclude, Krauss demands that scientific leaders “publicly stand up not only for free speech in science, but for quality, independent of political doctrine and divorced from the demands of political factions.”

Here’s a place Krauss could start: at WUWT, where blogger Eric Worrall is very upset about some speech that he considers incorrect, politically, and has worked hard to censor. Because, apparently, a Wikipedia entry referred to climate denier Sallie Baliunas as a denier.

Worral edited the entry, because “people who dispute the connection between climate change and CO2 find the word ‘denier’ offensive,” and claimed it’s “an attempt to link the concept of disputing the consensus to ‘holocaust denial.”

The WUWT post includes some of the amusing back-and-forth, with Wiki editor “Hob Gadling” addressing the substance of the issue: “Wikipedia does not pander to fringe groups: we do not call evolution “just a theory” because creationists are offended if we don’t… If you want to be treated like real scientists, behave like real scientists…”

And that brings us to the crux of PC-complaint hypocrisy: deniers like Worrall, who otherwise decry political correctness in science, are all too eager to police the speech of others.

Meanwhile, we will never know the number of women and people of color forced out of science not by PC culture run amok, but by the (alleged) abuse of people like Krauss.

If someone with a history of groping women and telling one that he’s going to buy her birth control so she doesn’t take maternity leave, and who has publicly defended and taken funding from a convicted pedophile, can still be published in one of the world’s most popular newspapers, then clearly PC cancel-culture isn’t as powerful as he claims.

Particularly since his WSJ op-ed byline notes that Krauss has a forthcoming book on the physics of climate change…

(Crossposted with DailyKos. Cartoon by Tom Toles from the Washington Post – get his book on climate change co-written with Michael Mann, The Madhouse Effect.)

in reply to pretty anodyne art'l on royal soc and _ doing agw primer, post pastes: Wikipedia: Peer review Scientists questioning the accuracy of IPCC climate projections

https://www.thedailybeast.com/ex-trump-aide-frantically-scrambles-to-scrub-russia-from-bio

former Donald Trump campaign aide Michael Caputo is determined to prove that he did not work for Vladimir Putin, and he’s using every tool at his disposal to do so—from a congressional ethics complaint, to a defamation lawsuit, to a surreptitious Wikipedia edit campaign.

Sean Dwyer, an employee ofCaputo’s PR firm, Zeppelin Communications, was blocked from Wikipedia in August after he was caught using multiple pseudonymous accounts to purge Caputo’s page of alleged Putin ties, according to an investigation by the site’s editors. After the accounts were exposed as what Wikipedia calls “sock puppets”—multiple accounts run by the same person as part of a coordinated editing campaign—Dwyer admitted he had financial ties to the subjects of his edits.

It’s just the latest front in Caputo’s battles to save his reputation from, what he sees as, Russian smears. He also says he has filed an ethics complaint against Rep. Jackie Speier (D-CA) over comments at a congressional hearing in March, where the California Democrat accused Caputo of having been Russian president Vladimir Putin’s “image consultant.” In emails with The Daily Beast, Caputo said he will also be filing a defamation lawsuit against Zac Petkanas, a Democratic strategist who worked on Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign and accused Caputo of being “a Russian stooge who used to work for Vladimir Putin” in a Fox News segment last month.

In an email, Petkanas said he stands by his statements. “To my knowledge, Michael Caputo has not disputed this Washington Post report to which I referred stating that he worked for a Russian government run media company to improve the image of Vladimir Putin, who was the leader of the Russian government at the time,” he wrote. “To the contrary, according to that same report, he informed his hometown newspaper that he was ‘not proud of the work today. But at the time, Putin wasn’t such a bad guy.’”

A Republican operative from New York, Caputo ran communications for Trump’s campaign in the Empire State. Since then, he has registered as a federal lobbyist and signed on with the comeback House campaign of former congressman and convicted felon Michael Grimm.

Caputo lived in Russia more than 20 years ago. And he has a history of business dealings in the country that, though less scandalous than those of other former Trump aides, have trailed him since his work for Trump. Unlike one-time campaign chair Paul Manafort and others in Trump’s orbit, Caputo has faced no allegations of wrongdoing. But he is nonetheless determined to head off any suggestion that he is connected to the Russian government—and by extension the stench of the federal investigation into alleged meddling in the 2016 presidential campaign.

Congressional investigators probing that alleged influence campaign interviewed Caputo in July, and he emerged from the meeting with the same stance he had going in: insisting that there was no collusion and that he has no business dealings in Russia.

Caputo says Dwyer’s editing campaign was simply an effort to root out misinformation to the contrary. “Months ago, I was informed that a Russia conspiracy buff had posted an inaccurate biography of me, noting that I worked for Putin. I have never worked for Putin,” Caputo told The Daily Beast in an email. “I asked my staff to edit the posting, but to register properly as a paid editor.”

Dwyer did notify the Wikipedia community that he was being paid for his efforts, but he only did so after editing Caputo’s page on 10 separate occasions, primarily to tweak references to Caputo’s past work for the media arm of Gazprom, a state-owned Russian energy company with close ties to the Kremlin.

Caputo never worked for Putin. But his former PR firm, Rainmaker Interactive, represented Gazprom Media chief executive Alfred Kokh in the early 2000s, and helped burnish the company’s reputation with U.S. media and policymakers. At the time, Gazprom had just acquired NTV, one of Russia’s few major opposition media outlets, sparking an internal revolt among staff. Gazprom dispatched security services to seize NTV’s headquarters in a move that was widely condemned as an assault on independent Russian media. According to Kokh, Putin personally sanctioned the crackdown.

In an interview last year, The Buffalo News characterized Caputo’s subsequent PR work for Gazprom Media as “help[ing] President Vladimir Putin weather U.S. government criticism for taking over an independent TV station.” Caputo says that characterization is inaccurate, though he told the paper at the time, as Petkanas noted, that he is “not proud of the work today,” adding the caveat that at “at the time, Putin wasn’t such a bad guy.”

Given what Caputo characterizes as widespread—and even malicious—misrepresentations of his work in Russia, “Wikipedia inaccuracies barely even make it on my radar,” he said.

pr dude so fluff?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Caputo

Madison Malone Kircher on how Wikipedia has banned the Daily Mail,

Look no further than the Qorvis Wikipedia page itself, Lauer suggested, calling it a "real yarn." There, Wikipedia claimed that Qorvis both employs hundreds of Wikipedia editors and that its CEO was nicknamed "The Super Gypsy"—statements that were, according to Lauer, "quite obviously false—and damaging to our company, clients, and the public."

But is the situation as cut and dry as Qorvis would have you believe, or is Lauer's public response just clever PR obfuscation?Wikipedia cofounder Jimmy Wales certainly isn't buying his excuses, telling Lauer via Twitter: "Your complaints are deeply dishonest to the point of being embarrassing. Your clients should fire you for it."

Wikipedians accuse Qorvis of employing a small crew of sockpuppets—multiple accounts owned by the same user to deceptively orchestrate an editing bloc—to fan out across the free encyclopedia and attempt to whitewash the pages of its clients.

Here is just a sampling of Wikipedians' voluminous evidence, which they've been gathering from as far back as 2011. Qorvis has claimed it has nothing to do with these accounts.

Wikipedia user "Sacoca" allegedly runs a string of five accounts that remove negative information and add PR fluff to the Qorvis page and that of Kazakhstan oligarch Alexander Mirtchev, an apparent Qorvis client. The Sacoca account is almost certainly run by Tom Squitieri, a Qorvis employee. Sacoca wrote nearly the entire Wikipedia entry for Squitieri, and also uploaded a photo of Squitieri to Wikimedia Commons. All of these accounts were blocked from editing after an internal Wikipedia investigation—which looks at IP addresses and editing behavior—confirmed that they likely belonged to the same person.

manipulated by new media strats for Koch

exxon

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Environment/Climate_change_task_force

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Cheatsheet

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Edit_warring

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Vandalism#Types_of_vandalism

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:BLP

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conflict-of-interest_editing_on_Wikipedia

Conflict-of-interest editing on Wikipedia occurs when edits are made to advance the personal interests of an editor rather than the interests and aims of the Wikipedia project. Various organizations and individuals have tried to edit articles on the encyclopedia related to themselves. Several Wikipedia policies and guidelines however exist to minimize or combat the effects of conflict of interest levels, in order to try to maintain neutral point of view.

Controversies that have come to public attention include United States Congressional staff editing articles about members of Congress in 2006, Microsoft offering a software engineer money to edit articles on two competing code standards in 2007, the British public-relations (PR) firm Bell Pottinger editing articles about its clients in 2011, and the discovery in 2012 that UK MPs or their staff had removed criticism from articles about the MPs. The media has also written about COI editing by the Central Intelligence Agency, Diebold, Portland Communications, Sony, the Vatican, and several others.

Both the public relations (PR) industry and the Wikipedia community have responded to these incidents. PR professionals and Wikipedia editors formed a group called Corporate Representatives for Ethical Wikipedia Engagement to work on the issue together. The Public Relations Society of America argued for greater editing permissions for PR professionals. The Chartered Institute of Public Relations reasoned for a cautious collaborative approach. The International Association of Business Communicators shared a variety of views on the subject. The Wikipedia Community formed two separate projects, WikiProject Cooperation andWikiProject Integrity in order to deal with the problem of conflict-of-interest editing on the English Wikipedia.

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4 Incidents

5 Reception

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GEO Group:{:(style="margin-right:0px;margin-left:0px"):}:[edit:{]}:

In February 2013, for-profit prison company GEO Group received major media coverage when a Wikipedia user under the name Abraham Cohen edited the entry on the company regarding naming rights to Florida Atlantic University (FAU) Stadium. GEO Group's Manager of Corporate Relations at the time was named Abraham Cohen, who is an FAU alumnus, former FAU student body president and former ex-officio member of the FAU board of trustees.^[89] Eleven edits constituting the majority of all those changes had been made in a single day under a Wikipedia account named "Abraham Cohen", the only day on which that account has ever been used.^[90][91]

BP

In March 2013, it was reported that BP had encouraged substantial changes to its Wikipedia entry through a member of its press office.^[92] According to the reports, Wikipedia editor "Arturo at BP" submitted drafts for rewriting parts of the company's article that were then reviewed and added by other editors, including sections dealing with its environmental record.^[93][94] Estimates of the size of the contributions were as high as 44% of the article.^[95] Arturo at BP had stated on his user page "In the interest of full transparency, I chose 'Arturo at BP' as my username so that my affiliation with BP is abundantly clear to all parties I may interact with on Wikipedia," and noted that he has not directly edited the page, but has only suggested text to other editors on the article's "talk page." The development caused concern among some users as the content was being produced by an employee, while "readers would be none the wiser."^[92] Jimmy Wales was quoted in Salon.com, saying "I think that accusing [BP employee] Arturo of 'skirting' Wikipedia's rules in this case is fairly ludicrous – unless 'skirting' means 'going above and beyond what is required in order to be very clearly in compliance with best practice.' So, I would consider that a blatant factual misrepresentation."^[95] The Wikipedia community intensely debated the ethics of the incident and how to handle it and other similar cases.^[96]...

^===^

Newt Gingrich loves technology, but apparently it doesn’t always love him back enough on its own and sometimes needs encouragement.

Gingrich has already been caught vastly inflating his Twitter following with phony accounts, and now CNN now reports that the campaign’s communications director, Joe DeSantis, has been aggressively making dozens of edits of Gingrich’s Wikipedia page. DeSantis has attempted to scrub or embellish embarrassing information about Gingrich’s marital troubles, House ethics investigation, and $500,000 Tiffany credit line:

Wikipedia records show DeSantis has made over 60 adjustments to entries in the online, publicly-edited encyclopedia to the biographical entry on Gingrich, the similar page on his wife, Callista, and a separate page on one of their books, Rediscovering Good in America. [...]

DeSantis’ edits, which began in October of 2008, included rewriting, removing, and editing lines, including several edits to references of Gingrich’s marriages, according to Wikipedia edit records, which are published and publicly viewable on the site.

While it’s common for campaigns to monitor and request edits to their candidates’ Wikipedia pages, what’s surprising is the degree to which DeSantis, a senior campaign official, has personally gone to great lengths to micromanage his boss’s entry.

Gilles-Eric Saralini. Entine has also set his sights on French Prof. Gilles-Eric Saralini, whose University of Caen study found that GM maize and Roundup at very low doses caused organ damage, tumors and premature death in rats over the long term.

Entine, again in Forbes, criticized Saralini in a May 2013 piece for withdrawing from a planned debate regarding biotechnology (Saralini is a critic of Monsanto, Roundup and GMOs, largely as a result of his findings) at the libertarian-leaning CATO Institute. Entine, in his critical piece, claimed that he wanted to use the debate forum to “present both sides of the issue”regarding genetically modified foods and GM biotechnology in general, but his history suggestions otherwise, as he is a regular, vociferous defender of GMO foods and the biotechnology that created them.

GM Watch reported that these articles are dishonest in the extreme. “For example, Entine described Seralini’s findings as “anomalous” even though Seralini’s was the only long-term toxicity study ever carried out on this particular GM maize and the herbicide it is grown with. It’s hard not to produce “anomalous” findings if there is only one experiment.”

Entine has also worked to undermine Saralini on Wikipedia, using the handle “runjonrun”(Incidentally, Entine’s email address isrunjonrun@earthlink.net). GM Watch was alerted by Wikipedia users to the fact that Entine was one of the early editors on a one-sided and originally potentially libellous Wikipedia article called “The Seralini affair”, which denigrated Seralini’s study and Seralini himself.

Entine, under the Wiki user name “runjonrun”, was active in vandalizing the article by rapidly deleting balancing information, for example, about the scientific support for Seralini’s study and the conflicts of interest among critics of the study.

In a previous Wiki spat, “runjonrun” had revealed his true identity as Jon Entine after upsetting other Wiki users by allegedly contravening Wiki conflict of interest guidelines and vandalising articles without justification.

virtual unreality book NYU scifri 7.4/14 mellville meteor self fdbk

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Wikipedia_sockpuppets

edited by exxon on valdez

after:

Peer-reveiwed studies conducted by hundreds of scientists have confirmed that there has been no long-term severe impact to the [[Prince William Sound]] ecosystem. Thousands of species in Prince William Sound were never affected by the spill in the first place, or recovered quickly after the initial impact. As an example, six of the largest [[salmon]] harvests in history were recorded in the decade immediately following the spill.

before:

The long-term effects of the oil spill have been studied. Thousands of animals perished immediately, the best estimates are: 250,000 sea birds, 2,800 sea [[otter]]s, 300 [[harbor seal]]s, 250 [[bald eagle]]s, up to 22 [[orca]]s, and billions of salmon and herring eggs. Though even as soon as a year later, one had to look carefully on most beaches to find any evidence of the spill. In the long term, declines have been observed in various marine populations, including stunted growth and indirect mortality increases in pink salmon populations. Sea otters and ducks also showed higher death rates years later, partly because they ate contaminated invertebrates. The animals also were exposed to oil when they dug up their prey in tainted soil.	+	Peer-reveiwed studies conducted by hundreds of scientists have confirmed that there has been no long-term severe impact to the [[Prince William Sound]] ecosystem. Thousands of species in Prince William Sound were never affected by the spill in the first place, or recovered quickly after the initial impact. As an example, six of the largest [[salmon]] harvests in history were recorded in the decade immediately following the spill.
Researchers said some shoreline habitats, such as contaminated [[mussel beds]], could take up to 30 years to recover.

Wikipedia is not considered a legitimate source for college level work. See PRwatch article on corporations altering Wikipedia including Chevron deleting the entire article on bio-diesel, and http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?diff=prev&oldid=8931861 Exxon rewriting the history of the Valdez oil spill.v The College 8 Wiki has a great deal of information on the debate on global warming, as well as information on climate change itself.

Last week we started a new participatory project to expose the government agencies, corporations and lobbying groups that have been censoring, whitewashing or otherwise spinning Wikipedia. (See CMD Senior Researcher Diane Farsetta's great blog post for some background on this sordid tale.) So far we've logged several attempts at spin into the respective SourceWatch profiles, including:

Chevron deleting the article on "Biodiesel";
Military contractor Raytheon deleting information on them spying on their competitors and the U.S. Air Force;
Republican-friendly broadcaster Clear Channel adding allegations of plagiarism to Democratic Senate Candidate Al Franken's profile;
PR firm Hill & Knowlton removing descriptions of the political repression by the government of the Maldives, an H&K client;
Amway parent company Alticor removing descriptions of the company's use of "Google bombing" to drive down the search engine rankings of Web sites critical of the company;
Electronic voting machine company Diebold removing descriptions of the controversies surrounding their machines' failures and glitches;
Conservative news network Fox News changing Keith Olbermann's profile (and not in a good way - see Olbermann's reaction on/maxresdefault.jpg));
2007
http://www.prwatch.org/node/6416

Sock Puppets for Hire

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Wikipedia_sockpuppets

In March 2011, a year after Koch hired New Media Strategies to manipulate articles and blogs, Wikipedia banned the previously well-known Republican publicity firm.[1] Beginning in February 2011, Scott Walker and Wisconsin brought corporations buying political influence and media to the mainstream media. Centered mainly on Koch's influence on Walker through election campaign contributions and then buying lobbyists and busing people in to support Walker at speeches after protests began, other news sources began finding other connections, which eventually led to Wikipedia recognizing the shills paid via Koch Industries as a marketing expense.

http://www.dkosopedia.com/wiki/Wikipedia

http://www.salon.com/2013/05/17/revenge_ego_and_the_corruption_of_wikipedia/

UPDATE

New Media Strategies at one point tried to lie about its affiliation with Koch Industries. The account “MBMAdmirer” wrote in December on Wikipedia: “I am a citizen who has read about and admires the Koch family. I was not pleased with the way that they have been presented in the media. And I thought that I could come to Wikipedia to try to make sure that there are balancing facts. Nothing I do is in coordination with Koch or authorized by Koch.”

Wikipedia

Contents

GEO Group:{:(style="margin-right:0px;margin-left:0px"):}:[edit:{]}:

BP

Sock Puppets for Hire

UPDATE