Amnesty International erases NGO Monitor criticism from Wikipedia entry; NY Times features article on ‘wiki-editing’
August 21st, 2007 by beccawitz | Category: Amnesty International
Wired Magazine (online) features a page where readers can post details about the editing of Wikipedia pages by interested parties. One reader posted an item detailing how Amnesty International edits out criticism of its organization on the Wikipedia page – including NGO Monitor’s detailed examples of false reports and double standards. They also removed a link to NGO Monitor’s Amnesty International infofile (the detailed log-page can be found here). So much for transparency and public debate.
The New York Times published an August 19 article dealing with this and related Wikipedia phenomenon — “ Seeing Corporate Fingerprints in Wikipedia Edits.”
On the Wikipedia AI discussion page you find some comments on the issue of criticizing Amnesty International, among which a long one by the person who was removing the materials critical on the NGO.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Amnesty_International#.22Articles_critical_of_AI.22
I have been editing wikipedia for quite a while, now, and personally I would not describe the behaviour of that person as vandalism. Vandals do not usually try to defend their point. The just hit and go. As you can see the discussion was about how to report criticism of Amnesty International, without letting the article itself being biased against Amnesty. It seems to me that it was not a matter of denying criticism, but rather a matter of how report on it. Eventually Sligahan removed the critical remarks, and the community decided “to start from scratch with the criticism”, rewording the entry in a balanced fashion.
Sligahan on February the 20 2006 at 19:27 had been warned not to remove materials without a reason, and it seems to me that he was behaving honestly, not as a vandal.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Sligahan