Wikipedia is, by comparison, small potatoes compared to HOW MANY police reports have been falsified by them over the years...

Since anyone can edit the entries, cops or anyone else who wants to suppress information can rewrite them. Then other people have to correct the entry, which can again be changed.

Wikipedia is a great thing, but it does have this problem.

Some entries can be locked and all have a history of the edits, so you can see each iteration and even read discussions that might ensue regarding the edits.

Where else is there transparency about what has been changed?

I'd love for you to supply me with a good source of information (FOX, MSNBC, NYT, MSM) that shows me the originals and the edits that go into the "news".

Everything can be gamed, including the IP addresses of 1 Police Plaza, so everything that we read/hear needs to be taken with a grain of salt.

However, I'll trust 99.999% of Wikipedia before I will some opinionated piece from a hack.

When are police officers going to be fired for misusing police resources for non-official purposes? Or is misinformation a practice that is SOP for the NYPD? Or is misappropriation of resources accepted by their management?

It's called "Media Relations", and it's about manipulating the media.

It's called "Media Relations", and it's about manipulating the media.

Last edited Fri Mar 13, 2015, 03:33 PM - Edit history (1)

that it is full of hacks, shills, and trolls. They aren't there to "improve Wikipedia", as Jimmy Wales always exhorts editors to do; but to push their parochial and sectarian biases - usually of a corporatist nature (that is, they want everything on Wikipedia dealing with the social sciences -geography, economics, etc.- to sound like a cross between The Economist and The Weekly Standard). I'm sure more than a few DUers reading this have experienced this first-hand.

What's ironic is that hardly anybody reads those contorted piles of words they call articles (the scientific ones excluded, as they are usually maintained by academics - although there is the issue of AMA pill-pushing and similar interference). They get a lot of clicks, yes; but believe me, most people stop after the first paragraph. My guess is that when Jimmy Wales passes on, it'll fold from all the infighting and the sheer dreariness of Wikipedia itself.

that establishes Wikipedia's foolproof infallibility...

Don't have one? Didn't think so...

They're constantly revised and assaulted by neo-con trolls. Since many of them are no doubt paid (plus the occasional me-too type), they're organized and e-mail each other whenever an edit war erupts.

One of the peculiarities of Wikipedia that make it such a Kafkaesque place, is their insistence that "good faith" be assumed at all times - even when the other editor made it abundantly clear they're not there to improve the article, just demonize (or lionize) the subject itself. Either tack, of course, is prohibited by Wikipedia's NPOV guidelines - but they won't enforce it at all if those pushing bias are organized and know how to game the system.

In other words, they reward knowing how to game the system, rather than the quality or neutrality of the content itself (as they claim to do).

Administrators are the only checks and balances against that sort of abuse - but if you're editing Wikipedia and find yourself fending off shills, forget it. Wikipedia administrators are usually too uninformed, too oblivious, and too lazy - or sometimes use their position to push bias themselves. I once had an admin "mediate" an edit war when he himself had just been blocked for a couple of days for abusing his privileges. He openly admitted to me that he was having emotional problems on account of some medicine he was taking, and thus couldn't fully grasp the situation - but that nevertheless I was to delete very significant and reliably-sourced info about a certain Republican just because the news was unflattering (I told him that I didn't realize Wikipedia was ****'s personal PR agency).

I looked back through his edit history, and sure enough: GOP-related subjects always got the light touch, Dems not so much - and he's a senior admin with all the rollback privileges and so on. I did lose that one (I won't say what it was; but believe me, everyone on DU would be furious with Wikipedia if I told you). Luckily though, I have won most of my edit wars - wars which, I'm proud to say I never started myself.

On this matter, if I were to do this, my little butt would be in jail, why is there more of this shield being putting up to further divide this country, of those that are above the law and those that are getting busted by the law, this is outrageous to perpetuate a cover-up, I feel like Nixon never left the White House

[center]
''Former NYPD applicants don't require training.
You go directly into the field.''[/center]

K&R