dispatches from TJICistan

Apparently a NYT reporter was taken hostage by the Taliban, and the NYT actively worked to suppress this information “for the safety of the captive”.

Funny, but I don’t recall the NYT working to suppress information on other people who have been taken captive. In fact, the NYT actively prints information about other captives.

It’s almost as if they consider journalists’ lives to be worth more than, say, those of contractors, troops, and civilians!

Further, the NYT worked to censor Wikipedia … with the help of Jimbo Wales:

http://blogs.siliconvalley.com/gmsv/2009…

Three days after the kidnapping, an anonymous user added the development to the page on Rohde, citing an Afghan news agency. A Times staffer spotted it and edited that information out. The original user returned and put it back in. The Times turned to Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales, who decided that Rohde’s safety outweighed any reluctance to tamper. “We were really helped by the fact that it hadn’t appeared in a place we would regard as a reliable source,” said Wales. “I would have had a really hard time with it if it had.”

Thus began a seven-month game of cat and mouse, with users, especially one increasingly angry one from Florida, posting the news and Wikipedia representatives removing the references and several times putting an editing freeze on the page. “We didn’t want it to look unusual in some fashion that would draw speculation, so we would protect it for three days, or up to a month, which is pretty normal,” Wales said. Because Wikipedia can be edited anonymously, the site couldn’t contact those it was trying to gag to explain what it was doing. “We had no idea who it was,” said Wales. “There was no way to reach out quietly and say ‘Dude, stop and think about this.’” Once Rohde was free, the page was unlocked, and it has now been edited to reflect the controversy over how the news of the incident was managed…

So it seems that the Wikipedia insiders have not only conspired to suppress true, well source, information, but they’ve also broken The Three Revert Rule

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revert_wars…

The “Three revert rule” (“3RR”) is a bright line rule concerning blatant overuse of reverting, a common kind of edit war behavior. It states that a user who makes more than three revert actions (of any material) on any one page within a 24 hour period, may be considered to be edit warring, and blocked appropriately, usually for a 24 hour period for a first incident. The aim of 3RR is to draw a line where edit warring via reverts is clearly beyond a reasonable level and action will be taken if it has not already been. As such it does not apply in a few narrowly defined situations where there is no edit war (listed below).

and the sock puppet rule.

Well done, NYT and Jimbo: yet more evidence that you’re both full of crap.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 30th, 2009 at 9:04 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.