have made somewhere in the region of 7,000 anonymous Wikipedia edits (i.e. not including those Beeboids who have their own Wikipedia accounts), including this BBC edit of George W. Bush’s entry, changing his middle name from Walker to the Beeboid’s own name. How amusing.
Of course the real joke is that we telly-taxpayers are paying these morons to sit on their backsides and indulge in their petty personal political prejudices whenever they think they can get away with it.
Update: Lots more BBC Wikipedia edits have been uncovered by Biased BBC readers, (see the comments), including this one, where a BBC Wikipedia editor has changed ‘terrorists’ to ‘freedom fighters’. What a surprise. Lots more Wikipedia edit-o-rama drama to come I’m sure!
Meanwhile, The Grauniad has picked up on this story too (from where they don’t say – unlike Biased BBC they don’t credit their sources) – but of course, they don’t make any mention of their BBC bedfellows penchant for er, ‘revising’, Wikipedia!
Thank you to Anonymous for this excellent detective work, and to (another) Anonymous for The Grauniad link.
(snap. sorry.)
“I don’t belieeeeeve it!!!”
Auntie Beeb has just put this priceless article on their website:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/6947532.stm
Now please excuse me for a second whilst I try to remember a time-worn adage about glass houses and stones.
This, of course, is simply an objective fact:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?diff=prev&oldid=36957685
BBC’s CIA edits wiki article
to paraphrase Basil Faulty
Oh I see now –
There I was thinking it was your fault and all along it was my fault.
The UN are up to no good either…
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?diff=prev&oldid=38791682
More fun edits from the fair, impartial and high-minded BBC:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?diff=prev&oldid=105351692
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?diff=prev&oldid=119715943
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?diff=prev&oldid=109304918
The last one’s interesting. Given the subject (C4’s “100 Worst Britons” programme) I was expecting an amusing reference to a prominent Tory, or Mr. Blair. In fact, it’s a reasonably fair point about the depth to which Channel 4’s standards have sunk. But it’s a bit rich coming from the Beeb.
To be fair, though, it’s true that most of the edits are unobjectionable – the bulk of them seem to be professional journalists correcting the often appaling grammar and spelling of other contributors. However, that doesn’t excuse the few that aren’t, and it certainly doesn’t excuse the BBC’s smokescreen about CIA edits.
Sam Duncan:
Perhaps the bulk of the Wikipedia changes are reasonable enough but what the hell are BBC employees doing correcting wikipedia entries anyway, when they should be getting on with making crap telly programs and nonsense news reports?
Are they seriously that overstaffed and overfunded they can afford to have employees languishing around their desk taking stabs at Wikipedia when it suits them.
In fact, Nick Reynolds, John Reith, Sarah Jane et al, what are you ALL doing posting here when you should be working? Don’t you peole have schedules?
I wish to god I had as much time in my day as these BBC staff to idly surf the internet.
Seriously, the BBC offices sound like one gigantic lefty free range farm to me.
Seriously, the BBC offices sound like one gigantic lefty free range farm to me.
BBK | 16.08.07 – 3:15 am
Precisely. It’s like Animal Farm with the pigs in control.
(But with the infiltration of the BBC by radical Islamists, a comparison with pigs is not really suitable.)
And when I last looked, Fox News wasn’t funded by US taxpayers.
It’s the people’s money the BBC are frittering away.
Nick Reynolds – it appears one editor was “being nice” and he clearly had a left wing agenda given his remarks about the DMGT.
Others have pointed to the conflicts of interest page
“avoid, or exercise great caution when editing articles related to you, your organization, or its competitors, as well as projects and products they are involved with”
I’d avoid. It’s much cleaner.
I disagree – I think you should “exercise great caution” but not avoid. I have discussed this with a wikipedia editor. They have not told me to stop.
Nick
Well then why don’t you and the other BBC acolytes that do Wiki-edits not “exercise great caution” when editing the “Criticism of the BBC” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_the_BBC Wiki page. This is a classic example of Wipipedia not working.
Criticism of the BBC is airbrused out of this Wiki page by the BBC and various BBC linked individuals (ie Pit-Yacker http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Pit-yacker) on an almost daily basis. This is not exercising caution, it is Stalinist suppression of criticism.
I edited those pages and I did not “airbrush out” criticism of the BBC on those pages. In fact I left almost all the criticism there. What I did was add extra material and links.
For example anyone reading the orginal entry would have come away with the impression that the BBC Impartiality seminar held last year was “secret”. In fact it was streamed live on the web for anyone to see and I watched it with my own eyes. So I changed the entry to reflect that.
I made all these changes to make the entry more accurate and to try and improve wikipedia. So far the Wikipedia editors have not told me to stop.
To me this is an example of Wikipedia working well.
But I don’t do this on a “daily basis”. So if you want to change it…
Are we paying you to surf the internet all day Mr Reynolds? If so do you have any jobs going? I assume I have to pretend to be a leftie?
Nick
For your benefit, I am going to spend an hour or so going through the last couple of months of edits to the “Criticism of the BBC” page and post up a message with each one of santisations by the BBC staff or anonymous supporters (Pit-Yacker).
Au revoir
The CIA story has now been changed and there’s a post on the BBC Editors Blog:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/theeditors/2007/08/wikipedia_edits.html
[MJ – please don’t shout. To contact us please email biasedbbc@gmail.com.]
Mmmm have you ever complained to the beeb about their glaring bias, I have and recieved heaps of ass covering bullshit in return, I usually keep an eye on honest reporting, a Jewish website exposing examples of medis bias, through them I have complained a few times (checking facts elsewhere) and beyond wasting their time it achieved little. I think blogs are really upsetting those who want to control what we read and believe, they must be getting real stressfull at their inability to affect, let alone control this new media.
Mmmm have you ever complained to the beeb about their glaring bias
Frequently. I’ve rarely had the courtesy of a response, even an automated one.
But that could be because I don’t live in Britain.
Re the excellent Honest Reporting, they link to this blog on the Wiki issue:
http://www.honestreporting.com/articles/45884734/critiques/new/Stories_You_May_Have_Missed.asp
@ Nick Reynolds (BBC):
“…[anyone] would have come away with the impression that the BBC Impartiality seminar held last year was “secret”. In fact it was streamed live on the web for anyone to see and I watched it with my own eyes.
Ms Boaden also made this point on the editor’s blog, but it seems the only people who were aware of and watched this live stream were BBC employees. Perhaps you can clarify:
1. How or where the URL for this live stream was publicised?
2. Via your access logs, can you give us approx. numbers for how many people accessed this stream, and how many were from outside the BBC (i.e. non-BBC IP’s)?
Yes, I recall people in the blogosphere looking for that “live stream.” Don’t recall anyone finding it.
I can’t do that, but there is a full transcript of the seminar as an appendix of the recent BBC Trust “Impartiality in the 21st Century” available on the Trust’s website should you wish to read it.
let’s see whether the beeb has edited any entries relating to the labour party or Gordon Brown?
You know this led to the BBC dropping he BBC IP and using BT ?