ESA, EA Caught Editing Their Own Wikipedia Entries

With the whitewashing of Wikipedia now an easily-reviewable record, it's been noted that games-related organizations are not above tweaking their public image online. Joystiq notes that EA, for example, is unabashed about removing founder Trip Hawkins from their entry. More ominous edits from the Entertainment Software Association are reported by GamePolitics. The organization, which you may recall backing the recent raids on mod chippers, has made a concerted effort to cast mod chips in a negative light. " In one paragraph, someone at ESA deleted a nuanced discussion of mod chip legality, replacing it with a flat assertion that mod chips are illegal. Less than a minute later, a lengthy section on the positive uses of mod chips was deleted, as was a notation that the US Supreme Court has not yet dealt with the DMCA. Finally, a sentence stating that mod chips are legal in Australia was removed."

Re:As an Australian...

[QuantumG]

Australia has been the US's bitch for much longer than any of those three.

Re:Fundamental Flaw In Wikipedia?

[nlitement]

Oh, really? Or then the dumb idiot pulls of a three-revert, or the good user brings it up on the talk page, or even better, notifies an admin of a badly behaving IP and gets someone to solve the whole issue. The greatest weakness of Wikipedia is the prejudiced approach that people often hold against it and how it handles vandalism/etc.

Re:Fundamental Flaw In Wikipedia?

[Anonymous Coward]

If these people had used IP anonymisers, they'd never have been picked up and the edits would have looked just like arguments back and forth until someone gave up.

Or more likely, they would have just been presented with a page telling them they were blocked from editing - Wikipedia blocks all the public proxy servers it can find, for precisely this reason.

Re:Change it back?

[Enlightenment]

Of course they were changed back. The whole point of this article is that people found out and weren't pleased with the disinformation being spread. Would they then allow those edits to remain? Besides, I've been checking, and I've found that yes, the redacted information has been restored. So don't worry. :)

Tor is blocked

[tepples]

And if you use Tor, your exit node's IP address gets blocked unless you log in.

Re:Fundamental Flaw In Wikipedia?

[LKM]

Please check out the change history. In most of the cases, the changes were reverted within minutes. It doesn't matter who makes the edits, if the edits are wrong or uncalled for, they will be reverted.

Constantly changing back would lead to the article being locked. Being tenacious does not matter one bit if the article can't just be changed anymore.

If you doubt the information in a Wikipedia article, check out its history. It's there for a reason.

Re:Something people don't seem to realize...

[sholden]

Since wikipedia itself says it's not a good idea, why would you be surprised to find that no one has acknowledges it is?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Business'_F AQ#Am_I_allowed_to_edit_articles_about_myself_or_m y_company.3F [wikipedia.org]

It gives some ways to get your content into an article you have a conflict of interest over (via the talk page), but just editing the article is clearly not the way to do things.

Re:I hope there's a wiki page

[5E-0W2]

The bird is Prometheus, Sisyphus is the one rolling the boulder up the hill (and Tantalus was the one with the pool of water and the grapes).