So here's a hypothetical scenario.....

would someone please attempt to explain to me seriously, in Wikipedia terms?
It is very hypothetical, because product names and countries have been changed to protect the innocent.

What if a web page on the U.S. Department of State site in 2006 listing global arms transactions stated that "Mongolia is currently purchasing Umkhonto surface-to-air missiles from South Africa." But the page was changed in 2008 to remove any mention of that. Archive.org has kept a copy of the old 2006/2007 page. A search of Google returns no mention whatsoever of Umkhonto missiles ever going to Mongolia. Google News returns zero results for Umkhonto and Mongolia. Searches of the Mongolian government's website, the South African government's website, and the ****** Dynamics website reveal nothing of any trace that Mongolia ever acquired missiles from South Africa.

The preserved State Dept page stored on Archive.org is the ONLY RECORD of this transaction. It could have been a mistake, for all we know, because there is no other source substantiating it. You figure the State Department is a reliable source, but why did they remove the text? Nobody knows.

So, the question: If a Wiki prick wanted to include a mention in the ****** Dynamics article on Wikipedia that "In 2006, according to the United States Department of State, Mongolia purchased Umkhonto missiles from ****** Dynamics", would that archived "dead link" be sufficient within the "rules" of Wikipedia?

Are there any cases where Archive.org is how wiki perpetrators dug up unsubstantiated dirt about a subject?

Examples please!

Nice hypothetical scenario

I'm assuming that someone interested could use the info in the article, and possibly get away with it. The question is whether that statement would stand scrutiny. The lack of corroboration, and the fact that the link is dead, would make me recommend its removal. Most likely, if it was brought to significant attention, the challenged material would be removed.

Honestly, though, there's far bigger issues than corporations getting bad press on Wikipedia. God knows they deserve most of it, and I'm not buying into the Court's "coorporations are people too" reading. If you're an arms dealer, I'm not losing sleep over what Wikipedia says about you and Mongolians.

So in your world, Wikipedia is judge, jury, and encyclopedia?

Does Northrop Grumman "deserve it"? What about Raytheon -- do they "deserve it"? How about Boeing, what do they deserve in a Wikipedia article, since they are merchants of weapons? What about Cerberus Capital Management, owner of Remington Arms?

Assuming you're an American or British fox, just which companies do you think helped keep you from speaking German?

Anyway, I don't want to derail this thread by arguing with a silly pseudonymous fox.

Eric, this list of more than 94,000 links might be some indication of how pervasive is the use of Archive.org on Wikipedia. If I had to guess how many of those links are being used to deliberately defame a subject in main article space, I'd guess about 3,000, or about 3%. If I had to guess how many are being used for defamation and the Archive.org link is the ONLY source on the matter, anywhere, that's probably very rare -- maybe 100, or about 3% of 3%.

I have no doubt that Wikipediots, even if challenged as to the veracity and prudence of staking a claim solely on a snapshot of an out-of-date website, would fight tooth and nail to prevent that "source" from being removed from an article if it were defaming an evil corporation that "deserved it".

I suspected that would be the response. If Wikipedia had been the product of fanatical volunteer work by obsessive older men, it would probably be more conservative and pro-business.


Well, I suspect those firms can well afford to pay legions to sanitize their WP pages.

Although frankly, I can't help looking at the Northrop Grumman article.......

Oh, looky at that! At the bottom of the "History" section, is something very odd:

Now whatever in the world is that doing there?......it doesn't make much sense, and it has no apparent bearing on the "history" of the company, having occurred less than 2 years ago. Why is it not better written, and perhaps in the "Scandals" section, or in some other section? And it's been there since July 2008! Isn't that strange! Someone ought to have a talk with the company article-cleaners!

(And who in hell is Fintler (T-C-L-K-R-D) ?)

Actually, many parts of the article are poorly written and not very informative. The "Environmental Record" section looks like a bunch of complaints about the company's pollution, appended by something that looks like a press release from the company.....

Read the talkpage. It appears to me as if people squabbled over its content in 2006-07, and then gave up--now it's a Marie Celeste of articles, drifting on the random tides. What a mess.


I can't get that request to finish, but you could easily be right.

Speaking of defamation, can anyone name the Wikipedia article where a serving United States senator is mentioned as having accepted bribes?

I'm not talking about clouded political "donations" method of trying to lobby, the article says he accepted blatant bribes.

I once voted to delete Category:Companies linked to Holocaust [sic] and was accused of… well, take one good guess.

It lives on as an article, List of companies involved in the Holocaust, but curiously still omits firms which despite meeting the criteria are based in the U.S.A. (such as IBM and UBC).

I suppose an honest academic project would be concerned with the sources intent in removing the material from its website. A book that is out of print might still be a very good source. A book that the publisher ceased to publish because of the author's misrepresentations or fraud would be another mater. I believe Archive.org will remove material at the site owner's request. At least I seem to recall running into that happening when looking for material there. But the absence of such a request means little if the original website is unfamiliar with, or indifferent to, Archive.org. I'm not certain on how you could learn the intent of the State Department and of course all of this effort to evaluate the source's intent is a form of original research. Wikipedia should probably recognize its limits and not allow the use of website sources based on material that is no longer hosted by the party being used as a source.

The problem is that 99% of the time the material is not taken down for reasons of accuracy/et al (I suppose someone could use an archived copy of a site to support an assertion in an attempt to hide a later retraction/update, but I haven't seen that in the wild.) Even reliable sources update or refresh their sites, breaking old links; if the story still exists, it's essentially lost on the server. Archive.org is usable in comparatively few cases, and even if its cached the page in question it may be months after the page drops off the face of the web that it will turn back up.



I was about to get really amazed, Conspiracy, but then I realized it was you making the good point and not Victim of Censorship

Corporations are not people. They have no souls, no conscience, and no motive for existing beyond profit. If you group enough profit-driven people together, how can the sum of their parts be anything more moral than themselves? The fact that these companies' Wikipedia pages are not scrutinized and manipulated by proxies from the companies themselves is a failure of imagination and strategy on their part; if they were aware of how much clout and public opinion they could warp through use of the page, you bet they would whitewash every damning fact from their entries.

As C. mentioned above, industrial companies were "on our side" as convenient, and even the biggest moral qualms can be erased with greenbacks. As Christopher Plummer's character in Inside Man states when explaining why he sold out his Jewish friends during the war: "Nazis pay too well."

Oh, and I speak German

They don't "deserve" Baseball Bugs, but he works for that company. (No joking, he really does.)

BB has a job? I always figured him for a particularly annoying twelve-year-old Goth kid.

WikiPampers™ always seems to bring out the Inner Child, doesn't it …

Jon

Yes, I found that out by accident. I don't know his real name or what he does at the company, but I was also surprised to discover that tidbit.

During the Brandt-wars, DB got info pulled from the net, which then someone dug up in Archive.org. It was all retold on some version of the hive-mind.

As for the more general question; interesting indeed. (And no; I don´t know the answer)
Another example: back in the 1990s some of the official web-sites of local municipals/cities here in my part of the world (=north Europe) were in an utter deplorable state. Tons of wrong names, and plain wrong info, etc. Basically the problem was that every little place wanted an official web-site..but very few knew what/how to do it. Indeed; few knew even how to get online. So all was left to, possibly, one or two kids who could code. They cleaned up eventually, but much of that unbelievable garbage produced can still be found in the archive.org. <shudder> But the sites are, pr. definition, as "[[WP:RS]]" as you can get.

Mods, could I step in here as the resident "expert" on corporate defamation on Wikipedia, and ask that you split off this utter derailment about WW2, so that future onlookers might actually learn something about WP "policy" regarding things like Archive's Wayback Machine as a "reliable source"?

Mod note: Done. - The Joy

Looks like you were torn about whether to move my post. I was trying to nudge discussion back on-topic you see.