It seems a community with extensive knowledge of "bridgegate" and a lot of time on their hands has put it to good use.
The George Washington Bridge lane closure scandal now has its own - extremely comprehensive - Wikipedia page.
The page, titled "Fort Lee lane closure scandal" is more than 10,000 words long and contains nearly 200 media citations. It also features an extensive timeline going back to August of 2013.
The entry includes dozens of headers and sub-headers detailing everything from the players involved to speculation over the motive.
It is under constant update and was tweaked as late as this morning.
The original entry seems to have been copied from Gov. Chris Christie's own Wikipedia page, however, the bridgegate page is now far more detailed than the governor's page.
At least some of the updaters have no connection to the scandal, and the "talk" and history pages of the entry show extensive discussion about the validity of each entry. Wikipedia is an entirely self-policed community, where interested editors eye even the smallest change to a page for correct citations and to weed out users with a clear self interest.
To date, the page has been viewed more than 76,000 times.
I seldom use Wikipedia as a source of information any more. When it first started it was reasonably accurate factoid pages... generally about technology and such but now it is no more accurate than a mainstream rag. It is severely tainted by opinion rather than fact and everything has to be checked. Citations are often sources that are even more biased than the wikipage itself. Of course we now have movements that are out to edit pages that they don't find to be factual. Nothing wrong in that but replacing one bias for another is not helpful.
Just because someone can cite the plaque installed outside the Frank Lloyd Wright Building at Northeastern Illinois University, Naming Lincoln as a Democrat and just because the plaque was installed in 1905, doesn't make it accurate or historic..
Boy Scott I agree. I have found some stuff on Wiki that was completely wrong and so I changed it. The Wiki police (self described experts that patrol the site)got all over me. Their source was Time Magazine. I had to "out source" them with govt records and census reports to win the change It's ridiculous what these Gods of wiki think they know and how they protect that turf
Wiki along with many web based media sources bring a renewed definition to the term "newspeak."
When Oldspeak had been once and for all superseded, the last link with the past would have been severed. History had already been rewritten, but fragments of the literature of the past survived here and there, imperfectly censored, and so long as one retained one's knowledge of Oldspeak it was possible to read them. In the future such fragments, even if they chanced to survive, would be unintelligible and untranslatable. It was impossible to translate any passage of Oldspeak into Newspeak unless it either referred to some technical process or some very simple everyday action, or was already orthodox(goodthinkful would be the Newspeak expression) in tendency. In practice this meant that no book written before approximately 1960 could be translated as a whole. Pre-revolutionary literature could only be subjected to ideological translation -- that is, alteration in sense as well as language. Take for example the well-known passage from the Declaration of Independence:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among men, deriving their powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any form of Government becomes destructive of those ends, it is the right of the People to alter or abolish it, and to institute new Government. . .
It would have been quite impossible to render this into Newspeak while keeping to the sense of the original. The nearest one could come to doing so would be to swallow the whole passage up in the single word crimethink. A full translation could only be an ideological translation, whereby Jefferson's words would be changed into a panegyric on absolute government.
A good deal of the literature of the past was, indeed, already being transformed in this way. Considerations of prestige made it desirable to preserve the memory of certain historical figures, while at the same time bringing their achievements into line with the philosophy of Ingsoc. Various writers, such as Shakespeare, Milton, Swift, Byron, Dickens, and some others were therefore in process of translation: when the task had been completed, their original writings, with all else that survived of the literature of the past, would be destroyed. These translations were a slow and difficult business, and it was not expected that they would be finished before the first or second decade of the twenty-first century. There were also large quantities of merely utilitarian literature -- indispensable technical manuals, and the like -- that had to be treated in the same way. It was chiefly in order to allow time for the preliminary work of translation that the final adoption of Newspeak had been fixed for so late a date as 2050. http://www.newspeakdictionary.com/ns-prin.html
It seems a community with extensive knowledge of "bridgegate" and a lot of time on their hands has put it to good use.
ReplyDeleteThe George Washington Bridge lane closure scandal now has its own - extremely comprehensive - Wikipedia page.
The page, titled "Fort Lee lane closure scandal" is more than 10,000 words long and contains nearly 200 media citations. It also features an extensive timeline going back to August of 2013.
The entry includes dozens of headers and sub-headers detailing everything from the players involved to speculation over the motive.
It is under constant update and was tweaked as late as this morning.
The original entry seems to have been copied from Gov. Chris Christie's own Wikipedia page, however, the bridgegate page is now far more detailed than the governor's page.
At least some of the updaters have no connection to the scandal, and the "talk" and history pages of the entry show extensive discussion about the validity of each entry. Wikipedia is an entirely self-policed community, where interested editors eye even the smallest change to a page for correct citations and to weed out users with a clear self interest.
To date, the page has been viewed more than 76,000 times.
If you want to know why New Jersey and our country are in trouble go to this wiki page sand scroll down to the References at the bottom of the page.
DeleteI have never been a big Christie backer but this bonfire of the vanities is f-------ed up.
The media is turning Christie into another Sarah Palin case study.
DeleteI seldom use Wikipedia as a source of information any more. When it first started it was reasonably accurate factoid pages... generally about technology and such but now it is no more accurate than a mainstream rag. It is severely tainted by opinion rather than fact and everything has to be checked. Citations are often sources that are even more biased than the wikipage itself. Of course we now have movements that are out to edit pages that they don't find to be factual. Nothing wrong in that but replacing one bias for another is not helpful.
ReplyDeletehttp://dailycaller.com/2014/02/02/wikipedia-is-very-masculine-so-feminists-pledge-to-fix-it/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Meetup/Feminists_Engage_Wikipedia
Just because someone can cite the plaque installed outside the Frank Lloyd Wright Building at Northeastern Illinois University, Naming Lincoln as a Democrat and just because the plaque was installed in 1905, doesn't make it accurate or historic..
Boy Scott I agree. I have found some stuff on Wiki that was completely wrong and so I changed it. The Wiki police (self described experts that patrol the site)got all over me. Their source was Time Magazine. I had to "out source" them with govt records and census reports to win the change It's ridiculous what these Gods of wiki think they know and how they protect that turf
ReplyDeleteWiki along with many web based media sources bring a renewed definition to the term "newspeak."
ReplyDeleteWhen Oldspeak had been once and for all superseded, the last link with the past would have been severed. History had already been rewritten, but fragments of the literature of the past survived here and there, imperfectly censored, and so long as one retained one's knowledge of Oldspeak it was possible to read them. In the future such fragments, even if they chanced to survive, would be unintelligible and untranslatable. It was impossible to translate any passage of Oldspeak into Newspeak unless it either referred to some technical process or some very simple everyday action, or was already orthodox(goodthinkful would be the Newspeak expression) in tendency. In practice this meant that no book written before approximately 1960 could be translated as a whole. Pre-revolutionary literature could only be subjected to ideological translation -- that is, alteration in sense as well as language. Take for example the well-known passage from the Declaration of Independence:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among men, deriving their powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any form of Government becomes destructive of those ends, it is the right of the People to alter or abolish it, and to institute new Government. . .
It would have been quite impossible to render this into Newspeak while keeping to the sense of the original. The nearest one could come to doing so would be to swallow the whole passage up in the single word crimethink. A full translation could only be an ideological translation, whereby Jefferson's words would be changed into a panegyric on absolute government.
A good deal of the literature of the past was, indeed, already being transformed in this way. Considerations of prestige made it desirable to preserve the memory of certain historical figures, while at the same time bringing their achievements into line with the philosophy of Ingsoc. Various writers, such as Shakespeare, Milton, Swift, Byron, Dickens, and some others were therefore in process of translation: when the task had been completed, their original writings, with all else that survived of the literature of the past, would be destroyed. These translations were a slow and difficult business, and it was not expected that they would be finished before the first or second decade of the twenty-first century. There were also large quantities of merely utilitarian literature -- indispensable technical manuals, and the like -- that had to be treated in the same way. It was chiefly in order to allow time for the preliminary work of translation that the final adoption of Newspeak had been fixed for so late a date as 2050.
http://www.newspeakdictionary.com/ns-prin.html