Wikipedia Blocks Suspicious Edits From DoJ

kylehase writes "The release of Wikiscanner last year brought much attention to white-washing of controversial pages on the community-generated encyclopedia. Apparently Wikipedia is very serious in fighting such behavior as they've temporarily blocked the US Department of Justice from editing pages for suspicious edits."

Re:Summary has the wrong emphasis

[Anonymous Coward]

The real story, at least to me, is that the DOJ has demonstrably been involved in a systematic effort to rewrite history.

The deeper story is that a systematic effort to rewrite history has already been accomplished by the Arab League and its Western allies. Look how many people accuse Israel of "occupying" "Palestine" since 1967 and then go look for Palestine on a 1967 or 1968 map. The whole area was split between Israel and Jordan. The Palestine Liberation Organization charter at the time specifically rejected any claim to the West Bank or Gaza. [hirhome.com]

People also complain about Israel's "illegal" settlements. The West Bank and Gaza were officially ceded to Israel by Jordan in 1994 [kinghussein.gov.jo] and Egypt in 1978 [mideastweb.org]. None of the settlements are "illegal" so long as their construction follows Israeli law because it is Israeli land. They might be obnoxious and bad for the peace process, but they are not illegal.

It is also widely claimed that UN Resolution 242, passed after the 1967 war, requires Israel to withdraw to the 1948 armistice lines. This claim gets around so much that I believed it to be true until I read the words of Lord Caradon [palestinefacts.org] who presented the resolution on behalf of Britain:

It would have been wrong to demand that Israel return to its positions of June 4, 1967, because those positions were undesirable and artificial. After all, they were just the places where the soldiers of each side happened to be on the day the fighting stopped in 1948. They were just armistice lines. That's why we didn't demand that the Israelis return to them.

The common story about UN242 and "the occupation" is a blatant lie.

You cannot have read many Internet threads about Israel without running into one of these pieces of anti-Israel propaganda. In this environment, I am willing to give CAMERA some benefit of the doubt when their leaked emails claim their objective was only to restore NPOV. Let us see what their edits actually were before we accuse them of "rewriting history".

Re:Our long national nighmare is almost over

[Anonymous Coward]

I've always liked the way that Switzerland does it. The government is still basically representative, but when the government passes a law that's really not what anybody wants, there are mechanisms in place to get the law overturned by referendum. You get all the benefits of a representative democracy with a little added protection against stupid or greedy lawmakers.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Switzerland#Direct_democracy