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NYPD Deny Wikipedia Editing, Launch Internal Investigation
By
Ben Yakas
Published Mar 14, 2015
Modified Mar 14, 2015
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NYC Mayor's Office
By
Ben Yakas
Published Mar 14, 2015
Modified Mar 14, 2015
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Yesterday, computers at 1 Police Plaza headquarters were linked to major Wikipedia edits and changes on various police controversies (as well as stuff like...Chumbawamba). The NYPD has now denied that major edits on entires for Eric Garner, Sean Bell and Amadou Diallo were done by them: they told NY1 they are conducting an internal investigation and that "these incidents did not originate from computers located at Police Headquarters."
As we wrote yesterday, Capital New York traced the edits to the NYPD through a series of IP addresses working on the NYPD headquarters' network. In theory, this could mean anyone could be hacking into one of their IP addresses (there are more than 15,000 IP addresses registered to the NYPD) and editing away—but the fact that there were significant changes to police-related brutality incidents suggest this 'wikiwashing' isn't just a weird coincidence.
In addition to major changes to entries on Garner (“Garner raised both his arms in the air” was changed to “Garner flailed his arms about as he spoke.”) and attempts to delete the entry for the "Sean Bell shooting incident" ("He [Bell] was in the news for about two months, and now no one except Al Sharpton cares anymore. The police shoot people every day, and times with a lot more than 50 bullets."), there was also a very large amount of edits of completely random people and terms, including "Mars hoax," "Star Trek Generations," "Jean-Claude Van Damme," and "Little Lord Fauntleroy."
The Post cherry picked a few more examples, including a person who changed the history section for Playboy in 2007 to contain this majestic sentence: "Today, ‘Playboy’ is still Responsible for teenage boys for having their first orgazime [sic]." They also pointed out changes to entires on The Nanny (someone changed character Fran Fine’s native locale from Brooklyn to Flushing), the Vatican section of the "Ages of Consent in Europe" page, and the color of Batman's suit.
Then there was this:
Someone under the IP address 206.212.134.12 stayed busy with more than 30 edits to pages ranging from Levittown, New York, and “Who Moved My Cheese?” to Vince Lombardi Trophy and New York City Police Department.
Tagged
edits
nypd
police
Wikipedia
wikiwashing
Ben Yakas
Ben Yakas is a former Gothamist reporter.
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Gothamist is funded by sponsors and member donations
Gothamist is funded by sponsors and member donations
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