Slated to appear

Last Thursday, in the wake of the Palin interview, I spent most of the night on Wikipedia, butting heads with a slew of freshly created accounts that were trying to subtly (and not-so-subtly) edit the article on the Bush Doctrine, muddying it up so Palin's utter lack of knowledge might seem more reasonable. ("Gosh, even Wikipedia doesn't know what it means. I guess she's not so dumb!") I was up well past 5AM, failing to get any writing done, getting more and more frustrated.

Apparently, one of Slate's bloggers noticed:

A fight breaks out between “Jere7my” and “EHSFFL2010.” The latter objects to any Palin references. “This has nothing to do with the definition of Bush Doctrine and has nothing to do with any current event pertaining to the doctrine,” he writes. “It should not be placed here.” Jere7my pulls rank: “Note that the EHSFFL2010 account was created 45 minutes ago.”

[...]

Jere7my takes matters into his own hands and deletes the entire “controversy” section, calling it “a blatant attempt to muddy the waters after the Palin interview.” As of posting time, all Palin references have been scrubbed.

Woo, fame!

Eventually, EHSFFL2010 was blocked from editing for violating the Three Revert Rule, and the whole article was semi-protected to keep new and anonymous accounts from editing it. Victory!

Anyway, if the Slate blog helps more a few more people figure out that Wikipedia is particularly subject to partisan bias, so they're less likely to use it to make voting decisions, I'll be happy.

(Thanks for the pointer, currentlee!)