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Keeping our website links on Wiki's main JFK page


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Ok so this subject has come up before.

Lots of us have JFK-related websites and some of us have tried to improve our site's visibility by placing an external link to our sites at Wiki's main JFK page:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_F._Kennedy#External_links

First, I recommend that people do that. I mean, McAdams is there...

Second, it appears that it may have to be done multiple times as some links seem to disappear. (Not McAdams of course.)

Just FYI.

I would think that it's the single most significant thing we can do to SEO our sites.

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Ok so this subject has come up before.

Lots of us have JFK-related websites and some of us have tried to improve our site's visibility by placing an external link to our sites at Wiki's main JFK page:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_F._Kennedy#External_links

First, I recommend that people do that. I mean, McAdams is there...

Second, it appears that it may have to be done multiple times as some links seem to disappear. (Not McAdams of course.)

Just FYI.

I would think that it's the single most significant thing we can do to SEO our sites.

This is an interesting post that needs answering. I have given a fuller answer to this problem here:

http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=10652

Most people looking for information about the JFK assassination will type in something like the “assassination of John F. Kennedy” at Google. The first three sites out of 1,580,000 are (1) Wikipedia, (2) John McAdams (3) Spartacus.

It is assumed that anyone really interested in this subject will look at all three websites. Therefore if people use the web to find out about the case, they will be put into contact with the latest information available (my pages on the JFK assassination include a large number of links to the appropriate threads in this forum). In fact, I have decided to give a link to this thread from my home page (over 50,000 visitors a day).

How did I get into this position at Google? The main reason is the links that you get from other websites. However, getting links from some sites are more important than others. The ranking of the site is also taken into consideration. Therefore a link from Wikipedia, John McAdams or Spartacus is more important than links from other, lower-ranked sites. For example, both Wikipedia and John McAdams link to my website. The system also works in reverse. You also get higher ranking if you link to other high-ranking sites.

On my index page I provide links to all the JFK assassination websites that I am aware of. If your one has been missed out, send me an email about it and I will add your URL to my page (it will also help you if you link back to me).

There is another important factor in website ranking that is not so well-known and so I am unwilling to post details on an open forum. However, if you email me I will send you details.

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Wikipedia is a major problem. However, sometimes you can have success. For example, the original entry for Operation Mockingbird said it was an urban myth. I rewrote it but it was immediately removed. When I complained they said that I had not added references to my article. I did that and it was accepted as being an academic article. This page is now one at Google whereas my Spartacus page is at number 3. However, I am not complaining.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Mockingbird

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Alex Jones did an article on Wikipedia censorship for his site a couple of weeks back, which I've linked below. It seems that there is a commited team of Wiki censors who openly target any and all conspiracy related material for immediate deletion, and (in many instances) general leftwing material critical of the Bush administration is removed as well. Even fully backed up, non-speculative, factual recounting of information that differs from their viewpoint is removed. The Jones piece is worth reading as it provides a link to the main page of the key offenders, all of whom openly brag in detail of their efforts and who post 'zany' insult pictures of themselves standing around wearing tinfoil hats - no joke - to ridicule anyone who attempts to address conspiracy related material in an openminded manner on Wikipedia. For what it's worth, Jones posted his article below and announced a campaign to get members to attack, defend, repair and rebut the damage done by the goons in question, and then had his own site hit by a major hack attack a day or so later. Spooky stuff! For my own part the article and links provided by Jones' piece just made me angry. I've engaged in Wiki comments discussions there defending conspiracy related material on 9/11 - the majority of key books on 9/11 conspiracy material have all had their individual pages removed - but the general tone is very hostile and it takes a lot of time and energy.

http://www.prisonplanet.com/articles/july2...07fightback.htm

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Alex Jones did an article on Wikipedia censorship for his site a couple of weeks back, which I've linked below. It seems that there is a commited team of Wiki censors who openly target any and all conspiracy related material for immediate deletion, and (in many instances) general leftwing material critical of the Bush administration is removed as well. Even fully backed up, non-speculative, factual recounting of information that differs from their viewpoint is removed. The Jones piece is worth reading as it provides a link to the main page of the key offenders, all of whom openly brag in detail of their efforts and who post 'zany' insult pictures of themselves standing around wearing tinfoil hats - no joke - to ridicule anyone who attempts to address conspiracy related material in an openminded manner on Wikipedia. For what it's worth, Jones posted his article below and announced a campaign to get members to attack, defend, repair and rebut the damage done by the goons in question, and then had his own site hit by a major hack attack a day or so later. Spooky stuff! For my own part the article and links provided by Jones' piece just made me angry. I've engaged in Wiki comments discussions there defending conspiracy related material on 9/11 - the majority of key books on 9/11 conspiracy material have all had their individual pages removed - but the general tone is very hostile and it takes a lot of time and energy.

http://www.prisonplanet.com/articles/july2...07fightback.htm

Interesting Anthony, thanks for the link.

Here's what he wants people to do:

"Remember - e mail info-en-v@wikimedia.org and complain that the user at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Morton_devonshire is deleting and editing pages against Wikipedia policy and with a clear political bias. Demand that his administration and editing privileges be removed immediately."

Do you know if Alex created the "War Room" yet?

Wiki is indeed a serious problem...

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Up until a couple of years ago if you typed in any country at Google the number one site would be the CIA Fact Book. I did not mind as it was clear where the information was coming from.

However, all this has changed. If you type in "China" or any other country the number one page is Wikipedia and the CIA page is nowhere to be found.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China

Is it because the CIA interpretation of China has been incorprated into the Wikipedia entry?

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There is a piece on this by John Borland on Wired today -

See Who's Editing Wikipedia - Diebold, the CIA, a Campaign

On November 17th, 2005, an anonymous Wikipedia user deleted 15 paragraphs from an article on e-voting machine-vendor Diebold, excising an entire section critical of the company's machines. While anonymous, such changes typically leave behind digital fingerprints offering hints about the contributor, such as the location of the computer used to make the edits.

In this case, the changes came from an IP address reserved for the corporate offices of Diebold itself. And it is far from an isolated case. A new data-mining service launched Monday traces millions of Wikipedia entries to their corporate sources, and for the first time puts comprehensive data behind longstanding suspicions of manipulation, which until now have surfaced only piecemeal in investigations of specific allegations.

Wikipedia Scanner -- the brainchild of CalTech computation and neural-systems graduate student Virgil Griffith -- offers users a searchable database that ties millions of anonymous Wikipedia edits to organizations where those edits apparently originated, by cross-referencing the edits with data on who owns the associated block of internet IP addresses.

Inspired by news last year that Congress members' offices had been editing their own entries, Griffith says he got curious, and wanted to know whether big companies and other organizations were doing things in a similarly self-interested vein.

"Everything's better if you do it on a huge scale, and automate it," he says with a grin.

This database is possible thanks to a combination of Wikipedia policies and (mostly) publicly available information.

The online encyclopedia allows anyone to make edits, but keeps detailed logs of all these changes. Users who are logged in are tracked only by their user name, but anonymous changes leave a public record of their IP address.

The organization also allows downloads of the complete Wikipedia, including records of all these changes.

Griffith thus downloaded the entire encyclopedia, isolating the XML-based records of anonymous changes and IP addresses. He then correlated those IP addresses with public net-address lookup services such as ARIN, as well as private domain-name data provided by IP2Location.com.

The result: A database of 5.3 million edits, performed by 2.6 million organizations or individuals ranging from the CIA to Microsoft to Congressional offices, now linked to the edits they or someone at their organization's net address has made.

Some of this appears to be transparently self-interested, either adding positive, press release-like material to entries, or deleting whole swaths of critical material.

Voting-machine company Diebold provides a good example of the latter, with someone at the company's IP address apparently deleting long paragraphs detailing the security industry's concerns over the integrity of their voting machines, and information about the company's CEO's fund-raising for President George Bush.

The text, deleted in November 2005, was quickly restored by another Wikipedia contributor, who advised the anonymous editor, "Please stop removing content from Wikipedia. It is considered vandalism."

A Diebold Election Systems spokesman said he'd look into the matter but could not comment by press time.

Wal-Mart has a series of relatively small changes in 2005 that that burnish the company's image on its own entry while often leaving criticism in, changing a line that its wages are less than other retail stores to a note that it pays nearly double the minimum wage, for example. Another leaves activist criticism on community impact intact, while citing a "definitive" study showing Wal-Mart raised the total number of jobs in a community.

As has been previously reported, politician's offices are heavy users of the system. Former Montana Senator Conrad Burns' office, for example, apparently changed one critical paragraph headed "A controversial voice" to "A voice for farmers," with predictably image-friendly content following it.

Perhaps interestingly, many of the most apparently self-interested changes come from before 2006, when news of the Congressional offices' edits reached the headlines. This may indicate a growing sophistication with the workings of Wikipedia over time, or even the rise of corporate Wikipedia policies.

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales told Wired News he was aware of the new service, but needed time to experiment with it before commenting.

The vast majority of changes are fairly innocuous, however. Employees at the CIA's net address, for example, have been busy -- but with little that would indicate their place of apparent employment, or a particular bias.

One entry on "Black September in Jordan" contains wholesale additions, with specific details that read like a popular history book or an eyewitness' memoir.

Many more are simple copy edits, or additions to local town entries or school histories. One CIA entry deals with the details of lyrics sung in a Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode.

Griffith says he launched the project hoping to find scandals, particularly at obvious targets such as companies like Halliburton. But there's a more practical goal, too: By exposing the anonymous edits that companies such as drugs and big pharmaceutical companies make in entries that affect their businesses, it could help experts check up on the changes and make sure they're accurate, he says.

For now, he has just scratched the surface of the database of millions of entries. But he's putting it online so others can look too.

The nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation, which runs Wikipedia, did not respond to e-mail and telephone inquiries Monday.

Original article link is -

http://www.wired.com/politics/onlinerights...08/wiki_tracker

Edited by David Butler
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There is a piece on this by John Borland on Wired today -

See Who's Editing Wikipedia - Diebold, the CIA, a Campaign

On November 17th, 2005, an anonymous Wikipedia user deleted 15 paragraphs from an article on e-voting machine-vendor Diebold, excising an entire section critical of the company's machines. While anonymous, such changes typically leave behind digital fingerprints offering hints about the contributor, such as the location of the computer used to make the edits.

In this case, the changes came from an IP address reserved for the corporate offices of Diebold itself. And it is far from an isolated case. A new data-mining service launched Monday traces millions of Wikipedia entries to their corporate sources, and for the first time puts comprehensive data behind longstanding suspicions of manipulation, which until now have surfaced only piecemeal in investigations of specific allegations.

Wikipedia Scanner -- the brainchild of CalTech computation and neural-systems graduate student Virgil Griffith -- offers users a searchable database that ties millions of anonymous Wikipedia edits to organizations where those edits apparently originated, by cross-referencing the edits with data on who owns the associated block of internet IP addresses.

Inspired by news last year that Congress members' offices had been editing their own entries, Griffith says he got curious, and wanted to know whether big companies and other organizations were doing things in a similarly self-interested vein.

"Everything's better if you do it on a huge scale, and automate it," he says with a grin.

This database is possible thanks to a combination of Wikipedia policies and (mostly) publicly available information.

The online encyclopedia allows anyone to make edits, but keeps detailed logs of all these changes. Users who are logged in are tracked only by their user name, but anonymous changes leave a public record of their IP address.

The organization also allows downloads of the complete Wikipedia, including records of all these changes.

Griffith thus downloaded the entire encyclopedia, isolating the XML-based records of anonymous changes and IP addresses. He then correlated those IP addresses with public net-address lookup services such as ARIN, as well as private domain-name data provided by IP2Location.com.

The result: A database of 5.3 million edits, performed by 2.6 million organizations or individuals ranging from the CIA to Microsoft to Congressional offices, now linked to the edits they or someone at their organization's net address has made.

Some of this appears to be transparently self-interested, either adding positive, press release-like material to entries, or deleting whole swaths of critical material.

Voting-machine company Diebold provides a good example of the latter, with someone at the company's IP address apparently deleting long paragraphs detailing the security industry's concerns over the integrity of their voting machines, and information about the company's CEO's fund-raising for President George Bush.

The text, deleted in November 2005, was quickly restored by another Wikipedia contributor, who advised the anonymous editor, "Please stop removing content from Wikipedia. It is considered vandalism."

A Diebold Election Systems spokesman said he'd look into the matter but could not comment by press time.

Wal-Mart has a series of relatively small changes in 2005 that that burnish the company's image on its own entry while often leaving criticism in, changing a line that its wages are less than other retail stores to a note that it pays nearly double the minimum wage, for example. Another leaves activist criticism on community impact intact, while citing a "definitive" study showing Wal-Mart raised the total number of jobs in a community.

As has been previously reported, politician's offices are heavy users of the system. Former Montana Senator Conrad Burns' office, for example, apparently changed one critical paragraph headed "A controversial voice" to "A voice for farmers," with predictably image-friendly content following it.

Perhaps interestingly, many of the most apparently self-interested changes come from before 2006, when news of the Congressional offices' edits reached the headlines. This may indicate a growing sophistication with the workings of Wikipedia over time, or even the rise of corporate Wikipedia policies.

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales told Wired News he was aware of the new service, but needed time to experiment with it before commenting.

The vast majority of changes are fairly innocuous, however. Employees at the CIA's net address, for example, have been busy -- but with little that would indicate their place of apparent employment, or a particular bias.

One entry on "Black September in Jordan" contains wholesale additions, with specific details that read like a popular history book or an eyewitness' memoir.

Many more are simple copy edits, or additions to local town entries or school histories. One CIA entry deals with the details of lyrics sung in a Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode.

Griffith says he launched the project hoping to find scandals, particularly at obvious targets such as companies like Halliburton. But there's a more practical goal, too: By exposing the anonymous edits that companies such as drugs and big pharmaceutical companies make in entries that affect their businesses, it could help experts check up on the changes and make sure they're accurate, he says.

For now, he has just scratched the surface of the database of millions of entries. But he's putting it online so others can look too.

The nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation, which runs Wikipedia, did not respond to e-mail and telephone inquiries Monday.

Original article link is -

http://www.wired.com/politics/onlinerights...08/wiki_tracker

This is an excellent article David; thank you for posting it.

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"Yes, we found this choice little quote tucked away in a recent New Scientist interview with Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales. It’s official: “Wikipedia is not controlled by the CIA, Martians, or Elvis.” Jimmy says so.

To be fair, he didn’t just come out and make such a bald statement. He was answering a question that implied the CIA had doctored the site to remove links to conspiracy theories about the agency (allegedly) killing President Kennedy."

http://computerworld.co.nz/news.nsf/news/9...C257299000847A2

On edit:

Discussion about propaganda on Wiki is continued here:

http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=10738

Edited by Myra Bronstein
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