Crazy From The Heat, or It’s Only Logickal

Welcome to the dog days of August. Originally having something or other to do with the heliacal rising of the Dog Star, Sirius, the Nile floods and the UFOs moving the Pyramids, they now seem to just be dog days.

Today they released a Wikipedia "scanner" that allows people to see WHO has been editing the popular on-line community-written encyclopedia. Little did anyone realize what mad hounds of paranoia would be unleashed in the increasingly fabulist world of the Rightie Blogosmear ...

Little Green Footballs:

NYT Bias Graphically Illustrated
Tue, Aug 14, 2007 at 11:31:44 am PST

Someone at the New York Times contributed the following edit to the Wikipedia page for George W. Bush: Wikipedia scanner results.

[NOTE: someone has added the word "Jerk" to Bush's Wikipedia profile. A mild descriptive, compared to how those whose children are dead in this war feel about him. -- HW]

UPDATE at 8/14/07 11:50:54 am:

Just to verify, here’s a WHOIS lookup on the IP: 199.181.174.146.

UPDATE at 8/14/07 2:44:37 pm:

Auspundits has another gem of an edit, also by someone at the New York Times, in which they changed a description of Tom Delay from “a prominent member of the Republican Party” to “a Grand Dragon of the Republican Party.”

UPDATE at 8/14/07 2:47:27 pm:

Someone at the New York Times has also been editing the Wall Street Journal’s Wikipedia page: Riehl World View: New York Times Editing WSJ’s Wiki?

UPDATE at 8/14/07 2:53:03 pm:

Allahpundit discovered a Democratic Party IP that was apparently used to vandalize a page about Rush Limbaugh.

Gee. Somebody who works at the New York Times (perhaps in the mail room) added "jerk" to George W. Bush's page on Wikipedia. Ahh. THEREFORE, the TIMES is BLATANTLY BIASED!!!! (All men are mortal. Socrates is a man. Therefore: All men are Socrates. Logick is so much more funner than drinking used ter be.)

Oh, and Democrats might have said bad things about Rush Limbaugh. YA THINK?

(I must admit that calling Tom Delay "a Grand Dragon of the Republican Party" seems to me more like a sincere attempt to increase the accuracy of the entry in question than anything necessarily negative. But then, having been personally smeared on his website, I may be a tad biased.)

Hmmm, what other EARTH-SHAKING revelations have come to the dazed dogs?

Over at NewsBusters -- "Combating and Exposing Liberal Media Bias" -- this one seems right up their alley (as it were). Under an unintentionally ironic (as in, how he can write this with a straight face is beyond me) title, "Tool For Propaganda?" Matthew Shepherd (who works for Brent Bozell's "Media Research Center," of which NewsBusters is a wholly-owned, and just-turned-two-years-old subsidiary) writes:

This type of cybersquatting is quite widespread but up until now, difficult to track. That's changed however, with the creation of Wikiscanner, a search engine that allows you to see what organizations have been editing Wikipedia. You can, for instance, look up to see what Wikipedia users from different political groups, business, churches, and any other organization have been up to on the site. Early results are showing that many employees seem to have a habit of editing the entries of their own company/organization. You can also see that at least one person at the New York Times deliberately defaced Wikipedia's entry for George W. Bush with the words* "jerk" inserted into the page repeatedly.

[* The last time I checked, "jerk" was one word. "Repeatedly" would mean that one word was used several times.]

I guess I stand in slack-jawed awe at someone who can take an organization the size of the New York Times, and, based on the actions of one employee in putting "jerk" into the Wikipedia entry for George W. Bush, divine that the ENTIRE organization, including Arthur Sulzberger himself, were squeezed into that basement cubicle, beside the xerox machine, egging that bored employee on to put digital graffiti into the Wikipedia description of Bush. Ahahahahahah!!!! (Mad Scientist cackle goes HERE.)

You see, that "traditional value" that the Righties pride themselves on, classical Logic, has been quietly supplanted by classical Logick, which is what allows the Inquisitor to logically prove you to be a witch. Therefore, you are in league with the Devil. Therefore ... (well, you get the idea.)

If the defacer of The Decider had been an employee of Kentucky Fried Chicken, Inc. we could, therefore logickally divine that every smiling stylized picture of long-dead figurehead Col. Sanders is actually oozing contempt and liberal bias right into the drumsticks.

Or, perhaps, had it been an employee of the State of Texas, we could logickally divine that the government of Texas had turned against the Commander Guy, and safety precautions would have to be taken on a massive scale, up to and including the invading and subduing major areas of discontent, such as Austin, Fort Worth, and Luckenbach.

Going mad with the heat, the blog at Hot Air -- an enterprise entitled with the opacity of the obvious and the obliviousness of the truly opaque -- Allahpundit unleashes the dogs in the garden to root for gophers ...

Awesome: Wikipedia edit tracker shows who’s editing which pages
posted at 1:34 pm on August 14, 2007 by Allahpundit

They’re getting slammed with such immense traffic that it’s actually crippled their search function for the moment. But I’m going to link anyway, first and foremost so that you can bookmark it for use later when the wave subsides and second because the “Editor’s Picks” search terms in the sidebar do work — and some of them are tasty indeed. For example, select “Democratic Party” and it’ll bring up all the edits made to all Wikipedia pages from the range of IPs (allegedly) assigned to Democratic Party computers. Scroll down to the one for Rush Limbaugh and click the number in the “diff” column and you’ll see this. The pre-edit version is in the red text in the yellow box at the top and the post-edit is in the red text in the green box. Needless to say. Click to enlarge:

[photo]


That should start you off. I’ll leave you to find the other easter eggs for yourself; I’ve already found a few myself. Feel free to report back in the comments below. Thanks to L[ittle G[reen] F[ootballs] for the heads up.

Er ... yes. Easter eggs. That's Logickal, if you're an Inquisitor doggie. Which makes perfect sense if you feel as though you've fallen down a rabbit hole.

And look! A doggie named Wizbang has dug one up. Turns out someone from the (GASP) New York Times has CHANGED the Condoleeza Rice entry to alter "pianist" to "penis," thus resulting in the hilarious sentence "At age 15, Rice began classes with the goal of becoming a concert penis."

Juvenalia, right? The kind of stuff you remember from grade school. But NOT to the Logickal attack dogs. No, with dogged determination, they will hunt down their prey. They must track and tree the infamous PENIS Writer, the Pianist Enhancer at the NYTimes. Wizbang writes:

Interestingly there are several edits from that address for specific New York Times employees. By frequency the most updated entry is the one for Nick Bilton, who was hired at the Times via Jeff Koyen. Koyen had a nasty departure from the Times in 2005 and edits from inside the Times building after he left suggest that Bilton may have been the author editing Wikipedia from the 199.181.174.146 address.

Only The New York Times knows for sure if that's the case. We've sent an inquiry to the Times and will report their response...

As the attack dogs of the Rightie Blogosmear go mad in the August heat.

Courage.

Now, for a completely hilarious posting -- and don't be drinking liquids when you read it -- please go directly to Sadly, No! Read the short post AND the comments. Do not pass "GO." Do not collect $200. (Well, OK, collect the $200.) Good luck.