2y ago

(Wisconsin) Supreme Court Justice Rebecca Bradley has been quietly editing her own Wikipedia page

www.jsonline.com

Bice: Supreme Court Justice Rebecca Bradley has been quietly editing her own Wikipedia page

Last week, a person with the Twitter handle @arizonasunblock from Tampa, Florida, noticed that Bradley, who has been on the high court since 2015, appeared to make major changes to her Wikipedia biography earlier this year.

46 comments

- "It's so unfair that my own words can be written down for posterity!"
  Tell me she doesn't know that just because you've edited a Wikipedia page, that the previous version still exists, and is likely to draw attention and discussion because of your edits.
  
  And is super easy to revert to the prior version too. It's basically two clicks to make it happen. And then have an admin protect the page to only allow established editors so randos can't do this with just an IP address again.
  
  I love too that she mentioned, "REAL OPINIONS" as if those are more valid than the exact words she said.
- It's an inaccurate epithet anyhow. Uncle Tom was overly nice to whites so as not to draw their wrath.
  In the end, the whites beat Uncle Tom to death when he refused to give the whereabouts of two runaway slaves.
  I don't know what epithet you'd call someone who turned in the two slaves and lived to work the big house another day, but that's what you should call Clarence.
  I used to call Clarence an Uncle Tom, but then I read the book.
  
  We're just using racial slurs now? Come on, that's over the line.
- Gosh dang LiBrUlS at it again!
  
  Right!! They never got no treddfiddy neither for us!! Lol
So this is what my teachers meant when they said "don't trust Wikipedia".
- Don't worry, it'll be corrected. Issues like this are temporary and ultimately fixed, as this news article coming out helps do.
  Politics articles aren't ones I would suggest are inherently reliable in any medium regardless.
  
  Oh I know it'll get corrected. Hard-core wikipedia editors and admins are a different breed, this shit won't last.
  
  Butt she was quietly, psst.
- One time in school the teacher actually told us to go on Wikipedia to look something up for a report. I edited the page to change the information to something incorrect. I of course put the correct info on my report. I taught everyone a lesson that day.
  
  Since then you've donated some money to the Wikimedia Foundation, to make up for your misdeeds, right?
  
  And then everyone clapped.
I've seen this happen so many times and it's always so embarrassing. There's a lovely template that you can slap onto an article that says something along the lines of "this article appears to have been edited by someone with a close association with the subject." It's truly a marvel in how close it skates towards saying, "the subject of this bio didn't like parts of what people were saying, so they edited it to suit themselves" without saying exactly that. It's subtly brutal.
Fortunately for the feelings of people who edit their own wiki bios, I suspect that they probably don't feel the sense of shame that I would if I were in that position.
- They're the type of person who is upset they get caught and apologizes of they upset someone but not for their actual transgression.
  
  I'm sorry that you feel like I hurt you...
- Why use that template when you could revert the self-serving edits instead?
Which iirc is against Wikipedia rules
I'll have to go post this to the Wikipedia admin noticeboards to be dealt with, though it's likely someone else has already beat me to the punch if this is hitting the news itself.
- As I thought, someone already did and the page has been fixed and temporarily protected to prevent another IP address doing this again. A lot more editor eyes will be on the article too from now on.
  
  Hey, I wonder what Barbara Streisand's house looks like!
It's uncanny how much "conservative" and "can't take responsibility of their documented actions" overlap.
That’s silly - judges are supposed to have clerks to do that for them.
- I’m more concerned that a judge didn’t have a clerk do this. Judges should be half-decent at delegating tasks.
  
  In 2009-ish my local US House rep had his bio edited from an office in the Capitol building. Repeatedly, in fact. I've always wondered it was done by him or an intern.
  Based on the blisteringly dumb things he'd say in public, and the fact that he was one of the vanishingly small minority of Republicans to get redistricted out of his very safe seat in Ohio by his own party - I'm betting that he did it on his own time. Not that I think his "retirement" had anything to do with the Wikipedia bio. It's just something that would fit with his ideas of "having a cunning plan."
The REAL way to fix this is:
Host a personal blog arguing about details
Use a pseudonym like "SpaghettiSaiyan69" and add start sprinkling those links as reference.
Wait a few more weeks as those links become source of truth
- Probably better not to share this information.
It's a shitty thing to do. But not illegal. I'm sure there's something worse to accuse her of doing, than breaking the terms of services of Wikipedia.
- Don't let shitty things slide just because they aren't illegal.

46 comments