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Attorney, or ambulance chaser? Susan Burke vs. Wikipedia

By E. A. Barbour and Gregory Kohs (with the assistance of several Wikipediocracy researchers)

Manipulation of Wikipedia content has been shown repeatedly to be orchestrated by the very insiders who run Wikipedia. Paid advocacy editors and political operatives who learn these tricks can also control Wikipedia with some effectiveness, and by taking advantage of the community’s obsession with secrecy and false transparency, agenda-driven alterations to article content can be made without becoming a magnet for wider attention and corrective editing. This can get especially ugly when editors use pseudonyms to hide their real-world accountability and begin to attack by name the reputations of living people via their Wikipedia biographies. It’s no surprise that Wikipedia’s most historically active page for edit warfare is the biography of George W. Bush. With Bush, at least numerous editors on each side of the political debate will keep watch on the biography, and they tend to balance each other out. But what happens when a less-prominent individual is defamed (or glorified) on Wikipedia by editors who use fake names to mask their identity?

Susan L. Burke, an attorney in private practice and a specialist in filing lawsuits against government contractor firms who were involved in the Iraq war, found her Wikipedia biography the locus of some alleged defamation by an anonymous person or persons. In her legal practice, one of Burke’s toughest adversaries has been the controversial Blackwater company. It is reasonable to suspect that at least some conservative and libertarian groups are politically aligned against Burke. The Wikipedia editor accounts that were of most concern to Burke were “Zujua” and “CapBasics359”. The problems began in December 2011 and ran until early 2013. Burke found some of the edits so offensive to her reputation that in September 2013 she pursued a legal case to unmask

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