In early 2007, I gave a talk to the El Paso County Republican Central Committee entitled "While You Were Out, The Democrats Took Over The Internet." I put the outline on my blog so that others could use it as they chose. It is old stuff now, but I said about the presentation:
The handouts were the Wikipedia printouts of each of the three politicians. The two Democratic politicians' entries amounted to campaign promotional pieces, though I didn't have the audience look at them. [ Bob ] Beauprez, the Republican, had an entry that half way down was nothing more than an attack piece.
It is nice to note that in 2008 Republicans are in the game and watching their Wikipedia entries. That doesn't stop the Democrats from trying to play dirty with them.
What is amazing is how careless the Democrats are. Janus303 seems to be a lot like me. Yesterday, I wrote that I used "a watcher" as a screen name several places. Janus303 does the same thing. If you go to mikeditto.com, you get Janus Online. Janus303 has a livejournal profile that identifies him as Michael Ditto, and an Amazon profile.
Facebook identifies Mike Ditto as Udall for Colorado's Director of Online Communications. You might expect a Director of Online Communications to be familiar with Wikipedia. Sure enough, there is a Janus303 as a Wikipedia editor. The Wikipedia Janus303 writes almost exclusively on Colorado issues, most recently on the Mark Udall and Bob Schaffer entries.
Unsurprisingly, he doesn't want Wikipedia readers to know about the close connection between Maggie Fox, Mark Udall's wife, and the League of Conservation Voters. He has eliminated references to that connection twice.
I tagged this section as disputed because it's not relevant that LCV does business with an organization that used to be headed by Mark Udall's wife.
LCV never mentioned Bob Schaffer in the six years he was out of office, but in 2008 he comes up third on their dirty dozen list and LCV's connection with Mark Udall's wife isn't relevant? No one will buy that when they understand that a Mark Udall staffer wrote it while trying to hide his identity.
Mark Udall needs to explain why his paid campaign staff isn't identifying itself as paid staff on Wikipedia when it edits Bob Schaffer's page. Failing to do so is swarmy politics and it makes Wikipedia untrustworthy.
Anyone who wishes to quote this on Wikipedia has my express permission to do so. Wikipedia rules say that I cannot post it myself.
Added: Without providing notice to me, Mike Ditto published a three paragraph claim on Politicker that this post is "a lie." I guess he put it there in the hope that I wouldn't see it, and I almost didn't. I published a response on Friday morning. The standard Ditto sets is that if a conservative is only 99% accurate, he is lying.
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