Where’s my “shocked” color crayon? I need to do a self-portrait.
Oh, come on! Wikipedia got off light! The NYPD could have put it in a banned stranglehold and edited it to death.
Really, what did you expect? This is about what I would have expected to happen - they weren’t breaking laws or doing anything that could be considered (realistically) dangerous to the public. Would it really be reasonable to fire them over some Wikipedia edits?
If this was something coordinated by higher-ups or their press office, yeah - PR is part of their job, and the the unethical aspects of it, and the bad PR this brings would be a sign they’re not doing their job right, and need to be replaced. A couple of employees/cops who aren’t supposed to be engaging in PR in any way? Slap them for making the department look bad, and make sure they know the PR dept. is pissed at them.
I think I agree, the guys weren’t breaking any laws, and also, Wikipedia has a mechanism to filter out noise like this, so no harm was done. I think the department handled it about right. Still, it says something about the character of the cops in question.
Only in a world in which policemen who are prepared to lie get fired.
No kidding.
The NYPD doesn’t have a policy specific to accessing Wikipedia
Wait, is that the problem here? I’m pretty sure there aren’t specific laws to accessing banks either, but there are laws about accessing them while wearing a balaclava screaming “hand over all the money!” and waving a sawn off shotgun.
What’s the problem here? That they were pushing their point of view on wikipedia? That’s what everybody who edits wikipedia does. The few editors left that is, as the number of editors has been dwindling consistently since 2007.
Um, actually the Cabal is supposedly enforcing a neutral point of view. (By which they mean their point of view, so you’re kind of right in a sad way.)
Will they get their own page now, or just a paragraph on each of the pages they edited? Or both? How does that work?
While you’re right that there’s a pretense of neutral point of view, the administration only deals with behavioral issues, not content issues. That leaves the content to the activist group with the most members. Wikipedia is a numbers game.
These police officers should have opened accounts and got a few more buddies onboard. If they’d have kept their noses clean behavior-wise they could have got whatever they want into the encyclopedia.
[quote=“robulus, post:8, topic:53812, full:true”]
>The NYPD doesn’t have a policy specific to accessing Wikipedia
Wait, is that the problem here? I’m pretty sure there aren’t specific laws to accessing banks either, but there are laws about accessing them while wearing a balaclava and holding a sawn off shotgun.
[/quote]I’m pretty sure the balaclava isn’t the problem so much as the shotgun, and even that will depend on the state. There appears to be no federal regulation about carrying a gun into a bank, so unless your state makes it illegal, then unless you actually act threatening or use phrases like “down on the ground” you’re not actually breaking the law.
[quote=“kupfernigk, post:6, topic:53812”]Only in a world in which policemen who are prepared to lie get fired.[/quote]But did they actually lie?
Also, policemen often are taught lying as a valid tactic to gain confessions or aid in investigations (i.e. “we talked to your friend, and he already told us, so you might as well come clean”). Lying is neither illegal nor even generally against police rules, so…
Agreed. Shockingly, some people wear balaclavas because it’s cold out.
I love Baklava
So when they shoot innocent people they just get a wrist slap for personal use of department handgun?
False comparison. If the police are caught lying in court, that’s perjury. If they tamper with evidence, that is an offense. Tampering with Wikipedia may not be a criminal offense, but it is surely indicative of character, and thus of fitness to be a policeman.
Unless you are one yourself, I suspect you will hold your views right up to the point of having a run in with the police and finding them reading out false statements of what you were alleged to have said in court. It is said that a conservative is a liberal who has been mugged, but a liberal may be a conservative who has been stitched up by the police.
No kidding. I spent a bit of time trying to do some editing, helping to curate a few pages I cared about. But after building up a few fun and informative bits here and there, inevitably some editor would come along, notice my work, and sit on the page, removing edit after edit, until I stopped bothering.
