NYPD Fights Police Brutality ByEditing It Off Wikipedia
Dozens upon dozens of IP addresses traced back to NYPD Headquarters, 1 Police Plaza, are behind Wikipedia edits that attempt to coverup police brutality... Capital New York Article: http://www.cap...
By: Sam Seder
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NYPD Fights Police Brutality ByEditing It Off Wikipedia - Video
Image from the Wikipedia page of the San Diego Police Department.
A San Diego Police Department dispatcher and anonymous Wikipedia users have edited or deleted paragraphs from the misconduct section of the police departments Wikipedia page five times since January 2014.
One of the Wikipedia users told U-T Watchdog he made the changes because individual cases were wrongly used to smear the whole department, or because of inaccuracies.
The anonymous edits were made through Internet connections owned by the City of San Diego and assigned to the police department, as recently as this January.
The edits, which eliminated references to negative information, came as the police force faced several scandals over officer misconduct a pattern that resulted in top brass requesting a federal review that was released today.
Wikipedia is a free online encyclopedia that is written and edited by volunteers. Its mission is to produce a neutral, reliably sourced encyclopedia.
The website discourages conflicts of interest that could undermine the sites credibility, including content changes that advance the interests of a users employer over the interest of readers.
Edits by the San Diego Police Department about something that pertains to their work would generally be considered a conflict of interest by the Wikipedia community, said Juliet Barbara, senior communications manager for the Wikimedia Foundation, the San Francisco nonprofit group that runs Wikipedia.
U-T Watchdog also asked police officials whether the use of department technology to make Wikipedia edits might violate policies on communications or use of equipment. Lt. Scott Wahl responded:
This Wikipedia page in not an SDPD or City sponsored website. The editing of content found on the Wikipedia page regarding the San Diego Police Department is not, nor has it ever been, assigned to any Police Department Personnel. Because Wikipedia is 'based on a model of openly editable content,' the department has no control over information displayed on the website, including any edits that may be made by internet users. We appreciate you bringing this to our attention. We will look into it as appropriate.
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Wikipedia edits came from within SDPD
The number is a mathematical constant, the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter, commonly approximated as 3.14159. It has been represented by the Greek letter "" since the mid-18th century, though it is also sometimes spelled out as "pi" (//).
Being an irrational number, cannot be expressed exactly as a common fraction, although fractions such as 22/7 and other rational numbers are commonly used to approximate . Consequently its decimal representation never ends and never settles into a permanent repeating pattern. The digits appear to be randomly distributed; however, to date, no proof of this has been discovered. Also, is a transcendental number a number that is not the root of any non-zero polynomial having rational coefficients. This transcendence of implies that it is impossible to solve the ancient challenge of squaring the circle with a compass and straightedge.
Although ancient civilizations needed the value of to be computed accurately for practical reasons, it was not calculated to more than seven digits, using geometrical techniques, in Chinese mathematics and to about five in Indian mathematics in the 5th century CE. The historically first exact formula for , based on infinite series, was not available until a millennium later, when in the 14th century the MadhavaLeibniz series was discovered in Indian mathematics.[1][2] In the 20th and 21st centuries, mathematicians and computer scientists discovered new approaches that, when combined with increasing computational power, extended the decimal representation of to, as of late 2013, over 13.3 trillion (1013) digits.[3] Scientific applications generally require no more than 40 digits of so the primary motivation for these computations is the human desire to break records. However, the extensive calculations involved have been used to test supercomputers and high-precision multiplication algorithms.
Because its definition relates to the circle, is found in many formulae in trigonometry and geometry, especially those concerning circles, ellipses or spheres. It is also found in formulae used in other branches of science such as cosmology, number theory, statistics, fractals, thermodynamics, mechanics and electromagnetism. The ubiquity of makes it one of the most widely known mathematical constants both inside and outside the scientific community: Several books devoted to it have been published, the number is celebrated on Pi Day and record-setting calculations of the digits of often result in news headlines. Attempts to memorize the value of with increasing precision have led to records of over 67,000 digits.
The symbol used by mathematicians to represent the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter is the lowercase Greek letter , sometimes spelled out as pi. In English, is pronounced as "pie" ( //, pa).[4] In mathematical use, the lowercase letter (or in sans-serif font) is distinguished from its capital counterpart , which denotes a product of a sequence.
The choice of the symbol is discussed in the section Adoption of the symbol .
is commonly defined as the ratio of a circle's circumference C to its diameter d:[5]
The ratio C/d is constant, regardless of the circle's size. For example, if a circle has twice the diameter of another circle it will also have twice the circumference, preserving the ratio C/d. This definition of implicitly makes use of flat (Euclidean) geometry; although the notion of a circle can be extended to any curved (non-Euclidean) geometry, these new circles will no longer satisfy the formula = C/d.[5] There are also other definitions of that do not immediately involve circles at all. For example, is twice the smallest positive x for which cos(x) equals 0.[5][6]
is an irrational number, meaning that it cannot be written as the ratio of two integers (fractions such as 22/7 are commonly used to approximate ; no common fraction (ratio of whole numbers) can be its exact value).[7] Since is irrational, it has an infinite number of digits in its decimal representation, and it does not settle into an infinitely repeating pattern of digits. There are several proofs that is irrational; they generally require calculus and rely on the reductio ad absurdum technique. The degree to which can be approximated by rational numbers (called the irrationality measure) is not precisely known; estimates have established that the irrationality measure is larger than the measure of e or ln(2) but smaller than the measure of Liouville numbers.[8]
More strongly, is a transcendental number, which means that it is not the solution of any non-constant polynomial with rational coefficients, such as x5/120 x3/6 + x = 0.[9][10] The transcendence of has two important consequences: First, cannot be expressed using any finite combination of rational numbers and square roots or n-th roots such as 331 or 10. Second, since no transcendental number can be constructed with compass and straightedge, it is not possible to "square the circle". In other words, it is impossible to construct, using compass and straightedge alone, a square whose area is equal to the area of a given circle.[11] Squaring a circle was one of the important geometry problems of the classical antiquity.[12] Amateur mathematicians in modern times have sometimes attempted to square the circle and sometimes claim success despite the fact that it is impossible.[13]
Mayor Bill de Blasio on Monday scolded the cops who used NYPD computers to edit Wikipedia pages but his memory got hazy when asked how it was any different from his campaign staffers making changes to his own page on the website.
This is a well-known city policy where people are not supposed to have any personal activity on city computers, on city equipment, de Blasio said in addressing the cops who altered pages on Eric Garner, Sean Bell and Amadou Diallo.
Were quite clear that if youre using city computers for personal business, this is not authorized, he said.
In 2012, The Post reported that staffers for de Blasio, then the public advocate and a mayoral candidate, altered his Wikipedia page by removing Warren Wilhelm as his birth name and adding that he is of German-American and Italian-American heritage.
Of course, we update the page, de Blasio spokesman Wiley Norvell said at the time. Thats become standard practice for public officials.
But on Monday, when pressed about those changes, de Blasio said he didnt remember them and then added they could only be made if it were part of a staffers job responsibilities.
He also sidestepped a reporters question on whether his aides were authorized to edit his Wikipedia page at the time.
I dont remember that incident, he said.
The mayors memory failure came right after Police Commissioner Bill Bratton who was standing next to him at a press conference told reporters that the cops wouldnt be punished.
Were in the process of reviewing our social-media policy, Bratton said. We have a ... three-tiered system in which certain individuals are authorized to do certain things. Wikipedia, for example, we dont have a policy specific to accessing that site.
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De Blasio rips cops for Wikipedia edits but his staff did the same
Looks like the long arm of the law is trying to diddle Wikipedia into submission. Members of the NYPD are trying to scrub Wikipedia's entries about police violence.
Capital New York traced edits to IP addresses registered to the NYPD. Looking at which entries the NYPD tried to alter highlights a disturbing pattern. These are blatant attempts to bend the narrative on horrific state-administered brutality:
Computer users identified by Capital as working on the NYPD headquarters' network have edited and attempted to delete Wikipedia entries for several well-known victims of police altercations, including entries for Eric Garner, Sean Bell, and Amadou Diallo. Capital identified 85 NYPD addresses that have edited Wikipedia, although it is unclear how many users were involved, as computers on the NYPD network can operate on the department's range of IP addresses.
It isn't the first time people in power have been caught trying to make the crowdsourced encyclopedia reflect their reality. People have tracked the edits Congress makes to Wikipedia. But in that instance, most of the edits were for weirdo entries like "horse head mask" rather than articles that directly referred to Congressional misconduct.
The NYPD, in contrast, has made edits that are clearly in its best interest, attempts to whitewash the bloodiest moments in contemporary NYPD screw-ups by literally re-writing history and recasting critical moments of police violence as irrelevant blips:
On Nov. 25, 2006, undercover NYPD officers fired 50 times at three unarmed men, killing Sean Bell, and sparking citywide protests against police brutality. On April 12, 2007, a user on 1 Police Plaza's network attempted to delete the Wikipedia entry "Sean Bell shooting incident".
"He [Bell] was in the news for about two months, and now no one except Al Sharpton cares anymore. The police shoot people every day, and times with a lot more than 50 bullets. This incident is more news than notable," the user wrote on Wikipedia's internal "Articles for deletion" page.
The matter is "under internal review," according to an NYPD spokesperson.
Police IPs were also linked to entry changes on stop-and-frisk, police misconduct, fictional NYPD officer Andy Sipowitz, and the band Chumbawumba. [Capital New York]
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NYPD Scrubbed Wikipedia Entries on Police Brutality and No One Cared