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.

  • MicroWave@lemmy.worldOP
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    1 year ago

    Liberal media has distorted my record since the beginning of my judicial career, and I refuse to let false accusations go unchecked,” Bradley told the Journal Sentinel in an email. “On my wikipedia page, I added excerpts from actual opinions and removed dishonest information about my background.”

    What, then, was getting under her skin?

    It’s clear Bradley really, really disliked the section in her Wikipedia page dealing with a Republican challenge to the stay-at-home order issued by the administration of Democratic Gov. Tony Evers in response the COVID-19 pandemic.

    According to her Wikipedia page, in May 2020, Bradley “compared the state’s stay-at-home orders to the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II,” a case known as Korematsu v. the United States.

    • Nougat@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      “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.

      • Silverseren@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        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.

        • Nougat@kbin.social
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          1 year ago

          Just in case she happened to read my comment, I didn’t want to use the word “revert” in order to avoid confusion.

      • JDubbleu@programming.dev
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        1 year ago

        I love too that she mentioned, “REAL OPINIONS” as if those are more valid than the exact words she said.

        • antizero99@lemmynsfw.com
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          1 year ago

          It said “Actual Opinion” not “Real Opinions”.

          I’m pretty sure opinion doesn’t mean what you think it does. When a judge writes up an opinion it’s a bit stronger than me saying what I do or don’t like or how I feel about something. Same as between scientific theory and the other definition.

      • 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.

          • DragonTypeWyvern@literature.cafe
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            1 year ago

            As someone who also read the book and was shocked that Tom wasn’t the minstrel show Tom that really earned the name: this weird effort to take back his name is self defeating and artificial.

            It says quite a lot that people also try to say “Maybe we should call them Uncle Ruckuses instead!”

            Mainly, it says they’re not clued in enough to realize the show/comic had two Uncle Toms. One had Uncle in his name, the other Tom.

            MacGruder wasn’t being very subtle, and yet everyone seems to have missed it anyways.

            Hell, if nothing else this whole weird idea is erasure of the minstrel shows. If you want to raise some actual awareness then feel free to separate Book Tom from Minstrel Tom, because we need to remember both.

    • Silverseren@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      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.

    • ImplyingImplications@lemmy.ca
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      1 year ago

      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.

  • ArtieShaw@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • Brkdncr@artemis.camp
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      1 year ago

      I’m more concerned that a judge didn’t have a clerk do this. Judges should be half-decent at delegating tasks.

      • ArtieShaw@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        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.”

  • ChicoSuave@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    It’s uncanny how much “conservative” and “can’t take responsibility of their documented actions” overlap.

  • Silverseren@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • Silverseren@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      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.

        • ArtieShaw@kbin.social
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          1 year ago

          You know, I never even wondered that until you mentioned it. Maybe I’ll check it out because now I’m irrationally curious! I bet it’s pretty nice!

          (/s)

  • Potatos_are_not_friends@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    The REAL way to fix this is:

    1. Host a personal blog arguing about details
    2. Use a pseudonym like “SpaghettiSaiyan69” and add start sprinkling those links as reference.
    3. Wait a few more weeks as those links become source of truth
  • Ddhuud@lemmynsfw.com
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    1 year ago

    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.