Obama's Wikipedia Page Distances President From Wright and Ayers

Obama's Wikipedia Page Distances President From Wright and Ayers
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,507244,00.html

Monday, March 09, 2009

By Joshua Rhett Miller
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March 9: The 'scrubbing' of critical mentions was briefly noted in Obama's Wikipedia page Monday, but the entry has since been removed.

What a tangled Web Wikipedia users can weave.

Critics noted over the weekend that President Obama's page on the free online encyclopedia had been edited to remove any mention of his links to former Weather Underground terrorist William Ayers, and to allow only a brief citation of his connection to the Rev. Jeremiah Wright — though pages for Ayers and Wright are heavily peppered with references to the president, including subsections on both pages that detail their past affiliations with him.

The lone mention of Wright on Obama's page appears in a section on his family and personal life; it says the president left Chicago's Trinity United Church of Christ in May 2008 after "controversial statements made by Rev. Jeremiah Wright became public," citing an Associated Press article.

Click here to read Obama's current Wikipedia page.

Though Obama was baptized at the church in 1988 and remained an "active member" at Trinity United for two decades, its controversial former pastor is not cited in a paragraph on Obama's religion.


"Obama is a Christian whose religious views have evolved in his adult life," the entry reads. "In The Audacity of Hope, Obama writes that he 'was not raised in a religious household.'"

But according to an archived Wikipedia page for Obama from February 2008, a theme of Obama's 2004 Democratic National Convention keynote address and the title of his 2006 book, "The Audacity of Hope," was "inspired" by Wright.

The sixth chapter of Obama's book — titled "Faith" — details how "Obama, in his twenties, while working with local churches as a community organizer, came to understand 'the power of the African American religious tradition to spur social change,'" according to the archived entry.

Click here to read Obama's archived Wikipedia page.
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Neither that archived page nor Obama's current Wikipedia page contains any mention of Ayers — whose own page, like Wright's, contains a separate section detailing his link to Obama.

"During the 2008 U.S. presidential campaign, a controversy arose regarding Ayers' contacts with then-candidate Barack Obama, a matter that had been public knowledge in Chicago for years," Ayers' Wikipedia page reads.

Click here to read Ayers' Wikipedia page.

Obama's controversial relationships with both men have two extensive independent Wikipedia pages: "Bill Ayers presidential election controversy" and "Jeremiah Wright controversy." The associations, however, are largely downplayed or ignored altogether in Obama's main Wikipedia entry.

Click here to read Wright's Wikipedia page.

Jay Walsh, a spokesman for Wikipedia, told FOXNews.com that the Web site's content is monitored and edited entirely by users. As of Monday afternoon, Obama's main page was in "full protection mode," he said, or blocked from editing until disputes are resolved.

"That's fairly normal for articles like this one," said Walsh, adding that Obama's main entry is one of the site's most popular pages. "Things may be absent from one area to keep one page shorter or more manageable."

Walsh said the "fluid" process of Wikipedia allows for users to "migrate" information once removed from a page back into an original article.

"Editors are really, really trying to do this as neutral as possible," Walsh said. "This is tough with political figures."

According to Wikipedia's Obama "talk page," which addresses concerns to the president's entry, some criticisms and controversies may not be included because they are no "more appropriate than a section dedicated solely to praises and is an indication of a poorly written article."

Users of the free online encyclopedia — which is written and edited by users — have reportedly deleted attempts to add Ayers' name to Obama's main entry.

One such addition, according to WorldNetDaily, included details of Obama's tenure alongside Ayers on the board of directors at several organizations in Chicago during the 1990s.

"Within two minutes that Wikipedia entry was deleted and the user banned from posting on the website for three days, purportedly for adding 'Point of View junk edits,' even though the addition was well-established fact," WorldNetDaily reported.