(Wisconsin) Supreme Court Justice Rebecca Bradley has been quietly editing her own Wikipedia page
(Wisconsin) Supreme Court Justice Rebecca Bradley has been quietly editing her own Wikipedia page
Supreme Court Justice Rebecca Bradley was scolded by a Wikipedia editor this month for her heavy editing of her own biography on the online encyclopedia.
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.
"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.
Also, not sure if she knows how to use the internet:
"Conservative Wisconsin Supreme Court justice @JudgeBradleyWI is currently engaging in an edit war on her Wikipedia page under an anonymous username that she also uses in her personal email."
The username? "rlgbjd," which could very well refer to Rebecca Lynn Grassl Bradley, J.D. She received her law degree from the University of Wisconsin in 1996.
It turns out the Tampa tweeter had guessed correctly.
"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.
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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.
Gosh dang LiBrUlS at it again!
Right!! They never got no treddfiddy neither for us!! Lol
So this is what my teachers meant when they said "don't trust Wikipedia".
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.
Oh I know it'll get corrected. Hard-core wikipedia editors and admins are a different breed, this shit won't last.
Butt she was quietly, psst.
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.
Since then you've donated some money to the Wikimedia Foundation, to make up for your misdeeds, right?
And then everyone clapped.
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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.
They're the type of person who is upset they get caught and apologizes of they upset someone but not for their actual transgression.
I'm sorry that you feel like I hurt you...
Why use that template when you could revert the self-serving edits instead?
Which iirc is against Wikipedia rules
That’s silly - judges are supposed to have clerks to do that for them.
I’m more concerned that a judge didn’t have a clerk do this. Judges should be half-decent at delegating tasks.
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."
It's uncanny how much "conservative" and "can't take responsibility of their documented actions" overlap.
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.
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.
The REAL way to fix this is:
- Host a personal blog arguing about details
- Use a pseudonym like "SpaghettiSaiyan69" and add start sprinkling those links as reference.
- Wait a few more weeks as those links become source of truth
Probably better not to share this information.
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.
Don't let shitty things slide just because they aren't illegal.