Bold Plum: with the Guerillas in China's War against Japan

I was looking up the name of Michael Lindsay after finishing Philip West's Yenching University and Sino-Western Relations, 1916-1952 this morning. West mentions Lindsay, who taught at Yenching, and Lindsay's sympathy for the Communists. The reason I was interested in Linsday was that he was mentioned by name when R.O.C. (Taiwan) Minister of Education Cheng Tianfang (程天放) expressed to the founders of Tunghai his concern that they make sure they didn't hire any Communists or "fellow travelers" as faculty.

Anyway, I came across this website advertising a new book by Hsiao Li Lindsay, Michael Linsday's widow. The website has a 2006 copyright and says the book is coming soon. I checked Amazon, but the book isn't listed yet. Looks interesting, though!

[books] [Bold Plum] [Hsiao Li Lindsay] [Michael Lindsay] [Yenching University and Sino-Western Relations]

Violation from other parties, official notification from -----!

Dear ----- Member,

This email is to inform you, that we are upgrading our ways of security and your account may have been compromised by other parties.

Our terms and conditions you agreed to state that your account must always be under your control or those you designate at all times. We have noticed some
unusual activity in our research due upgrading related that your account indicates that other parties may have access and or control of your details in your account.

These parties have been involved with money laundering, illegal drugs, terrorism and various Federal Title 18 violations.

Your will need to re-enter some imformations about your account for advanced verification and to let us know that your are aware of this violation and due this way we can stop the outside parties.

We won't require your ATM PIN number for this operation!

Please follow this link to complete your security verification and protect your account :

Update your account now.

Please be aware, if you don't upgrade your account this will lead to money loss and we will have no other liability for your account or any transactions that may have occurred lately.

Thank you for your time and consideration in this matter .

Sincerely,
© 2006 -----

Bank name deleted. The original link (which I've also deleted) leads, of course, up a phishing line. I don't usually post the spam I get, but this time I couldn't resist...

CFP: Rhetorics of Social Formation

Received this through the CFP mailing list.

Rhetorics of Social Formation

University of Redlands, Redlands, CA
19 - 20 January 2007

The Centre for Rhetorics & Hermeneutics and the New Testament Rhetoric Project of the Institute for Antiquity and Christianity is pleased to announce Rhetorics of Social Formation, the sixth in a series of highly successful international conferences exploring rhetorical theory in the context of pressing public issues.

This conference will examine the role of rhetoric in creating, elaborating, and sustaining social formation and small group communication - how is group identity formed? How must it change in order to meet new and unforeseen contexts? How does it social formation break down? How are new group identities formed from out of old? How are conflicting identities of members of multiple, if casual, group identities negotiated? What can we learn from groups whose success is seen by their growth and longetivity?

The organizers start with the premise that much of group identity and the devices that support that identity, including belief systems and ideologies, are derived from rhetorical constructs and represent the convergence of arguments meant to describe and explain realities as experienced by the group.

We invite papers that either illustrate or challenge that premise, using theoretical models and/or analytical methods, etc., from the disciplinary perspective of the presenter. All disciplines are welcome, including biblical studies, anthropology, ethnology, rhetoric, culture criticism, public sphere, and other social sciences and the humanities. We have traditionally provided a unique space for dialogue and cross-, inter- and transdisciplinary exchange.

We welcome papers examining the phenomenon of group and social formation from any area and any part of the world. Additionally, we welcome papers that deal with the formation of the gospel tradition and the emergence of diverse early Jesus and Christian communities. Proposals should be no more than 500 words long, and must include identification of institutional affiliation of the applicant, or, in the case of independent scholars, a brief resume.

In the past we have had presenters from Australia, Botswana, Canada, Columbia, France, Japan, the Netherlands, South Africa, and the USA. As in the past, we strongly encourage foreign scholars to continue to submit proposals.

Each presenter must submit their paper several weeks in advance. The programmatic assumption of our dialogues is that every participant has read the submitted works prior to arriving on site. Each presenter is given 10 minutes to offer a summary of your paper, and we then dedicate 45-50 minutes of unmoderated, roundtable discussion regarding the implications and contributions of your work. In this way, we are unique in both the care with which we approach your work and the ways in which your work is brought into conversation with others.

Proposals are due to the organizers by 1 May 2006 (though the date is not firm). For more information, please go to www.ars-rhetorica.net.

Sounds interesting--and they're looking for scholars from outside the U.S....

Nice site on semiotics

Just came across a great website called "Semiotics for Beginners" by Daniel Chandler. It's been up for over 10 years, but I only came across it today. The web is a big place!

Just to let you know I don't just buy books...

I finished reading Cold War Orientalism this morning. I found the book to be both interesting on its own terms and helpful to my thinking about my dissertation project. It introduced me to what Klein argues were some of the dominant Cold War era discourses in the U.S. regarding U.S.-Asian relations, both in terms of external relations and in terms of the assimilation of Asians within the U.S. The latter Klein sees as a way for the U.S. to demonstrate to Asia its good intentions during the Cold War era competition for the 'heart' of Asia. (I'm not sure how much Klein sees this as a primary motive for the middlebrow intellectuals' treatment of Asian Americans in their work.)

As I mentioned elsewhere, the idea that middlebrow intellectuals--and the government--in the U.S. encouraged Americans to develop a sense of empathy for the people of Asia provides a useful connection (or counterpoint) to the kind of empathy that development scholars like Daniel Lerner argued was necessary for people in Third World countries. Lerner argued that empathy was necessary for people in undeveloped countries so that they could learn to imagine ways of living that were different from their own. This would provide motivation for the integration of the various groups (tribes, clans) into the "imagined community" (not Lerner's term, of course!) of the nation and for the integration of the new nations into the global community (a community that excluded Communist countries, of course). The kind of empathy that Americans needed to develop, according to Klein, was something that would enable Americans to avoid the accusations of imperialism that were made against other Western powers.

Klein's chapter "How to Be an American Abroad: James Michener's The Voice of Asia and Postwar Mass Tourism" gives a good example of the discourse of empathy that she describes. She argues that Michener positions himself as "a 'listening man'" who does not privilege his own voice in the book but rather privileges the voices of the people he interviews. "Michener presents himself and his interviewees as leaping governments and engaging in direct communication with each other," she writes (132). Michener's portrayal of himself as a listener is an embodiment of the "curious and open-minded American presence in Asia" (133) that was part of the ideal of an empathetic America.

I also like the fact that although Klein does critique what she analyzes (pointing out, for instance, how Michener's work feeds into "the liberal critique of racism as individual prejudice [that] proliferated in the late 1940s and 1950s" [134]), she also tries to read these texts sympathetically, as well. She argues, for instance, that "it would be a mistake to dismiss Michener's liberalism as only a mystification of neocolonial expansion" (135). She prefers to see the texts and the discourses in which they participated as more complicated than that--as having more than one kind of effect on or relationship to the U.S.'s role in Asia.

[Update: I should also mention that I finished Fires of the Dragon early last week. It was quite an enlightening read. It was a fast read, too--I guess because of its narrative style.]

[books] [Cold War Orientalism] [empathy] [James Michener] [The Voice of Asia]

Adventures in Mandarin pronunciation

The former native Chinese speaker has complained recently that my mispronunciation of several tones in Mandarin is beginning to affect her pronunciation. Most egregious of my mistakes is my frequent reference to the "kitchen waste container" (廚餘桶 chu2 yu2 tong3) as the chu3 yu2 tong3 (楚瑜桶, perhaps named in honor of James Soong?).

Two recent opinion pieces on culture and democracy

Two interesting articles with somewhat different perspectives on the relationship of culture to democracy:

• "Democratization: One View from Kuwait" by Dr. Samar Rashdan Al-Roomi, Kuwait Arab Times (via Intermittent Clarity)
  
• "Democracy Isn't 'Western': Cultural determinists should look beyond Ancient Greece" by Dr. Amartya Sen, Opinion Journal (from the Wall Street Journal Editorial Page) (via The Blogora)

[culture] [democracy]

CFP: Knowledge Economy: The Commodification of Knowledge and Information in the Academic System

Received this through the CFP mailing list. It looks like an interesting project and would, I think, benefit from an international perspective.

Knowledge Economy: The Commodification of Knowledge and Information in the Academic System

Tomas R. Giberson, Ph.D. Oakland University, Michigan
Gregory A. Giberson, Ph.D. Salisbury University, Maryland

We are seeking proposals for papers to be included in an edited collection investigating the various ways the academic economy drives the purposes, processes, and outcomes valued from Academics, individually and collectively. We suggest that our behavior as academics is governed not only by our dedication to our individual disciplines and our specific specialties but also is influenced and often determined by varying professional, intellectual, social, and political factors. These factors differ by the size, prominence, and mission of our individual institutions, our tenure status, as well as the expectations of our colleagues, students, administrators, and local communities. The competing and often contradictory demands placed upon us are often at odds with the traditional notions of liberal education that persist as traditional performative façade, an idealization of the academy existing primarily in the lore, rituals, and mission statements of most colleges and universities but not always in the products faculty are expected to produce. As Jean François Lyotard observed in The Postmodern Condition, "The question (overt or implied) now asked by the professionalist student, the State, or institutions of higher education is no longer 'Is it true?' but 'What use is it?" (51) Indeed, the "value" of higher education has taken on new meaning, which often contradicts its traditional goals: critical and intellectual development, and civic engagement.

Members of all disciplines are invited to share thoughts, observations, and experiences in each of the three traditional areas of academic work: teaching, scholarship, and service. We also encourage submissions that address the implications of the meta economy-the interaction of these three areas on individual and systemic behavior. Historically, these three areas of the academic "job" are thought of as responsibilities defined in job descriptions and position postings. However, teaching, scholarship, and service have become commodities-outcomes that enable academics to advance their careers and achieve prominence among peers and administrators, who bestow the ultimate commodity for individual faculty members, tenure and promotion. As commodities, these become not the production of individual scholars and teachers, but units of value to be held, traded, and bargained with by universities, corporations, publishers, and degree holders to promote, trade, and sell.

Examples of questions that may be addressed include, but are not limited to:

Scholarship

• How has the commodification of knowledge influenced the research you engage in and the scholarship you produce?
• How is your behavior as a scholar influenced by the "number" and/or "quality" of publications required for tenure?
• How is your scholarly production consumed by the university and other institutions and individuals and how does that influence you as a professional academic?
• How has the increasing pressure to secure external funding through grants and the like impacted what and how you conduct research and scholarly inquiry?
• How does the pressure of publication affect the pedagogy within graduate and undergraduate education?

Teaching

• How does/did your perception of the professional implications of student evaluations influence your teaching in pursuit of tenure?
• How has your teaching been affected by the expectations of students, peers, and administrators?
• How are your teaching strategies influenced by the number of classes/students you teach in a given semester?
• How is your pedagogy influenced by the mission of your institution?
• How has your teaching been influenced by other external factors, local or otherwise?

Service

• How do service requirements influence your work as a teacher and/or scholar?
• How are service requirements for faculty accounted for in terms of tenure and promotion by the institution?
• How do service requirements influence your behavior in productive and non-productive committees?
• How do service commitments on the part of untenured faculty affect their bid for tenure?

Other

• How are the actions of your institution influenced by national rankings in teaching and research?
• How do federal, state, institutional, and unit-level budgets affect your behavior as an academic?
• How has the academic economy forced you to compromise your personal and professional goals?
• How have increasing expectations for productivity and assessment across generations influenced your relationship with other faculty?

Given the sensitivity of the topics addressed, we will accept submissions from authors who prefer their work to be published anonymously, particularly for aubmissions from untenured faculty. However, your submission must include a brief description of your institution, department, and your placement within the tenure process, along with reasons why using your name with your submission would cause problems. We hope that tenured faculty will want their names attached to their submission.

We are seeking proposals of 500 words or less for chapters between 3,000 and 7,000 words. We welcome submissions from faculty, administrators and staff. The deadline for submissions is July 15, 2006.

For questions or to submit a proposal: knowledge_economy@hotmail.com

***************************
Greg Giberson, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
Director of Freshman Composition
Director of the Eastern Shore Writing Project
Department of English
Salisbury University
410-677-5003
***************************

Two new books in the former native speaker's library

Even though I'm only halfway through Cold War Orientalism right now, the post office still operates (to the extent that it operates) and two more books have found their way from various places in the U.S. (via Alibris) to my mailbox.

• Fires of the Dragon: Politics, Murder, and the Kuomintang, by David E. Kaplan (NY: Atheneum, 1992)
  This book was, I believe, recommended or listed in a posting by Michael Turton a while back. I found an inexpensive copy and got it while I could (had an e-coupon, which helped). The interesting thing about the hardback copy that I've got is that it has an American flag sticker taped to the spine and another sticker on the first page with an American flag and the name "COLONEL ELMER C. MARTIN" written below. He might have been the Elmer C. Martin, Sr. who passed away in 2000. Colonel Martin took good care of this book--it's in perfect shape.
  
  
• Transforming Agriculture in Taiwan: The Experience of the Joint Commission on Rural Reconstruction, by Joseph A. Yager (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1988)
  This one looked interesting because it's based on unpublished archival documents and covers the entire period, 1948-1979, when this US-ROC joint development agency was in operation.

[books] [Taiwan]

They have contests about these kinds of things?!

From a Times of India report:

MANGALORE: The Marathon Lecturer stopped at 11.30 am on Sunday, clocking 98 hours and beating the earlier world record of 88 hours for non-stop teaching.

Towards the end, the strain on Annaiah Ramesh had begun to show, and he had to be stopped by his mother and the guide. Ramesh, lecturer from the department of applied botany, Mangalore University, was in the quest of Guinness Book of Records, and began his lecture on Wednesday morning.

He wanted to clock in 101 hours, but spotting his incoherent speech, his mother Kamalamma and guide Y Srinivasa Reddy from the department of sericulture, Mysore University, and others convinced him to stop as he had already gone past the record.

According to the article, "Ramesh is fine, but disoriented due to lack of sleep." But what about his students??

[via]

CFP: Book collection about second-language writing across contexts

Would be nice to have some submissions to this book from Taiwan...

Also of interest: a conference on second-language writing at Tamkang University

Call for Papers—Building Bridges: Second Language Writing Across Contexts

We invite contributions for an edited collection, Building Bridges: Second Language Writing Across Contexts, which attempts to close existing gaps in international conversations among second language writing scholars in elementary and secondary schools, two-year colleges, post-secondary institutions, and community programs. Much current scholarship on second language writing comes out of post-secondary institutions in the United States. This volume attempts to build bridges between this context and other sites of second language writing research, theory, and pedagogy.

We anticipate contributions to five major sections:

• Exploring Boundaries: Disciplinary Realms for Second Language Writing
• Understanding Contexts: The Current Status of Second Language Writing
• Posing Questions: Sites of Inquiry in Second Language Writing
• Supporting Collaboration: Projects that Cross Contextual Boundaries
• Identifying Resources: Annotated Bibliographies on Second Language Writing in Context

Contributions might focus on, but are not limited to:

• The current status of second language writing pedagogies, research, or theories in a specific context
• Institutional locations of second language writing instruction and research in relation to disciplinary boundaries
• What second language writing scholars would like to learn from their colleagues working in other contexts
• Underrepresented sites of second language writing scholarship
• Questions developing out of teaching or researching second language writing in a specific context
• Reports of in-progress or completed research that crosses contextual boundaries for second language writing
• Reports of in-progress or completed projects that reflect collaborations among scholars working in different contexts
• Suggestions for initiating and supporting collaborations among scholars working in different contexts

All contributions should be accessible to readers who are new to the field of second language writing or who primarily work in a related field. Given the volume’s focus on contexts, authors also should include descriptions of their own institutional contexts.

We request that submissions not exceed 20 manuscript pages (including a list of references, tables and figures, and appendices). Please follow the manuscript preparation guidelines outlined in the 5th edition of the APA Manual. We plan to send each manuscript out for external review to help us assess its quality and to generate feedback for revision.

Please send submissions to Jessie Moore Kapper (jkapper@elon.edu)—as Microsoft Word (.doc) or rich text format (.rtf) files—by June 30, 2006. Any questions also should be directed to jkapper@elon.edu.

Co-Editors:
Jessie Moore Kapper, Elon University, and Elizabeth Patton, Purdue University

Another new book in the former native speaker's library

Just received my copy of Cold War Orientalism: Asia in the Middlebrow Imagination, 1945-1961 by Christina Klein. I got the hardback edition for US$9.95 through the University of California Press website's sale. (Other books should be coming soon.)

Klein's book looks really interesting and useful to me. I'll probably post some goodies on my dissertation blog soon. [here] For now I want to quote something from the beginning of the book, where Klein is analyzing a scene from the play/movie The King and I. Klein argues that although the setting for the play is the late 19th century, it really spoke to American concerns with their relationship to Asia during the Cold War period. She argues that the sentimental relationship of Anna to the Siamese is "an idealized self-representation of the middlebrow artists and intellectuals" Klein discusses in her book. Klein illustrates this by analyzing two things going on in the scene that culminates in the "Getting to Know You" singalong:

At one level the scene produces a hierarchical relation between West and East: Anna is an adult who dispenses knowledge, and her students are ignorant children subordinate to her authority. When Anna replaces the old Siamese map with the new English one, she replaces the local and implicitly inferior knowledge of the Siamese with a metropolitan and implicitly superior knowledge derived from European models. In the best Orientalist fashion, she denies the Siamese the ability to represent themselves and insists that they can only know themselves through a Western and literally Eurocentric system of knowledge. But something else is going on here as well: Anna is more interested in forging connections between East and West than she is in demarcating racial and cultural differences. ... She presents a world in which East and West can be understood as related to one another outside the coercive ties of empire. A shared history of political independence, as well as small size, implicitly connects England and Siam. Anna animates this vision of interconnectedness by infusing it with emotion: as she sings "Getting to Know You," she translates the map's geography lesson into a playful song about the intimate bonds of friendship that can reach across national and cultural divides. More important, Anna opens up a way for the children to participate in the forging of these emotional--and international--ties when she invites them to sing along. ... By the end of the number the hierarchical differences that structured the scene at the outset ... are looser, although they do not disappear entirely. (11-12)

I must admit that when I have watched the movie The King and I in the past, I never looked at the "Getting to Know You" scene from this kind of perspective. But Klein's point about Anna's encouraging the students to sing along with her puts a new twist on the lyrics of the song. If we just think about Anna's point of view--when she's singing--lines like "Telling you my dreams, / Getting to feel that you're with me" sound as though her main concern is with having her students identify with her. But when the students sing, the point of view changes and now they're telling her their dreams. Thus there's at some level the expectation of an intercultural interchange going on here, despite the hierarchical relations between Anna and the Siamese children. I am struck by this because it complicates the notion of the cultural imperialism of Anna's actions.

Later in the book Klein engages in an in-depth analysis of the play and movie, concluding that

Anna's loving instruction establishes an exemplary hegemonic relationship: it achieves its goals through sentiment rather than through physical force and by inculcating a desire on the part of its objects to behave in a certain way. It suggests power exercised not through political or military control, but through relations of exchange and influence. Anna's influence, like American-guided modernization, results in local leaders governing themselves but always according to Anna's precepts. (215)

I should note that Klein stresses the "ideal" nature of the images of Anna and of the United States here. She isn't suggesting that this is what actually happened. (Certainly Taiwan's experience during the postwar years is enough to illustrate how tenuous the connection was between this image and the reality of U.S. influence in Asia.)

Anyway, I'm glad I found this book--and grateful to Rex at the Savage Minds blog who mentioned the U. of California Press book sale!

[I should add here--for people who are wondering why I'd go to the trouble of buying this book rather than getting it out of the library--according to Taiwan's National Bibliographic Information Network, no library in Taiwan owns this book... *sigh*]

[books] [Cold War Orientalism] [The King and I]

Homework and college students

This news is a little old, but a report in last Saturday's Taiwan News cites a study that found that "[m]ore than half of Taiwan's university freshmen spend less than one hour per day studying outside of the classroom" and "the situation is similar among college seniors".

The article also mentions that "more than 40 percent of seniors at state-run universities and colleges are working part-time, a much higher figure than their counterparts at private universities and colleges." This is interesting, continues the article, because it "contradicts a commonly held belief that students at private universities and colleges which charge a higher tuition are more likely to work on the side while pursuing their studies."

A China Times article that was reprinted on the National Science Council's website adds that the survey was done by over 40 educational researchers and was given to over 40,000 first-, second-, and third-year university students. The study was conducted by Peng Sunming (彭森明) as part of a larger study commissioned by the National Science Council.

[higher education] [National Science Council] [Taiwan]

International writing conference "pre-call"

Received this via H-Rhetor:

Save the Dates February 22, 23, &24, 2008

2008 Santa Barbara Conference on Writing Research Theme: Writing Research Across Borders

This is an exciting time where research on writing is having many births, rebirths, and growing spurts in many nations and with focus on many levels of schooling and development across the lifespan. At the 2008 Santa Barbara Conference on Writing Research we hope to foster dialogues across different writing research traditions, located in different national, disciplinary, and programmatic venues. We are currently making preliminary plans to hold the conference on Friday through Sunday February 22-24, 2008. We are in the process of inviting a premier panel of plenary and featured speakers to represent the diversity of writing research in the world and to symbolically invite further broad participation from researchers of all nations interested in all age levels, institutional settings, and disciplinary approaches.

This conference follows on the successes of the 2002 and 2005 Santa Barbara Conferences on Writing Research, with the themes of "Writing as A Human Activity" and "Writing Research in the Making." Further information about this current conference and the previous ones is available at

http://education.ucsb.edu/netshare/wrconf08/ [My note: this link doesn't work yet] [Now it does...]

http://education.ucsb.edu/netshare/wrconf05/

Later this spring watch for our full announcement and call for proposals. If you have any questions contact us at
writing@education.ucsb.edu

For the Organizing committee

Charles Bazerman
Sheridan Blau
Rober Krut
Susan McLeod
Paul Rogers
Amanda Stansell

I'm looking forward to hearing more about this, and will pass on what I hear. Would be nice to have some folks from Taiwan there!

Beautiful warm spring day...

In the span of less than two hours--between about 10:15 and 11:50--we saw three 2-car accidents and two 3-car accidents on Taichung Harbor Rd. Nothing serious enough to need an ambulance, but their cars are all going to need some body work. (If I were Michael Turton I'd probably have pictures of 'em, but unfortunately, you'll have to use your imagination.) Beautiful day. Drive carefully.

Hmmm....

Haven't felt one of those in a while... (Guess I'm not usually sitting in the office when they come.)

The View from Taiwan: Bias and the International Media

Michael Turton has a great rhetorical analysis/critique of a USA Today article about Taiwan/China/US relations, reflecting on the biased manner in which these relations are portrayed in the U.S. media.

I'm not sure that it's possible to write about Taiwan (or anything else, perhaps) without some sort of bias, but I agree with Michael that the international press tends not to write articles that are fair to Taiwan. And, of course, I feel strongly that being fair to Taiwan is pretty important. China, for some reason, gets cut a lot of slack in the press. As Michael demonstrates, articles often end up blaming the victim for the PRC's actions and statements. Guess they don't want to "hurt the feelings of the Chinese people"...

Marjorie Bly of Penghu

Earlier this evening I caught a story on the TV news about Pres. Chen's visit to Marjorie Bly, a retired American nurse who is in a Penghu hospital. The reason that I mention this is that I only first heard of her very recently when I was going through some archival documents for my disseration and she was mentioned in a letter from the late 1950s. It was quite an interesting coincidence.

Bly, whose Chinese name is 白寶珠 (Bai Baozhu, which means "White Precious Pearl"), has lived in Taiwan since 1952 (most of those years in Penghu), helping people with leprosy. She is 87 years old and is in failing health, and the president's visit was to express the country's appreciation for her love and care for people with leprosy. A Chinese-language story about Chen's visit to Bly is available here (thanks, Linda!). Another Chinese-language story that covers Bly's 50 years in Taiwan is here. There's an English-language story from 2002 that reports on a fund raised to help her in her retirement and to continue to help people with leprosy. And here is an English story on her receipt of permanent residency in honor of her work in Taiwan.

[Update, 3/11/06: David Bly has included and linked to more information on his blog, including a Taiwan News article that I hadn't noticed. (For some reason, the TN article--actually a Central News Agency release--gets Marjorie Bly's name mixed up, calling her "Bly Marjorie Ingeleiv"...)]

"這就是中國人所說的人情味..."

Last night we went to "Tea Work" on Wenxin Road for dinner. Walking into the restaurant, we spotted a cute little baby (maybe a year old) sitting in a high chair at a table across from the cashier. He was playing with his mother's wallet while she and a friend chatted. A few minutes later, as I took our order to the cashier, he held his mother's credit card out to me, as if to say, "沒關係,你拿去用!別客氣!"

我實在太感動了!年輕人,你好大方! (I didn't take his offer, of course...)

In news about Wikipedia...

From BBC News:

Online reference site Wikipedia blames US Congress staff for partisan changes to a number of political biographies.

Computers traced to Capitol Hill removed unpalatable facts from articles on senators, while other entries were "vandalised", the site said.

The article goes on to report that

Wikipedia says the controversy raises questions about whether it is ethical for those with a vested interest in the subject to edit entries about it.

On the other hand, the article cites Wikipedia as saying that "its investigation showed the vast majority of edits from Senate IPs were 'beneficial and helpful'."

I suppose there's some degree of transparency to the Wikipedia's articles if you're willing to go to the trouble of figuring out who made particular changes, as the Wikipedia folks did here.