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The Debate Over “Devil’s Triangle” Shows Wikipedia At Its Best

Source: www.slate.com - Sunday, September 30, 2018
If the rest of the internet is lawless, Wikipedia stands out. Over the past 17 years, the community of Wikipedia editors has established a formal framework of policies, guidelines, and explanatory supplements to advance the goals of the project. Dutiful Wikipedians often refer to one of these rules when they remove something inappropriate from the site. If you “ listen to Wikipedia ” for a few minutes, you’ll see that edits like this happen all the time. What is unusual—and heretofore unprecedented—is for the objectionable content to play a role in a hearing about allegations that a nominee to the U.S. Supreme Court committed sexual assault while in high school. The subject came up on Wikipedia after Thursday’s Senate hearing, in which Rhode Island Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse asked Kavanaugh a series of questions about “Devil’s Triangle,” a reference in his high school yearbook that had raised eyebrows. Kavanaugh claimed that Devil’s Triangle was a “drinking game” played with “three glasses in a triangle.” He said that “it’s a quarters game,” i.e. a drinking game where players bounce 25-cent pieces off the table and into cups of beer. It was an answer that many dismissed as unbelievable. Soon after Kavanaugh offered his definition, an anonymous Wikipedia editor added the following text to the Devil’s Triangle disambiguation page ,  which lists and describes various meanings for a given topic: “Devil’s Triangle, a popular drinking ga
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