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.
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.
I love too that she mentioned, “REAL OPINIONS” as if those are more valid than the exact words she said.
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.
Oh shit! Maajmaaj is offering free fistings! Sign up before Lindsey Graham wears their arm out
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.
I don’t think that’s a racial slur my guy, a dictionary indicates it’s slang for female genitalia.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
