Wickedpedia
'Mostly harmless', as the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy would say
Wikipedia is massive. Founded only 21 years ago, it currently has 6.5 million articles in English and contains 100 times more words than the Encyclopedia Britannica. In the last 3 months it had almost 21 billion pageviews. What an achievement!
Sadly, it also has a reputation for inaccuracy. This is unsurprising, since hundreds of new articles are added daily and there are c. 48 million registered users (over 100,000 ‘active’), plus ‘bots’, who can edit material online (the total number of edits passed a billion last year.) Because of its size and community nature, Wikipedia is bound to include errors, despite the best efforts of its 1,000-plus admins.
But as with IT generally, there is also the potential for deliberate misuse - boosting an ally, doing down a rival; one reads about this from time to time, especially concerning controversial subjects or people. Even when the facts are right, their presentation may be biased.
Take for example the case of retired British GP and prolific author Vernon Coleman. As at the time of writing, the first two sentences of the Wikipedia article on him read:
Vernon Coleman is an English conspiracy theorist,[1][2][3] anti-vaccination activist,[4][5] AIDS denialist,[6][7] blogger and novelist who writes on topics related to human health, politics and animal issues.
Coleman's medical claims have been widely discredited and described as pseudoscientific.
Given that start, why would anyone read any further, either of the article or anything written by Dr Coleman?
Yet all may not be what it seems. There is a site critical of Wikipedia, calling itself ‘Wikispooks’; this asserts that online information sources can be subverted by ‘deep state’ actors in order to influence public perceptions and promote official agendas. Wikispooks says:
His [Coleman’s] Wikipedia article received a complete re-write when he started to criticize the official narrative on Covid-19… The edit history of his Wikipedia page is well worth studying. The number of edits in March 2020 became very high and since then is more than double the number since the beginning of that article in 2005. Especially apparent is the agenda when comparing the last version of 2019 and any example of it in 2021. Philip Cross did a few edits as well.
I came across the name ‘Philip Cross’ several years ago in connection with another writer (and former diplomat), Craig Murray, who made himself unpopular with the authorities by whistle-blowing about human rights abuses in Uzbekistan. Murray has since been outspoken on other matters, and was recently jailed for some months for his comments on what he saw as a conspiracy against former SNP leader Alex Salmond.
Another way in which ‘the system’ can attack individuals is through suppressing their presence on the internet, or by misrepresenting them. Wikispooks says:
In 2016 Craig Murray reported that he was shadow banned by Twitter and Facebook, resulting in a loss of 90% of the referrals to his website.[57]
"Philip Cross" made hundreds of "hostile" edits to Craig Murray's Wikipedia page, before suddenly stopping on 8 May 2018.[58]
To build trust and then abuse it is a source of power. As the man said, ‘The secret of success is sincerity. Once you can fake that you've got it made.’ Some (including Craig Murray) say that, for example, the investigative site Bellingcat has itself become a conduit for intelligence agency narratives.
It’s not just with Dr Coleman or Craig Murray that we have to exercise caution; and perhaps there may be elements of what they say that can be trusted more than officialdom.