by Brent Bedford
I think that one of the great strengths of the open collaborative approach is the fast and powerful destruction of untenable conspiracy theories. It is quite easy to watch a pseudo-documentary like ``Loose Change" and to find it compelling, until you back up and do some homework with the help of sites like Wikipedia.
--Jimbo Wales,[1]02:48, 7 July 2006 (UTC); from the "9/11 Conspiracy Theories Page" of campaigns.wikia
According to its page, ``What Wikipedia is NOT," Wikipedia is NOT a publisher of original thought (WP:NOT#OTHOUGHT).[2]It is NOT a democracy (WP:NOT#DEMOCRACY). Wikipedia is NOT an indiscriminate collection of information (WP:NOT#INFO, WP:NOT#NEWS), yet at the same time, it is NOT censored (WP:NOT#CENSORED). What, then, is Wikipedia, and how does such a formless, ``collaborative approach" so powerfully and quickly destroy ``conspiracy theories"?
In a world where ``conspiracy theories" are ruled out, you are not permitted to determine the reason for anything. All you can do is arrive at a conveniently arbitrary consensus, through submission to manipulation and persuasion. To ensure the ``fast and powerful destruction" of conspiracy theories, Wikipedia was created. Wikipedia is simply a conspiracy of anonymous editors who create and change Wikipedia entries. Did the Nazis facilitate the burning of the Reichstag to consolidate Hitler's dictatorship? If you read the ``Reichstag Fire" page on Wikipedia (in its current form), you are led to believe that it was done at the hands of Communists.
But is there really a consensus against conspiracy theories?
In order to create this consensus, or break it, when ``necessary," Jimmy Wales has structured Wikipedia to be a very loose and powerless body. As Wales described it, his relationship to Wikipedia is analogous to the Queen's relationship to her Parliament. Wikipedia's first step toward achieving consensus involves the Mediation Committee (MedCom), a body drafted by Wales in 2004 to resolve ``disputes." Wales has the final say on its members. When MedCom fails to neutralize dissidents, they are referred to the Arbitration Committee (ArbCom), which imposes binding solutions by decree. (Of course, Wales reserves the right of executive clemency in all matters.)
ArbCom ensures that WP:NPOV (Neutral-Point-of-View) is never violated. If they fail, Jimbo Wales has the final say, and he even retains the power to dissolve the ArbCom at any time. To make sure Wikipedia does not degenerate into anarchy, Jimbo created WP:NOT#ANARCHY. As I show below, these rules do nothing but obscure the fact that Jimbo always has the final say--not the ``editor" or ``community."
On the Wikipedia:Elections page, it is even stated explicitly that Wikipedia discourages voting and favors decree by consensus. In the case of ArbCom, even though they held ``elections," these were only ``suggestions" to Jimbo on whom they thought he should select, reject, or retain for the ArbCom. He has the final say--always! (WP:CONEXCEPT, ``consensus exceptions").
And, the policy of ArbCom itself is not based on any sort of principle except that which ``may be tweaked as the Committee gains experience and learns better ways of doing things." This policy toward policy, it has been suggested by Wales, is not subject to amendment by the ``community."
Well, as it turns out, the reason Wikipedia stinks so much, is that its loyal Wikipedians worship a man, Jimbo Wales, who follows in the footsteps of ... Ayn Rand! Wales found inspiration for naming his poor daughter after a character from Ayn Rand's cheesy epic, We the Living. What's worse, Wales' entire history is spilled out in daily rantings on alt.philosophy.objectivism, bit.listserv.politics, and elsewhere, all throughout the 1990s, when he underwent a peer-dominated religious transformation to become the ego-worshipping, Ayn Rand-defending anarchist that he still is, today. This serves as the most painful documentation of Wales' pathetically mediocre existence. And to think--Wales' hometown, Huntsville, Ala., was the residence of the German V-2 rocket scientists, whose scientific knowledge propelled America into the Space Age!
Before founding Wikipedia, Wales moderated and contributed material to websites devoted to Ayn Rand's doctrine of Objectivism. When that failed to take off, he started something not much different than an Ayn Rand novel, a soft-core porn portal, called Bomis.com. He moved to California and subsequently founded Wikipedia with his good libertarian buddy from the USENET groups, Larry Sanger. By removing Ayn Rand's name, but demanding that only material published from inside her hellish world be tolerated on Wikipedia's pages, hundreds of people were fooled into giving Wikipedia credit for its good aspects, which were all actually unintended by Wales (and, which people have discussed implementing since the 1940s), while missing the significance of its faults, as well as its mysterious alliance with Google.
In August 2004, User:Herschelkrustofsky followed procedure and filed a request for arbitration, over a dispute involving User:Adam_Carr, User:John_Kenney, and User:Homey, three people who had engaged in ``edit wars" with him over the status of Wikipedia:Lyndon LaRouche. These users refused to participate in User:Herschelkrustofsky's earlier request for Mediation, through MedCom, which is the procedure Wikipedians are encouraged to follow.
The edit wars began over the following superlative: ``The most outspoken proponent of American System Economics in the early 20th Century was Dr. Sun Yat-sen. Today, it is the American politician and economist Lyndon LaRouche," which User:Herschelkrustofsky had added to Wikipedia:American System. User:Homey deleted this statement, and also reverted edits made on Wikipedia:Frankfurt School, which cited Lyndon LaRouche as the third major school of criticism of the Frankfurt School.
An attempt to summarize the proceedings of this legal battle here would be long and pointless. The case will be preserved online--unless WP:OFFICE deletes it--at Wikipedia:Requests_for_arbitration/Lyndon_LaRouche and /Lyndon_LaRouche_2. It is noteworthy that User:Adam_Carr is a political enemy of Lyndon LaRouche's movement in Australia. The outcome of the LaRouche1 trial led to terms of probation for User:Herschelkrustofsky.
Subsequently, in LaRouche2, involving opposition to User:Herschelkrustofsky by other political enemies of LaRouche--Chip Berlet (User:cberlet) and suspected Linda Mack (User:SlimVirgin)--the ArbCom ruled that User:Herschelkrustofsky had violated his terms of probation created after LaRouche1, and they enacted a one-year ban against editing Wikipedia, which was later extended to July 2008.
After delivering this fateful sentence, ArbCom enacted the following decrees, with accompanying penalties for future users who violated them:
Original work which originates from LaRouche and his movement may be removed from any Wikipedia article in which it appears other than the article Wikipedia:Lyndon LaRouche and other closely related articles.
Supporters of LaRouche are instructed not to add references to him directly to articles, except where they are highly relevant, and not to engage in activities that might be perceived as ``promotion" of LaRouche.
In light of this ruling, User:Will_Beback proceeds to delete material not just having to do with LaRouche, but with Jose@aa Rizal, Friedrich List, Henry Cary, the doubling of the cube, Pope John Paul II, and the drug-legalization policies of Milton Friedman and George Shultz.
This story is demented and broken on so many levels, it is quite difficult to know where to begin, even. Here we have an excellent Wikipedia administrator who has been victimized by lunatic conspiracy theorists, a private person who has absolutely no relation to the wild stories that this article promulgates. Slashdot, you have been trolled.
At the end of July 2007, a professor of Physics and International Humanitarian Law, Dr. Ludwig de Braeckeleer published an expose of Wikipedia"s penetration by intelligence services. The article was published on the Korean website OhMyNews, and was quickly picked up by Slashdot and other sites.
Dr. de Braeckeleer had been investigating the 1988 incident involving Pan Am Flight 103, known as the Lockerbie bombing. He wrote:
``In the aftermath of the Lockerbie bombing in 1988, the finger of suspicion quickly pointed to a Syria-based Palestinian organization--the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, General Command (PFLP-GC)--hired by Iran. The terrorist group was created by a former Syrian army captain, Ahmed Jibril, who broke away from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) in 1968.
``I had learned from a recently released U.S. National Archives file that Shin Bet, the Israeli Security Agency, had infiltrated the PFLP and helped the Entebbe hijackers (Israeli commandos rescued the hostages in Uganda in 1976), so I wanted to learn more about the link between the PFLP and the PFLP-GC. I also wanted to learn more about allegations made by David Colvin, the first secretary of the British Embassy in Paris, concerning the rather bizarre collaboration between the PFLP and the Shin Bet.
``As I could not locate the article in which I had learned about the allegations, I consulted the article on the Entebbe Operation on Wikipedia, where I knew the story had been noted. To my surprise, I found that all references to the alleged collaboration between the PFLP and the Shin Bet had been suppressed. Moreover, it is no longer possible to edit the page."
Upon a closer inspection of these Lockerbie-related Wikipedia articles, de Braeckeleer identified SlimVirgin as an editor of articles relating to Pan Am 103, as well as those of ABC News journalist Pierre Salinger--one of the original investigators of the Pan Am 103 incident, who was working out of the ABC News London Bureau at the time. Salinger served as the White House press secretary for Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, as a U.S. Senator from California, and as campaign manager for the Robert Kennedy 1968 Presidential campaign. While investigating the Pan Am 103 incident in London, he and his collaborator, John Cooley, hired a young graduate student from Cambridge, Linda Mack.
As John Cooley would later write, in a submission to the website Wikipedia Review, which investigates suspiciously powerful Wikipedia Administrators, like SlimVirgin:
``She claimed to have lost a friend/lover on [Pan Am] 103 and so was anxious to clear up the mystery. ABC News paid for her travel and expenses as well as a salary....
``...Salinger came to believe that [first name redacted but known to be Linda] was working for [name of intelligence agency redacted but known to be Britain's MI5], and had been from the beginning; assigned genuinely to investigate Pan Am 103, but also to infiltrate and monitor us."
A Cambridge University website showing the names and e-mail addresses of its alumni, provided the link between Linda Mack and her former e-mail address, slimvirgin1@cayahoo.com.
SlimVirgin is also known for her edits of Lyndon LaRouche-related Wikipedia pages going back to 2004.
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[1] Jimmy Donal ``Jimbo" Wales, is identified on Wikipedia as the president of Wikia, Inc., and the board member and chair emeritus of the Wikimedia Foundation.
[2] This notation is official ``Wiki-speak."