Lies, damned lies, and the wickedness of Wikipedia
Tuesday May 27 2008
Googling away, as one does, I came across my Wikipedia entry the other day, and learnt for the very first time that I was recruited as an agent by the British in Belfast.
Furthermore, I also discovered that a sexual offence by me against a young boy was hushed up by the authorities, and the child's parents were mysteriously induced to stay silent.
That entry has since been removed. Later -- the Wikipedia entry informed me -- I then became a British agent in the Republic, and Wikipedia even quoted at length from a column I had never written, extolling our duty to be loyal to Mother England.
To judge from the accuracy of the items about me, we can only imagine what Wikipedia might say in the future about any number of illustrious Irish men and women.
Ireland's first woman President, Mary Robinson, the eldest of 17 children, was probably born, Immaculata Higginbottom, to a Tallaght washerwoman.
She became Mary Robinson on her marriage to Peter Robinson (qv), whom she had first met on the doorstep of the massage parlour where she did the laundry, and he was handing out election literature.
She was smoking a Park Drive cigarette, her hair was in curlers, and her stockings around her ankles: it was love at first sight. She entered politics in protest after her 10th child, Billygene, failed to qualify from the opening heat of the Miss Ireland (Butlin's, Mosney) competition.
Of her successor, Mary McAleese, Wikipedia no doubt says she is the first transgender president of Ireland.
She was born Tarquin Tollemache-Tollemache Plantagenet Chandos, 17th in line to the throne of England, and fourth to the principality of Luxemburg.
The young Tarquin was commissioned into the Blues and Royals, and it was while performing assassination duties in south Armagh, that he discovered both his Irish roots (his mother was an Arbuthnot-Arbuthnot, of the Sligo Arbuthnot-Arbuthnots) and his feminine side.
Two weeks in Casablanca soon sorted that out, and Mary McAleese was born.
However, Tarquin Tollemache-Tollemache Plantagenet Chandos is not entirely dead: President McAleese even knows the second verse of 'There'll Always be an England', with which she often regales her guests at the secret St George's Day annual bash at the vice-regal lodge in Phoenix Park in Dublin.
The former Fine Gael leader Garret FitzGerald began his career on the boards, (says Wikipedia) with his imitations of birds, and occasionally of buildings: his portrayal of Wellington's Monument has yet to be bettered. He met his first wife, the comedian Maureen Potter, at the winter panto at the Gaiety, where she was playing Mother Goose and he was the rear-end of a horse. Upon her death, he was remarried, to the Nobel prize-winning economist Twink. They have a daughter, Chardonnay, and a son, Wayne.
And so on. Thus Wikipedia can give space to complete falsehood, both amiably frivolous and deeply malignant.
Lies and truth, fantasy and reality, superstition and fact have now achieved parity of Wikipedic esteem, exactly as they once did in the medieval market-place. It was the printing press -- and the encyclopedia which followed -- which abolished the authority of such ignorance, by the winnowing out, over time, of the chaff of malice and gobbledegook.
But time is the one dimension missing from the internet: instantaneity is the defining feature of this age: knowledge now, friends now, sex now, music now.
But these "now" things are all bogus: and whereas little or no harm results while the fantasies are confined to the internet, real evil can result when cyber-plane intersects with corporeal reality. Every misanthropic fantasist now has an uncontrolled forum for his or her bilious ravings, which are then given a wholly spurious "encyclopedic" status on Wikipedia, causing them to be believed and even acted on by the credulous, the weak, the stupid and the violent -- of which and of whom, there are absolutely no shortages.
Thus, at one level I can scoff at Wikipedia's preposterous allegations against me (and the very fact that 'Phoenix' magazine's poisonous vapourings are quoted as authoritative says something about the author of the Wikipedia item).
But at another level, there will inevitably be some who actually believe what they read -- and are possibly demented enough do something about it.
For I am called a sexual violator of children, a corrupter of the law, and a traitor to my country. The manifold lie is told in what masquerades as an encyclopedia, and the falsehood established in the credulous mind, and I have no comeback.
So who are the people who founded and run Wikipedia? I don't know, and nor have I any foolproof way of finding out, because the only way of doing so is by consulting Wikipedia itself: a hole-in-bucket solution to a hole-in-my-bucket problem (and if you don't understand that explanation, you're probably too young to understand anything else in this column).
And so -- do these wretched Wikipedia people ever lie awake worrying at the damage that the evil or the impressionable might inflict upon those who have been maligned in their uncontrolled and filthy internet gossip-shop, whose very power derives from the complete fiction that it is an "encyclopedia"?
I doubt it extremely: for of all the lies of our time, Wikipedia is surely the greatest.
kmyers@independent.ie
Oh dear, Kevin.
It's understandable that someone writing exclusively for printed media would be so critical of democractisation of social, historical and political commentry, because it means the old guard's reach is severely diminished.
Wikipedia is and always wil lbe a work in progress. Try searching through any A or B class articles and you'll probably find them tot he more even handed and encycolpeadic than any other article on the same subject.
You are, of course, not particularly notable and so your article is of lower priority meaning less people look at your entry and thus less people are there to fix it.
Oh, and yes, those crazy Wikpedia people do have a critieria system for articles.
How novel!
How contary to what you said in your article!
If you are a wikipedia editor, you can do something about this problem by voting for Gregory Kohs for the Wikipedia Board of Trustees.
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Board_elections/2008/Candidates/en
He's running on a platform of cleaning up the problem of biographies that Myers describes so well.
Kevin, you could not be more on target.
I feel for all who have suffered abuse.
In my article from the Israel News Agency entitled: "Wikipedia: A Nightmare Of Libel and Slander" - I also went into fine detail.
I was also hurt. If you perform a search for my name on Google one can see the results of my unmasking of Wikipedia administrator Gili Bar-Hillel who implied that I was a threat to her family. Rather than providing an apology, Wikipedia bashes me. Wikipedia calls that "abuse." But who is the one being abused by Wikipedia?
I will quote USA Today Senior Editor John Seigenthaler who was accused of assasinationg John F. Kennedy and his brother Robert F. Kennedy: "When I was a child, my mother lectured me on the evils of "gossip." She held a feather pillow and said, "If I tear this open, the feathers will fly to the four winds, and I could never get them back in the pillow. That's how it is when you spread mean things about people. For me, that pillow is a metaphor for Wikipedia."
Contemptible cowards who slander and defame someones good name and reputation should have no hiding place,
Why is Kevin comparing himself to Mary Robinson and Mary McAleese?
Perhaps the Wiki entry was a parody of Kevin's penchant for playing fast and lose with the facts.
It could be worse. Someone could start a false blog about you, like the ones for Pat Kenny or John Waters.
What a vile thing to write about you Kevin. But I can’t say that I’m surprised. Common decency and intellectual honesty seem to be common as dogs who speak Norwegian lately.
One of the main goals of Wikipedia has always been in the words of its creator Jimmy Wales to undermine "the tyranny of the expert", without the slightest care given to the idea than while some of the noisiest "experts" are vainglorious and asinine ideologues, the vast majority are intelligent, passionate people who have absorbed the knowledge of generations in their particular field and preserved that knowledge along with their own thoughts for those to come. The idea that the prejudices of the sundry lunatics ranting on the net would hold equal parity with the reasoning of an educated person who has given a lifetime of thought to their subject is like something from one of the more surreal Monty Python sketches.
Wikipedia is easily edited and certainly not a reliable source of information. Unfortunately, many people, especially the young use this resource as if it is reliable and they are unaware that it has a political outlook and will distort history and facts accordingly.
Having just looked through the history of the entry for Kevin Myers on Wikipedia (the lies never actually get removed - just buried) I can see exactly why this article was written - there is some real nasty bile-drenched misinformation written against him (and no doubt anyone even mildly controversial) on that site.
Far too much bad press for Wiki of late. It must be very distressing
for individuals defamed by entries. I believe these people have no
recourse through the courts also. It should be closed down.
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