Wednesday, June 20, 2007

Wikipedia - The Memory Hole




Gone - Gavin Hopley, Christopher Yates, Charlene Downes, Mary-Ann Leneghan, Richard Whelan. Was Ross Parker there before ?

Charlene Downes entry was deleted by a chap called Srikeit, an Indian national who discovered Wikipedia in January and became an administrator in July. I have to admire his self-confidence in feeling able to chop an item on an English murder - I'm sure I wouldn't feel myself competent to pronounce on murder cases in India.

How long can Kriss Donald's entry survive ? Or Isiah Young-Sam's ?

I don't think we have to worry yet about Anthony Walker. But don't tell them about the Zebra Killings.




(Hat-tip and stolen logo - the Dumb One)

11 comments:

Unknown said...

I see that a user called The Happy Rampager has left a lengthy comment on his user talk page regarding the deletion.

wiki talkbalk page for Srikeit

No reply yet.

Is that one of your aliases or perhaps that of another visitor to your blog?

Hopefully someone will put it back.

Answers.com still has a copy of the Charlene Downes entry if anyone want to copy and paste the information back into wikipedia.

answers.com page for Charlene Downes

Anonymous said...

Yeah its bad that someone in India deletes articals about events in England after a stupid poll that is dominated by liberals, and 'anti-racists'.
But its not that bad. Its only wikipedia.
The bigger questions should be where's the memory hole in Britains big media. We should even 'need' wikipedia if our proper news organisations were doing their job.

Anonymous said...

On the contrary, Wikipedia is far more accessible than the MSM, it's potentially a good way to make sure that the cases or Charlene Downes, Chris Yates and others aren't thrown down the memory hole, and can be something to compare the media's account against. Wikipedia actually has a policy of 'neutrality' which to my mind
means that the entries on Charlene et al ought to be retained, and the deletion of those entries indicates
bias rather than neutrality - something which Wikipedia is supposedly against.

Anonymous said...

I believe the Charlene Downes was deleted at the request of her family.

Anonymous said...

They used to have some excellent hi-resolution charts on Wikipedia that showed the relationship between CO2 and temperature over the last 600000 years. Problem was these charts showed clearly that CO2 increase FOLLOWS temperature increase, not the other way around, thus refuting climate change theory.

Mysteriously the charts have since dissappeared leaving only charts with a low resolution from which no clear indication can be extracted.

Oh what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive.....

Edwin Greenwood said...

IanCroydon: I believe the Charlene Downes was deleted at the request of her family.

The archived AfD discussion was certainly marked, presumably by the ubiquitous Srikeit, as "blanked as a courtesy to the surviving relatives", which is not quite the same thing as "at the request of...", unless you have another source for this, of course.

In any case, encyclopaedias should not suppress material because it might upset someone. It's ultimately up to the someone not to look at the relevant article. A little harsh, perhaps, but encyclopaedias are about truth.

Anonymous said...

There was an easy fix to the objections of the other editors, which was rename the article "Murder of Charlene Downes". Nothing to stop you doing that now in fact.

Edwin Greenwood said...

Anonymous: There was an easy fix to the objections of the other editors, which was rename the article "Murder of Charlene Downes".

They would still counter that with the "lack of notability" argument, ie that the incident was a transient news item with no exceptional features meriting a dedicated encyclopaedia article.

Actually the unstated presumption of the "Delete Posse" seems to be that while white-on-black murders are (a) ipso facto racist and (b) automatically notable as corroborating evidence of White nastiness, black-on-white murders are never racist and are very much business as usual. (Nothing to see here, folks, just some white guy getting his just desserts.)

You can't use generic reasoned argument against that kind of smug pigheadedness. As Tottenhamlad said elsewhere (I forget where), the only response is to sign up to Wikepedia and bombard the AfD discussion with (reasoned) "Keep" votes.

Anonymous said...

"They would still counter that with the "lack of notability" argument, ie that the incident was a transient news item with no exceptional features meriting a dedicated encyclopaedia article."

The obvious reply there is that the very point of an encyclopedia is to inform people about important matters, which they presumably were earlier ignorant of. As such, it isn't notability, it's importance that should be used to decide to keep or dump.

Anonymous said...

As I said at Tottenham Lad:

Here are the comments about why the Mary-Ann Leneghan article at Wikipedia was deleted:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Mary_Ann_Leneghan

A good example of how liberalism works. It's a "non-notable crime". It's:

Another one. Poor child was raped and murdered - do we need to record it. Newsworthy, yes. Encyclopedic, no. We have too many of these British child muder victims - and many seem to be chosen for their possible racial dynamic. I don't want to imply anything, but....

I wonder if he reads the Guardian and believes "There's only One Race -- the Human Race"?

Anonymous said...

Isiah-Young Sam's page - gone!