FAKING THE NEWS
How much can you believe Wikipedia? Winston Aldworth reveals all.
British journalist Simon Ricketts, who died in December, once scored a hat-trick on debut for the England under-14s football team and was the first man to kitesurf across the Mediterranean. He briefly dated Melanie C, of the Spice Girls and it was Ricketts who developed the slogan “Hope”, when working as a marketing consultant to Barack Obama’s nascent presidential campaign. Earlier, when moonlighting as a script rewriter, Ricketts had convinced Quentin Tarantino to ditch the clunky film title “The Tyranny of Evil Men” and instead go for Pulp Fiction.
I met Ricketts at the Independent newspaper in London in the mid-2000s where we were news sub-editors, working into the early hours of the morning, running stories into the next day’s paper, and generally getting in a few pints in our dinner break — occasionally a few more after final edition. He was smart, funny and wore a cool leather wrist-strap thing. We hit it off immediately.
In UK papers at the time, it was common to throw a news story out of a later edition and run in a piece about a dead semi-celebrity. The job of writing these pieces would be given to a keen, young, night reporter, a 20-something who sat eagerly at their desk until 1am in the hope that some movie starlet who’d dated a Duke in the 1960s had died, or that a bloke who’d flown with the Dam Busters and later scored an FA Cup-winning goal would pop their clogs. (Fact: the UK has more dead semi-celebrities per day, per capita than any other nation. People you wouldn’t think would warrant a mention in the briefs column would get a 700-word tribute if their demise made the Press Association wires in time for second edition.)
One night at work in the mid-2000s, news came through that Derek Taverner had died. You know the bloke. No? Taverner was an accomplished musician and composer — he wrote the theme tune to the television show Dad’s Army, the foot-tapping Who Do You Think You Are Kidding Mr Hitler? And he had a late-career renaissance when he co-wrote a top hit for chartclimbing pop group S-Club 7, in the 1990s. S-Club freaking 7.
Except, he didn’t.
Someone had jumped on Taverner’s Wikipedia page and slipped in the reference to an S-Club 7 song credit. At all the UK papers — all those harried junior night reporters — had mined
Wikipedia and thrown the S-Club 7 reference into their copy to pad it out as deadline loomed. All the papers (except, from memory, the Daily
Telegraph) were busted the next day for relying on unsubstantiated claims posted on Wikipedia, an unverifiable and unreliable source. Our bad.
Don’t blame the night reporters. The poor kids had 45 minutes to write 600 words about someone they’d never heard of. You try it. Blame the people who owned, managed and underresourced the papers.
Wikipedia is today the fifth most-visited website in the world. Journalists have long been warned not to reply upon it as source material.
The Taverner sting got me and Ricketts thinking. What if every time someone was about to die, we got on their Wikipedia page and typed in loads of half-believable nonsense? Something that would slip through in the 45-minute scramble. If enough papers ran enough patently ludicrous stuff about enough dead semi-celebrities, we could maybe get enough material together to make a lightweight, funny book, canvassing the flimsiness of modern news processes. This was the mid-2000s and we’d invented Fake News. If we’d trademarked the name, we’d be millionaires by now — or, on the downside, White House spokespeople.
Naturally, we agreed that any paper we worked for should be preserved. We’d diligently watch and edit out any of our own dubious Wikipedia-sourced nonsense under our masthead.
As Ricketts and I saw it, we weren’t information vandals, we were artists highlighting the awful lack of resources being put into news production by the people who owned the media. And we’d have fun.
Quickly we figured out how to rudimentarily game the Wikipedia system. Wikipedia is, of course, one of the world’s most-used websites. It’s an online encyclopedia of humanity — slave to no master, noble in principle and staffed by an army of zealous volunteers. Anyone could offer their expertise — writing and editing articles, that later Wiki editors would edit further. Good on them. Wikipedia’s openness was its strength.
It’s openness was also its weakness. By shifting about, logging in from different machines and using different registrations, we could change small details in different profiles, assuming the role of “concerned editor”. We learned that the more outlandish claims would be quickly edited out. And the more high profile the ailing figure, the more likely our edits were to be cut altogether. When someone like the imminently jokeable David Bowie dies, the relevant page is quickly shut for editing.
We had some fun minor victories. To this day there are people who still believe Roy Scheider (the cop from Jaws) was the initial casting choice to play John Rambo.
I can’t recall most of our other rewrites but I’ll never forget our masterpiece. When Jose Ramos-Horta, the respected statesman of newly fledged nation East Timor, was shot in an assassination attempt in February 2008, we got to work. For weeks, we massaged and tweaked RamosHorta’s Wikipedia profile, fabricating crucial footnotes and weblinks that led down internet wormholes to make our version of Ramos-Horta more believable to vigilant Wikipedia editors and bleary-eyed night reporters. Our version of the man was certainly more fun, we had the Nobel Prize winner an accomplished professional volleyballer and jazz musician who paid for his studies at The Hague by touring with a Rocky Horror
Picture Show troupe.
At its peak, with Ramos-Horta grasping for the doctor’s sleeve, his Wikipedia page was our crowning achievement in fakery. While on other Wikipedia profiles, we’d merely slipped one fake fact in, here we’d created a whole new Jose. There was a moment there, where if he’d died, newspaper obituaries all over the world would have been the punchline to our joke — and our hilarious book would be underway. But the heart monitor beeped back into life. As the real man stood tall again, our highly finessed version of Ramos-Horta was slowly edited away. No: he didn’t play top volleyball. No: He was never Frank N. Furter. And no: he couldn’t play the saxophone. Happily, Ramos-Horta is alive today (according to his Wikipedia page) and I wish him the best of health.
NEW ZEALAND’S Wikipedian-at-large, Mike Dickison, doesn’t take our messing about and goosing lightly.
“It irritates me a bit when people vandalise Wikipedia pages — especially when they try to reframe it by calling it ‘messing about’ or ‘goosing’. There are always sociopaths who think vandalising Wikipedia is cool, especially if they fool someone.
“Some articles are relied on by tens or hundreds of thousands of people every day — from kids researching an essay to elderly people needing medical advice. Fake news is an increasing problem in journalism, but Wikipedia’s buffered against it. Its articles, especially wellused and important ones, are kept reliable entirely through the efforts of unpaid volunteers. Nobody’s getting paid to do this.”
Today, vandalised pages are less likely to stay vandalised for long, Dickison says.
“Over the past 10 years Wikipedia volun- teers have organised themselves into teams to check recent changes for suspicious edits. Vandals tend to be new users or anonymous; and their edits aren’t backed up by reliable sources, so they’re reverted by a human volunteer in a few minutes. Crude vandalism like adding swear words is fixed by software in 15 to 30 seconds. The more obscure the article, the longer the vandalism can persist: a 19-year-old from Dannevirke snuck his name into a long list of Japanese monsters from folklore and it stuck around so long a game designer used it, thinking it was real.
In New Zealand, says Dickison, there are only about 250 regular Wikipedia editors, “so more of their time gets wasted reverting vandalism than in other countries.
“Whenever something big hits the news, a vandal will try to change the article; they get a thrill from seeing their changes repeated by media. Academics, teachers, and journalists rely on Wikipedia — and they should! It’s often the most reliable source out there. The danger is if something gets into the permanent record, and historians in the future get confused.” Dickison’s tip: “If you rely on Wikipedia, check the citations. Everything in the article is supposed to be backed up by reliable, independent sources, so if there are no references, be suspicious.”
ALL OF this bit is true.
The journalist Simon Ricketts, who died in December, was a really lovely and funny bloke. Late in life, while working at the Guardian, he was a bit of a Twitter celeb and BBC pundit, with thousands of online followers and a knack for the coughingly funny and the gently profound.
Simon was the first person I ever knew to disengage with someone on social media because they were a bit of a Nazi (the guy was an East End cab driver, known to his customers and fellow cab drivers as “Dave Hitler”).
As a handsome young man, he’d fronted a rock ’n’ roll band with a residency at a bar in Spain. He did — truly — moonlight as a movie script rewriter. He supported Watford FC and loved people. My mate was a humble, wise and beautiful bloke who’d roll his eyes to see me say so. If you followed him on social media, then you’ll have a good idea of what he was about. In little bits, his humour, mischief, humanity and warmth made places better — whether online or here, in the real world. Simon’s legacy?
Enjoy what you read and write, but don’t believe it all.