Cast into an Orwellian world of faceless bullies
WORKING as a reporter for almost 30 years — first for Anglia TV and then the BBC — it was always imperative to be accurate. That’s why I never looked at Wikipedia after the online encyclopedia launched in 2001 and quickly gained in popularity. I’d heard it was full of errors and shot through with personal prejudices and score-settling.
But our daughter said she had stumbled upon its entry for me and the very first line was wrong. It claimed that I had been educated at Millfield, one of the most expensive private schools in the country.
Naturally, I wanted to get this mistake corrected.
But this meant being plunged into a disturbing world similar to the one conjured up by Kafka in his novels about the oppression of the human spirit by sinister, powerful forces.
It is a world now coming under increasing scrutiny after 53 of its editors, almost all of whom remain anonymous, collaborated in a vote which persuaded Wikipedia that it ought to ban the Daily Mail.
The move was revealed by the Leftwing Guardian newspaper, which said the site’s editors had decided that the Mail’s journalism cannot be trusted — though no statistics were offered in support of this claim.
Meanwhile, the website has no qualms about using the state propaganda outlets of many of the world’s most repressive dictatorships as a source. Wikipedia has yet to ban the Chinese government’s Xinhua news agency, Iran’s PressTV or the Kremlin mouthpiece Russia Today.
As for my story, first the facts: I went to Preston Manor County Grammar School, near the old Wembley Stadium, in the Fifties.
My father was a London taxidriver, my mother a book-keeper. They could certainly not have afforded the fees at Millfield — which was 130-plus miles away.
So I emailed Wikipedia about the error, using an address it provides to contact its ‘volunteer editors’, thinking it would be easy for them to remove such a glaring mistake.
Exactly who had made the error, I didn’t know. The site’s pages can be written and edited by anyone in the world, with 30 million people now registered as ‘editors’, of whom around 130,000 have been active in the past six months.
But I was told that there were several sources citing my attendance at Millfield, as if this proved that I did go there.
I felt I was being told to shut up and go away.
How could I give them proof? Send them a picture of me aged 11, in a Preston Manor School photograph? Dig out my old school report and send it to Wikipedia’s Volunteer Response Team at info-en-o@wikimedia.org?
Even then, would they believe me and correct the entry?
Since I noticed other factual errors (such as the sequence of the jobs I have done and their dates), rather than embark upon the laborious task of correcting everything, especially in the face of clear resistance, I asked Wikipedia to delete my entry entirely.
I then received a message from someone who initially signed himself as ‘Axl’ though it emerged after my probing that this was a pseudonym and he claimed his name was Alex Matulic.
I found out that most of the contributers to Wikipedia hide behind such aliases. ‘Axl’ told me that this was to protect them from people who became ‘irate’ about the website’s anonymous profilers.
I assured him that I was not ‘irate’ but simply wanted my privacy protected from an organisation that was so careless it couldn’t get right something as basic as where I went to school.
‘Axl’ then informed me it was most unlikely that what he called ‘The Community’ of Wikipedia would permit my entry to be deleted. ‘The Community’ sounded like something from George orwell’s 1984 novel and the faceless men in Big Brother’s Ministry of Truth.
Next, I asked for the identity of the person who had written my profile. ‘Axl’ was reluctant to tell me, but said the man was an ‘academic’ based in Northern Ireland specialising in ethnic studies, then revealed another pseudonym with a ‘link’ to the man’s personal profile, listing his academic achievements but hiding his identity — which I never discovered.
I told ‘Axl’ the one thing a proper journalist would have done before writing such a piece would have been to speak to people who knew me. That’s what happens when a profile appears in a newspaper.
Eventually, ‘Axl’ agreed to remove the reference to Millfield, but informed me that my request for full deletion would have to go for consideration by ‘The Community’. I would not be informed of its judgment for a week.
By now I had discovered that ‘The Community’ consists of anyone in a group of self-appointed busybodies with time on their hands who sign up for Wikipedia and chip in with their views and judgments on people they probably do not know. The results of the work of these individuals then appear on the Wikipedia website masquerading as a bulletin of record. All this correspondence took several weeks with emails going back and forth. When ‘The Community’ graciously began to consider my request for deletion, a hint of their true nature was revealed when Axl directed me to the online thread in which they discussed the issue. one said that as my public profile was ‘lower than a gnat’s belly’, it would be no loss to delete
me. Another added: ‘We will easily survive without him.’
Then, the still unidentified man who had written my own entry joined in. I found out that the name he hid behind was Kerasapa, rather sinister, I thought.
He said it had not been his finest work and he had no objection to its deletion.
Finally, several weeks after my initial complaint, ‘Axl’ informed me that my Wikipedia entry had been deleted.
Thus freed from the unelected tyranny of Wikipedia, I felt pleased with my small but significant victory against the seemingly all-seeing and all-powerful website by revealing it to be arrogant, obstinate and wrong.
But how many others have they traduced?
My experience at the hands of Wikipedia’s editors demonstrates just why their online encyclopedia — so ready to smear the Mail as ‘unreliable’ — has become notorious for inaccuracies.
But far more is at stake than the inconvenience and upset they cause to individuals, unpleasant though it is.
When the term ‘fake news’ is increasingly used by political opponents as a catch-all criticism against reputable outlets, the authority of what is presented to the world as fact has never been more important.
If those online editors who banned the Daily Mail really do want to lead their readers to the truth, I suggest that they warn them off a source much closer to home: Wikipedia itself.