WHAT A WIKI HYPOCRITE

Wikipedia’s boss is crusading against ‘fake news’ and media manipulation. Yet he altered his own online entry . . . to delete his pornographic past

THe BBC rolled out its proverbial red carpet this week to give Jimmy Wales, co-founder of the website Wikipedia, a high-profile platform to promote his latest pet project.

In reverent tones more appropriate for an encounter with the Pope, the American entrepreneur was interviewed on Radio 4’s Today programme about a new media service to tackle ‘fake news’.

So-called ‘fake news’ is increasingly widespread, thanks to a proliferation of websites that publish stories they know to be false. It’s also become a term of abuse against accurate articles which people dislike. According to Wales, his new venture, Wikitribune, aims to provide stories that are ‘politically-neutral’ and meticulously ‘fact-checked’.

How this will be achieved was left vague. Wales merely suggested the site’s agenda — overseen by a motley selection of right-on celebrity ‘advisors’ (including model-turnedactress Lily Cole) — will be ‘driven by readers’.

By the rigorous standards of the Today programme, best known for John Humphrys’ scrupulous interviews, the encounter saw Wales given a very easy time.

Vulgar

This was surprising at a time of concern about free speech and censorship online, and when the BBC is protective of its own reputation for political neutrality.

Specifically, Wales was not asked two obvious questions.

First: How can Wikipedia’s creator preach about the dangers of fake news considering that the internet site is infamous for inaccuracies?

It once claimed as ‘fact’ that Greek philosopher Plato was a Hawaiian surfer who discovered Florida. More recently, it gave the wrong name for the man who killed six people in the terror attack on London’s Westminster Bridge.

Second: having doctored his own Wikipedia page to play down his previous links to the porn industry, how can he complain about media manipulation?

For back in the Nineties, Wales launched a dotcom firm called Bomis, which profited from ventures such as ‘Bomis Babes’, a search engine that let users trawl the internet for vulgar photos, and ‘Nekkid’, a website with degrading images of nude women.

Fast forward to 2005, and having achieved global fame, Wales edited his own Wikipedia page in an apparent attempt to erase unwholesome aspects of this episode. He made 18 changes, cutting references to ‘Bomis Babes’ and replacing the word ‘pornography’ with softer terms such as ‘glamour photography’.

However, the changes were spotted. Although Wales argued he’d merely been trying to correct factual errors and provide a more ‘rounded’ version of events, he apologised, admitting it’s unethical to edit one’s own page on the site.

‘People shouldn’t do it, including me,’ he said. ‘I wish I hadn’t done it. It’s in poor taste.’ A fuller mention of ‘Bomis Babes’ returned to his Wikipedia page.

Flagrant

But how Wales now squares this episode with his opposition to ‘fake news’ is unclear.

Then there’s the issue of Wikipedia’s attitude to fact-checking.

Unlike mainstream news organisations, which operate under the law and have robust corrections policies (the Mail’s is regulated by the Independent Press Standards Organisation), Wikipedia sometimes refuses to remove flagrant inaccuracies from its site.

A cynic might wonder if the BBC treats Wales so reverentially because he has impeccable liberal credentials: a campaigner against Brexit, who (until this week) sat on the board of the Guardian, and is married to Tony Blair’s former diary secretary (Alastair Campbell played bagpipes at their wedding).

Wales says he was inspired to launch ‘politically-neutral’ Wikitribune by the Brexit vote and the election of Donald Trump, which left him with ‘a feeling things have gone wrong’. Of course, Wales is perfectly entitled to be unhappy with both events.

However, if the basis for the creation of Wikitribune is that these two democratic decisions indicate ‘things have gone wrong’, then it suggests the site may not be ‘neutral’.

The BBC failed to confront Wales on this. What’s more, his previous internet activities show what many would call ‘form’ for projecting liberal prejudice.

In February, for example, he was behind a PR stunt in which Wikipedia, the world’s sixthmost-popular website, decided the Daily Mail is too ‘unreliable’ to be included on its site.

No statistics were offered to support this claim and it came shortly before the Mail was named Newspaper of the Year at the British Press Awards, the news industry’s Oscars.

Unsurprisingly, many therefore saw Wikipedia’s ban as politically-motivated.

Indeed, no other world news source has been censored in this way. And yet Wikipedia remains happy to publish information from state propaganda outlets of North Korea and Russia, and a host of Leftwing dictatorships.

Wikipedia claimed the ban followed a ballot of the site’s volunteer editors.

But that was — shall we say — stretching the truth: for the vote took place in virtual secrecy and involved just 53 editors, a mere 0.00018 per cent of the 30 million total.

One of the most vociferous advocates of Wikipedia’s censorship of the Mail was a man from Bournemouth who was acquainted with Wales via the site’s chat-rooms, where they had shared conversations.

An investigation by the Mail subsequently revealed the man was a vile internet troll who’d shared Islamophobic, and potentially illegal material on his public Facebook page.

One post stated: ‘All Muslim men admitted to Paradise will have an ever-erect penis and they will each marry 70 wives, all with appetising vaginas.’

Still more posts (on what is a social network accessible by children) contained pornographic images: two gay men performing a sex-act in public and bestiality between a man and a sheep.

Yet rather than condemn this behaviour, Wales (who told his BBC interviewer that internet trolls and anti-Semites are ‘banned almost instantly’ from Wikipedia) defended it.

Disastrous

He used one of the site’s chatrooms to describe the Bournemouth activist as a harmless ‘charity volunteer’.

All of which suggests that Wales, this self-styled crusader against ‘fake news’, has been guilty of propagating something very similar.

As to Wikitribune, its celebrity backers must hope that its future is more successful than Wales’s last big venture, an ‘ethical’ mobile phone firm called The People’s Operator.

He joined as £250,000-a-year chairman in 2014, promoting it via interviews (including one on the BBC) in which he claimed the company could be worth £2 billion by 2018.

It duly raised £20 million from investors to float on the stock market at £1.30 a share, but the share price nose-dived.

By the time Wales quit in January this year, they were trading at 2.5p each.

This disastrous episode is also almost entirely absent from his Wikipedia page.

Above all, it’s most odd that our national broadcaster should provide such a comfortable PR platform for this egregious Wiki-hypocrite.