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British Politicians Delete Negative Wikipedia Descriptions Before Election
EwanPalmer writes: The Wikipedia pages of dozens of UK politicians had references to sex scandals, fraud and opposition to same sex marriage removed in the run up to the UK general election. Dozens of MPs had negative aspects of their online biographies removed or altered prior to the election in a bid to make them more electable. The changes include several instances of MPs' expense claim scandals being removed, as well as details of arrests and the use of 'chauffeur-driven cars.' The edits were made using computers with IP addresses registered from inside Parliament.
You assholes re-elected the torie menace David Cameron, and he is going to COMPLETELY destroy your country.
'There is a Party slogan dealing with the control of the past,' he said. 'Repeat it, if you please.'
'"Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past,"' repeated Winston obediently.
I think there's a sense of defeat amongst most Wikipedia editors right now, that if they revert the removal of sourced, no-BLP-problems, negative information from Wikipedia, they're going to end up in a fight that leaves them banned for "edit warring" or "incivility" by admins and arbs more keen on the appearance of dealing with conflict than on resolving real issues with off-site organizing of vandalism and harassment.
I wouldn't recommend anyone get involved in that hole for a while, and as such I reluctantly discourage anyone from reading Wikipedia for anything but the least controversial articles - unless they're also willing to put the work in and examine page histories, checking references, etc.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Note: The general people in the UK don't vote for the Prime Minister - they vote for their local Member of Parliament (MP).
The MPs collectively vote for the Prime Minister.
So 'You assholes' is presumably only referring to the 650 (minus the Sinn Fein folk) MPs?
Well, that may be true if an editor gets involved in a protracted edit war with another editor. For anon IPs, such as the ones doing the edits described in the summary, it's trivial to revert the edit, and if anon IPs continue to remove sourced material, the IP addresses tend to get blocked for a few days, or a week, or a month, depending on the individual circumstances surrounding the edit war. An administrator is going to back a registered editor over an anon IP pretty much every time, so there's no danger of getting banned.
I've learned that they're worthless, so I don't read AC comments anymore.
The US voters have had the dilemma of having to pick the lesser of two evils for awhile now. It's all downhill from here. May God have mercy on you.