I still think Wikipedia is, on balance, a good thing. This is even though its mysterious ruling council of Wikicrats have now banned me from taking any part in editing it. It is despite the fact that the said Wikicrats then gagged and muzzled me, when I said that this action should not be taken until after a fair trial, rather than before any kind of trial.
It is a bit like the aftermath of an unpleasant dream. In the world of Wikipedia I have been arrested, penalised and silenced without trial, denied any freedom to defend myself before any independent or unprejudiced tribunal, and told I can only have my freedom back if I publicly abase myself before the arbitrary authorities. Actually, ahem, I’m not guilty until I have been ruled to be so by a unanimous independent jury of my peers, and if they treat me as guilty without due process, they can take a flying leap. So they can whistle for the grovel they want, till the end of time. There is only ever one answer to such Kangaroo Tribunals. So Goodbye Wikipedia, at least from the editing point of view But it is a mild taste of what it must be like, in reality, to face obdurate authority of this kind, nasty and dispiriting. It dims the sunshine, and nags at the mind.
Of course, not being able to contribute to areas of knowledge where you have expertise is annoying. But fall foul of the strange, nameless elite which actually runs Wikipedia, and it is like Kafka’s ‘The Trial’ without the jokes. My Kangaroo Trial grinds on, and I confidently expect shortly to be banned from Wikipedia until I kowtow to them, which means ( see above) for the rest of my life.
Is this a great loss? It is a loss, for certain. Most of you will probably never have bothered, but some years ago I thought it would be interesting and rewarding to sign up as what Wikipedia rather grandly calls an ‘editor’. You can easily create an identity and a sign-on – mine is ‘Clockback’, as in ‘Putting the Clock Back’ and is meant to be a mild self-depreciating joke, though few people get it. When, like me, you have no sense of humour, it is hard to work out what might amuse other people.
The first thing I learned from this is that any Wikipedia entry about any live issue which is even mildly controversial cannot be trusted. It is at best a useful starting point from which to find research sources, but often not even that. I made the mistake of challenging the consensus view on one or two such subjects, and introducing into their entries mentions of controversies which they did not refer to. Within minutes, my changes had been wiped out by militant guardians, who plainly had more numbers and more time on their side than I could ever hope to do. Had I had a hundred allies, all with limitless time, it might have been possible to change things. Otherwise not. This sort of intimidation works, and is diligently done by propagandists, because Wikipedia is still taken more seriously than it should be by innocent readers.
Oddly, you can face the same problem in what appear to be wholly uncontentious areas. I once attempted to add a short reference to what I thought of as an important book, which had not been given much space, on the Wikipedia page about a favourite author. Again, my change was wiped out within minutes by a furious guardian, who seemed to think that she, and nobody else, should control the entry. Life’s too short to qyarrel with people like this.
My one significant success has been to alter the Wikipedia entry for the ‘Education Policy Institute’ so that the alert reader will realise that this body is not a wholly disinterested research organisation, but has deep connections with the Liberal Democrat party, and with the ‘Academy’ movement.
Because I can see that some people might be worried by this fact, and are entitled to know what I am up to, I have also made clear from the start that I am Peter Hitchens, yes, that one, and even went through a strange procedure to confirm this. Had I not done so, and had I instead hidden my identity, perhaps I would have been spared the events of the past week. So much for honesty being the best policy.
I thought this was especially important, as I have sometimes made changes in the entry about me and the one about my late brother and in a few others where I have an openly-declared interest. In the family ones, I have kept myself pretty strictly to correcting factual errors, which in some cases nobody else could possibly do. Who else knows when I joined and left the International Socialists? Who else would be troubled by, and put right, a foolish mistake about my late father’s naval career? Who else recalls the day I broke into a government fall-out shelter in Cambridge, more than 50 years ago? But then again, why let a silly mistake survive, where it might be believed, cited and repeated? One day it could just be important.
Yet by doing so I have probably been breaking some of Wikipedia’s myriad little rules about neutrality and conflicts of interest. Well, so what? These rules are blunt instruments, more or less assuming universal bad faith. They remind me of the extraordinary cobweb of rules about sexual contact devised by Antioch College, Ohio , see
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/24/style/antioch-college-sexual-offense-prevention-policy.html
These rules it seems to me, were decided on the assumption that the male sex is predatory and untrustworthy.
Likewise, Wikipedia’s rules seem designed to deal with people who, offered the opportunity to wield secret influence in their favour, will do so. They also assume that those editors involved entirely lack the normal human emotions, such as grouchiness, and are never impatient, let alone sarcastic or satirical. Actually, let me qualify this. You
can do these things if you’re more or less on the side of conventional wisdom and don’t work for the Mail on Sunday. My opponent on the Bishop George Bell’ entry (the source of all my troubles) is extraordinarily rude without provocation, calling me a ‘loudmouth’, describing my articles as ‘rants’, dismissing the highly distinguished, disinterested and multi-party group of people who seek basic due process for the late Bishop Bell as a ‘fan club’ and claiming wrongly that they are ‘right-wing’ in the clear belief that this would be a bad thing if so, (so simultaneously disclosing his own partiality and his ignorance of the subject). Nothing whatever happens to him for this behaviour. Indeed, he has a ‘Platinum medal’ for his services to Wikipedia.
Wikipedia’s rules were made to prevent secret distortion and lying, and manipulation, not to prevent someone like me openly and transparently correcting errors, even if I do sometimes shout and stamp a bit, to get attention.
In this openness, I am highly unusual. Pseudonyms are actively encouraged on Wikipedia, for reasons I can guess at but don’t really understand. Most Wikipedia ‘editors’ have names like ‘Woof’ or ‘3ZjY8Splat!’ . And the people who have adopted these interplanetary names also understand Wikipedia’s cobwebbed maze of rules (like an arcane board game invented by someone who enjoys algebra) about how exactly to appeal and who to appeal to in case of difficulty. I confess I never have done. Sometimes I have been able to hunt help down, using parts of the keyboard I had never even noticed before. What *is* a ‘tylde’? (It’s all right, I know now). Sometimes, a week later, trying to repeat the feat, I have lost my way doing so, and ended up going round in electronic circles. You try, if you think it is either easy, or easy to learn.
As so often, in computer world, those who *are* skilled in it completely fail to understand how baffling it is for those who are not. In my experience the best way to get help is to make a small but definite noise, at which point a helpful person often descends from the sky and fixes the problem.
I agree this is not ideal, but nobody ever gets hurt and no lies get told in this process, whereas problems often do get fixed.
But it has now got me into dreadful trouble, as you can see here
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Administrators'_noticeboard#Block_review_for_Clockback
(scroll down to ‘Block review for Clockback)
And here
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Clockback
(Scroll down to ‘Comment on the block’)
The really funny bit is that, on this occasion, I finally did discover which button to press, and appealed for help from an ‘administrator’, who immediately descended from on high, studied the issue in depth for what must have been all of 90 seconds, and thereupon blocked me indefinitely from the whole Wikipedia site (except from my own small talk page, from which I have also now been banned as well, for refusing to kowtow).
I appealed about this: ‘I am in dispute with another editor who repeatedly reverts legitimate changes in the entry and will not engage in discussion’
This administrator ruled ‘I have blocked
Clockback based on a review of contributions, which skew heavily towards highly biased
Very quickly, the fact that I am a newspaper columnist (and not for ‘The Guardian’) entered into the discussion.
‘Note also that
Clockback is
Peter Hitchens [152] , who writes for
The Mail on Sunday and is involved in the topic itself.’
To which my blocker responded : ‘Should have guessed. If only his brother were here instead.’
After that, my entire Wikipedia record, stretching back more than ten years, was combed for offences against the rules.
I have a record of the whole exchange, in which the significance of my connection with the MoS is explored at length, but it is pretty dull, and I have edited it severely to remove identifiers.
After that, my entire Wikipedia record, stretching back more than ten years, was combed for offences against the rules. The Wikigulag looms.
Today I sneaked a final defence on to the trial page, where it remained for all of ten seconds before being wiped. It ran as follows: ‘Hullo everybody, this is Peter Hitchens (in real life!), not logged in as Clockback as I would then be censored and muzzled. Administrators have my e-mail address, thanks to the appeals they have rejected on it, and are invited to contact me if they wish to check the authenticity and provenance of this contribution. I would just like to ask all those involved in this decision to take a long, slow breath and look at what they have done. Most fundamentally, they have responded to a plea for help with a kick in the teeth. When I posted a request for assistance in a dispute with another editor, which had lasted two years and involved the other editor being unpleasantly rude, openly biased on the issue under discussion, and unresponsive on the talk page, on several occasions, the person who intervened (who could not possibly, in the time, have made a just or thorough examination of the matter) immediately blocked me, and to rub the matter in, blocked me indefinitely. This is plainly unjust and no free person would accept it or be willing to abase himself to get it lifted. If you wish to discuss this matter with me, treat me fairly. If (as seems to be the case in some comments) you take a special pleasure in blocking a Mail on Sunday columnist, feel free. If that is your idea of a good time, then I can only say that we're all different. But do not pretend you are doing this in pursuit of the truth. The fact remains that my much-frowned-on edits, though satirical and not intended to stand (I made their purpose plain on the talk page), were entirely factual, an undeniable truth which I have yet to get any administrator or editor to notice, acknowledge or address. Fact One: The police, in England, have precisely no statutory role in the investigation of crimes allegedly committed by the dead; Fact Two: it is a legal absurdity for any English tribunal to say it has found no reason to doubt an allegation. Reason to doubt is actively embodied in the principle of presumption of innocence, is the basis of jury trial and is embedded in both civil and criminal procedure. If you are ready to listen, then I'm ready to defend myself. If I am treated with fairness, an open mind and civility, you will find I respond in the same way. If I am muzzled and silenced, then I just remember how my English ancestors would have responded to such treatment. Please do not delete this. I have of course kept a copy.’
And now we come to the issue itself, which I must now leave it to others to sort out. I should at this stage point out that some editors and administrators on Wikipedia have nobly come to my defence. I am very grateful to them but they have been met with quite a lot of derision and hostility for simply abiding by the laws of fairness. Some - but not all of them - believe I should have ‘helped myself’ by grovelling, but I cannot pretend to believe that I have done anything wrong.
The dispute is about the description of controversy about the late Bishop George Bell. My view is this. whatever anyone may have believed about this in the past (and the C of E made great efforts to persuade people that they had serious evidence against Bishop Bell when they did not), the charges were dealt a devastating blow (the lovely old English word ‘Whirret’ seems right in the circumstances) by the report of Lord Carlile QC, which you may read in full here.
https://www.churchofengland.org/sites/default/files/2017-12/Bishop George Bell - The Independent Review.pdf
Amazingly, until I put it there last week, the Wikipedia entry on the George Bell case did not even contain a direct link to this report.
Now, Lord Carlile was specifically debarred from giving any opinion on the charges against George Bell
in his conclusions. Archbishop Welby put that in the terms of reference.
But that did not stop him giving an opinion elsewhere in the document. And lo:
Paragraph 171: 'Had the evidence my review has obtained without any particular difficulty (see section[H] below) been available to the Church and the CPS, I doubt that the test for a prosecution would have been passed. Had a prosecution been brought on the basis of that evidence, founded upon my experience and observations I judge the prospect of a successful prosecution as low. I would have expected experienced criminal counsel to have advised accordingly.’
Lord Carlile must be one of the most experienced lawyers of his generation. Coming from him, this judgement is quite devastating, and only people who don't understand English legal understatement could miss its import. I have known this since Christmas and waited for other Wikipedia editors, unburdened by being me, to discover it and include it, because I am aware of preposterous prejudices against anyone with knowledge of the matter, daring to tinker with the sacred Wikipedia.
Yet the Wikipedia version, while giving a wholly inadequate account of the Carlile Report, *still* contains tendentious rubbish, dating from the C of E’s original slippery attempt to smear Bishop Bell in the eyes of public and media, driven by the fact that it wasn’t anything like as sure of his guilt as it was claiming to be.
Most especially is the redundant, outdated, and discredited section about how the police had said they had enough evidence to arrest George Bell, had he not been dead for some decades. To my own direct and painful personal knowledge, this inaccurate claim poisoned the minds of many people, often highly educated ones, especially in the media, against George Bell. It created a great solidified wall of slime, which had to be cleared out of the way before the case could be properly debated. It should never have been said. Now that it is discredited, it has no place in a tightly-edited and concise account of the case *unless* it is qualified by a strong rebuttal. The questionable, indeed legally needless and ultra vires, involvement of the police should certainly not be the opening stage of the story.
This claim that Bell would have been arrested was clearly stated by Carlile to be wrong in law in his paragraph 167, which everyone interested in the case should read to the end, especially the bit about the C of E taking ‘ an exaggerated view’ of the use of the word ‘arrest’
The police have also admitted to me, in their formal response to a complaint I made to them on behalf of GB’s niece, that the C of E diocese persuaded them to get involved. Detective Superintendent J.D. Graves wrote :
‘…
the Diocese of Chichester notified Sussex Police that they planned to release a statement to the media. It was never our intention to be proactive (my emphasis); in other words
, there was no intention to release a police statement about the alleged criminality of Bishop Bell (my emphasis). However,
we were asked by the Diocese to make a statement as they had decided to make this information public and so we provided them with a statement for inclusion in their press release on the basis that once the Diocese published their statement a natural consequence would be a media request to the police for comment’.
It later repeats
‘the press release was driven by the Diocese’.
This was an extraordinary admission, though of course one that could have been foreseen by any informed person, since the Police in England have absolutely no statutory role in the investigation of criminal allegations against the dead, who cannot, in English law, be prosecuted. Anyway, since ‘Carol’ first made her claim in 1995 (as Carlile records) her concern has always been to make a civil claim against the C of E, not a criminal charge against Bishop Bell.
As for the stuff about some secret tribunal ‘finding no reason’ to doubt the claims against George bell, that was just a confession of legal incompetence. The presumption of innocence is always a reason to doubt any charge. And there was a good deal more, as any reader of the long paragraph 178 shows.
That’s what it was all about. But at the end of it, the Wikipedia account is still hopelessly biased against the truth. Perhaps someone else unburdened by being me, is prepared to become as knowledgeable as I am about the case, and set the matter right. If they do, I warn them not to make any jokes.
UE weight with all the of the WP:RS, this is a significant event for the subject and deserves a mention in the very least. We have to word it correctly to abide by WP:BLP of course, but it does not deserve to be excluded. Tutelary (talk) 15:22, 3 August 2018 (UTC)
ensorship need to be noted by the community and be banned from editing the article and talk page. Nodekeeper (talk) 07:20, 4 August 2018 (UTC)
