Ah. THAT William Connolley!
Global Cooling and Wikipedia Fake News
By Andy May There is an excellent new post up at notrickszone.com on the global cooling scare of the 1970’s and the efforts to erase it from the record by the climate alarmists at realclimate.com. For some the scandal at Wikipedia over William Connolley deliberately posting false articles and altering factual ones on climate is…
December 25, 2016 in
Climate News.
William Connolley, now “climate topic banned” at Wikipedia
Bishop Hill had the news first, which is fitting since Mr. Connolley is based in Britain. In a vote of 7-0, The most prolific climate revisionist editor ever at Wikipedia, with over 5400 article revisions has been banned from making any edits about climate related articles for six months.
Seriously, from the number of times this stuff gets posted do you guys think that 'Wikigate' is some kind of major international scandal, or what? Number of article edits means absolutely nothing on its own. Most Wikipedia editors are anonymous/pseudonymous and depending on their level of tech savvy even a single person could use any number of accounts in succession. If some propaganda-driven partisan hacks made a thousand biased and inaccurate or even simply sloppy changes to articles, someone else would have to make a thousand corrections. This isn't exactly rocket science.
So the question is simply who was sloppy, who were the propagandists, who were the correctors?
The fact is that we know virtually nothing about what went on with all of that. The accusations against Connelley trace back through James Delingpole of
The Telegraph to some article by Lawrence Solomon of
The National Post. But whatever one's opinion of those authors or publications, the original article is no longer on the National Post website and Delingpole's article is not on the Telegraph's site either. Whatever the reason for those removals, obviously their accusations now amount to little more than random internet rumour-mongering.
However the information we do have from the individuals most closely involved in whatever it was that went on suggest that while Connelley's knowledge and (relative) expertise was appreciated by the Wiki community, he apparently got too heated by becoming too
personally invested in whatever disputes he was having with the unknown counter-editor/s of climate articles (who by the looks of it were also banned by the community). These are the only two comments amongst the votes to topic-ban him, from that second WUWT link:
3. It has become clear, during the case itself, that the topic area has become too personalized and polarized around a number of editors who are, frankly, incapable of working together. While I may not agree that all editors involved have the same severity of misbehaviour, I can appreciate that a forcible fresh start is probably going to help - with gradual return on merit as the editors involve themselves in other areas of the project.
7. Sad, reluctant support. I dislike intensely the idea of separating a knowledgeable editor from editing in the field of his expertise. My instincts impel me to say that I would, if possible, prefer a more carefully tailored, nuanced sanction or set of sanctions that could preserve the value of William M. Connolley's editing while addressing the problems that exist with it. . . . We have also acknowledged that some of the specific assertions made about him previously were inaccurate or taken out of context.
Short of personally going through and trying to figure out all previous edits and counter-edits of relevant articles - and it's worth noting that despite providing several direct Wikipedia edit-history links,
Delingpole's claims do not highlight any specifically problematic examples - those comments above are the only primary sources we have on this issue, from people directly involved.
All the third-party partisan sensationalism in the world is pretty much worthless compared to the first-hand knowledge and objectivity of the people who voted to topic-ban him. Kudos to Anthony Watts for providing that information.
eace