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<img alt="" height="1" width="1" />Hammersmith Election Candidates In [b]Wikipedia Malarkey[/b]
Londonist
Over at the Guardian, Dave Hill reports on what appears to be a spot of pre-election Wikipedia meddling on behalf of the Tories. The case concerns an entry ...

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I was curious when I read the article and I did searching. I responded to the blog to call him out as a liar.

This and this were the edits. I tried searching for the name and I found no personal info. Tried searching for the user name with the real name and no connection.

There is no way the blogger could have connected the two. Furthermore, the first edit was to remove stuff not in the source here. That is what the policies state to do. The other has sourced information about the other candidate.

Furthermore, one of the attack articles that was used as a source and cropped out was the blog that whined about it all.

By the way, I'm pissed off. That guy's blog is linked quite a few times, even though 1. its a blog and 2. it is an attack blog. On both pages, there are way too many blogs: wordpress, blogspot, etc. WTF. Those should be cleaned up.

The "blogger" did connect the two, so perhaps he's better at this kind of thing than you are (or perhaps he made the connection using information that has now been deleted).


You think blogs of Guardian writers should be treated the same as Blogspot blogs? Really?

1. The blogger from the Guardian is no different than the others. He is a no nothing hack political promoter who has edited wikipedia before. 2. The blogger bullshitted the connection. The Guardian has had actual journalists who have been exposed as plagiarising or lying before, so it wouldn't be surprising for a no nothing political hack blogger to do the same, especially when there is a lot of evidence that he created an SPA to spam his own blog up as a reference: here. By the way, same guy cites blogspot and youtube before vanishing off into SPA land.

Now more nonsense being added by a pro Labour SPA toss away account. The guy claims that Wikipedia's problem is that anyone can add misleading or incorrect news material to articles but he is the one producing the inaccurate material and having it put up for him. Disgusting hypocrite.

Update:

The SPA account who linked the blog material and vanished had his only other edits as posting major copyrighted material from the Guardian into his user page (promoting a Labour political figure who died - a memorial taken from here).

Coincidence?

Apparently, the copyvio was spotted when it was in article space but no one noticed the copy on his user page. I hate SPAs.

As far as your number two goes, you might want to see the Google cache of Ryan Wells' Twitter account, where he identifies himself as "Senior E-Communications Manager, Grey Europe, Middle East, Africa". This coincides with the edits made by User:R2997790. They confirmed their involvement. Do you think that the Guardian journalist made this all up? Are you really that much of a kook?

I looked and looked and I don't see any "confiramtion".

1. He isn't a journalist. He is an amateur blogger for the Labour party as you can see here.

2. The only edits from the user in question do not match anything on the twitter except editing on Grey but they were only to make redirects (which, by the way, isn't even enough for a CoI). A group that has over 70 offices across the world is flimsy evidence to list one guy as a possible individual. That is like saying an edit to Microsoft's article must be by Bill Gates.

I took this for confirmation: "I gave Ryan a ring. He confirmed that the recent edits of both Wikipedia pages were his work, but was less forthcoming about some other matters."

1. I guess being an amateur blogger and party hack is what won him the "2009 UK Press Gazette Digital Journalist of the Year" award.

2. See confirmation above. He confirmed he made the edits using that account - the earlier edits simply add to that. If you still don't believe it, why not ask Ryan Wells yourself instead of positing your half-assed theories here?

3. Are we done yet?

Then you are gullible. There were people who published in papers like the Guardian as real journalists about war stories in Afghanistan/Iraq and it turned out they never held a gun let alone fought anywhere.

He wouldn't have been able to find out the person so calling up Ryan is a charade. He found someone who may like a candidate and then made up the rest. Hell, he even makes a claim that it was campaigned sponsored when there was clearly no evidence. That is in addition to the fact that out of all the edits, the edits were within standard Wiki policy.

It is bs upon bs upon bs, and the guy has a history of doing such shady things while spamming Wikipedia with his links.

If you're at all serious about this, you are either more warped by your binary political view than I thought, or you are off your meds. I prefer to think that this is just more of your trolling.

Are you saying that journalists haven't been caught making up stuff?

Are you saying that a blogger, who is less than a journalist, and who has a long history of working for the Labour party, would not stoop to such things as lying to make someone look bad?

Hell, this guy has basically written (as I linked above) all about sock puppetry and faking internet personalities in order to game Wikipedia. His own blog appears on this pages for a reason. Surprised?

His story has huge holes in it and you bought it hook, line, and sinker.