Wikipedia, Spartacus and the JFK Assassination

[John Simkin]

I see I have been described as an "extremist website".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Req...ding_editor_RPJ

[Guest]

I see I have been described as an "extremist website".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Req...ding_editor_RPJ

Not only that but also "unreliable and propagandistic"

I am concerned that I didn't notice these traits in your writing earlier

[John Simkin]

I have been told by a Dr Debug, that I must put a link to my Spartacus Educational website, from my Wikipedia biography. He/she has described this as “advertising”. Once again, it is impossible to know who this Dr Debug is. As I said earlier, Wikipedia cannot obtain credibility until they provide names and background information on the people writing and editing its encyclopedia.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Dr_Debug

It seems that I made a mistake about Dr Debug. It was Demiurge who told me off for mentioning my website in my Wikipedia biography.

[Guest Gary Loughran]

Demiurge, seems to come from my neck of the woods. Deals extremely simplistically with highly charged, controversial subjects such as Supergrasses, An Phoblacht, Sunningdale Agreement, NICRA etc.

Highlighting once again that Wikipedia in a very poor source for historical/controversial issues. But then he does abide by the neutral POV, but beyond simple definitons there is nothing substantial.

Speaking of which wheres my Xmas party piece? Can I have an arbitrator please

[John Simkin]

Demiurge, seems to come from my neck of the woods. Deals extremely simplistically with highly charged, controversial subjects such as Supergrasses, An Phoblacht, Sunningdale Agreement, NICRA etc.

Highlighting once again that Wikipedia in a very poor source for historical/controversial issues. But then he does abide by the neutral POV, but beyond simple definitons there is nothing substantial.

Speaking of which wheres my Xmas party piece? Can I have an arbitrator please

I will repost it after others get a chance to work it out.

[Guest John Gillespie]

I have just had this message from a sympathizer:

Spartacus is about to be deemed an "unreliable" source of information for use in Wikipedia. It has been accused of "left wing" bias and being "propagandistic."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Req...oposed_decision

Those who want it banned are ready to strip any reference to Spartacus. There doesn't appear to be a reasoned decision for this except that it carries sources of information that some of the administrators don't like regarding the Kennedy assassination.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Req...t_of_view.3F.22

John,

They're a sham for kids who don't want to do real homework anyway. Talking about unreliable sources.

People like Wikipedophilias, who view the world as liberal or conservative, right wing and left wing, don't realize that we live in a new world that can't be so classified, and that infomaiton is neutral, either correct or incorrect, right or wrong.

It's a shame however, that some legitimate sites link to sites like McAdams, Meyers, Reitzes, Raham and company, as if they are reliable.

Maybe we should start a Secret History Archive.

BK

_____________________________

"They're a sham for kids who don't want to do real homework anyway. " How true, especially in light of the point you made about pigeonholing people. It is shorthand propaganda.

JG

[Guest]

It is shorthand propaganda.

JG

No .. it is just another historical source.

[David Collins]

ArbCom is the equivalent of a kangaroo court on Wikipedia. Even though there are elections, it is not democratic, since King Jimbo has a final say in selecting the candidates because for him the site is about a "cult of personality" and power games, so democracy is not what he wants.

The main person in Arbcom is his friend Fred Bauder who is a disbarred lawyer and not allowed to practise law anymore and Wikipedia is his revenge. Since disbarred lawyers are pretty much unelectable, he calls himself retired and has deleted and banned everybody who mentioned that he was disbarred, so Wikipedia contains no mentioning whatsoever of his little personal problems. This of course means that he is highly corruptable and that is exactly what Jimbo wants and therefore he is the first choice as "Supreme Judge."

http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getc...25a&invol=1

Fred has been involved in many controversies, like trying to delete the John F. Kennedy assassination theories:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Art...nation_theories

This gives some idea to what he probably is, yet another disbarred lawyer with CIA connections.

If you look at the MONGO case, you'll also notice that Fred tries very hard to keep Mongo from getting desysoped:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Req...ration/Seabhcan )

Another person of interest is JayJG who is one of Jimbo's personal appointes and who plays an equally dubious role as enforcer.

Overall the majority of Arbcom candidates are part of the so-called Cabal (which they deny exists) which consists of the IRC channels for their personal communication to ensure that the abusive administrators have free reign. Mongo is exceptionally that he was desysoped, but that was because his abuse was so extensive and widespread and because of running for ArbCom, his employment by the Department of Homeland Security was becoming public knowledge. He previously deleted all references to Encyclopedia Dramatica who first discovered the links between him and the DHS, however they couldn't keep it a secret anymore.

The main problems with Wikipedia are:

1. Jimbo Wales who uses the site for his "cult of personality" and is active behind the scenes on the channels to enforce his view on the encyclopedia.

2. Abusive administrators. Especially the Scientology group (Kelly Martin and Tony Sidaways) are a real concern. It is unclear whether they are scientology, however they used to hang out at their usenet forum before they descended on Wikipedia. THere is no term limit to administrators and they actively cover each other's back and function as a clique, stiffling all critism.

3. Vandalism and misinformation. This is one of the major problems. The quick 5 minute revert is complete nonsense, since vandalism stays on the pages for hours and often days and they basically lost any control over school children, trolls and you name it. The site has into one huge pile of gravity and nobody cares.

I think I ranted enough already. However it is a seriously screwed up site and it's unable to reform itself so hopefully it'll crash sooner or later under its own weight. The interaction with various alphabet agencies is immense, since it serves as a useful tool for propaganda and censorship and because it functions by bullying, it is right on their alley.

[David Collins]

The conspiracy theory noticeboard is one of their latest additions and it is fully supported from the administrators. Notice that they work as a group consisting of alphabet suspects (TBeatty, MONGO (confirmed DHS), Morton devonshire, etc.) and neocon supporters from xxxxx havens like Conservative Underground, a website created to insult liberal posters. Since they work as a group and Wikipedia works by consensus (or supermajority), they always win every fight.

I suggest that you look first into Mongo, because he ran for Arbitrator as well and wanted to become a corrupt, government appointed judge at Wikipedia. Luckily he didn't make the quota, and was brought for Arbcom himself for abusive conduct. There is a long discussion at wikipediareview.com about Mongo and notice the comment by Jimbo Wales that he will personally vote for Mongo to be reinstated as an administrator (Is Wikipedia on the DHS payroll?)

[Charles Matthews]

If John Simkin will specify more closely his edits to the English Wikipedia (whether logged in or IP editor, and which articles he edited) I will look into the matter. (I am participating here at John's invitation).

Charles Matthews (I'm an admin and arbitrator of the English Wikipedia)

[John Simkin]

If John Simkin will specify more closely his edits to the English Wikipedia (whether logged in or IP editor, and which articles he edited) I will look into the matter. (I am participating here at John's invitation).

Charles Matthews (I'm an admin and arbitrator of the English Wikipedia)

First of all, let me thank Charles Matthews for joining this forum in order to explain how the Wikipedia Arbitration Committee works. I emailed all those who voted to ban Pat Jaress from editing pages at Wikipedia. Charles is the only one who bothered to reply.

I have personally had little trouble from the administrators from editing Wikipedia pages. The reason is that I rarely do so. In the areas that I am particularly interested in, the covert activities of the intelligence services, it is clear that those who control those pages are concerned with reproducing the “official” account of past events.

The only pages I have rewritten for Wikipedia is my own biography (it included a few inaccuracies) and the one on “Operation Mockingbird”. The original page claimed that it was an urban myth. This was absurd and it had in fact been written about in some detail in The Final Report of the Select Committee to Study Government Operations With Respect to Intelligence Activities (April, 1976, pages 191-201). This of course illustrated the problem with Wikipedia. The person who wrote the original entry knew nothing about CIA operations. However, that did not stop them from writing about the subject. What is worse, this page is then ranked at number one at search-engines like Google. As Operation Mockingbird was set-up to control the information that appeared in the mass-media, I thought it was an important subject to spend sometime on at Wikipedia.

I rewrote the page based on the information from my own website. This was immediately removed and so I posted an account of this on this forum. I was then told that the reason it had been removed was that I failed to provide “notes and references”. This was surprising as the original page that had claimed it was an “urban myth” had not done so. Nor did most other pages I read on Wikipedia. I therefore rewrote the page supplying 20 notes and references. The page still remains and is currently ranked 1st in most of the search-engines.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Mockingbird

I do not have the time to rewrite all the CIA related pages on Wikipedia. Especially, as I suspect that in most cases they would be rewritten by CIA assets. I therefore usually give the page a link to the relevant page in my encyclopedia. I am often left messages by Wikipedia editors/administrators that I am not allowed to provide links to my own site. I do not know if this is always followed by the removal of these links.

Pat Jaress drew my attention to the problems he was having with the Wikipedia Arbitration Committee over links he had added to my website on the issue of the assassination of John F. Kennedy. (See this thread for a full discussion on this issue).

It seems to me that decision to ban people like Pat Jaress and Daniel Brandt from editing Wikipedia is a clear case of removing people who are willing to question what the WAC consider to be the “official truth”. It was also noticeable that the WAC does not have debates on these issues. They speak in unison and every vote is unanimous. That it shows all the signs of being a kangaroo court.

My main argument against Wikipedia is that it is an intellectually dishonest operation. It is based on a false premise that it is possible to produce objective and neutral accounts of the past. As part of the UK National Curriculum, pupils in primary school are taught that this is impossible. By the time they reach secondary school the vast majority of pupils would have grasped the concept of different interpretations of the past. They would also have a good idea of the reasons why these interpretations are different.

In 1986 I was a member of a committee that was advising the people drawing up the history national curriculum in the UK. We felt very strongly that “interpretations” should be included as a key concept for students to study in history. We argued that this was vitally important as part of their “political” education. That it would provide them with protection against “political propaganda” in the mass media. That it was an important part of the child’s education that would enable them to become fully functioning active citizens.

Although the history national curriculum committee had been carefully selected by Kenneth Baker, the education secretary (all ten members were supporters of the Conservative Party), they accepted the wisdom of this suggestion (it had already been introduced as part of the history GCSE exam in 1984). However, the government did add that history lessons should not examine the history of the last 20 years. It was decided that this was not history but current affairs.

Hopefully, people reading Wikipedia in the UK will realize that it is an absurd idea that it is possible to produce an objective and neutral account of the past. However, I fear that people who have not benefited from being taught in the UK in recent years might be fooled by this idea and assume that this so-called objective truth is accurate.

[David Collins]

If John Simkin will specify more closely his edits to the English Wikipedia (whether logged in or IP editor, and which articles he edited) I will look into the matter. (I am participating here at John's invitation).

Charles Matthews (I'm an admin and arbitrator of the English Wikipedia)

This is with regards to Charles Matthews post.

I think that there are two issues here and it is not so much with regards to John Simkin's edits:

1. Spartacus has been deemed "unreliable, propagandistic and extremist" without due process and without providing the accused any chance of a defense and even deleting the defense using a straw man argument of "not posted on the right place."

2. The Mongo affair and the conspiracy noticeboard. Despite working for the DHS, despite being desysoped for abuse, he is still active as a government appointed censor and has nominated: CIA and September 11 by von Bülow and The New Pearl Harbor.

These are bad faith nominations since both books sold well over 100,000 copies and are not written by anybody but by a former German minister of Defense von BÃlow who after leading the investigation into the activities of the Stasi became very concerned about the BND and CIA's activities in Germany. Since both the BND and CIA immediately refused any cooperation with a minister of Defense, he was taken it upon himself to investigate both secret services and came to the conclusion that their methods are exactly like the Stasi except that the BND and the CIA are even better organized. We are not talking about a kooky

conspiracy theorist, but a career politician who was frustrated that even minsters of Defense are not allowed to know anything about the secret services and discovered that propaganda, money laundering, drug dealing and arms dealing were their main objectives and that intelligence was only a minor task of the secret services.

Both books clearly meet the notability criteria and looking at the Conspiracy Noticeboard it contains many subjects which easily make the criteria, however since they do mass voting they can delete everything they want. This IS government appointed and politically motivated censorship.

Also the behavior of Fred Bauder is very much a concern, yet Wikipedia thinks that there are no issues whatsoever and keeps on allowing censorship and propaganda.

Please explain why you considered John Simkin's Spartacus site an unreliable site and please explain Mongo and the Conspiracy Noticeboard, because the discussion about Mongo's affliation with the DHS has been known for about half a year now and Jimbo himself wants to reinstate him. That sure reeks like full cooperation with the US Department of Homeland Security and given the reliance of Wikipedia on donations, the likelyhood of conflicts of interests is immense.

[Pat Jaress]

Matthews only believes in a partial "condemnation" of Spartacus, and Fred Bauder says "the problem was the use of selected pages" from Spartacus "to advance contentious points."

Mr. Bauder is now simply flailing around for a qualification. His explanation lacks any support in his decision. He states that the pages I selected was the "problem." He suggests I selected pages from the "condemned" part of your encyclopedia that is allegedly "unreliable" and misused these "selected" pages" to "advance contentious points."

Here are the three points made with Spartacus citations.

The three cites given are:

1-Transcripts of tapes of J. Edgar Hoover telling LBJ two times that the “magic” bullet came from Kennedy.

2- Dallas Police Chief Curry giving statement "We don't have any proof that Oswald fired the rifle, and never did. Nobody's yet been able to put him in the building (Texas School Book Depository) with a gun in his hand."

3-The concealment of the Hosty information in the Oswald address book, and destruction of Oswald letter to Hosty.

There is nothing unreliable about about this information. The tapes exist, Curry gave the statement, and the Hosty matters were explored in detail by the HSCA and Hosty's own book.

The Hosty material is still in the article, since it is hard to remove. The other two are still kept out with arguments such as, "one man's opinion" ie Curry." Hoover was old and out of the loop and similar such arguments claiming it is not important what he said because it wasn't true.

However, the arbitrators will simply churn out a number of confusing and ever changing statements until people get bored. If it was a close-ended debate the arbitrators are digging a deeper and deeper hole to trap themselves. However, in an open ended debate, the confusing set of statements simply leave a memory of confusion in the casual readers' minds.

[Robert Charles-Dunne]

Now comes news that Jimbo plans to launch his own search engine, Wikiasari, to compete with Google. One wonders what the ranking for Spartacus would be on Jimbo's search engine.

Please see:

http://business.timesonline.co.uk/article/...2517026,00.html

and here, where Jimbo himself takes issue with the notion that Wikipedia has anything to do with his search engine:

http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/technology/arc...ght_google.html

Oddly enough, Jimbo asserts that the success of his project will depend upon building a "community of trust."

No doubt he'll have no shortage of adolescent Gestapo-wannabes who'll help him build that "community of trust."

[John Simkin]

Gerald Ford died yesterday. If you do a search at Google for "Gerald Ford", Wikipedia is ranked number one. The page does not include details of the role he played in the cover-up of the assassination of JFK. I have therefore edited the page to read:

In his later years new documents emerged that suggested that Ford had played a vital role in the cover-up of the assassination of John F. Kennedy. The original first draft of the Warren Commission Report stated that a bullet had entered Kennedy's "back at a point slightly above the shoulder and to the right of the spine." Ford realized that this provided a serious problem for the single bullet theory. As Michael L. Kurtz has pointed out (The JFK Assassination Debates, 2006, page 85): "If a bullet fired from the sixth-floor window of the Depository building nearly sixty feet higher than the limousine entered the president's back, with the president sitting in an upright position, it could hardly have exited from his throat at a point just above the Adam's apple, then abruptly change course and drive downward into Governor Connally's back."

In 1997 the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB) released a document that revealed that Ford had altered the first draft of the report to read: "A bullet had entered the base of the back of his neck slightly to the right of the spine." Ford had elevated the location of the wound from its true location in the back to the neck to support the single bullet theory.

It will be interesting to see how long it stays there. I have also added a link to my page on Ford that explains how Gerald Ford provided J. Edgar Hoover with information about the activities of staff members of the commission. Hoover ordered that Norman Redlich's past should be investigated.

Ford was also being blackmailed by both Hoover and Johnson (see for example page 209 of Bobby Baker's Wheeling and Dealing: Confessions of a Capitol Hill Operator, 1978)

I also include details of how he established the Rockefeller Commission in an attempt to cover-up the illegal activities of the CIA.

http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USAfordG.htm