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If you have been following the ruckus over Wikipedia editors deleting women from the list of American novelists, and moving them to a separate list of female novelists, the original revealer of the practice writes in her third piece on the subject that several editors are shown in the Wikipedia change record. Novelist Amanda Filipacchi's findings posted today at The Atlantic are pretty bad in themselves, but it's also disturbing to see detailed (by Andrew Leonard at Salon) the siege of "revenge editing" attacks on Filipacchi by trolls who are given the keys to Wikipeda.
The edits didn’t stop at Filipacchi’s page. Edits were also made to pages about her novels, stripping content from them on the grounds that they were overly self-promotional (a big Wikipedia no-no.) One editor, as recently as Monday morning, even started editing the pages devoted to Filpacchi’s parents, and slashed huge swaths from a page about the media conglomerate Hachette-Filipacchi, whose chairman emeritus happens to be Filipacchi’s father, Daniel Filipacchi.
As is usually the case with Wikipedia, high-profile “revenge editing” clearly motivated by animus tends to draw a lot of attention. A frequent result: ludicrous “edit wars” in which successive revisions are undone in rapid succession....
Such troll attacks are often caught by the larger Wikipedia community — but not always. For a stark example of the problem, look at this rant by one of the Wikipedia "editors" who took umbrage at Filipacchi's New York Times op-ed about the sexist way of organizing novelists into "novelists" and "women novelists." He froths about Judith Miller and Saddam Hussein and the New York Times to justify his dishonest editing, and basically promises to plague her through the years.
The bloody p.o.s. New York Times supposedly employs fact checkers, but they have allowed this incompetent woman to libel Wikipedia not once, but two times. They owe Wikipedia two separate retractions. They have no journalistic integrity whatsofuckingever. They are nothing better than a blog, a barrel full of dog feces offered to the world as the “truth.” There is one thing you are wrong about, however. This incident is never going to be forgotten. Not by anyone involved in it. Retribution will be taken five, ten, fifteen, twenty years from now. That’s just the way people seem to be, unfortunately. It is the way these things work, and that’s something about the world which many of us actively dislike, and are working hard to change. The documented fact is that this woman has sent thugs after certain Wikipedia editors. This is no slight affair, I am afraid.
The New York Times has a vested interest in trying to undermine Wikipedia. For one thing, the Times has only 600,000 digital subscribers, which makes it a piece-of-shit website in terms of numbers. On Sundays, its biggest day, the Times adds another 1.4 million readers in its paper edition, for a total of 2 million. Meanwhile, HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS OF PEOPLE are reading you and me on Wikipedia EVERY DAY. You can see why the Times feels it has a very very short and stubby and ugly little penis compared with us. This is the real reason why they want to run baseless articles slamming us. Because we are the future and they are already the distant past.
If losers like this are allowed to do anything for Wikipedia, it's a shame.
Photo of Amanda Filipacchi: Facebook
