I am terrible 2017
OMG. I have just realised the fascist power of Wikipedia. I have always been a supporter of free information and a public encyclopedia and contributed to their future, even as much as dollar a time, but they’ve just deleted my life.
Wikipedia could be Evil
I have seen the control of information by Wikipedia as they delete the being of a person or an entry of a being. If they choose, through their editors – Wikipedia employees – they can make an entry disappear as if it never existed.
They have a policy of being fair and unbiased, Wikipedia the creation of the general Public, but they have rules which allow people to attempt to delete entries, and if not objected to within seven days, a Wikipedia editor can agree with that attempt, and delete an entry.
There was an entry about the record label I co-founded in 1988 with James McCarthy, 1M1 Records. It had quite a lot of information – historical information that was relevant to music in Australia in the 1980s and 1990 – in it and quite a lot of people had made updates and entries over the years.
I was enormously proud that someone had created an article about my label. Now it is gone. There’s no entry. Someone or some people have decided that it should be erased.
My God, that’s a powerful bit of power to hold. What if someone one day decides to take all reference to the Holocaust of World War II out of the encyclopedia? Or anything that relates to the existence of Jesus Christ or Josef Stalin? Or decided to remove the entry about Stravinsky?
Wikipedia has the power to change history if it wants
A long time ago, someone said to me that this was not a matter of free information. There would always be another card to be played by this free encyclopedia which could take away – from us – the decisions we made and things we have done.
Wikipedia is that card.
