The mess that is George Bell

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Ming
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The mess that is George Bell

Unread post by Ming » Tue Jul 31, 2018 7:43 pm

AndyTheGrump wrote:Back on the subject of the Mail, author and Mail on Sunday columnist Peter Hitchens (T-H-L), who edits Wikipedia as Clockback (T-C-L), has just been blocked indefinitely, after his edits to the article on George Bell (bishop) (T-H-L). Hitchens has been a long-standing critic of the way allegations of child abuse by Bell (long after his death) were handled, and seems either to have mistaken Wikipedia for his MoS column, or decided to vent his anger at not being able to spin the Bell article his way. At least, that is the only other explanation I can think of for edits which someone of Hitchens' reputation would surely have realised that blatant editorialising in the article wasn't going to fly with the 'community'. See the diff for Hitchens' purple prose:
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?ti ... =852723065
Hitchens's edit is idiotic; surely any professional author could have foreseen that. But the issue over Bell is very real. Of course, since he isn't protected by BLP, repeating accusations in WP is fair game, even obligatory.

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Re: The mess that is George Bell

Unread post by Kumioko » Tue Jul 31, 2018 8:06 pm

One positive thing from a critics perspective though. One less editor, one less editor who is an actual writer, it's possible this could get some visibility in the media and portray Wikipedia in a less than positive light..Hasten the day!

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Re: The mess that is George Bell

Unread post by Poetlister » Tue Jul 31, 2018 8:35 pm

It's always difficut when allegations are made long after someone's death. He isn't here to defend himself, and he seems not to enjoy the presumption of innocent until proven guilty. In the Jimmy Savile case, it all came out immediately after his death and there were so many allegations that it's difficult to believe that it was all made up. In Bell's case there seems to be one complainant decades after his death. For all we know, the woman is misremembering. Lord Bramall has lived to find himself acquitted; Leon Brittan died before he was acquitted.
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Re: The mess that is George Bell

Unread post by The Garbage Scow » Tue Aug 07, 2018 2:36 pm

He's been editing disruptively/pushing POV on various articles since at least 2008.

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Re: The mess that is George Bell

Unread post by Kingsindian » Tue Aug 07, 2018 7:30 pm

There's a blog post by Hitchens on the matter.

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Re: The mess that is George Bell

Unread post by Bezdomni » Tue Aug 07, 2018 7:45 pm

Excellent. ^^
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Re: The mess that is George Bell

Unread post by Kingsindian » Thu Aug 16, 2018 8:25 pm

A radio interview with Hitchens where his Wikipedia banning is discussed. The host is Eric Metaxas (T-H-L). Metaxas says that he's not happy with his own Wikipedia page; and that he tried to edit Wikipedia but found the experience "horrifying" (no details).

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Re: The mess that is George Bell

Unread post by Anroth » Thu Aug 16, 2018 9:31 pm

Well Hitchens is grasping at anything to seem relevant these days.

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Re: The mess that is George Bell

Unread post by Midsize Jake » Thu Aug 16, 2018 9:35 pm

Anroth wrote:Well Hitchens is grasping at anything to seem relevant these days.
Heck, the same thing could be said of most people who are actually relevant.

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Re: The mess that is George Bell

Unread post by Ming » Thu Aug 16, 2018 10:07 pm

Kumioko wrote:One positive thing from a critics perspective though. One less editor, one less editor who is an actual writer, it's possible this could get some visibility in the media and portray Wikipedia in a less than positive light..Hasten the day!
Well, maybe not. Anyone who looks at the thing and went to college and passed English 101 or the equivalent "how to write a basic research paper" course can see that the way he made his change couldn't possibly pass muster. Heck, Ming learned to do this back in middle school. What he's saying, really, is that professional journalists can't play by the rules of non-fiction writing that all of them are supposed to know. How it comes off, therefore, is that he was too arrogant an SOB to deal with that, and threw a tantrum instead.

One thing that is unclear is how many high-profile writers/scholars manage to contribute without raising notice because they can't play by the rules.

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Re: The mess that is George Bell

Unread post by Kingsindian » Fri Aug 17, 2018 5:20 am

He never intended it to pass muster: it was a reductio ad absurdum. His intention was to make a "small but definite noise" so that somebody might help him out after he had been arguing on the talk page for more than a year. It's not the ideal way -- he could have just opened an RfC, but apparently he's not good with computers.

The text which he objected to is now not in the article. That's not because I am meatpuppeting for him (I have had no contact with him for quite a while). Rather it is because Hitchens was right about this point. He just wasn't skilled enough in Wikipedia bureaucracy to push his changes through.

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Re: The mess that is George Bell

Unread post by Ming » Fri Aug 17, 2018 9:49 pm

Well, Ming wouldn't call what he wrote in the end a reductio anything. What I see is that he was going along fine until this edit, which was obviously going to be a problem, and for whatever reason Charlesdrakew (T-C-L), after reverting it, went on the warpath, starting with this dubious removal. Then things rolled along swimmingly until July of this year, more than two years later. Then Hitchens made this edit. The C of E statement that's cited for the next sentence does include the material he excised, although in a BLP Ming thinks it would be justifiable to suppress it if they didn't actually make an arrest. At that point he and Charlesdrakew got into an edit war, and then things moved to the talk page. Hitchens then made this edit which included the reference for the disagreement between the two sources; at the same time he also engaged in some editorializing which was obviously going to be reverted. And unsurprisingly, the whole thing was then reverted, but then the new citation was restored. At that point Hitchens pretty much lost it: the whole passage of his opinion of how the law would/should have been applied was put back in, and then he edit-warred over it, and that was that.

You can call it a protest, or something. Ming calls it "someone with his education should have known better." He went to Leys and York, for crying out loud.

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Re: The mess that is George Bell

Unread post by Beeblebrox » Sat Aug 18, 2018 7:28 pm

Kingsindian wrote: The text which he objected to is now not in the article. That's not because I am meatpuppeting for him (I have had no contact with him for quite a while). Rather it is because Hitchens was right about this point. He just wasn't skilled enough in Wikipedia bureaucracy to push his changes through.
You got that right. It’s a real problem, I think we can all remember being a bit confused by the maze of policies and rules, but it seems in this case that rather than trying to understand what was going on they just went kinda nuts about it, thereby becoming their own worst enemy. It’s a pattern we’ve seen before, where someone is at their most obnoxious when they are also at their most correct. More established users can often get away with this, or just get off with a short block (I’m sure you all can think of a few examples).

I have to say I shared your bemusement at people commenting on you “picking a strange hill to die on” and so forth as you seemed to stay calm and reasonable through that whole process, much more so than Hitchens himself did. I assume what they meant to say was that you picked an odd person to advocate for but that doesn’t have quite the same ring to it, does it?
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Re: The mess that is George Bell

Unread post by Ming » Mon Aug 20, 2018 1:30 pm

See, Ming doesn't see abstruse/bureaucratic policies as the primary problem here. Ming went to the American version of a place like Leys, from sixth grade on; high school was so Anglophiliac that we had forms, not grades. And when Ming went on to college, Ming already knew the difference between the kind of writing that WP expects, and the kind of writing that Hitchens does as a matter of his daily work, regardless of whether one writes for the Mail or for the Times. And much of what he did in the Bell article shows that he knows the difference, because he carefully cited material and wrote in a way which made clear it wasn't his opinion he was attributing to WP. But then, for whatever reason, he decided that his analysis of the claims of the diocesan statement could be stated outright without citation. He knew how to do it right: make it clear that the diocese was making this claim about whether there was sufficient cause, not the actual police. But for whatever reason he decided that publishing his analysis was the hill he was going to die on, when he had to know that die was what he was going to do.

To be clear: Ming happens to share his unease/mistrust over the allegations. But every public school sixth former in England gets taught how the material he was trying to add wasn't going to be appropriate in context, so his "I'm a pro" stance that set off the Wikibureaucracy was simply not going to cut it.

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Re: The mess that is George Bell

Unread post by Poetlister » Mon Aug 20, 2018 8:37 pm

Indeed, as we all know, it's very dangerous to declare oneself an expert on Wikipedia. Even a Nobel prizewinner can get into trouble.
"The higher we soar the smaller we appear to those who cannot fly" - Nietzsche

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