Canadian politician the subject of an edit war
Best known for its potatoes and Anne of Green Gables, Canada's smallest province is also home to the longest serving First Minister in the country, Premier Pat Binns of the Progressive Conservative party. Binns’ Wikipedia article was the subject of national print and online coverage, as well as regional radio and television stories, after a liberal versus conservative editing spat arose.
On 12 April, a reporter from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), Canada’s state-owned broadcaster, contacted admin and press contact Nick Moreau (known as Zanimum), inquiring whether political views are normal or encouraged on Wikipedia, pointing to the article on Premier Binns. Moreau quickly replied to the reporter from CBC Radio One Charlottetown (PEI’s capital city), and checked the page, to see what was the matter.
Until mid-March, Premier Binns’ article was of fairly good length and had a neutral point of view (NPOV), albeit with no references. The situation started when an anonymous user—who decided the article was perhaps too balanced, and not portraying the well-liked Premier in a good light—began editing Premier Binns’ originally NPOV article. Other than a complete lack of references, it was fairly clean, if, perhaps, unexciting prose. It included a photo of Binns, acquired through Moreau who convinced a Flickr user to “free” their creative work. Another anonymous user began cleaning up the less stellar points in his tenure, making the article sound as positive as one would expect from campaign literature.
This attracted the attention of Stephen Pate, a disability rights activist from the province. According to sources, Pate regularly pickets the PEI legislature regarding the issue, as well as running a blog on the topic. Not a fan of Binns' disability policies, Pate decided to revert the article, and add his own content focusing on disability rights. The paragraph included promotion for the Disability Alert blog, labeled as an advocacy organization representing 19,000 people. Pate has since refused to offer the media any membership list, to prove any such organization even exists beyond his PC.
The decision to not only revert, but add an extra helping of criticism angered the anonymous user, who again whitewashed the article. This process repeated itself a number of times, until it degenerated into pranks and name-calling. The Conservatives started to add paragraphs solely knocking Pate, while Pate chose to blank the entire article, with exception of the introduction and criticism sections. He also deleted Binns from an information box template of Canadian premiers. This despite later saying, “to just delete [parts of an article] is very unprofessional.”[1]
During this process, established Wikipedians would occasionally step in with the revert button. None, however, realized that all-out intervention was needed, no one seeing how both sides displayed childish behaviour for weeks on end.
- ^ “Wikipedia new P.E.I. election battleground”