{"id":2144,"date":"2007-05-29T12:14:42","date_gmt":"2007-05-29T17:14:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/2007\/05\/29\/wikipedia-vs-private-eye\/"},"modified":"2010-05-10T12:17:42","modified_gmt":"2010-05-10T17:17:42","slug":"wikipedia-vs-private-eye","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/2007\/05\/29\/wikipedia-vs-private-eye\/","title":{"rendered":"Wikipedia vs Private Eye"},"content":{"rendered":"

\nThis is interesting… Snatched from a Dave Langford comment<\/a> at Making Light<\/cite> comes this Private Eye<\/cite> article insinuating that Wikipedia was pressured into scrubbing most of the more …damning material from the entry on Giovanni di Stefano, selfstyled lawyer to the stars, if the stars are not very nice former heads of states accused of crimes against humanity:\n<\/p>\n

\n

\nWIKIPEDIA WHISPERS\n<\/p>\n

\nIT’S hard to keep up with the helter-skelter career of Giovanni di Stefano, the self-styled lawyer who claims to have represented Saddam Hussein, Slobodan Milosevic, Ian Brady and Kenneth Noye.\n<\/p>\n

\nThe past fortnight has seen him busier than ever: issuing statements on behalf of his chum “Dutchy” Holland, who is in Belmarsh awaiting trial on abduction and firearms charges; complaining about political interference in the Eurovision song contest; revealing that Saddam was a fan of Dundee FC, where di Stefano was once a director; threatening legal action against Ashworth top-security hospital for refusing to let Ian Brady keep a book about the Moors Murders; and, er, releasing a CD by “Italian singer Just Carmen” which includes a cover-version of “Everyone’s Gone to the Moon” by kind permission of di Stefano’s mate Jonathan King, the convicted sex-offender.\n<\/p>\n

\nUntil recently, anyone wanting a guide to his exotic career could find an extensive article in Wikipedia, which mentioned everything from his fraud conviction in 1986 (when a judge branded him “one of nature’s swindlers, without scruples or conscience”) through his failed attempts to buy football clubs and the recurring doubts about whether he’s really a lawyer at all. (“As far as we’re concerned,” the Law Society has said, “he has no legal qualifications whatsoever.”)\n<\/p>\n

\nDi Stefano didn’t like this one little bit. Two years ago he started editing out anything he found embarrassing, sometimes twice a day, to the point where the page was “locked” for several months to prevent further tampering. When asked to stop deleting the contents he threatened Wikipedia contributors with legal action.\n<\/p>\n

\nOn 24 April this year, without warning, Wikipedia founder and director Jimmy “Jimbo” Wales personally deleted the entire page. Soon afterwards a new, cleaned-up version of the di Stefano entry was created – minus all the awkward facts.\n<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\nThis is of course denied on the relevant discussion page<\/a>, but there has been a similar incident when John Byrne complained about his article, which was not to his liking but largely true if not very well sourced andwhich was subsequently scrubbed by Jimbo “sole founder of Wikipedia” Wales himself. So it would not surprise me if he panicked again in this case…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This is interesting… Snatched from a Dave Langford comment at Making Light comes this Private Eye article insinuating that Wikipedia was pressured into scrubbing most of the more …damning material from the entry on Giovanni di Stefano, selfstyled lawyer to the stars, if the stars are not very nice former heads of states accused of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[97],"tags":[974,975,973,2458],"class_list":["post-2144","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-wikipedia","tag-giovanni-di-stefano","tag-jimbo-wales","tag-private-eye","tag-wikipedia"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2144","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2144"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2144\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2145,"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2144\/revisions\/2145"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2144"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2144"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2144"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}