User:Wiki-is-truth

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[edit] Consensus reality

The truth is...

  • what the majority of people think it is
  • what Wikipedia's manipulable content policies allow you to present it as

[edit] Wikipedia, Value and Neutrality

Wikipedia is unreliable as a serious reference work since it is manipulable by those with a partisan approach. Since apparently uncontentious articles generate edit wars, what happens with more controversial subjects is hardly surprising.

[edit] Wikipedia, Sex Offenders and Neutrality

In 2003 Pete Townshend was arrested and ultimately cautioned for "accessing a child porn website". This means that, in England, he is a "registered sex offender" (which is shorthand for "subject to the notification requirements of Part 2 of the Sexual Offences Act 2003"). At one time, Wikipedia had a category of "Child sex offender", into which Townshend was comfortably slotted. This enraged various people who set about altering the category so that it became impossible to include Townshend in it by making the category one for "Convicted child sex offenders". Townshend, of course, precluded a conviction by accepting a police caution. By virtue of "this legal technicality", it is impossible to reflect the objectively verifiable fact that Townshend is a "registered sex offender" using a Wikipedia tool that (if it should be used at all), should be used to reflect fact and not opinion.

Townshend claimed to have acted as he did for "research" purposes, and this has allowed some people to come to the opinion that he did no wrong, was "merely" "caught up" in Operation Ore and was included on the "sex offenders register" as a result of a mere technicality. In editing the article on Townshend to remove this bias and stick only to objective verifiable fact, I was told that my edits were "low-quality" and "opinion-driven". Furthermore, I was told that I was "gaming the system" by "changing the wording to make someone sound more vile than our cited sources do". I simply made a change of emphasis to make it clear that Townshend's minimising "research" justification was precisely that and not an objectively verifiable fact. If it had been objectively verifiable that Townshend was carrying out research, he ought to have been able to avail himself of the legitimate reason defence.