The Conservatives Who Are Rewriting History on Wikipedia

The rule of thumb tends to be that the victorious rewrite history. At least that’s what we are told by those who we suppose to have been the winners. However, nowadays our history is written through collaboration and each example of this is an independent skirmish which makes up the wider global war. Wikipedia is on the front line of these daily battles. The modern encyclopedia is a one stop shop for knowledge on most subjects. Wikipedian's are well aware that they are strange creatures, who often revel in their own obsessive compulsive natures. They argue with each other over details that would bore the majority of normal folk. But hidden amongst the millions of pages of Wikipedian's conversations are many arguments over neutrality.

An article which I wrote about UK Prime Minister Theresa May’s father, Reverend Hubert Brasier, led to me investigate Wikipedia. Hubert Brasier’s Wikipedia page had vanished just after Theresa May became PM in July 2016. Two days after my story went viral Mr. Brasier’s Wikipedia page was reinstated under the pretence that it was of importance as Theresa May was now running for PM. If that was so then why would you decide to delete, or merge the page, when she had already become PM a year earlier? The battle over the Hubert Brasier Wiki page is still being fought. The page was soon re-merged with Theresa May’s page and information about Hubert’s work placements was again hidden away in the archives.

There was some backlash to my questions. One man suggested that I just didn’t understand how Wikipedia worked and I took that as a challenge. I wanted to find error in my reasoning but what I discovered instead was confirmation of corruption. I read thousands of conversations between Wikipedian's who went into detail about the most mundane of semantics. I studied all the pages of interest, checking the controversial conservative and right wing figures of history. Enoch Powell, Oswald Moseley, Lord Sudeley, Margaret Thatcher, Ted Heath, all of them had a long history of page edits and numerous patterns began to emerge.

Wikipedia ‘Sock Puppets’ are Wikipedian's who are using multiple accounts to force through edits and deletions. Once they are discovered to be suspected sock puppets they are banned from any further edits. But the damage they do before they are caught effects the history that we read. The agenda of a sock puppet is often to undermine pages by slowly taking away information from articles until they are eventually disjointed and full of errors. Then the pages are put forward for deletion or to be merged with other Wikipedia articles. On any page history, you can witness Wikipedian user names highlighted in red who have left, been banned for vandalism, or discovered to be a sock puppet for a different account. Their former profile pages usually show some detail of their punishment and gives you access to all their previous conversations leading to the account being suspended or banned.

Neve Selbert was the first active Wikipedia username to be written down in my little note book on multiple occasions. The account has been actively editing pages about senior UK Conservatives, and others connected with conservative politics, since 21st July 2015, nearly 2 months after the UK Conservatives won the 2015 General Election. Neve Selbert describes himself as a secret monarchist and his account has been suspended on numerous occasions. On his Wikipedia profile page he says that he is sorry for things he has done before on Wikipedia and promises to make it right. It isn’t long into my investigation of the Neve Selbert user account before I stumbled across a group that he is a member of on Wikipedia. The group is the Wikiproject Conservatism and states their intentions as ‘a group dedicated to improving Wikipedia's coverage of topics related to conservatism’. The group is large, organised and global. It’s quite difficult for anyone on the left of politics to imagine an impartial conservative, let alone a group of impartial conservatives. It is clear that the right wing of politics is using every possible tool to rewrite history in a way that suits their narrative. They wish to erase all evidence that points to the average conservative being manipulative, false, incompetent, and out of touch.

There are groups who oppose these attempts to rewrite a conservative history of the world. But it seems that for every one person fighting for truth and impartiality, there are two more fighting to hide facts. It is obvious that the real history will be written by those who organise. For now the global war of information trundles onward. We most all fight disinformation, not only in the future but also in the present.