Lynton Crosby’s staff deleted valid criticism from Wikipedia – Kitty S Jones
Hot air on the blower: He’s probably just been told Wikipedia has reinstated the part about his ‘wedge issue’ strategy: “The party he advises introduces a divisive or controversial social issue into a campaign… (with) the goal of causing vitriolic debate inside the opposing party.”
The Conservative election guru’s staff engaged in an ‘edit-war’ to delete details of his links with the tobacco industry and his election strategies from Wikipedia, according to this article by Kitty S Jones.
A Channel 4 News investigation has found that substantial sections were removed from the Wikipedia page of Lynton Crosby, an Australian political strategist, by staff at the Crosby Textor consultancy firm that he co-founded.
On 15 July last year, accounts linked to Crosby Textor staff deleted multiple times sections on the controversy when the Conservative party dropped its policy for plain cigarette packaging.
The policy on cigarette packs has been revived after a review, but at the time the press linked the policy being dropped to Crosby Textor representing the tobacco giant Philip Morris.
The deleted section includes a call by a Liberal Democrat MP for Lynton Crosby to be sacked.
Wikipedia editors reverted the changes, leading the Crosby Textor linked-staff to again make the deletions, initiating an “edit-war” in which users repeatedly try to edit a page, disregarding more senior Wikipedia editors’ warnings and revisions.
This led to the Crosby Textor-linked accounts, including entire Crosby Textor computer networks, being permanently banned from editing any Wikipedia entry.
For further information on the edits made to Crosby’s Wikipedia entry, see the article on Kitty S Jones’ blog.
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That is the problem with Wiki though I have corrected flaws on the julie bailey page only to have the incorrect information returned on many occasions.
Echoes of US conservatives a couple of years ago, altering Wikipedia to attempt to cover up a gaffe about the US War Of Independence by Michele Bachmann.
Always conservatives.