Guido Fawked – Caught In The Wiki Edit Act

[Update at end of post]

How does the blogger who specialises in accusing others of spin pass the time when on his extended family holiday at his French home, one of his four residences scattered across three countries? Well, for the perpetually thirsty Paul Staines, who styles himself Guido Fawkes, there is always the temptation of spinning all those inconvenient details that have been posted to his Wikipedia entry.

95 minutes? Yeah, I was too pissed to carry on. I think

That entry had, after all, contained items such as the incident outside the entrance to London Bridge tube station, when a camerawoman was knocked over as Staines and his tame gofer, the flannelled fool Henry Cole, barged into a gathering of hacks and snappers attending a photo-op for Labour Mayoral challenger Ken Livingstone.

Staines got very sore at the suggestion he had knocked over the camerawoman, but someone who was there has told this blog that, whoever made the contact, it was Staines and Cole barging in that caused her to be knocked over. Staines is also known to be sensitive about his past career which ended in acrimonious litigation and his being declared bankrupt.

Rather a lot of self-promotion going on here ...

So it should be no surprise to Staines watchers to see that, late last Thursday, someone with the same name made a whole raft of changes tohis Wikipedia entry, the first one being annotated “removed false claim that I [note first person] knocked over a camera woman”. This was followed just three minutes later by another edit, marked “Adds context for bankruptcy declaration”.

And, as the man said, there’s more: “Updates business activities from 2006 to 2012 with links” brings a whiff of vanity, then “Elaborates on circumstances of litigation” looks like more self-justification. And then look: “removed reference to BIJ story as too trivial”. Perhaps the BIJ, or the person who put that up in the first place, would like to comment on that slice of censorship.

There then follow another six significant edits to the Staines entry, taking the length of the exercise to a not insignificant 95 minutes. Of course, it’s possible that this is all the work of Another Big Boy That Ran Away, but a look at the contributions made under that name is consistent with his being the author, including the use of the first person for the London Bridge incident.

... and there was more last January

And a previous session of edits, including such turd-burnishing items as “Cites Guardian Media 100 and GQ Most Influential 100 rankings” and “Amends Guy News TV info adds Guidogram email”, points to a deliberate revision of history from someone rather more thin skinned than he likes to pretend. The version without the two sessions of edits would make interesting viewing, and who knows, it yet might.

Another fine mess, once again.

[UPDATE 17 August 1000 hours: Staines has owned up to editing his Wikipedia entry, and has excused his selective re-writing of his own particular history by asserting that he had "been invited to by the editors".

That's an interesting one, given that there was no sign beforehand that those same editors were unhappy about the content of the entry. And there were, as I've shown, two batches of editing several months apart.

My conclusion is that this is more weak spin from The Great Guido - if he'd really been on a mission to "factually correct the record", he might have been expected to say so at the time. Sneaking it through late at night during a quiet moment on his holiday suggests otherwise. Another fine mess]