The WWW Weird World of Wikipedia  By Martin J Walker February     With this in mind most people dealing with this issue attempt to mitigate the problem by understanding that all knowledge is situated knowledge and that all judgements come from a particular standpoint This means that it is understood that no one can claim to be  neutral or objective and that there are always power struggles involved when someone claims to be objective especially whilst engaging in partisan behaviour  Angela Kennedy  Jane Bryant The One Click Group to Jimmy Wales   November  httpwwwtheoneclickgroupcoukdocumentsMECFSdocsMoreWikipediaOnWesselydoc  One Click seems to me to be a bunch of paranoid zealots And I   will state again that before I tried to tone down the shit they put on the Wessely page I had never heard of them or Simon Wessely  Just Z  G you know TC AfD    December  httpenwikipediaorgwikiTalkSimonWessely   A conservative estimate of the number of adults and children suffering from ME suggests that there are around  in the UK yet it is rarely diagnosed by the medical profession is fleetingly mentioned in government research funding documents is seldom accepted by medical research workers and is almost never admitted to by insurance companies    Since  while gathering around him an entourage of like minded disciples which has become known as the Wessely School Professor Simon Wessely has almost singlehandedly been responsible for the strategy of a moratorium on the investigation of ME as an illness  with a physically neurological cause Professor Wessely is a psychiatrist and for nearly twenty years he has promulgated the idea that ME and the broader groupings of chronic fatigue illnesses CFS are the product of false illness beliefs mental aberrations which can be diagnosed and treated with psychiatric based therapies and antidepressants    Professor Wessely carries out research mainly in the Londonbased Institute of Psychiatry which is situated in Kings College teaching hospital He is a member of numerous research organisations and advisory groups and is advisor to the British Armed Services While his membership of an official web of research organisations tell us a lot about his work added substance to his views is to be found in his more informal and less renowned associations with a number of minorityview groups set up by or aligned with US and British quackbuster organisations    Just before Christmas  the Wikipedia an electronic and sometimes publicly edited encyclopaedia was host to a small anonymous entry about Professor Wessely The entry appeared to have originated with someone opposed to Wesselys psychiatric view of ME On seeing this entry Jane Bryant of the One Click OC campaign substituted a longer text which contained not just biographical facts but a broader description of Wesselys role in the politics of ME    When this longer text was seen by the Wikipedia edit police who cruise the pages seeking vandalism and skewed edits it was immediately considered to break most of Wikipedias self serving rules On writing to the owner and founder of Wikipedia Jimbo Wales in an attempt to put their case the OC campaign received a personal communication from him   Although Wales aimed at a slight upbeat and reconciliatory tone in his email the text was scattered with veiled insults He accused One Click participants of behavioural problems while stating that OC organisers had lied and purposefully made libellous statements in their posted piece on Wessely He made clear even at this early stage of the exchange that Wikipedia would from then on act on the basis that anything from your site will be treated with extreme scepticism Jimbo Wales ended his email with an exhortation for everyone to settle differences and unit in the spirit of Wikichristmas    When however OC answered Jimbo with a rebuttal of his argument in favour of an orthodox objectivity and neutrality  we are not going to be advocates for or against either side in this dispute  the debate entered another level   It seems possible that Professor Wessely having been alerted to his Wikipedia entry began to liaise with Wikipedia and the business of drafting a  Sovietstyle biographical text about him was given to the indulgently named Just Zis  Guy you know Clearly I have no intention of using this onanistic sobriquet in this essay and so will refer to him as ZG   There ensued an argument about One Clicks contribution to the Wessely entry which though handled with cool clear minded determination by OC degenerated into bad language and scatological rebukes from male Wikipedians   G my warmest compliments  wikihug for putting up with the faecal matter of One Click                                                  JFW Tlk   December                           httpenwikipediaorgwikiTalkSimonWessely   Air Brushing Out the Context   I do not want to get embroiled in any of the detailed arguments about the meaning of concepts and words which became to some degree the subject of this row What seems more important is the way in which Wikipedia a cultlike project employing its own acronymic language evidently believed that it could recreate define and separate the  experience and perception of Professor Wessely  held by thousands of MECFS patients from any biographical account of the man himself   I have made the forked version live As outside editors are converging on the fork after an awareness campaign by One Click I see no point in hiding it further Criticisms of hagiography are likely to persist from those people who feel Wesselys research has caused mental health stigma of chronic fatigue syndrome and there will be a lot of reverts until the partisans learn the importance of WPNPOV WPNOR and WPCITE   Jfdwolff httpenwikipediaorgwikiTalkSimonWessely  The quote above shows not only the insider argot of the group but also their seeming incapacity to understand what the grounds for opposition were from OC One Click does not for instance complain about the stigma of a mental health diagnosis rather it objects strongly to Wesselys psychiatric diagnosis forming the basis for treatment modalities when no biophysical research has been carried out    Nor does OC generally speaking refer solely to chronic fatigue syndrome which is an all embracing Wessely nomenclature which has taken root in Britain and the US after Wessely did away with ME One of the planks of the OC campaign has been the fact MECFS is classified by the WHO as a neurological disease under ICD G In their texts OC has always been careful to refer to the illness as MECFS so retaining the status of the original illness ME and stressing the physical aetiology of these illnesses generally    By making errors of this kind however small they might appear to those who make them either purposefully or by error the Wikipedia editors and writers determinedly stated one side of the discourse The arrogance of Wikipedia is also shown in this quote in which the writer expresses the view that critics will come to their senses when they learn the Wikipedian rules and language   I will argue that biographies about the contentious lifestyle or work of prominent individuals are utterly without use or intelligent direction if they cite only facts What is more accounts that cite only facts in uncritical biographies of contentious individuals inevitably take sides with that individual and the social effects of their words and deeds    I will cite a simple example which is extreme and has nothing to do in its substance with Professor Wessely I have to stress this here because no doubt next week I shall be accused of saying that Wessely is a Nazi     In writing biographical text about Alfred Rosenberg the senior ideologue of the German Nazi Party between  and  a compiler or writer who cited only his published writing and his rise within the hierarchy of Hitlers parliamentary party would be obscuring the less verifiable fact that his ideology and policies led to the deaths of  million Jews Gypsies gay disabled and other human beings Rosenberg who was himself of Jewish extraction was executed after a trial by the Allies in    Information is power and the most powerful information goes almost unnoticed as a convincing part of everyday culture Every reason it is possible to find argues that this information is rational and based upon a majority view while in reality it is simply the prejudices of the most powerful minority groups which often remains unquestioned by the majority    If Wales and ZG were to have stuck honestly to the understanding of rounded neutrality in their Wikipedia entry for Professor Wessely it would read something like this little more little less  Professor Simon Wessely has worked as a psychiatric medical researcher mainly in Britain at the Institute of Psychiatry between  and the present Professor Wessely has argued on the basis of his research results that many apparently environmentallyprovoked illnesses are the product of false illness beliefs perceived and presented by their sufferers as physical illnesses but having no basis in biological fact  In the areas of Gulf War