Wikispooks:History

This page is about the first 10 years of this site's history, 2010-2019. See Wikispooks:News for information about this year or last year.

Origins

Wikispooks was started by retired UK businessman and Deep Politics Forum administrator, Peter Presland. After a couple of months learning how to run a server, Peter Presland launched the site on May 22, 2010 with announcements on Cryptome^[1], the Deep Politics Forum^[2], Sabretache^[3] and several other sites. Acknowledging its influence from other sites, the launch email described it as being "an amalgam of Wikipedia, Cryptome and the Deep Politics Forum".

Name

The first half of the name should be obvious. The second half is an Anglicisation of the Dutch word for 'Ghosts', used since WW2 as a synonym for 'Spies' (e.g. in the BBC series 'Spooks'^[4]). Both meanings are apposite; while the relevance of spooks needs no elaboration, the ghosts of deep political motivations often come back to haunt those who would conceal darker motives under an establishment-backed official narrative.

Logo

I was casting about for a simple, unique, eye-catching, recognisable, memorable etc etc image - all the orthodox requirements of a logo in fact. It had to be a home-made job because the services of a professional was out of the question. I perused hundreds of open-source images looking for something fitting the above criteria. I was well aware of the significance and widespread use of the triangular form in occult symbolism - especially 'Illuminati' related and that did indeed give me pause. However, in finally deciding on using it, my reasoning went like this:
In spite of the reservations indicated above and because of its occult connections, a standard triangle is clearly consistent with representation of any "Official Narratives"

An impossible triangle (i.e. the Wikispooks logo triangle) is therefore representative of the misleading to impossible nature of any and all Official Narratives

The light shining though the impossible triangle symbolises the illumination that comes from recognising the true nature of all Official Narratives.

Peter Presland

2020

2020 was Wikispooks busiest year ever, as remarked upon by commercially-controlled media.^[5]

The site's bounce rate, consistently from 70-72% since 2014, began to gradually decline into the high 60s as editors focused less on increasing pagecount, more on completing existing pages.

After 10 years at the helm, User:Peter announced his retirement, passing control of the site to User:Robin, who set up a page on Patreon to crowdfund the site. As COVID-19 came to dominate the news agenda of commercially-controlled media, traffic went up to the site, which received 1.085 million visits in 2020.

26 June

Buy the "first they ignore you" dictum, Wikispooks advances to stage #2 with an article from Business Insider, which was published without contacting anyone from the website, entitled Conspiracy-theory encyclopedia Wikispooks is thriving during the coronavirus pandemic, seeing huge traffic gains from search engines.^[5]

26 May

Exactly 10 years since the site went online, it experienced its busiest week ever after renewed interest in Lori Klausutis. A new daily record of 8900 visitors on 24 May was broken on 26 May when the site saw 9598 visitors.

10 May

The site surpassed 25,000 pages.

31 January

Searches on "Eric Ciaramella" lead to the busiest day on record, with 8300 unique visitors.^[6]

25 January

The project to assign the missing nationalities to all Bilderbergers is all but completed, leaving just one who was "in attendance" — James A. Blay — still of unknown nationality.

2019

Traffic graph at the end of December 2019

Wikispooks traffic fell at the beginning of the year, but climbed from June to September, after an upgrade to the hardware and software increased the site's responsiveness. It concluded the year with a global rank of around 220,000 and received around 664,000 visits in 2019, up from 564,000 in 2018.

December

The site surpassed 10,000 people pages.

September

Traffic for 11 September, 2019 was over 5000 unique visitors, and for the following day it was over 6000 visitors, the busiest on record.^[7]

March

The proportion of stubs went below 60% for the first time in years.^[8]

10 January

Arms for Libya 2.0‎‎ became the site's 20,000^th content page.

2018

Wikispooks has slightly less than 565k visits in 2018 and concluded the year with a global rank of around 275,000.

29 April

Traffic graph at the end of April 2018

Traffic picked up sharply in March and April 2018, coincident with the unfolding of the Skripal Affair, reaching a rank of 200,000 websites for the first time in a year.

24 January

Server upgrade - increased both RAM and #CPUs to tackle slow page production

4 January

The Wikispooks:Projects page was created, to coordinate work on priority areas

2017

Wikispooks has slightly over 700k visits in 2017 and ended the year with an Alexa traffic rank of about 250,000.

13 December

The site now has a page for each of the 65 Bilderberg Meetings, and for each of the 3019 known Bilderberg participants.

16 October

The site now has over 16,000 content pages.

23 August

The site now has over 15,000 content pages.

July

The site now has over 6,000 people pages, over 2,000 group pages & over 750 event pages.

22 May

Alexa rated the site as #33,572 in UK.^[9]

29 April

The site now has over 14,000 content pages.

February

The site now has over 5,000 people pages.

2016

The site surpassed 100,000 edits and had 703,950 visits in the year, its busiest so far.

November

PropOrNot included Wikispooks on a list of 200 purported "Fake News" sites, alleged to be outlets of "Russian Propaganda".

14 September

Bernard Burrows became the 4,000^th person to have an entry on Wikispooks.

26 June

Today we surpassed 85,000 edits. Also:

"Radicalisation" became the 10,000^th content page.

2 April

After surpassing 80,000 edits last week, two new milestones this week:

Nelson Aldrich became the 3,000^th person to have an entry on Wikispooks.
The Bank of England became the 9,000^th content page.

2015

15 November

The capacity of the server was increased earlier this month to tackle increased traffic. Two milestones this month:

8,000 content pages
4,000 uploaded files

8 August

Two new milestones this week, after a Summer of steady growth in terms of pagecount, and a smarter coverpage design:

Samuel Bush became the 2,000^th person to have an entry on Wikispooks
The Category:Subjectless Documents category became empty for the first time since it was created in December 2013 - meaning all 1149 Documents on the site now have subjects!

22 May

Wikispooks celebrated its 5^th birthday with a significant server upgrade.

Editors who request it may be granted access to the Wikipedia Sandbox server, suitable for development and testing of new software.
Use of SMW has not changed in the last 9 months, so can be considered stable.
Active editorship continues to climb steadily

2014

The SMW extension is now used by almost all pages on the site. This goes beyond just standardising page appearance with a Wikipedia-style 'info box'. The semantic nature means that:

Pages now dynamically build cross-references (so pages display, for example, a list of documents that relate to them, jobs display a list of people who have held that post etc.)
The ExportRDF page allows export of semantic data about pages, for use in other websites or software

2013

Wikispooks has been assembling a lot of material on the Lockerbie bombing, which may not be as straightforward as the official narrative would suggest.

December

The Semantic Mediawiki extension is now helping to organise material and integrate the 3rd party documents into the main wiki.
The Community portal has been completely revamped and clarified.

August

Wikipedia+ was formally checked and accepted by Mozilla and added to their Firefox extension gallery.

2011

November

Significant updates to the ISGP Archive home page. The changes introduce a proposed new model for the operation of US/UK/European covert politics.
An expanded commentary on the '3 Establishments' now available as a Wikispooks Document - Three Establishment Model of Covert Politics

22 July

Peter sent to the Wikispooks mailing list:

It has been largely a solo effort but with noteworthy contributions about Hasbara influence on Wikipedia and maybe 50 other Wikipedia-enhancing original articles.
In total there are now some 5,000 articles and files comprehensively categorised and indexed - though the category tree is a mess.
In the 12 months to date (21 July 2011) there have been 250,000 page loads with average page read time of 1 Minute 7 seconds. ie about 200 man-days of reading in total. Hmmm certainly nothing exceptional there, but it's a start.
Technical stuff
I try to run the latest stable versions of everything the site uses. The most noteworthy being Mediawiki (though we are still on the 1.16 branch). It runs on a dedicated VPS so there is also considerable operating system and other server side software to be maintained. It has been a steep learning curve but the site is now probably as secure as any small security-concious site - FWIW - and, whilst far from a Mediawiki guru, I'm no longer a rookie. The site is also in process of mirroring to a separate VPS in Iceland.
Wikipedia+
This is a Browser extension designed to help people who access Wikipedia a lot, but who recognise that it reflects the establishment view and are interested in reading alternative perspectives. Wikispooks has been co-operating with its development through the summer. See here for full details. It has major potential to facilitate wider access to "Official Narrative" dissenting information. It will therefore be of interest to any webmaster whose site hosts information not readily available on or through Wikipedia.
Appeal
I will continue to develop the site along the lines set out in the project information pages. However, realising the potential of the project will require additional contributors - authors, editors and techies.
With the launch of Wikipedia+, the most pressing task is to cross-reference existing Wikispooks content to appropriate Wikipedia pages. It's a fairly simple procedure and a few hands to that pump would be most welcome.
Please feel free to post suggestions, criticisms, offers/queries about contributing, using any of the methods outlined on the Contact Page

June

The site is now Wikipedia+ enabled. This is a browser extension designed to help people who read Wikipedia but who recognise that it reflects the establishment view and who are interested in reading alternative perspectives such as Wikispooks.

2010

19 August

Peter sent the following message to the Wikispooks mailing list:

Part of the rationale for the Wikispooks site concerns the impossibility of Wikipedia providing effective coverage of deep political issues which have the potential to seriously jeapardise key 'official narratives'. To expect balanced coverage on such matters is akin to expecting the encyclopedias of the day to have provided rigorous coverage of Galileo's evidence on 'Heliocentism' when to do so was to invite excommunication or worse by the Catholic Church power structure of the day. In similar fashion, and in company with the rest of the Mainstream Media, stable articles on Wikipedia largely reflect the consensus view of 'experts' whose continued rank, position and place as 'experts' among their peers and society at large, is dependent upon them keeping criticism and questioning of 'the official narrative' within clearly understood (if unwritten) bounds. Coverage outside such bounds is permissible, but only if relegated to the category of 'conspiracy theory', an inane and meaningless pejorative, but one which has a life of its own. Its sole purpose is to pigeon-hole anything and anyone anointed with it to the equivalent of a lunatic asylum and thus better kept both out of sight and out of mind.
There are sub-sets of this global self-censoring mechanism which may manifest when a well organised group of Wikipedia monitors, authors and editors set out to influence content in pursuit of an agenda. In its third month of operation, Wikispooks has stumbled upon a fascinating example of just such a sub-set in action. The evidence is of a group of Wikipedia editors rapidly coalescing around a carefully researched and properly referenced article, and using all the tools available to experienced senior Wikipedia people to remove and/or dramatically reduce coverage of events seen as damaging to Zionist Israel.
For full information see https://wikispooks.com/wiki/Israeli_art_scam.
A related, if less blatant, example is at: https://wikispooks.com/wiki/2001_Israeli_Nerve_Gas_Attacks
Both articles were provided by their original Wikipedia author. "The Israeli Art Scam" article is preceded by referenced details of its Wikipedia history.
Wikispooks does not have a view on the significance of the 'Art Scam' article beyond posing the question: "Would such blatant airbrushing of Israeli involvement really be warranted if the intent was merely to cover-up a relatively trivial financial scam?"
The lessons

If you want to know the truth about deep political issues - don't rely on Wikipedia.

If you want to know the truth about Zionist Israel - don't expect to find it at Wikipedia.

For pretty much anything else, Wikipedia probably IS your best option as a 'first-port-of-call' introduction to a subject.

Information for editors Wikispooks is a collaborative project aimed at building a comprehensive reference source of deep political structures and events, together with the people and organisations connected to them. In company with 'Wikipedia' and other wiki-based projects, knowledgeable involvement with the site is invited.
Wikispooks enforces an editorial policy designed to compensate for the blind-spots of Wikipedia and other mainstream media. Principle tenets of the policy are:

The veracity and accuracy of official announcements, documents, press releases etc should be treated as inversely proportional to the power, wealth, statutory - or other claimed - authority of their source.

Any such information should be assumed to be in furtherance of a hidden - if more or less obvious - agenda and thus designed to mislead rather than to inform.

Reputation, Position, Rank, Place etc., in Establishment hierarchies and protocols should be treated as pretentious conceits serving Establishment agendas (hidden or otherwise) and thus deserving of ridicule, satire and other forms of literary attack.

Wikispooks also provides a secure anonymous file upload facility for whistleblowers wishing to put information into the public domain without revealing their identity.
The Wikispooks site is hosted in the Irish Republic.

3 July

Lots of behind the scenes techie stuff done in the past couple of weeks:

Traffic to and from the entire site is now available encrypted using a Starfield Technologies Standard SSL certificate. This guarantees that you are communicating with the bona-fide operator of the 'wikispooks.com' domain and encrypts all traffic so that anything intercepted between your browser and the Wikispooks server will be gobbledygook.
The anonymous upload form no longer uses Flash. It too is available over SSL which means that both message and and uploaded files are also encrypted.
Encrypted messages intended for Wikispooks can now be left on the Yahoo pgpboard. Messages should be encrypted using the Wikispooks PGP public key
'Fail2Ban' installed on the server to screw all those persistent brute-force attempts to break in.
'Spider-Trap' installed on the server to screw all those bad-mannered, bandwidth-consuming bots that ignore the 'Robots.txt' file.
'PiWik' stats package installed so that useful management statistics on pages accessed, referring sites etc, can be collected without the need to retain server log files and IP addresses.

I just keep plugging away and hope to garner one or two interested parties to help develop this thing before long.

Help will be needed if it is to get anywhere close to its stated objective so, Any offers?

12 June

A brief update:

As of this morning the site has a total of 1,104 articles documents and files posted. Many of the files remain uncategorised; many of the pages need extra work - most of them lots of it.

I haven't done any more site promotion because I'm acutely aware of a host of security-related and software enhancement things that need attention - ALL of them distracting and time-consuming - and I am immersed in trying to get a reasonably comprehensive category-tree framework plus substantial content up - even if only in outline.

The 'Spooks' 'Israel Lobby' and 'Northern Ireland' categories (accessible from the left hand 'category tree' menu option) are particularly well populated (Thanks in large part to SpinProfiles and Wikileaks) - though all need masses of additional input. The whole thing to date makes me realise what a mammoth task it will be to do an 'alternative' encyclopedia of Deep Events justice. I certainly won't be able to on my own! Still, time-enough for approaches to disgruntled Wikipedia editors when it has (if it gets??) a bit more credibility eh?

It currently averages just over 300 unique visitors per day equating to 4000-5000 page loads - which of course means that its content is effectively hidden from the Lumpen and therefore probably of little interest to you know who - yet anyway. Googlebot and other greedy slurping bots are constantly trawling though it and account for over 10% of bandwidth consumed - I'd love to figure out a way of charging them.

Right now I still intend to just keep plugging away and maybe give it a proper launch/push when the inclination to do so strikes. --Peter P 11:56, 12 June 2010 (IST)

24 May

Just over 50,000 page loads in three days equating to 2,500 unique visitors. Need to sort out the precise meaning of those AWstats reports. MediaWiki probably causes 2-5 log entries per actual page rendered because the ratio of pages to visitors seems a bit cockeyed.