Wikipedia/Problems

Caveat

WikiSpooks does NOT aspire to rival Wikipedia in either size or scope of content. Wikipedia is, without question, a massively successful and valuable reference work-in-progress. It's openness, moderated by carefully thought-out rules of article composition, content and standard, guarantees that it is ALWAYS worth consulting on almost ANY subject where introductory knowledge is being sought. However, it is WikiSpook's contention that, to the extent that a particular subject is judged a potential threat to established power centres and the acceptance of their 'official narratives' of events, the reliability and ultimate accuracy of any Wikipedia article about it is likely to be compromised. At the extremes of such perceived threats, Wikipedia's 'Neutral-Point-of-View' principle pretty much guarantees that the compromise will be fundamental.

With all due (ie considerable) respect for the Wikipedia project, the following examples illustrate the problem which WikiSpooks seeks to address, in what is a narrow but nonetheless massively important area of publicly accessible knowledge.

The problem

The following is the introductory section of the main Wikipedia page on the London Bombings of 7th July 2005:[1]

The 7 July 2005 London bombings, also known as 7/7, were a series of coordinated suicide attacks on London's public transport system during the morning rush hour. The bombings were carried out by four British Muslim men, three of Pakistani and one of Jamaican descent, who were motivated by Britain's involvement in the Iraq War.

At 08:50, three bombs exploded within fifty seconds of each other on three London Underground trains, a fourth exploding an hour later at 09:47 on a double-decker bus in Tavistock Square. The explosions appear to have been caused by home-made organic peroxide-based devices, packed into rucksacks and detonated by the bombers themselves, all four of whom died. 52 other people were killed and around 700 were injured.

(Wikipedia May 2010)

The above complies with Wikipedia editorial guidlines; in particular those concerning 'Neutral point of view' and it illustrates why Wikipedia cannot be relied upon for accurate resumes of 'deep political events'.

Here is a list of the problems with that short, ostensibly factual, introduction to a deep political event:

1. "The 7 July 2005 London bombings, also known as 7/7, were a series of coordinated suicide attacks on London's public transport system during the morning rush hour."

We do not know that they were suicide attacks. We have only the assurances of official sources that they were - the 'official narrative' in other words. There has been no forensic identification of the bodies of the alleged perpetrators; as of March 2010, nearly 5 years after the events, there has yet to be a Coroners Inquest into any of the deaths. A 'pre-inquest review' is scheduled to take place on 26/28 April 2010. Much of the evidence that might reasonably be expected to be available in support of the official narrative continues to be either witheld or alleged by officialdom not to exist. This is especially the case over video evidence where we were assured by Brian Paddick of the Met just after the attacks that there would be copious video evidence available from London's vast network of surveillance cameras. In the event we have been provided with miniscule, heavily edited footage with time-stamps mostly obscured together with a few video stills that show compelling evidence of having been doctored.

2. "The bombings were carried out by four British Muslim men, three of Pakistani and one of Jamaican descent, who were motivated by Britain's involvement in the Iraq War."

Again we have only have the assurance of official sources about the identities of the perpetrators. Also, the alleged motivation is drawn from two videos which appear to threaten war-like actions against unspecified Western Countries because of the West's military involvement in Muslim Countries - hardly evidence justifying such a categorical assertion.

3. "The explosions appear to have been caused by home-made organic peroxide-based devices, packed into rucksacks and detonated by the bombers themselves, all four of whom died."

Those 'official sources' again - even though 'appears to be' is slightly less dogmatic. There is ample evidence, not least from those same official sources, that the explosives 'may have been' of a military grade plastic variety since that was their position for several weeks after the events. But there really ought to be NO doubt about the nature of the explosive used because, as a matter of forensic routine, it is easily identifiable from the residues of the explosion. We have had NO such confirmation, just obfuscation by the authorities. As for '...detonated by the bombers themselves' there is similarly no independently verifiable evidence.

The rest of the article is replete with similar dogmatism in furtherance of the official narrative but unsupported by independently verifiable evidence. When it comes to obvious and undeniable anomalies however, a rigorously sceptical approach is the order of the day, together with strenuous efforts to reconcile such anomalies with the official narrative. A good example of this is in the separate Wikipedia article about the video 'Ripple Effect'. It is a relatively short piece but every rhetorical trick in the book is applied to discredit it; from the ridicule and character assassination of its producer (ad hominem - which Wikipedia is supposed to guard against) through to the absurdity of citing a BBC 'Conspiracy Files' program as definitively debunking it. There is no mention of an article by Dr Ridley Duff of Sheffield Hallam University (File:Theorising Truth.pdf), in which he applies 3 separate types of scientific analyses to each of the videos and conclude that the probability of Ripple effect being closer to the truth of what happened than the BBC 'Conspiracy Files' varies between about 50 and 75%.