Andy McSmith's Election Diary: Tories editing Wikipedia? It's happened before
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Your support makes all the difference.We do not know the identity of ‘Contributsx’, who has been altering the Wikipedia entries on Grant Shapps and other politicians, but the story evokes memories of an occasion when someone at Conservative Central Office was caught bang to rights doctoring Wikipedia.
In February 2009, David Cameron mocked Gordon Brown for a statement that he had made at the World Economic Forum in Davros about the Venetian painter Titian. To illustrate the point that it can take a long time to learn to do things properly, Brown claimed the Titian did not really feel that he had truly learnt to paint until he reached the age of 90. In the Commons, soon afterwards, Cameron claimed, to much Tory laughter: “The Prime Minister never gets his facts right; he told us the other day that he was like Titian aged 90, but the fact is that Titian died at 86.”
That sent Brown’s researcher Theo Bertram rushing to the nearest computer. To his relief, as he logged into Wikipedia, up popped the information that Titian lived to be 90. But no sooner had he spread the word to Labour press officers, than the Wikipedia article was saying that Titian had died at 86.
As many people now know, it is easy to check the IP address of a computer used to edit Wikipedia, and so it was easily proved that the alteration was made in Conservative Central Office. David Cameron subsequently apologised.
By the way, no one knows for certain how old Titian was when he died. But you would think that professional researchers would look beyond Wikipedia to check their facts.
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