Last evening, about two miles of the office building where I work, a crazy guy named John Patrick Bedell opened fire at the Pentagon Metro station, wounding two officers before being killed by return fire. While police are still sorting through his motives, bloggers are combing through the trail of his Internet activity. One thing we know already: Bedell was a contributor to Wikipedia.

The website Media Elites was the first to locate his user account, which has since been suspended (reason given: “User is deceased”). The user page for Bedell’s account has been shielded from public viewing; no public explanation is available but this is almost certainly to prevent Wikipedia from becoming a posthumous soapbox for Bedell’s views (Wikipedia tolerates unorthodox beliefs, but not when they become the impetus for attempted murder). However, Media Elites thought to copy and republish the full text before Wikipedia’s administrators stepped in. Here is an excerpt:

I apologize for the graphic content of some of my contributions, but detailed evidence is sometimes necessary to address important matters. I am very disturbed by the fact that Col. Sabow’s civilian superiors and their successors have been able to continue their narco-mercantilism. For historical comparison, I might resemble the odd German still complaining about the murders of the Night of the Long Knives in 1938(?). Of course, Wikipedia didn’t exist in 1938!

While his User page is gone, Bedell’s Talk page and Edit history remain. From these vestiges of his editing activity, we can learn some things about him:

• As declared in his former User page, Bedell was focused on adding information related to the late Col. James Sabow, whose apparent suicide is apparently believed by 9/11 conspiracy theorists (which Bedell clearly was) to have been a murder covered up by the U.S. government. Bedell created an article about Sabow on more than one occasion. Said page was deleted on more than one occasion, partly for containing original research.


• Bedell was an occasional but occasionally very active editor. His edits span 2006 to 2009, although he did not edit (at least from this account) even a single time during 2008. While much of his activity was related to advancing his views, this was not the sum of his activity. His first contribution was in November 2006 with a minor edit to the Bureaucracy article. His last was in August 2009, creating a redirect from one page to another, about the company Inslaw Inc.


• Bedell was familiar with Wikipedia conventions, probably as a consequence of being thwarted in his efforts by other editors. Rather than giving up, Bedell studied up on the community, making for what I can best describe as sophisticated weirdness. Here he is commenting on an obscure project page, making a “confession” that only kind of makes sense. Here he is on Jimmy Wales’ Talk page, challenging Wikipedia to approve his Sabow article and “create an environment where wikitruth, wikijustice, and wikilove may prevail.”


• Bedell joined a few subcommunities within Wikipedia’s ranks. He listed himself as a member of WikiProject Military History, WikiProject Molecular and Cellular Biology.


• Many of his edits were minor changes but constructive in nature, frequently on esoteric or offbeat topics: Khalistan movement, Basilar skull fracture, Human penis size, Joseph Stalin, David Icke, Vince Foster and so on.


• Although his articles on Sabow were deleted twice in February 2007 — the deletion debates are still available, here and here — other articles that he created remain, most prolifically about U.S. government and military officials. Some of these include William G. Thrash, Peter D. Williams, Roger E. Combs and Tony L. Cothron. The article Air Intelligence Officer is also his. In February 2007 — by far his greatest period of activity, he created the article September 11 demolitions. It has since been redirected to World Trade Center controlled demolition conspiracy theories.

While political bloggers argue over whether Bedell was a member of the far-left or the far-right, such arguments are really less about Bedell and more about the participants. As Gawker put it, Bedell was “clearly intelligent” but “nonetheless a certifiable wackjob”.

Likewise, I can imagine some who would depict Bedell as a typically obsessive Wikipedian, although as Media Elites notes, his Internet activity included Facebook, YouTube and Amazon, although it seems not Twitter. Believe me, I have seen obsessive Wikipedians, just as I have known people on the far-left and far-right, and they haven’t shot anybody. Bedell’s participation in Wikipedia was as incidental as his politics; the content of his madness and platform for its expression are less important than the fact of it.

Update: It should come as no surprise, now John Patrick Bedell is the subject of a Wikipedia article himself.

Cross-posted from The Wikipedian.

Illustrating the point perfectly is a clumsy news item in a small UK newspaper, the Southport Visiter, highlighting local complaints in late February about a perceived error concerning the boundaries of Lancashire. According to the Visiter, the following text from Wikipedia (still present at this writing) is the matter of some dispute:

The county was subject to a significant boundary reform in 1974, which removed Liverpool and Manchester with most of their surrounding conurbations to form part of the metropolitan counties of Merseyside and Greater Manchester. Today the county borders Cumbria, Greater Manchester, Merseyside and North and West Yorkshire.

I say “some dispute” in part because I’m not quite clear on what the issue is. According to a group called the Friends of Real Lancashire, Wikipedia “leaves Southport off the … map.” But as far as I can tell, Wikipedia has already absorbed this perspective and includes the following sentence later in the article:

Pressure groups, including Friends of Real Lancashire and the Association of British Counties advocate the use of the historical boundaries of Lancashire for ceremonial and cultural purposes.

So it appears to me that Friends of Real Lancashire are unhappy with the representation of Lancashire’s borders on Wikipedia, and have gone to the press with their concerns. This is not such a crazy idea: oftentimes ensuring placement of a particular fact or viewpoint in Wikipedia requires validation in a newspaper or magazine article before Wikipedia editors are likely to agree the fact or viewpoint is true or significant enough for inclusion. Because their viewpoint is presented, at least in summary, this must be a dispute over facts.

Now, let’s say I am a Wikipedia editor who lives thousands of miles away from Lancashire and have no special knowledge of the area’s boundaries (which is in fact the case). A newspaper article pointing out a supposed error could be useful to me. Perhaps I’m inclined to update the article based on what I have learned. Except the article does not explain the dispute carefully enough for me to make a judgment; the impression I am left with is that some people are unhappy with the designated boundary and wish for Wikipedia to elevate their views over existing reality. In which case I will ignore them as soon as I figure this out. Or maybe I write this blog post.

That Friends of Real Lancashire and the Southport Visiter have little idea how Wikipedia works is also quite evident:

[Friends of Real Lancashire] has contacted the website on several occasions, are concerned that those wanting to learn about Lancashire will be given the wrong information. … Although comments and letters have been sent to the editor of Wikipedia, Mr Dawson said that no action has since been taken.

Letters to the editor? The editor? There is a fundamental disconnect here, one in fact so stark that one wonders whether Wikipedia’s structures are so vanguard as to be incomprehensible to the average user, or whether the Real Lancashirites are hopelessly behind the times. It’s one thing for people who don’t think much about Wikipedia to misunderstand it; it is quite another for an organized interest group to care what Wikipedia says but not take the time to understand why it says what it does.

This phenomenon is bigger than Wikipedia. From where I live and work in Washington, DC, I often see advocacy organizations that are so focused on advancing their viewpoint using a manner and technique which is advantageous to them in one venue (newspapers, radio, television) that they cannot adjust their approach to advance their viewpoint in another (weblogs, social networks, Wikipedia). Sometimes, this adjustment may require the undermining of their original point, in which case they were destined to lose, anyway. This happens all the time.

So Friends of Real Lancashire may lose no matter what; if I am correctly interpreting their case, they will. Even so, it does not appear they have even tried to make their case in the proper manner. At least they have not engaged the one forum in which they might make their case directly to Wikipedia’s contributors: the Talk page associated with the Lancashire article. It’s there for a reason, and if you don’t use it, those who will probably have themselves a laugh at your expense and go right back to editing Wikipedia.

Lancashire map via Wikipedia.

For now, at least, the technology and media industries are looking at the brighter side. “Steve believes in old media companies and wants them to do well,” said a person who has seen the device and is familiar with Apple’s marketing plan for it, but who did not want to be named because talking about it might alienate him from the company. “He believes democracy is hinged on a free press and that depends on there being a professional press.”

Call me cynical, but I have a difficult time seeing Steve Jobs wax philosophical about democracy and the free press. This is, after all, a man who is famous for bullying and stonewalling the press. (Not that these attitudes are fundamentally incompatible, but they do look funny next to each other.) No, I think this sounds more like, I don’t know, maybe New York Times executive editor Bill Keller. You’ll remember him, he’s the one who appeared to let slip something he wasn’t supposed to let on that he knew about last year:

I’m hoping we can get the newsroom more actively involved in the challenge of delivering our best journalism in the form of Times Reader, iPhone apps, WAP, or the impending Apple slate, or whatever comes after that.

Yes, that “democracy” quote sounds a lot more like a particular someone I can think of who would not want to be named because talking about Apple’s new product because it might alienate him from the company.

But what interests me even more is the intellectual framework writer Jonathan Dee imposes on the proceedings. While there certainly appears to be a personal element involved for Johnson — one Dee apparently wasn’t quite able to crack — there is also the possibility that events occurred as they did because the Internet elevates the importance of links and the act of linking, opening the possibility for the forging of novel (and possibly false) relationships. On the Internet, the possibility of creating new contexts is limited only by any one person’s imagination. It’s impossible for me to say whether this is true in Johnson’s case, but Dee at least presents a persuasive case.

Key excerpts:

Whatever you think of him, Johnson is a smart man, a gifted synthesizer of information gathered by other people. But just as for anyone in his position, there is an inevitable limit to what he can learn about places, people, political organizations, etc., without actually encountering them. Instead of causes and effects, motivations and consequences, observation and behavior, his means of intellectual synthesis is, instead, the link: the indiscriminate connection established via search engine. …

Regardless of whether Johnson’s view of Vlaams Belang is correct, it is notable that the party is defined for him entirely by the trail it has left on the Internet. This isn’t necessarily unfair — a speech, say, given by Dewinter isn’t any more or less valuable as evidence of his political positions depending on whether you read it (or watch it) on a screen or listen to it in a crowd — but it does have a certain flattening effect in terms of time: that hypothetical speech exists on the Internet in exactly the same way whether it was delivered in 2007 or 1997.

Fans of Don DeLillo may recall the final pages of his 1997 novel “Underworld” (no relation to the graphic novels, film series nor English techno artists) where the characters Sister Edgar and J. Edgar Hoover are joined for eternity in cyberspace, “a single fluctuating impulse now, a piece of coded information. Everything is connected in the end.” Well, I did, anyway.

Meanwhile, Dee makes a secondary point that this blurring of context may contribute to a conflation of conflicting perceptions which one may find too often in online discourse:

Not only can the past never really be erased; it co-exists, in cyberspace, with the present, and an important type of context is destroyed. This is one reason that intellectual inflexibility has become such a hallmark of modern political discourse, and why, so often, no distinction is recognized between hypocrisy and changing your mind. …

The soundest conclusion seems to be that he has indeed changed his mind — less about issues (though there are a few, global warming chief among them, on which he will admit to having gradually reversed positions) than about the people with whom he is willing to share the stage, or, perhaps, about his willingness to share the stage at all. Not that changing your mind, even in today’s political environment, makes you into some kind of intellectual hero. People change their minds all the time, for all kinds of reasons.

I cannot say that is what is happening here — I’m certainly not about to be pulled into a discussion of Vlaams Belang. And while misreadings of intentions are not new to online discourse, I think there is a “flattening effect” or, to borrow a metaphor from television, “time-shifting” of opinion which can sometimes confuse more than enlighten. Such confusion may be innocent, but it is also open to exploitation. With no information online separated by more than a few clicks, anyone can choose their own context. And in the blogosphere, some choose contexts incompatible with others’ — even if only for the sake of argument.

We are now even earlier in the present presidential election cycle than we were then, yet we can already note the existence of Mike Huckabee President 2012 (to which, you may have already noticed, the old site redirects).

The blog is run by the same pseudonymous “Blue State Republican” responsible for the previous campaign. In a recent e-mail, BSR notes:

we start out not only with Huckabee’s name being included in early polling, but as the front runner. It should be an interesting three years.

Huckabee faced an uphill battle in 2008 mostly because he lacked name recognition. That is not his problem this time, since his surprisingly strong performance has earned him a weekend slot on Fox News and what seems to be a standing invitation to appear on The Daily Show. The bigger issue now may be his record in commuting sentences of Arkansas criminals who went on to re-offend.

Interestingly, Mike Huckabee President 2012 does not appear to be the first blog supporting Huckabee’s presumed campaign this cycle. In March 2008, once Huckabee had withdrawn, the very similarly named Mike Huckabee for President 2012 opened for business and posted 15 updates before going dark in December 2008.

P.S. The above screen shot contains a small (very small) Easter egg of sorts. Guess correctly in the comments and buy yourself a cookie!

According to records released by the New York City Board of Elections, the cartoon billionaire received 27 write-in votes out of the 299 that were cast. … Burns and the rest of the write-in candidates ultimately lost to real-life billionaire and incumbent mayor Michael Bloomberg.

Disappointingly, CNN does not attempt to provide an explanation. It would not be hard to find: Montgomery Burns was the focus of an Internet-driven joke campaign this fall intended to parody Bloomberg’s third basically inevitable term (and shady maneuvers to secure it).

Even Monty Burns. would be a better mayor — I think that was the joke.

As of now, BurnsforMayor.com remains up, and if you have a few moments to spare, I suggest perusing “Monty’s Plan” for New York City. Oh well. Maybe in 2013.

The following is a growing list of examples of liberal bias, deceit, frivolous gossip, and blatant errors on Wikipedia.

The list of examples is currently at 150 and counting, and it defies easy summary. Many relate to disagreements over the portrayal of religion and use of international or non-U.S. standards, or complaints that certain details they find important have not been included on certain pages. For example, one of the most recent (#150) states:

Wikipedia’s Nidal Malik Hasan article fails to mention any connection to Obama’s transition government.

It’s true that Hasan participated in a task force associated with GWU think tank that offered advice to Obama’s transition team. In fact, the detail has been considered for inclusion on the article about Hasan. Maybe something about it will be, however if it does it will surely fail to imply… whatever it is that this factoid is supposed to imply.

And then there are some objections (#2) that would never have occurred to me:

Wikipedia’s article on engineering features a photo of … an offshore wind turbine, which is an inefficient liberal boondoggle and certainly not a representative example of engineering. None even exist off the shores of the United States because they are not competitive.

Actually, as of today there is no such photograph in that particular article. Victory for Conservapedia! In fact, there are other cases where the Conservapedia perspective has “won”; here (#45) is another:

Wikipedia has once again deleted all content on the North American Union. The old pages are inaccessible, and re-creation is blocked.

As it happens there is a North American Union article, and has been since December 2007, following a period where it indeed had been deleted. This was certainly in error, as the concept has received plenty of coverage — the article has nearly 50 sources.

And then there are some examples (#14) which are not, in fact, genuine examples:

In his article entitled Wikipedia lies, slander continue, journalist Joseph Farah supports his observation that Wikipedia “is not only a provider of inaccuracy and bias. It is wholesale purveyor of lies and slander unlike any other the world has ever known.”

Well, I am sure he is sincere in this belief, but I would still have to tag that “citation needed”.

Cross-posted from The Wikipedian.

Apart from the auto-launching pre-roll ad—I tried and failed to pull this off DVR myself—not too shabby: I got two sound bites, the final conclusion restated in the reporter’s words, and some hilarious B-roll which is clearly the two of us shooting B-roll. Enjoy.

No matter what one thinks of him, it’s becoming ever more clear that Arrington is driving a significant part of what journalism is becoming. And while I’ll decline for the moment to unpack what all of that means (I will happily do so for a modest book advance) let me point to two announcements from TechCrunch in recent months.

First, in December 2008, Arrington declared — in a post titled “Death to the Embargo” — that he would no longer honor non-exclusive news embargoes:

We’ve never broken an embargo at TechCrunch. Not once. Today that ends. From now our new policy is to break every embargo. We’ll happily agree to whatever you ask of us, and then we’ll just do whatever we feel like right after that. We may break an embargo by one minute or three days. We’ll choose at random.

Some firms will stop talking to us (yeah! less email), but we’ll find other ways to get the news. Others, who haven’t read this post because they don’t read TechCrunch, will be unpleasantly surprised. Maybe if we cause enough pain then PR firms will start to take action against those publications who break the rules.

It’s a radical idea in the world of old media, but that world is quickly ending. This is the business side of political bloggers’ dissatisfaction with the inside-the-Beltway “cocktail circuit” journalism. Those rules are under attack and those can undermine them will.

And, indeed, just this past week the Wall Street Journal announced it would no longer honor such embargoes either. If you want them to hold off on covering a story, it had better be an exclusive. This makes great sense in an age where just about anyone can (more or less plausibly) call themselves a news outlet. “Publish or perish” is a phrase long-established in academia, but it applies in journalism now more than ever.

The lastest example of TechCrunch pushing on the boundaries of journalistic piety comes this weekend from Paul Carr, sort of a Toby Young for the Web 2.0 set, declaring his intention to break from convention and reveal the names of sources whom he comes to believe have lied to him:

I’ll never trust either of my two liars again, but they’re still free to scamper off to another reporter and peddle the same bullshit with a decent chance it’ll be published, at least as a rumour.

Every technology and business reporter I’ve spoken to this week about the off the record problem has their own story to tell about bullshitting sources, and every single one says they don’t know what to do about it. They just consider it one of the risks of the game.

Well enough’s enough. The one-sided contract ends here.

From now on, if you tell me something off the record and I later discover that you’ve knowingly mislead me, our contract of anonymity is immediately void, for breach. That means that everything you’ve told me about the story becomes on the record, and fully attributable.

Here too one can see lessons for print journalism. It may not have saved Judith Miller 85 days in jail, but the notion that journalists are sworn to uphold sources even after being burned by them is a thankless task. For obvious reasons, it mostly goes unreported or is left a matter of allegation. For yet more obvious reasons, this is also much more dangerous than merely breaking an embargo. After all, the consequences for being wrong are much higher than merely breaking an embargo — where one can be, at most, “wrong.”

But the same pressures are in effect: the dissatisfaction with the old way of doing things is finally starting to change, for two reasons that are immediately apparent:

1. The recent proliferation of news outlets gives writers options to find stories elsewhere, and likewise flacks options to get coverage elsewhere; and
2. These new journalistic outlets identify with each other much less closely than the television networks or big city dailies of old.

This looser confederation of participants is already producing a more anarchic news environment — one in which someone like Arrington thrives. That means trouble for anyone who isn’t prepared, or willing, to play by the new rules. But it’s a great thing for information consumers — especially those who like some entertainment with their news.

Cross-posted from New Media Strategies.

But this one was @CQPolitics, representing Congressional Quarterly, the venerable political news organization recently acquired by The Economist Group. [Also: CQ is a competitor of my former employer (and in the interests of disclosure: client of my current employer) and has at various times employed various friends and associates of yours truly.] I followed back.

I noticed almost immediately that there was a wide gap between the number of Twitter accounts following @CQPolitics and the number of accounts CQ was following back. According to the e-mail notification, the account had 17,929 followers and was following only 84 people. I had become the 85th. This is highly unusual; the very few Twitter users with a ratio of followers-to-friends this lopsided are typically famous-offline celebrities who have hopped on the Twitter bandwagon: Oprah Winfrey (@Oprah), Ashton Kutcher (@aplusk) and Shaquille O’Neal (@THE_REAL_SHAQ) for example. Although these celebs have north of 1.5 million followers (Kutcher has twice that) even Shaq follows 555 people back.

I might have liked to believe, for a moment, that I should be flattered CQ had counted me among its Beltway media personalities worth following. But I didn’t buy that, either. I saved a screen cap of @CQPolitics’ friend grid, featured in everyone’s right hand column, and decided to revisit the matter in a few days. This is what it looked like last weekend:

A few days became last night, when I returned to the page and compared the grid to the one from a week ago, this is what it looked like:

Quite a bit different, no? I thought so, and decided to check it against TwitterCounter.com, which produces graphs of Twitter users’ recent follower/following history. First of all, I wondered, how many other users have been following @CQPolitics over time? The graph looks like this:

And then, over time, how how many other users had CQ’s Twitter account been following back? This is what I found:

Well, that’s something. What are we looking at? In the first chart, we can see CQ’s followers growing organically since April, only to drop off slightly in the past couple of weeks. But this drop-off is only the ripple from a much bigger change we see in the second chart: after following and unfollowing accounts as it climbed from 4,600 friends to 9,200 (more about this below), CQ decided to shed them all — in fits and starts and then, last weekend, it deserted the rest in one fell swoop: somebody spent an entire afternoon (at least) unfollowing some 9,100 Twitter accounts. Or they set up a bot to do it for them.

The resulting impression is that @CQPolitics has so much clout that it can attract a substantial following without having to reciprocate in kind. But as we can see, this impression is false. I assume they wanted their account to beat Beltway it-publication Politico, whose @Politico account has 16K+ followers but only follows two Politico-owned accounts. But as TwitterCounter shows, @Politico’s large and growing number of followers happened without them playing games with their Twitter followers. Now, that account is decidedly anti-social — but at least it’s honest. CQ took the shady route.

Even now, they are still playing games. As of this morning, @CQPolitics is following 126 accounts, relatively quite a few more than a week ago. But I am sure these accounts are expendable too, and part of the same ploy: follow a Twitter account in hopes they will return the favor, then once they do (or even if they don’t) unfollow that user in hopes they will not notice. The follow-unfollow routine is one of the spammiest practices a Twitter user can undertake; more sophisticated versions of this practice have gotten other accounts banned.

So, it turns out CQ is running a de facto spam Twitter account (even their tweets are piped in RSS content via Twitterfeed, which would be no problem under other circumstances). And I am all the more sure of this based on one very good piece of evidence: @CQPolitics is no longer following me.

Update: Well, now I think I know why they’re doing this — in fact, I was more right than I knew about trying to beat Politico. Fishbowl DC is comparing the Twitter followers of Beltway media institutions in a weekly post, every “Twitter Count Friday”. And it looks like nobody has wanted it more than CQ.