February 08, 2007

AVWatch: will facts stick in Villaraigosa's Wikipedia entry?

As a test designed to show how unreliable Wikipedia is, I added some long-missing facts to the WP entry for Los Angeles mayor Antonio Villaraigosa. Then, someone else came along and junked the paragraph I added up a bit. Then, problem administrator "Will Beback" added 'citation needed' marks to the junked-up paragraph, and I noted at the time that that was most likely a pretext to remove the whole paragraph. I was half right, since "Will Beback" subsequently reduced my paragraph to just this one line:

At [[UCLA]], Villaraigosa was a leader of the group [[MEChA]] [http://www.bruinalumni.com/antonio/antonioindex.html] [http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=3531] [http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/politics/recall/20030830-9999_1n30mecha.html].

Now, I've fleshed out the original paragraph in order to avoid future pretext-related deletions. Let's see what fun happens to this:

At [[UCLA]], Villaraigosa was a leader of the group [[MEChA]] [http://www.bruinalumni.com/antonio/antonioindex.html] [http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=3531] [http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/politics/recall/20030830-9999_1n30mecha.html]. Some, such as [[John and Ken]] of [[KFI]], derisively refer to him as ''Mayor [[Reconquista]]'' [http://www.kfi640.com/podcast/JohnandKen.xml] [http://www.google.com/search?q=%22mayor+reconquista%22] [http://hotair.com/archives/2006/09/15/video-la-mayor-villaraigosa-jumps-ugly-with-john-and-ken-over-immigration/] [http://newsbusters.org/node/5903] because of that and because of his support for [[amnesty]] for [[illegal immigrants]] [http://cbs2.com/topstories/local_story_024214716.html] [http://24ahead.com/blog/archives/003211.html] [http://24ahead.com/blog/archives/004756.html]. Quote: ''"I think there is a lot of momentum and support for an amnesty or regularization."'' [http://socrates.berkeley.edu:7001/Events/spring2002/04-12-02-villaraigosa/index.html]

Posted to Miscellania at February 8, 2007 09:32 PM

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