Leighton Andrews tug-o-war on Wikipedia

Posted on December 30th, 2007 filed in Politics, Welsh Assembly

The Wikipedia article for Rhondda’s Labour MP Leighton Andrews is being vandalised.

Interesting elements of Andrews’ career are being removed from the article only to be restored by conscientious editors.

It is like a virtual tug-o-war played out publically in a small niche of Welsh cyberspace.

So what is this Wikipedia thing ? Wikipedia is the world’s largest encyclopaedia and it’s all available for free online.

The encyclopaedia was created by a collaborative effort involving people from across the world.

If there isn’t an article on a noteworthy subject, then create it.

If you want to contribute or edit an article, you can.

Thus in the example of the Leighton Andrews article, certain facts have been removed.

References to political researcher David Taylor and Andrews’ previous political career as a prominent Liberal have been deleted, albeit temporarily.

The attempt to delete certain aspects of the Wikipedia article is totally futile. It reminds one of John Gilmore’s famous aphorism about the Net ‘routing around censorship’.

Perhaps we should leave the last words to Michael Meadowcraft former Liberal MP, friend and fellow campaign colleague to Leighton Andrews. He wrote an excellent essay on Leighton Andrews entitled “What’s he doing there?” opening thus :

In recent times, on being told of Leighton Andrews’ defection to Labour I’ve consistently dismissed it as being for too improbable. Indeed, to have done otherwise would have been akin to emulating Lewis Carroll’s White Queen who “sometimes believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.” Leighton Andrews? The colleague who kept the rest of us in line. The solid, dependable comrade whose Liberal instincts and libertarian heart could always be trusted. The anorak wholly at ease with fellow Liberator revue satirists. The writer and editor whose solid work provided vital reference points. The intellectual Liberal prepared to take on David Owen and all comers at radical conferences. The friend as responsible as any for the tactics which got me elected in 1983. Impossible!

Leighton Andrews article on Wikipedia