{"id":2373,"date":"2009-07-28T17:54:35","date_gmt":"2009-07-29T01:54:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/secularright.org\/wordpress\/?p=2373"},"modified":"2009-07-28T18:18:50","modified_gmt":"2009-07-29T02:18:50","slug":"gossipedia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/gossipedia\/","title":{"rendered":"Gossipedia"},"content":{"rendered":"

[Note:\u00a0 The editors at Taki’s Magazine<\/a> have kindly given me permission to reproduce the column below. Several Taki readers were kind enough to go into Wikipedia and amend some of the more egregious errors in my Wiki page. Whether their amendments will be accepted or not, I don’t know. In any case, the Wiki page I am referring to will likely have changed, removing the sense from some of my comments. <\/em>However, with that low cunning for which the English are well-known, I preserved an image of the original Wiki page here<\/a>.]<\/em><\/p>\n

———————————————————————<\/em><\/p>\n

<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n

The first thing I noticed about my Wikipedia page<\/a>, when someone directed my attention\u00a0to it, was that they got my name wrong, there in the very\u00a0first line!<\/p>\n

Not the spelling\u00a0\u2014 they at least managed to get that<\/em> right\u00a0\u2014 but the pronunciation. Their rendering in\u00a0the International Phonetic Alphabet is \u00a0\/\u00a0\u02c8d\u0251rb\u0268\u0283\u0259r<\/strong> \/\u00a0 That includes two fricative-lingual\u00a0r<\/strong> sounds. In fact there are no r<\/strong> sounds at all in the pronunciation of my name, fricative-lingual or otherwise. It is pronounced with\u00a0pure vowels: \u00a0\/\u00a0\u02c8d\u0251\u02d0b\u026a\u0283\u0259<\/strong> \/\u00a0 (DAH-bi-shuh). I refer\u00a0interested readers to \u00a7773 of Daniel Jones’ classic\u00a0Outline of\u00a0English Phonetics<\/em><\/a>:\u00a0 “[I]n London English the r<\/em> is never sounded when final or followed by a consonant.” The\u00a0following \u00a7774, “Words for practising the omission of r<\/strong>,” is also helpful. Prof. Jones does not give a phonetic\u00a0transcription of “Derbyshire” in standard English but he does, in \u00a7287, show\u00a0\u00a0\/\u00a0\u02c8d\u0251\u02d0b\u026a<\/strong> \/\u00a0 for “Derby.”<\/p>\n

Trust me on this. It’s my name. I’ve been pronouncing it since the Truman administration.<\/p>\n

The second thing I noticed was that my Wikipedia page was written by an AAM\u00a0\u2014 that is, an Angry Asian Male. This needs a bit of\u00a0explanation.<\/p>\n

Among East Asian males, there is a large subgroup who are flipped into a mode of blind fury by the thought of Asian women consorting with non-Asian\u00a0males. In the young-adult cohort of mainland-Chinese males, I would estimate the subgroup as about one in three. These are the AAMs. One recent\u00a0target of their rage has been Chinese movie star Zhang Ziyi, whose\u00a0affair with Israeli venture capitalist\u00a0Vivi Nevo<\/a> has stirred quite horrifying levels of vituperation against Ms. Zhang on Chinese-language blogs.<\/p>\n

After hanging out among Chinese people for forty years on three continents, and having been married to a lady of Chinese ancestry for twenty-three\u00a0of those years, I am exquisitely well-sensitized to the AAM mentality. I can, as it were, spot an AAM at five hundred yards. That the author of my\u00a0Wikipedia page is an AAM shone out loud and clear.<\/p>\n

In fact, you really don’t need to have my level of sensitization. Just look at that first subheading: “Conflicts of peoples.” Pure Chinglish\u00a0\u2014 no native English-speaker would write that.<\/p>\n

Having grasped that my Wikipedia page was an AAM production, I was not much surprised by its contents. For example: “During a debate with\u00a0[white nationalist] Jared Taylor at the Robert A. Taft club in August 2006 Derbyshire joked that the only reason he was not an open white nationalist\u00a0was because ‘it would get me in trouble at home’.” Did I?<\/p>\n

Here is a precise transcription of the relevant part of the debate. You can listen to it yourself. It’s at 9m 22s into the “Question & Answer Period” audio clip. (The link on my Wikipedia page does not work directly\u00a0\u2014 rather a lot\u00a0of Wikipedia links don’t work\u00a0\u2014 but if you scroll down on the error page you can find the audio file. Or you can just go here<\/a>.) I am talking about Steve Sailer’s “citizenism” concept, which I\u00a0agree with:<\/p>\n

Our government, our authorities, ought to regard us all equally, and they ought to prefer our<\/em> interests to the interests of the\u00a0other six billion people in the world, which currently they don’t. I’m on board with that. I’m kind of on Steve’s side on that. I’m not a white\u00a0nationalist. I’d be in trouble at home if I was. [Laughter.] But I agree with Steve: citizenism<\/em>.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

That’s what I actually said. Is it what Wikipedia says I said? Judge for yourself.<\/p>\n

The following sentence on my Wikipedia page is\u00a0\u2014 how shall I put it?\u00a0\u2014 a bare-faced lie. To uncover the lie, you\u00a0unfortunately need to listen to all 69 minutes of that “Question & Answer Period” audio clip. I guess my AAM-biographer calculated that\u00a0very few people would be bothered to do this. I guess he is right.<\/p>\n

My Wikipedia page is pretty much downhill from there.<\/p>\n

\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014<\/p>\n

Now, I am not much bothered by this kind of thing. I have a congenitally thick skin\u00a0\u2014 a terrific asset in the opinionating business. I\u00a0did recently start thinking, though, that with\u00a0a book\u00a0coming out in the fall<\/a>, I might be coming to the attention of a lot of people who know nothing about me. For some of them their first point of\u00a0reference would be my Wikipedia page. Did I really want these innocents to get the AAM-slanted view of John Derbyshire?<\/p>\n

I decided that I didn’t, and so set about editing my Wikipedia page.<\/p>\n

This was not easy. For editing purposes, Wikipedia has a mark-up language all its own, a superset of ordinary HTML (in which I am\u00a0fluent\u00a0\u2014\u00a0in which, in fact, I am writing this post). There is also a mass of protocols concerning style, copyright permissions, and so on. I spent a few hours reading through all this,\u00a0then set to work on my page.<\/p>\n

It proved impossible to patch the thing up. It was too disorganized and unbalanced. I therefore rewrote it from scratch, striving to present a\u00a0fair picture. (For example, I included more<\/em> of the petty controversies I’ve been involved in, actually giving Derb-haters more material to\u00a0feast on.) My finished product was, as best I could judge, well-organized, balanced, literate, and Wikipedia-compliant.<\/p>\n

The rewritten page lasted just one day. Then the old AAM-angled page came back, and I got a message from the Wikipedia people saying that my\u00a0rewrite was unacceptable because of “multiple style issues.” What were those style issues? They didn’t tell me, and there was no way to\u00a0reply to the Wiki message. Perhaps the Wikipedia editors objected to my painstaking avoidance of crass Chinglish-isms like “Conflicts of\u00a0peoples.” Or perhaps they were annoyed by the fact that all my links, unlike theirs, actually worked<\/em>.<\/p>\n

The only part of my rewrite that Wikipedia accepted was the photograph. So I can console myself with the reflection that readers of my Wikipedia\u00a0page have at least an up-to-date portrait to go with Wikipedia’s gibberish “biography” of me.<\/p>\n

\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014<\/p>\n

That’s Wikipedia for you. They can say what they like about you, employing any level of sub-literacy for the purpose, and there isn’t a darn thing\u00a0you can do about it, even if you are patient and computer-literate enough to master their mark-up language. I had heard this, but just hadn’t believed\u00a0they are really so brazen.<\/p>\n

I had heard it from, amongst others, Irish journalist\u00a0Kevin Myers, who, at the slightest prompting, will give you a passionate forty-five minute harangue on the evils of Wikipedia.\u00a0There’s a Myers column on the topic\u00a0here<\/a>, from which:<\/p>\n

So who are the people who founded and run Wikipedia? I don’t know, and nor have I any foolproof way of finding out, because the only way\u00a0of doing so is by consulting Wikipedia itself: a hole-in-bucket solution to a hole-in-my-bucket problem\u00a0\u2026 And so\u00a0\u2014 do these\u00a0wretched Wikipedia people ever lie awake worrying at the damage that the evil or the impressionable might inflict upon those who have been maligned\u00a0in their uncontrolled and filthy internet gossip-shop, whose very power derives from the complete fiction that it is an “encyclopedia”?<\/p>\n

I doubt it extremely: for of all the lies of our time, Wikipedia is surely the greatest.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I’m still not very worked up about this\u00a0\u2014 nothing like as worked up as Kevin, for sure. Ninety percent of what you read about people in\u00a0the public prints and forums is malicious lies. Any adult who does not know that should stop reading and take up fishing. Any public person who is\u00a0bothered by it should retire into private life.<\/p>\n

I’ll go on using Wikipedia\u00a0for quick links to merely factual issues, assuming that my readers know there’s a level of unreliability even there. (Last year I looked up the\u00a0Wikipedia article on the Battle of Agincourt. It was long, detailed, and informative, except that it had the English side led by Henry IV, who had\u00a0been dead for two years when Agincourt was fought. I see they have since corrected this particular blooper, but no doubt there are a hundred thousand
\njust as egregious lurking\u00a0on the Wikipedia pages. If, as I have heard, high school and college students rely on Wikipedia for factual information, our academic culture is in\u00a0serious trouble.)<\/p>\n

I do think it’s probably a mistake, though, for Wikipedia to include living persons among its entries. The opportunites for Wikipedia’s anonymous,\u00a0unaccountable editors to work off grudges, conduct vendettas, and vent the milder, AAM-grade varieties of psychopathology are just too\u00a0tempting.<\/p>\n

There is, unless I am out of date, a rule\u00a0that postage stamps may not depict anyone currently alive. I recommend the postage-stamp principle to the managers of Wikipedia. But then, what do\u00a0I know? According to Wikipedia, I can’t even pronounce my own name correctly.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[Note:\u00a0 The editors at Taki’s Magazine have kindly given me permission to reproduce the column below. Several Taki readers were kind enough to go into Wikipedia and amend some of the more egregious errors in my Wiki page. Whether their … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false},"categories":[9,11],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2373"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2373"}],"version-history":[{"count":16,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2373\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2393,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2373\/revisions\/2393"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2373"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2373"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2373"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}