Although the main players had all resigned by the time the investigation reached the arrest/interview stage, and the investigation has yet to get beyond that, it's not an understatement to say that if fraud is uncovered and people are convicted, it could seriously harm the independence movement for a generation. The competence and integrity of the former SNP Leader Nicola Sturgeon and the long record in domestic government of the SNP being key planks of the separatist strategy, stuff that allegedly makes a breakaway from the UK less of a leap of faith for undecideds.
With support for independence never having been overwhelming to begin with, undecided/non-ideological voters are extremely crucial. Not having their ducks in a row regarding basic questions like what will your currency be and who will be your head of state, were enough to see the SNP narrowly lose a supposedly "once in a generation" independence referendum in 2014. Even without Brexit as the convenient excuse for a re-run, nobody is any real doubt that never ending calls for a referendum will be a feature of every term in office of the SNP.
Even before the investigation started to get noisy, it was already being suggested Sturgeon's legacy would be to have snatched defeat from the jaws of victory, failing to reap the benefits of epic levels of UK government ineptitude and the consistently high levels of support for independence that come from it. Not even Brexit seeing Scotland "dragged out of the European Union against its will" was capitalised upon. The smaller Union of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland is in tact, with it looking more likely that Northern Ireland might be the first nation to break free before even Scotland.
In hindsight, per reliable sources, even before this investigation got loud, Sturgeon's glorious tenure has been revealed to have been marked by her being a controlling, secretive and egotistical leader who has actually probably already set back the cause of independence for a generation through a series of questionable strategic decisions that bungled efforts to hold a second referendum, and effectively turning the SNP into a Cult of Personality.
The SNP arguably already was a bit of a cult of personality under previous leader Alex Sakmond, who hand picked Sturgeon as his successor, only to fall out so badly withh her he has created his own party, which has thus far proved ineffective in wrestling the mantle of the independence cause away from the SNP. An investigation therefore has potentially deep significance even on whether or not the SNP fully tears itself apart in a civil war, never mind what opponents of independence might be able to reap from it.
With all the power of Comical Ali (holy shit, remember him!?) the current leader, widely seen as the continuity candidate, is insisting support for independence has never been stronger and the SNP has a proud record in government (in reality, the leadership contest to succeed Sturgeon effectively became all about who was to blame for the increasingly unavoidable proof to the contrary).
For all their troubles, it says a lot about the state of the UK that the SNP will probably win every Scottish government election for generations to come, in spite of their electoral system having been designed to specifically avoid this level of dominance. Tony Blair's legacy in action. Albeit quite secondary to the whole War Criminal stuff.
With all that in mind, you'd expect Wikipedia's treatment of the investigation to be superb, impeccable responsible and thus perfectly neutral. Wikipedia being globally influential and all that shite. They wouldn't want their website to directly tip the scales of the UK's political future, if only because of would mightily piss off the UK politicians currently writing internet regulation law.
You would of course be wrong.
The first thing you notice, is the questionable inclusion of the Nicola Sturgeon banner on the side of the article, as if she is somehow the prime suspect or she otherwise is inextricably linked to it (as unlikely as it sounds, she could theoretically still be an innocent victim duped by her husband). It seems a highly prejudicial act for an encyclopedia.
When you dive into the statistics, you are unsurprised to learn the content of the article and the outcome of editorial decisions is primarily the product of only three editors. Hardly gives you confidence.
Bondegezou created the article and is responsible for virtually half its content and number of edits. As experienced and evidently neutral as he is, his subconscious bias and other personal interpretations of policy is inevitably going to be all over this article as a result.
Second by number of edits is equally experienced DeFacto, with a quarter. Unsurprisingly, a lot of the edits are these two fighting over policy interpretation. Which may sound like there is some heavyweight editorial oversight going on, but it is hardly a good look when De Facto wrongly claims that there is "no need for cites in the lead as everything in the lead should already be covered, and sourced, in the article body". Policy is unambiguous, for claims like "so and so was arrested on date", you absolutely do need a citation in the introduction. That is exactly what DeFacto has removed, and Bondegezou is evidently not in disagreement.
As usual, nobody, least of all any passing Administrator, is alarmed to see two experienced editors, the primary custodians of an important article, are in a fundamental way, functionally incompetent. If they don't know the basics of BLP policy, who does? It is of course commonplace on Wikipedia that experienced editors don't like and indeed often reject with some hostility, any suggestion by their juniors that their edits are incorrect.
Despite only making three edits to the article, it's a level of contribution that makes UltrasonicMadness the 9th most prolific editor of the article by number of edits. One of their edits was to add the citations to the introduction that a mere forty minutes later, DeFato removed with their factually incorrect reason. If a good faith editor with a vague interest in the article who is adding citations from the BBC no less is treated with such casual disregard, it is perhaps unsurprising they don't stick around to do the "discuss" part of the "bold, revert, discuss" cycle. BRD has always been a license for Wikipedia hostility.
There was no urgency. There was no reason DeFacto couldn't have simply left that edit alone and approached UltrasonicMadness like a human being and simply talked to them. Who knows. With almost 2,000 edits over two years, the fresh blood Wikipedia needs some might say, DeFacto might have even learned through such an interaction that he has been operating under a serious policy misapprehension.
This is all normal for Wikipedia, of course. But it's impact is perhaps never greater than on relatively quiet but hugely important articles.
DeFacto may or may not have an agenda, or he may just have an extreme interpretation of BLP, but it is certainly at least odd to see him arguing strongly that the article on the investigation should not even mention the date that Sturgeon or her husband resigned, lest readers draw a connection.
It is a rather obvious ommission from a simple comprehension standpoint, since the investigation was launched in July 2021, but police didn't get around to interviewing people until February 2023. Sturgeon resigned on 15th February 2023 and her husband resigned on 18th March 2023. While nominally unconnected to the investigation, Surgeon's resignation was widely seen as a shock/surprise, and Murray resigned on the eve of a no confidence vote arising from having admitted to misleading a party official over membership figures. Needless to say, reliable sources have drawn the inevitable conclusions and asked the relevant questions of police and key individuals. There is no BLP violation in recording these events in the article. It is simply a matter of wording.
When you see another dispute between DeFacto and Bondegezou revolves around whether to categorize this article as a Scottish political scandal, with DeFacto apparently wanting to see overwhelming evidence this is how unreliable sources view it, you definitely start to wonder if they have a distinct POV. He appears to have at least conceded this point.
One person who definitely does have a clear POV, is the third primary editor involved in the article. Anna Lertreader is actually the second most prolific editor to the article by amount of text added, despite coming a distant third in total edits, barely beating Timrollpickering, who also narrowly beats DeFacto into fourth place in terms of text added. Even so, the combined edits of Anna, Tim and DeFacto barely exceed the amount of text added by Bondegezou.
The high text / low edit ratio involvement of an editor like Anna can be a sign of a problem, a POV pusher, or a benign editor who gives to Wikipedia out of love and doesn't fight too hard to retain their edits (or if they do, they do it through talking things out, as you are supposed to). I have perhaps already spoiled the surprise, but you were surely unsurprised to learn that Anna is most definitely the former. This is Wikipedia.
Anna has actually been on Wikipedia since 2016, but have only made less than 500 edits, which makes it quite easy to see that their solitary interest in Wikipedia is Scottish independence. Delve a little deeper, and it seems they might either be the Scottish journalist Stuart Campbell or someone closely connected with them. Close enough to care that, for example, Wikipedia needs to note things like.....
Campbell is a pro-independence journalist and runs the Wings Over Scotland blog. Prior to the investigation, Anna's edits focused on creating a Wikipedia article for "The Wee Blue Book", a pro-independence pamphlet written by Campbell (their first edit!) and on both the Wings Over Scotland article and Campbell's biography. They also showed a heavy interest in the biography of John McTernan, a Scottish political commentator, trying to paint them as a bit of an idiot. As McTernan's own Wikipedia biography illustrates, Campbell has a strong conflict of interest....In November 2015 Campbell was named at No.80 in the Herald newspaper's "Power 100" list of "The leading Scots who shape our daily lives".
Anna's presence on the article for Operation Branchform is therefore easily explained by the fact it is apparently Campbell's blog that was instrumental in this scandal coming to light and the investigation being launched. Anna isn't backwards in coming forwards that this is their view on the talk page of the article, despite the seemingly mild mannered heading "Removal of relevant material". Under it, they accuse DeFacto of vandalism. To his credit, or perhaps because he is being strategic, DeFacto ignores their behavioural issues and general hysteria, and generally succeeds in their aim of ensuring that the article doesn't link to Campbel's blog and only mentions it with minimal fanfare, sourced to reliable sources.....In November 2016, McTernan bet blogger Stuart Campbell $100 on a Clinton victory in the 2016 US presidential election, which he lost. Campbell has claimed that McTernan failed to honour the bet, and Campbell has taken court action against him.
I have some sympathy with Anna given how easy it is for an established editor like DeFacfo to just blithely ignore the many reliable sources Anna presented that do seem to support the idea WOS has been very influential in this matter. Then again, when you have seemingly good reason to think Anna might be Campbell themselves, talk page posts like this read very differently...In January 2020, the pro-independence blogger Stuart Campbell, through his website Wings Over Scotland, claimed that the SNP's published accounts for 2018 did not contain enough money to cover the ring-fenced sums that were said to have been raised.[10]
....
In December 2022, Wings Over Scotland reported that a loan of £107,620 made to the SNP in June 2021 had come from the party's then-CEO Peter Murrell,[22] and that the Electoral Commission had not been informed until over a year later, in August 2022,[23][13] despite this being a breach of the Commission's reporting rules.[24]
Casual observers might be quite confused that a pro-independence personality is pushing so hard for the potential eventual destruction of the SNP as a political force in Scotland, until you realise the wider context. Surgeon's latter day poor performance and her failure to do what her mentor did and nominate a clear successor or leave with any kind of succession plan, was fertile ground for the civil war that followed, both internally within the SNP in the leadership election and from without from Salmond et al.It is an acknowledged fact, therefore, that Wings Over Scotland - not merely "a blog" but an extremely widely-read website written by a 30-year professional journalist, with both the site and the journalist considered sufficiently notable by Wikipedia to have their own separate entries - was instrumental not only in bringing the missing money to attention but also in actually instigating the police investigation and breaking several of the key facts.
You have absolutely no basis under Wiki's rules for removing these sections, particularly as you did not replace them with any other sources. But in any event WoS was the ORIGINAL source - in many cases breaking the news several months before any other media - which is the one that should always be cited on Wiki unless there are compelling reasons otherwise. There are not.
It is not a stretch to say the cause of independence is on the ropes, and the outcome of the investigation could be crucial. Perhaps the most bizarre thing about this as a classic Wikipedia controversy, is that one side, the Unionists, might not even care what Wikipedia is saying about it.
In the real world, the SNP's cause has been effectively nullified, in large part due to Sturgeon's tactical errors, such as trying to use the Courts to get around the UK government's flat refusal to let them hold another referendum.
None of their current paths forward look remotely realistic, and are only likely to further the problem that many undecided voters are just so tired of them banging on about it, while Scotland's governance worsens amid several global crises. People can already see Sturgeon's actual successor has none of her charisma or control, and furthermore, their efforts to right the ship and get the SNP back on track, is being constantly disrupted by this very investigation, and the fact that while not annointed, he was the loyalist/continuity candidate to replace Sturgeon.
That might all mean that the only interest Wikipedia editors have in the article, is in shaping the future of the independence movement as members of competing factions of a civil war. You could easily say Campbell's motive is either to wrest control of the SNP away from the continuity faction and replace the leadership, or perhaps even help Salmond return to the helm in some kind of reverse takeover of a (perhaps quite literally!) bankrupt party. DeFacto's interest therefore could be to fight for the continuity cause, downplaying the scandalous nature and divorcing the current leadership from the previous one.
Bondegezou is perhaps just an innocent bystander, a remnant of a bygone era when people assumed it was worth their while creating and updating Wikipedia articles on political controversies in a timely but encyclopedic fashion. You kind of feel bad for him, having only DeFacto and Anna for company in a meaningful fashion. Timrollpickering might have sounded like a significant contributor up above, until you realise his textual additions are merely exclusively filling out bare references. Grunt work.
Bizarrely, it seems to be Bondegezou's lazy editing that requires this cleanup activity, perhaps a sign he is getting bored of Wikipedia, having edited constantly since 2005. He has quite literally not taken a single month off. Twelve edits in September 2021 is a definite outlier for an editor who averages 6.5 edits a day.
If you believe the SNP hype, Scottish independence will arrive very soon, as a result of a groundswell of support by the YOUTH, Scotland's voting age having specifically been lowered to 16 to help facilitate this. They have been saying this forever, with 16 years olds in 2014 now aged 25. With Wikipedia's brand heading south fast among the young, Campbell et al might be completely wasting their time, and none of their hoped for constituency will be consulting Wikipedia if the time comes when a future Independence referendum hinges on the argument that a new broom has swept away the Old Order.
All I know is, Wikipedia is asleep at the wheel as usual. Even on an article where there are effectively on!y three main editors, nobody is seeing the risks, much less policing anything. A literal political civil war might be being quietly played out on this small corner of Wikipedia, still at the internal stages but with at least one bad actor trying to influence Wikipedia content before the hoped for avalanche of eyeballs. Trying to push a narrative and direct readers to a potentially partisan blog. And with potentially another bad actor trying to stop them by pushing the article the other way.
Needless to say, this is not how neutrality works.
If matters a lot, since Scottish independence would be a major political earthquake in the UK that would make Brexit, Covid and Prince Harry/Andrew look like trivia, and yet nobody cares enough to do even the basics on Wikipedia. Can't even spot, much less deal with, obvious problem editors.
Anna has thrown up plenty of red flags here. Their obvious singular interest, their history of warnings and blocks for BLP violations, and their very clear conflict of interest, and yet it genuinely seems to be only little old me who has even noticed.
Wikipedia has been decline for years, but for various reasons, identifying and eliminating red flag POV pushers like this, was one of the things they kept up with.
Can't even do that anymore.
Nobody cares. Perhaps not even me. I'm a unionist. I sense absolutely no threat from the SNP, finding only amusement in watching some apparently assuming Wikipedia carries some influence over the politics of the years ahead.
The SNP has royally fucked itself and its cause, perhaps because they did a very Wikipedia thing, believing their own hype and creating a cult, impervious to criticism from without or even within, perhaps knowingly doing nothing about the corruption and malfeasance that underpinned their perceived success.
Wikipedia's eventual death, when it comes, will be a quiet slide into irrelevance, never to be replaced.
We perhaps can't say the same of the SNP. It will either be revived or replaced.
The difference? People understand that *real* things have *real* influence. Political parties and movements still matter. Voting still matters.
Wikipedia as a movement has always been a myth. Their latter day claim to be important in the efforts to combat misinformation affecting elections has been laughable. Nobody ever believed the model works, because it doesn't. It never did. Even with only three editors on this small but important article, we can see it doesn't work. Someone's desired version of a narrative always wins out. Policy is irrelevant. Administrators, absent.
With more eyes as the case heats up to a potential flashpoint, major errors will be fixed. Citations in the introduction. Basic and relevant dates and events included. But there will be problems of a different kind. All depending on where Wikipedia's ideological sympathies lie. Which is not all that clear here. Narratives will be pushed howeved, and rather obviously. It will be as obvious to swing voters in Scotland as when Wikipedia tries to downplay Democrat failings and amplify Republican evil.
Who do the think they are fooling, is what everyone, from the young to the old, will say.
America is fucked because they don't have an alternative. They have no choice but to retreat to unregulated and hugely biased silos.
There are people in Britain who claim the BBC is biased in the Independence arguments, biased to Unionism. They even allege unfairness in the way our biased but regulated print media reports the issues.
It probably should have tipped the SNP off the they had completely lost the plot when they started making absurd arguments like this, bringing them in from the fringes to become mainstream explanations for their inability to do a simple thing like win a 50%+1 vote despite decades of popular support and literal power.
We are not America, so we are not so fucked that this police investigation is being dismissed as an establishment plot or a witch hunt. People can easily see that whatever has actually happened, the SNP have been the authors of their own demise.
Would the the same could be said of Wikipedia.
Black Kite was amusingly the Administrator that blocked Anna for a week for BLP violations way back in 2016. They probably never followed that up because they got distracted by the Eric Corbettt Problem.
Did the ridiculous protection of Eric Corbett drive good contributors away from Wikipedia? Rather obviously it did.
A decade ago, this article would have been way busier at this stage. Lots more edits and editors. People noticing and caring about basic and obvious BLP issues and editorial screw ups. More eyes on it, establishing consensus and fixing neutrality issues before it becomes a huge controversy and the floodgates open.
No longer.
It's a small but obvious thing. Sure, DeFacto didn't actually tell UltrasonicMadness to fuck off like Eric would have, convinced as he always was that he was correct even when he unambiguously wasn't (as much as people like Black Kite wish this wasn't the truth of the nasty little weasel that was Eric), but if civility had truly won the day in that Wikipedia civil war, it isn't a stretch to imagine that in the Wikipedia of 2023, the culture would be very different.
People would perhaps notice and disapprove of an experienced editor like DeFacto just reverting a manifestly good and policy backed edit, rather than opting for polite and conflict avoiding engagement. People would ask questions about what that says about DeFacfo's philosophical approach to editing and collaboration, and they might uncover a real problem. Either an issue of competence or an evident bias.
The persistence with toxicity as a mode and the dearth of genuine community that comes with it, has perhaps robbed Bondezegou of their passion for Wikipedia, if not their addiction. Eric is no longer around, so being subjected to a stream of deeply personal insults for lazily using bare references and then seeing Administrators aggressively defend the aggressive asshole in that interchange, isn't the way he will leave Wikipedia.
Needless to say, editors like Anna benefit from less eyes all round, period.
Black Kite et al would have us believe that somehow it wasn't Eric that killed Wikipedia, it was Scottywong and his ilk.
I'm fucked if I can follow that logic.
I would ask his home from home Wikipedicracy, but Wikipedia dysfunction and the causes thereof, are hardly their speciality.
