ericbarbour wrote: ↑Thu Sep 02, 2021 8:02 pm
Have a big fat dose of unreadable long article AND a perfect example of Wikipedia trying to practice "social justice". Badly as usual. The presence of The Anome and Andy Mabbett in the early history are dead giveaways. Not sure anyone ever reads this pile of feces.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_P ... ce_scandal
The vast bulk of which was the work of this guy. He loves boats but nowadays seems to be even more obsessed with the post office scandal. Been grinding the hell out of it for the past few months.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Jacksoncowes
And BTW, this shitty article was originally called "Horizon", after the crummy ICL-Fujitsu software system that caused the scandal. Yes kids: hundreds of UK Post Office employees had their lives ruined by bad software. Wikipedians are "experts" in this area, aren't they?
Said article was originally created by that noted high-quality nitwit Richard Symonds, who was
desysopped and resigned from Wikimedia UK shortly thereafter.
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?ti ... =654039489
Even though the successful appeals were headline news, amazingly, this scandal has only become widely known in the last few days, in the wake of a television docu-drama.
It's been quite the furore, pushing the government into all manner of unprecedented announcements (in the opinion of one senior officer, seeing politicians take over from judges as the arbiters of guilt and innocence).
The article was, and arguably still is, completely useless for anyone looking for further information.
And they will need it. As the drama laid out, this has been an insanely complex. The article is curiously unhelpful both as a quick introduction for those who know nothing, and those who knew a bit but want to know more. I for example want to know more about the precise nature of the software faults, and it must be out there, because there were multiple that were described in detail in the drama.
My personal favourite is how it omits any mention of the reasons why it failed to gain traction before now, and who in the media did the necessary to get it to at least the national level before now.
Reliable sources exist.....
https://pressgazette.co.uk/news/post-of ... urnalists/
......but quite clearly, the Daily Mail being at the forefront, causes the Wikipedians quite the problem.
Indeed, such has been the Wikipedians dogged determination to declare right wing sources as untrustworthy due to their own rampant left wing bias, the only truly gold standard newspaper source they can cite for this crucial period between the computer Weekly article and the drama, is the paywalled Times.
Total speculation, but I suspect their preferred source, the Guardian, chose not to help expose this scandal, even though it has occurred mostly under right wing governments, for the following reasons....
* It was arguably had its genesis in the questionable decisions of the Tony Blair government (PFI contracts)
* It actually started to become an injustice under the Tony Blair government
* A key minister at a crucial time was actually from the centrist third party the Lib Dems, part of the rare and disastrous experiment with coalition government (the third party would supposedly be the main beneficiary of any move to "proportional" voting)
* The trade union for the victims was apparently complicit
* The victims are hard working self employed entrepreneurs, business owners, not salt of the Earth "workers"
* The huge compensation payouts have thus far come from Post Office funding, so threaten the ability of militant unions to have that money be used for ever rising wages for postal workers
)