Jimmy Wales does Matt Hancock a favour

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Followers of UK politics will find this mildly amusing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Matt ... tion_claim

What's the betting that it was one of his kids that made the offending edit?

This is of course yet more proof that Wikipedia is SHIT SCARED of forthcoming UK legislation aiming to regulate internet harms.

Jimmy surely has no other reason to personally help this right wing disgraced former Minister, except in sure fire knowledge that by virtue of still being an MP, he still has access to the very department that is very interested to hear of real world examples of Wikipedia fails. Not to mention the guy is a proper media whore, so no anecdote is safe in his hands.

For those who don't know UK politics that well, this biography had a million plus page views in November 2022, and has a median monthly view count of 130,000 this last year.

That's a heck of a lot of people wandering around with false information about this guy's family life, having been added almost two years ago.

I wonder if he got an apology from Jimmy? Can Jimmy fairly be considered the person who is obligated to issue such apologies these days, given he has zero influence over Wikipedia policy (but we can assume by now having seen shit like this so many times, he would have reflected further on the wisdom of Wikipedia's still relatively open door as far as being able to vandalize BLPs goes).

There is for example absolutely no good reason why a change to an infobox parameter detailing number of children should not be automatically rejected unless it comes with a whitelisted source than an AI has confirmed does appear to be pertaining to such biographical materials.

Or of course, they could just implement age verification and therefore real world identities. That would surely be a very effective way to prevent this kind of harm.