Example 1
* K1 Britannia - HMY Britannia Replica Project
(26 June 2023)
At time of writing, the article has been redirected for the usual reasons, but for the purposes of this thread, when David Gerard arrived, it was an article, and he left it as an article.
Before David Gerard fucked it up, the relevant content was as follows....
Source [12], as you would hope, exists to support the entire sentence. It is the K1 project's own website, and says.....
It is straight up copyright violation, but this is Wikipedia, so that is to be expected.But there was an auction of Britannia’s spars and fittings in Southampton on 24th June 1936, to raise £1050 for the King George’s Fund for Sailors, and K1 Britannia is hoping that families may still have items from that auction in their possession.
As you can see, all that source [11] was doing, was helpfully showing the well meaning editor who added the inflation adjusted figure, had used an inflation calculator hosted by This Is Money, a financial website owned by the same media group the owns the Mail.
If David Gerard wasn't such a fool, he would have realised this was all that source [11] was being used for, a currency factoid, and therefore realised he could have simply removed the source and the conversion simply for being original research and recentism.
Here is the content after David Gerard takes a hack at it. After his edit, the content now read like this......
It is a completely nonsensical statement. What auction? Why are they hoping this?K1 Britannia is hoping that families may still have items from that auction in their possession.[11]
It says a lot that you can't even look at the change and make an educated guess as to what David Gerard was trying to do. All he did, clearly, and this is fucking hilarious, is he saw a reference in an article from the Mail, and simply removed the, the words behind it up to the last paragraph break, and the words after it up to the next punctuation mark.
Example 2
On 21 June 2023, David Gerard removed the factoid that top class cricketer Mark Wood supports Wimbledon football club, purely because it was sourced to the Daily Mail.
Why is this edit so stupid? For a start, a claim that person X supports football club Y is so far removed from the sort of controversial and potentially damaging claim BLP was written to prevent, it isn't even funny. It is a banal fact you find in any celebrity profile in Britain.
This isn't a claim that is coming from a Mail journalist, this is quite literally Mark Wood's own words. The Mail is reproducing "exclusive extracts" of his new autobiography. The article is quite literally bylined, "By Mark Wood, for the Daily Mail". The article ends.....
Such is their Nazi-like hatred of the Mail, their prejudice so total, so rabid, I would genuinely not put it past Gerard to try and argue the fact a book is being sold via the Mail, means its entire contents must be fabricated.Extracted from The Wood Life by Mark Wood, published by Allen & Unwin at £20. © Mark Wood 2022. To order a copy for £18 (offer valid to 01/10/22; UK P&P free on orders over £20), visit www.mailshop.co.uk/books or call 020 3176 2937
He is entitled by policy to remove this claim and it's source. He is entitled to say, "I have no reason to think this content isn't a complete lie", and nobody can challenge it. I shit you not, this is Wikipedia policy. As solid as it gets. It should tell you something about what a massive propaganda effort this Daily Mail ban was, this fact free prejudice fueled ban of the Mail, if the source here was Fox, there would be literally no issue.
Ideally Gerard would have simply removed the source and tagged it as {citation needed} or even better, replaced the Mail reference with the details of the actual book. As a non-controversial claim of literally no real importance, Wood is allowed to be a self source.
It says a lot about David Gerard's attitude and incompetence that we can't really say why he didn't take those alternatives, since it seems equally likely that either he had no fucking clue what the context here was at all, that he didn't know the source was Wood himself, quite literally, because Gerard clearly doesn't read the source he is removing, but he has also previously suggested to detractors that it isn't his job to find alternative sources or use tags, he can just yank it out. He cites ONUS.
Example 3
This edit in 22 June 2023 again sadly can't be faulted on policy. This is the Daily Mail ban in action.
Because so much of Wikipedia is quite literally unsourced, the {citation needed} tag having attained meme status for it, every now and again Wikipedia runs a campaign called #1Lib1Ref. To quote the cult.....
Yeah, great. So, someone noticed that a factoid in the Marmite article has been tagged as citation needed since August 2021.Imagine a World where Every Librarian Added One More Reference to Wikipedia.
The content is....
The enterprising librarian found a Daily Mail article from 2 April 2015 that seems to support it....Marmite should be stored in the dark and kept cool, but should not be refrigerated. The "[[best before]]" date is given as guidance for the loss of vitamins rather than [[Food safety|safety]].
What a brilliant find, eh?Whether you love it or loathe it — and I count myself firmly among the latter — it seems everyone has an opinion on Marmite. But very few of us actually know what it contains, or how it’s made. So the Mail took an exclusive tour of the world’s only Marmite factory in order to find out.
[...]
The distinctive salty odour surrounds the factory like a fog. St John Skelton, the factory’s quality specialist and master taster who has worked here for 41 years, is positively infused with it.
He’s like a savoury Willy Wonka, hopping from one foot to the other with excitement as he reels off some of Marmite’s statistics
[...]
St John, known by his colleagues as Mr Marmite, is about as big a fan as they come. He trained as a biochemist before taking his first job at the factory straight out of Warwick University, aged just 21, but has never lost his taste for the spread.
[...]
And his favourite thing about the product is its ‘astounding’ shelf life
"We put 18 months on the jar, because that’s how long it retains its vitamin content. But you could eat Marmite that was manufactured in 1945 and it would be safe. Its flavour would have changed, but it would still taste good. "
..... But one thing St John can’t abide is people putting Marmite in the fridge.
"If a Marmite jar is contaminated with bacteria, leave it alone in the cupboard — because of its high salt content, the Marmite will kill the bacteria. Putting it in the fridge, on the other hand, preserves the bacteria. So not only does it taste better out of the fridge, it’s safer."
Nope. Rejected by David Gerard, solely for reasons of prejudice.
Probably because he realised this was a campaign edit, he at least said "sorry". His full edit summary, rather unusually, reads like a personal message he crafted with thought...."Daily mail is deprecated and not usable, sorry" . What a suck up. Ordinary editors aren't given the same treatment.
It makes absolutely no sense. It is all well and good virtue signalling and making grand claims about how the Daily Mail has no scruples, but does anyone seriously believe that, like the Mark Wood case, the Mail secured an exclusive tour of the factory of a beloved national food, manufactured by a billion dollar conglomerate, and then just wrote down any old bollocks, because nothing would happen, right?
It is beyond ridiculous. Again, there are valid reasons to question the content, anything from promotion to medical claims, perhaps fixable by attribution. But I stress again, such things were entirely outside of David Gerard's concern. He has left the content there, unsourced, even though It is potentially a medical claim in Wikipedia voice.
The rich fruit of the Mail ban is the enduring proof that nobody cares about Wikipedia. The journalist here, Sarah Rainey, hasn't got a Wikipedia biography. She doesn't need one! Jess Wade can fuck off if she thinks she is "invisible".
Example 4
This removal (29 June) has the unfortunate effect of persuading readers of Wikipedia that something like...
... is just a dumb factoid of interest only to local media (Houston Chronicle).[Pearl Bar] is the only lesbian bar in Houston, one of only two in the state of Texas, and fewer than 25 in the United States.
The reality of course is that this coverage exists because the U.S. Republic party's war against non-traditional values is manifesting in curious ways, including the loss of lesbian bars across the nation due to, of all things, loss of insurance coverage because of the widely known dangerous activity of hosting drag shows!?!
Amusingly, the remaining sources Gerard left behind, don't seem all that great at fact checking, and could perhaps learn a thing or two from an award winning national newspaper like the Mail. The lesbian blog takes a vague guess that there are only ten such bars in the US, after a bit of Googling one presumes (or consulting Wikipedia maybe?).
But as well all know, the Daily Mail ban wasn't about comparing the Mail to the reliability of other newspapers (not honestly anyway). It wasn't about empirical data at all. Nor was it about whether Wikipedia should be relying on newspapers at all for this kind of dry but important cultural statistic (unless the reports identify their data sources as credible for such a purpose, which they don't).
As a spokesperson or whatever of the WMF, the very last thing Gerard would want, surely, would be for people to think he is hiding or minimising a hot button LGBTQ issue of our times. They would want to know that in situations like this, he would not want to harm Wikipedia's coverage, and so if he deemed the Mail report to be unreliable, he would seek out a different source that showed this was an international news story.
Was his removal without replacement really a mistake though, really? Perhaps not. The very excellent and highly detailed Daily Mail report is typical of the Daily Mail, whose commercial success ensures they can produce more news reporting and to a greater depth than other newspapers.
I haven't looked, but it is a fair bet there probably isn't another UK outlet, least of all a national newspaper, that saw this content as newsworthy. The Mail is probably the only newspaper that has taken this local news / special interest story, and turned it into an international issue.
Moderator note: This post has been merged from several other to reduce redundancy. In addition, it has also been shortened and re-formatted to be more readable, the original versions can be found here: 1 2 3 4 5.
