Wikipedia Redux
Wikipedia's newsletter mentions my objection to its Cantor Fitzgerald entry. It does so under the heading Digging up conspiracy theories:
Well, the upshot of it seems to be that the article was changed after an objection was raised (I can't really take credit for that; I'm sure if Instapundit hadn't linked to my post, my post would have gone nowhere). And that's good, so far as it goes. Further, it seems that some of the information I called attention to was put there by soneone who has since been banned by the Wikipedians themselves.
I don't pretend to know how all this works. The authors of this piece, if I read them right between their lines, don't feel inclined to defend the assertion that something once done by a CF spin-off might have made the firm a chosen target, rather than just the unlucky occupants of the floors that got hit by the plane. I'd seriously like to know if anyone anywhere has any information that al Qaida actually planned the attack to hit this particular firm, based on al Qaida's knowledge that its subsidiary once had done some work in conjunction with the U.S. Navy. Otherwise, why sully the memories of hundreds of innocent dead? And spare me the snark.
The parenthetical notation that "Neither Britannica nor Encarta has so much as an article on the firm" also strikes me as hardly a point in Wikipedia's favor. Between slander and silence, I'd prefer silence.
But, on the whole they seemed to accept the objection, so props to them for that. I'm still highly distrustful of open source references.
An article that was "not of apparent professional quality" was not nearly so hard to find for a blogger who posts under the name Callimachus, however. On a blog called Done With Mirrors (http://vernondent.blogspot.com/2005/02/wikipedia-weirdness.html), he told of finding the Cantor Fitzgerald article (actually, this is a redirect to Cantor Fitzgerald Securities) based on a Google search, and proceeded to quote it in full as it existed last Friday. At the time, it had three very short paragraphs, one "See also" link, and three external links. His verdict was that "this seems a curiously incomplete full entry for a major company that has been around since 1945." (Neither Britannica nor Encarta has so much as an article on the firm.)
Not only was the article sketchy, Callimachus commented, "It all looks like a lot of conspiracy theory hoo-ha." The article briefly mentioned the company's employee losses in the September 11, 2001 attacks (most of the article's history involved this, as a list of casualties was created, then later removed to the September 11 memorial wiki). It also mentioned an affiliated business called eSpeed, through which Cantor Fitzgerald worked on a wargaming exercise with the US Naval War College, with some rather "clumsy innuendo" suggesting that terrorists might find such an organization a logical target. (The information about eSpeed was added in 2003 as an "ironic fact" by an IP address in the 142.177 range associated with since-banned user EntmootsOfTrolls.)
Well, the upshot of it seems to be that the article was changed after an objection was raised (I can't really take credit for that; I'm sure if Instapundit hadn't linked to my post, my post would have gone nowhere). And that's good, so far as it goes. Further, it seems that some of the information I called attention to was put there by soneone who has since been banned by the Wikipedians themselves.
I don't pretend to know how all this works. The authors of this piece, if I read them right between their lines, don't feel inclined to defend the assertion that something once done by a CF spin-off might have made the firm a chosen target, rather than just the unlucky occupants of the floors that got hit by the plane. I'd seriously like to know if anyone anywhere has any information that al Qaida actually planned the attack to hit this particular firm, based on al Qaida's knowledge that its subsidiary once had done some work in conjunction with the U.S. Navy. Otherwise, why sully the memories of hundreds of innocent dead? And spare me the snark.
The parenthetical notation that "Neither Britannica nor Encarta has so much as an article on the firm" also strikes me as hardly a point in Wikipedia's favor. Between slander and silence, I'd prefer silence.
But, on the whole they seemed to accept the objection, so props to them for that. I'm still highly distrustful of open source references.
