Wikipedia Wikismhedia

I was supposed to be writing a thesis. But instead of writing a thesis, I would do anything, literally anything, not to write a thesis.

Between the years 2007 and 2011 I became an expert in procrastination. My thesis subject was the Structural Segmentation of Irish Traditional Music. In hindsight, all of that research has now been rendered useless by AI. What took me four years could now probably be achieved in four hours. During that time I became an expert in lots of things which didn’t involve writing the 100,000 words I was supposed to be writing.

Fortunately, while I was going through this at the Dublin Institute of Technology, my cousin was doing exactly the same thing and operating on exactly the same procrastination levels just down the road in Trinity College. If you think I am into cycling stats and facts, you should have seen us go back then when it came to football puzzlers. Creating all kinds of football-themed questions for each other and answering them kept us both sane during the thesis-writing process. So much so that I even acknowledged this fact by thanking my cousin in the Acknowledgements section at the start of my PhD thesis. I have never forgotten that he did not return the favour in his (fuck you Niall).

Name 13 Premier League managers whose first name beings with ‘A’
Name 5 Spanish players who’ve played for two Premier League clubs
Who is the only player to have won the Champions League with three different clubs?

While we would trawl through Wikipedia coming up with these puzzlers to send to each other over Skype (no Whatsapp back then), we would dabble in another of our favourite activities - editing Wikipedia pages. We would just make stuff up and edit all kinds of things. Just add jokes here and there. Funny things that weren’t true. But we tried to be sensible about it too. Lies that weren’t outrageous. Lies that were just believable enough that people might shrug and take no notice.

Because people did take notice.

I went through a phase of adding myself to the notable residents section of the Perrystown page. If anyone has never heard of Perrystown, it is the beating heart of Dublin suburbia. There were two notable residents on the page, Niall Quinn the footballer, and Sonny Knowles the show band singer. I would periodically add myself to this section as ‘Cillian Kelly (local hero)’, but would be just as periodically be removed by the same Wikipedia Nazi every time. I remember his name (fuck you Giulio Lopez).

You might think that a working knowledge of the local legends of Perrystown is an absolute waste of brain space but you would be wrong. Around this time I ended up on that Ray D’Arcy quiz game on his TodayFM show - the Odd One Out Quiz (remember, anything to avoid writing that thesis). Ray asked me where I was from. I said Perrystown. Disgracefully he had never heard of it so he was Wikipediaing it live on air. He saw the notable residents section. Disappointingly this was during one of the phases where Giulio Lopez had removed me - that would have made great radio. But Ray said if I was able to tell him the two notable residents he’d give me the coveted Odd One Out Hoodie without actually having to win the quiz. I nailed it, obviously. That hooide got away from me over the years though, I think someone stole it (fuck you Niall).

But this isn’t supposed to be out PhDs or Perrystown, this post is supposed to be about Wikipedia and the pitfalls of relying on it.

One of the changes we added to a Wikipedia page during that time was an entry to the Terry Phelan page. He was a footballer who played for Man City and Chelsea who was first on to the scene when Ray Houghton scored against Italy at USA ‘94 and weirdly showed absolutely no emotion on his face while wildly celebrating with the rest of the Irish team. We used to call him The Scuttler because of the way he scuttled up and down the wing. We made this name up. Nobody else ever called him The Scuttler. It wasn’t his nickname. So we added it to his Wikipedia page.

It stayed there for years.

Eventually, someone noticed (don’t think it was Giulio Lopez this time, but fuck him anyway) and added one of those little question marks beside it with ‘citation needed’. It stayed like that for a few months, no citation was forthcoming because one didn’t exist and it was eventually removed.

Then a few years later I was reading a book about Eric Cantona written by esteemed French journalist Philippe Auclair and there it was, in print.

Terry ‘The Scuttler’ Phelan.

Auclair had obviously taken it from Phelan’s Wikipedia page when it was there and just presumed it was true - why would he have reason to doubt it?

But now, the Giulio Lopez’s’s and the rest of the Wikipedia Nazis could actually fuck off this time. Here was our citation, in a reputable book written by a reputable person and published by a reputable company. So we put it back on Wikipedia, correctly cited with a reference to the Eric Cantona book.

Now it’s true. We made it true. Terry Phelan’s nickname is The Scuttler now and always will be. Even though it isn’t. But now it is.

I feel some shame for inadvertently tricking Philippe Auclair into using our lie. I like him as a journalist and weirdly (and wonderfully), he ended up contributing to a cycling book I produced with Ned Boulting shortly before I discovered I had tricked him.

So let this be a cautionary tale. The way Wikipedia works is that once there’s a reputable source for something it’s allowable. And the world turns to Wikipedia for facts now. If it’s on there it’s generally accepted as true. A lot of it isn’t. The system for allowing edits hasn’t changed since my procrastination days. There will always be bollockses like me causing mischief…