Here is the timeline:

Friday: someone tells me about one of our newest borough councillors having an entry on Wikipedia.

Saturday: I mention it on this site.

Sunday: Its all gone. The entry has vanished and the username which created it has gone too.

So no trace remains, proving that Wikipedia does, indeed, heal itself.

Actually that is not strictly true. The page has a deletion log, showing that an administrator deleted the entry, with the note “author requests deletion as hoax”. The author’s username has gone but there is still a talk page for them with a few tickings off from admins and bots for trying to delete text on the “1979” and “July 31” pages.

All very confusing until you read this and find that Adam is saying it was indeed a variation of the ‘stalker theory’ instead of vanity publishing, so I am glad I didn’t totally discount that as a possibility.

Being more of a general anorak than a political anorak, it was really the implications for Wikipedia’s integrity which bothered me more than any local political implications. I learnt the hard way a long time ago about the concepts of neutral POV and citations on Wikipedia, and have grown to trust that it eventually leads to a useful resource. Mind you, its easy to take that sort of perspective when you have been using the Internet and bulletin boards for (I think) about 12 or 13 years and were over 30 at the start…

The ultimate irony is that Adam’s friend need not have bothered. That Google search which previously had him at No. 300+ now has him at No. 9 quite naturally. There are reasons for this, some of which I don’t understand, and some which I can’t explain properly, but its something to do with how Google ranks blogs higher because of links to and from them and because of frequent updates.

In a way I am glad as AGB had always seemed to be OK and I don’t have to go to the trouble of revising my original opinions.