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If it’s not already, the Wikipedia page on Hurricane Sandy will become the most widely viewed internet resource on the storm. And as PopSci discovered, it’s being largely controlled by a 56-year-old, unemployed Floridian who doesn’t believe in rising global temperatures.
Ken Mampel, a one-time disaster reporter by trade, began editing the page on October 25 and has since spent countless sleepless nights patrolling for accuracy, honest reporting, and any mention of global warming’s role in the storm, which he promptly deletes. Theoretically, no one Wikipedia editor carries any more weight than another, but Ken currently has twice the number of edits as the next most active contributor. Still, editors with conflicting views have resigned themselves to humoring people like Ken, assuming he’ll eventually give up his crusade against global warming references:
One contributor wrote: “With the article being edited heavily with updates at the moment, many of whom are in the storm, my view is that it can wait for a day or two.” Another said, “it sounds more like, ‘We’ll keep all mention of global warming out of the discussion until after nobody’s interested in this storm any more.’ This isn’t so much “waiting for new information to come in.” This is “waiting for majority rule to overcome the will of the few.” The few are what kept global warming off that page for so long.
Ken Mampel really thinks he is improving that page by eliminating an unclear passage about climate change, so that’s a “good faith” edit. Which, for Wikipedians, means the system is working. But what about for those 500,000 readers who didn’t get the full story?
Ken may be keeping “the full story” off the page now, but the nature of Wikipedia won’t keep it that way. As a seasoned contributor, Ken knows the politics of Wikipedia’s editing community, and it’s a group he has no desire to alienate:
Mampel doesn’t want to risk being banned; he’s very concerned about being a good guy in the contributor community. Whenever anyone commented with any issue about his work, he immediately apologized and offered to fix it…. But for days, the internet’s most authoritative article on a major tropical storm system in 2012 was written by a man with no meteorological training who thinks climate change is unproven and fought to remove any mention of it. [PopSci]
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Hairiest shoulders ever…
Is this an issue? I’ve always considered Wikipedia to be about the facts. This is how we understand this works. Even when it comes to the theories, its a “this is how it works if it’s right” style of database.
We do have many theories about Global Warming… sorry, Climate Change and although we do have numbers to support these theories, we can’t claim we have a suitable sample size to make definitive claims about it all being fact or fiction.
All we can say for certain is that the climate does change, how much of an impact we ourselves are having is a whole other question. Because as we all know, the Ice Ages were all caused by a freak occurance of every creature on the planet farting simultaneously. But the fact that it’s all so open to discussion, should it be considered factual on wikipedia?
Maybe if the passage was stating that many believe this could be down to climate change, then the removal is indeed questionable. But if it’s stating it as fact then I can understand the removal.
doesn’t seem like an issue to me either.
i am a big believer in humans being the cause of some kind of climate change. i mean, can’t see how we can chop down all the trees & not affect the climate somehow
but this isn’t an article about climate change. its an article about a storm
The deniers craftily use the term ‘global warming’ to put down those of us who know that climate change is the issue. As it happens, warming may cool another part of the Earth, due to changes in the air and ocean currents that keep us warm. For example, the gulf stream that keeps the United Kingdom warmer than Canada, which exists on the same plain us our fair isles.
@lifemachine
Bah everyone knows that “Global Warming” is just a scare tactic created by the illiberal libetard lamestream media as a ploy to get us to build more Wind Turbines so they can use them to take over the world..
http://xkcd.com/556/