Peter Presland & Wikispooks: congratulations

[Peter Presland]

I'm sort of unsure where to jump in. I thought about maybe authoring something on Fred Lee Crisman or fleshing out the Pearl Harbour stub/stump, but should I begin where the OTHER wiki leaves off, or develop original content, or ... or just plunge in and put something, anything, up there?

Helen

Those are exactly the questions I wrestle with. I have to admit that some of the Wikipedia stuff is excellent. There's no precise pattern that I can discern. What I DO know is, when it comes to anything connected with 'The War on Terror', 9/11, Iraq and anything closely connected with recent/current military intelligence and political developments, Wikipedia can be relied upon to echo the official narrative. They will always contain a 'conspiracy theories' section but - well enough said. No point in trying to edit the obvious stuff either because after a couple of attempts and edit reversals, you'll be warned off on pain of being blocked. Same applies to JFK, MLK and the other high profile historical stuff. The official narrative rules and there's simply no point trying to edit some sense into those articles - you will be labelled a conspiraloon and banned.

But, some of the older stuff can be very useful and surprisingly establishment-hostile (apparently anyway). That is particularly the case where hitherto secret files have been de-classified or leaked. Operation Northwoods is a good case in point - as are the MKULTRA related articles.

I started by hoovering up Wikipedia pages. They can simply be exported by category then imported into WikiSpooks. The problem with that approach is that they are full of dozens of templates some of which call other templates such that the tedium and difficulty of an already difficult editing process is compounded by having to cope with literally hundreds (sometimes thousands) of bits of redundant wiki-mark-up syntax. I've abandoned that approach completely after wasting a lot of time on it and having to install an entirely fresh database and do the export/import thing in reverse. That is NOT going to happen again!

I now tend to put up stubs with a brief intro, invite others to flesh it out with a template message, and add links to corresponding Wikipedia and other stuff - especially good solid deep politics stuff and there's plenty of it around.

Right now I'm concentrating on getting a good logical category structure in place so that a single click displays the entire category tree beneath the one chosen - very quick way of finding almost anything when its done.

I'll jump in and categorize any floating content properly so don't worry about simply searching for a phrase that you judge describes your proposed article well and, if its not there, simply click the resulting red link and create it.

I think the potentially most confusing thing about posting new stuff is the distinction between articles and documents. Documents can be in any form whatever so long as they are relevant to the site and/or a standard article. They are for copy-and-paste exercises, duly linked and credited, from existing good stuff elsewhere. They are NOT intended to be edited but rather to be internal site reference documents for the main articles. I already have a list of hundreds I intend to put up and categorise.

So, Pearl Harbour or Fred Lee Crisman - or whatever. Just go for it.