#PalinHistory 1
For those who have been trapped under something heavy, or have been transfixed by Anthony Weiner’s weiner, you may have missed an attempt by Palinistas to revise history to comport with Sarah Palin’s stupid recounting of Paul Revere’s midnight ride:
Since Ms. Palin described the ride last week while she was visiting Boston, Wikipedia’s Paul Revere article page has been the site of a mini “edit war.” And the page has gone from a little-visited one — 2,000 or so page views a day — to a more heavily trafficked one, with54,000 on Saturday when Ms. Palin’s comments were gaining the most news attention.
Over the course of the weekend, people added sentences to the Revere article that repeated Ms. Palin’s claims. It can be hard to discern motives for changes on Wikipedia, and in some cases people appeared to be attributing the claims to Ms. Palin in order to mock her.
One editor, Tomwsulcer, added the following sentence: “Accounts differ regarding the method of alerting the colonists; the generally accepted position is that the warnings were verbal in nature, although one disputed account suggested that Revere rang bells during his ride.”
When the discussion board for the Revere article was ringing with complaints that this was a lie, Tomwsulcer replied that it should be included as a theory because a prominent American politician, that is, Sarah Palin, had said it. “If you follow Wikipedia’s rules,” he wrote, “we must maintain a neutral position, representing the mainstream position as well as disputed versions.”
He lost the argument, but others have been searching history books to find evidence to support Ms. Palin’s claims.
One editor added the fact that the colonists on the eve of revolution were themselves British. That argument was included at the end of a passage stating that “Revere did not shout the phrase later attributed to him (‘The British are coming!’), largely because the mission depended on secrecy and the countryside was filled with British army patrols.”
By that logic, Revere did, as Ms. Palin put it, “warn the British” – namely, the rebel colonists who were still technically British subjects.
But the battles continue, and recent changes to the Revere article have used more facts to undercut the additions that seem to support Ms. Palin. For example, on Monday, one editor added, “Everything Revere told his British captors had a single goal, to move the soldiers away from Lexington, where he had left Hancock and Adams.”
As a result, the Revere article has become much longer, and much better sourced -– a version of what Wikipedia users call the “Streisand Effect,” which is described as when “an attempt to hide or remove a piece of information has the unintended consequence of publicizing the information more widely.”
Last night, on The Colbert Report, Stephen Colbert tried to do Sarah Palin a solid; he asked Colbert Nation to revise the Wikipedia definition of “bells”. Needless to say, Wikipedia quickly locked the page. Here’s the video:
Here’s a tip: If it takes four days to find historical evidence to back up the claim of a woman whose stupidity knows no bounds, it’s time to pack it in.
Also? Sarah Palin’s utter doofiness when she says “ridin’ his horse through tooowwwn!” will never not be funny.
Also, too?
1 For those of you not on the Twitterz, you should do a search for #PalinHistory. Many hilarities will ensue.
[cross-posted at Balloon Juice]
I so love Stephen Colbert!
They should remake Laid Back’s old school video, White Horse, but feature Palin. If you wanna ride, don’t ride the white horse…
“ridin’ his horse through tooowwwn!”
Any one else think she sounded just like Nora Dunn’s SNL character, Pat Stephens, when she said that?
When, when, when oh when will the media stop letting her play that “gotcha moment” card that she plays more frequently than a race card at a KKK meeting????? Just once, someone tell her straight up that she’s an ignorant twat-waffle and be done with it.