SECTARIAN  WIKIPEDIA 

The Wikipedia project is popularly celebrated as an online encyclopaedia. However, a growing number of critics, from both the academic and citizen sectors, are in evidence. Some regard Wikipedia merely as a controversial website. Critics regard the aggregate pseudonymous editorship as a major drawback, in addition to other factors of objection such as sectarian agendas and talkpage problems.

CONTENTS  KEY

1.      Citizen  Philosophy

2.      Wikipedia  as  a  Sectarian  Avenue

3.      Attack  Strategy  of  Administrator  Smartse

4.      Wikipedia  Attack  Forum     

5.      Jimmy  Wales  Deletes  SSS108  Attack

6.      Removed  from  the  Registers

7.      Fifelfoo's  Dismissal  Ignores  Citizendium

8.      Sai  Baba  Movement  Issue  Obscured

9.      A Sufi  Matriarch, Ethnic  Blanking, and Citations

10.    Wikipedia  Gestapo

11.    Wikipedia  Flaws  and  Misinformation

12.    Wikipedia  as  a  Social  Problem

         Annotations

1.  Citizen  Philosophy

This article is the successor to Wikipedia Anomalies. I have never been a contributor to Wikipedia. The following commentary is that of a complete outsider. Some background information is relevant.

During the years 1981-93, I undertook a private research project at Cambridge University Library. As a citizen observing the academic scene in Cambridge, I found that both insular and liberal attitudes were represented. The liberal category of academic always win my admiration; one of those persons sponsored me for admission to CUL. A veteran psychologist, Robert H. Thouless (1894-1984) expressed interest in my case. As an unprivileged citizen, I was prepared to give much time for no pay, in contrast to official researchers who are generously funded by conventional academic channels. I heard the view expressed that most researchers would never do any research if they were not paid for their labours. I met other liberal academics who were also concerned at how I would survive without any funding.

The conservative category of academic had a different approach. They would not generally concede any relevance to a non-academic background, for instance. This meant that only the academic activity had any validity; the public sector did not count and were effectively non-existent. The man in the street was just a non-intellectual robot doomed to a mundane occupation, while the academic elite were the cream of society and could be relied upon to get everything right. It was they who became the politicians and the bureaucrats, for example. They were even knighted by royalty (just like pop stars).

In the view of some readers, my most significant work was Meaning in Anthropos (1991). (1) This is unknown on Wikipedia, which is no disgrace, as many academic books are also missing from the listings. Wikipedia has been a scene of argument about some of my early works, also Investigating the Sai Baba Movement (2005), only read by the supporter contingent on that online media. There is a pervasive habit on Wikipedia of discussing books unread by editors and administrators. As a consequence, the judgements can be pronouncedly haphazard and erroneous.

2.  Wikipedia  as  a  Sectarian  Avenue

There are numerous academics who choose, on principle, never to cite or link to the notoriously pseudonymous project called Wikipedia. The vast majority of Wikipedia editors do not use their real name.

We live in a backward society, where misinformation still exists much as it did in earlier centuries. With the difference that, in those past times, the misinformers and miseducators generally used their real names. The internet has given life to various forms of dubious web presence, from cyberstalkers and spammers to the bloggers with no name. When this factor percolates a purported online encyclopaedia, hazards can be expected.

Diverse critics of Wikipedia have lodged strong complaints. For instance, living real name persons are liable to dire afflictions when becoming the subject of Wikipedia articles and User pages. They risk severe distortion at the hands of unsympathetic pseudonymous editors. The results can be transmitted elsewhere on the web, with potentially adverse consequences. Another prospect is deletion from the Wikipedia article files, in circumstances which may provoke disagreement.

Attacks and libels, from supporters of guru cults, can amount to a serious social problem. In my own case, Wikipedia was the attack launch for a sectarian activist editor (afterwards banned). In 2006, SSS108 (Gerald Joe Moreno) proscribed my books on a User page. This was because I had relayed criticisms (in appendices of one book only) of a controversial guru (Sathya Sai Baba) by disillusioned ex-devotees. This pseudonymous American activist (SSS108, alias Equalizer) gained the strong repute of being a cyberstalker. His libellous blogs nevertheless influenced pro-Deletion editors in 2009, especially the entity called Dazedbythebell, who was keen to delete the Wikipedia article Kevin R. D. Shepherd. Dazedbythebell, a supporter of the Meher Baba movement, is now identified with Christopher Ott of Myrtle Beach, South Carolina.

Despite the articulate protests of a real name academic editor (Simon Kidd, educationist and philosopher), the pseudonymous Wikipedia administration deleted the article Kevin R. D. Shepherd. They did this despite strong implications that the American cyberstalker Joe Moreno would thereby consider himself justified in his tactics commenced on Wikipedia. Wikipedia editor Simon Kidd was the only participant who belonged to the real name world. Some weight attaches to his observation made at the time of occurrence: “In my opinion, Moreno’s prompt blogging only reinforces the suspicion that Wikipedia editors in sympathy with him were involved in the Shepherd AfD [Article for Deletion] nomination.” This disclosure met with a very suspect degree of indifference.

The Wikipedia anomalies mean, amongst other things, that pseudonymous entities associated with this project have a potentially greater influence than real name entities, whether the latter are academics or citizens. Wikipedia pseudonymity has greatly assisted tactics of disguised cultists, and even a sectarian cyberstalker.

Internet trolls have become widely recognised as a social menace. Nevertheless, there is insufficient attention given to necessary controls. The troll has been described as an internet yob, of whatever background, who expresses verbal damage and/or libel while hiding behind a pseudonym. This offence is not limited to the popular social networking sites like Facebook.

3.  Attack  Strategy  of  Administrator  Smartse

In January 2012 commenced the Noticeboard campaign of administrator Smartse to eliminate three of my books from Wikipedia reference. This situation reveals substantial discrepancies. Smartse was a pseudonymous scientist (associated with Cambridge) who became influenced on Wikipedia by hostile cult lore concerning myself. Smartse abused his administrative role on Wikipedia when he tried to portray me as a writer and publisher of "new age" associations. Smartse was a plant biologist with no interest in religious subjects.

This superficial strategy of Smartse, in 2012, was evidently devised to cover up for his earlier deletionist role in abetting the tactics (against me) of no less than four guru cults active on Wikipedia, including affiliates of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh and Adi Da Samraj. The two major sectarian hostilities were launched by supporters of Sathya Sai Baba and Meher Baba.

A disputed "reliable source investigation" commenced with the attack of Meher Baba devotees (Hoverfish and Dazedbythebell) on a prospective new Wikipedia article, which they evidently viewed as a competitor to their GA-status article on Meher Baba. The new article Critics of Meher Baba was withdrawn after an episode of friction and suppression. The author was Stephen Castro, a real name editor who preserved his unabridged article elsewhere. See Critics of Meher Baba: Paul Brunton and Rom Landau.  The harassed article was not hostile to Meher Baba.

This episode featured the acute xenophobia of Dazedbythebell (now identified with Christopher Ott). This editor mistakenly insisted that I was Stephen Castro. The Castro article was resented by opponents because books of mine were included in the sources. Castro reported that the devotee bias against my books was almost unbelievable. He retreated from Wikipedia in disgust, regarding the online encyclopaedia as a lunatic asylum.

The bias became revealed as part of a hidden agenda operating amongst the Meher Baba partisan editors, who had created a myth of heresy from poorly assimilated details relating to long past events. This factor of devotee misconstruction had evidently been at work in deletion of the Kevin R. D. Shepherd article, an excision so notably furthered on the part of Dazedbythebell.

The convergence of Smartse with the devotee bias was instrumental in deleting books of mine from Wikipedia articles and bibliographies. The hostile tactic employed the stigma of self-publishing. However, the issues at work were evidently much in excess of that factor, being influenced by the aversion to my books on the part of sectarian apologists (Ott and Karavias) camouflaged as Wikipedia editors. The plant biologist Smartse opted to confuse me with a New York publisher (Larson), insinuating that my output was similarly deficient. This calculating juxtaposition effectively amounted to damning association with the Larson array of "new spirituality" authors like Ram Dass, alias Richard Alpert, the American psychedelic enthusiast who inspired a tidal wave of drugmania and pseudo-Hindu lore in the 1960s and after. Such Wikipedia functionaries as Smartse deceive via acute neglect of the data they seek to dismiss.

I am known in more discerning circles as an opponent of new age entrepreneurs and drug promoters like Alpert, having made many references to them in published works suppressed on Wikipedia by the alliance of plant biology and sectarian affiliates (see also my Letter to BBC Radio). Science was here the accomplice of cult, a situation not made any the more impressive by Wikipedia pseudonymity, a common resort of the American underground, and held in question by many academics. I have always used my real name. In contrast with Richard Alpert, I have strongly warned against cannabis, Ecstasy, cocaine, heroin, and LSD, also the promoters and pushers. The Grof psychedelic movement was one subject criticised in my book Pointed Observations (2005).

I was wrongly associated by Smartse (via Larson Publications) with such writers as Paul Brunton, Kenneth Hurst, Joseph CampbelI, Ram Dass, Joan Halifax, Willis Harman, Rupert Sheldrake, and Huston Smith. My first website was strongly in contention with new age activities, including lengthy epistles of complaint to Tony Blair and others. The same tendency is reflected on other websites of mine, a fact evident even to superficial scrutiny.

The Smartse-referred writers are known for occultism, pop-psychology, pseudo-shamanism, new spirituality, psychedelic theory, Jungian mythology, and new age lecture roles. I am not guilty of those inclinations. I have explicitly disagreed, e.g., with the enthusiasm of Huston Smith for hallucinogenic plants and chemicals (Pointed Observations, p. 78, where I describe Smith's Cleansing the Doors of Perception as "a psychedelic pitfall").

The subsequent verdict of Wikipedia manager Jimmy Wales placed the hostility in question. In 2012, Wales personally deleted the very influential Wikipedia User page of SSS108 (alias Equalizer) which had been significantly utilised by the opposition. That User page, militating against my books, was now considered inexcusable. SSS108 (Gerald Joe Moreno) had been banned from Wikipedia in 2007. However, much Moreno damage had meanwhile occurred on the internet, with many victims of defamation in addition to myself. The New Mexico troll had scored for years, by means of such web devices as his Wikipedia User page of 2006, also featuring the "cult promoter" Jossi Fresco. Wikipedia editors had believed the mistakes and libels of SSS108, accepting these as fact.

As a consequence of the Smartse conflationary tactic, his pseudonymous colleagues (sporting ridiculous names like Hoverfish and Fifelfoo) censored, e.g., my early book A Sufi Matriarch, the only annotated monograph on Hazrat Babajan, and the only hardback publication in existence on the subject. That book was a gesture to feminist interests, so often excluded from male repertories. Hazrat Babajan was a Pathan mystic reputedly buried alive in the Punjab by fundamentalists, but who survived at Poona. Anglo-American suppression of the only annotated work on the subject is perhaps no more appealing than fundamentalist censure. To write about traditional religion is no proof whatever of a new age orientation.

The Smartse strategy confused a literate citizen with the new age of drugs, alternative therapy, and occultism, despite evidence to the contrary. The pseudonym Smartse, impliying finesse, amounted to an absence of ethical deportment and due explanation. Furthermore, the attack of this administrator arose in support of agitations visible at that time on the influential Wikipedia Meher Baba article discussion page, where the partisan editors Dazedbythebell and Hoverfish sought to retain their monopoly over more critical editors.

Smartse had already dialogued with Dazedbythebell (a Meher Baba supporter) in an episode of article deletion, working to my disadvantage. That episode featured a very questionable tactic of Dazedbythebell, who paraded (on a deletion page) links to Equalizer (Gerald Joe Moreno) attack blogs. Dazedbythebell treated those libellous blogs as authoritative documents, and as justification for deletion of the Wikipedia article Kevin R. D. Shepherd. The cult scenario has been considered deplorable by close analysts.

An academic investigator discovered the real name identity of Hoverfish, meaning Stelios Karavias, who is a devotee of Meher Baba, also one of a devotee trio involved in Wikipedia editorship. Dazedbythebell is now identified with Christopher Ott, leader of that trio, and a strong influence upon the Myrtle Beach Meher Baba Centre. Ott is strongly implicated in a secret agenda underlying article deletion, an episode in which I was clandestinely viewed as a heretic by the godly devotees.

4.  Wikipedia  Attack  Forum

Critics of Wikipedia say that an internet encyclopaedia cannot successfully be conducted along the lines of a web forum, in which pseudonymous entities contribute. Some Wikipedia "noticeboard" discussions have been observed to resemble an attack focus, in whole or part, furthering a questionable context of opinion departing from established rules of investigation found elsewhere.

The Smartse campaign is now notorious in terms of an attack forum. However, not all the participants were attackers. A real name academic editor, namely Simon Kidd, was clearly in sympathy with my case, contrasting with the hostile attitude of several other editors. This academic philosopher argued in favour of myself, and did not exhibit any trace of sectarian biases. He was exasperated by the dogmatic campaign of cult affiliates, who were unable to assimilate textual sources. The most eccentric expression of hostility occurred in the instance of editor Hoverfish (Stelios Karavias), who emerged as a supporter of the Meher Baba movement, relaying a misleading statement evidently derived from that contingent. The accusations against me were extremely distorted. I have responded to these accusations elsewhere.

Hoverfish also asserted: "Contrary to the use of Shepherd's references, the references from Kalchuri's Lord Meher in the biography articles of Meher Baba, Upasni [Maharaj], Shirdi [Sai] Baba and elsewhere do not refer to his personal opinions but strictly and only to historical recorded facts" (28 January 2012).

Simon Kidd responded: "Hoverfish, have you actually read any of Shepherd's books? And what you say about Kalchuri is absolutely not true, since anyone can see that Kalchuri's work is replete with his own (devotional) interpretation of events." (2) On the book by Kalchuri et al, see Lord Meher Critique.

Another adamant opponent of Kidd was Fladrif, who maintained that my books were irrelevant because they were self-published. He had not evidently not read those books, similar to the instance of Hoverfish (and also other editors and administrators). Some statements of Fladrif implied familiarity with cyberstalker attacks at saisathyasai.com, and more specifically, the resort of Gerald Joe Moreno to "vanity" press stigma. (3) Fladrif employed highly selective quotations from two academic partisans of Sathya Sai Baba, the context of which is more complex than might at first appear. (4) Simon Kidd, who had actually read the literature involved, countered by giving appropriate information.

In his 2005 book, Investigating the Sai Baba Movement, Shepherd addresses the critical comments by [Antonio] Rigopoulos and [Marianne] Warren (the index contains 39 page references to the former, and 25 to the latter). It should also be borne in mind that both Rigopoulos and Warren were devotees of Sathya Sai Baba, and would not therefore have been sympathetic to Shepherd's [brief] critical comments about their guru. Warren later changed her opinion about Sathya Sai Baba (Reliable Sources Noticeboard, 27 January 2012).

These relevant details were ignored by Fladrif, in preference for his simplistic refrain against self-published books, compatible with G. J. Moreno attack policy. (5) The opposition tactic did not come to terms with the cult-laden values of the Rigopoulos-Warren literature. The late Dr. Marianne Warren's book Unravelling the Enigma (1999) evidences her devotee belief in Sathya Sai Baba, whom she subsequently repudiated as a decadent guru after discovering some shocking details. (6) See Marianne Warren's Rejection of Sathya Sai. Fladrif was effectively supporting Sathya Sai miracle lore and the questionable guru role which became a focus of strong testimonies to sexual abuse.

The stigma of "vanity publisher" was earlier the resort at saisathyasai.com, a Moreno site noted for libellous hate campaign. That site declared the revealing motto: "Exposing Critic's Smear-Campaigns against Bhagavan Sri Sathya Sai Baba." All criticisms of the favoured guru were here treated as crimes by Gerald Joe Moreno (Wikipedia SSS108), who resorted to many defamations of the various critics. (7)  Numerous observers considered this situation to be acutely irrational, and also potentially dangerous. Lawyers were not impressed by the Moreno output.

Moreno (alias Equalizer) specialised in attack blogs, even hitting at relatives of critics. He strongly resisted his sole known web image from being displayed. Moreno nevertheless freely used the images of victims, even to the extent of creating offensive triple images. He caricatured one academic victim as an ape-like monster. The Pro-Sai attack ploys strongly influenced some Wikipedia events.

Simon Kidd found that anomalies and drawbacks of the Wikipedia ideological climate were formidable. For instance, the attack on my books as being self-published, posed extensive discrepancies with the endorsed situation of many sectarian books found in Wikipedia bibliographies, books lacking the desired "third party reliability" which the opponents were emphasising. (8)

Fladrif was criticised for blanking relevant comments in the Noticeboard discussion. The action of blanking was too frequently a notorious resort of Wikipedia personnel, serving to dispose of unwanted themes and data. Fladrif preferred to give an impression that the consensus of supposedly "uninvolved editors" (including himself) was five to one against the use of my books as reliable sources. Fladrif asserted: "Most of those commenting conclude that the [Shepherd] sources should not be cited." Kidd countered that such numbers do not prove accuracy. This real name editor observed that the numbers had been misrepresented, the consensus really amounting to three against two (Kidd, point 29, in the document subsequently blanked by Fifelfoo). These numbers were quite apart from the "involved editors" who were taking sides in the discussion.

5.   Jimmy  Wales  Deletes  SSS108  Attack

Wikipedia became strongly associated with the pro-sectarian stance, involving miracle lore and other drawbacks. However, an acute anomaly requires mention. The Wikipedia manager Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales, at this same juncture, made a strong gesture of resistance to the pro-sectarian attitude. In early February 2012, Wales personally deleted the 2006 User page of the banned editor SSS108 (Gerald Joe Moreno), who had proscribed my books in an obvious mood of sectarian bias. That User page had been showing on Google for several years, to my detriment. Now Jimmy Wales effectively countered the "sectarian attack" image afflicting Wikipedia. The significance of this event was slow to dawn, being completely ignored by many Wikipedia personnel (including Smartse).

6.  Removed  from  the  Registers

Simon Kidd felt obliged to write a lengthy defence of my books in the face of a Noticeboard dismissal based on dubious and inflexible criteria. I was surprised at the detail in the document by Kidd, which enunciated 40 points in a logical manner. The print-out was 10-14 pages, depending on font size. The statement, entitled Self-published sources (Kevin Shepherd), was posted on 11 February 2012 (three days after Jimmy Wales had deleted the SSS108 User page). This relevant statement was promptly blanked by an overbearing pseudonymous entity called Fifelfoo, who contemptuously tagged the academic document as "disruptive soapbox." Kidd responded with a quotation from George Orwell's 1984:

In the vast majority of cases there was no trial, no report of the arrest. People simply disappeared, always during the night. Your name was removed from the registers, every record of everything you had ever done was wiped out, your one-time existence was denied and then forgotten. You were abolished, annihilated.... the past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became truth.

Afterwards, Kidd produced a shorter document, listing only ten points, amounting to only two pages in print-out. Even this was considered too long to read by other editors, one of whom requested a short single paragraph summary of key points. Unread documents add to the list of deficiencies in this sector. Brief statements of 50 words or so were emphasised as the ideal form of communication. Skeletal detail is not the best solution for an issue. One party incorrectly described the unread document in terms of "sermonising." The patient attitude of explanation on the part of Simon Kidd, in the face of harassing opponents, was ridiculed by pseudonymous editors lacking his abilities.

A dismissive response to the Kidd document came from editor JN466, who briefly commented: "This is exactly the sort of wall of text Shepherd produces on his own website, e.g., Wikipedia_Anomalies." The reasoning here becomes: Shepherd writes long compositions, therefore other items of length are suspect.

The accusations concerning "wall of text" are incongruous. For instance, the best Wikipedia articles are generally long, evidently taking some time to formulate. Wikipedia "wall of text" is a reminder of the need for detail. Yet Simon Kidd found that very brief communications were in favour amongst pseudonymous editors, because longer ones were too much for casual scrutiny. The "coffee table" reading appetite sees long articles or books as an alien factor. Judgements made at this level are frequently infantile by academic (and some citizen) standards, and occasionally admixed with offensive comment.

A few days later, JN466 made a mistaken extrapolation from another "wall of text" web article of mine. This confused editor asserted: "Shepherd has worked in some capacity at Cambridge University Library." The erroneous suggestion was made that this "has something to do with his works being held by more than the expected number of academic libraries." The negative implication was obvious, also preposterous.

I was actually a private researcher at CUL, as my web article clearly stated. I was not an employee (section one above). Research is not understood in the sectors opposed to "wall of text." CUL cannot be successfully implicated as the artful and conniving distributor of my works on the international library circuit. Librarian protocol at Cambridge University Library is very strict, of a high professional standard. My books were mediated to worldwide libraries by specialist booksellers with advanced facilities.

I was also incriminated by JN466 as the son of Kate Thomas (Jean Shepherd), whom the hostile editor obviously did not like. The contention here was: my mother is unreliable, and therefore I am also unreliable. The degree of personal insult found on Wikipedia can be startling. JN466 was one of the initial agents of deletion, in 2009, for the Kevin R. D. Shepherd article on Wikipedia. This editor was strongly associated with the Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh (Osho) sect, via wordings on his Wikipedia user page.

What did the blanked document of Simon Kidd actually say? For one thing, this provided a record of the Noticeboard discussion by a real name academic analyst who had participated. Various aspects of the attendant themes were covered. A basic recommendation was: "In exceptional circumstances, a self-published author may be acceptable if he has multiple publications, over a sustained period, uses the scholarly apparatus, and is cited by other (preferably academic) authors" (point 37).

There was a lot more to the argument. However, Wikipedia editors had no interest whatever in such complexities. Only indifference, jibe, and oddly weighted assertions were in vogue. The dismissal of unread books, plus the gross inattention to editorial discrepancies (including sectarian allegiances), is surely not the sign of a duly efficient or progressive encyclopaedia.

In my favour, Simon Kidd disputed the belief that more reliable sources existed in the Wikipedia articles citing my writings. This belief was committed to the elevation of pro-sectarian sources at my expense. Some of the more critical observers (outside Wikipedia) have dubbed the hostile attitude as "cut-throat cultism." The educationist Kidd was far more polite. "Shepherd is no more unreliable than authors published by organisations associated with the subjects of NRM (new religious movement) articles; indeed, in my experience, he is more reliable" (point 31). Further, "Shepherd is at least as reliable as Rigopoulos and Warren, who were both devotees of Sathya Sai Baba when they wrote their books, and Warren expressed her own misgivings about Rigopoulos' blind acceptance of statements by his guru" (point 31).

Kidd also reminded that the senior age veteran administrator DGG, in relation to the Shirdi Sai Baba article, stated in 2010 that my output was "considerably more acceptable than many of the other sources in the article." Kidd also observed that a theme raised in the Noticeboard discussion had been ignored in favour of a digression, avoiding the fact that some books regarded as more reliable sources were in fact written by devotees of Meher Baba, whose publishers were exclusively partisan to this figure (point 30).

The same analyst included the results of his investigation into WorldCat library holdings relating to Antonio Rigopoulos, Marianne Warren, and four books of mine. Those holdings only extend to America, Canada, and Britain, and are by no means exhaustive in terms of global library holdings. Kidd concluded: "The distribution of Shepherd's books in the major libraries of three of the top English-language-speaking countries of the world is comparable to that of Rigopoulos and Warren" (point 26). He also informed that Rigopoulos was represented in the e-book domain, which is a more specialised facility. Simon Kidd explained that the number of holdings for all three authors was relatively small, as the subjects involved did not comprise a major area of academic interest. The four books of mine here discussed were A Sufi Matriarch, Gurus Rediscovered, Meher Baba, an Iranian Liberal, and Investigating the Sai Baba Movement. Three of those were early works, not representing my overall output.

The same commentator stated: "As a philosopher, I find that the whole discussion on this (Noticeboard) page lacks any rigour; points are made and then not addressed" (point 32). Kidd complained that Fladrif had blanked "two significant portions of the discussion," which included the concession of one editor (Dmcq): "If there is good evidence the author was involved with the subject [Meher Baba] then they [i.e., Shepherd] can also be used as a primary source I'd have thought" (point 27). Kidd had touched upon my association with primary source material via the book Iranian Liberal. This factor was evidently unwelcome to the opposition, which disclosed, via the editor Hoverfish, a pronounced misrepresentation of myself mediated from the Meher Baba movement. This adverse attitude of devotee lore was presented by Hoverfish as a justification for resistance to my books. See further Meher Baba Movement.

The hidden agenda of the Meher Baba supporters on Wikipedia was now clear. However, this matter was covered up by the strategy of Wikipedia blanking (i.e., text vanishing from view). The embarassment was literally eliminated in this dictatorial manner. In that way, Dazedbythebell (Christopher Ott) and Hoverfish (Stelios Karavias) were sanctioned in their hidden agenda, a factor underlying their frequent aggressive statements on Wikipedia in my direction.

See also the article by Kidd entitled Wikipedia and Kevin R. D. Shepherd.

7.  Fifelfoo's  Dismissal  Ignores  Citizendium

Simon Kidd pressed Fifelfoo for a belated response to the 40-point document. This took ten days to materialise, and transpired to be a sweeping rejection of the content. The mood of blanket dismissal was all too obvious, attended by the explicit judgement: "Simon Kidd needs to produce far more concise contributions." The tone was set for acute reductionism. This response was posted at the Reliable Sources Noticeboard on 21 February 2012.

Fifelfoo simplistically employed the same argument used by Fladrif (section four above), emphasising criticisms made in my direction by the pro-Sathya Sai writers Antonio Rigopoulos and Marianne Warren (without naming them), also implying that these criticisms were a sound basis for a Wikipedia conclusion. In this context, Fifelfoo misleadingly affirmed that "the intensity of scholarly criticism is significant." This distorting view shows not the slightest cognisance of scholarly issues involved, and ironically misrepresents the two writers abovementioned. The pseudonymous dismissal was accompanied by an erroneous assumption that my output is not cited anywhere else save in one American publication.

Fifelfoo was evidently not aware that Rigopoulos and Warren only referred to one of my early books, which Dr. Rigopoulos actually described as "a ground-breaking work." The same work was credited by Dr. Warren with very relevant innovations that she herself supported. The intensity of scholarly approval was not in abeyance, though invisible to superficial scanning on the web. Indeed, the scanning by Fifelfoo may not have gone much further than the extremist Gerald Joe Moreno version of myself and Warren on a cyberstalker blog dating to 2009.

Fifelfoo did not even know what the subject matter comprised in my case. I am classified in his version as "history, biography and sociology of a new religious movement." He refers exclusively to an NRM (new religious movement). In contrast, several movements are involved in certain books of mine. The people who just read the titles of books are easily confused. Investigating the Sai Baba Movement is a well known encoded title for a conglomerate of movements. Fifelfoo was ignorant of the complexity.

There is no indication whatever that Fifelfoo had read any of the literature under discussion here. There was instead the diversionary statement: "Shepherd is not quoted in summaries of Muslim or Hindu devotional practices, or new religious movement devotional practices." This superficial distraction is irrelevant. I did not cover devotional practices, which anyone familiar with my books would know. The unread material was rather more radical than the constriction here imposed.

The assertion was also made by Fifelfoo: "Shepherd is not quoted in scholarly encyclopaedia with relevance." He certainly was cited at Citizendium, one of the more publicly visible resources. Dr. M. Emmans Dean wrote a relevant article (accessed 19/03/2012) which favourably cited a book of mine. This academic reported on Citizendium, in 2007, that his "article was rescued from Wikipedia and edited back to the impartial state I left it in before followers of Meher Baba adopted it and turned it into a devotional exercise."

The ham-fisted dismissal by Fifelfoo soon resulted in further mutilation of the Sheriar Mundegar Irani article, as this had survived on Wikipedia. My name and book were removed from that article by a zealous follower of Meher Baba (meaning Dazedbythebell, alias Christopher Ott). Dr. Dean had privately acknowledged that my book From Oppression to Freedom (1988) was the inspiration for the original article. The contents of both the article and book were evidently unknown to Fifelfoo, whose tactic is significant for extensive omission via haphazard web surfing.

Fifelfoo was unaware that SSS108 sectarian errors, magnified on the talkpage of the Wikipedia article Sheriar Mundegar Irani, were disproved by the Citizendium version. See Zoroastrian Issue and Wikipedia Sectarian Strategies. In recognition of this anomaly, the Wikipedia manager Jimmy Wales deleted the offending statements, only to find that further damage to the Wikipedia article was achieved via the Meher Baba partisans unleashed by Fifelfoo censorship of myself. A sectarian camp caught in the act, so to speak. A passage in the Citizendium version of Sheriar reads:

He [Sheriar M. Irani] has been linked with the ishraqi tradition of Iranian illuminationist philosophy, as mediated by the 16th century Iranian Zoroastrian sage Azar Kayvan (Shepherd 1988). The circle of savants associated with Kayvan combined Zoroastrian, Sufi, neo-Platonic and other gnostic beliefs with a nonsectarian approach to the study of comparative religion. Sheriar taught the odes of Hafez to his second (and 'favourite') son Merwan, later Meher Baba, but a possible connnection between his Kaivani-ishraqi interests and Merwan's encounters with advanced Sufi teachers such as Hazrat Babajan and Shirdi Sai Baba was overlooked by Meher Baba's earlier biographers (e.g., Purdom 1964). More recent scholarship [Shepherd] suggests that the polyglot Sheriar provided Merwan with a good education and a command of languages, and an ecumenical approach to mysticism. These advantages, and the unusual position of the Irani family - recently nested within the Parsi community, embedded in turn in the Indian social and religious context - may have prepared the ground for the inclusive syncretic teaching for which Meher Baba later became known.

Only one sentence of the above-quoted original passage (by Dr. Dean) now survived in the Wikipedia version (accessed 21/06/2012). My name and reference were deleted. Much of the original context was despatched to oblivion. Subsequent readers could only find a lop-sided reference in that article to the Kaivani savants. Those entities are treated elsewhere. Informed observers have viewed this Wikipedia episode as confirmation of the sectarian tendency to tamper with original documents. For this reason, one cannot trust sectarian versions of documents, and nor sectarian documents.

In 2018, the compromised Sheriar Mundegar Irani article was deleted from Wikipedia by new opponents of Dazedbythebell and Hoverfish. This article was now recognised as one of a number maintained by Dazedbythebell (Christopher Ott). Various Wikipedia personnel had at last grasped that various articles associated with Meher Baba were a "partisan zone" facility. These articles were now deleted. The deletions were accomplished in the face of complaint from Dazedbythebell, an editor now regarded on Wikipedia as being in need of restraint. The Meher Baba article was not deleted.

8.  Sai  Baba  Movement  Issue  Obscured

In another direction, the tactic of Fifelfoo (and Fladrif) further amounted to suppression of the sole book (out of three) which argued against hagiology and miracle lore in biographical presentation. The suppressors endorsed a questionable interpretation of the two Sai Babas favoured by Rigopoulos and Warren (section 4 above). When my dissident Investigating the Sai Baba Movement was published in 2005, there were only two well known rival books committed to analysis of the "Sai Baba movement," one of these by Rigopoulos, who awarded a very minor profile to Upasani Maharaj and Meher Baba. That was the most visible book to American web surfers; an earlier book was published in India, while mine was published in Britain. The differences in format were not recognised on Wikipedia, which dismissed books unlocated and unread by their personnel.

To date, Investigating is the only book in this field to award Upasani Maharaj and Meher Baba equal coverage to Shirdi Sai Baba. I have been led to understand that this is a sufficiently notable factor to warrant references elsewhere, despite the cordon imposed by Wikipedia cultism (in 2006) and semi-literate Wikipedia Noticeboard bias against documents over 50 words long (in 2012).

Amongst literate parties, there is the major issue of reincarnatory lore, here meaning the claim of Sathya Sai Baba (d.2011) to be the reincarnation of Shirdi Sai Baba (d.1918). That controversial claim is accepted by devotees of Sathya Sai Baba, while being strongly resisted by the devotees of Shirdi Sai Baba. This aggravating factor has caused much confusion, in both India and Western countries, being continued via Wikipedia.

According to many critics, the reincarnatory claim of Sathya Sai Baba was used as a cover for sordid activities described in testimonies to sexual abuse. There are so many testimonies that these cannot be discounted in assessment of events as a whole.

The reincarnation claim of Sathya Sai Baba was an underlying feature of the books authored by Rigopoulos and Warren. Their subscription to that claim is not a convincing academic mode of analysis, instead amounting to a susceptibility to sectarian doctrine. The reincarnation claim is the means by which the "Sai Baba movement" theory was promoted by partisans of Sathya Sai Baba. The so-called "Sai Baba movement" implies a progression from Shirdi Sai Baba to Sathya Sai Baba, with the rival entities Upasani Maharaj and Meher Baba being conveniently implied as sideline figures by comparison with the culminating Sathya Sai. (9)

This cultic formulation was contested in my Investigating the Sai Baba Movement (2005). The flagrant suppression of this annotated book, by Wikipedia, is a very questionable symptom of deference to the opportunistic avatar scenario associated with Rigopoulos and Warren. See further Shirdi Sai and the Sai Baba Movement. This suppression is reminiscent of cordoning events in 2006, when the SSS108 User page reacted to the same book. The very same month (Feb. 2012) that Fifelfoo created another cordon, Jimmy Wales deleted the proscribing SSS108 User page (section 5 above), a significant gesture lost upon Wikipedia personnel who were devising a contrasting agenda.

In 2012, the attacking Wikipedia entities, sporting false names, were effectively pro-sectarian (however indirectly). Smartse, Fladrif, and Fifelfoo rank alongside Dazedbythebell and Hoverfish, two supporters of the Meher Baba movement who proved aggressive in my direction (one of them being a primary agent in the earlier deletion of the Wikipedia article Kevin R. D. Shepherd). These two devotees started the attack, in which other misinformed aggressors subsequently took the leading roles.

All five of these pseudonymous personnel were unrelenting extensions of the hate campaign commenced against me on Wikipedia in 2006, when SSS108 (Gerald Joe Moreno) attacked with the evident approval of the (now notorious) arch-supporter of cults, namely Jossi Fresco. Moreno was subsequently banned from editing. Other sectarians later became menacing. Not content with the 2009 deletion of the Wikipedia article on Kevin R. D. Shepherd, the five sequel specialists in cordon apartheid also wanted to suppress my books.

Not one of these pseudonymous entities demonstrated the slightest familiarity with the arguments and data represented by Investigating the Sai Baba Movement. I have been studying the various traditions and sources involved since the 1960s. Annotated format was ignored by Wikipedia attack (and gossip) forums, where participants preferred 50 word statements instead of due analysis. The obstructing personnel reacted to longer statements with a gesture of censorship, even when a relevant document was contributed by an academic real name editor duly conversant with the sources requiring evaluation.

What emerged via Fifelfoo's rejection of a painstaking academic 40-point document (authored by Simon Kidd) was the effective Wikipedia support for hagiology and miracle lore. That is the realistic purport of suppressing the critical counter (i.e., my own books on the Indian/Irani subjects, starting with Gurus Rediscovered, and ending with the rather more detailed Investigating the Sai Baba Movement).

See further my more recent book Sai Baba of Shirdi: A Biographical Investigation (New Delhi: Sterling, 2015). This is over four hundred pages in extent, and thus may elude the 50 word digests preferred by trolls. See also Shepherd, Sai Baba: Faqir of Shirdi (New Delhi: Sterling, 2017).

9.  A  Sufi  Matriarch, Ethnic  Blanking, and Citations

The disapproving Fifelfoo mentioned only one academic book (American, of course) which cited my output. In that American book can be found a reference to my early work A Sufi Matriarch: Hazrat Babajan (1986), the first annotated treatment of the subject. The impression was thereby given by Fifelfoo that no other academic sources had cited this work (or any of my works). Indeed, no attempt was made even to define which book was cited in the sole author source stipulated (the average reader would not even know which book was meant, in the absence of all details).

By 2012, at least four academic sources had cited A Sufi Matriarch. Wikipedia is an unreliable index to such occurrences. The subject was even confused by Fifelfoo with an NRM or new religious movement, whereas the tradition involved is Sufism. This error arose from confusion with the Meher Baba movement, which can indeed be considered an NRM.

This matter is further aggravated by the fact that Hazrat Babajan is a Pathan (Pashtun) figure, strongly associated with Afghanistan. She is not so easily to be dismissed by Western biases, despite the customary low rating given to Muslims by some Western voices. Female Muslim scholarship proved partial to A Sufi Matriarch, a matter totally uncomprehended by the repressive tactic evident on Wikipedia, a project predominantly associated with American administrators and editors. Fifelfoo was overlooking and dismissing, e.g., Tahera Aftab, Inscribing South Asian Muslim Women: An Annotated Bibliography and Research Guide, the author also being editor of the Pakistan Journal of Women's Studies. This blanking of the citation record is not commendable. The ethnic and sexist insensitivity of Wikipedia is unenviable, quite apart from the errors made in assessing the content of diverse sources by rule of thumb, which too often seems to be what the Wikipedia guidelines inspire.

On the basis of the very misleading Fifelfoo verdict, my book A Sufi Matriarch (10) was soon after deleted from the notes and bibliography of the Wikipedia article on Hazrat Babajan. The interests of the Meher Baba movement were strongly represented in that article by the devotional biography (of Meher Baba) which Simon Kidd had queried. The Hazrat Babajan article became regarded by informed parties as a supplementary promotion for the Meher Baba movement, via the sectarian editor Dazedbythebell (Christopher Ott), who was keen to have the Kevin R. D. Shepherd article deleted in 2009 (employing libellous blogs of SSS108, alias Sathya Sai defender Gerald Joe Moreno, to falsely incriminate me).

Fifelfoo also missed out other relevant sources of citation in relation to my output. He instead asserted that if I wanted my books to be "taken seriously" on Wikipedia, I should start "publishing in a popular commercial, or scholarly manner." This deliberate insult ignored the fact that all my books are annotated, most of them too much so for the popular commercial publishing world.

Some critics say that many Wikipedia articles on religion should be scrapped or revised. The issue of books being "taken seriously" on Wikipedia is acutely anomalous, in that many editors and administrators do not appear to know what the priorities are. Academic books assisting miracle lore and lavish reincarnation claims are not the remedy. The suppression of literate citizens, when they disagree with such format, can evoke the description of facilitating public hazard (bearing in mind the related testimonies to sexual abuse and other problems).

At the end of a Wikipedia suppression feat, Fifelfoo rather pretentiously asserted his scholarly accomplishment as being in demand elsewhere. On this pretext, he made an exit from further discussion. His trolling manners did not command universal approval, whether or not he was an academic, and whether or not he was committed to a sectarian agenda.

A more recent book of mine reverses the tendency to ethnic blanking. See further Hazrat Babajan: A Pathan Sufi of Poona (New Delhi: Sterling, 2014). See also Shepherd, Sai Baba of Shirdi: A Biographical Investigation (New Delhi: Sterling 2015); Shepherd, Sai Baba: Faqir of Shirdi (New Delhi: Sterling, 2017, reprinted 2018).

With regard to academic citations, the following list, pertaining to three early books of mine, includes a number of citations antedating the misleading assessment of Fifelfoo:

Citations of Gurus Rediscovered: Biographies of Sai Baba of Shirdi and Upasni Maharaj  of Sakori (1986)

Professor Eleanor Zelliot, “Four Radical Saints” in Religion and Society in Maharashtra (University of Toronto, 1987).

Zelliot and Dr. Maxine Berntsen, eds., The Experience of Hinduism: Essays on Religion in Maharashtra (State University of New York Press, 1988); cited in “Selected Bibliography on Religion in Maharashtra,” page 360.

Professor Antonio Rigopoulos, The Life and Teachings of Sai Baba of Shirdi (State University of New York Press, 1993); cited on page xxvii, with a now famous approving remark: “a ground-breaking  work.”

Professor Smriti Srinivas, “The Brahmin and the Fakir: Suburban Religiosity in the Cult of Shirdi Sai Baba,” Jnl of Contemporary Religion (1999) 14 (2): 245-261; cited on pages 246, 247, and 259 notes 2 and 4.

Dr. Marianne Warren, Unravelling the Enigma: Shirdi Sai Baba in the Light of Sufism (New Delhi: Sterling, 1999, revised edn 2004); see page 15 for a review that is now well known, because I closely anticipated the contentions of Dr. Warren herself.

Professor Tulasi Srinivas, Winged Faith: Rethinking Globalisation and Religious Pluralism Through the Sathya Sai Movement (Columbia University Press, 2010); cited on page 354 note 24.

Dr. Kiran Shinde and Professor Andrea Marion Pinkney, “Shirdi in Transition: Guru Devotion, Urbanisation and Regional Pluralism in India,” South Asia: Jnl of South Asian Studies (2013) 36 (4):554-570; cited on page 555 note 4.

Professor William Elison, “Sai Baba of Bombay – A Saint, his Icon, and the Urban Geography of Darshan,” History of Religions (2014) 54 (2) 151-187; cited on page 155 note 5.

Professor Karline McLain, The Afterlife of Sai Baba: Competing Visions of a Global Saint (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2016); cited on page 233 note 3.

Dr. Jonathan Loar, “From Neither/Nor to Both/And: Reconfiguring the Life and Legacy of Shirdi Sai Baba in Hagiography,” International Jnl of Hindu Studies (2018) 22:475-496; cited on pages 476 note 2, 477, 478, 491 text and note 20.

Citations of A Sufi Matriarch: Hazrat Babajan (1986)

Professor Tahera Aftab, Inscribing South Asian Muslim Women: An Annotated Bibliography and Research Guide (Leiden: Brill, 2008), entry 525.

Professor Nile Green, Islam and the Army in Colonial India: Sepoy Religion and the Service of Empire (Cambridge University Press, 2009); cited on page 186 note 148.

Citations of Meher Baba, an Iranian Liberal (1988)

Dr. Marianne Warren, Unravelling the Enigma: Shirdi Sai Baba in the Light of Sufism (New Delhi: Sterling, 1999, revised edn 2004); cited on page 128 note 40 of 1999 edn.

Dr. Raymond Kerkhove,  Authority and Egolessness in the Emergence and Impact of Meher Baba (1894-1969), Queensland University doctoral dissertation, 2002.

Kerkhove, “Multi-faith Invisibility – The Case of Meher Baba,” paper presented at the Annual Conference of AASR (Australian Association for Study of Religions), Griffith University (Brisbane), July 2003.

Professor Smriti Srinivas, In the Presence of Sai Baba: Body, City, and Memory in a Global Religious Movement (Leiden: Brill 2008); cited on page 42 note 16.

Dr. Sumita Mukherjee, “Indian Messiah: The Attraction of Meher Baba to British Audiences in the 1930,” Jnl of Religious History (2017) 41(2):215-234; cited on page 224.

10.  Wikipedia  Gestapo

The domineering behaviour of pseudonymous editors and administrators has frequently been in question. A strong complaint is on record: "Wikipedia resembles the Third Reich rather than a free media."

This evocative reflection was quoted by Professor Carl Hewitt in his Corruption of Wikipedia (2010), a well known PDF feature formerly showing on Google. Another quote from the same critical source affirms that Wikipedia "is a blog disguised as an encyclopaedia, controlled by a limited number of people with administrator tools who have particular axes to grind about living people with real names."

Hewitt covers the scenario in which "academic experts who have tried to participate have been denigrated as 'self-promoters,' censored, and then banned on the grounds that their views are not in accord with Wikipedia-imposed administrator point of view." According to the same informant, "the power of censorship tends to corrupt administrators."

One of the grievances quoted is: "Wikipedia is a playground for belligerent adolescents." The average age of editors is sometimes assessed in terms of the mid-20s. Of course, a number of the personnel are much older, it would seem.

Hewitt is a computer scientist associated with MIT. He was banned from Wikipedia editing in 2007, allegedly because of "self-promotion." In 2007, The Guardian described him as "a disruptive professor," a judgment reflecting the Wikipedia version. Hewitt's protest subsequently appeared online. He strongly repudiated the situation of imposed disgrace, revealing the matter in a very different light to media reporting. For instance, Hewitt describes how a zealous Wikipedia administrator instigated a libellous newspaper article against him, subsequently attempting to justify this hostility. "The article served as an object lesson intended to intimidate other academics from challenging censorship by Wikipedia Administrators lest the same thing happen to them" (Corruption of Wikipedia PDF, p. 16).

There is a Wikipedia article about the work of Hewitt, his User page also being in evidence. His earlier critique cites Professor John Harnad, who made the strong accusation that Wikipedia "has led also to an inner cult, shrouded in anonymity, with structures and processes of self-regulation that are woefully inadequate. Many of these tools and procedures are reminiscent, in parody, of those of the Inquisition: secret courts, an inner 'elite' arbitrarily empowered to censor and exclude all those perceived as a threat to the adopted conventions of the cult; denunciations, character assassination, excommunication. An arbitrarily concocted 'rulebook' and language rife with self-referential sanctimoniousness give a superficial illusion of order and good sense, but no such thing exists in practice" (Corruption of Wikipedia PDF, pp. 7-8).

When Professor Harnad attempted to correct some errors in a Wikipedia article, he was blocked by an undergraduate student who represented the Wikipedia system.

Hewitt relayed that, in a survey of 2008, the discovery was made that 73% of university students had been explicitly told by their Professor not to use Wikipedia. Two years later, a Wikipedia contributor (Yintan) made an exit from the project after making about 10,000 edits and struggling against vandalism. The defeated editor reported: "Vandalism is still rampant and any anonymous idiot can still ruin an article.... Other jokers just play the system time and again, as if it's some kind of sport " (Corruption of Wikipedia PDF, p. 26). This message appeared on the User talk page of Jimmy Wales in January 2010.

The Hewitt protest concluded that "Wikipedia is not an encyclopaedia - because of censorship by its Administrators, instant publishing of anonymously submitted content, lack of accountability, and disrespect for expertise" (Corruption of Wikipedia PDF, p. 10).

11.  Wikipedia  Flaws  and  Misinformation

Wikipedia guidelines rule against self-publishing, instead advocating third party commercial publishers (and academic press) in terms of reliability. All citizen efforts at independence are set at naught by Wikipedia. Citizen initiative counts for nothing; commercial giants are endorsed by the administration. Commercial third party publishers make enormous profits out of fiction, trivia, and dirt. Wikipedia guidelines serve the dollars and the exploitation.

Further adding to the discrepancies is the fact that very numerous sectarian and other books, listed and cited on Wikipedia, do not represent the output of "reliable third party publishers." Such books are instead the product of independent ideological formats of a wide variety. To rectify that situation, a massive purge would be required, as distinct from deleting authors targeted by religious "cult" interests. Wikipedia anomalies are extensive.

The vast majority of Wikipedia contributors are pseudonymous. Real life identities can rarely be established. Strongly assertive editors clearly seek to dominate many of the talkpages. Critics concluded that web surfing has frequently replaced due research and scholarship. Google Scholar is no effective substitute for patient research. The Wikipedia claim to expertise, via citations and bibliographies, has been dismissed at university level. Many Wikipedia articles fail to mention major works on the chosen subject. The history of religion is a particular disaster area. Eminent academic scholars (university professors) have been questioned in terms of notability by the haphazard editorial process.

Some critics insist that the majority of Wikipedia editors are under the age of 25. A 2010 global survey utilised data from over 176,000 respondents, with a heavy proportion of Russian speakers, English speakers, German and Spanish speakers. Over a hundred thousand were readers of Wikipedia, and over fifty thousand were contributors. The survey says that 25% of the respondents were under the age of eighteen, while 50% were under the age of 23 (the survey is no longer online).

The assessment of a Wikipedian says: "A very large number of people have found themselves drawn into disputes with anonymous trolls there [on Wikipedia], and then found that Wikipedia's processes are opaque, arbitrary, unfair, administered by children and more trolls, and most of these ordinary people have been forced out or been left bruised and upset."

The problems visible on Wikipedia have led to strong criticisms of founder and manager Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales. In my case, he conceded that the SSS108 User page should be deleted. He also opted to place a warning on the talk page of Hoverfish, an editor who had resorted to a hostile inset against myself on the related User page. See Anomalies and Jimbo. However, these gestures of imposing restraint do not alter the Wikipedia bias against self-publishing, which editors can invoke in the routine endorsement of pronouncedly unreliable third party commercial publishers, whose frequent commitment to fiction and bad taste is a social affliction.

Wikipedia critic Daniel Brandt innovated Wikipedia Watch, a former internet feature which commented on deleted articles. That feature stated: "The criteria of 'notability' and 'neutral point of view' and 'verifiability' for such [Wikipedia] articles are almost meaningless. A straw poll of mostly-anonymous editors is used to make such determinations. There are no conflict-of-interest controls, no accountability, and many editors are teenagers with big egos and little commonsense. These polls, known as AfD or 'article for deletion' procedures, are a joke."

The same source affirmed: "If an administrator has a political or personal agenda, he can do a fair amount of damage with the special editing tools available to him. The victim may not even find out that this is happening until it's too late. From Wikipedia, the material is spread like a virus by search engines and other scrapers."

A revealing insight into what can happen behind the scenes of a Wikipedia article has informed: "When I started contributing to a page called 'Da Costa's syndrome,' I was confronted by two editors who abused all of the basic principles and objectives by pedantically treating the large number of policies and guidelines as if they were rules carved in rock." Max Banfield complains that this situation involved an episode where "in May 2008 my main critic mixed up a potion of plausible misrepresentations and lies, and told a group of editors that their attitude readjustment tools had failed to 'scathe' me because I lived too far away in Australia, and that it may be necessary to act like the Wicked Witch of the West to drive me out of Wikipedia. The words Wicked Witch of the West included a gratuitous link to the Wikipedia article with that title." The reference concerns a fictional character created by an American author. The attitude problem was obviously extreme.

Some academic reactions to Wikipedia article content have been strong. A senior academic commentator, teaching at a university in Japan, gave the verdict: "Wikipedia is a production by armies of totally unqualified amateurs writing about, discussing and arguing about subjects they are wholly unqualified to write about, discuss or argue about. No professional would join such a discussion because his/her informed voice would be drowned out by the cacaphony of uninformed voices. Trying to fix the content of a Wikipedia article would be a waste of valuable time. It would be better to make one's own website on the subject."

The commentator (Charles T. Keally) was a specialist in Japanese archaeology. He investigated the Wikipedia version of that subject in 2007-8. "It was far worse than poor, and all topics were full of errors," and "with no way for the ordinary reader to discern fact from fiction, accurate from erroneous."

The same writer added: "I have no choice but to assume all 7,000,000 Wikipedia articles in 250 different languages are equally unreliable sources of information." Even if that judgement is considered over-generalising, a major problem in web format is under discussion, bearing in mind the prominence of Wikipedia articles on Google Search. A more clement verdict (in the academic world) is that some editors do try much harder than others, but even the best Wikipedia articles are to be regarded as "starters" and not as definitive coverages.

Keally also commented: "Wikipedia was supposed to fill the minds of the world with all the knowledge the world ever produced. It was supposed to be the ultimate in one-stop knowledge shopping. In fact, Wikipedia likely is the greatest source of misinformation the world has ever had."

A continuing matter of concern has been the age of some administrators.. In 2013, the Wikipedian Andreas Kolbe informed: "Many Wikipedia administrators are school-going teenagers. The youngest I personally am aware of was 11 years old when he won administrator rights; at 12, he became a bureaucrat, which means he had the ability to close requests for adminship and appoint other editors as administrators" (quote from A Feminist's Wikipedia Biography).

The same online article also relays the complaint of a veteran contributor to Wikimedia projects: "Under the current system, any little ignoramus who has chatted on IRC for ten days can amass enough support to become an administrator, and attack long-standing editors of the highest calibre, driving them away from Wikipedia. That these people... are treated with such disdain by a pack of semiliterate high school kids is depressing, because it spells the writing on the wall for Wikipedia."

Some scholars who attempted contributions to Wikipedia were deterred by harassment. An instance is described online in which an administrator, aged almost 14, removed links to the website/blog of an academic specialist, namely Dr. Peter W. Dunn. The links applied to French and German articles on the Acts of Paul (Acta Pauli). The schoolboy interferer was called Anonymous Dissident, and the victim was a Ph.D. The academic commented: "I therefore recommend that scholars like myself [do] not bother to make edits on that platform [Wikipedia] where any non-specialist can take them down within seconds. Scholars don't have the time to waste on such games." See Roger Pearse, The Acta Pauli blog and Wikipedia trolls (2012).

A radical conclusion of Pearse, appearing in the same article, was as follows: "I am told that the founder-owner of Wikipedia, James Wales, made his money in the porn industry, and where people are treated like meat; and I see the same attitude in Wikipedia. It needs to be addressed. The solution is to remove Wales from the equation, get rid of all the 'administrators'/trolls/children, and get rid of the system where the REAL system administrators remain unknown. Instead, introduce a fair, sane, and transparent system of governance, run by responsible people who do so under their own names in an accountable manner."

Pearse, a Wikipedia contributor, is noted for stating on his User page: "As far as I know, I am one of the last online scholars to attempt to contribute; I will no longer do so. In practice, it seems that educated people cannot edit Wikipedia. Until this problem is addressed by the owners of Wikipedia, it is a mistake for us to try."

See also Criticisms of Wikipedia.

12.  Wikipedia  as  a  Social  Problem

The most well known critic of Wikipedia is Larry Sanger, an American philosopher. This academic was the co-founder of Wikipedia. He soon became a dissident, creating (in 2006) the rival Citizendium, an online encyclopaedia emphasising real name contributors. Sanger became noted for resisting the pseudonymous "trolls" of Wikipedia.

In 2012, Sanger pointedly addressed the porn problem on Wikipedia, a media which "features some of the most disgusting sorts of porn you can imagine, while being heavily used by children." Sanger observes that "even pre-teen children are heavy users of Wikipedia, which is often ranked in the top five of all websites in terms of traffic." This issue is capable of arousing strong reactions, despite the abnormal degree of support for web pornography.

Sanger describes an acute anomaly. Wikipedia and other sites of the Wikimedia Foundation "host a great deal of pornographic content," even while "the Wikimedia Foundation encourages children to use these resources." This aberrant situation involves "an enormous and rapidly growing amount of pornographic content." That content is further described as "extremely explicit."

Sanger warns that "many parents and teachers are neither aware of the adult content on Wikipedia sites, nor that it is accessible to school-age students." Despite some stories to the contrary, "almost all the most frequently viewed media files on Wikimedia servers are sexually explicit files." The situation is such that "the Wikipedia community actively permits children to edit such [sexually explicit] content."

The scenario is one of a strongly entrenched obsession with crude stimuli, unconducive to intellectual study, and contributing to various social drawbacks covered up by commercial processes. Decadent cinema and sordid computer screen is perhaps one reason why foul language is so widespread in America and elsewhere. The so-called progressive society is a contradiction at basic levels visible to the thinking citizen, as distinct from the unfortunates who are manipulated by delinquent media.

Several years ago, a self-published work was one of the relatively few books standing against the general trend of commercial indulgence assisting the escalation in crime.

The same commentator referred to 'a twisted thread of sexual excitement' being visible in the volume of crimes. The reasons are obvious, as sexual excitement is one of the obsessions of sick literature and trash cinema. Say no to sexual excitement before it kills you or maims you. Many people with vested interests are supplying that excitement to an impoverished audience.... The high incidence of rape and other violent crimes have gone hand in hand with decadent cinema and television. (Shepherd, Pointed Observations, 2005, p. 112)

Of course, such self-published themes are unwelcome on Wikipedia, which assumes the profile of a "reliable third party" source, associated with so many commercial publishers in the decadent capitalist world of pornography, violence, bad language, and fiction unrelated to facts.

Perhaps the worst symptom of malady on Wikipedia is the aggregate use of ridiculous false names. The pseudonymous editors and administrators have no real identity, and are accordingly part of the worst society yet devised: a faceless web community absolved of all responsibility for who they are, what they do, and what they say. They are neither real name citizens nor bona fide academics, instead existing in an identity vacuum mistakenly credited as a valid encyclopaedia.

Kevin R. D. Shepherd

March - June 2012 (last modified March 2021)

ANNOTATIONS

(1)     The full title is Meaning in Anthropos: Anthropography as an interdisciplinary science of culture (1991). An online review is available at Reflections.

(2)    This issue was further mentioned in Simon Kidd, Self-published sources - Kevin Shepherd, Feb. 2012, point 8, and commenting: "The book that Hoverfish refers to (Kalchuri's Lord Meher) is full of factual errors. Some of these I have seen myself, but no less an authority than the editor of the second edition [meaning the English version] actually admits it himself, blaming the shortcomings on the process of translation and re-translation, sometimes from one Indian language to another and then into English." Cf. Shepherd, Investigating the Sai Baba Movement (2005), pp. 267-8 note 480. I would say that the actual number of surviving errors remains to be ascertained. The book under discussion is commemorated at www.lordmeher.org. The most well known exegetical problem is the theme of Yad rakh, promoted by Bhau Kalchuri, who became controversial amongst devotees for his repeated assertions that he heard Meher Baba speak aloud. See further Investigating the Sai Baba Movement, p. 268, in reference to that controversy, which early involved an accusation from Don Stevens concerning "accounts of conversations which, on closer examination, are seen as almost certainly never having occurred." In another direction, see the favourable account in Sheela Kalchuri Fenster, Growing Up With God (2009), pp. 763ff., describing the circumstances in which Bhau Kalchuri wrote Lord Meher during 1971-2. Kalchuri was evidently very committed to the task. The sheer speed of composition perhaps had some disadvantages. "Bhau wrote continuously, filling nineteen large notebooks, and he completed the entire biography in Hindi prose in seven months. There were no revisions" (ibid., p. 769). Subsequently, an extensive editorial process of amplification occurred. See further Meher Prabhu and Lord Meher Critique.

(3)    "In the course of this discussion, Fladrif referred to Shepherd's books as 'vanity press publications.' This is a damaging misnomer. Self-publishing is a broader category than vanity publishing. Shepherd has addressed this issue himself in his Publishing Retrospect" (Simon Kidd, Self-published sources - Kevin Shepherd, point 10). The origin of the Fladrif stigma is not difficult to ascertain. The cyberstalker Gerald Joe Moreno (of New Mexico) described me as a vanity publisher, in the attempt to justify his original attack on a Wikipedia User page of 2006 (in his editorial role as SSS108). Persons who have read my books are aware of a different dimension to the content. "Popular authors would not like Shepherd's books because they are too scholarly for popular tastes" (Kidd, document cited, point 11).

(4)    Simon Kidd observed that Fladrif quoted only unfavourable comments from Warren and Rigopoulos about my early contribution, ignoring the positive remarks they both made (Kidd, Self-published sources - Kevin Shepherd, points 16 and 17). Kidd informs that "throughout his book, Rigopoulos makes several references to Shepherd, all of them indicating that he takes Shepherd's views seriously." Rigopoulos described one of my early books as "a ground-breaking work presenting [Shirdi] Sai Baba as a Muslim and a Sufi adept" (The Life and Teachings of Sai Baba of Shirdi, State University of New York Press, 1993, p. xxvii). Warren stated: "Shepherd was the first author to question this Hindu bias and to redefine the broad 'Muslim' category.... Shepherd observes many links between Sai Baba and the strong Sufi tradition in the Deccan.... most of his arguments concerning Sai Baba's Sufi connections are strong" (Warren, Unravelling the Enigma: Shirdi Sai Baba in the Light of Sufism, New Delhi: Sterling, 1999, p. 15). Dr. Warren also asserted her one-upmanship in the sphere of Marathi, which I never claimed to read. The absence of a Marathi lexicon did not affect the nature of my contentions at all, as she herself proved by her assessment. She also criticised Rigopoulos for not using the Marathi version of Dabholkar (ibid: 18). In contrast to myself, Rigopoulos cited extensively from the defective adaptation in English. I knew that such texts posed serious problems, and was concerned to emphasise other sources instead. Neither Warren nor Rigopoulos were able to locate all the relevant sources in English, a fact rendering the Warren position defective. A basic point is that Rigopoulos "never academically questions the obvious Hindu bias" (ibid) found in many sources. My researches dated back to 1967, many years before either of the pro-Sathya Sai academics began their own versions. Warren was correct in stating that my "material was first drafted in 1967" (ibid:15). She nevertheless failed to grasp that my critique of the hagiologist B. V. Narasimhaswami was derived from Meher Baba, to whom she defers, though she chose to criticise me on a misconceived pretext. Her difficulty in locating sources was not my fault. In point 18 of his analysis, Kidd countered the misleading accusation of Warren about the absence of a bibliography in my early monograph, found in Gurus Rediscovered: Biographies of Sai Baba of Shirdi and Upasni Maharaj of Sakori (1986). "Fladrif would not be aware that the monograph in question is the first half of Gurus Rediscovered (on Shirdi Sai Baba). The second half of the book (on Upasni Maharaj) does have a bibliography. In addition, the Sai Baba monograph does have seventy-seven fully referenced notes." Some professional scholars say that full annotations render a bibliography superfluous, especially in contrast to those books which feature bibliographies but no annotations.

(5)    Amongst other matters, Gerald Joe Moreno was keen to include the aspersions of Warren at his attack site saisathyasai.com, where he described me as "a pseudo-philosopher, pseudo-moralist and Findhorn fanatic." I have no connection with the Findhorn Foundation, and never did. I am a critic of the Findhorn Foundation, but that is a different matter. The elaborate and misleading vituperation devised by Moreno proved influential on Wikipedia. The manager Jimmy Wales proved immune to sectarian bias. In 2012, he personally deleted the offensive 2006 User page of SSS108 (alias Moreno), which attacked my publishing venture and books. On his attack site, Moreno resorted to a typically misleading jibe: "it is amusing that Shepherd cited and eulogised the very same woman who condemned him for his subjective, unsupported and opinionated writings." I believed in being fair to Warren, despite her flaws in assessment. Furthermore, Warren did not condemn me; instead, Moreno was the agent of condemnation and superfluous rhetoric. Warren stated that my early book Gurus Rediscovered "introduces a new and thought-provoking perception of [Shirdi] Sai Baba" (Unravelling the Enigma, p. 15), a perception from which she evidently benefited. She did not obtain her Ph.D until 1996; her thesis was subsequent to my book, and some borrowings are evident. See also note 4 above. Moreno deviously quoted a brief reference in a web article of mine, accusing me of an incomplete quotation, while totally failing to give the due information earlier supplied in my annotated book Investigating the Sai Baba Movement (2005), where I explained the context of my resistance to the missionary writer B. V. Narasimhaswami, a matter misrepresented by Warren. To accuse a writer of not having divulged all the details (as Moreno did), while avoiding his published account of those details, is reprehensible. The book deceitfully omitted by Moreno has twenty-five indexed references to Warren, and fifty indexed references to Narasimhaswami. Moreno deception is now well known. See also annotation 43 in my web article Shirdi Sai Baba and the Sai Baba Movement, also ignored by Moreno. That annotation includes the comment: "I was here vicariously blamed [by Warren] for criticising the Apostle of [Shirdi] Sai Baba." Two relevant quotes concerning the Warren issue, from my Investigating the Sai Baba Movement, were appropriately provided in Kidd, Self-published sources- Kevin Shepherd, point 20. Kidd also included in point 20 a lengthy quote from my Pointed Observations (2005), bearing upon the same subject. Kidd observed that the books of Narasimhaswami were published by an organisation of which he was the president. Narasimhaswami was nevertheless cited in the Wikipedia article on Sai Baba of Shirdi, "which has GA [Good Article] status" (point 21). Kidd was here referring to the Wikipedia issue of reliable third party publications.

(6)   After her withdrawal in disillusionment from the Sathya Sai Baba sect, Dr. Warren became very critical of the guru, and also commented: "Even Rigopoulos was not discriminating enough in his book on Shirdi Sai, accepting Sathya Sai's pronouncements as gospel." Simon Kidd included that quote in Self-published sources - Kevin Shepherd, point 22. Kidd also commented: "Here one academic writer (Warren) undermines the objectivity of another (Rigopoulos), and in so doing she implicitly supports Shepherd's own take on the unreliability of devotees, notwithstanding their academic status" (document cited, point 22). The quotation comes from a letter of Warren, dated 2003, to the salient ex-devotee Robert Priddy, whom Kidd describes as an academic philosopher.

(7)   The hostile campaign of sectarian extremist Gerald Joe Moreno was notorious amongst the ex-devotees of Sathya Sai Baba. Moreno himself has been described as an ex-devotee, a factor considered ambiguous in view of his extensive support for Sathya Sai Baba, whose critics he pilloried online for several years. The Kidd version of events relates: "Shepherd's book [Investigating the Sai Baba Movement] became the target for [Wikipedia] editor SSS108 [Moreno], a former devotee of Sathya Sai Baba who was subsequently banned from editing [in 2007] due to his extremely belligerent behaviour." Kidd adds that this problem "spilled over into off-wiki attacks on Shepherd by the banned editor." However, Moreno was not banned in any way because of me. "Later, I was also subject to off-wiki harassment by this former editor, just because I defended Shepherd as an author" (Kidd, Self-published sources - Kevin Shepherd, point 2). See also Analysis of a Cultist Defamation, and especially Attacking all Connections.

(8)   This matter is pressing. Simon Kidd disclosed, for instance, that the Wikipedia article on Meher Baba, which gained GA (Good Article) status, exhibits a chronic imbalance of sources, in that "over half (9 out of 16) of the referenced books are published by organisations with connections to Meher Baba: Sufism Reoriented, Sheriar Foundation, Avatar Foundation, Manifestation. Just to spell out the point, these GA-status articles are dependent on sources published by organisations that are linked to the subjects of the articles themselves. But it is Shepherd, for some reason, who is the subject of a reliable-source investigation" (Self-published sources - Kevin Shepherd, point 21). The Meher Baba devotee agitators Ott and Karavias were intent upon regarding me as unreliable, for sectarian reasons that later became obvious.

(9)   The affiliation of Rigopoulos is evident in The Life and Teachings of Sai Baba of Shirdi (1993), pp. 247-49, which refers approvingly to the reincarnation claim of Sathya Sai Baba, also reporting: "Satya Sai has announced that he will die at the age of ninety-six, and that eight years after his death, that is, in 2028 or 2029, he will be reborn as Prema Sai." Sathya Sai Baba died in 2011, while in his eighties. Rigopoulos urges: "What Charles S. J. White has appropriately termed 'the Sai Baba movement,' initiating with Shirdi Sai, may indeed be classified as one of the major religious phenomena of neo-Hinduism." Substantial components of this putative "movement" were not Hindu. The description is misleading. The reincarnation claim was also reported, without criticism, in Warren, Unravelling the Enigma (1999), pp. 28-9, also in a glowing separate chapter on Sathya Sai Baba (pp. 366-79). Likewise promotional was Warren's Preface, in which she stated: "Sri Sathya Sai Baba has revealed that his divine mission to usher in a new golden age, will take the lifetimes of a triple avatar or descent of the divine in human form.... he has declared that this triple incarnation is Shirdi Sai Baba, Sathya Sai Baba and Prema Sai Baba" (ibid:xviii). Belief in this claim is ultimately what caused Warren to resist my criticism (mediated from Meher Baba) of the hagiological tendency in Narasimhaswami, an associated figure in the "Sai" corpus. Warren subsequently repudiated Sathya Sai Baba; a revised edition of her book appeared in 2004, the year of her death. The revision was not thorough, flaws still remaining in the text. The angle of pseudonymous Wikipedia editors on these two works (of Rigopoulos and Warren) was pronouncedly deficient, exhibiting a total lack of familiarity with all the complexities.

(10)  The description by Simon Kidd of A Sufi Matriarch is: "the only full biography of Hazrat Babajan that is not written by a devotee" (Self-published sources - Kevin Shepherd, point 1). The devotee contingent here basically refers to the Meher Baba movement, whose literature has frequently referred to Babajan, though for the most part only briefly.

Copyright © 2021 Kevin R.D. Shepherd. All Rights Reserved. Page uploaded June 2012, last modified March 2021.