title: Criticism of Wikipedia

text: Larry Delay and Pablo Bachelet wrote that from their perspective, some articles dealing with Latin American history and groups (such as the Sandinistas and Cuba) lack political neutrality and are written from a sympathetic Marxist perspective which treats socialist dictatorships favorably at the expense of alternative positions.


title: Criticism of Wikipedia

text: In 2008, the pro-Israel group Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA) organized an e-mail campaign to encourage readers to correct perceived Israel-related biases and inconsistencies in Wikipedia. CAMERA argued the excerpts were unrepresentative and that it had explicitly campaigned merely "toward encouraging people to learn about and edit the online encyclopedia for accuracy". Defenders of CAMERA and the competing group, Electronic Intifada, went into mediation. Israeli diplomat David Saranga said Wikipedia is generally fair in regard to Israel. When it was pointed out that the entry on Israel mentioned the word "occupation" nine times, whereas the entry on the Palestinian people mentioned "terror" only once, he responded, "It means only one thing: Israelis should be more active on Wikipedia. Instead of blaming it, they should go on the site much more, and try and change it."


title: Criticism of Wikipedia

text: Israeli political commentator Haviv Rettig Gur, reviewing widespread perceptions in Israel of systemic bias in Wikipedia articles, has argued that there are deeper structural problems creating this bias: anonymous editing favors biased results, especially if the editors organize concerted campaigns of defamation as has been done in articles dealing with Arab-Israeli issues, and current Wikipedia policies, while well-meant, have proven ineffective in handling this.


title: Criticism of Wikipedia

text: On August 31, 2008, "The New York Times" ran an article detailing the edits made to the biography of Alaska governor Sarah Palin in the wake of her nomination as the running mate of Arizona Senator John McCain. During the 24 hours before the McCain campaign announcement, 30 edits, many of them adding flattering details, were made to the article by the user "Young_Trigg". This person later acknowledged working on the McCain campaign, and having several other user accounts.


title: Criticism of Wikipedia

text: In November 2007, libelous accusations were made against two politicians from southwestern France, Jean-Pierre Grand and Hélène Mandroux-Colas, on their Wikipedia biographies. Grand asked the president of the French National Assembly and Prime Minister to reinforce the legislation on the penal responsibility of Internet sites and of authors who peddle false information in order to cause harm. Senator Jean Louis Masson then requested the Minister of Justice to tell him whether it would be possible to increase the criminal responsibilities of hosting providers, site operators, and authors of libelous content; the minister declined to do so, recalling the existing rules in the LCEN law (see "Internet censorship in France").


title: Criticism of Wikipedia

text: On August 25, 2010, the "Toronto Star" reported that the Canadian "government is now conducting two investigations into federal employees who have taken to Wikipedia to express their opinion on federal policies and bitter political debates."


title: Criticism of Wikipedia

text: In 2010, Al Jazeera's Teymoor Nabili suggested that the article "Cyrus Cylinder" had been edited for political purposes by "an apparent tussle of opinions in the shadowy world of hard drives and 'independent' editors that comprise the Wikipedia industry." He suggested that after the Iranian presidential election of 2009 and ensuing "anti-Iranian activities", a "strenuous attempt to portray the cylinder as nothing more than the propaganda tool of an aggressive invader" was visible. The edits following his analysis of the edits during 2009 and 2010, represented "a complete dismissal of the suggestion that the cylinder, or Cyrus' actions, represent a concern for human rights or any kind of enlightened intent," in stark contrast to Cyrus' own reputation as documented in the Old Testament and the people of Babylon.


title: Criticism of Wikipedia

text: Articles of particular interest to an editor or group of editors are sometimes modified based on these editors' respective points of views. Some companies and organizations—such as Sony, Diebold, Nintendo, Dell, the CIA, and the Church of Scientology—as well as individuals, such as United States Congressional staffers, were all shown to have modified the Wikipedia pages about themselves in order to present a point of view that describes them positively; these organizations may have editors who revert negative changes as soon as these changes are submitted.


title: Criticism of Wikipedia

text: The Chinese Wikipedia article on the Tiananmen Square massacre was rewritten to describe it as necessary to "quell the counterrevolutionary riots" and Taiwan was described as "a province in the People's Republic of China". According to the BBC, "there are indications that [such edits] are not all necessarily organic, nor random" and were in fact orchestrated by the Chinese Communist Party.


title: Criticism of Wikipedia

text: In a 2006 mention of Jimmy Wales, "Time" magazine stated that the policy of allowing anyone to edit had made Wikipedia the "biggest (and perhaps best) encyclopedia in the world".


title: Criticism of Wikipedia

text: In 2008, researchers at Carnegie Mellon University found that the quality of a Wikipedia article would suffer rather than gain from adding more writers when the article lacked appropriate explicit or implicit coordination. For instance, when contributors rewrite small portions of an entry rather than making full-length revisions, high- and low-quality content may be intermingled within an entry. Roy Rosenzweig, a history professor, stated that "American National Biography Online" outperformed Wikipedia in terms of its "clear and engaging prose", which, he said, was an important aspect of good historical writing. Contrasting Wikipedia's treatment of Abraham Lincoln to that of Civil War historian James McPherson in "American National Biography Online", he said that both were essentially accurate and covered the major episodes in Lincoln's life, but praised "McPherson's richer contextualization ... his artful use of quotations to capture Lincoln's voice ... and ... his ability to convey a profound message in a handful of words." By contrast, he gives an example of Wikipedia's prose that he finds "both verbose and dull". Rosenzweig also criticized the "waffling—encouraged by the NPOV policy—[which] means that it is hard to discern any overall interpretive stance in Wikipedia history". While generally praising the article on William Clarke Quantrill, he quoted its conclusion as an example of such "waffling", which then stated: "Some historians ... remember him as an opportunistic, bloodthirsty outlaw, while others continue to view him as a daring soldier and local folk hero."


title: Criticism of Wikipedia

text: Other critics have made similar charges that, even if Wikipedia articles are factually accurate, they are often written in a poor, almost unreadable style. Frequent Wikipedia critic Andrew Orlowski commented, "Even when a Wikipedia entry is 100 percent factually correct, and those facts have been carefully chosen, it all too often reads as if it has been translated from one language to another then into a third, passing an illiterate translator at each stage." A study of Wikipedia articles on cancer was conducted in 2010 by Yaacov Lawrence of the Kimmel Cancer Center at Thomas Jefferson University. The study was limited to those articles that could be found in the "Physician Data Query" and excluded those written at the "start" class or "stub" class level. Lawrence found the articles accurate but not very readable, and thought that "Wikipedia's lack of readability (to non-college readers) may reflect its varied origins and haphazard editing". "The Economist" argued that better-written articles tend to be more reliable: "inelegant or ranting prose usually reflects muddled thoughts and incomplete information".


title: Criticism of Wikipedia

text: In the September 12, 2006, edition of "The Wall Street Journal", Jimmy Wales debated with Dale Hoiberg, editor-in-chief of "Encyclopædia Britannica". Hoiberg focused on a need for expertise and control in an encyclopedia and cited Lewis Mumford that overwhelming information could "bring about a state of intellectual enervation and depletion hardly to be distinguished from massive ignorance." Wales emphasized Wikipedia's differences and asserted that openness and transparency lead to quality. Hoiberg said he "had neither the time nor space to respond to [criticisms]" and "could corral any number of links to articles alleging errors in Wikipedia", to which Wales responded: "No problem! Wikipedia to the rescue with a fine article", and included a link to the Wikipedia article about criticism of Wikipedia.


title: Criticism of Wikipedia

text: Wikipedia has been accused of systemic bias, which is to say its general nature leads, without necessarily any conscious intention, to the propagation of various prejudices. Although many articles in newspapers have concentrated on minor factual errors in Wikipedia articles, there are also concerns about large-scale, presumably unintentional effects from the increasing influence and use of Wikipedia as a research tool at all levels. In an article in the "Times Higher Education" magazine (London), philosopher Martin Cohen describes Wikipedia as having "become a monopoly" with "all the prejudices and ignorance of its creators," which he calls a "youthful cab-drivers" perspective. Cohen concludes that "[t]o control the reference sources that people use is to control the way people comprehend the world. Wikipedia may have a benign, even trivial face, but underneath may lie a more sinister and subtle threat to freedom of thought." That freedom is undermined by what he sees as what matters on Wikipedia, "not your sources but the 'support of the community."


title: Criticism of Wikipedia

text: Researchers from Washington University in St. Louis developed a statistical model to measure systematic bias in the behavior of Wikipedia's users regarding controversial topics. The authors focused on behavioral changes of the encyclopedia's administrators after assuming the post, writing that systematic bias occurred after the fact.


title: Criticism of Wikipedia

text: Critics also point to the tendency to cover topics in detail disproportionate to their importance. For example, Stephen Colbert once mockingly praised Wikipedia for having a longer entry on 'lightsabers' than it does on the 'printing press'. Dale Hoiberg, the editor-in-chief of "Encyclopædia Britannica", said "People write of things they're interested in, and so many subjects don't get covered, and news events get covered in great detail. In the past, the entry on Hurricane Frances was more than five times the length of that on Chinese art, and the entry on "Coronation Street" was twice as long as the article on Tony Blair."


title: Criticism of Wikipedia

text: This approach of comparing two articles, one about a traditionally encyclopedic subject and the other about one more popular with the crowd, has been called "wikigroaning". A defense of inclusion criteria is that the encyclopedia's longer coverage of pop culture does not deprive the more "worthy" or serious subjects of space.


title: Criticism of Wikipedia

text: Wikipedia's notability guidelines, which are used by editors to determine if a subject merits its own article, and the application thereof, are the subject of much criticism. A Wikipedia editor rejected a draft article about Donna Strickland before she won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2018, because no independent sources were given to show that Strickland was sufficiently notable by Wikipedia's standards. Journalists highlighted this as an indicator of the limited visibility of women in science compared to their male colleagues.


title: Criticism of Wikipedia

text: The gender bias on Wikipedia is well documented and has prompted a movement to increase the number of notable women on Wikipedia through the Women in Red WikiProject. In an article entitled "Seeking Disambiguation", Annalisa Merelli interviewed Catalina Cruz, a candidate for office in Queens, New York in the 2018 election who had the notorious SEO disadvantage of having the same name as a porn star with a Wikipedia page. Merelli also interviewed the Wikipedia editor who wrote the candidate's ill-fated article (which was deleted, then restored, after she won the election). She described the Articles for Deletion process and pointed to other candidates who had pages on the English Wikipedia despite never having held office.


title: Criticism of Wikipedia

text: Novelist Nicholson Baker, critical of deletionism, writes: "There are quires, reams, bales of controversy over what constitutes notability in Wikipedia: nobody will ever sort it out."


title: Criticism of Wikipedia

text: Journalist Timothy Noah wrote of his treatment: "Wikipedia's notability policy resembles U.S. immigration policy before 9/11: stringent rules, spotty enforcement". In the same article, Noah mentions that the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Stacy Schiff was not considered notable enough for a Wikipedia entry until she wrote her article "Know it All" about the Wikipedia Essjay controversy.


title: Criticism of Wikipedia

text: On a more generic level, a 2014 study found no correlation between the characteristics of a given Wikipedia page about an academic and the academic's notability as determined by citation counts. The metrics of each Wikipedia page examined included length, number of links to the page from other articles, and number of edits made to the page. This study also found that Wikipedia did not cover notable ISI highly cited researchers properly.


title: Criticism of Wikipedia

text: In 2020, Wikipedia was criticized for the amount of time it took for an article about Theresa Greenfield, a candidate for the 2020 United States Senate election in Iowa, to leave Wikipedia's Articles for the Creation process and become published. Particularly, the criteria for notability were criticized, with "The Washington Post" reporting: "Greenfield is a uniquely tricky case for Wikipedia because she doesn't have the background that most candidates for major political office typically have (like prior government experience or prominence in business). Even if Wikipedia editors could recognize she was prominent, she had a hard time meeting the official criteria for notability." Jimmy Wales also criticized the long process on his talk page.


title: Criticism of Wikipedia

text: According to "Haaretz", "Wikipedia has succeeded in being accused of being both too liberal and too conservative, and has critics from across the spectrum.", while also noting that Wikipedia is "usually accused of being too liberal". According to CNN, Wikipedia's ideological bias "may match the ideological bias of the news ecosystem."


title: Criticism of Wikipedia

text: U.S. commentators, mostly politically conservative ones, have suggested that a politically liberal viewpoint is predominant in the English Wikipedia. Andrew Schlafly created Conservapedia because of his perception that Wikipedia contained a liberal bias. Conservapedia's editors have compiled a list of alleged examples of liberal bias in Wikipedia. In 2007, an article in "The Christian Post" criticised Wikipedia's coverage of intelligent design, saying it was biased and hypocritical. Lawrence Solomon of "National Review" considered the Wikipedia articles on subjects like global warming, intelligent design, and "Roe v. Wade" all to be slanted in favor of liberal views. In a September 2010 issue of the conservative weekly "Human Events", Rowan Scarborough presented a critique of Wikipedia's coverage of American politicians prominent in the approaching U.S. midterm elections as evidence of systemic liberal bias. Scarborough compares the biographical articles of liberal and conservative opponents in Senate races in the Alaska Republican primary and the Delaware and Nevada general election, emphasizing the quantity of negative coverage of Tea Party movement-endorsed candidates. He also cites criticism by Lawrence Solomon and quotes in full the lead section of Wikipedia's article on Conservapedia as evidence of an underlying bias.


title: Criticism of Wikipedia

text: In 2006, Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales said: "The Wikipedia community is very diverse, from liberal to conservative to libertarian and beyond. If averages mattered, and due to the nature of the wiki software (no voting) they almost certainly don't, I would say that the Wikipedia community is slightly more liberal than the U.S. population on average, because we are global and the international community of English speakers is slightly more liberal than the U.S. population. There are no data or surveys to back that." In 2007, Wales said that claims of liberal bias on Wikipedia "are not supported by the facts". Shane Greenstein and Feng Zhu analyzed 2012 era Wikipedia articles on U.S. politics, going back a decade, and wrote a study arguing the more contributors there were to an article, the less biased the article would be, and that based on a study of frequent collocations fewer articles "leaned Democrat" than was the case in Wikipedia's early years. Sorin Adam Matei, a professor at Purdue University, said that "for certain political topics, there's a central-left bias. There's also a slight when it comes to more political topics, counter-cultural bias. It's not across the board, and it's not for all things."


title: Criticism of Wikipedia

text: In February 2021, Fox News accused Wikipedia of whitewashing communism and socialism. In November 2021, the English Wikipedia's entry for "Mass killings under communist regimes" was nominated for deletion, with some editors arguing that it has "a biased 'anti-Communist' point of view", that "it should not resort to 'simplistic presuppositions that events are driven by any specific ideology", and that "by combining different elements of research to create a 'synthesis', this constitutes original research and therefore breaches ." This was criticized by historian Robert Tombs, who called it "morally indefensible, at least as bad as Holocaust denial, because 'linking ideology and killing' is the very core of why these things are important. I have read the Wikipedia page, and it seems to be careful and balanced. Therefore, attempts to remove it can only be ideologically motivated – to whitewash Communism." Other Wikipedia editors and users on social media opposed the deletion of the article. The article's deletion nomination received considerable attention from conservative media. The Heritage Foundation, an American conservative think tank, called the arguments made in favor of deletion "absurd and ahistorical". On December 1, 2021, a panel of four administrators found that the discussion yielded no consensus, meaning that the status quo was retained, and the article was not deleted. The article's deletion discussion was the largest in Wikipedia's history.


title: Criticism of Wikipedia

text: In 2008, Tim Anderson, a senior lecturer in political economy at the University of Sydney, said Wikipedia administrators display an American-focused bias in their interactions with editors and their determinations of which sources are appropriate for use on the site. Anderson was outraged after several of the sources he used in his edits to the Hugo Chávez article, including "Venezuela Analysis" and "Z Magazine", were disallowed as "unusable". Anderson also described Wikipedia's neutral point of view policy to ZDNet Australia as "a facade" and that Wikipedia "hides behind a reliance on corporate media editorials".


title: Criticism of Wikipedia

text: Wikipedia has been charged with having a systemic racial bias in its coverage, due to an underrepresentation of people of colour as editors. The President of Wikimedia D.C., James Hare, noted that "a lot of black history is left out" of Wikipedia, due to articles predominately being written by white editors. Articles that do exist on African topics are, according to some critics, largely edited by editors from Europe and North America and thus reflect their knowledge and consumption of media, which "tend to perpetuate a negative image" of Africa. Maira Liriano, of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, has argued that the lack of information regarding black history on Wikipedia "makes it seem like it's not important." San Francisco Poet Laureate Alejandro Murguía has stressed how it is important for Latinos to be part of Wikipedia "because it is a major source of where people get their information." In 2010, an analysis of Wikipedia edits revealed that Asia, as the most populous continent, was represented in only 16.67% of edits. Africa (6.35%) and South America (2.58%) were equally underrepresented.


title: Criticism of Wikipedia

text: In 2018, the Southern Poverty Law Center criticized Wikipedia for being "vulnerable to manipulation by neo-Nazis, white nationalists and racist academics seeking a wider audience for extreme views." According to the SPLC, "[c]ivil POV-pushers can disrupt the editing process by engaging other users in tedious and frustrating debates or tie up administrators in endless rounds of mediation. Users who fall into this category include racialist academics and members of the human biodiversity, or HBD, blogging community. ... In recent years, the proliferation of far-right online spaces, such as white nationalist forums, alt-right boards and HBD blogs, has created a readymade pool of users that can be recruited to edit on Wikipedia en masse. ... The presence of white nationalists and other far-right extremists on Wikipedia is an ongoing problem that is unlikely to go away in the near future given the rightward political shift in countries where the majority of the site's users live. The SPLC cited the article "Race and intelligence" as an example of the alt-right influence on Wikipedia, stating that at that time the article presented a "false balance" between fringe racialist views and the "mainstream perspective in psychology." In 2022 "The Chronicle of Higher Education" reported on a researcher at Cleveland State University whose "home institution was essentially providing a soapbox for racist pseudoscience." The article states that he had some influence on "public misperceptions of race" as a result of heavy editing of an early version of Wikipedia's article on race and intelligence.


title: Criticism of Wikipedia

text: Wikipedia has a longstanding controversy concerning gender bias and sexism. Gender bias on Wikipedia refers to the finding that between 84 and 91 percent of Wikipedia editors are male, which allegedly leads to systemic bias. Wikipedia has been criticized by some journalists and academics for lacking not only women contributors but also extensive and in-depth encyclopedic attention to many topics regarding gender. Sue Gardner, former executive director of the Foundation, said that increasing diversity was about making the encyclopedia "as good as it could be". Factors cited as possibly discouraging women from editing included the "obsessive fact-loving realm", associations with the "hard-driving hacker crowd", and the necessity to be "open to very difficult, high-conflict people, even misogynists."


title: Criticism of Wikipedia

text: In 2011, the Wikimedia Foundation set a goal of increasing the proportion of female contributors to 25 percent by 2015. In August 2013, Gardner conceded defeat: "I didn't solve it. We didn't solve it. The Wikimedia Foundation didn't solve it. The solution won't come from the Wikimedia Foundation." In August 2014, Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales acknowledged in a BBC interview the failure of Wikipedia to fix the gender gap and announced the Wikimedia Foundation's plans for "doubling down" on the issue. Wales said the Foundation would be open to more outreach and more software changes.


title: Criticism of Wikipedia

text: Writing in the "Notices of the American Mathematical Society", Marie Vitulli states that "mathematicians have had a difficult time when writing biographies of women mathematicians," and she describes the aggressiveness of editors and administrators in deleting such articles.


title: Criticism of Wikipedia

text: Wikipedia has been criticized for reflecting the bias and influence of media that are seen as reliable due to their dominance, and for being a site of conflict between entrenched or special institutional interests. Public relations firms and interest lobbies, corporate, political and otherwise, have been accused of working systemically to distort Wikipedia's articles in their respective interests.


title: Criticism of Wikipedia

text: Wikipedia has been criticized for issues related to bias in firearms-related articles. According to critics, systematic bias arises from the tendency of the editors most active in maintaining firearms-related articles to also be gun enthusiasts, and firearms-related articles are dominated by technical information while issues of the social impact and regulation of firearms are relegated to separate articles. Communications were facilitated by a "WikiProject," called "WikiProject Firearms", an on-wiki group of editors with a common interest. The alleged pro-gun bias drew increased attention after the Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in Parkland, Florida, in February 2018. The Wikimedia Foundation defended itself from allegations of being host to opinion-influencing campaigns of pro-gun groups, saying that the contents are always being updated and improved.


title: Criticism of Wikipedia

text: In 2014, supporters of holistic healing and energy psychology began a Change.org petition asking for "true scientific discourse" on Wikipedia, complaining that "much of the information [on Wikipedia] related to holistic approaches to healing is biased, misleading, out-of-date, or just plain wrong". In response, Jimmy Wales said Wikipedia covers only works that are published in respectable scientific journals.


title: Criticism of Wikipedia

text: Wikipedia has been accused of being biased against views outside of the scientific mainstream due to influence from the skeptical movement. Social scientist Brian Martin examined the influence of skeptics on Wikipedia by looking for parallels between Wikipedia entries and characteristic techniques used by skeptics, finding that the result "does not prove that Skeptics are shaping Wikipedia but is compatible with that possibility."


title: Criticism of Wikipedia

text: Wikipedia has been criticized for allowing graphic sexual content such as images and videos of masturbation and ejaculation as well as photos from hardcore pornographic films found on its articles. Child protection campaigners say graphic sexual content appears on many Wikipedia entries, displayed without any warning or age verification.


title: Criticism of Wikipedia

text: The Wikipedia article "Virgin Killer"—a 1976 album from German heavy metal band Scorpions—features a picture of the album's original cover, which depicts a naked prepubescent girl. In December 2008, the Internet Watch Foundation, a nonprofit, nongovernment-affiliated organization, added the article to its blacklist, criticizing the inclusion of the picture as "distasteful". As a result, access to the article was blocked for four days by most Internet service providers in the United Kingdom. Seth Finkelstein writing for "The Guardian" argues that the debate over the album cover masks a structural lack of accountability on Wikipedia, in particular when it comes to sexual content. For example, the deletion by Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales of images of lolicon versions of the character created a minor controversy on the topic. The deletion was taken as endorsement of the non-lolicon images of Wikipe-tan, which Wales later had to explicitly deny: "I don't like Wikipe-tan and never have." Finkelstein sees Wikipedia as composed of fiefdoms, which makes it difficult for the Wikipedia community to deal with such issues, and sometimes necessitates top-down intervention.


title: Criticism of Wikipedia

text: As an online encyclopedia that almost anyone can edit, Wikipedia has had problems with vandalism of articles, which range from blanking articles to inserting profanities, hoaxes, or nonsense. Wikipedia has a range of tools available to users and administrators in order to fight against vandalism, including blocking and banning vandals and automated bots that detect and repair vandalism. Supporters of the project argue that the vast majority of vandalism on Wikipedia is reverted within a short time, and a study by Fernanda Viégas of the MIT Media Lab and Martin Wattenberg and Kushal Dave of IBM Research found that most vandal edits were reverted within around five minutes; however, they state that "it is essentially impossible to find a crisp definition of vandalism." While most instances of page blanking or the addition of offensive material are soon reverted, less obvious vandalism, or vandalism to a little-viewed article, has remained for longer periods.


title: Criticism of Wikipedia

text: A 2007 conference paper estimated that 1 in 271 articles had some "damaged" content. Most of the damage involved nonsense; 20% involved actual misinformation. It reported that 42% of damage gets repaired before any reader clicked on the article, and 80% before 30 people did so.


title: Criticism of Wikipedia

text: Most privacy concerns refer to cases of government or employer data gathering, computer or electronic monitoring; or trading data between organizations. According to James Donnelly and Jenifer Haeckel, "the Internet has created conflicts between personal privacy, commercial interests and the interests of society at large". Balancing the rights of all concerned as technology alters the social landscape will not be easy. It "is not yet possible to anticipate the path of the common law or governmental regulation" regarding this problem.


title: Criticism of Wikipedia

text: The concern in the case of Wikipedia is the right of a private citizen to remain private; to remain a "private citizen" rather than a "public figure" in the eyes of the law. It is somewhat of a battle between the right to be anonymous in cyberspace and the right to be anonymous in real life ("meatspace"). A particular problem occurs in the case of an individual who is relatively unimportant and for whom there exists a Wikipedia page against their wishes.


title: Criticism of Wikipedia

text: In 2005, Agence France-Presse quoted Daniel Brandt, the Wikipedia Watch owner, as saying that "the basic problem is that no one, neither the trustees of Wikimedia Foundation, nor the volunteers who are connected with Wikipedia, consider themselves responsible for the content."


title: Criticism of Wikipedia

text: In January 2006, a German court ordered the German Wikipedia shut down within Germany because it stated the full name of Boris Floricic, aka "Tron", a deceased hacker who was formerly with the Chaos Computer Club. More specifically, the court ordered that the URL within the German domain () may no longer redirect to the encyclopedia's servers in Florida at although German readers were still able to use the US-based URL directly, and there was virtually no loss of access on their part. The court order arose out of a lawsuit filed by Floricic's parents, demanding that their son's surname be removed from Wikipedia. The next month on February 9, 2006, the injunction against Wikimedia Deutschland was overturned, with the court rejecting the notion that Tron's right to privacy or that of his parents was being violated.


title: Criticism of Wikipedia

text: The community of Wikipedia editors has been criticized for placing an irrational emphasis on Jimmy Wales as a person. has also been criticized as contrary to the independent spirit that Wikipedia supposedly has gained. In early 2007, Wales dismissed the criticism of the Wikipedia model: "I am unaware of any problems with the quality of discourse on the site. I don't know of any higher-quality discourse anywhere."


title: Criticism of Wikipedia

text: A "Business Insider" article wrote about a controversy in September 2012 where two Wikimedia Foundation employees were found to have been "running a PR business on the side and editing Wikipedia on behalf of their clients."


title: Criticism of Wikipedia

text: In 2015, "The Atlantic" published a story by Emma Paling about a contributor who was able to obtain no relief from the Arbitration Committee for off-site harassment. Paling quotes a then-sitting Arbitrator speaking about bias against women on the Arbitration Committee.


title: Criticism of Wikipedia

text: In the online magazine "Slate", David Auerbach criticized the Arbitration Committee's decision to block a woman indefinitely without simultaneously blocking her "chief antagonists" in the December 2014 case. He mentions his own experience with what he calls "the unblockable"abrasive editors who can get away with complaints against them because there are enough supporters, and that he had observed a "general indifference or even hostility to an outside opinion" on the English Wikipedia. Auerbach considers the systematic defense of vulgar language use by insiders as a symptom of the toxicity he describes.


title: Criticism of Wikipedia

text: In January 2015, "The Guardian" reported that the Arbitration Committee had banned five feminist editors from gender-related articles on a case related to the Gamergate controversy while including quotes from a Wikipedia editor alleging unfair treatment. Other commentators, including from "Gawker" and "ThinkProgress", provided additional analysis while sourcing from "The Guardian"s story. Reports in "The Washington Post", "Slate" and "Social Text" described these articles as "flawed" or factually inaccurate, pointing out that the Arbitration case had not concluded as at the time of publishing; no editor had been banned. After the result was published, "Gawker" wrote that "ArbCom ruled to punish six editors who could be broadly classified as 'anti-Gamergate' and five who are 'pro-Gamergate'." All of the supposed were among the editors punished, with one of them being the sole editor banned due to this case. An article called "ArbitrationGate" regarding this situation was created (and quickly deleted) on Wikipedia, while "The Guardian" later issued a correction to their article. The Committee and the Wikimedia Foundation issued press statements that the Gamergate case was in response to the atmosphere of the Gamergate article resembling a "battlefield" due to "various sides of the discussion [having] violated community policies and guidelines on conduct", and that the committee was fulfilling its role to "uphold a civil, constructive atmosphere" on Wikipedia. The committee also wrote that it "does not rule on the content of articles, or make judgements on the personal views of parties to the case". Michael Mandiberg, writing in "Social Text", remained unconvinced.


title: Criticism of Wikipedia

text: On the Croatian Wikipedia, a group of administrators were criticized for blocking Wikipedians who were in favor of LGBT rights. In an interview given to Index.hr, Robert Kurelić, a professor of history at the Juraj Dobrila University of Pula, has commented that "the Croatian Wikipedia is only a tool used by its administrators to promote their own political agendas, giving false and distorted facts". As two particularly prominent examples he listed the Croatian Wikipedia's coverage of Istrianism (a regionalist movement in Istria, a region mostly located in Croatia), defined as a "movement fabricated to reduce the number of Croats", and "antifašizam" (anti-fascism), which according to him is defined as the opposite of what it really means. Kurelić further advised "that it would be good if a larger number of people got engaged and started writing on Wikipedia", because "administrators want to exploit high-school and university students, the most common users of Wikipedia, to change their opinions and attitudes, which presents a serious issue".


title: Criticism of Wikipedia

text: In 2013, Croatia's Minister of Science, Education and Sports at the time, Željko Jovanović, called for pupils and students in Croatia to avoid using the Croatian Wikipedia. In an interview given to "Novi list", Jovanović said that Jovanović has also commented on the Croatian Wikipedia editors – calling them a "minority group that has usurped the right to edit the Croatian-language Wikipedia".


title: Criticism of Wikipedia

text: David Boothroyd, a Wikipedia editor and a Labour Party (United Kingdom) member, created controversy in 2009, when Wikipedia Review contributor "Tarantino" discovered that he committed sockpuppeting, editing under the accounts "Dbiv", "Fys", and "Sam Blacketer", none of which acknowledged his real identity. After earning Administrator status with one account, then losing it for inappropriate use of the administrative tools, Boothroyd regained Administrator status with the Sam Blacketer sockpuppet account in April 2007. Later in 2007, Boothroyd's Sam Blacketer account became part of the English Wikipedia's Arbitration Committee. Under the Sam Blacketer account, Boothroyd edited many articles related to United Kingdom politics, including that of rival Conservative Party leader David Cameron. Boothroyd then resigned as an administrator and as an arbitrator.


title: Criticism of Wikipedia

text: In July 2006, "The New Yorker" ran a feature by Stacy Schiff about "a highly credentialed Wikipedia editor". The initial version of the article included an interview with a Wikipedia administrator using the pseudonym Essjay, who described himself as a tenured professor of theology. Essjay's Wikipedia user page, now removed, said the following:


title: Criticism of Wikipedia

text: Essjay also said he held four academic degrees: Bachelor of Arts in religious studies (B.A.), Master of Arts in Religion (M.A.R.), Doctorate of Philosophy in theology (Ph.D.), and Doctorate in Canon Law (JCD). Essjay specialized in editing articles about religion on Wikipedia, including subjects such as "the penitential rite, transubstantiation, the papal tiara"; on one occasion he was called in to give some "expert testimony" on the status of Mary in the Roman Catholic Church. In January 2007, Essjay was hired as a manager with Wikia, a wiki-hosting service founded by Wales and Angela Beesley. In February, Wales appointed Essjay as a member of the Wikipedia Arbitration Committee, a group with powers to issue binding rulings in disputes relating to Wikipedia.


title: Criticism of Wikipedia

text: In late February 2007, "The New Yorker" added an editorial note to its article on Wikipedia stating that it had learned that Essjay was Ryan Jordan, a 24-year-old college dropout from Kentucky with no advanced degrees and no teaching experience. Initially Jimmy Wales commented on the issue of Essjay's identity: "I regard it as a pseudonym and I don't really have a problem with it." Larry Sanger, co-founder of Wikipedia, responded to Wales on his Citizendium blog by calling Wales' initial reaction "utterly breathtaking, and ultimately tragic". Sanger said the controversy "reflects directly on the judgment and values of the management of Wikipedia."


title: Criticism of Wikipedia

text: Wales later issued a new statement saying he had not previously understood that "EssJay used his false credentials in content disputes." He added: "I have asked EssJay to resign his positions of trust within the Wikipedia community." Sanger responded the next day: "It seems Jimmy finds nothing wrong, nothing trust-violating, with the act itself of openly and falsely touting many advanced degrees on Wikipedia. But there most obviously is something wrong with it, and it's just as disturbing for Wikipedia's head to fail to see anything wrong with it."


title: Criticism of Wikipedia

text: On March 4, Essjay wrote on his user page that he was leaving Wikipedia, and he also resigned his position with Wikia. A subsequent article in "The Courier-Journal" (Louisville) suggested that the new résumé he had posted at his Wikia page was exaggerated. The March 19, 2007, issue of "The New Yorker" published a formal apology by Wales to the magazine and Stacy Schiff for Essjay's false statements.


title: Criticism of Wikipedia

text: Discussing the incident, the "New York Times" noted that the Wikipedia community had responded to the affair with "the fury of the crowd", and observed:


title: Criticism of Wikipedia

text: The Essjay incident received extensive media coverage, including a national United States television broadcast on ABC's "World News with Charles Gibson" and the March 7, 2007, Associated Press story. The controversy has led to a proposal that users who say they possess academic qualifications should have to provide evidence before citing them in Wikipedia content disputes. The proposal was not accepted.


title: Criticism of Wikipedia

text: Wikipedia has been criticised for allowing editors to contribute anonymously (without a registered account and using an auto-generated IP-labeled account) or pseudonymously (using a registered account), with critics saying that this leads to a lack of accountability. This also sometimes leads to uncivil conduct in debates between Wikipedians. For privacy reasons, Wikipedia forbids editors to reveal information about another editor on Wikipedia.


title: Criticism of Wikipedia

text: The standard of debate on Wikipedia has been called into question by people who have noted that contributors can make a long list of salient points and pull in a wide range of empirical observations to back up their arguments, only to have them ignored completely on the site. An academic study of Wikipedia articles found that the level of debate among Wikipedia editors on controversial topics often degenerated into counterproductive squabbling:


title: Criticism of Wikipedia

text: In 2008, a team from the Palo Alto Research Center found that for editors who make between two and nine edits a month, the percentage of their edits being reverted had gone from 5% in 2004 to about 15%, and people who make only one edit a month were being reverted at a 25% rate. According to "The Economist" magazine (2008), "The behaviour of Wikipedia's self-appointed deletionist guardians, who excise anything that does not meet their standards, justifying their actions with a blizzard of acronyms, is now known as 'wiki-lawyering'." In regards to the decline in the number of Wikipedia editors since the 2007 policy changes, another study stated this was partly down to the way "in which newcomers are rudely greeted by automated quality control systems and are overwhelmed by the complexity of the rule system."


title: Criticism of Wikipedia

text: Another complaint about Wikipedia focuses on the efforts of contributors with idiosyncratic beliefs, who push their point of view in an effort to dominate articles, especially controversial ones. This sometimes results in revert wars and pages being locked down. In response, an Arbitration Committee has been formed on the English Wikipedia that deals with the worst alleged offenders—though a conflict resolution strategy is actively encouraged before going to this extent. Also, to stop the continuous reverting of pages, Jimmy Wales introduced a "three-revert rule", whereby those users who reverse the effect of others' contributions to one article more than three times in a 24-hour period may be blocked.


title: Criticism of Wikipedia

text: In a 2008 article in "The Brooklyn Rail", Wikipedia contributor David Shankbone contended that he had been harassed and stalked because of his work on Wikipedia, had received no support from the authorities or the Wikimedia Foundation, and only mixed support from the Wikipedia community. Shankbone wrote, "If you become a target on Wikipedia, do not expect a supportive community."


title: Criticism of Wikipedia

text: Wikipedia has also been criticized for its weak enforcement against perceived toxicities among the editing community at various times. In one case a longtime editor was nearly driven to suicide following online abuse from editors and a ban from the site before being rescued from the suicide attempt.


title: Criticism of Wikipedia

text: In order to address this problem Wikipedia planned to institute a new rule of conduct aimed at combating 'toxic behavior'. The development of the new rule of conduct would take place in two phases. The first will include setting policies for in-person and virtual events as well as policies for technical spaces including chat rooms and other Wikimedia projects. A second phase outlining enforcement when the rules are broken is planned to be approved by the end of 2020, according to the Wikimedia board's plan.


title: Criticism of Wikipedia

text: Oliver Kamm, in an article for "The Times", said Wikipedia's reliance on consensus in forming its content was dubious:


title: Criticism of Wikipedia

text: Wikimedia advisor Benjamin Mako Hill also talked about Wikipedia's disproportional representation of viewpoints, saying:


title: Criticism of Wikipedia

text: In his article, "" (first published online by "Edge: The Third Culture", May 30, 2006), computer scientist and digital theorist Jaron Lanier describes Wikipedia as a "hive mind" that is "for the most part stupid and boring", and asks, rhetorically, "why to pay attention to it?" His thesis says:


title: Criticism of Wikipedia

text: Lanier also says the current economic trend is to reward entities that aggregate information, rather than those that actually generate content. In the absence of "new business models", the popular demand for content will be sated by mediocrity, thus reducing or even eliminating any monetary incentives for the production of "new" knowledge.


title: Criticism of Wikipedia

text: Lanier's opinions produced some strong disagreement. Internet consultant Clay Shirky noted that Wikipedia has many internal controls in place and is not a mere mass of unintelligent collective effort:


title: Criticism of Wikipedia

text: Various figures involved with the Wikimedia Foundation have argued that Wikipedia's increasingly complex policies and guidelines are driving away new contributors to the site. Former chair Kat Walsh was quoted in a 2009 article as criticizing the project, saying, "It was easier when I joined in 2004... Everything was a little less complicated... It's harder and harder for new people to adjust." Wikipedia administrator Oliver Moran views "policy creep" as the major barrier, writing that "the loose collective running the site today, estimated to be 90 percent male, operates a crushing bureaucracy with an often abrasive atmosphere that deters newcomers who might increase participation in Wikipedia and broaden its coverage". According to Jemielniak, the sheer complexity of the rules and laws governing content and editor behavior has become excessive and creates a learning burden for new editors. In 2014 Jemielniak suggested actively rewriting, and abridging, the rules and laws to decrease their complexity and size.


title: Criticism of Wikipedia

text: Despite the perception that the Wikipedia process is democratic, "a small number of people are running the show", including administrators, bureaucrats, stewards, checkusers, mediators, arbitrators, and oversighters. In an article on Wikipedia conflicts in 2007, "The Guardian" discussed "a backlash among some editors, who argue that blocking users compromises the supposedly open nature of the project, and the imbalance of power between users and administrators may even be a reason some users choose to vandalise in the first place" based on the experiences of one editor who became a vandal after his edits were reverted and he was blocked for edit warring.


title: Nafs

text: Nafs () is an Arabic word occurring in the Quran, literally meaning "self", and has been translated as "psyche", "ego" or "soul". The term is cognate with the Hebrew word "nephesh", נֶפֶשׁ. In the Quran, the word "nafs" is used in both the individualistic (verse 2:48) and collective sense (verse 4:1), indicating that although humanity is united in possessing the positive qualities of a "nafs", they are individually responsible for exercising the agencies of the "free will" that it provides them.


title: Nafs

text: Much of the popular literature on "nafs", however, is focused on the Sufi conceptions of the term located within the sadr (the chest). According to the Sufi philosophies, the "nafs" in its unrefined state is "the ego", which they consider to be the lowest dimension of a person's inward existence — his animal and satanic nature. "Nafs" is an important concept in the Islamic tradition, especially within Sufism and the discipline of gnosis ("irfan") in Shia Islam.


title: Nafs

text: The noun "nafs" has important instances in the Quran such as the following: "O you who have believed, upon you is [responsibility for] yourselves..." The major theme of the word "nafs" as used in the Quran is to instill a sense of individual responsibility through a strong emphasis on the choices made by the individual (as in 5:105), while at the same time reminding humanity of its common origins (verse 4:1).


title: Nafs

text: The Quran affords much importance to the "nafs" of an individual, highlighting the agency of free will and intelligence, without which neither responsibility nor accountability can exist. The Quran does not attribute to the "nafs" any inherent properties of good or evil, but instead conveys the idea that it is something which has to be nurtured and self-regulated, so that it can progress into becoming 'good' and 'inwardly meaningful' through its thoughts and actions. The Quranic conception of the "nafs" therefore has an extremely modernistic undertone, much like Nietzsche's conception of "Übermensch" or 'Superman', as suggested by Muhammad Iqbal, a prominent Muslim scholar and philosopher, who went as far as to accuse Nietzsche of borrowing the term from Islamic thought. Iqbal stated: "It is probable that Nietzsche borrowed it (Übermensch) from the literature of Islam or of the East and degraded it by his materialism."


title: Nafs

text: There are three principal stages of "nafs" in Sufistic Wisdom, also mentioned in different verses of the Quran. The Sufis call them "stages" in the process of development, refinement and mastery of the "nafs".


title: Nafs

text: In its primitive stage the "nafs" incites people to commit evil; this is the "nafs" as the lower self, the base instincts. In the eponymous Sura of the Quran, Yusuf says "Yet I claim not that my "nafs" was innocent: Verily the "nafs" incites to evil."


title: Nafs

text: Islam emphasizes the importance of fighting the inciting "nafs" in Quran as well as in hadith. One tradition holds that Muhammad said after returning from a war, "We now return from the small struggle (Jihad Asghar) to the big struggle (Jihad Akbar)". His companions asked, "O prophet of God, what is the big struggle?" He replied, "The struggle against temptations."


title: Nafs

text: This stage is generally divided into the levels "al nafs al-hayawaniyya" and "al nafs al-iblissiyya". "Al nafs al-hayawaniyya" ("the animal state") describes the self, which runs after material possessesion, sensual desires and animalistic pleasures. "Al nafs al-iblissiyya" is even lower than the animal state, because the self seeks to replace God in the love for itself.


title: Nafs

text: The Quran enjoins the faithful "to hinder the "nafs" from lust", and another traditional narration warns that "the worst enemy you have is [the "nafs"] between your sides." Rumi warns of the "nafs" in its guise of religious hypocrisy, saying "the "nafs" has a rosary and a Koran in its right hand, and a scimitar and dagger in the sleeve."


title: Nafs

text: Animal imagery is often used to describe the "nafs". A popular image is a donkey or unruly horse that must be trained and broken so that eventually it will bear its rider to the goal. Rumi compares the "nafs" to a camel that the hero Majnun, representing the intellect ('Aql), strains to turn in the direction of the dwelling-place of his beloved.


title: Nafs

text: In Sura al-Qiyama the Quran mentions "the self-accusing "nafs"". This is the stage where "the conscience is awakened and the self accuses one for listening to one’s ego. One repents and asks for forgiveness." Here the "nafs" is inspired by one's heart, sees the results of one's actions, agrees with one's brain, sees one's weaknesses, and aspires to perfection.


title: Nafs

text: In Sura al-Fajr the Quran mentions "the "nafs" at peace". This is the ideal stage of ego for Muslims. On this level, one is firm in one's faith and leaves bad manners behind. The soul becomes tranquil, at peace. At this stage, followers of Sufism have relieved themselves of all materialism and worldly problems and are satisfied with the will of God.


title: Nafs

text: This stage comes between the second (The self-accusing "Nafs" ) and the third (the "Nafs" at peace) principal stages. It is the stage of action. On this level "One becomes more firm in listening to one’s conscience, but is not yet surrendered." Once one have seen one's weaknesses and have set one's targets, this ego inspires one to do good. The Sufis say that it is important that whenever one think of good, one must immediately act upon it. Abbas Bin Abdul Muttalib lays down three rules:


title: Nafs

text: According to the Quran, charity should be given both secretly and openly. In Muhammad Asad's translation of the Quran, 14:31 reads: "[And] tell [those of] My servants who have attained to faith that they should be constant in prayer and spend [in Our way], secretly and openly, out of what We provide for them as sustenance, ere there come a Day when there will be no bargaining, and no mutual befriending."


title: Nafs

text: This stage comes after the third principal stage. On this level "one is pleased with whatever comes from Allah and doesn’t live in the past or future, but in the moment." "One thinks always: ‘Ilahi Anta Maqsudi wa ridhaka matlubi’. One always sees oneself as weak and in need of Allah."


title: Nafs

text: On this level the two Ruhs in man "have made peace". "One is soft and tolerant with people and has good Akhlaq (Arabic: أخلاق), good manners."


title: Nafs

text: On this level "one is dressed in the attributes of the Insan Kamil, the perfected man, who is completely surrendered and inspired by Allah." One is "in full agreement with the Will of Allah".


title: Nafs

text: Dervishes from the Jerrahi school of Sufism are encouraged to study a text describing these stages of "nafs" as a nested series of cities.


title: Bankey Bihari Temple

text: Bankey Bihari Temple is a Hindu temple situated in the town of Vrindavan, Mathura district of Uttar Pradesh, India. The temple is dedicated to Bankey Bihari who is believed to be the combined form of Radha and Krishna. Bankey Bihari was originally worshipped at Nidhivan, Vrindavan. Later, when Bankey Bihari temple was constructed around 1864, idol of Bankey Bihari was moved to new temple.


title: Bankey Bihari Temple

text: The image of Radha Krishna's united form stands in the Tribhanga posture. Swami Haridas originally worshipped this devotional image under the name of Kunj-Bihari ("one who enjoys in the groves (Kunj) of Vrindavan").


title: Bankey Bihari Temple

text: 'Bānke' means 'bent', and 'Bihāri' or 'Vihāri' means 'enjoyer'. This is how Kṛiṣhṇa, who is bent in three places, got the name "Bānke Bihāri". According to Śrī Brahma-saḿhitā (verse 5.31), Brahma says the following about Kṛishna


title: Bankey Bihari Temple

text: "I worship Govinda, the primeval Lord, round whose neck is swinging a garland of flowers beautified with the moon-locket, whose two hands are adorned with the flute and jewelled ornaments, who always revels in pastimes of love, whose graceful threefold-bending form of Śyāmasundara is eternally manifest."


title: Bankey Bihari Temple

text: Bankey Bihari Temple was established by Swami Haridas (Lalita Sakhi in Dvapara Yuga), a guru of the famous singer Tansen. Once at the request of his disciples Swami Haridasji sang the following verse in Nidhivan, Vrindavan "Mai ri Sahaj Jori pragat Bhai Ju rang ki gaur Syam ghan damini jaisen.


title: Bankey Bihari Temple

text: On singing the verse, the Celestial couple Shyama-Shyam (Radha Krishna) appeared in front of him and his devotees. At the request of Shri Swamiji, the couple merged into one and the idol of Banke Bihari appeared there (the same idol is seen in the temple).


title: Bankey Bihari Temple

text: The image of Bihariji installed in Shri Bankey Bihari Mandir is the one granted to Swami Haridas by the celestial couple Shyama-Shyam themselves. Submitting to the desire of devotees, The Lord appeared in person with his divine consort and left-back a black charming image before disappearing.


title: Bankey Bihari Temple

text: Swami Haridas was born to Shri Ashudhir and his wife Srimati Gangadevi on the day of Radha Ashtami i.e. eighth day of the second (bright) fortnight of Bhadrapad month of the year 1535 Vikrami (1478 A.D.). He was born in a small village, now known as Haridaspur, near Aligarh in Uttar Pradesh. The lineage of the family can be traced back to Shri Gargacharya. Shri Gargachrya was the Kulaguru (family guru) of Yadavas and visited Brij secretly for conducting the Namakarana Samskara (naming ceremony) of young Krishna and Balarama on request of Sri Vasudeva. A branch of the family migrated to Multan (now in Pakistan), but some of them returned after a long time. Sri Ashudhir was one such migrant who after returning from Multan settled at the outskirts of Brij, near Aligarh.


title: Bankey Bihari Temple

text: Swami Haridas was the reincarnation of Lalita ‘sakhi’ (female friend), of the inner consortium of Lord Krishna. This easily explains the fact that even in his childhood, he was more into meditation and scriptures, while other children of his age were busy playing. He was married at a suitable age according to the time to Harimati. Even after his marriage, young Haridas stayed away from worldly pleasures and concentrated on meditation. Harimatiji was such a saintly soul herself that on realizing the inclination of her husband, she prayed intensely and was bodily transported to the heavenly abode of Lord by entering the flame of a small lamp in the presence of Haridas. No physical remains were left behind.


title: Bankey Bihari Temple

text: Soon after that Haridas left his village for Vrindavan, which was a dense forest at that time and chose a secluded spot, which is now known as Nidhivan, to practice his music and to enjoy the eternal bliss of meditation. He constantly and continuously meditated on Nitya Ras and Nitya Bihar of Lord at Nitya Vrindavan. His way of Sadhna was to compose and sing songs in the praise of the Lord. While on earth, living in a mortal state, he facilitated his regular unobstructed entry in the Nitya Bihar and always enjoyed the pleasure of closeness of Lord. He chose a secluded and densely forested area, Kunj, in Nidhivan as his gateway to the nirvana and was mostly sitting there, singing, meditating and surfing in the ocean of eternal bliss.


title: Bankey Bihari Temple

text: His disciples were curious about this place and one day with the permission of Swamiji, they all entered the Kunj. But instead of seeing anything, they were almost blinded by bright, intense light, which seemed to fill the whole place. On knowing of their plight Swamiji himself went there, and then after his requests, the lord appeared in person with his divine consort, pleasantly smiling and in a playful mood and casting a spell of charm on every living being present there. Those who witnessed this were so spell bounded by the beauty of the Lord and his consort, that they couldn't even blink their eyes; it seemed that all of them had turned into stone statues.


title: Bankey Bihari Temple

text: The legend as handed down to the generations of Goswamis, says that the beauty of the divine couple was such that no one wanted to lose the sight and proximity of divinity, but then what kind of divinity is it, which cannot make a mere mortal swoon and charmed enough to forget and give up the world and its luxuries? The beauty of the divine couple was so much that lesser mortals, like you and me, won't be able to bear such a heavenly beauty. Sensing this Swami Haridasji requested both of them to take a single form, as the world won't be able to bear their image. He requested them to take a single form like Ghan (cloud) and Damini (lightning), thus giving a perfect metaphor to the combined beauty of the dark Lord and his fair consort, Radhaji.


title: Bankey Bihari Temple

text: Also, he wanted his beloved lord to be in front of his eyes always. Granting him his both wishes, the couple turned itself into one single black charming idol, the same one that you see in the temple today. The charm and beauty of Shri Bankey Bihariji is the only reason why the ‘darshan’ in the temple is never continuous but is broken by the curtain drawn on him regularly. It is also said that if one stares long enough into the eyes of Shri Bankey Bihariji, the person would lose his self-consciousness.


title: Bankey Bihari Temple

text: Thus came into existence the physical form of Lord Bankey Bihari, popularly known as Bihariji. The responsibility of Sewa of Bihariji was handed over to Goswami Jagannath by Swamiji himself. Goswami Jagannath was one of the principal disciples and younger brothers of Swamiji. By tradition, the Sewa is performed by descendants of Jagannath Goswami till day.


title: Bankey Bihari Temple

text: Initially, the deity was installed in a temple close to the first appearance in Nidhivan. A new temple befitting the glory of Bihariji was constructed in 1862 AD. Goswamis themselves mobilized resources for the construction. The temple is an architectural beauty in itself and follows the contemporary Rajasthani style.


title: Bankey Bihari Temple

text: The sewa of the Bihariji is unique in its own way. It is performed in three parts every day i.e. Shringar, Rajbhog and Shayan. While shringar (which includes bath, dressing and adornment with jewellery like crown and necklaces) and Rajbhog(feast) are offered in the forenoon, Shayan Sewa (Shayan means sleep) is offered in the evening. The temple doesn't have a tradition of Mangala (early morning) sewa. Swami Haridas did not favour Mangla Sewa as he wanted his childlike Lord to take complete rest and did not want to disturb him out of deep slumber so early in the morning.


title: Bankey Bihari Temple

text: So, the temple today stands with its full glory, inside which the Lord himself resides. It is thronged by thousands of visitors every day.


title: Bankey Bihari Temple

text: During Jhulan Yatra, the swing festival of Lord Krishna, there are a number of silver-plated and some solid silver ornamented swings, which are shown at this time. The main day of Jhulan Yatra is the third day of the waxing moon, at which time Shri Bankey Bihari is placed on a golden swing (hindola).


title: Bankey Bihari Temple

text: The curtain before the Deities is not left open like at other temples. Every few minutes, the curtain is pulled shut and then opened again. It is said that the brilliant eyes of Shri Bankey Bihari will make one unconscious if seen for too long a stretch. It is the only temple where loud temple bells are not used to wake Krishna in the morning. It is believed improper to wake a child with a start. He is woken gently. There are thus no bells even for Aarti, as it might disturb Him.


title: Bankey Bihari Temple

text: The Deities do not get up until 9 am, because it is believed that Bankey Bihariji has been up until late at night sporting. Mangala-arati is only one day a year in this temple, on Janmasthami. Only one day a year can the lotus feet of the Deity be seen, on Akshaya Tritiya (Chandan Darshan or Dolotsav), on the third day of the bright half of the month of Vaishaka (April–May). The autumn full moon day is the only day that the Deity holds a flute, and also on this day, He wears a special mukut (crown). Shri Bankey Bihari comes off his altar and can be seen in full view on the last five days of the month of Phalguna, during the Holi festival. He can be seen with four gopis, who are seen just at this time.


title: Herrenvolk democracy

text: Herrenvolk democracy is a system of government in which only a specific ethnic group participates in government, while other groups are disenfranchised. Ethnocracy, in which one group dominates the state, is a related concept. The German term "Herrenvolk", meaning "master race", was used in 19th century discourse that justified colonialism with the supposed racial superiority of Europeans.


title: Herrenvolk democracy

text: This elitist form of government is typically employed by the majority group as a way to maintain control and power within the system, and typically coincides with the false pretense of egalitarianism. There is a prevailing view that as people of the majority gain freedom and liberty and egalitarian principles are advanced, the minority is repressed and prevented from being involved in the government. This principle can be seen in the development of both the United States—especially the Southern states—and South Africa in the 19th and 20th centuries. In these historical scenarios, even as legislation moved toward universal male suffrage for whites, it also further entrenched restrictions on political participation by black people and upheld their disenfranchisement. The term was first used in 1967 by Pierre van Den Berghe in his book "Race and Racism".


title: Herrenvolk democracy

text: In his 1991 book "The Wages of Whiteness", historian David R. Roediger reinterprets this form of government in the context of 19th-century United States, arguing that the term ""herrenvolk" republicanism" more accurately describes racial politics at this time. The basis of herrenvolk republicanism went beyond the marginalization of blacks in favor of a republican government serving the "master race"; it contended that "blackness" was synonymous with dependency and servility, and was therefore antithetical to republican independence and white freedom. Consequently, the dependent white worker at this time used his whiteness as a way to differentiate himself from and elevate himself over the dependent black worker or slave. According to this ideology, blacks were not merely "non-citizens"; they were "anti-citizens" who inherently opposed the ideals of a republican government.


title: Alan Bond

text: Alan Bond (22 April 1938 – 5 June 2015) was an English-born Australian businessman noted for his high-profile and often corrupt business dealings. These included his central role in the WA Inc scandals of the 1980s, and what was at the time the biggest corporate collapse in Australian history and also for his criminal conviction that saw him serve four years in prison. He is also remembered for bankrolling the successful challenge for the 1983 America's Cup, the first time the New York Yacht Club had lost it in its 132-year history. He is also the founder of Bond University, Gold Coast, Australia.


title: Alan Bond

text: Alan Bond was born on 22 April 1938, the son of Frank and Kathleen Bond in the Hammersmith district of London, England. In 1950, aged 12, he emigrated to Australia with his parents and his elder sister Geraldine, living in Fremantle, near Perth. At the age of 14, he was charged with stealing and being unlawfully on premises. Aged 18, he was arrested for being unlawfully on premises, and reportedly admitted planning a robbery.


title: Alan Bond

text: Bond began his career as a signwriter under the name 'Nu-Signs' after terminating his apprenticeship 18 months before it was due to end. In 1956 he was charged with attempted burglary, having been found by police roaming the streets of Fremantle dressed in State Electricity Commission overalls and carrying tools. Nu-Signs changed its name to Lesmurdie Heights – after the name of Bond's biggest estate – and changed the name again to Bond Corporation in 1959. In the 1960s, as a property developer in an expanding market, he was one of WA's largest borrowers from finance companies eager to lend to developers and uncritical of the valuations Bond put on his estates. Some of his developments included apartments along the Swan River and Lesmurdie Heights.


title: Alan Bond

text: In his heyday the Perth-based Bond was one of Australia's most prominent businesspeople. He extended his business interests into fields outside property development including brewing (he controlled Castlemaine Tooheys in Australia, leading the business to legal success in the landmark constitutional law case of "Castlemaine Tooheys Ltd v South Australia", and G. Heileman Brewing Company in La Crosse, Wisconsin, US), gold mining, television, and airships. Australia's first private university, Bond University, was founded by the Bond Corporation in 1987. He purchased QTQ-9 Brisbane and settled an outstanding defamation dispute the station had with the Queensland premier, Joh Bjelke-Petersen by paying out A$400,000. He said in a television interview several years later that he paid because "Sir Joh left no doubt that if we were going to continue to do business successfully in Queensland then he expected the matter to be resolved".


title: Alan Bond

text: In 1987, Bond purchased Vincent van Gogh's renowned painting "Irises" for $54 million—the highest price ever paid for a single painting at the time. However, the purchase was funded by a substantial loan from the auctioneer Sotheby's, which Bond failed to repay. The transaction was criticised by art dealers as possibly a manipulated sale designed to artificially inflate values generally (which it seems to have done). The painting was subsequently re-sold in 1990 to the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles.


title: Alan Bond

text: That same year, Bond also organised the establishment of the Bond Centre in Hong Kong, which was located in a twin tower skyscraper complex. The property was later bought by the Lippo Group of Indonesia, and is now known as the Lippo Centre.


title: Alan Bond

text: Bond became a public hero in his adopted country when he bankrolled challenges for the America's Cup, which resulted in his selection in 1978 as Australian of the Year (awarded jointly with Galarrwuy Yunupingu). His "Australia II" syndicate won the 1983 America's Cup, which had been held by the New York Yacht Club since 1851, thus breaking the longest winning streak in the history of sport. That victory, widely regarded as one of Australia's greatest international sporting achievements, resulted in Bond's receipt of the Order of Australia, in the grade of Officer.


title: Alan Bond

text: In 1987, Bond paid $1 billion to purchase the Australia-wide Channel Nine television network from Kerry Packer's PBL. In a 2003 interview with Andrew Denton, Bond described the negotiations as follows:


title: Alan Bond

text: ...when we first sat down, we said, 'We're either going to sell our stations to you for $400 million, or you're going to sell your stations to us.' And [Kerry Packer] said, 'Well, I don't really want to sell my stations.' And I said, 'Oh, is that right?' So, anyway, after much discussion, Kerry thumped the table and said, 'Listen, if you can pay me $1 billion, I'll sell them to you, otherwise bugger off'. ... [T]hen I rang the National Australia Bank. I said, 'Look, I'm in discussions here to buy these television stations. Kerry will sell to me, and what I want to do is put our stations together and then, with Sky Channel, I'm going to float it off as a separate entity and raise the capital to pay for it... [Packer] said $1 billion [was his asking price], but I think I'll get it for $800 million.' ... [The bank manager] duly rang back and said yes. I said, 'Thank God. I'll go and have some further negotiations with Kerry,' which I did. And true to his word, he never budged one penny off it. So I settled the deal with $800 million and a $200 million note. So he put his own $200 million in. So I had $1 billion. And we put our other two stations up as collateral, which were worth probably $400 million.


title: Alan Bond

text: In fact, the agreed price was $1.05 billion. Packer took $800 million in cash and $250 million in subordinated debt in Bond Media.


title: Alan Bond

text: When Bond went bankrupt, Packer was able to turn the debt into a 37% equity in Bond Media, which now included Channel 9 in Brisbane, and was worth about $500 million. It was valued at $1 billion, but had $500 million in debt on the books. Packer was quoted as saying "You only get one Alan Bond in your lifetime, and I've had mine".


title: Alan Bond

text: In 1992, Bond was declared bankrupt after failing to repay a $194 million personal guarantee on a loan for a nickel-mining project. His debts reportedly totalled $1.8 billion at the time. He feigned brain damage to avoid answering questions during bankruptcy trials, a charade he saw no need to keep up afterwards. He was forced to sell Glympton Park in England.


title: Alan Bond

text: In 1995, his family bought him out of bankruptcy, with creditors accepting a payment of A$12 million, a little over half a cent per dollar.


title: Alan Bond

text: In 1997, Bond was sentenced to seven years in prison after pleading guilty to using his controlling interest in Bell Resources to deceptively siphon off A$1.2 billion into the coffers of the Bond Corporation. The funds were used to shore up the cash resources of the ailing Bond Corporation, which spectacularly collapsed, leaving Bell Resources in a precarious and uncertain position. He was stripped of his 1984 honour as an Officer of the Order of Australia.


title: Alan Bond

text: Bond was released from Karnet Prison Farm in 2000, having served four years in various Western Australian prisons.


title: Alan Bond

text: Following release, he became active in various mining investments, predominately in Africa, including Madagascar Oil PLC and Global Diamond Resources, of Lesotho and was included in "Business Review Weekly"'s "Rich 200 List" in 2008.


title: Alan Bond

text: In 2003, Bond was inducted into the America's Cup Hall of Fame. Since 2003, Bond had worked closely with his son Craig and longtime business partner Robert Quinn through Strategic Investments Ltd.


title: Alan Bond

text: Interests related to the Bond family also control Global Diamond Resources plc (formerly Lesotho Diamond Corporation) which is developing the Kao diamond pipe in the Kingdom of Lesotho. In 2007, the Federal Court rejected an attempt by Bond to sue freelance journalist Paul Barry over an article Barry wrote about his dealings in Africa with the Lesotho Diamond Company. Bond had claimed that the article had several false statements. In 2008 Bond appealed but this, too, was rejected by the same court which found Bond's claims had no reasonable prospects of success.


title: Alan Bond

text: Bond was involved in a long-running defamation case against "The West Australian" newspaper and journalists Mark Drummond and Sean Cowan over a series of articles published in December 2005, in which it was alleged that Bond's friend and business partner Robert Leslie Nelson was moving to hide Bond's involvement in Lesotho Diamond Corporation, Madagascar Oil and a gold company. During that case, Bond tried to have the journalists convicted of contempt of court after some electronic documents disappeared.


title: Alan Bond

text: In 2008, Bond made a return to the "Business Review Weekly"s "Rich 200 List", in 157th spot, with an estimated wealth of $265 million—thanks primarily to his stakes in Madagascar Oil and Global Diamond Resources.


title: Alan Bond

text: In 1955, Bond married Eileen Hughes, a member of a prominent Catholic family in Fremantle (she is a cousin of car dealer John Hughes). She and Bond were both 17, and she was pregnant at the time. Bond, who had been raised Protestant, converted to Catholicism for the marriage. The couple had four children: John, Craig, Susanne and Jody. Bond and Eileen divorced in 1992. Susanne, an equestrian showjumper who had been a member of the Australian showjumping team for seven years, died in 2000 from a suspected accidental overdose of prescription medication.


title: Alan Bond

text: Bond married Diana Bliss, a public relations consultant and theatre producer, in 1995. On 28 January 2012, Bliss was found dead in the couple's swimming pool. Police said the circumstances of her death were not suspicious and concluded that Bliss, a long-time sufferer of depression, had committed suicide.


title: Alan Bond

text: On 2 June 2015, Bond underwent open-heart surgery at a private hospital in Perth to replace and repair his heart valves. Following complications, he was transferred to Fiona Stanley Hospital in Perth and placed on life support in an induced coma. He died on the morning of 5 June 2015.


title: Alan Bond

text: John Wood portrayed Bond in the miniseries "The Challenge" (1986), which depicted Australia's famous victory of the 1983 America's Cup.


title: Alan Bond

text: The Australian TV miniseries "House of Bond" (2017) is a heavily fictionalised account of Bond's life. Bond was portrayed by Ben Mingay. It was aired on the Nine Network on 24–25 April 2017.


title: Alan Bond

text: In real life, Bond was represented by criminal lawyer Andrew Fraser, notable for representing Australian underworld figures and other unsavoury elements. Fraser himself would later become imprisoned.


title: Rod Ansell

text: Rodney William Ansell (1 October 1954 – 3 August 1999) was an Australian cattle grazier and a buffalo hunter. Described to be from "the bush", Ansell became famous in 1977 after he was stranded in extremely remote country in the Northern Territory, and the story of his survival for 56 days with limited supplies became news headlines around the world. Consequently, he served as the inspiration for Paul Hogan's character in the 1986 film "Crocodile Dundee". In 1999, he was killed in a shootout by policemen of the Northern Territory Police.


title: Rod Ansell

text: Ansell was born in Murgon, Queensland, to George William Ansell and Eva May Ansell, the third of four children. He then moved to the Northern Territory at the age of 15. As a young man, he made a living hunting feral water buffalo in the Top End, the meat being exported to foreign markets.


title: Rod Ansell

text: In May 1977, shortly after completing a buffalo catching job in Kununurra, Western Australia, Ansell decided to travel to the Victoria River on what he claimed was a fishing trip. He was not specific about his plans, only telling his then-girlfriend Lorraine he would be back in a few months. When Ansell's motorboat was capsized and sunk by "something big" (he sensationally claimed it was a whale), no one knew where to find him. Ansell managed to board his tender, a small dinghy with only a single oar, and retrieve his two 8-week-old bull terriers and a small amount of equipment (a rifle, a knife, some canned food, and bedding). But with no fresh water, Ansell was in a perilous situation, stranded almost from the nearest permanent human settlement, and one of his dogs had a broken leg.


title: Rod Ansell

text: During the night, Ansell's dinghy drifted out to sea, eventually washing up on a small island at the mouth of the Fitzmaurice River, north of the Victoria River. Over the next 48 hours, Ansell travelled up the Fitzmaurice on tidal flows, becoming severely dehydrated but eventually finding fresh water above the saltwater tidal range. Ansell subsisted on wild cattle and buffalo, hunting by day to feed himself and his dogs. He sometimes resorted to drinking cattle blood as a substitute for water, the fluids helping to maintain his body's electrolyte balance. He was also able to follow bees to their hive to retrieve honey. During the night, Ansell slept in a tree fork out of reach of crocodiles, although he shared the tree with a brown tree snake. At one point, he shot a crocodile, whose head he kept as a souvenir.


title: Rod Ansell

text: Ansell never counted on being rescued; he had told others he would be away for months, and any search parties would be combing over the Victoria River, not the Fitzmaurice. He rested his hope on walking overland to a pastoral station when the wet season began. One day, Ansell heard the distinctive tinkling of horse-bells, which drew him to two Aboriginal stockmen and their cattle manager, Luke McCall. Although he was somewhat emaciated, Ansell was otherwise healthy. Once back home, he apparently kept his seven-week ordeal to himself, fearing he would upset his mother with his recklessness. He later claimed the experience was hardly a big deal, explaining:All the blokes up in this country, who work with cattle, ringers, stockmen, bull-catches, whatever, all of them, have really narrow shaves all the time. But they never talk about it...I think the opinion is that if you come through in one piece, and you're still alive, then nothing else really matters. It's like going out to shoot a kangaroo. You don't come back and say you missed by half-an-inch. You either got him or you didn't. So that is how I looked at it. Until the paper got hold of the story, and that changed a lot of things.


title: Rod Ansell

text: Newspapers dubbed Ansell the "modern-day Robinson Crusoe" and he was making headlines by August 1977.


title: Rod Ansell

text: In 1977, after becoming a sensation in the Australian media following his harrowing ordeal in the Outback, Ansell met Joanne van Os, 22, a radio operator originally from Melbourne who was then working at the remote Aboriginal community of Wadeye. The two fell in love and married, having two sons: Callum (born 1979) and Shawn (born 1981). The family spent much of their early years living "under just a canvas sheet." With no electricity or running water, they cooked by campfire and communicated by radio.


title: Rod Ansell

text: In 1979, filmmaker Richard Oxenburgh asked Ansell to relive his adventures in the documentary film "To Fight the Wild", which the following year was published as a book. Although both accepted Ansell's version of events uncritically, his story was frequently treated with skepticism by locals in the Top End. Some believed it was a publicity stunt and others wondered why Ansell did not follow the river downstream to the nearest town. When Ansell was asked in interviews what he was doing in the remote Australian wilderness by himself, he claimed he was on a fishing trip. Privately, however, he confided to friends that he was actually poaching crocodiles.


title: Rod Ansell

text: In 1981, Ansell was invited to Sydney where he was interviewed by English journalist Michael Parkinson for his television program "Parkinson". Ansell attended the interview barefoot. While staying at the famous five-star Sebel Townhouse Hotel, he slept in his sleeping bag on the floor rather than on his bed, and was reportedly mystified by his room's bidet. Ansell's interview and curious city antics sparked Paul Hogan's interest, inspiring him and co-writers Ken Shadie, and John Cornell to create the character Mick "Crocodile" Dundee. Following the unexpected blockbuster success of "Crocodile Dundee", Ansell unsuccessfully took Hogan to court.


title: Rod Ansell

text: According to Ansell's friends, he was "at one" with Arnhem Land's Indigenous Australians, and like the film character, he spoke Urapunga fluently, having become a "fully initiated white man." An "unassuming achiever" who embodied "the spirit of the Territory," Ansell was named Territorian of the Year in 1987 for helping to put Top End on the world map. Journalist Chips Mackinolty, who met Ansell in the 1980s, described him as "articulate and likable, if somewhat intense." However, Ansell's new-found fame alienated him from his peers, and he later lamented of his rejection back home:Proving the point about the story being true or not wouldn't matter that much. Because the people it would affect, who affect me, are the people who live where I work, and know me. And people up here have a phobia about appearing on the media. So that was detrimental to my standing in their eyes...they thought it was a terrible thing to do.


title: Rod Ansell

text: In 1985, Ansell borrowed money and secured a pastoral lease in northern Arnhem Land. He started up Melaleuca, a cattle station east of Darwin, near Kakadu National Park, named after the "Melaleuca" paper bark trees which dot the landscape. The Ansells built their homestead on the station, not far from the Mary River. In the 1980s, he found himself in a protracted dispute with the Northern Territory government over the controversial Bovine Brucellosis and Tuberculosis Eradication Campaign (BTEC). To comply with BTEC, Ansell was forced to kill 3,000 head of feral buffalo on his property. He had originally planned to capture and domesticate the animals, creating a pastoral herd that would have afforded his family a comfortable lifestyle. Arguing that money spent on the BTEC program "would be better spent on research on AIDS," Ansell considered the destruction of the animals an outrageous waste of good livestock.


title: Rod Ansell

text: Three neighboring graziers were eventually awarded $100,000 in government loans, but Ansell was never compensated for his losses. "Mimosa pigra" weeds also began taking over the floodplain, rendering it useless. With no money to fight the invasive weeds, the Ansells were forced to sell their cattle station in June 1991. The couple's 15-year marriage soon disintegrated and the Ansells divorced. Depressed, unemployed, and cash-strapped, Ansell began growing marijuana, later becoming a user of amphetamines.


title: Rod Ansell

text: In June 1996, he began dating Cherie Hewson. The couple lived at Urapanga Station, an Aboriginal outstation on the Roper River about south of Darwin. Over the next several years, the couple's drug addiction became more destructive, culminating in a psychotic episode that ultimately claimed Ansell's life in a shootout with police.


title: Rod Ansell

text: Ansell was killed following a police shootout on 3 August 1999. The deadly altercation began at approximately 10:45 a.m. on the roadblocked intersection of Stuart Highway and Old Bynoe Road, near Acacia Hills. Ansell had ambushed veteran Sergeant Glen Anthony Huitson and his partner, rookie Constable Jamie O'Brien, with a shot from Ansell's .30-30 lever-action rifle deflecting off a police car and fatally striking Huitson in the abdomen, below his bulletproof vest and severely injured onlooker Jonathan Anthonysz in the pelvis and lower back. A gun-battle immediately erupted involving numerous officers of the Adelaide River Police Station. About five minutes into the fight, Ansell was shot dead. O'Brien killed Ansell with a shotgun after unloading on Ansell's position with his Glock pistol, having missed all his previous shots. The battle ended the authorities' 12-hour search for an attacker who shot and seriously injured two nearby residents (David Hobden in the eye and Brian Williams in his index finger) the previous night. Ansell's girlfriend Hewson was with him but escaped before the gun-battle occurred; she fled, eventually turning herself in to Brisbane police on 7 August 1999.


title: Rod Ansell

text: Although police were at a loss to explain Ansell's motive (he could have easily escaped the roadblock had he chosen to), it was later determined that Ansell had been raving about Freemasons prior to his death; he was distraught, apparently convinced that Freemasons had kidnapped his two sons and were now stalking him. During the coroner's inquest, psychiatrist Robert Parker made the following observations on Ansell's mental state before his death:There is no doubt that Ansell was affected by amphetamine intoxication prior to his fatal interaction with Sergeant Huitson...Ansell's behaviour prior to the initial shots being fired is consistent with amphetamine intoxication with restlessness, hypervigilance, anxiety, anger and impaired judgement (DSM IV). He was also affected by a paranoid psychotic state which is typical of chronic amphetamine use.


title: Rod Ansell

text: Parker also determined that Ansell and Hewson had developed a shared psychosis, stating:...the two of them developed a shared delusional state or "folie a deux"...It is possible, therefore, that one or both parties had an underlying vulnerability to mental illness which was enhanced and sustained by their regular use of amphetamines.


title: Rod Ansell

text: An autopsy of Ansell's remains showed he had suffered 30 entry wounds or grazes, all caused by shotgun pellets; the fatal injury was caused by a pellet that had perforated his aorta. The cause of death was determined to be "haemorrhage from multiple gunshot wounds involving various parts of the body." Following the request of his sons, Ansell was given a full Aboriginal burial at Mount Catt, Arnhem Land. His funeral was attended by his sons and parents.


title: Alfred Deakin

text: Alfred Deakin (3 August 1856 – 7 October 1919) was an Australian politician who served as the second Prime Minister of Australia. He was a leader of the movement for Federation, which occurred in 1901. During his three terms as prime minister over the subsequent decade (1903–1904, 1905–1908, 1909–1910), he played a key role in establishing national institutions.


title: Alfred Deakin

text: Deakin was born in Melbourne to middle-class parents. He was elected to the Victorian Legislative Assembly in 1879, aged 23, additionally working as a barrister and journalist. He held ministerial office sporadically beginning in 1883, serving twice as Attorney-General of Victoria and aligning himself with liberal and radical reformers. In the 1890s Deakin became one of the leading figures in the movement for the federation of the Australian colonies. He was a delegate to the federal conventions and served on the committees that drafted the federal constitution. He later campaigned at a series of referendums and lobbied the British government for its adoption.


title: Alfred Deakin

text: After Federation in 1901, Deakin became the inaugural Attorney-General of Australia in the ministry led by his close friend Edmund Barton. He succeeded Barton as prime minister in September 1903. Two subsequent elections in 1903 and 1906 produced an even split between three parties, with Deakin's Liberal Protectionist Party occupying an effective middle ground between the Free Traders and the Australian Labor Party (ALP). He left office in April 1904 following an unproductive first term, but returned in July 1905 and was able to form a functional government with the support of the ALP. He relinquished office again in August 1908.


title: Alfred Deakin

text: In 1909, in what became known as the Fusion, Deakin controversially led his supporters into a union with the Free Traders. Their alliance, based on anti-socialism, marked the beginning of a two-party system in federal politics and allowed him to form Australia's first majority government. Deakin regarded his final term as prime minister, from June 1909 to April 1910, as his most productive. However, to his surprise the ALP won a majority in both houses at the 1910 election. He retired from politics in 1913, in the early stages of a degenerative neurological condition that led to his death at the age of 63.


title: Alfred Deakin

text: Deakin is regarded as one of Australia's most influential prime ministers. He was the principal architect of the "Australian settlement", the features of which – the White Australia policy, compulsory arbitration, protectionism, state paternalism, and support for the British Empire – formed the basis of Australia's socio-economic framework well into the 20th century.


title: Alfred Deakin

text: Deakin was born on 3 August 1856 in his parents' cottage at 90 George Street, Fitzroy, Melbourne, Victoria. He was of English and Welsh descent, the younger of two children born to Sarah ("née" Bill) and William Deakin. His father left school at the age of 14 and became a travelling salesman. He met his future wife while travelling through Abergavenny, and they married at Grosmont, Monmouthshire in 1849. Britain was experiencing an economic depression associated with the Panic of 1847, and they decided to migrate to Australia. The Deakins arrived in Adelaide, South Australia, in March 1850. Their first child Catherine (known as Kate) was born in July 1850, at which point her father was working as a storekeeper and clerk. The family moved to Melbourne as a result of the Victorian gold rush, which began the following year. William Deakin initially struggled to find steady employment, but later became involved with the carrying and coaching trade, transporting people and goods; he was listed as a carrier at the time of his son's birth in 1856. By the early 1870s he was working with Cobb & Co. as a manager, inspector, and accountant, earning a salary that allowed he and his family to maintain a comfortable middle-class lifestyle.


title: Alfred Deakin

text: Deakin spent his early years in Fitzroy, then lived briefly in Emerald Hill (now South Melbourne) before his family settled in South Yarra in about 1863. Rather than build an entirely new house, his father transported a wooden cottage from Fitzroy to South Yarra and then had it brick-nogged. His parents and sister would live there for the rest of their lives. At the age of four, Deakin was sent to join his ten-year-old sister in Kyneton, a small country town where she was attending a girls' boarding school run by the Thompson sisters. He was the only male pupil at the school. It was unusual for children to be sent away at such a young age, and his biographer Judith Brett has speculated that their mother may have been suffering from a bout of depression or recovering from a stillbirth. The Thompson sisters eventually moved their school to Melbourne, which Deakin continued to attend until the age of seven. In early 1864, he was enrolled at Melbourne Grammar School as a day-boy. He attended Melbourne Grammar for eight years, where he was a good student without excelling academically. He later recalled that he had been "an incessantly restless, random and at times studiously mischievous pupil", and regretted that he had not been made to work harder. Deakin was also passionate about Australian rules football a game which he played during his youth, though it is not known for which clubs or teams he played in.


title: Alfred Deakin

text: In 1871, aged 15, Deakin passed the matriculation exam for the University of Melbourne. He formed an ambition to become a barrister, and began attending evening classes the following year. He could not afford to study full-time, working during the day as a schoolteacher and private tutor. At the time, the Victorian Bar did not require a complete university degree for admission, only passing grades in relevant legal subjects. Deakin was consequently admitted to the bar in September 1877, aged 21, without ever graduating from university. According to his biographer John La Nauze, his legal studies were "the least important part of his education" during his time at university. He was a frequent speaker in the Melbourne University Debating Society, where he was mentored by Charles Henry Pearson, and was also involved in the Eclectic Society. He spent much of his spare time reading, "from Chaucer to the great writers of his own time". For some time Deakin was "more interested in dreams of being a dramatist, a poet or a philosopher" rather than a lawyer. He wrote numerous works of blank verse and narrative poetry, and in 1875 published "Quentin Massys", a drama in five acts.


title: Alfred Deakin

text: Deakin initially had difficulty in obtaining briefs as a barrister. In May 1878, he met David Syme, the owner of the Melbourne daily "The Age", who paid him to contribute reviews, leaders and articles on politics and literature. In 1880, he became editor of "The Leader", "The Age"s weekly. During this period Syme converted him from supporting free trade to protectionism. He became active in the Australian Natives' Association and began to practise vegetarianism. He became a lifelong spiritualist, holding the office of President of the Victorian Spiritualists' Union.


title: Alfred Deakin

text: Deakin stood for the largely rural seat of West Bourke in the Victorian Legislative Assembly in February 1879, as a supporter of Victorian Legislative Council reform, protection to encourage manufacturing and the introduction of a land tax to break up the big agricultural estates, and won by 79 votes. Due to a number of voters being disenfranchised by a shortage of voting papers, he used his maiden speech to announce his resignation; he lost the subsequent by-election by 15 votes, narrowly lost the seat in the February 1880 general election, but won it in yet another early general election in July 1880. The radical Premier, Graham Berry, offered him the position of Attorney-General of Victoria in August, but Deakin turned him down.


title: Alfred Deakin

text: In 1882, Deakin married Elizabeth Martha Anne ("Pattie") Browne, daughter of a well-known spiritualist. They lived with Deakin's parents until 1887, when they moved to "Llanarth", in Walsh Street, South Yarra. They had three daughters, Ivy (b. 1883), Stella (b. 1886), and Vera (b. 1891).


title: Alfred Deakin

text: Deakin became Commissioner for Public Works and Water Supply in 1883, and the following year became Solicitor-General and Minister of Public Works. In 1885 Deakin secured the passage of the colony's pioneering Factories and Shops Act, enforcing regulation of employment conditions and hours of work. In December 1884 he went to the United States to investigate irrigation, and presented a report in June 1885, "Irrigation in Western America". Percival Serle described this report as "a remarkable piece of accurate observation, and was immediately reprinted by the United States government". In June 1886, he introduced legislation to nationalise water rights and provide state aid for irrigation works that helped establish irrigation in Australia.


title: Alfred Deakin

text: In 1885, Deakin became Chief Secretary and Commissioner for Water Supply and from 1890 Minister for Health and, briefly, Solicitor-General. In 1887 he led Victoria's delegation to the Imperial Conference in London, where he argued forcibly for reduced colonial payments for the defence provided by the British Navy and for improved consultation in relation to the New Hebrides. In 1889, he became the member for the Melbourne seat of Essendon and Flemington.