`        The WWW. Weird World of Wikipedia  By Martin J. Walker February 2006    With this in mind, most people dealing with this issue, attempt to mitigate the problem by understanding that all knowledge is `situated' knowledge, and that all judgements come from a particular standpoint. This means that it is understood that no one can claim to be 100% ‘neutral’ or ‘objective’, and that there are always power struggles involved when someone claims to be `objective` (especially whilst engaging in partisan behaviour).  Angela Kennedy & Jane Bryant, The One Click Group to Jimmy Wales.  17 November 2005. http://www.theoneclickgroup.co.uk/documents/ME-CFS_docs/More%20Wikipedia%20On%20Wessely.doc  One Click seems to me to be a bunch of paranoid zealots. And I   will state again that before I tried to tone down the shit they put on the Wessely page I had never heard of them or Simon Wessely.  Just Z  G, you know? [T]/[C] AfD? 15:46,  19 December 2005 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Simon_Wessely   A conservative estimate of the number of adults and children suffering from ME suggests that there are around 250,000 in the UK, yet it is rarely diagnosed by the medical profession, is fleetingly mentioned in government research funding documents, is seldom accepted by medical research workers, and is almost never admitted to by insurance companies.    Since 1986, while gathering around him an entourage of like minded disciples which has become known as the Wessely School, Professor Simon Wessely, has almost single-handedly been responsible for the strategy of a moratorium on the investigation of ME as an illness  with a physically neurological cause. Professor Wessely is a psychiatrist, and for nearly twenty years he has promulgated the idea that ME and the broader groupings of chronic fatigue illnesses (CFS) are the product of ‘false illness beliefs’, mental aberrations, which can be diagnosed and treated with psychiatric based therapies and anti-depressants.    Professor Wessely carries out research mainly in the London-based Institute of Psychiatry which is situated in King’s College teaching hospital. He is a member of numerous research organisations and advisory groups, and is advisor to the British Armed Services. While his membership of an ‘official’ web of research organisations tell us a lot about his work, added substance to his views is to be found in his more informal and less renowned associations with a number of minority-view groups set up by, or aligned with US and British ‘quackbuster’ organisations.    Just before Christmas 2005, the Wikipedia, an electronic and sometimes publicly edited encyclopaedia, was host to a small, anonymous entry about Professor Wessely. The entry appeared to have originated with someone opposed to Wessely’s psychiatric view of ME. On seeing this entry, Jane Bryant of the One Click (OC) campaign substituted a longer text, which contained not just biographical facts but a broader description of Wessely’s role in the politics of ME.    When this longer text was seen by the Wikipedia ‘edit police’ who cruise the pages seeking ‘vandalism’ and 'skewed' edits, it was immediately considered to break most of Wikipedia’s self serving rules. On writing to the owner and founder of Wikipedia, ‘Jimbo’ Wales, in an attempt to put their case, the OC campaign received a personal communication from him.   Although Wales, aimed at a slight up-beat and reconciliatory tone in his e-mail, the text was scattered with veiled insults. He accused One Click participants of ‘behavioural problems’, while stating that OC organisers had lied and purposefully made libellous statements in their posted piece on Wessely. He made clear even at this early stage of the exchange that Wikipedia would from then on act on the basis that ‘anything from your site (will be treated) with extreme scepticism.’ Jimbo Wales, ended his e-mail with an exhortation for everyone to settle differences and unit in the spirit of Wikichristmas.    When, however, OC answered Jimbo with a rebuttal of his argument in favour of an orthodox objectivity and neutrality – ‘we are not going to be advocates for or against either side in this dispute’ - the debate entered another level.   It seems possible that Professor Wessely, having been alerted to his Wikipedia entry began to liaise with Wikipedia and the business of drafting a  Soviet-style biographical text about him was given to the indulgently named Just Zis  Guy, you know? (Clearly I have no intention of using this onanistic sobriquet in this essay and so will refer to him as ZG)   There ensued an argument, about One Click’s contribution to the Wessely entry, which though handled with cool clear minded determination by OC, degenerated into bad language and scatological rebukes from male Wikipedians,.   G, my warmest compliments & wikihug for putting up with the faecal matter of One Click.                                                  JFW T@lk 20.51, 19 December 2005                          http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Simon_Wessely   Air Brushing Out the Context   I do not want to get embroiled in any of the detailed arguments about the meaning of concepts and words, which became to some degree the subject of this row. What seems more important is the way in which Wikipedia, a cult-like project employing its own acronymic language, evidently believed that it could re-create, define and separate the  experience and perception of Professor Wessely  held by thousands of ME/CFS patients from any biographical account of the man himself.   I have made the forked version live. As outside editors are converging on the fork after an awareness campaign by One Click I see no point in hiding it further. Criticisms of hagiography are likely to persist from those people who feel Wessely's research has caused ``mental health`` stigma of chronic fatigue syndrome, and there will be a lot of reverts until the partisans learn the importance of WP:NPOV, WP:NOR and WP:CITE.   (Jfdwolff) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Simon_Wessely  The quote above shows not only the insider argot of the group, but also their seeming incapacity to understand what the grounds for opposition were from OC. One Click does not, for instance, complain about the stigma of a ‘mental health’ diagnosis; rather, it objects strongly to Wessely’s psychiatric diagnosis forming the basis for treatment modalities when no biophysical research has been carried out.    Nor does OC, generally speaking, refer solely to chronic fatigue syndrome, which is an all embracing Wessely nomenclature which has taken root in Britain and the US after Wessely ‘did away’ with ME. One of the planks of the OC campaign has been the fact ME/CFS is classified by the WHO as a neurological disease under ICD-10 G93.3. In their texts, OC has always been careful to refer to the illness as ME/CFS, so retaining the status of the original illness ME, and stressing the physical aetiology of these illnesses generally.    By making errors of this kind, however small they might appear to those who make them, either purposefully or by error, the Wikipedia editors and writers determinedly stated one side of the discourse. The arrogance of Wikipedia is also shown in this quote, in which the writer expresses the view that critics will come to their senses when they learn the Wikipedian rules, and language!   I will argue that biographies about the contentious lifestyle or work of prominent individuals are utterly without use or intelligent direction if they cite only ‘facts’. What is more, accounts that cite only facts in uncritical biographies of contentious individuals, inevitably ‘take sides’ with that individual and the social effects of their words and deeds.    I will cite a simple example, which is extreme and has nothing to do in its substance with Professor Wessely (I have to stress this here, because no doubt next week I shall be accused of saying that Wessely is a Nazi).     In writing biographical text about Alfred Rosenberg, the senior ideologue of the German Nazi Party between 1930 and 1945, a compiler or writer who cited only his published writing and his rise within the hierarchy of Hitler’s parliamentary party would be obscuring the less verifiable fact that his ideology and policies led to the deaths of 11 million Jews, Gypsies, gay, disabled and other human beings. Rosenberg, who was himself of Jewish extraction, was executed after a trial by the Allies in 1946.   Information is power, and the most powerful information, goes almost unnoticed as a convincing part of everyday culture. Every reason it is possible to find, argues that this information is rational and based upon a majority view, while in reality it is simply the prejudices of the most powerful minority groups, which often remains unquestioned by the majority.    If Wales and ZG were to have stuck honestly to the understanding of rounded neutrality in their Wikipedia entry for Professor Wessely, it would read something like this, little more, little less:  Professor Simon Wessely has worked as a psychiatric medical researcher, mainly in Britain at the Institute of Psychiatry between 1985 and the present. Professor Wessely has argued on the basis of his research results that many apparently environmentally-provoked illnesses are the product of ‘false illness beliefs’ perceived and presented by their sufferers as physical illnesses but having no basis in biological fact.  In the areas of Gulf War Syndrome, electromagnetic fi