While
the world’s press is lively discussing the idea that the weather
disasters in the United States might be caused by climate change,
Wikipedia has no mention of that suggestion.
Local media suggests that this is because the brains behind that Wikipedia page – Ken Mampel, an unemployed, 56-year-old Floridian, – appeared to be a climate change denier who is using Wikipedia page to push his own agenda. He created a winner on the page: his Wikipedia article was the most-viewed one about Hurricane Sandy, and he established himself as the most active contributor to it. According to the statistics, he made twice the number of edits than any other contributor.
The strange thing is that Ken Mampel made sure that the article about Hurricane Sandy, for 4 days after it made landfall in New Jersey, never mentioned “global warming” or “climate change”. Finally, on the 1st of November, a new section was added to the bottom of the page, titled “Connection to global warming”. However, it was instantly deleted by Mampel – the contributor insisted that it be sent to the global warming page.
Since then, Ken Mampel has continued to fight any discussions on global warming, making it clear that he didn’t believe in climate change. As such, he has had to bend a lot of the reports to make sure that climate change isn’t mentioned.
For instance, he pointed out that New York City’s Mayor Michael Bloomberg had endorsed Obama for president based on his handling of the disaster, but failed to mention that the mayor had specifically been talking about climate change in his speech.
In the meantime, there are lots of science-focused comments about Hurricane Sandy that are linked to climate change, but Ken Mampel doesn’t allow to add them to the Wikipedia entry. Even if someone pointed to a reference, Mampel still took it out because he believed it was not proven.
The experts have always claimed that the hijacking of Wikipedia by people with political views or those wishing to push an agenda has always been the main drawback of the world’s online encyclopedia. In our case it’s far from politics, but still just one editor having oddball ideas and trying to keep data which he doesn’t like away from the public.
Local media suggests that this is because the brains behind that Wikipedia page – Ken Mampel, an unemployed, 56-year-old Floridian, – appeared to be a climate change denier who is using Wikipedia page to push his own agenda. He created a winner on the page: his Wikipedia article was the most-viewed one about Hurricane Sandy, and he established himself as the most active contributor to it. According to the statistics, he made twice the number of edits than any other contributor.
The strange thing is that Ken Mampel made sure that the article about Hurricane Sandy, for 4 days after it made landfall in New Jersey, never mentioned “global warming” or “climate change”. Finally, on the 1st of November, a new section was added to the bottom of the page, titled “Connection to global warming”. However, it was instantly deleted by Mampel – the contributor insisted that it be sent to the global warming page.
Since then, Ken Mampel has continued to fight any discussions on global warming, making it clear that he didn’t believe in climate change. As such, he has had to bend a lot of the reports to make sure that climate change isn’t mentioned.
For instance, he pointed out that New York City’s Mayor Michael Bloomberg had endorsed Obama for president based on his handling of the disaster, but failed to mention that the mayor had specifically been talking about climate change in his speech.
In the meantime, there are lots of science-focused comments about Hurricane Sandy that are linked to climate change, but Ken Mampel doesn’t allow to add them to the Wikipedia entry. Even if someone pointed to a reference, Mampel still took it out because he believed it was not proven.
The experts have always claimed that the hijacking of Wikipedia by people with political views or those wishing to push an agenda has always been the main drawback of the world’s online encyclopedia. In our case it’s far from politics, but still just one editor having oddball ideas and trying to keep data which he doesn’t like away from the public.
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