WP:DAILYMAIL

Moar info: The Daily Mail.

In January 2017, the entire community of Wikipedia rose up in all its majesty and summarily exiled evil British tabloid The Daily Mail from the world's foremost repository of precious truth and rationality. Henceforth, the Mail would no longer be acceptable as a reliable source, under any circumstances, until the end of time itself. The moral guardians of the information universe were applauded by the whole of human civilization for this bold step in purging The Internet of such distortions, fabrications, and falsehoods.

Pretty much

Or so Wikipedia would like you to believe.

Truth's Tag-Team

Moar info: Wikipedos.

This spontaneous anti-Mail crusade was led by two protagonists, who both declared war on the Daily Mail at the same time - Wikipedos registered as Guy Macon and Hillbillyholiday.

Guy Macon

A typical Guy Macon
(Serving suggestion only)

Guy Macon is a quasi-literate goon who advertizes his own website on his Wikipedia userpage, in open contravention of Wikipedia's rules about shameless self-promotion. That particular bit of spam has been on his userpage since January 2011, so you can see how serious he is about upholding the Sacred Laws Of Wikipedia.

For those with long memories, Guy Macon is indeed one and the same person as the Guy Macon who created the unfunny TL;DR wall of text known as “Guy Macon's original post.” In fact, he is so proud of this very meager accomplishment that he maintains and updates it on his personal website (archived: 1 2).

And when you click through to read Guy's resumé, you can see how serious he is about producing quality content that shows himself in the best possible light.

Things get better when would-be employers click through to read Guy's “FAQ” page. This is similarly littered with spelling mistakes and random capitalization, but additionally chides and insults would-employers as though they are the stupid ones and Guy himself is bestowing his wisdom to them as a taster of what he can offer.

This is a bit rich, when you consider the fact that Guy doesn't know how to run a spellchecker to weed out his many basic errors, or – worse – thinks that he's so clever he doesn't need to.

Hillbillyholiday

Dog-on-a-string not pictured

File:Hillbillyholiday (michael cockram) confesses he smokes discarded cigarette ends (october 24, 2017).png

Classy

Hillbillyholiday is a lesser-known individual, but he had announced his animosity towards the DM and its like as early as 2013, when he introduced himself as "Tabloid Terminator" (Archived: 1 2). As you can see, Hillbillyholiday in the flesh does not resemble any kind of lean, mean, killing machine. In fact, he looks more like the sort of person you might find drinking cans of super-strength lager and picking up cigarette butts in a provincial town center at 8am on a working day, while swearing at passersby. Since he lives in the British town of Bournemouth, a dilapidated seaside resort that has upright wicker coffins instead of deckchairs, this impression is probably accurate.

	“	I usually makes do with dog-ends off the pavement...	„
	—Hillbillyholiday himself (October 24, 2017) 1 2

The self-appointed “tabloid terminator” was so ruthlessly efficient that after he got the ball rolling on the campaign to ban the DM from Wikipedia, he ran away and hid, stating that he didn't want the DM to find out who he was. Sadly, he didn't understand how search engines work, and so it didn't even take ten minutes for the DM to find out who he was. From there, it took another five minutes to figure out that he was hiding in his mother's flat. His name is Michael Cockram, which is ironic because he got cockrammed by the DM due to his own stupidity. Unbelievably, the haggard, wizened creature in the photograph is just 35 years old. In addition to being a scrawny and weasely-looking streak of piss, he is ginger. He is rightly so ashamed of this fact that he will only publish photographs of himself if they are black-and-white and/or blurred. Some choice samples of what the Daily Mail found Michael had been up to:

	“	His Facebook page includes an image of two gay men performing a sex act in public, a photograph of a naked, dark-haired man having oral sex with himself, and a painting that depicts bestiality between a man and a sheep.	„

	“	Three years ago, Cockram wrote on his timeline that "all Muslim men admitted to Paradise will have an ever-erect penis and they will each marry 70 wives, all with appetising vaginas."	„

	“	Around the same time, he declared: "If you gently lick the outside of a Kinder Egg, you can slowly recreate the changing skin tones of Michael Jackson."	„

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The "Tabloid Terminator" bravely hides behind his elderly mother for protection "You won't find me!" So bold and fearless "How did you find me?!?" Jimbo calls... Busted!

So between them, these two men were the ideal Wikipedia representatives to spearhead the effort to purge the Daily Mail from their precious vanity-press project.

How shit went down

On January 7, 2017, Hillbillyholiday started a Request for Comment discussion about blacklisting the Daily Mail. His opening salvo was: "Many, many editors (and Jimmy Wales) have said over the years that the Mail is not a relaible source in any area. A list of reasons why would be enormous, it doesn't need reiterating, the paper is trash, pure and simple." A day or two later, perhaps realizing that such sweeping statements were not entirely persuasive, Hillbillyholiday proudly produced what he thought was evidence of the Mail's unreliability – statistics from the UK's press watchdog, IPSO. Except, as Hillbillyholiday soon learned, it was no such thing.

	“	Independent Press Standards Organisation from 2014 to 2015: Mail 11 breaches, Guardian 0 breaches; reparations by Mail 34 times, Guardian 0 times.	„
	—Hillbillyholiday 04:23, 12 January 2017 (UTC)

	“	IPSO 2016: Daily Mail was the worst publication, with a total of 17 sanctions for inaccuracy. The Sun followed with 14, the Daily Express with 12. The Independent and Guardian had none.	„
	—Hillbillyholiday 09:57, 14 January 2017 (UTC)

	“	IPSO does not regulate the Independent or the Guardian.	„
	—Peter Gulutzan 17:00, 18 January 2017 (UTC)

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And things went downhill from there. Hillbillyholiday pretended that he hadn't been totally rekt with his bullshit about IPSO and simply went on asserting that everyone agreed already that the Daily Mail was totally worthless. He didn't provide a speck of evidence to back up his argument, and nor did anyone else during the next six fucking weeks that the discussion grew long and longer and crankier and crankier.

"Is the Daily Mail a reliable source?" Part 1 (Indexed) Part 2 (Indexed) Part 3 (Indexed) Part 4 (Indexed)

Well, the debate went on for six weeks. The voting itself was closed within 24 hours of the discussion's commencement, with a massive 58 evidence-free votes in favour of blacklisting the Daily Mail as unreliable. When you consider that a total of 85 votes were cast in the debate, this means that a consensus of just under 70% had been achieved. For a Wiki that boasts some 35 million registered users, this was a clear victory for public opinion and a giant leap forward for the online encyclopedia.

One constant throughout the make-believe debate was the presence of Guy Macon, pushing out cherry-picked tales of the Daily Mail's failures and presenting them as conclusive evidence. This is because he didn't have a single analysis by an independent expert to fall back on, which also meant that his personal handful of cherry-picked tales counted as original research. Of course, no-one did anything about that violation of Wikipedia's pathetic rules, either. When he wasn't passing round his hoary old chestnuts, Guy sat on the sidelines repeating the phrase “Kill it with fire!” over and over, until even the autists of TOW found the constant repetition uncomfortable and politely suggested that he STFU.

Aftermath

Having achieved a landslide victory in favor of banning the Daily Mail as a Wikipedia source, next to nothing happened. Guy Macon launched a one-man campaign to present the RfC decision as a coherent and comprehensible rules-based decision. Of course it was no such thing, being a bunch of partisan libfags armed only with petty personal grievances instead of actual evidence.

Guy took a sly route towards getting the airbrushed version of events into Wikipedia's Daily Mail article. First, he spammed Jimbo Wales's talk page with this fake history. Twelve minutes later, Guy spammed the talk page of the Daily Mail article with pretty much the same thing, word for fucking word. Having laid his words at the altar of Jimbo, and then pitched them onto the Daily Mail talk page, Guy waited a fortnight to see what happened next. When nothing did, he felt the coast was clear to insert his propaganda into the article itself. He tried to do this on three separate occasions. This was clearly the work of a disinterested editor, with no hidden agenda.

Guy Macon's one-man campaign of historical revision User talk: Jimbo January 11, 2018 (9.54am) Talk: Daily Mail January 11, 2018 (10.06am) Article: Daily Mail January 26, 2018 (Insertion #1) Article: Daily Mail February 26, 2018 (Insertion #2) Article: Daily Mail February 28, 2018 (Insertion #3)

And it was clearly just a coincidence that the next time the subject of the Daily Mail came up for discussion on Wikipedia, it was Guy that alerted Hillbillyholiday to get him to take an active part in the new proceedings. In response, Hillbillyholiday accidentally boasted that the RfC that led to the Daily Mail ban was driven solely by his own malice towards the newspaper.

	“	Of course, the idea of using Wikipedia to traduce their good name (again) is rather appealing	„
	—Hillbillyholiday, March 2018 1 2

Another Michael Cockram confession, for anyone who still doubts the above Michael Cockram self-doxes (Indexed) Cockram's confession #2 (Indexed)

Two years after Wikipedia banned the Daily Mail, which was clearly a matter of life or death at the time, the 'pedos have barely removed even 10% of Daily Mail links. Meaning that there were 50,672 Daily Mail links still polluting the internet's Holy spring of unbridled reliability (December 2018). It's almost as though everyone involved has lost interest because the whole thing was nothing more than a propaganda stunt. In fact, the Wikipedia purge has failed so badly that in late 2018 a debate started up about whether the Daily Mail should be fucking unbanned. This is obviously because unbanning the Daily Mail would mean less work for the wiki-grunts who were sifting through 50k links and trying to sort out suitable replacement sources for each and every claim made.

The new possibility of a ban reversion caused immediate ructions in the wiki-elite. The old-skool wikipedos always hated the Daily Mail for its rightwing politics, illiberal claims, and tendency to publish stories about astrology, predictions and similar stuff that defies verifiability. So it was no surprise that two "big names" on the pedo scene - JzG and Davey "Dracula" Gerard - were ready to chime in with their wisdom, to ensure lesser mortals were "persuaded" to vote the "right" way.

	“	I lean toward exclusion of tabloids generally, but there is a substantive difference between the Mail and the Mirror (and Sun and the rest) in its fabrication of stories, churnalism (especially in Mail Online) and of course its notorious "sidebar of shame"	„
	— JzG (September 12, 2018)

	“	They need much more than two months with a new editor to overcome a long and extensively-documented history of literally making stuff up	„
	— Dracula (just after midnight, December 4, 2018)

	“	I think you missed the point. It's not about bias, it's about fabrication, propaganda and lack of fact checking in service of that bias.	„
	— JzG says it's NOT about the Mail's bias (September 15, 2018)

	“	the Mail is a once-mainstream news organisation whose right wing editorial bias has turned into a drive to push a political agenda	„
	— JzG says it IS about the Mail's bias (September 16, 2018)

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Mr Big

Moar info: The Guardian.

Why so guilty?

Only one thing is certain about all this. Jimbo Wales was of course the mastermind behind all these nakedly political machinations, and Guy Macon and Hillbillyholiday were just his henchmen. For starters, when Wiki-pimps JzG and Dracula are laying down the law, and bending the truth seven ways till Sunday to do it, you know for a cast-iron certainty that they are acting as Jimbo's megaphones.

Jimbo's invisible hand in the campaign to ban the Daily Mail from Wikipedia is further established by Guy Macon's blatant spamming of Wales's talkpage, when he tried to establish his bogus version of the RfC decision. In effect, Guy was secure in the knowledge that Wales wouldn't try to correct his lies, and so it served as Wales's endorsement. Guy was then “protected” when he went on to insert the same lies into the Daily Mail article.

Hillbillyholiday used the same tactic when he launched the original RfC in January 2017, by stating at the outset that ”Many, many editors (and Jimmy Wales) have said over the years that the Mail is not a relaible source in any area.” So the campaign to ban the Daily Mail had the shadow of Jimbo hovering over it from the get-go. And when it came to time to present his fake “evidence” that the Mail had been found guilty of fakery more often than other papers, Hillbillyholiday dishonestly chose to present The Guardian as an example of journalistic purity. His enthusiasm to make the Guardian look good by comparison is particularly telling.

Throughout all this time, Jimbo Wales sat on the board of the Guardian Media Group, which oversees the financial health of the Guardian, which is the Daily Mail's bitter rival and would like to see the Daily Mail driven out of business. Four months after Wikipedia banned the Daily Mail, Wales resigned from the GMG board. He has never publicly explained why he resigned.

On the other hand, The Guardian clearly learned from Wales that non-stop e-begging can sustain a multi-billion dollar media company, even when it's stuffed with pampered cronies and talentless moochers. And Jimbo himself? As soon as he'd left The Guardian, he started his own newspaper, the WikiTribune.

See also

• Chapman, Guy
• Consensus
• Corruption
• Daily Mail, the
• Gerard, David
• Guardian, the
• Propaganda
• TOW
• Wales, James Donal

External links

The man, the myth, the mong

• RfC: Daily Mail' – the month-long spergout that led to the Mail's bannination (Archived: 1 2')
• 'The Wikipedia user page of the completely sane Michael Cockram, as it looked during the RfC: (Archived: 1 2')
  • February 8, 2017: Having poked the hornets' nest, Cockram bravely runs away... (Archived: 1 2)
    • February 14, 2017 .... but is traced almost immediately to his hiding-place (under his mother's kitchen table) (Archived: 1 2)
  • February 15, 2017: Cockram receives a cryptic message from Jimbo himself! (Archived: 1 2)
  • "The making of a Wiki-Lie" - The Daily Mail doxes Cockram, March 4, 2017 (Archived: 1 2)
• Guy Macon's "so bad, it's awful" professional website (Fully archived: 1 2)
  • Guy's propaganda insertion strategy
  • 1: Insert lies on Jimbo's talkpage
    • January 11, 2018 (9.54.am) (Archived: 1 2)
  • 2: Immediately repeat lies on "Daily Mail" article's talkpage
    • January 11, 2018 (10.06am) (Archived: 1 2)
  • 3: Wait, then insert lies into "Daily Mail" article
    • January 26, 2018 (Archived: 1 2)
    • February 26, 2018 (Archived: 1 2)
    • February 28, 2018 (Archived: 1 2)
• JzG and Dave Gerard intervene to prevent an UnBan
  • Dracula draws first blood (December 4, 2018) (Archived: 1 2)
  • JzG gets his fat arse up onto his soapbox to preach about what a disgrace the Daily Mail is (September 12, 2018) (Archived: 1 2)
  • JzG lectures people less important than him about why the Dail Mail's bias isn't the real issue (December 15, 2018) (Archived: 1 2)
  • JzG lectures people less important than him about why the Daily Mail's bias is, in fact, the real issue (December 16, 2018) (Archived: 1 2)
• General coverage of this frenzy of faggotry
  • The first news reporting of Wikipedia's Daily Mail ban - The Guardian (surprise, surprise), February 8, 2017 (Archived: 1 2)
  • “What Wikipedia's Daily Mail 'Ban' Tells Us About The Future Of Online Censorship” - Forbes, February 10, 2017 (Archived: 1 2)
  • “Wikipedia ban condemned by Daily Mail as cynical politically-motivated attempt to stifle the free press” – Press Gazette, February 10, 2017 (Archived: 1 2)
  • The Wikimedia Foundation's Katherine Maher is given an "exclusive interview" that focuses on this bullshit - The Guardian (again), February 12, 2017 (Archived: 1 2)
  • Yet another slab of propaganda, this time from our ditzy-airhead-in-residence - The Guardian (yet again), February 13, 2018 (Archived: 1 2)
  • Obsessive blogger and hysterical rubber-faced faggot Tim "Bo Selecta" Fenton shrieks his typical nonsense about the "scandal" - Zelo Street, March 13, 2017 (Archived: 1 2
  • Jimbo's new money-spinning project, an anti-fake news "e-newspaper" called the WikiTribune, gets a lengthy promotion - The Guardian, April 25, 2017 (Archived: 1 2)

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