The Evil that is called 'Wikipedia' ....

In the early days of Wikipedia we supported it both by written contributions and with money. It seemed such a great idea to promote free encyclopedic knowledge for everyone.

Long before Wikipedia, and long before the World Wide Web, and long before the Internet began to emerge from behind the walls of the U.S. Defence Department and the university labs where it was born, there was a small network of computers known as the Intranet. One of the leaders in promoting the Intranet was the Tandy Corporation who made computers. Their home office was in Fort Worth, Texas.

The organization that provided the platform for the Intranet was the 'Fort Worth Star-Telegram', a big daily newspaper known for its liberal approach versus the more conservative approach of the 'Dallas Morning News' daily newspaper.

Geographically, Fort Worth is in Tarrant County and Dallas is in Dallas County situated in North Texas. Fort Worth was traditionally known for its stockyards and cattle droves and acquired the tag of 'Cow Town'. Officially it bragged under the slogan 'Where the West Begins'.

Dallas was known as the merchandise distribution city with its Trade Center. It was also the city where President John F. Kennedy was murdered on November 22, 1963.

About 30 miles away in Fort Worth, JFK had arrived to a warm welcome and stayed overnight in a downtown hotel before taking off on the short journey to Dallas where his life came to an abrupt end at Noon on that sunny day.

But it was not Dallas that pushed the 'Information Age', but Fort Worth, because Tandy was making personal computers and its Radio Shack shops were selling them with help from the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. They called their new Intranet service 'StarText', and customers bought subscriptions to be linked to it by dial-up telephone numbers.

Initially, StarText had no graphics, no pictures and no color, and there were no services such as Microsoft and Google. They did not exist. StarText was for people living in Tarrant County who could access local calls at little cost. This was back is in the days before AT&T was forced to release its stranglehold on the U.S. telephone system when phone calls were proportionately expensive.

Well, we were among the pioneers back then, because we helped to populate StarText with pages of information that ultimately began this research project of today.

StarText even published its own newspaper called 'StarText Ink', which of course was edited from the offices of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram where the servers for StarText were also based.

Then one day, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram linked StarText to a similar service in Kansas City where another paper owned by the same publishers was also located. Now StarText was an embryonic Internet.

This was followed by the advent of another service called GEnie owned and operated by the U.S. General Electric Company, and it linked its operation in the USA to its affiliate in West Germany, as it was, back then. A lot of StarText subscribers (there were only about 3,000 maximum), then began to drift over to GEnie, so StarText got color words and eventually some crude illustrations, but it was too late. Time and technology had moved on and soon StarText was no more.

But in the early days of StarText when publishing was for the 'big boys' and information was under the control of big companies and universities, the idea of 'citizen journalism' seemed wonderful, and we said so and praised StarText and the company behind it.

Now jump ahead in time to Wikipedia. Same idea but on a vast scale. So we joined, and we contributed both journalistically and financially. However, groups of trolls began to emerge who then started to remove information and replace it with fake information. The fake information was removed by reversing the changes and lo and behold the fake information reappeared.

We were among the early contributors that Wikipedia encouraged and asked one of our Trio to become a Supervisor. But when this ideological propaganda 'war' began to take over, we quit. We still financially supported Wikipedia, but today - no more.

Now another trend has appeared. Our documented source material for articles which has remained on Wikipedia for years, has been removed and our source material has been inserted as though the people editing specific pages have performed the research themselves.

Wikipedia is turning into, or has already turned into a voice similar to 'The BBC' which claims to be 100 years old, when it was only 95 years old when they began to herald their boastful claim. In other words 'The BBC' spread false or fake information about themselves, and of course, about many other subjects as well.

Technically, on one level the letters 'BBC' when applied to British broadcasting have been in use for at least 100 years, but not as letters representing the British Broadcasting Corporation. The British Bible College also uses the initials 'BBC'. Before the British Broadcasting Corporation there was another entity called the British Broadcasting Company Limited, but it had nothing to do with the British Broadcasting Corporation which even lies about the ultimate fate of the British Broadcasting Company Limited.

Before the British Broadcasting Company Limited, there were Marconi ventures such as radio station MZX, from where the famous commercially sponsored Dame Melba concert originated.

'The BBC' is an empire of fake news and fake information, just like Wikipedia, and that is why our own self-funded project exists. It is not beholden to any outside interests. Its aim and objective is truth and honesty in both research and publication. Naturally the promoters of fake news and misinformation hate our operation, but as long as the platform servers exist to allow us to publish, we will continue in both electronic type and in print to present readers with the discoveries of our independent researh.

Our printed works of recent times have been devoted to academia, but we are now working on a two-part general circulation book. It will be published this year in the United Kingdom, and next year in the United States.