A good example of William M. Connolley’s work on Wikipedia.

William M. Connolley’s efforts to enforce a specific POV on Wikipedia within the climate change articles are well known and have been prominently noted in the international media:

• Box 1. Challenges of being a Wikipedian from Internet encyclopaedias go head to head by Jim Giles. Nature, December 15, 2005
• Know It All: Can Wikipedia conquer expertise? by Stacy Schiff.  The New Yorker, July 31, 2006
• Wikipedia rival calls in the experts by Jim Giles. Nature, October 4, 2006
• Wiki’s world by Mick Brown. UK Telegraph, October 28, 2006
• Know-alls by Stacy Schiff. The Age December 2, 2006 (An edited version of The New Yorker article).
• Thinking is so over by John-Paul Flintof. Times Online, June 3, 2007
• The Opinionator: Solomon by Lawrence Solomon.  Financial Times, May 03, 2008
• Wikipropaganda Spinning green by Lawrence Solomon. National Review Online, July 8, 2008
• Wikipropaganda On Global Warming by Lawrence Solomon. CBS News, July 8, 2008
• Climategate; The Supporting Cast – Thought Police Anyone? by Timothy Ball.  Canada Free Press, December 7, 2009
• Wikipedia’s climate doctor: How Wikipedia’s green doctor rewrote 5,428 climate articles by Lawrence Solomon. National Post, December 19, 2009
• Lawrence Solomon: Climategate at Wikipedia by Lawrence Solomon.  National Post, December 23, 2009

Since it was a slow day on the Wikipedia climate change probation I took the opportunity to simply browse around a bit and see how things were going in the various interesting places to be found there.  One such place is always the User talk:William M. Connolley page so I stopped over for a little look see.

Prior experience suggests that on this particular page what you see may not be all there is to see so I tend to look back through the history of that page to see what has been systematically scrubbed from it.  This is generally where the more interesting content from that page is to be found.

Today was no exception and I quickly took note of this diff which was used to remove this section from the page.  I’ll quote it in its entirety for your benefit:

Question about Booker

WMC, when you made this edit to the Christopher Booker article and edits like these [10] [11] [12] [13] to Booker’s book, The Real Global Warming Disaster, were you aware at the time that the book mentioned you in an unflattering way on pages 236–237? Cla68 (talk) 08:19, 4 April 2010 (UTC)

Now this seems a fair question but one that WMC seems unwilling to answer judging from his rather abrupt brushing of the matter into the bit bucket as it were.  For the curious out there this book is available on Amazon.com and it’s contents can be easily searched.  If you search for “Connolley” the website dutifully serves up the places where WMC is mentioned.  I won’t excerpt it here for you out of respect for the copyright on that material so you will need to go search for yourself.

What you will find isn’t that earth shattering, and it isn’t anything that we haven’t already been made aware of in the media links above, but it clearly highlights how WMC frequently has conflicts of interest on the articles that he edits.  Was he specifically aware of the COI in this case?  Only he knows for sure but I seriously doubt that knowing would have stopped him from acting as he did.  That’s just not how he’s made in my experience with him.

The thing that caught my eye with this diff is that WMC is using the blog of one of his best buds, Tim Lambert, to source his claim.  This is just another example of what counts as [[WP:RS]] on the climate change pages as we learned right here.  My, what a small world WMC seems to travel in.