Saturday, April 10, 2010

Wiki Edit Wars, the Armistice

I figured it would end this way:
"On February 5, 2010, Arizona Judge Steven F. Conn approved a stipulation from the previous day between Mohave County prosecutor Matt Smith and Warren Jeffs' defense attorney, Michael Piccarreta, that evidence seized from the YFZ Ranch in Texas would not be used in any manner in Warren Jeffs' two criminal trials in Arizona. Based on the agreement of the attorneys, Judge Conn issued an order adopting the stipulation. Jeffs' first of two trials on charges of being an accomplice to sexual conduct with a minor is scheduled to begin November 2, 2010."
Since, in general, bloggers are considered less reliable sources than the print media, or the broadcast media, visibility, is everything.

In the "Main Stream Media," there is only one reference I know of to the YFZ Evidence being suppressed in Arizona. That is at Brooke Adams' "Plural Life" blog. This is an extremely insignificant reference. It is an official blog of the Salt Lake Tribune and though Brooke is a "Real Live Reporter," it barely qualifies as a Main Stream Media reference.

For this reason the only location for the revelation of this simple fact is Wikipedia. Shortly after the raid I made my first edit (I have been a member since 2006) to a Wikipedia article about the YFZ Ranch stating that the evidence has been suppressed in Arizona, checked back on it a few hours later, saw it still there, and didn't think much about it.

A month later I returned and found it changed to an outright lie.

Since then I have been trying to negotiate behind the scenes (as if that is possible) with "BlueSooner" (TxBluesMan), RonLawHouston (RonInHouston) and someone named "Hope4Kids" whose moniker I could swear I've seen in some form at their favorite site.

Since you can barely find through Googling "suppression" in conjunction with YFZ, the news about the Arizona ruling at anything other than what are considered "partisan" blogs (yes, that would be how new viewers would see me), it goes completely unnoticed by the casual follower of the story that (shock), some judges don't think the raid was conducted in a lawful fashion.

The various editions of the story went back and forth with me trying to find some way to present the term "unlawful" (as it was ruled that way) on the page without offense. I settled on simply quoting the name of the granted order and linking it to the official court record at the court site. Of course, that wasn't going to work. The way the "Blues Crew" characterizes the legal activity in Arizona, it was just a considerate concession of the prosecution, merely a "stipulation." Nothing more. The fact that it was a complete and total surrender on the part of Prosecutor Matt Smith doesn't daunt them one bit. This is a "spin" war in the mind of the reading public, as long as the turf of Wikipedia can be successfully defended against the insertion of the words "Unlawful," or "Suppressed" into the YFZ Record, no one will really know it happened.

Thus ends the battle for now, at least until a week from now, when the page is reopened for edits. I may have been as a result, barred forever from editing a Wikipedia page. So it goes. Before I edited the YFZ page I hadn't contributed anything to the online reference so I have exactly what I had before in regard to Wikipedia, nothing except a reference guide.

My promotion of the site may plummet though. Not that they will miss my 3 or 4 hits generated per day for Wikipedia, but nevertheless, if it goes as it continues to go, I'll just find some other way to get material to reference, instead of at Wiki. Unless they're the only ones.

Wikipedia represented a sort of "last best chance" for the FLDS to get the truth out, not a spin, the absolute truth that when outside of Walther World, the evidence and her decisions don't stand up. That's significant, but no one knows about it.


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