Did Wayne Rooney earn his Brownwings?

If you believe Wikipedia, he did. According to them, Wayne Rooney played for a youth team called the Brownwings. After which he signed to Everton on a schoolboy contract.

Now for our innocent readers, if you are unsure why this is a strange statement, you want to check out the definition of brown wings. The rest of you impure souls can keep reading.

Now there is absolutely no way, Rooney played for a team called the Brownwings. There is no way a name like that slipped by all those dads, coaches and boys who would have been involved with a team like that. This is the work of a Wiki vandal. A person who gets their kicks by falsely editing Wikipedia pages. While it may seem like the harmless backdoor shenanigans of a cyber prankster, there is a serious side.

People believe what they read on Wikipedia. And I’m not just talking about everyday Joe Shmoes like us. Serious journalists use this info as the basis for their reporting. Like the Independent in London did. On Monday the 16th of April 2007, Wayne Rooney’s tenure at the Brownwings transcended from cyberspace into the printed word. It became fact.

Once something is in the newspaper, it obtains a new level of truthfulness. If people believe Wikipedia, the printed press is gospel. Of course, Wayne could have complained and the paper would have written a retraction, but who reads retractions?

Overall Wayne Rooney got off pretty lightly here. Yes, he was the butt of a joke but no biggie. The respected journalist, John Seigenthaler Senior, on the other hand felt the sting of a far harsher joke. His Wikipedia entry was changed to state he had been a suspect in the both the JFK and Bobby Kennedy assassinations. Mr Seigenthaler had been Bobby Kennedy’s assistant in 1960s. But he was never a suspect in his murder. In fact he was a close friend of Bobby Kennedy and had been pallbearer at his funeral. The only assassination here is the assassination of Mr Seigenthaler’s character.

In another case in 2005, someone edited the page of the Norwegian prime minister, Jens Stoltenberg, to say: “He sat in prison from 1983-1984 for paedophilia on a little boy.” Wikipedia deleted the prank in a few hours but the page was downloaded and saved hundreds of time. So for a short while, it ranked as the number one search result on the prime minister’s name. Obviously this was a blatant lie, a clear untruth. But there are people out there who will take it as the truth. No matter how little evidence there is or how stupid the story sounds, they will believe it. If you don’t believe me, think about all the fools who watch documentaries that claim the CIA blew up the twin towers or genuinely believe we never went to the moon. People want to believe bad things about public figures.

So who is the Wiki vandal? When we think of him, the image that springs to mind is a tech geek sitting at home inflicting his brand of humour on the world. And if this were true, that would be awesome. We all love a joke — they make the workday go faster. They make our inboxes a better place.

But the Wiki vandal is far darker than that. A search on the subject abounds with the names of companies, organisations and governments that have edited Wikipedia to suit their purposes. From Fox News to the Guardian , Republican Party, BBC and Portuguese government. They have changed stories on the Iraq war, smeared rivals, taken out scandals that didn’t suit them and edited the Guantanamo Prison page. My personal favourite was a story on digg. Apparently someone with a BBC IP address changed George Walker Bush to George Wanker Bush. Who says the Beeb doesn’t have balls?

Now I am not sure if all these cases are true or the product of someone else’s disinformation campaign, but there are certainly a lot of them. And the fact is Wikipedia is very easy to change. It presents a very easy way to sell an idea to the world without it looking like advertising. An easy way to spread a lie about your opponent or a rival company. An easy way to fool the world into thinking your way. Yes, its peer regulation works most of the time but if you are crafty you can slip one through every now and then. Wayne Rooney has had his brownwings now for several years and probably will have them for several more.