As the person who did most of the recent revision of the Wikipedia page for Ronald Borek Kessler, born December 31, 1943, I'm not sure that I completely agree that the first two controversies mentioned, before this other matter exploded, were utterly unnecessary or inappropriate.

Flattering garbage about President Bush and the Bush White House would have to be a fundamental criticism of Kessler's "journalism," as is the matter of the short-shrift he gives to the issue of torture. ADDING more or better examples of criticisms of Kessler's stances on these issues would be the most appropriate thing, not just ripping stuff out. That way, you get the "context" that y'all love.

So what we see here is one of the fundamental flaws of Wikipedia and Wikipedians. You add good, factual, accurate stuff, and rather than editing it or revising it or expanding it, people just rip it out. A lot of good stuff, even wildly noncontroversial stuff about noncontroversial subjects, regularly gets ripped out of Wikipedia and thrown away. Little bits of knowledge are lost because people can't say either, "This is a starting point," or "This factoid is utterly harmless and noncontroversial."

Anyway, thank goodness this recent matter has gained some publicity and brought some attention to what Kessler and NewsMax are doing. Controverial people (Judith Miller, anyone?) are going to get and are going to deserve sections labeled "controversies." Duuuh.

And as other people have discussed, and as I have discussed elsewhere, Kessler's previous version of the Wikipedia page was poorly arranged, poorly edited garbage, pap sent out by a publishers' PR department or NewsMax.

And, get this, Kessler never minded NewsMax getting labeled as "right-wing." I changed that to "conservative."

So, I have a mission for y'all: What books of Kessler's, exactly, were "New York Times best sellers"??? Find out--and put it on his Wikipedia page.

Posted at March 17, 2008 11:40 PM in response to Newsmax's Kessler Scrubs Reference To His Obama Factual Blunder From His Wiki Page