Ken Mampel, an unemployed, 56-year-old Floridian, is in large part the creator of the massive Hurricane Sandy Wikipedia page. He’s also the reason that, for nearly a week, the page had no mention of climate change.
Still think Wikipedia is just super awesome?
In an unpaid but frenzied fit of news consumption, editing, correction, aggregation, and citation, Mampel has established himself as by far the most active contributor to the Wikipedia page on Hurricane Sandy, with more than twice the number of edits as the next-most-active contributor at the time this article was written. And Mampel made sure that the Hurricane Sandy article, for four days after the hurricane made landfall in New Jersey, had no mention of “global warming” or “climate change” whatsoever.
Wikipedia really is the refuge of the ignorant. Still not convinced?
Late in the evening of November 1st, a new section appeared at the bottom of the Wikipedia page, titled “Connection to global warming.” It was the first mention of climate change the article had had, and laid out the response from climate scientists, mostly stating that climate scientists don’t really know if the hurricane was caused in part or whole by climate change. I emailed Ken, who goes by the name Kennvido on Wikipedia, to get a response, and he wrote back: “thanks deleted again and told them to go discuss Sandy on the global warming page.” I reloaded the page and confirmed: Ken had eliminated any discussion of climate change. A few minutes later, I reloaded and the section was back, only with a big block warning, telling me that “The neutrality of this article is disputed.” By 10:23, that warning read: “An editor has expressed a concern that this Section lends undue weight to certain ideas, incidents, controversies or matters relative to the article subject as a whole. Please help to create a more balanced presentation.”
By the morning of November 2nd, the section was gone again. The revision history shows an argument: “the existence of other views is solved by referencing them in RS, not deleting views one disagrees with,” says one contributor. Mampel continues to fight, and he’s not the only one: another user chimed in that the Hurricane Sandy page is “Not the place to push global warming when no evidence exists that this was a cause.” But by early afternoon, the article had a small paragraph in the “Meteorological history” section linking to a few articles that suggest a connection to global warming. Ken had been overruled.
Ok let’s be honest, if you aren’t convinced by now of the utter fecklessness of Wikipedia, you’re probably Ken Mempel.
So you think the category 3 hurricane in 1938 that hit NYC was global warming too? This is exactly why wiki is great! It keeps nut jobs like global warming believers from controlling the media.
Jim you complain, rightly, about Wikepedia as it is largely written by dilettantes, and you complain, again rightly, about dilettantes writing about theology. But unless your areas of expertise are not only ministry and theology, but also science, then it is perhaps safer for you not to weigh in on the “global change” claims lest you be also called a dilettante
fair enough- on this one i have to rely on the experts- which i’m happy to do.
Jim is on safe ground. The science is in and there is ample evidence that we humans are the cause of the increasing temperatures (we set the all time record high this year just down the road from Jim, in Knoxville, and matched it the next day), extraordinary weather events, the melting of the polar ice cap, the longer growing season, the movement of fauna and flora north, the rising sea level, the disproportionate ratio of record hot temperatures to record cold temperatures, and on and on. Responsible voices said it would happen and it is. Do you think all of this is just a coincidence? Are they just lucky? How did they guess? If the contrarian position is valid, why have not their predictions come true? What more proof does anyone need?