The Wikiness

that the public’s sense of reality is located on-line. We know this because Georgia politicians, who trade on the public’s sense of reality, are vigorously defending their “brand” on-line. (James H. “Sloppy” Floyd was a state representative in Georgia from 1953-74. Apparently the state has named office buildings in his name).

The Georgia Governor’s campaign yesterday verifies that not only has <a href="“I have no idea who did this… all I would like to really believe is that one of my opponents would not have engaged in something this low,” said Handel
“If anyone from my team did anything like that, that individual would be fired,” said Handel.”>Wikipedia become the normative resource for truth in schools (which we teachers have known for some time now), but also in the mid-south, where one candidate’s primary campaign has allegedly libeled the candidate of another where it counts: on Wikipedia. What was the libelous charge? That the candidate did not have a high school diploma, but only a G.E.D.

Said Georgia Secretary of State Karen Handel, defending herself against the –pay attention now– slanderous charge of libel:

“I have no idea who did this… all I would like to really believe is that one of my opponents would not have engaged in something this low,” said Handel
“If anyone from my team did anything like that, that individual would be fired,” said Handel.

Two things occur to me about this:
1. Is it not very easy to identify the IP address of the trickster? So why try?
and
2. I had attributed clever originality to the political trickster responsible for this row, but then the WSB-TV report mentions that this same Wikipedia dirty trick was done previously, in 2006. So like much else in society, political campaigns have not changed their content, but the fields of their endeavor have brought on new forms.