Saturday, August 01, 2009

July 30, 2009
The following story is from the highly regarded literary website, The Millions.

Debut Booker Longlister Subject of Controversy Online and Off

Most of the Booker longlisters are fairly well-known, and (as of this writing) all of them, save three, have their own Wikipedia pages. However, one of those three has actually been the subject of a Wikipedia war over the last few years, and his page was deleted after months of contentious argument.
Ed O'Loughlin is a first-time novelist, who was until recently Middle East correspondent for The Australian, Sydney Morning Herald, and The Age. His book, Not Untrue and Not Unkind is about a former war correspondent looking back on years of reporting from Africa.

It appears that O'Loughlin was at the center of intense debate over his Middle East coverage for the Australian papers, where he was a target of critics who charged that he was biased against Israel.
A note in The Australian gives a taste of the rancor O'Laughlin incited:

He walked away from journalism last year with impressive references. Federal MP for Melbourne Ports Michael Danby, for example: "There's nothing funny about O'Loughlin's systematic bias against Israel, which is indeed both intellectually lazy and politically intemperate." Or journalist Tzvi Fleischer: "Ed O'Loughlin is obviously a talented journalist who brilliantly distorts facts and substitutes opinions for news." O'Loughlin responded to such attacks saying there had been an "intensive lobbying effort to skew the Herald and The Age to a pro-Israeli position".

Even as O'Loughlin was targeted by critics in Australia, a debate raged over his Wikipedia page in the back rooms of the online encyclopedia. One such page serves as something of an index to the ongoing dispute (the encyclopedia's procedural intricacies can be notoriously difficult to parse for the casual Wikipedia reader, myself included). It appears that at one point, O'Loughlin himself requested that his page be removed from Wikipedia.
Read the full fascinating piece at The Millions website.

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