Wesselygate

This is not so much about the vicious group of activists known as the One Click Group as about the kind of thing that led to the Wikipedia  policies.

Back in November 2005 I was doing a bit of vandal-spotting on Wikipedia and found an anonymous edit to an article titled. Thinking it a mis-spelling of one of the Methodist, and a bit curious as to who Simon Wesley might have been, I went along to have a look. What I found was a rant (there is no other word for it, see below) posted by, as it turned out, a member of an ME/CFS sufferers group called the One Click group; it was clearly defamatory and fell a long way short of the required "neutral point of view", with phrases like this:

First I reduced it to a stub while I worked on it (they reverted it, and accused me of vandalism - a wiki "crime" - for undoing "book text" which was "approved by lawyers"), then I tried simply rewording it to a more neutral tone. No go: they simply reverted, para by para and line by line, to the original text. And accused me of being an "apologist" and a "hagiographer". Eventually Wessely contacted the admins and Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales reverted to a sub-stub and locked it.

A couple of us worked up a new version, which was based on verifiable data (which, as we discovered, bore very little resemblance to what the One Click group said). That's what's there now - and if they were pissed off before that was nothing compared with how livid they were with the new article! So they took to flaming me first on Wikipedia, then on their website (this should take you to the right place, roughly). And of course the real laugh is that if they had left well alone an inaccurate and sympathetic (to them) version would be there now. There were some gross inaccuracies, like saying I was a Wiki admin, which I wasn't, although I am now, and among the more prize idiocies was picking up a flame I posted to serial Usenet troll and anti-bike bigot Mike Vandeman after a series of gleeful reports of deaths of mountain bikers (one of whom was not even riding a bike at the time),and representing it as if I were attacking some upstanding pillar of the community.

Biggest stupidity of all was the assumption that I had some kind of brief for Wessely. As anyone who knows anything about me at all will realise, if there is quackery around I like to pick and prod at its soft underbelly (yes, Diane C Thompson, this means you!). In the end instead of recruiting me they pissed me off, with the result that I was far more sceptical of One Click's claims. Luckily this turns out to have been a sound approach, as even their friends often distance themselves from One Click's savagely aggressive campaigning. Oh, one more irony: Wessely turns out to be a cyclist, and One Click has an association with the Countess of Mar, who spoke in favour of a Lords amendment to the 2006 Road Safety Bill compelling - you guessed it! - cycle helmets. So much for "evidence-based medicine"... On the left is One Click's screed, on the right my rewording. They accused me of invention, hagiography and outright lies. See how many statements you can find on the right that are not identifiably reworded from the text on the left. Note: This text is based on a highly biased and often outright false portrayal of the subject - neither version is accurate, this discusses only the allegation that the rewording was a hagiography, and that factual inaccuracies were introduced solely as a result of that rewording.

Update March 2011: Jane Bryant, owner of One-Click, has been convicted of criminal harassment and is currently subject to a curfew enforced by electronic tag. Angela Kennedy is, I believe, no longer associated with One-Click.

Note that the content is essentially the same, just not so openly polemical. I subsequently discovered that, for example, the PRISMA section was pretty much fantasy, with no obvious connection to the truth. Also, the One Click and PACE materials are grossly distorted and very, very biased.

The edit war rumbled on for some time, and probably continues still, since these people think Wessely is the Antichrist. I have by now exchanged a few emails with him, I have seen nothing to persuade me that he is anything other than sincere in wanting to help sufferers, I suspect that the root of the problem is that any suggestion that the cause is anything other than physical raises the bogeyman of "mental illness". As anyone who has suffered depression, alcoholism or any other essentially mental illness will tell you, the disease is absolutely real and creates genuine measurable chemical effects, the distinction between mental and physical illness is largely spurious. Wessely's point was that certain therapies appeared to help, and that was about it, really. The One-Clickers reject these therapies on ideological grounds, and hate Wessely with a passion because not only has he shown them to work, but he's been widely published in the process.