VANCOUVER — If you go to B.C. New Democratic Party leader Adrian Dix’s biography online at Wikipedia, you will find that he is married to a poet, has Type 1 diabetes, is fluently bilingual and served as Glen Clark’s chief of staff when Clark was the NDP premier.
What you won’t find on the ubiquitous user-edited digital encyclopedia is any reference to Dix’s darkest days or his biggest admitted mistake, when he falsified an executive memo while serving Clark, in an effort to protect him from allegations of conflict of interest. Or that he was fired for it, or that the memo-writing affair was part of the casino scandal that led to Clark’s resignation and paved the way for the Liberal election rout of 2001.
It isn’t for lack of trying by a number of Wikipedia users, who have been adding those facts and others into Dix’s online biography, even if some of those additions are coloured with political invective.
But, for at least the past two years, ever since he became the NDP leader, Dix’s biography has been carefully stage-managed by a largely anonymous group of people who cleanse any negative comment, even if it has been cited by credible sources or has been accepted by Dix himself.
In recent days, as the province gets ready for the May 14 provincial election, the digital fight over Dix’s personal history reached a climax. Since April 6, details of the “memo to file” incident have been re-inserted at least 10 times, and just as quickly removed.
On Tuesday morning, a Wikipedia editor with powers to lock down the page did so, leaving online a cleansed version that omits any negative bits of Dix’s history.
For the leader of the opposition it has stopped — at least temporarily — the problem of subjective editing that has befallen many politicians and celebrities.
Premier Christy Clark isn’t immune from this. Her Wiki page has had personal and sexist comments added.
Unlike Dix’s page, there have been no efforts to remove a number of negative references, including her close connections in the B.C. Rail scandal. The biography of Conservative leader John Cummins hasn’t been tinkered with and all three party pages at Wikipedia are not subject to the same level of attention as Dix’s biography.
In the past 90 days, Dix’s online history has been read at least 20,000 times, according to Wikipedia. By comparison, Christy Clark’s biography was viewed nearly 60,000 times over the same period.
The NDP and the Liberals say they are not behind the continual editing of Dix’s Wiki biography. The Vancouver Sun was unable to contact any of the people making the changes.
