qwghlm.co.uk : because all the other domain names were taken

The story of Alan Mcilwraith is an intriguing one – a call-centre operative from Glasgow who claimed to friends and colleagues that he had served in the SAS, been decorated and, get this, been knighted – all by the age of 29! It’s intriguing for several reasons – quite apart from the reasons of why he lived this intricately constructed fantasy life (I am no psychologist), it was curious to see how easy it was for him to pass it off. Not just that he got the various paraphernalia with great ease (he apparently got his uniform and medals from eBay but they’re also available at surplus stores, antique collectors etc.) but how it took so long for anyone to fully question his facade.

It wasn’t very hard to rumble him – as well as having a surprisingly scrawny physique for an army “hero”, he made a huge number of elementary mistakes and was repeatedly self-contradictory; he said he had gone to university aged 16; he had claimed he had a CBE (which doesn’t mean you can call yourself “Sir”) before switching to KBE. He claimed he had served both in the SAS and the Paratroop Regiment but wore the uniform of a totally different regiment, and said that he had been knighted by Prince Andrew rather than the Queen or Prince Charles. Most of all – just what was a decorated officer and knight of the realm now doing working in a call centre? Apparently he’s been at it for three years, and yet it’s only been now that he was rumbled.

Many of the newspapers make much of the fact he had a Wikipedia entry listing much of these hoax achievements, providing a concession that “his entry on Wikipedia has now been removed”. This is now actually false (the article was resurrected on April 12th following his exposure, and now details the hoax), but in any case was highly misleading; the hoax article had been removed long before the story broke. As this excellent account details, the original article had been added on October 5th 2005, but was flagged as a suspected hoax on the 10th and deleted on the 26th following a vote. It was resurrected a couple of times in the time since but was quickly redeleted both times. So Wikipedia, for all its faults, had managed to work out he was a charlatan a good six months before the rest of the world (and those that had met him) had caught up.

In a similar case about earlier this year, an American man, Joshua Gardner, had adopted the persona of the “Duke of Cleveland”, adding false information to Wikipedia and attempted to join a school in Minnesota. After a bit of online sleuthing (and aided by the fact that he had mistakenly included his real name in his false Wikipedia entry), his fellow students found out that Gardner was actually a registered sex offender. The teachers and principal at the school had quite easily been taken in – had it not been for those pesky kids, he could have well been enrolled fully without any question.

What is it that makes people fall for amazing whoppers? Is the “Big Lie” concept – people thinking “no-one would dare make this kind of shit up”? I’m not sure – it’s too easy an explanation for people’s sense of (in)credulity. There must be more to a lie than it being “Big” for it to be believable. An attention to detail maybe, or a back-story that is hard to check out, but in both cases the details were flawed and simple to check, especially in a Google-enabled age. Maybe it’s the topic – in both cases they had something to do with the British honours system (partly in Mcilraith’s case); if it’s a topic that most people are initially unfamiliar with or indifferent to, they may be unwilling to pursue or check it, even if they have the ability to do so. Or maybe it’s because people want to believe the lie, no matter how outrageous, which raises questions about the motives of Mcilwraith’s acquaintances and Gardner’s schoolteachers.

Oops, I said I wouldn’t start on psychology at the start of this post. So I won’t go any further. As a postscript, these are two examples of when Wikipedia’s own internal processes have worked quite well; there are many cases when it hasn’t. Jason Scott’s “The Great Failure of Wikipedia” highlights some of the cases when it hasn’t, though the arguments around them aren’t satisfying; confused conclusions and ad hominems apart, the central point seems to be that the “wrong” decisions sometimes get made by the “wrong” people. But this could be said of any form of social organisation, to certain degrees, and Scott is too busy in his wiki-bashing to come by any sort of alternative.