The mystery of the missing Wikipedia page

This is a conspiracy.

This is a conspiracy perpetrated by editors of Wikipedia.

This is a conspiracy about Above Top Secret.

Wikipedia, for those new to the internet (all two of you,) is a collaborative encyclopedia of everything. Hundreds of thousands of users create pages on websites, events, places, television shows, radio shows, chemistry, philosophy. If it exists, it has a page on Wikipedia. Except Above Top Secret. If you type in any variation of Above Top Secret, you will find everything but an article about this website.

Type in a website. go ahead, any one. Giantbomb.com, Kotaku.com, digg.com, Questionable Content.com, Wookieepedia. They all have pages. Some more defined then others, but regardless, it has an article.

Above Top Secret had articles, but they were all deleted. They were deliberately removed from Wikipedia. You will only catch fleeting glimpses of it's existence by trying to make a page yourself. Create it and it will be deleted quickly. Little warnings are posted, letting you know it was deleted before, with an excerpt of the decision. A decision you will not find on that users history. Wiped clean, even from the page-creators contribution history.

03:16, 24 April 2006 Mysekurity (talk | contribs) deleted "Above Top Secret" ‎ (Deleted after 5 days on ProD. content was: '[[prod|No evidence that this Internet forum meets our website notability guidelines]]Above Top Secret is an internet forum dedicated to t...')

If you were to go to Mysekurity's contributor page, you will find a gap of time between 03:11 and 03:41, 24 April 2006.

The same for the contributor "Lucky 6.9"

01:44, 1 February 2006 Lucky 6.9 (talk | contribs) deleted "Above top secret" ‎ (content was: '[[db-nocontent]]Abovetopsecret.com is the internets number one conspiracydicussion board.Started in late 1998 by the owner, Simon Gray; Above Top ...')

It's interesting to note on "mysekurity's" contribution removal it states that it fails to meet their "website notability guidelines." Said guidelines state:

1. The content itself has been the subject of multiple non-trivial published works whose source is independent of the site itself. This criterion includes reliable published works in all forms, such as newspaper and magazine articles, books, television documentaries, websites, and published reports by consumer watchdog organizations[4] except for the following:
* Media re-prints of press releases and advertising for the content or site.[5]
* Trivial coverage, such as (1) newspaper articles that simply report the Internet address, (2) newspaper articles that simply report the times at which such content is updated or made available, (3) a brief summary of the nature of the content or the publication of Internet addresses and site or (4) content descriptions in Internet directories or online stores.
2. The website or content has won a well-known and independent award from either a publication or organization.[6]
3. The content is distributed via a medium which is both respected and independent of the creators, either through an online newspaper or magazine, an online publisher, or an online broadcaster;[7] except for trivial distribution including content being hosted on sites without editorial oversight (such as YouTube, MySpace, Newgrounds, personal blogs, etc.).

I think ATS has qualified for this, even in 2006, on multiple occasions, on any of those points.

I thought maybe it was just the size of Above Top Secret, so I checked how large it was in 2006. In 2006 ATS recieved approx 700,000 unique visits a month, Far more than website "Giantbomb.com" or "QuestionableContent.com" both which hover around 100,000 a month.

So it met all the criteria, and definitely does now, yet Wikipedia continues it's censorship. The question that obviously comes up, is why? That is what I have no answers for. Wikipedia is an amalgam of different users. There is no grand structure in either it's editorship or contributor base. Surely at one point an admin on ATS had to submit a rather nice article for the site, and if things were to work the way they should, it should have, at least at one point, been approved.

This smells like a calculated effort to censor the site off of Wikipedia. Not the government or any specific official group, but by somebody.



[edit on 8-7-2010 by WolfofWar]


We have attempted to make a wiki-page for above top secret. Please do not produce extra pages, if you would like to add it (if it still exists by then) go to en wikipedia.org Thanks.




Mod Edit: Additional content at member request.

[edit on 8/8/10 by JAK]

interesting,,,, very interesting.
some one got a hate on for ATS.com???
let the stories begin!!....................................................

Try to contact the the staff. People run wikibots (some are legit, some aren't) to sort of go and automatically fix or do certain things. I'd assume ATS deletion is one of them. If its a bot, the staff should be able to ban it.
I'm not a Wikipedia editor, so I'm not sure how the entire system works now. I used to keep up with it, when Wiki technology was released, but not anymore.

reply to post by Zaxxon


The editors are the ones removing the pages, not the bots. They are being marked for deletion first, could be by staff or by users. An editor (non-bot) must then evaluate the page and make a decision. So the people deleting it are in fact Wikipedia itself, or at least a large chunk of it's own staff.

reply to post by WolfofWar


The simple answer is that they see ATS as competition.

Advertising.

Making information allowable to all the populace.

And never forget they might be getting pressured by Government.

We had a TinWiki here on ATS and it crashed.

Mysteriously.

Originally posted by SpartanKingLeonidas
reply to post by WolfofWar

 

We had a TinWiki here on ATS and it crashed.

Mysteriously.

Supposedly that was due to Encyclopedia Dramatica and its various deluded minions/off-shoots. At least that seems to be the claim.

reply to post by Zaxxon


anonymous has very little involvement on ATS. TinWiki was attacked by somebody other then anon, and I can say that because I never once saw a proposed attack by anon, and I'm in on the loop enough to know when one occurs.

reply to post by Zaxxon


Really?

Quite interesting if you ask me.

It crashed.

Then ATS is not allowed to have its own page on Wikipedia?

Sure sounds like discrimination against our website.

I'm betting the Government stepped in and threatened them.

They can point to ATS as a hate-group whether it is or not due to the content.

No, ATS is not a hate-group, it is a website designed to do one thing.

Deny Ignorance.

reply to post by SpartanKingLeonidas


No, I doubt that any of this occurred by federal hands. If the site was such and issue it would have had many more attacks and legal issues come about it. It serves its purpose as a nice disinfo platform for any truth that may trickle out from the site. The issues with an ats article appears, to me at least, to be coming internally from Wikipedia or via influence of somebody else.

reply to post by WolfofWar


Who knows.

It is oddly suspicious nonetheless.

Of all the nonsense people put onto Wikipedia this surprises me.

And it being internally just smells of the wrong kind of influence.

Wikipedia usually gives a fair representation and balanced perspectives.

The good, the bad, and the ugly.

The Good, The Bad & The Ugly Theme 1966


I just couldn't resist.

I think we need to test to see who's pulling the strings on the "pull."

We should make a wiki article for Abovetopsecret, as well constructed as possible, as see who takes it down, if they do at all.

Seems very strange.

So, here is a theory I thought of that seems to make sense: Which is that someone, somewhere wants to limit any possible publicity ATS gets? Of course, I am not sure that Wikipedia would do much for people unless they had already heard of the website.

Again. That is weird. Wikipedia is supposed to have everything. Another possible explanation is that whoever was making the pages that got deleted was not making satisfactory pages? Like, maybe all the info was wrong so they got rid of the entire entry? Seems crazy that this would happen multiple times but I am trying to think of at least one logical, non-conspiratorial explanation

Originally posted by spacekc929
Seems very strange.
Again. That is weird. Wikipedia is supposed to have everything. Another possible explanation is that whoever was making the pages that got deleted was not making satisfactory pages? Like, maybe all the info was wrong so they got rid of the entire entry? Seems crazy that this would happen multiple times but I am trying to think of at least one logical, non-conspiratorial explanation

It seems odder to me that the pages were stricken completely from the authors' records. There is more missing time in their history then abductees.

The only references I can find are from 2006 of there ever being an attempt to produce an article for ATS. I can't imagine that, whether by users or admins/moderators, nobody has attempted to produce one since.

I also can't imagine all of those attempts were so malformed in code and writing that they just NEEDED to be wiped from the face of Wikipedia. The writing on ATS in general is not noteworthy prose, but compared to some of the articles produced on Wikipedia they read like Mark Twain.

reply to post by WolfofWar


Yeah, I agree. It is the only non-conspiratorial explanation that I can think of, so it worries me that something more is going on...

I think that you are right though... we should try to make a page. See what happens. Can you do it and tell us what happens?

Originally posted by spacekc929
reply to post by WolfofWar

 

Yeah, I agree. It is the only non-conspiratorial explanation that I can think of, so it worries me that something more is going on...

I think that you are right though... we should try to make a page. See what happens. Can you do it and tell us what happens?

My only issue is I really don't know how to properly code a Wikipedia page.

reply to post by WolfofWar


Yeah, me neither, that's why I wanted you to do it lol!

I will look into it. I have never even thought about making a wikipedia article before, I have no idea how it works, so... who knows what will happen.

Yeah I don't think I have the patience to sift through Wikipedia right now. It's a bit confusing. Haha. I might look into it tomorrow.

Originally posted by WolfofWar
reply to post by Zaxxon

 

anonymous has very little involvement on ATS. TinWiki was attacked by somebody other then anon, and I can say that because I never once saw a proposed attack by anon, and I'm in on the loop enough to know when one occurs.

I never mentioned Anonymous. I believe it was that someone edited all of the pages with some sort of derogatory remark in a very very short time over and over crashing it? If not then some EDiots took credit for it anyway. Just saying.

I think its pretty obvious going on the guidelines posted in this very thread that ATS does not meet the criteria for having its own Wikipedia page.

Wikipedia is not supposed to be an advertising platform. This website has not done anything groundbreaking or notable in the eyes of the world and as such has no place for it in Wikipedia.

Giantbomb has influence over the gaming industry which is how it gets to stay. Questionable Content is a work of creative fiction, one that has won multiple awards which is how it gets in.

Originally posted by maskfan
I think its pretty obvious going on the guidelines posted in this very thread that ATS does not meet the criteria for having its own Wikipedia page.

Wikipedia is not supposed to be an advertising platform. This website has not done anything groundbreaking or notable in the eyes of the world and as such has no place for it in Wikipedia.

Giantbomb has influence over the gaming industry which is how it gets to stay. Questionable Content is a work of creative fiction, one that has won multiple awards which is how it gets in.

Well....

1. The content itself has been the subject of multiple non-trivial published works whose source is independent of the site itself. This criterion includes reliable published works in all forms, such as newspaper and magazine articles, books, television documentaries, websites, and published reports by consumer watchdog organizations[4] except for the following:
* Media re-prints of press releases and advertising for the content or site.[5]
* Trivial coverage, such as (1) newspaper articles that simply report the Internet address, (2) newspaper articles that simply report the times at which such content is updated or made available, (3) a brief summary of the nature of the content or the publication of Internet addresses and site or (4) content descriptions in Internet directories or online stores.

Wired.com has written about Above Top Secret. It has been featured on a CNN broadcast at one point, I believe criticizing the 9/11 truthers and it has published work in a book by Jim Marrs, who essentially is the equivalent of a scholar in the alternative news field.


And Giant Bomb has pull in the video game industry? It's a bunch of guys in a garage office (actually sorry, they moved out now and joined the rest of Whiskey-Media in a larger garage office.)

GameFAQS is an online game discussion board with nothing to contribute. It has a 5,000 word article.

Those requirements seem to be rather lax.