Larry Daley

This year I will retire after serving more than 20 years as a plant science researcher and occasional teacher of graduate students. Long ago I served with Castro in the mountains, and after many scary things, we got to Havana and I promptly handed in my resignation. Eventually the Cuban government jailed me but luckily my nationality was then British, and after a while the British Embassy secured my release.

Now writing my memories of Cuba takes more and more time. To brush up my knowledge of history (my training was in Biochemistry and Biophysics and my published scientific papers now approximate a hundred with another one or two on the way). Recently I turned to Wikipedia for practice writing history where I only have one article published in hardcover. This seemed ideal since the “Cuba area” of Wikipedia was full of errors, so using careful citations I began a long series of steady additions and corrections, from the Taino's use of copper to the present politics.

To my horror I found that the "editors" not only were rather uninformed but also very opinionated (even compared to scientific editors), and somewhat less than ethical. One favorite tactic is to claim that a certain entry is "vandalism" find a buddy editor to say the same and then impose a ban on access.

In a recent example the editors kept insisted that Castro was a student "activist," most Cuban histories use the work gangsters, trigger happy etc. So I inserted the modifier "lethal," perhaps not the most tactful word but accurate, because even by that time Castro, as I was to learn much later, had killed perhaps three or four fellow students. These Wikipedia "editors" got bent out of joint accused me of “Vandalism” --it may have been lack of tact perhaps but certainly not Vandalism—they held a drumhead tribunal of two editors and within a few hours I was banned for week.

The matter and the editor’s reactions seemed very interesting, perhaps Wikipedia as it is now could serve to model techniques of thought control on the internet (the Chinese government might like that). So I am preparing a talk at a summer conference on this topic, and discuss how to foil such a putative intent.

Then I found your site and thought I might get some input, quotes, advice, etc….