McSeegan Goes Ballistic on his Wikipedia Talk Page

omment 1

Hi. This is the talk page for.... Please advise as to how to format
the footnotes that I have included for some of his many publications.
I have verified that there is one living in Maryland.

As to whether there is a different authoring papers on similar
topics-- I leave this to be answered through debate and facts. Thank
you Freyfaxi 12:44, 26 April 2007 (UTC)

[edit] comment 2

This entry was not authorized or authored by Edward McSweegan. The
writer of this error-filled page is identified as
freyfaxi@...deleted..., a self-described Lyme disease Activist
obsessed with the notion that Lyme disease-caused by the tick-borne
bacterium, ''Borrelia burgdorferi''-is actually some kind of
engineered bioweapon. Lyme activists have a long history of
propagating fantastic fantasies and conspiracy theories through the
Internet, and harassing scientists and physicians who disagree with
their opinions and delusions (NYT Magazine, June 17, 2001). Some of
these activists have been jailed; others apparently have been placed
in psychiatric hospitals for a time, though obviously not long enough.

In any case, the information below is inaccurate. This should not come
as a surprise when an online encyclopedia allows vandals, children,
conspiracy nuts and the mentally ill to write and edit entries. Until
this entry can be removed completely, I have made some corrections to
illustrate just how farcical are this page and its author. Emcsweegan
17:41, 1 July 2007 (UTC)emcsweegan

[edit] comment 3

What the hell is wrong with you people? Bored? Unemployed? Can't
afford enough medication? Emcsweegan 23:28, 19 July 2007 (UTC)

[edit] material removed from article

I've removed the following rant from the article:

'''Edward McSweegan''' did not approve or author this entry. He has no
interest in being part of an online source of transient, inaccurate
gossip compiled by anonymous and irresponsible vandals, adolescents,
and busybodies.

In keeping with the Wikipedia tradition, some of material below is
dated and therefore inaccurate. In addition, all of the material was
lifted, without permission, from the IOM and NIAID websites. Yet, this
is a huge improvement over the original entry, which was so full of
inaccuracies and distortions that every sentence had to be corrected
and referenced. That edited entry has since been removed by
Wikipedia's nameless guardians of digital fluff.

Like the guy standing before a firing squad who says, "I'm flattered
by the attention," I have similar feelings about Wikipedia's
insistence that I be included in their compilation of junk information
authored by high schoolers, pseudo-intellectuals, fake experts,
crackpots, and online stalkers.

You can only be put before a firing squad once, but Wikipedia offers
endless rounds of entries, edits, revisions, rewrites, updates,
clarifications, addendums, supplements and postscripts, on and on,
into the endless future. At least they spelled my name right.

Studerby 04:14, 21 July 2007 (UTC)

[edit] comment 4

Why? It's true. None of this online crap was approved or authored by
me (EMS). Why do I have to be listed on this site? I did, however,
send copies of these latest Wiki entries to various friendly reporters
trying to get them interested in doing another story on Wiki as a
source of mis- and disinformation and all around junk data. I also
included Wikipedia in a note to the Institute of Medicine suggesting
the IOM Forum explore the topic of online disinformation related to
infectious disease. Emcsweegan 13:25, 21 July 2007 (UTC)

[edit] coment 5

Hey! Who keeps editing this crap! What's wrong with you??? Do you
really care so much about me? Who are you? You keep writing false
information about me and its got to stop. You don't know a goddamn
thing about me, about NIH policies, about Lyme disease or anything
else. If I want a Wiki entry I'll write one. Not some anonymous
***.


Emcsweegan 17:25, 21 July 2007 (UTC)

Dr. McSweegan, I'm not the same person who wrote that article--I was
actually trying to bring it up to our standards. Please work with us
here. Blueboy96 17:41, 21 July 2007 (UTC)

[edit] comment 6

I can keep adding a disclaimer to my unauthorized entry until the
effort attracts the attention of the media and lawyers. I've already
contacted the Wiki Comm office asking for a call back about his
juvenile nonsense. If Wikipedia thinks I merit an entry in its pages
then Wikipedia has yet another thing wrong with it: an inability to
discern the important and the notable from the trivial and boring. EMS

I've notified the Wikipedia:Biographies of living persons/
Noticeboard hoping to attract more experienced editors to this article
to help us figure what, if anything, should be done. --ElKevbo 19:13,
21 July 2007 (UTC)

I noticed your Wiki page "is deliberately blank." I want only
the same thing. A blank page. EMS Emcsweegan 20:04, 21 July 2007 (UTC)

Your user page is blank. I think you have confused my user
page with an encyclopedia article about me. I do not warrant an
article. I'm very sorry that you feel that we are "out to get you" and
I assure you that I am not (I can't speak for other editors but I'm
pretty sure about them, too). But, as Studerby points out below, you
have been the subject of multiple, non-trivial articles, interviews,
and similar incidents. Therefore you meet our criteria for being the
subject of an encyclopedia article.
We welcome your comments and suggestions on how to improve
this article. You're even welcome to participate in the current
discussion regarding the possible deletion of this article. But please
keep in mind our goal to make a free encyclopedia; we simply can't
have an editor, even a very passionate one, disrupting the project due
to a difference in opinion and a refusal to allow publicly-available
information to be cited and referenced. --ElKevbo 20:54, 21 July 2007
(UTC)

Dr. McSweegan: you've been the subject of public comment by a
United States Senator, a subject of national news, and you regularly
inject your opinions into public debate on health issues of national
significance, beyond the scope of any employment at NIH or wherever
you're working now. All of that is rather incompatible with being a
"nobody". Studerby 20:35, 21 July 2007 (UTC)

Who are you? A somebody or a nobody? One news story and the demented
ravings of one woman in Ct. (jailed for internet harassment, by the
way) makes me a "somebody"? By that standard only the dead are
nobodies. And no I don't inject my opinions. I write a monthly column
about infectious diseases for a small town newspaper. Only you and the
Internet make it out to be more than it is. But I guess this struggle
to prevent Wikipedia from defining who and what I am is going to end
up making me a somebody. I guess then I'll really need a Wiki bio. I
suppose there's some irony in there somewhere. EMS

"One news story?" Your name appears in roughly a dozen articles in
the Washington Post on several different topics. That "small town
newspaper" happens to publish everything on the Internet, so it's not
exactly a "small town newspaper" anymore; the material is available to
anyone in the world interested in the topic. In terms of distribution,
there's almost no such thing as a "small town paper" anymore. It
appears that you've even been quoted as an expert in National
Geographic (though I don't have the actual quote, just an index entry
suggesting it exists). Studerby 23:37, 21 July 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Oversight requested

I have requested that all versions of this article prior to today be
oversighted. The original version is, in my opinion, the definition of
an attack page, and there seems to be merit to Dr. McSweegan's
complaint that this version is still visible. Blueboy96 01:28, 22 July
2007 (UTC)

Done ... faster than I expected. Hopefully this fixes things.
Blueboy96 01:49, 22 July 2007 (UTC)

Good call, I would have done that, but was unaware that there
was a formal process for it (should've guessed and gone hunting for
it, mea culpa, mea culpa); it looks like all the revisions before
ThuranX's stub version are gone, which is a good thing. Studerby
01:55, 22 July 2007 (UTC)

.

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