It's long been known that the winners of the world get to write history. Sarah Palin supporters? They apparently have to settle for vandalizing Paul Revere's Wikipedia entry.
Computerworld reports that Revere's entry has been besieged by people attempting to alter the section on Revere's famous "midnight ride" in order to bring it into line with Palin's recent assertion that silversmith/patriot Revere made the ride in order to warn the British.
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Though consensus has long held that Revere made the ride in order to alert his fellow colonists about advancing British troops, Palin offered an alternate theory during a recent stop on her bus tour.
"He who warned, uh, the British that they weren’t going to be taking away our arms uh by ringing those bells and making sure as he’s riding his horse through town to send those warning shots and bells that we were going to be secure and we were going to be free and we were going to be armed," Palin said of Revere while in Boston on Friday.
Since that utterance, according to Computerworld, Revere's page has been altered with misinformation approximately 15 times in an apparent effort to make reality conform to Palin's assertion.
"Revere did not shout the phrase later attributed to him ('The British are coming!'), largely because the mission depended on secrecy and the countryside was filled with british army patrols," one such entry — which has since been removed — claimed. "Also, most colonial residents at the time considered themselves British as they were all legally British subjects."
Other users requested that Palin's remarks about Revere's midnight ride be added to Revere's entry verbatim, as fact. The requests were shot down by Wikipedia editors.
Despite their fervent efforts, however, Wikimedia spokesperson Jay Walsh tells Computerworld that it's unlikely users will succeed in their efforts to rewrite history.
"It's a difficult medium to go in and say this is the truth when you have so many people watching the page making sure there's no vandalism to it," Walsh said.
Perhaps Wikipedia needs its own version of Revere, to warn the site's editors about advancing hordes of partisan revisionists.