by Tim Fenton

How does the blogger who specialises in accusing others of spin pass the time? Well, for the perpetually thirsty Paul Staines, who styles himself Guido Fawkes, there is always the temptation of checking out your own Wikipedia entry.

That entry had, after all, contained items such as the incident outside the entrance to London Bridge tube station, when a camerawoman was knocked over as Staines and his tame gofer Henry Cole barged into a gathering of hacks and snappers attending a photo-op for Ken Livingstone.

Staines got very sore at the suggestion he had knocked over the camerawoman. Staines is also known to be sensitive about his past career which ended in acrimonious litigation and his being declared bankrupt.

Late last Thursday, someone with the same name made a whole raft of changes tohis Wikipedia entry, the first one being annotated “removed false claim that I [note first person] knocked over a camera woman”.

This was followed just three minutes later by another edit, marked “Adds context for bankruptcy declaration”.

And, as the man said, there’s more: “Updates business activities from 2006 to 2012 with links” brings a whiff of vanity, then “Elaborates on circumstances of litigation” looks like more self-justification. And then look: “removed reference to BIJ story as too trivial”.

There then follow another six significant edits to the Staines entry, taking the length of the exercise to a not insignificant 95 minutes.

And a previous session of edits, including such turd-burnishing items as “Cites Guardian Media 100 and GQ Most Influential 100 rankings” and “Amends Guy News TV info adds Guidogram email”.

All this points to a deliberate revision of history from someone who is rather more thin-skinned than they like to pretend.

UPDATE: Staines has owned up to editing his Wikipedia entry, and has excused his selective re-writing of his own particular history by asserting that he had “been invited to by the editors”.

That’s an interesting one, given that there was no sign beforehand that those same editors were unhappy about the content of the entry. And there were, as I’ve shown, two batches of editing several months apart.

UPDATE 2 (by Sunny): It has been pointed out on Twitter that Wikipedia’s own rules strongly discourage people to edit their own entry. Hilarious.