Broadway runs east of Seventh Avenue north of 45th Street. Donald Trump owns an office building on Sixth Avenue. Lee Brown, the early 1990s police commissioner who presided over the highest murder rate in the city’s history, was a hero in the war against crime.
In what otherwordly New York City can this be true? In the wacky world of Wikipedia, the engine of ignorance “compiled by volunteers” and masquerading as a legitimate reference work. Its unreliability is not exactly news – it’s the bane of educators who must teach pupils not to trust it.
For all its popularity, Wikipedia is an agent of intellectual negation, based on the seditious idea that truth is subjective. Let anyone weigh in on the Boer War, or cyclotrons, or hula hoops – surely, the theory goes, if mistakes are made, they’ll be promptly corrected by more knowledgeable contributors to the site or by in-house editors.
But it’s a joke. To prove it to yourself, just check out any subject you happen to know well – as I did on New York City real estate and restaurants, which I write about in The Post every week.
I am also an editor, and in this capacity I confess to consulting Wikipedia on such essential matters as which actress plays which bimbo in “Gossip Girl.” Thanks to its habit or posting press releases, Wikipedia can actually be useful when it comes to pop cultural sensations of the here and now.
But when it comes to the city’s geography and streetscape, Wikipedia can be wildly out of date – like its notoriously wrong-headed story on Hunts Point, which (to the neighborhood’s dismay) cites 20-year old crime data.
Other entries read like dumb bus-tour guides’ off-base spiels. One states that the East Village “is considered part of the Lower East Side” – by morons, maybe, but not by anyone who has ever crossed Houston Street. Nor was the East Village “formerly known as the Bowery.”
It would take all the space on this page to straighten out the Times Square article’s zany misconstruing of past history and ignorance of how its present-day current condition came to be. But for a hint of how out-to-lunch it is, just check out the top photo depicting the scene looking south from 45th Street. The caption helpfully mixes up Broadway and Seventh Avenue, perhaps accounting for the dazed look of confused tourists I see there every day.
Count on Wikipedia to omit the most important single fact on a given subject. Of the New York Palace Hotel, it says former owner Harry Helmsley hired architect Emery Roth to design a 55-story tower to “blend in” with the historic Villard Houses at the site. Of course, although the entry’s writers (maybe the hotel PR people?) don’t mention it, Helmsley, over a period of years, infamously tried to demolish the Villard Houses – a widely reported preservation saga of the 1970s that’s common knowledge to locals, but unknown to Wikipedia.
Because anyone can tap into the site and put in his or her two cents, it’s not uncommon for an article to contradict itself. Anyone trying to learn about the Freedom Tower at the World Trade Center site will end up with a headache hoping to figure out what the endless entry is trying to say.
It’s such an incoherent maze of mangled chronology and outright falsehoods, you don’t know where to laugh first. For starters, there’s no “residential tower” planned at Ground Zero. A museum will not highlight “many of the different aspects of the past and future World Trade Centers.” The Port Authority did not “organize a competition through the LMDC” to come up with a master plan in 2002 – it was entirely the work of the LMDC.
Wikipedia is no smarter about our power players than our landmarks. Donald Trump’s entry says he “completed” 1290 Sixth Ave., an office building he neither built, owns nor has anything to do with. Wikipedia says he “bought and renovated” 40 Wall in 1996 for $35 million. The real story is that Trump famously bought the then-vacant property for a chump-change $1 million in 1995 and fixed it up later.
Stupider yet, the article snarks that although Trump values 40 Wall at $400 million, city tax officials assess it at just $90 million. Such assessed valuations have nothing to do with a building’s market value. But how would untrained contributors unfamiliar with the most basic principles of real estate know that?
At its worst, Wikipedia dangerously rewrites history. Take the entry on Police Commissioner Ray Kelly. When Kelly replaced Lee Brown as commissioner under Mayor David Dinkins in the early 1990s, we are told he “saw the continuing reduction of crime that started with Lee Brown’s community policing concept.”
Most New Yorkers who recall that period will guffaw at that, but readers outside the city or newly arrived might take it as true. In fact, although crime dipped ever so slightly in Dinkins’ last 18 months in office, it assuredly did not under Kelly’s predecessor, a top cop so lame he was widely ridiculed as “Out of Town” Brown.
Nor is it true that Kelly “aggressively pursued quality of life issues such as the squeegee men” – that didn’t start until Rudy Giuliani was elected and he made Bill Bratton his first police commissioner. Wikipedia unfathomably goes on to say the new Giuliani administration tried to “minimize the effect of the crime-fighting policies already in place.” Wha?
Nowhere is Wikipedia worse than when it comes to the history of this newspaper. Its malicious and ignorant essay on the New York Post starts off by saying, “Since 1976, it has been owned by Australian-born billionaire Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation.”
Except, of course, that for six well-chronicled years it was not – from 1988-mid-1993, a period that was crucial in the paper’s history and was the subject of a book I wrote, “It’s Alive!” Wikipedia lifts one irrelevant quote from it without mentioning the book, but attributing it to me as “executive editor” – a title I have not held in 15 years.
The dimwitted entry claims The Post’s famous 1983 front-page headline, “Headless Body in Topless Bar,” was written by a onetime employee named Paul Beeman. In fact, it’s a matter of historical record that the headline was written by then-managing editor VA Musetto (who is today The Post’s film editor and Cine File columnist).
Mr. Beeman – a low-level editor on the midnight-8 a.m. shift – did not even work at The Post in 1983. But why should that matter in Wikipedia’s world, where anyone can say anything about anyone or anything, and call it truth?