Wikipedia says that Grant Shapps, the bullying, untruthful millionaire spam kingpin who chairs the UK Conservative Party is behind an account that vandalised the entries for senior party officials and edited out references to Shapps’s spamming career.
The account, Contribsx, has been blocked from future edits. It was used to smear the Wikipedia entries for Tory grandees who had bucked the party line, like foreign secretary Philip Hammond and international development secretary Justine Greening, as well as party strategist Lynton Crosby.
Wikipedia editors say there’s evidence that the account is “a sockpuppet of Grant Shapps’ previous accounts on Wikipedia … and based on the evidence the account is either run by Shapps directly or being run by someone else – an assistant or a PR agency – but under his clear direction.”
Shapps denies it.
Little is publicly known about Contribsx despite numerous edits. On the user page there are claims of being “a floater. Have voted for all three main parties at different times in my life. Not being flaky, but just prefer to think issues through and find the manifesto that best represents my views at any one time”.
Wikipedia tracked a range of IP addresses used by Contribsx to a web hosting service regularly employed by internet spammers. The same service had been used by an anonymous user in 2013 to remove material from Wikipedia related to How To Corp, to Michael Green and to Shapps’ past sockpuppetry.
These anonymous edits expend much energy on editing Shapps’ political credentials so he is listed on Wikipedia as chairman of the Conservative party. He is, in fact, co-chairman, Lord Feldman having been co-chairman since 2010, initially alongside Lady Warsi.
Senior editors at Wikipedia became exasperated by this anonymous amending with one responding on 20 July 2013 by saying: “Dear Grant Shapps, clearly your and your supporter’s dodgy behaviour knows no bounds.”
Grant Shapps accused of editing Wikipedia pages of Tory rivals [Randeep Ramesh/The Guardian]