User:Adpete/Christian Porter Conspiracy Theory

This page is dedicated to the explaining facts behind the Christian Porter Conspiracy Theory, i.e. the theory that there was a concerted effort to erase data from the Christian Porter Wikipedia page between 28 February and 3 March, 2021.

On 26 February 2021, the story broke of a current male cabinet minister being accused of a rape in Sydney in 1988 (ABC News, 26 February). There were 16 men in cabinet at the time, and naturally there was a lot of speculation over who it could be. About two days later, some time on 28 February, some people connected the dots and worked out that Porter was in Sydney in 1988 for a debating competition, so was almost certainly the politician in question.

It is important to point out that, before 28 February, there was nothing in the article about Porter and debating competitions, in Sydney or anywhere else. This can be seen by reading the The 25 February 2021 version of the article. So the net result of all the edits was to add, not remove, information on Porter's debating career.

Two main sources were used to place Porter in Sydney in 1988:
 * The Four Corners program "Inside the Canberra Bubble". This does not specify Sydney, but simply says "Young Porter was a champion debater who was selected for Australia’s national schools team."
 * Porter's 1987 Hale School magazine, which said Porter "was again selected in the Australian [debating] team, to compete in the 1988 World Intervarsity competition", which people (correctly) deduced was the World Universities Debating Championship, which was in Sydney in 1988.
 * The magazine can be found on the Internet Archive site at https://web.archive.org/web/20140701134643/http://www.oldhale.com/images/oldhale---poosodequa.pdf . (Be warned, if you want to download it, it's 34 MB!) As far as I can determine, all references were to the archived version, and the original version has not been on the web at least since November 2020.

From that point, up until the time with Porter publicly announced he was the subject of the allegations on Wednesday 3 March, there were 47 edits to the Christian Porter article. I have gone through them all and classified them according to the following code: I = Inserted information about Porter's debating; R = Removed information about Porter's debating; U = Unrelated edit; A = Administrator edit.

I1 U2 I3 R4 I5 U6 I7 I8 R9 U10 I11 U12 I13 I14 I15 I16 R17 U18 U19 I20 R21 U22 I23 R24 A25 A26 I27 R28 U29 I30 U31 U32 U33 I34 R35 A36 I37 I38 R39 I40 U41 A42 U43 U44 U45 U46 U47

The first thing to notice is that only 8 of these removed information about his debating. So while "47 edits over 3 days" might sound incriminating, it does not mean a wholesale removal of material, as some have suggested. In fact, if you compare the versions at the start and the end of these edits, you will see that material has been added, including material about his debating.

The only edits which removed information about Porter's debating history are the eight edits beginning with "R". These were as follows:
 * R4 by User:E.jokovich, removed a reference to the school magazine, but left in other details of Porter's debating, including the Four Corners reference.
 * R9 by User:5225C, removed an uncited statement about Porter's debating from the lead paragraph.
 * R17 by User:Jevansen, removed two uncited comments about Porter, which were poorly written and attacks on his character, i.e. this was simple removal of WP:vandalism.
 * R21 by User:5225C removed cited information about Porter's debating (both the Four Corners and school magazine citations).
 * R24 by an unregistered user with IP address 175.38.215.178, deleted a short but uncited sentence about Porter's debating.
 * R28 by User:Malcolmxl5 removed edit I27, and hid what that edit showed (a procedure known as WP:Oversight). Judging by the comment User:Malcolmxl5 used when editing ("No, we can’t use Twitter as a source for that"), the deleted edit (I27) said that some Twitter users had identified Porter as the subject of the allegations.
 * R35 by User:5225C, deleted a short but uncited reference to Porter's debating, a very similar type of deletion to R28.
 * R39 by User:5225C, deleted cited information about Porter's debating; a very similar type of deletion to R21.

If we are looking for suspicious edits trying to remove evidence of Porter being a debater, or being in Sydney in 1988, we can immediately discount edits R4 (because it left some information in), R17 (because it removed blatant vandalism, the type which is always appropriate to remove), and R28 (because a Wikipedia administrator thought it was serious enough to remove and hide). That leaves R24, by an unregistered editor; and four edits by User:5225C (R9, R21, R35 and R39).

We can also discount User:5225C as being on a mission to remove information. If you look at the article talk page (Talk:Christian Porter), you can see them justifying the edits on the grounds that they believed the edits were against Wikipedia policy. It can also be seen that this user later changed their mind and supported mention of the debating, saying: "Per WP:INDISCRIMINATE we don't just include facts because they are true. Porter is known for being a politician, not a high school debater, so that he was on a state/national team is not an inherently notable fact about him, it must receive some indpendent coverage. Since Adpete has confirmed this was discussed in Four Corners I don't oppose its inclusion". This is perfectly normal on Wikipedia: some editors think something should be included, others think is should not be, and eventually a compromise is reached. This is evidence of different editors having different opinions and coming to a consensus, not of a political cover-up.

So that leaves us with a single anonymous edit, R24. which removed the uncited sentence "where he was involved in debating competitions, travelling to Adelaide and Sydney", with the comment "Source?". That may have been politically motivated, but can also be justified in the same way User:5225C justified their edits.

So there you have it: exactly one anonymous edit removing information about Christian Porter's debating career, with no attempt to remove the information again after it was re-added. If this was an attempt by Porter's staff to sanitise his article, it was half-hearted and ineffective, to say the least. A far simpler explanation is that this was the normal flurry of editing which occurs when a politician becomes the subject of media speculation.

Disclosure: User:Adpete, the author of this article, has edited the Christian Porter Wikipedia article.