Friday, November 28, 2008

The “Erdős–Bacon Number" or the Winchester Atrocity? Maintaining Standards at Wikipedia

By Nicholas Stix

On October 15, the tortured corpses of newlyweds, Marine Sgt. Jan Pawel Pietrzak, 24, and Quiana Jenkins-Pietrzak, 26, were found in their Winchester, CA home. Mrs. Pietrzak had been gang-raped, and husband and wife had each been bound, gagged, and shot, execution-style, in the back of the head.

Four “Marines” are in custody: Pvt. Emrys John, 18; Lance Cpl. Tyrone “Cripgeneral” Miller, 20; Pvt. Kevin Darnell Cox, 20; and Pvt. Kesaun “Psycho” Sykes, 21. According to the Riverside County Sheriff’s Office, all four confessed to the torture-murders, though there was some dispute as to who the rapists were. Each said he was innocent of the rape—though Sykes confessed to cutting Mrs. Pietrzak’s clothes off of her—but that his three accomplices had raped Mrs. Pietrzak. One thing that Miller, Cox, and Sykes all agreed on, however, was that John was the shooter. (In court, all four suspects have since pleaded “not guilty” to the crimes, which are death-penalty eligible.)

Sgt. Pietrzak was a helicopter mechanic at Miramar Air Station, in San Diego; John and Miller were his subordinates. Pietrzak was white; his wife was black, as are the defendants.

The official story is that the crime was committed for “financial gain,” but there was no financial gain. The killers took the husband’s digital camera and the wife’s engagement ring, but made no effort to sell them.

This was a racial killing. I believe that the motive was humiliation and murder, based on the killers’ racism—and thus their rage that a white man had taken a black woman for his wife—and the items the killers stole souvenirs, with which to recall and savor their crimes. As a black former Marine, Sabrina, who had married a white fellow Marine while in the service and whom black racists put through hell for it argued,

Everything about this case points to a racially motivated hate crime which is fueled by sexual jealousy! It is as much of a hate crime as what happened in 1955 to Emmett Till and in 1998 to Matthew Shepherd….



Wikipedia’s Presentation of the Case

Wikipedia claims to provide “the sum of all human knowledge,” yet as of 2:28 a.m., November 28, the only mention of this crime in all of Wikipedia’s “2,638,091 articles in English,” is the following, 22-word mention in the entry for “Winchester, California.”

Winchester, California

Winchester is a census-designated place (CDP) in Riverside County, California, USA. As of the 2000 census, the CDP had a total population of 2,155.

Largely rural for most of its history, Winchester experienced rapid growth during the housing construction boom in the early to mid 2000s. However, construction and growth slowed when the housing bubble burst in 2007, resulting in a housing market correction. In October of 2008, the town was rocked by the brutal murders of Marine Corps Sgt. Jan Pawel Pietrzak and his wife, Quiana.


Then again, as I showed in my Wikipedia exposé in the July issue of American Renaissance, where race is concerned, such non-scholarship is par for the course at The Pretend Encyclopedia (TPE).


The Real Stuff of Encyclopedias: The “Erdős–Bacon Number”

The Wikipedia habitués whom I call, among other sobriquets, Wikithugs, make sure that none of Wikipedia’s entries on black-on-white atrocities honestly depict the crimes.

TPE also purports to be an inexhaustible font of “knowledge” about things like the “Erdős–Bacon number,” to which a 3,376-word entry has been devoted, replete with 69 footnotes.

What is an “Erdős–Bacon number,” you ask? Nothing at all, really. The notion is a third-hand trivia game, derived from the trivia game, “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon,” which was itself derived—no doubt by a fan of character actor Kevin Bacon—from the notion embodied in the title of John Guare’s 1990 play, Six Degrees of Separation. Another person—doubtless a camp follower of Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdős—then created an imitation Bacon trivia game, and combined the two.

Guare’s idea is that six degrees of acquaintance separates every human being from every other human being. Thus, limiting the notion’s application to Bacon’s acting career is contrary to Guare’s idea. Of course, few of the multitudes who use the phrase, “six degrees of Kevin Bacon,” in order to sound hip and knowledgeable have ever heard of, let alone read or seen the stage or film version of Six Degrees of Separation. (This writer has seen both versions.)

During the early 1980s, black con man David Hampton notoriously made fools of a series of white, leftwing, Manhattan socialites, claiming to be the son of Sidney Poitier (who, unbeknownst to them, had no sons!), in order to momentarily drop into their lives and homes, and by the way, pocket some symbolic small change from them. Guare, who was friends with some of the victims, fictionalized the real-life exploits of Hampton, who died in 2003, in order to meditate on the trivial, empty lives of rich Manhattanites—the lefty part somehow never made it into the play—and their desperate need for connection to “the other.”

(During the same period, I encountered alcoholic hustlers pulling similar cons in Vienna and Paris.)

For all the blather and footnotes, no one reading the Wikipedia/TPE entry for “Erdős–Bacon number” will even learn of this third-hand trivia game’s origins.

A person’s Erdős–Bacon number is the sum of one’s Erdős number—which measures the “collaborative distance” in authoring mathematical papers between that individual and Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdős—and one’s Bacon number—which represents the number of links, through roles in films, by which the individual is separated from American actor Kevin Bacon. The lower the number, the closer an individual is to Erdős and Bacon.


But Wikipedians and their third-hand trivia-loving counterparts in the “real” world refuse even to follow the rules of their own game. Thus, the first name on TPE’s Erdős–Bacon number “table” is that of Hank Aaron. But Hank Aaron never authored any mathematical papers. Why is he listed on the table? A Wikipedian gave a “reason,” but since it is completely at odds with the rules of the game, it can’t be the real reason.

What is the point of inventing a game, any game, if the players immediately throw its rules out the window? And aside from the fundamental issue of having “encyclopedia articles” about third-hand trivia games, what is the point of having encyclopedic-looking entries about such games, if those writing them violate their rules, even in their descriptions of the games, and fail to provide their historical background, which is their only aspect which is of intellectual or encyclopedic interest? (In case you were wondering, the “Erdős–Bacon number” entry is not a Wikipedia self-parody. The people dominating TPE suffer from extreme irony deficiency.)

Thus, Wikipedia is worthless, even as a compendium of trivia! That’s why I call it variously The Pretend Encyclopedia and Antipedia.


Let’s Stop Pretending

To learn more about the racist crime that I have dubbed The Winchester Atrocity, start with my two VDARE articles, and then hit the embedded hyperlinks in them to get to other material:

“The Knoxville Horror with a Twist—Four Black Marines Murder Interracial Couple in Winchester, CA; MSM Censors Details, of Course”

and

“The Winchester Atrocity: Down the MSM Memory Hole While Cops Claim It’s Not a ‘Racial Crime’”

(This article used “nofollow” tags in its links to Wikipedia. In getting everyone to link to it, in order to maintain its page rank, TPE is the universe’s biggest spammer, yet it refuses to return the courtesy. It uses “nofollow” tags for all outgoing links, so that hitting them does not help the page rank of any site to which it links, except for those in which Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy “Jimbo” Wales has a commercial interest. Thus, I am returning the favor. To find out how you can return the favor to WP/TPE/Wales, read this informative article: “Preventing comment spam.”)

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Dude... it's a wiki, not a faceless conspiracy. Write the article yourself. That's the whole point.