Wikipedia: Now you see it, now you don’t. The story is gone — at least for today. DoctorJoeE has been busy updating the Wallace Beery and Ted Healy entries.
Having been involved with Wikipedia for years, however, I would bet that another “citizen scholar” will restore the material eventually. Thus is the nature of Wikipedia: No matter how many times you fix it, someone will come along and break it all over again.
Let’s applaud Doc for his tenacity in shedding light on a small corner of Wikipedia!
ladailymirror.com 
Kudos Doc…
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Thanks to you on behalf of us “Truth Seekers” well done!!!
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A world map showing real-time Wikipedia updates by the “citizen scholar” brigade (those who are not registered but who are listed by IP address) can be seen at:
http://rcmap.hatnote.com/#en
Of no particular intellectual value, but it might help you get on the other side of a hangover 🙂
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Thanks for a fascinating series! I had come across that Ted Healy story myself, very recently, and had wondered about it.
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I take back some of the uncharitable things I’ve previously said about Doc. And again, high kudos to you, Larry, for your strenuous devotion to those often shabbily-treated things called facts. Far from being the enemy of Wikipedia, you’re actually trying to goad it into being the valuable resource that it could be. Hat’s off.
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I’ve just read through all your followup material; thanks for your acknowledgements. I will continue to work on the Healy article, which obviously needs a lot more improvement. This isn’t a full time job for any of us, after all. If you’ve worked on WP in the past, you know that most people WANT articles to be 100% accurate; very few have their own agenda. And I wouldn’t be so pessimistic that bad content will be restored; overall accuracy on the project is improving steadily. As one editor once put it, “The problem with Wikipedia is that it only works in practice. In theory, it can never work.”
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More power to you! I have lots of Healy material coming up, including original coverage from the L.A. Examiner, Herald-Express and the Daily News. I wish these sources were online instead of microfilm — I keep hoping.
I admire your pluck in staying in the fray of Wikipedia. I finally got worn down fixing the Black Dahlia entry only to have it broken all over again.
Cheers,
Larry
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I’ll be following, with great interest. Up until recently, all I knew about Healy was what I had read in Three Stooges literature; I’ve learned a lot in the last couple of weeks, and thank you for that. BTW, the other articles you mentioned (Albert Broccoli, “Good Old Soak”, Eddie Mannix, Howard Strickling, Thelma Todd, and The Trocadero) have all been amended recently by other editors, mostly by removing unsourced content. I completely understand your frustration with working to improve an article, only to have others screw it up. We’ve all been through that, and I’m sure that’s a big reason that we’re down to ~3,000 regular editors on the English edition. But those of us who remain will continue to beckon WP to a higher standard, and a neutral point of view.
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