Friday, June 29, 2007

Benoit's Wikimystery

First off, gracias for the comments on the last entry, I tried to comment on them all as best I could, while keeping in mind that the investigation is still ongoing and trying very hard to keep my own personal speculations at a minimum and keeping only with what has been established as pretty much fact to this point. It isn't easy, main stream media sees a wrestler and prescription steroids in his home and run "Roid Rage" stories with no more facts to the case than that. Don't get me wrong, steroids may eventually play a role in the events that transpired in the Benoit household, but they may not as well. We need only look at the ongoing saga that is major league baseball and the allegations that many of the players either were or still are using steroids, yet we don't see vast numbers of baseball players offing their spouses or families. Assuming that some of the allegations involving baseball players are correct, then we can establish a theory that just because you use steroids, you aren't necessarily going to kill someone. It is this common sense logic that main stream media will pass on in favor of sensationalism, because putting butts in the seats for their advertisers is far more important than getting a story right and doing what passes for responsible journalism.

That being said, I have tended to stay away from the main stream media on this story, so I don't know how much of the wikipedia mystery they have covered, so I will be brief in this aspect of the investigation, just as a little more food for thought for the thinking public.

On Sunday, after it became apparent that Chris Benoit would not be participating in the WWE Vengeance pay per view, an addition to Chris Benoit's profile appeared on his wikipedia page, stating that the reason he would not be participating was the death of his wife. The odd thing is, the bodies of Chris, his wife and son would not be discovered until the following day. Strange to say the least but it could just be coincidence. I remember back when I was in 6th grade, I was throwing a tantrum of sorts, not even sure what the tantrum was about, but it was probably that we couldn't go outside for recess because of the weather and I wished that a tornado would come and blow the school away. Little did I realize, or appreciate at that time as well, that about 10-15 miles away in Apollo, PA a tornado had touched down at roughly that very same time, blowing through a trailer park. One could surmise that because I said it and it was happening in a town not that far away, maybe I had control of the elements, though we all know that the chance that I control the weather is highly unlikely, rather it was just a coincidence and nothing more.

What made the Wikipedia entry even more suspicious however, was that when tracing back the IP address to find who had done the addition to the Benoit entry, it was learned that it came from a computer in Stamford, Connecticut. For those of you playing along with the home version of this blog, Stamford is the very same town that serves as the corporate headquarters for WWE. Other posts had been placed on Wikipedia in the past from that IP address, from a variety of topics and most of the posts were not positive, going from The Sopranos to anti-gay remarks. That being said, the very same IP address was recently also used to do some corrections to an entry for Chavo Guerrero's entry in Wikipedia, clearing up some falsehoods that had appeared under his entry. What is unique about this, is that Chris Benoit was very close with the Guerrero family, his best friend being the recently deceased Eddie Guerrero, Chavo's uncle. Chavo was also one of the wrestlers that received one of the strange text messages Chris had sent out prior to taking his own life and that now the same poster who had corrected the Guerrero entry was now stating that Chris Benoit's wife was dead a day before the authorities knew about it.

Wikinews (eventually I am convinced, everything in the world will have a wikiversion) reported that they have since received a confession from the poster of the information on the Benoit page, which they cross checked with the IP address and determined it to be legitimate, and in it, the poster states that it is all just a coincidence, that he went on the page after finding out Chris wouldn't be wrestling and just threw something on there, not thinking that what he actually wrote was in fact a fact, rather just ramblings of someone who was disappointed in the lack of Benoit's appearance at the PPV. It is one of the disadvantages of running a system where anybody and everybody is allowed to contribute, fact checking can be problematic at best. After all, it wasn't that long ago that someone had posted the comedian Sinbad was dead, only to later retract that information. While I have found wikipedia to do a pretty good job in correcting such errors, it is far from perfect and I tend to take things there with a grain of salt, so to speak. That being said, it creates a new avenue in the Benoit investigation of who knew what and when. Is the computer in Stamford in fact a WWE computer? Does the poster have a connection to the Guerrero's or the Benoit's or both and was privy to information prior to the authorities? Or is it in fact just all a coincidence, and nothing more?

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