Hello everyone,

The last few days seem to have seen a great deal of back and forth in edits and on the talk section of Wikipedia’s page on email. Pro-Ayyadurai forces have jumped in to seize on the Huffington Post series as documentation to rewrite the text to give him a staring role. A cynic might speculate that the Wikipedia page is the real prize and the Huffington Post articles merely a means to an end. They have, thus far, been beaten back with heavy resistance by Wikipedia loyalists. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Email#Recent_published_research:_1978_Invention_by_Shiva_Ayyadurai.  

It is interesting to see the social processes at work in shaping what for most will be the first and only destination in a search for an authoritative account of something. I did notice many references to Ayyadurai being edited over the past couple of years into other, less policed, Wikipedia pages. This included about a dozen references to his book being added to various pages before it was even published. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/Arttechlaw

Ayyadurai himself saw the removal of previous references to him from various articles as some kind of conspiracy and documented the process as part of how “systems of power react when they feel threatened.” http://www.inventorofemail.com/Removal-Of-References-On-Wikipedia-To-VA-Shiva-Ayyadurai-As-Inventor.asp

Tom