I‘ve spent a fair bit of time on Wikipedia, as a donor, researcher, and contributor. And you don’t have to spend a lot of time looking at CBC-related Wikipedia articles (our CBC, not those CBCs) before you spot the Wikipedia user “Bearcat” in there — editing, tweaking, moderating, and contributing. So much work, in fact, I’ve often thought Bearcat should be paid by the CBC for all the work!
     Bearcat and I have spoken through Wikipedia, though I’ve never known her/his real identity. But it’s pretty clear to anyone who spends lots of time there, that Bearcat is passionate about the CBC.
     So, is Bearcat a CBC employee? Or maybe the name given to a communications team? I asked Bearcat to answer a few questions:

1. Who are you, really?
I’m a 35-year-old gay man living in Toronto. As you can tell from my Wikipedia username, some people know me as bearcat; in real life, others know me as Craig. I’m between jobs at the moment, so Wikipedia fills up a fair bit of my time (perhaps too much.)

2. Why the fascination with the CBC?
I’ve always been a bit of a media junkie. Canadian media topics (television, radio, newspapers, magazines, etc.) in general are probably the area in which I do the bulk of my Wikipedia editing, and the CBC is obviously a part of that. As well, since I almost always have my radio tuned to one of the CBC Radio networks these days (commercial radio is pretty much unlistenable crap), to a significant extent I’m just following the principle of “write what you know”…which is a pretty obvious maxim to stick to when you’re contributing to an encyclopedia.

3. How many articles do you write or edit every month about the CBC on
wikipedia?
I’ve never really kept count. I don’t generally plan my editing sessions on Wikipedia in advance — for one thing, as a person with administrator privileges, it’s hard to plan sometimes because you never know when some situation is going to come up that requires your attention and thus distracts you from other tasks. But even if that weren’t the case, my editing patterns are fairly random — I’ll usually work on anything that fits within my areas of expertise whenever I happen to run into it, so sometimes that means I’ll work on several CBC-related articles in a short spurt, but other times I may be off doing something completely different and hence don’t touch the CBC articles for several days at a time. So there isn’t really a set number I can give you.

4. Have you ever gotten into any Wikipedia fights with other editors about the content? If so, what was it about?
As I’m sure you know, though some of your readers may not, each article on Wikipedia has a talk page, and some of the disputes that arise can be utterly fascinating and hilarious to watch.
     There was an American editor who first popped up during the CBC labour dispute last year. He didn’t know very much about the CBC, but seemed to have heard on NPR that there was a labour dispute, and this somehow inspired him to make a complete muck of CBC articles on Wikipedia. First he *removed* the program schedules from the articles, and then asked us why the articles didn’t provide detail on CBC’s programming. Then he started writing articles himself on CBC programs that didn’t have articles yet; naturally, given his lack of knowledge, they mostly consisted of vague equivocations like “Music and Company is a program on CBC Radio Two that probably plays classical music.”
      He also tried more than once to propagate the theory that Toronto’s CFMX (Classical 96) should take over CBC Radio Two, which he did mainly by changing the call signs of CBC stations to make it appear as though his fantasy takeover had *already* happened. More recently, he popped up again, claiming that the R2 station in Vancouver had been converted to a rebroadcaster of WFMR in Milwaukee.
     Over the course of the dispute, I also had to explain to him that (a) Canadian temperatures are measured in Celsius, so a daytime high of 30 degrees in the summer does *not* mean there’s still snow on the ground, and (b) the CBC is not a National Public Radio affiliate.
     Wikipedia, needless to say, can be a real education in human psychology at times.

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