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This week, inspired by the Discourse™ around the role of kink in Pride, I did something I’ve been meaning to do for ages and rewrote the Wikipedia entry for Operation Spanner, an infamous 1980s police investigation into gay and bisexual sadomasochists. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation…
I started researching Spanner a couple of years ago, having first learned about the case as a teenager on — where else? — Wikipedia. Here’s the citation-free opening sentence of the entry as it appeared at that time. 
This Wikipedia entry was more or less the only online source of information about Operation Spanner, but as I began to look into the case IRL, I realised just how inaccurate it was.
For one thing, Spanner wasn’t “carried out [in] Manchester”. It was a nationwide investigation coordinated by the Metropolitan Police in London. (The investigation did have its roots in a raid carried out in Bolton, Greater Manchester, but that predated Spanner.)
That might be a relatively harmless error, but a harmless error on Wikipedia can pretty quickly become documented “fact”. Last October, The Guardian mentioned Spanner for the first time in a decade, and this is how they described it.
Ironically, The Guardian’s own reporting from the time would have been a better source of information, had the newspaper consulted itself rather than Wikipedia.
More insidious was this citation-free passage, which painted the institutional forces behind Operation Spanner as — at worst — bumblingly inept, and at best, fully justified in their hounding of the defendants (after all, they thought a murder had taken place!)
It’s impossible to say for sure whether police ever really thought people had been killed, but here’s what I’ve managed to unpack from that story over the course of my research.
Another priority was placing the investigation in its proper societal context. In my opinion, it’s impossible to understand Operation Spanner without setting it against the backdrop of 1980s Britain…
… and considering its role as a flagship operation of the Met’s notorious Obscene Publications Squad.
Here’s a detail I love, and an amazing rejoinder to today's Respectability Politics™ crowd: in February 1991, thousands marched to jointly defend sadomasochism, cottaging and LGBT foster carers!
And it worked! John Major’s government was forced to U-turn on both the cottaging legislation and the foster care guidelines.
A month ago, the Wikipedia entry for Operation Spanner was 1400 words long and contained a total of 11 citations. My version is 3400 words long and contains 72 citations. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation…
I think it’s a big improvement, but the entry shouldn’t be frozen in amber now that I'm done with it. If you know something I don’t about the case, or can spot any of the errors I’ve inevitably made, get in there and start editing!
And if you’ve ever been dismayed by the inaccuracy of a Wikipedia entry, I highly recommend doing something about it! I’m not an academic, but with the help of @BishopsgateInst (t/y @stefdickers!), @LSELibrary and more, I was able to find out more than I ever imagined possible!
Finally, if you’re interested to hear a first-person account of Operation Spanner from one of those targeted, please do check out my short film Lasting Marks, which was the impetus to start researching the case in the first place. vimeo.com/330121673
