As any young aspiring politician knows, carefully maintaining your image online is key. And no tool in your early-career arsenal is quite as effective as Wikipedia.
Luckily for Buttigieg, there is at least one person carefully looking out for his needs on Wikipediasomeone who has followed his political career from its very beginning, and whose interests and connections track his own with eerie sympathy. This Wikipedia user was there to post the sites first mention of Pete Buttigiegs political career in 2010, and to write the very first iteration of Pete Buttigiegs Wikipedia page. They go by the username Streeling. Streeling is an old Irish word that means wandering, the sort of word that might be familiar to the son of a scholar who studied James Joyce. Joyce uses the noun streel, meaning a disreputable woman, in Ulysses, which Pete Buttigieg has cited as the book that influenced him the most.
The Wikipedia user known as Streeling, however, is not Pete Buttigieg, according to the Buttigieg presidential campaign. I reached out to them after trying and failing to dismiss a tip Id gotten about the account possibly being the mayors own. Its not his. Hes never had a Wikipedia account, Buttigieg spokesperson Chris Meagher told me over email. The account has no connection to Pete Buttigiegs past or present political campaigns, Meagher says, and Pete Buttigieg has no knowledge of whos responsible for it. It appears it is an overzealous supporter of the mayors, Meagher said. He does not know whose it is.
Streeling has also denied being connected with Pete Buttigieg. I am not affiliated with this candidates campaign, Streeling wrote after creating the original Pete Buttigieg Wikipedia page just hours after the 2011 South Bend mayoral race had been called in Buttigiegs favor. The more I looked into Streeling, however, the more the various denials around any affiliation with Buttigieg seemed bizarre and, in a few instances, explicitly untrue. Though why a campaign would try to dissemble about something so completely benign is unclear.
Streeling appears to have first made their account in July of 2010, when they went to the page for Indiana elections and, as they notified other users, added all the major statewide candidates, and referenced their various campaign sites. One of those added candidates was Pete Buttigieg, who was running for state treasurer.
Streeling also took a bit of time that day to do some grammar-related tweaks on the Indiana State Treasurer page, in addition to adding a few citations on various state government pages.
About a month later, still during the campaign for treasurer, Streeling made a few stimulus packagerelated edits. And another month after that, they updated literary scholar Terry Eagletons page to note that he had spent a semester as a visiting professor at the University of Notre Dame, in the English department where Buttigiegs father had been teaching since 1980.
Later, in 2011, Streeling added the musician David Wax to the notable alumni page for Deep Springs College, which Wax attended before enrolling in Harvard, where Pete Buttigieg got his undergraduate degree. Wax, notably, played at Buttigiegs wedding. On his website, Wax described Buttigieg as one of my oldest friends.
Updating pages about notable alumni appears to be one of Streelings passionsespecially when they are pages that have failed to recognize Mayor Pete Buttigieg. In 2011, for instance, Streeling added Buttigiegs name (describing him as Mayor-elect of South Bend, Indiana) to the list of notable Rhodes Scholars exactly one day after hed won his mayoral campaign.
Six minutes later, Streeling also went on to create the page for Pete Buttigieg on Wikipedia.
In an entirely unrelated aside, while Wikipedias rules strictly forbid users from editing pages that present a conflict of interest (pages about themselves, for example, or about their employers), all but the most obvious cases generally rely on the honor system for enforcement.
Back to the matter at hand, in a comment on this new page creation, Streeling wrote that they had created profile for a notable politician (bio needs developing however, too campaign-y in my opinion). Another six minutes after that, Streeling took to the Pete Buttigieg Talk page (where Wikipedia editors discuss any issues related to the entry) to expand on the fact that they definitely didnt endorse the campaign-y tone of the page they had just finished writing:
I think this is a notable political figure, though I do think his bio needs more outside sources just to avoid any hint of campaigning. I am not affiliated with this candidates campaign, and put this up after his election was over.
They also noted that they just wanted to emphasize that this wasnt intended as some sort of campaign product.
Next, Streeling went on to update the notable alumni entry for Buttigieg on the page for St. Joseph High School, changing Democratic nominee to Mayor-elect. And exactly one day after Buttigieg assumed office in January of 2012, Streeling changed the qualifier to read simply Mayor. A few weeks later, Streeling added Mayor Pete to Wikipedias page for notable Buttigiegsbetween Australian rugby player John Buttigieg and Maltese poet Ray Buttigiegbringing the total number up to a whopping five notable Buttigiegs. ... More recently, in February of 2014, Streeling also did some minor upkeep on the Wikipedia page for Skagen Denmark, a Fossil-owned watch company. A few years later, Buttigiegs then-boyfriend, Chasten Glezman, would propose to him with none other than a Skagen watch. And this year, Buttigiegs presidential campaign would release what is essentially a Mayor Pete mood board for supporters to design against. That design kit includes, again, a Skagen watch.
Taken together, Streelings preoccupations seem to be the sorts of preoccupations that might consume a person like Peter Paul Montgomery Buttigieg. Indeed, the fact that Streelings interest in Buttigiegiana extends so far back makes it hard to believe there could be some wholly independent other person who cared so much about such an obscure political figure.
Before Streeling built the Pete Buttigieg page in 2011, a user named Hanumang06 created a Peter Buttigieg page in July of 2010. It was deleted less than a month after its creation because of Buttigiegs then lack of notability. In the discussion preceding that deletion, one Wikipedia editor noted a comment Hanumang06 had made while uploading a photo of Buttigieg. This is a biography created by his campaign staff using a picture from his campaign, Hanumang06 wrote.
Before uploading the photo himself, Hanumang06s first act on Wikipedia was to make a request on Wikipedias Files for upload page, which allows unregistered or less experienced users to request that someone else upload a file on their behalf.
Hanumang06 and Streeling share a number of similarities beyond their belief that Pete or Peter Buttigieg deserved Wikipedia enshrinement. While arguing against the deletion of the Peter Buttigieg page, Hanumang06 referenced none other than Andrei Cherny as part of his effort to defend Buttigiegs notability.
And like Streeling, Hanumang06 made a point to distance himself from the subject at hand, writing in the deletion discussion that he is not Pete Buttigieg by the way.
While both the edit logs and the original Peter Buttigieg page itself are hidden from the average Wikipedia user (as is the case with all deleted pages), a Wikipedia admin who requested anonymity to avoid blowback shared that deleted content with Slate.
The text of Hanumang06s short-lived creation is nearly identical to the text Streeling would use in creating the Pete Buttigieg page over a year later. So who is Hanumang06?
Googling the username will lead you to a college message board where, in 2006, Neehar Garg of South Bend, Indiana, posted his AOL Instant Messenger handle: Hanumang06. I reached out to Garg, who declined to talk on the phone but did confirm that he was Hanumang06 and, several emails later, also claimed ownership of the Streeling account, which was created the day after Hanumang06s last recorded edit.
Garg has declined to go on the record to discuss any details related to the accounts and their activity, including to what degree he was affiliated with Buttigiegs treasurer and mayoral campaigns, if at all. When I asked the Buttigieg campaign about Gargs relationship to past campaigns, Meagher wrote, I believe he volunteered with the treasurers race but never in paid capacity, and was not involved in the mayoral campaign.
When I asked Meagher whether he was saying definitively that the Streeling account had no connection to Buttigieg and that Buttigieg did not know whose it was, Meagher replied, Right. He does not know whose it is. And when I asked whether Buttigieg has ever asked staffers to edit Wikipedia on his behalf, or has ever known about any staffers who had done so, Meager replied simply, No and no.
It seems worth noting here that Pete Buttigieg is one of only seven people currently following Garg on Instagram (both attended St. Joseph High School, though Garg is about six years younger).
Buttigiegs treasury campaign was also fully aware that at least something on Wikipedia was happening on his behalf. The photo Hanumang06 uploaded, which he claimed was being uploaded at the direct behest of Pete Buttigieg himself, now has a permission box beneath it noting that Wikimedia Foundation has received an e-mail confirming that the copyright holder has approved publication. While most users cant view the actual correspondence in which permission was granted, a Wikipedia user with the necessary permissions shared a screenshot of the correspondence with Slate. That email, which was sent from [email protected], begins with the following line:
I hereby affirm that I, Peter Buttigieg, am the creator and/or sole owner of the exclusive copyright of the photo PeteButtigieg.JPG, a headshot of myself, found on wikipedia at http://en.wikipeida.org/wiki/File:PeteButtigieg.JPG.
The email is signed, Peter Buttigieg, Copyright Holder, July 14, 2010. ... So what, exactly, is going on here? The evidence seems overwhelming that, despite the campaigns repeated denials, Pete Buttigieg has had knowledge of, and at least some active participation in, the maintenance of his Wikipedia presence. This is not a crime. Its just a deeply weird thing to deny. Two potential scenarios come to mind.
One possibility is that the two accounts have two different people behind them. Garg, who self-identified to Wikipedia as a campaign staffer, is indeed Hanumang06. But when he proved unable to prevent the Peter Buttigieg page from being deleted, Buttigieg or someone else very close to him took matters into their own hands by registering the Streeling account. Having seen the issues Garg ran into by acknowledging his campaign affiliation, Buttigieg or his new agent would have insisted that Streeling was not affiliated with this candidates campaign. In the spirit of the cover-up, when asked about the Streeling account, the campaign would have asked Garg to take responsibility for both. This scenario, though entertaining, feels a bit too conspiratorial.
In the other, perhaps more likely case, Garg really is ultimately responsible for both accounts, but worked closely with Buttigieg and/or his campaign to raise the young future mayors profile. In this case, Garg would have to be either such good friends with Buttigieg or such a staunch supporter that he would feel compelled to semiregularly tweak Buttigiegs Wikipedia presence. He would also have to have an interest in the man who played at Pete Buttigiegs wedding, as well as Buttigiegs favorite watch brand. This scenario is more honest and almost aboveboard, except for the persistent denials by the Buttigieg camp that he or his campaigns knew anything about any of it. As in the first case, here the campaign would have to be so eager to dispel the notion that Pete Buttigieg would ever use Wikipedia for self-promotion that theyd even lie about Buttigieg having known someone else was editing his page on his behalf.
