QUOTE(GlassBeadGame @ Sat 28th November 2009, 10:43am)
Maybe Kelly or some old timer could tell us more about DG and CoS. It always seemed strange to me that an ex-CoSer (I assume that is what DG is, but not certain) would take on such an aberrant appearance/style and cult-like involvement in another project...
I'm quite certain that Dave has never been a Scientologist. If I looked hard enough, I could probably find something linkable somewhere in which he explains his motivations - Dave wanted to be a rock journalist back during the Usenet days, and apparently participated in several band-related newsgroups... at some point he noticed that the CoS was basically trying to "take over" Usenet via large-scale spamming and disinformation campaigns (and you're right, KM could tell us more about this). To some extent they succeeded, and they (along with numerous other groups and spammers in general) actually made Usenet largely worthless for people who just wanted to chat about things that interested them.
Essentially, he transferred his loyalties to Wikipedia fairly early on, and began to develop an almost hypervigilant mindset towards CoS activity on WP - I think the quote I saw went something like "I'll be damned if we're going to let them do to Wikipedia what they did to Usenet," or something to that effect.
Anyway, as a result of all that he was labeled a "suppressive person" by the CoS, which is ironic, since he actually is sort of suppressive, generally speaking.