QUOTE(Somey @ Sat 24th April 2010, 11:52pm)
So, what are we saying here? That User:Erik decided he could shield himself on WP by pretending to be this other Erik, Erik Kraft from Chicago, so as to throw people off his trail should he decide to do something stupid like... edit the Don Murphy article?
And when the shit hit the fan, and the real Erik Kraft got contacted by the Murphygoons and went to Wikipedia (almost immediately) to see what the hell was going on, it suddenly dawned on User:Erik that he was doing something extremely unethical, and possibly even illegal, and so he's now trying to disappear himself?
I dunno - three years ago I would have said that was too far-fetched, but now, I could definitely see one of them doing something like that. Still, it is far-fetched... Why would User:Erik think he'd be better off pretending to be Erik Kraft, rather than just not say anything about where he was from? Other than just sheer stupidity, I mean.
I guess sheer stupidity is a reasonable explanation, though, under the circumstances.
Yes, that's what I suspect is going on. User:Erik has been on Wikipedia long enough to recognize my name, and know that I've got a couple of old notches on my mouse. While I have no idea if his name is even Erik (originally he was Erikster on Wikipedia), I found his birthdate and that probably freaked him out. I suspect that he forgot about those user boxes he put on his user page briefly in 2006 that revealed his birthdate.
If he did what I think he did, the only smart thing for him to do at this point is to immediately retire and hope everyone forgets the whole thing. He doesn't have any admin bits, so he can come back as someone else with little fuss. He had better pray that Murphy doesn't find him. Murphy's lawyer could put both Murphy and Erik Kraft in front of a jury, where they can describe all the anguish this cruel 24-year-old caused while hiding behind a screen name. Maybe even Jimbo and Newyorkbrad and Carolyn Doran can be called, to explain why Wikipedia is unsupervised, and why this is such a wonderful thing for civil society.
I haven't figured out the time zone stuff on Murphy's forum, and I'm much too lazy to do a careful timeline. I think User:Erik planted the one-line evidence on his user page shortly after that résumé link appeared on Murphy's forum. Or perhaps it was
before (I haven't checked much)? Then again, which Murphy fanboy found Erik Kraft to begin with, and posted that link? Do we know who he is, and how he found Erik Kraft's site? What I mean is, just looking for "Erik" on Google leads to all sorts of weird stuff, none of which is very compelling. There must have been something else that pointed to Erik Kraft initially.
On the other hand, who cares? It's probably a non-starter just like Mark Binmore and Ron Livingston. And that one was a whopper that should have grown legs and sprinted into the mainstream media.