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Posted by: carbuncle

Apparently the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Ely of a school district in the good ol' US of A leaked information about a police investigation to the person being investigated, who was their employee (or something). Bearian, who plays a lawyer on television, writes a BLP about him so that this important piece of world history gets recorded. After some discussions http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:BLPN#Eric_Ely it gets nominated for http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Eric_Ely.

This seems like a very typical and uninteresting case, but it's got Jimbo involved now (and of course the "Article Rescue Squadron" are flying in to save it). I'm making popcorn.

Posted by: Milton Roe

I wish there was a policy that the head-up-ARS people were simply prohibited from being involved with BLP articles, period. Would save much drahmas, our entertainment notwithstanding.

When I make my own I'm always afraid of losing a crown on an old maid. No old maids are worth that. (A divorcee maybe ala Edward VIII, but not an old maid).

Posted by: Abd

Look, there is an obvious solution that was long ago proposed, with some support behind it, WP:PWD, i.e., Pure Wiki Deletion, which is simply blanking with some special software features to handle it better.

A deletion debate can take place with a blanked page, and any admin could blank a BLP and protect it there pending a decision. Most BLP violations involve defamatory edits, and those are not routinely revision-deleted. So, WTF?

ARS is not the problem here, the problem is the difficulty of seeing the forest for one's head being up one's ass.

Posted by: carbuncle

Bearian expands on his motivation for writing this BLP:

Posted by: EricBarbour

Where is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carolyn_Doran when one http://wikipediareview.com/blog/20071220/carolyn-doran-timeline-of-events/ her?

Posted by: Ottava

That article is longer and better sourced than many http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Gray http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Marvell http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Collins_(poet) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Cowper.

Sigh.

Someone, shoot me! Please!

Posted by: Moulton

Maybe you and EricBarbour can do a mashup of your avatars.

Posted by: Milton Roe

Why don't you point out her previous Wiki-BLP (isn't it on the web somewhere?) and all the stuff that's happened to her since, to Bearian, and see if he'll bring it up to date and post it. Two birds with one stone.

Posted by: Ottava

Code Geass doesn't go so well with Pokemon.

Posted by: taiwopanfob

Better sourced? Every last one is main-stream media. Literally, every one.

That alone should make it a candidate for instant, summary, erasure.

The usual things can be said here.

1. No sane person would waste more than a few minutes reading about Ely in the news, let alone devote hours creating a de novo biography about an otherwise non-notable bureaucrat. The real-world analog is someone persistently following Ely around, documenting their every public move and utterance on video. Wikipaparazi. Yes, indeed, the law says someone could do this, but the law doesn't say you must do it. In any polite society, such vultures should be identified as what they really are: crazy-ass wiki-stalking moterfuckin' creeps.

2. It is also a splendid case study in quantity vs. quality, and how this can be put to propaganda purpose. In essence, bullshit baffles brains: every last fact, no matter how trivial, is mentioned and referenced in exquisite detail. A completely novel synthesis of narrative erected from otherwise disparate sources, the whole apparatus clearly intended to disguise the fact that this is nothing more than a hit-piece.

Can the same be said of the articles you reference?

Posted by: Ottava

Those four pages of highly notable poets lack sources and get a lot of stuff wrong. It is shameful.

Posted by: HRIP7

Yep, that about sums it up. And of course, if kept, this thing will still sit there in five years' time, endlessly multiplied by WP mirrors, and the top google hit for the guy.

Posted by: EricBarbour

They both suck anyway. Now, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mnemosyne_(anime), that's what I call a show......

Why is Bearian pushing this with such insane obsessiveness? Well, since Ely is the
school district manager in Schenectady, and according to Hivemind, Bearian is a
http://www.wikipedia-watch.org/hivemind.html#333 in Albany, and his http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Bearian/Contributions shows a strange fondness for writing
BLPs about semi-obscure people and things from upstate New York....

Plus, he follows http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:UpstateNYer around like a puppydog.....

Either Bearian is an insane nerd with a very light classwork load, who trolls
local newspapers for subject matter......
Or he's being paid to write about local things. Or mebbe some of both.

And he has a http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Bearian%27sBooties. And his IP address is 71.245.156.223.

Posted by: HRIP7

The http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Eric_Ely has been closed as "no consensus", with the http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Eric_Ely&oldid=356647956 being kept.

Posted by: carbuncle

After continued prodding on his talk page, Jimbo has decided to take action. From Talk:Eric Ely:

Other editors have taken up the torch and removed some of the offending material. So ends round two. The third round should be interesting...

Posted by: the fieryangel

What I want to know is why is this so important to Bearian (T-C-L-K-R-D) ? He's obviously got an ax to grind here....and I'm wondering what his hidden motivation might be?

Posted by: Somey

Sorry to state the obvious, but this is why "default to delete" for "no consensus" AfD's on BLP articles was a good idea.

It's better than it was, but this article really shouldn't exist at all... Schenectady, NY isn't big or prominent enough to warrant this kind of attention for a school superintendent. Maybe one of the 50 largest cities in the world, I could sort of see that maybe - but not Schenectady.

Posted by: Eva Destruction

From his userpage, he lives in upstate NY; it's probably just that he knows the guy. Or, it could just be that it's a Big Deal in the local paper there, and he's made the mistake of assuming the rest of the world gives a shit.

This is the guy who http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia_talk:Arbitration_Committee/CheckUser_and_Oversight/May_2010_election&diff=prev&oldid=354357817, despite this thread being the first time he's even been mentioned here, FWIW. I'm not sure I'd take anything he says very seriously.

Posted by: Somey

Sometimes that's all it takes...

Specifically, he says he lives in Albany, and Schenectady is only about 15 miles north of there. I'm guessing (based on the photo) that he's in his mid-40's, so he could conceivably have kids (or maybe nieces/nephews) in high school up there, possibly even the one with the nasty facilities manager in question (the one Eric Ely "knew about") - though that wouldn't be a requirement, obviously.

Posted by: A Horse With No Name

Maybe he's confusing WR with Brandt's web site?

Posted by: Eva Destruction

Given that he lists his name, workplace and hometown on his Wikipedia page, I'm not sure it's the hardest piece of detective work.

Posted by: A Horse With No Name

I wonder how graceful he is on the dance floor.

Posted by: Somey

To be a good dancer, you have to be able to see your own feet, don't you?

Anyway, for many Wikipedians, "outed" is just a handy shorthand for "mentioned in a less than 100-percent positive context." I don't remember when he was added to the Hivemind page (it's not something I keep track of), but I vaguely recall that it was later than November 2008 - that's when his name appeared on his user page for the first time. I could be wrong, though.

Posted by: the fieryangel

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Jimbo_Wales#Eric_Ely_AfD

How could we have missed this?

Posted by: Somey

I'm not so sure we did miss it - that discussion started only three days ago, and IMO only got really interesting earlier today, when Jimbo posted http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk%3AJimbo_Wales&action=historysubmit&diff=357206526&oldid=357205348. I have to give him credit for being both clever and diplomatic, by saying that the "stellar work" done by Bearian to put together such a heavily-referenced attack article "only proves that a good biography of Ely is impossible" (and I'm paraphrasing somewhat, sorry).

Can Jimbo unilaterally impose even a relatively simple and common-sense policy change like "default-to-delete on no-consensus for BLP AfD's"? And would he actually want to, or is he just paying lip service here to the idea that WP should have responsible, humane BLP policies? (With or without the implication that the existing policies have proven themselves to be inadequate?)

I might be willing to believe that he might want to try to impose something like that, if only for the PR value... though I suppose he'd prefer to just do the bare minimum, which would be "default to simple voting majority on no-consensus BLP AfD's." That would have had the desired result in this case, at least.

Posted by: Milton Roe

But imagine the massive PR impact if WP simply decided that ALL BLPs would be outlawed. Period, no exceptions. Not EVEN Barack Obama's.

The second rule being that they could be instituted as bios of dead people 7 days after the person died (to allow a decent notification and relative warning period). All BLPs created up to now, to be released from storage then, on formal request.

Of course, this would encourage a scraper site BIOPEDIA which would do nothing but host the missing 400,000 BLPs (or whatever it is at the moment). But so what. WP would have taken a moral stance and I think the world would actually notice. The snigger factor would even go down.

I would even venture to guess that it wouldn't be long before the two things people knew about WP was that 1) it's not reliable and 2) it refuses to do biographies of live people.

Which would be cool.

Of course, WP will not avail itself of this chance, because, as an institution, WP is EVIL.* So doing well by doing good will be denied them, in this case. A shame.

MR

* Hell, these days even GOOGLE is stuggling not to be EVIL. I think when they created their motto they never envisioned the day when not being E-VIL would have an impact on their bottom line.

Horrors!

Posted by: taiwopanfob

The Diplomacy:



Jimbo encourages people to look at how others perceive your statements and actions, so when I think of Bearian and gang, I can't imagine them thinking much of this: they were clearly not trying to demonstrate the impossibility of a biography when they did all that, um, work. If they were doing as much, wouldn't that be WP:POINT violation?

Bearian doesn't look like he is much amused at all by all this stuff:

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk%3AEric_Ely&action=historysubmit&diff=357285646&oldid=357258160

"And I have lost faith in some of my fellow editors."

But make no mistake: he and the other fellows are clearly out for Ely's ass, for whatever fucked up reason. WP:COATRACK, WP:UNDUE, WP:ATTACK, and just plain common sense and decency say "nuke from orbit".

Posted by: Abd

One of Jimbo's better comments. Will anything come of it? I'm not holding my breath. But maybe.

Posted by: A Horse With No Name

Oh, I was expecting a pun along the lines of "dancing Bearian" -- but fat jokes are always in season.




Funny that he even had faith in those screwballs in the first place.



Hmmm...not the kind of expression I would use with this guy.

Posted by: the fieryangel

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Bearian/Sandbox#Wikipedia:Sourcing_means_notability

Posted by: EricBarbour

That guy is amazing. No self-awareness at all.
I can only offer this picture, and hope the fool sees it.

Posted by: dogbiscuit

The trouble is that these people have a lot of self-awareness. He knows exactly what he is doing - he is so convinced that his "neutral" view is the right one, that any other view must be biased. Given his point of view, he can find things written that reinforce it, so he must be right.

I read the article a week or two ago, and it stank. It had got longer and longer to accommodate the referenced information, and was completely designed to point to this controversy.

It is highly unsurprising though: Wikipedia does not do forgiveness or tolerance. Once the WikiMob has has a point of view imposed on it, "consensus" has no ability to rationalise and find that it has been misled. Everything must be turned into a conspiracy; any counter-intuitive answer must be the right one; dis-information must be free. (I like that last one).

Posted by: Somey

Well, you know they hate being thwarted. The next question is, will he merely threaten to quit, or actually do it? And how long will the bitter, resentful userpage goodbye message be?


It's blurb material!

To be fair, though, many truths about Wikipedia are, in fact, counter-intuitive. I mean, even in this case, Bearian is right: Anything that might even be slightly interesting to a general audience about someone as "marginal" as Eric Ely - given the sensationalistic nature of modern media and the jaded, shock-me-some-more infoconsumers who support it - is going to be negative. It's also going to be inappropriately emphasized and blatantly unfair, but of course that matters little to someone like Mr. Bearian.

IMO, this is probably inherent to any collaborative endeavor that relies on jaded infoconsumers to act as gatekeepers. In effect, the lunatics are running the asylum, yada yada yada. The thing about lunatics is, when you thwart them, they don't stop or even change their approach all that much - they just keep at it.

Posted by: carbuncle

DING DING DING - round three has begun: Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Eric Ely (2nd nomination)

Posted by: A Horse With No Name

All the usual suspects turn up to vote...but I don't recognize http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Weakopedia...unless we know him by another name?

Posted by: thekohser

It's not me! I'd never say...

Posted by: Somey

The current vote, by my count, actually would get the article deleted. It's sort of rare when Jimbo Wales actually agrees with most of the WR membership about anything, and when that happens it's usually a fairly clear-cut case, like this one... Note also that they're voting on the current version of the article, which is (as Mr. Bearian says) almost a "puff piece." Most Wikipedians dislike puff-pieces, IMO, so that also makes deletion a bit more likely under the current scheme, and (not coincidentally) further justifies the second AfD so soon after the first.

Posted by: Tarc

Sounds just like any other ARShole.

Posted by: Somey

For the benefit of readers who are less cognizant of WP's "alphabet-soup" acronym jargon, I believe this is a reference to "Article Rescue Squadron." (I could be wrong about that, though...)

Btw, one or two WP'ers went to the trouble to look up other school superintendents (esp. in New York state) so as to determine if any others had BLP articles, so I'd just like to thank them - for example, Santa Claus of the Future (T-C-L-K-R-D) - for sparing the rest of us the trouble. (Perhaps needless to say, no other New York school superintendents are the subjects of BLP articles.)

Posted by: Tarc

Yes, it was. I thought I had clicked reply to Horse's post though, as mine was supposed to be a direct response to the musing's on who "Weakopedia" is a sock of.

Posted by: A Horse With No Name

Doesn't seem like an ARS character. For all of their faults, they actually like Wikipedia -- not like them to be openly cynical, as per the language on the "Weakopedia" user page.

Who knows -- it is probably one of the Risker-approved editors that she allows to flatfoot around in violation of sockpuppetry violation. The blatancy of "Weakopedia" is too obvious -- even the Arbcom idiots wouldn't be able not to see it.

Posted by: Kevin

This time round it was deleted. Perhaps Jimbo's words do carry some authority after all. Seems unlikely that it would have been deleted otherwise.


Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Eric_Ely_(2nd_nomination)