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Posted by: Viridae

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:Jimbo_Wales&oldid=295308358#Cash_for_spam

(Perm link)

Posted by: Somey

Well, if you're going to produce spam anyway, why not get paid for it?

I suppose, though, another "functionary using an undisclosed sock to edit for money on behalf of businessmen" story might be a potential candidate for the year's Top Ten list.

How many functionaries are there, anyway? And do any of the WP functionaries play cricket? Because if they don't, I'm not sure I can figure out why YellowMonkey would be interested in them. Whereas if they do, he's likely to write a book-length article about whoever it is, complete with charts and graphs showing an innings-by-innings breakdown of his batting career, showing runs scored (red bars) and the average of the last ten innings (blue line).

Posted by: Viridae

This is a list of who has access to the functionaries mailing list: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:FUNC#functionaries-en

Might provide an indication.

Posted by: Somey

I'm not seeing any obvious cricketers...

If I had to guess, I'd say it's probably Jimbo himself. He travels a lot, so it's likely someone in India or Pakistan or South Africa taught him the essentials of the game at some point or other.

Posted by: Jon Awbrey

The only real question here is how much Viridae is getting paid to spam the Review.

Jon

Posted by: Viridae

Sorry, had like 5 mins to spare at work when i posted that - couldnt reply in full.

Yellow Monkey used to be an arb - hence why he might be interested in functionary misbehaviour in addition to cricket. (But I think you know that )

Posted by: thekohser

Now the Jimbo TalkPageTalkers are speculating that it might have something to do with our New Jersey http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Sockpuppet_investigations/Smkovalinsky/Archive who gives piano lessons, I Ching sessions, and Wikipedia articles in exchange for payment.

Does everything nefarious have to spiral back to me, somehow?

Posted by: CharlotteWebb

I'm sure Jimbo doesn't understand cricket, I'd bet dollars to donuts. He'd have to know what a crumpet is in order to...

Anyway if this is based on checkuser data, then anybody else with checkuser rights would be able to read the log and get a pretty good idea who he's talking about. They'd be unlikely to announce who the suspect is yet but should be at least able to indicate how plausible Bling-Bling's allegation is.

Of course if read the policy correctly "undisclosed sock" by itself would only be actionable if the suspect is not only a "functionary" but a current member of arbcom. However it seems like if YellowMonkey meant "current arb" he would have said so (but hey, stranger things have happened).

I can see how stress and/or boredom associated with "functionary" work, and a reluctance to acknowledge that they feel this way (lest they have some flock of busy-bodies recommending that they resign) could entice somebody to moonlight as an article editor under a secret account, and there would be nothing inherently sinister about it. Thus I'm more curious about what leads YellowMonkey to believe this editing (or some part of it) was "paid".

Speaking in general, one can consider possible scenarios in which a single-purpose account removes dodgy information from an article (about a business-man perhaps) in the interest of upholding BLP... but in a way that is indistinguishable from doing the same thing at the behest of (and possibly in exchange for compensation from) the article subject.

That is, I think WP would expect the former motive not to mean anything to a convincingly "new" user, and be more likely to assume bad faith. Shrug.

Consider also that some "functionaries" may (based on their interpretation of the alleged reasons for the removal Jayjg's "functionary" status) feel increased pressure to refrain from using their "functionary" account to edit potentially controversial topics in a way that indicates anything other than dispassionate interest.

Whatever evidence exists, whoever reviews it should be careful not to jump to conclusions not clearly warranted by it.

Posted by: tarantino

http://www.elance.com/experts/nicholas_a offering his wikiskills for pay is undoubtedly the cricket-loving OS/crat/admin http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Nichalp/old.

Posted by: endallbeall

If so, you can measure his wikilife in seconds... but he's gone already, isn't he? Hasn't edited since January.

Posted by: Milton Roe

If he's here as a psych-ops mental virus, their first mistake was naming him. I mean, really.

Posted by: tarantino

Not as Nichalp.

He's also Zithan (T-C-L-K-R-D) , and possibly other accounts.

Posted by: Somey

...
Damn you're good! They might as well all just give up, frankly.

Anyhoo, Mr. Rootlogy has started an http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_comment/Paid_Editing. That should be good for some nice, wholesome entertainment...

Posted by: Jon Awbrey

Maybe, but it'd be a lot more entertaining if the notion of "payment" could be liberalized to include sexual favors.

Then we might catch some Really Big Fish —

><> ><> ><>

Jon

Posted by: No one of consequence

Two different people, as far as I know.

Posted by: Milton Roe

Okay, so what kind of sexual favor did Jimbo have to do for Guy to get the Marsden BLP edited?

Posted by: tarantino

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:Jimbo_Wales&diff=295469233&oldid=295456387:

Nichalp's name is not well hidden, it = Nicholas A. He's currently attending university in Australia, and previously graduated from Mumbai University.

Nicholas A feedback at Elance.
http://www.elance.com/jobs/16984786/stereofame_wiki_page&&job_tier=11188
"As discussed, Wiki page on Stereofame.com."
wiki page
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Zithan/sandbox3

Nicholas A feedback at Elance.
http://www.elance.com/jobs/16933583/wikipedia_article&&job_tier=11188
"We would like a quote to create a wikipedia article about our CEO Brad Sugars"
wiki page
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Brad_Sugars&action=history

A Joe Job, Jehochman? Why don't you ask him? Then you can carry on with deleting Zithan's user space and pretend nothing's happened.

Posted by: privatemusings

can't really argue with the rather compelling info, I reckon....

being a bit bored of the cloak and dagger stuff, I just dropped this info onto Jimbo's talk page, and to the users concerned... hope that's cool, and we'll see where this heads....

Posted by: Somey

They'll probably say it's OK if this guy does it, because he "didn't incorporate."

Posted by: trenton

Well, I think the core of the problem is that Jimbeau is pissed that, unlike the creators of all the other major top websites, he's not a multi-billionaire.

Sure, he still gets his speaking fees and what not, but that's a comparative pittance.

Anyway, I don't think I really blame this guy. Spend years of your life working for free and climbing up a retarded social ladder and its no wonder that when you grow up and realize that you've been under the spell of, and enriching, the cult leader, you try to recoup some of your losses.

Posted by: carbuncle

I found http://www.elance.com/jobs/16737316/stable_wikipedia_product_placement&&job_tier=11188 on that eLance site looking for someone to:

By sheer coincidence an editor who focuses on religious topics and US politicians also seems to have http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Carpet_cleaning&diff=next&oldid=287300284 and http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Dry_carpet_cleaning&action=history. The fact that the WP editor and the http://www.elance.com/experts/johnbulten are both named John Bulten seems like another obvious joejob...

Posted by: MBisanz

Well if Tarantino's research is correct, it is a simple case of a highly trusted user socking to avoid scrutiny of his edits, and I hope Arbcom and Jimbo deal with it as they see appropriate.

On the issue of paid editing, I was thinking about it on my train ride tonight and I had some thoughts.

We can agree that an article like http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Arch_Coal&oldid=76592206 isn't POV-pushing, biased, etc, despite the commercial intent in its creation. Under the RfC on paid editing, I would list its creation as permitted. But let's say Wikipedia Review kicked off and became highly successful. And Greg was able to afford a staff of people to create all the articles people were paying for. And then someone AFD' one of these articles. If Greg's staff all showed up at the AFD (since presumably they would all be experienced editors by this point), people would call "shenanigans" the same way they did in Scientology, Prem Rawat, CAMERA, etc. I suppose the fear of many people is that by permitting paid editing, it opens the door to paid cabaling on topics. I'm sure it happens now, I've seen enough mysterious new accounts at AFD on spam articles to confirm that, but I believe many in the community still think that maintaining an altruistic outlook as opposed to a for-profit outlook deters commercial abuse.

Greg, any thoughts? How do you maintain the idea of an NPOV, balanced, article when someone(s) has a fiduciary responsibility to promote the interests of their client? Let's say you added an article on http://www.wikipediareview.com/Directory:Garreth_Westwood to Wikipedia, and then it was discovered he had defrauded clients and someone added the news reference to the article. If he complained that now his paid article was harming his interests, you would be stuck in a sticky situation. Do you remove it from the article and hope no one notices or tell him "tough cookies" while he writes out his last check to you?

Posted by: TungstenCarbide

Hopefully GeorgeWillaimHerbert will come and share his wisdom.


Here's a thought; what happens if paid editing is eventually accepted. Will there be competition between the big dogs? and will they resort to dirty tricks by sabotaging eachother's work ... "no, you don't want to go with my competitor, his articles always turn into mush after a short while "

Posted by: thekohser

Might as well add http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Ken_Underwood&oldid=287676375 to the mix. He's the founder of Stereofame.com, which is the company that Zithan was paid to write a Wikipedia article about. Zithan made this article, too.



I have said this about 20 times before, in various places including WR. The Arch Coal article had no commercial intent. No money exchanged hands. Arch Coal was unaware that I had even written the article. The funny thing is that Jimmy Wales and nearly all of his Wikipediot sycophants simply assumed it was paid content. Lots of things are assumed about paid editing. That doesn't make these assumptions facts, though.



What? On the encyclopedia "anyone can edit"? Where reality is determined by a not-a-vote majority reaching consensus? So, you object to the the rules of your encyclopedia only when you find that a majority that disagrees with you has suddenly gained control of your precious "consensus"?



My thought is that you need more thought about the idea of NPOV in a document anyone can edit.

Posted by: Somey

If you assume there's going to be a requirement that all paid editors openly state their affiliation and/or client relationship up front, this might not be a problem... My assumption would be that the AfD "closer" would count all the affiliated votes as one, or ignore them altogether. And that attempts by such a group to "stack the process," if discovered, would be a blockable offense.

As for whether or not such a requirement could actually be effective, that's a different story... My suggestion would be to institute some sort of "Good Wiki-Housekeeping Seal of Approval" which clients of these supposed paid editors would look for, so as to be assured they're not going to be caught doing something sneaky and thus receive bad publicity.

It's an interesting problem, though. The real issue IMO isn't "paid cabalism," it's that already-established WP'ers who consider themselves "altruists" and "free culture" types will be very unhappy having to work on articles directly with people who are being paid. Some will simply disengage and/or quit, but others... I could definitely see some serious drama in the works here.

Posted by: EricBarbour

What, drama on top of the drama (on top of the drama)?
Have a dose of their already-going http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_comment/Paid_editing.

Those bastards can "drama" all they want, but until they unban people like Greg,
they're not serious.

It appears the general tone of that "discussion" is turning paid edit=COI=bad, bad, bad.
If the twits removed the anon editing of which they are sooo proud, it would be far
easier to catch the COIs they are sooo angry at.

I'd call that a philosophical conflict. They want it both ways, which is impossible.


Too late, fool. Didn't you notice that Stephen Colbert uses your "encyclopedia" as
the butt of jokes? Haven't you seen the flap in the UK press over Sam Blacketer?

Posted by: tarantino

The other members of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:FUNCTIONARIES#functionaries-en must have convinced him to remove references to Wikipedia from his profile.

He's not the only admin doing it on the sly, just the first one caught.

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&as_q=wikipedia&num=100=&ft=i&as_sitesearch=rentacoder.com&as_qdr=all

Posted by: Nerd

ArbCom got their naughty chair out and have now removed Nichalp's privs. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Arbitration_Committee/Noticeboard#Nichalp

Posted by: MBisanz

I think you give AFD closers too much credit. Look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:JamesBurns. He used sockpuppets at over 300 AFDs with 28 sockpuppets. It wasn't until he used 9 socks on the same AFD that someone noticed something was amiss. And while it might be nice to have a "Seal of Approval", I suspect many, if not most, profiteers would figure out it is more profitable to sock to preserve an article at AFD and risk a CU noticing, than to seek the Seal and see their article deleted. Similar to how the Nintendo Seal of Approval never stopped Game Genie from making cheat add-ons since the disincentives were not large enough.

Posted by: CharlotteWebb

Well, one might dispute the strength of this analogy on the basis that cheating at Nintendo does not effect the gameplay of others.

Posted by: thekohser

Wow. Dramatic!

I wonder if my e-mail to Jimbo had anything to do with this.

Posted by: thekohser

Oh, wow. Now there's a story about it on the front page of Slashdot -- with a handy link to Wikipedia Review, right in the article. Getting about 75 to 100 additional uniques on my site, just in the past 2 or 3 hours. I hope the server can handle it!

http://news.slashdot.org/story/09/06/13/1824225/Should-Wikipedians-Edit-Stories-For-Pay

Posted by: EricBarbour

You're lucky this happened on Saturday night. The Slashdot traffic will be minimal.
If they had posted that on Monday morning, your server would be melting right now.

Posted by: Cock-up-over-conspiracy

I think the idea someone had recently of an "editors union" is a wonderful idea but a wasted one to be as limp and impotent as an "association" of established authors.

Where you have an unaccountable system of abuse, that even involves minors and vulnerable individuals (I am thinking a mix of borderline personality disorders and psychopaths), it is the responsibility of any upright member of society to push their way in and confront it ... or if they cant be bothered confronting it, at least alert others and ridicule it.

Having created a "global community" the size of a corporation that will probably stick for a while, the Wikipedia now needs something more than just "pastoral care" for its frontline troops. It needs militant social workers, welfare agencies and a real workers' union to create and protect rights. These should be funded by a share of all those bucks spent on evangelism, or taken for the purpose of personal benefit by the likes of Jimmy Wales, David Shankbone and others.

The Wikipedia is someone's business. Albeit one using the cultic model of the abuse of others goodwill. I would not suggest doing it, unless one was paid to do it. A common element within cultic business models is to appoint adherents with low self value to apparent leadership positions (as in those willing to work for free or less than the going market rate), keep them vulnerable by the odd symbolic "public hanging" and retain real power elsewhere.

So, how to get them to the responsible point where they will consider paying people to do that is the obvious question ... ?

(As an aside, what was going on in the shift of "pedophilia apologist" Erik Möller from unpaid (but potentially powerful) to paid (but potentially sackable) and has it been covered here?)

Posted by: thekohser

This was another blockbuster uncovered, it seems, by Tarantino.

The WMF should hire him, the way computer network firms hire hackers to show them where they're vulnerable.

How many big discoveries has Tarantino uncovered? The man needs a press agent.

Greg

Posted by: jayvdb

Tarantino (M-P-T) is YellowMonkey (T-C-L-K-R-D) ?

Jimbo was informed that there was a problem on 4th June 2009, but I don't think he was told who. He forwarded that email to functionaries-en@wikimedia.org on June 7, and that email didn't include a name of the culprit.

YellowMonkey started the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Jimbo_Wales/Archive_47#Cash_for_spam on 9th June 2009, 02:56 UTC, and filled me in with the details at 3:32 UTC.

Viridae started this thread at 03:51 UTC, linking to YellowMonkey's post.

After discussing it with me, YellowMonkey informed the Arbitration Committee of the details at 04:32 UTC.

Alex Bakharev posted the Elance link onto Jimbo's talk page at 05:54 UTC.

Tarantino's first post here was 15:08 UTC, with no more details than what Alex publicly posted nine hours earlier. Tarantino mentions Zithan (T-C-L-K-R-D) here another four and a half hours later - I am pretty sure that everyone knew of that account by then.

Posted by: thekohser

Okay, duly noted. My mistake.

Tarantino is still way more awesome than 12 Wikipedia admins put together, though.

Posted by: TungstenCarbide

Holy cow, I would have guessed Cyde.

Posted by: sbrown

So the next question is who is Yellow Monkey.

Posted by: jayvdb

A very keen assessor, from what I have gathered.

Posted by: Mike R

You noticed the question mark, right?

Posted by: SB_Johnny

Apparently this is a live one http://www.mail-archive.com/wikimediaindia-l@lists.wikimedia.org/msg06514.html.

Posted by: thekohser

Why was the post entitled "Pure Fiction"?