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Posted by: WordBomb

I've decided to post a few of the email threads taken from SlimVirgin's Cyberstalking list. I'm going to do this slowly because there are certain people I'd rather not embarrass and others who really deserve it and I need to figure out how to accomplish the later and not the former.

I'll start with my all time favorite: a thread in which David Gerard, Jimmy Wales and Gary Weiss (as Mantanmoreland in this case) discuss how to derail an AP reporter's inquiries into the situation Cade Metz ultimately did a great job reporting on http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/12/06/wikipedia_and_overstock/.

In this exchange, you'll see Gerard conclude that the best way to deal with the situation is essentially to mislead and confuse the reporter. When Gerard ultimately succeeds, Wales responds with "Brilliant, David!"

This should be required reading for any journalist dealing with the WMF on anything but a puff piece basis.

I'd post the text inline, but the emails as I received them were hard copies which I've scanned but cannot get to OCR very well, so I'm posting a pdf to my site (http://antisocialmedia.net/wikipedia-press-kill.pdf) which you can download and read.

I've got a ton of these, which I'll try to post weekly (though there may be some redactions).

Posted by: Vigilant

That's just fucking unreal.
Does the journalist they bamboozled have this doc?

Posted by: WordBomb

You bet. He was not happy but has yet to do anything about it. I should point out that the reporter was a little embarrassed himself for having forwarded my email to him on to Gerard intact, and for falling for such obvious (in hindsight) BS.

Posted by: Cla68

Keep it up Judd. It's about time this stuff came out. I understand a number of journalists have been reading this forum, so emails such as these should be of great interest to them.

Posted by: EricBarbour

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Jimbo_Wales#Overstock.com.2C_David_Gerard.2C_and_the_blocking_of_the_town_of_Lehi.2C_Utah. Quoted below in case it goes byebye.

Posted by: thekohser

Keep in mind that Paul Foy may have wished to be bamboozled in this way. He has a http://www.williamkwolfrum.com/2010/04/05/what-theyre-saying-about-paul-foy-of-the-associated-press that sounds like he'd naturally be on Gary Weiss' side of the equation.

I don't think he's at Associated Press any more. His old e-mail there doesn't work any more.

Posted by: Sololol

This is hysterically funny.
David Gerard tries to play off Bagley as someone on the paranoid-schizophrenic continuum ("allegations that certain users were Gary Weiss, and that the people trying to get him to stop on this course of exercising an obsession on the subject were either Gary Weiss, [or] working with him") to a journalist. And it does sound crazy were it not for the niggling detail of its truth. Gerad didn't know who mantanmoreland was yet, right? Cause that would make this low even by his standards.

Posted by: melloden

Was it ever interesting to begin with?

Also, who is Sami Harris (in the cc list)?

Posted by: Somey

Well, he did mention something about Mr. Bagley having "violated Wikipedia's fairness rules," and since we all know that no such rules exist, and that Dave didn't use the term himself, Mr. Foy is clearly not very good at the tedious "research aspect" of old-fashioned journalism.

Meanwhile, Dave has always been sort of the "G. Gordon Liddy of Wikipedia," though I'll admit that he has a slightly better sense of humor than Liddy. However, Liddy is a better dresser, and also has a better moustache.


Weiss.

Posted by: lilburne

Yeah but http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/10/05/verity_stob_wikipedia/ does get some some votes.

Posted by: WordBomb

Actually, that guy Wolfrum is one of Weiss's buddies (or at least they seemed to have a mutual-linking SEO pact going for a while). What you are reading is Wolfrum complaining that Paul Foy is a bad journalist because he wrote something non-slanted about Overstock.com last year.

As an aside, note how blatant the link trading in that post was: he links from the word 'journalist' to Weiss's blog in a completely non-contextual way. He and Weiss used to do that sort of crap for each other every day.

Posted by: WordBomb

And this is one of the most entertaining aspects of the email threads I'm going to be posting: Weiss contributing to the same conversation not only as Mantanmoreland and Samiharris, but also as HIMSELF!

When I look at the extreme lengths Weiss went to when selling his fiction, I begin to understand why so many fell for it: because to believe otherwise would be to believe that they'd spent an enormous amount of time and energy being made a fool of while defending a psychopath.

Posted by: thekohser

Jimmy Wales not only defends David Gerard, he http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:Jimbo_Wales&diff=442328926&oldid=442314519 as they sit together in the same bubble bath of lies.

I, for one, am really sick of Jimbo lying about so many things, with nobody there to step in and call him on it.

Jimmy Wales is such an obviously deceitful troll. It's no wonder he can't get a woman to stand by him, even in good times. Nor can I imagine that he retains any friends from his life before Wikipedia.

Posted by: thekohser

My bad.

Posted by: Milton Roe

Wales reponds!



Ahem. I'm afraid it's less than correct to say that "What David Gerard was trying to do there was find a way to explain the situation truthfully (which he did) without making it seem interesting (when it wasn't)." It is interesting (though this is a matter of taste). And as for the "truthfulness part," it depends on what Gerard knew at the time. Factual, it isn't.

Mr. Wales, you know, don't you, that the email you sent Gerard that said "Brilliant!" in getting a reporter to think that Bagley had violated WP's "fairness rules" (as a newbie less than a day old), was regarded Bagley's complaint that Wikipedia was being manipulated by a journalist named Weiss on matters of Overstock and shortselling and Wiess' BLP, and that Weiss was [[user:Mantanmoreland]]? And (later) that he had a number of socks on WP, which was what Bagley was banned for? You copied Mantanmoreland on your email, and you also copied one of his later identified socks, [[user:samiharris]]. And Bagley's other complaint was that these were being protected unfairly by [[user:SlimVirgin]], who was the OTHER person you copied?

If all this was true (which it proved to be) then the Wikipedia actions against Bagley certainly looked like a conspiracy, even if it was merely the manipulation of a bunch of clueless administrators. SlimVirgin AT LEAST had the grace to (later) complain on Wikipedia Review about being manipulated by Mantanmoreland. Gerard never said anything in public that I know of, since to do so would be to remind everybody how clueless he was to the real situation in 2007, despite some fairly frantic attempts to inform him (which he put off as the ravings of the mentally ill).

And now we come to YOU, Mr. Wales, in 2011. Have you not been brought up to date yet about your email cc: list in 2007? "Being manipulated by Mantanmoreland" is your BEST excuse. But that would involve some kind of apology for being wrong, and for mistreating Bagley for trying to get the truth out. A truth you weren't listening to. And still have yet to admit.

Perhaps Bagley will then admit that you actually were not in cahoots with the global conspiracy of financial journalists to cover up wrongdoing in the financial markets. That you were just clueless. Like Gerard. And SlimVirgin.

Posted by: Silver seren

Please do keep giving us more of this stuff. It's really fascinating. None of the stuff about Gerard or Jimbo surprises me at all though.

I wonder if any Arbcom members are going to comment in this thread. It doesn't actually apply to them at all, but there's also no way to explain away Jimbo and Gerard's actions in this.

Posted by: Milton Roe

He gets my vote for most merdiferous.

Posted by: EricBarbour

Jesus H. Christ. That stuff is dynamite.

(Of course, it's also old history. And the great mob of Wikiboys don't care and will never care--
until they get sick of blocking 200 new users and IP addresses every day, and quit.)

Posted by: Cla68

What amazes me is that Jimbo still defends Gerard range-blocking a neighborhood of several thousand people. I think it has been speculated that it was Jimbo who told Gerard to do the block, if so, that explains why Jimbo continues to defend it and Gerard won't talk about it.

Posted by: Cla68

This thread probably should be merged with the Cyberstalking list thread in the Arbcom-L leaks forum.

Posted by: Herschelkrustofsky

Mod response: can do.

Posted by: melloden

How did they get these @wikia.com email addresses? There was on for "wpinvestigations@wikia.com" or something like that--did/does Wikia give out emails to every site, or was this arranged by Jimbo?

Posted by: Somey

Wikia hosted both mailing lists ("wpinvestigations" and "cyberstalking"). We offered to host them ourselves, here on WR, but they didn't even reply to our kind offer!

Ironically, I suspect their discussions would actually have been more secure here than on Wikia.

Posted by: thekohser

Wikia is a COMPLETELY SEPARATE organization from Wikipedia or the Wikimedia Foundation.

Why are you all having such a difficult time accepting that?

Posted by: WordBomb

Jimbo is a case study in human nature, specifically the tendency of people to adhere to one convenient version of reality despite repeated demonstrations that it's flawed. I won't even get into the specifics (they've been chronicled at length on this site) but the most obvious and relevant is this: today Jimbo says I and all my neighbors were blocked because I was promoting a "conspiracy theory" (that SlimVirgin had socked and JayJG had oversighted the evidence) while http://wikipediareview.com/index.php?showtopic=34480 he's the first one to say that it's true.

If Jimbo happens to be referring to the whole SV as MI-5 conspiracy theory, I'm repeatedly on the record as saying I never believed it to be true, so he's wrong there, as well.

Admittedly, I might be guilty of this myself, as I have no recollection of ever publicly accusing Jimbo of sockpuppeting, as he seems to claim (though I did briefly have my suspicions at one time). I'm inclined to believe that this is another of his inventions.

Posted by: Somey

It seems clear enough that he wasn't referring to that, but of course that wasn't a "conspiracy theory" either, it was just repeating something Pierre Salinger had said about her. Salinger was probably wrong, but even the mere fact that he suspected (if not believed) it had some bearing on SV's behavior, and various people's attempts to explain it. (Or at least that was our position at the time.)

Jimbo has a real incentive to minimize Weiss's WP activities and refer to them now as being little more than "fiddling" or "mischief" - the last thing he needs are people pointing out how WP can be manipulated to do actual damage to companies, shareholders, and even entire economies, especially when so many countries' economies are already badly messed up. Even if it's just PR damage, it still reflects badly on him. The amount of damage Weiss actually did via Wikipedia is debatable, but there's no question that he was trying, very hard, to do damage. And he still is, most likely.

Posted by: SB_Johnny

Then, a bit later, decrees that it's http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk%3AJimbo_Wales&action=historysubmit&diff=442468657&oldid=442461998 and removes the section.

Posted by: -DS-

Ah, just like old times.

Posted by: EricBarbour

Everyone seems to realize that.

The only one who's a bit foggy on their separate nature.....is Mr. Wales.


If only I could find it even a little bit funny.

Posted by: Silver seren

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk%3AJimbo_Wales&action=historysubmit&diff=442483451&oldid=442481129

I was really hoping that he would remove my comment as trolling, because then I would give him a more expansive piece of my mind. Oh well.

I liked my comment too. With the blueberry/chocolate part and all.

Posted by: thekohser

I'm thinking this is probably mainstream media worthy now.

"Wikipedia co-founder supports info waffling" is my tentative headline for now, but I'll gladly consider your own submissions.

Posted by: WordBomb

Now I feel silly for thinking things might have gone differently.

Posted by: Milton Roe

Ah, yes, "trolling." Any discussion in which information is brought forward to suggest that Jimbo Wales or his buds ever made a really ignorant decision. We declare that we shall not ever speak or write of such things. For they are nonsense by their very nature.

Posted by: No one of consequence

Well, the unfortunate truth is that any one person or group of people can manipulate the content of articles on almost any subject and get away with it, if they play the game sufficiently well.

There are many examples, including certain science topics, religious leaders and organizations, geopolitical disputes, biographies, and of course naked short selling. I'm just not sure that NSS is a sufficiently sexy topic to lede out a mainstream expose on the manipulation of Wikipedia.

Posted by: victim of censorship

Nothing changes in the Wiki-Kingdom of BULLSHIT.

If you don't like some one or something in the wiki-kingdom, you delete, ban and remove.

Posted by: Milton Roe

Wow, he didn't even leave an edit summary comment on that delete. Just *bang* gone from his TALK page. I think you hit nerve there. He didn't just ignore you. He couldn't let it stay up.

Posted by: Silver seren

Apparently so. I went and added permanent links to both discussions in a section on my talk page, so i'll be able to access them quickly if I need to.

You can find that http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk%3ASilver_seren&action=historysubmit&diff=442488025&oldid=442453064 And I made the wording to the links there purposefully obscure, so that people will be tempted to click in and read them.

Posted by: melloden

Yes, yes, I think we all KNOW that. My question is, how did they GET these mailing lists to be hosted on Wikia? Does (or did) Wikia provide free mailing list hosting in addition to their free wikis?

Posted by: No one of consequence

Because Wikipedia is not forward-looking, as Greg suggested elsewhere.

A private email list for editors who experience harassment is potentially a good thing, if it connects them with people who can monitor the harassment or offer advice on avoiding and defusing harassment. Probably SlimV suggested it to Jimmy, who waved his hand and made it so.

No one thought through the potential downside.

As usual.

Posted by: SB_Johnny

If they had created a list monitored and moderated by a qualified professional, there would have been far less downside. Of course, that would involve dedicating resources to support the volunteers, which just isn't something Jimmy or the WMF want to bother with.

Posted by: Cla68

Once I found out about the cyberstalking list, if I remember right I requested to join it and was denied. It seems that the list was more of a http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Final_club than a true forum to help Wikipedia editors with harassment.

Posted by: melloden

Have they ever cared about their users being stalked? Because last I heard, their "Abuse Team" (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Abuse_response) of children still couldn't get the WMF to talk to ISPs of the stalkers.

Posted by: LessHorrid vanU

I don't believe that Weiss is interested in doing damage, except where it supports his central aim which is to enrich himself. Weiss probably did not maintain his campaign against Patrick Byrne/Overstock simply because he desired to damage it, but because they were hindering or obstructing his aim to make money out of naked short selling. Such is the banality of evil, that the damage caused is not for its sake but the disregard of the consequences to others in pursuit of another agenda.

Since such acts (including all the sockpuppets and forming of alliances with sundry "operators" at WP) are distant from the intended purpose, it is quite easy for such individuals to really believe that their actions are legitimate - or at least inconsequential (to them, at least). Weiss really may have believed that selling stock he did not intend to cover by purchasing subsequently was an appropriate method of "creating liquidity" in the market from which he could benefit. And he still may, most likely.

Posted by: SB_Johnny

That's a new one to me... is the abuse response team some sort of official body, or more like the old http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Counter-Vandalism_Unit?

Posted by: melloden

Not official in the WMF-endorsed sense. Their main page says, "Abuse Response is a community initiative for the reporting and investigation of abuse originating from IP address users. Those IP addresses are then reported to the Internet service provider with jurisdiction over the IP address in hopes to counter and even deter abuse to Wikipedia."

Note that half of the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Abuse_response/Volunteers are users who present themselves as children. I suspect that at least one of them could be a pedophile, too, but I don't really have much evidence for that right now.

Posted by: Piperdown

Uh, no.

Weiss is not a hedge fund manager or prime broker executive. He came to bat for several journalists and their "sources" (hedge fund managers who have a long history of shorting stocks, then using the same consistent vertically integrated network of journalists, supposedly independent analysts, and social media blowhards.

Weiss was said to have about $700K at one time that he was supporting himself with after getting let go by Business Week, and now several more outlets, and his books not selling enough to warrant more books. He probably trades stocks and shorts them too but that's not what got him started on Byrne's ass in 2006. He was tag teamed to jump in by a blogger/fund manager in the Rocker network named Jeff Matthews.

Without this network, journalists like Herb Greenberg and Weiss have no material to write about that would be controversial enough to ensure they can coninute their careers. Weiss killed his own career by writing nothing but whack job articles calling Byrne a whack job for the last 5 years. Greenberg had nothing to go with once his main man hedge fund manager retired involuntarily, and disappeared for a couple of years before returning with...the same cast of characters. There was no lone conspiracy against Overstock, they do this to several companies a year. It's what they do. It's very profitable for the ones at the bottom at that vertical ladder, and they kickback some of it upwards.

The WP NSS article brouhaha was overblown blog war that spilled over. It's true that it was a very obvious attempt to control what was sees when they google NSS, because NSS is a profitable thing for brokers and hedge fund managers, but regular, legal, shorting is way more profitable and prevalent.

Weiss is no more a sith lord of shorting than Linda Mack is the female James Bond.

Michael Milken on the other hand, that Star Wars fan is quite the sith...