Cumulus Clouds, Synopsis for Peter Damian Options

[lonza leggiera]

Early in November 2008, the Wikipedia editor Cumulus Clouds began a month-long break from editing Wikipedia. On November 20th, a new Wikipedia account, TGH1970, was created. It would later be suspected of having been created by Cumulus Clouds. TGH1970 discovered that a contributor to a web forum—titled FYAD—, on the site somethingawful.com, was claiming to have created a hoax article, Podtats, on Wikipedia as an entry in a contest to vandalise it. This contributor, who used the handle Anne Frank Fanfic, would later claim—with what justification I do not know—that Cumulus Clouds (and TGH1970) was a former, but now despised, contributor to the FYAD forum whose handle was variously given as Tyler Peppar, Tyler Pepper, or Tyler Pepar. The username of the Wikipedia editor who created the article Podtats was Banime, a user who had previously left oleaginously "friendly" warnings on Cumulus Clouds' talk page.

On December 3rd, TGH1970 raised the matter of Banime's alleged vandalism on the appropriate Wikipedia noticeboard (ANI). Despite making a very strong case, TGH1970—as an apparently new, but obviously very Wikipedia-savvy user—fell under suspicion of having an undisclosed axe to grind—and was unable to convince anyone else that there was sufficient evidence of vandalism by Banime for any action to be taken against him. Nevertheless, TGH1970 continued to argue the point at sufficient length to exasperate most of the participants in the discussion, and on December 4th one administrator became sufficiently fed up to block him indefinitely, for supposed "disruption".

Cumulus Clouds resumed editing on December 10th. On December 11th, Banime lodged a request for checkuser on the grounds that he suspected Cumulus Clouds of being the same user as TGH1970, and therefore guilty of evading his block. Cumulus Clouds opposed any checkuser's being carried out as "unnecessary". On December 12th he posted a "retired" notice on his talk page and ceased editing Wikipedia.

On December 18th a group of other contributors to the FYAD forum decided what great fun it would be to upload an image of an apparently strange-looking individual of their acquaintance and insert it into the Wikipedia article Fragile x syndrome as an example of someone (supposedly) suffering from that condition. Some of comments in the FYAD thread strongly suggest that the image had been distorted with photoshop. Within a day, Cumulus Clouds had the image deleted from commons, I believe on the grounds that the uploader's claim to own copyright of the image was fraudulent. This was taken by the above-mentioned group of FYAD contributors as justification for a vicious campaign of abuse and ridicule of Cumulus Clouds on both the FYAD forum and with edits to Wikipedia.

The Wikipedia edits were deleted or oversighted fairly quickly, but a screenshot of one of them has been preserved in the FYAD forum. The following edit was made to the Wikipedia article Eastlake High School (Sammamish, Washington) (Cumulus Clouds' alma mater) on December 19th.

On December 20, 2008, Dick Hansen, a 17 year old teenager known on several websites by his nickname "Cumulus Clouds", opened fire first in a classroom and then in the corridors of the school killing 69 students and injuring 420, until the police shot at him, hitting him in the anus and killing him, putting an end to the carnage. The tragic murder suicide had been announced on his personal Wikipedia page the evening before, followed by a speedy deletion request of said page shortly after. The causes of the incident have yet to be determined exactly, but several of his Wikicolleagues and classmates reported that Dick Hansen had been struggling for a long time with an organized band of internet trolls, a battle which had stemmed a lot of anger and frustration into the young man and had made him plunge into a deep depression

Both the age and name given here for Cumulus Clouds are likely to be fictitious, since they conflict with the ones which these FYAD contributors later would accept as being correct. Initially, they also didn't seem to be aware that Cumulus Clouds was supposedly the former FYAD contributor Tyler Peppar, but Anne Frank Fanfic informed them of this later on the same day, when he bragged (somewhat inaccurately) of having been responsible for getting Cumulus Clouds "banned" from Wikipedia, and pointing to the ANI thread started by TGH1970 as a reference. Much of the remaining FYAD thread was devoted to making fun of TGH1970's contributions to the ANI thread, lionising Anne Frank Fanfic for having "owned", and ridiculing Cumulus Clouds for having been so humiliated.

Three days later, a 25-year old Seattle man died suddenly, and an obituary was published on January 5th, 2009. On the following day, a contributor to the FYAD forum announced that Tyler Peppar had committed suicide and cited—with what justification I do not know—the aforementioned obituary as a reference. On January 27th, Banime added an item to Wikipedia's memorial listing of deceased Wikipedians, stating that Cumulus Clouds had committed suicide on December 22nd, again citing the abovementioned obituary as a reference. Six minutes later, Wikipedia adminstrator, Raul654, added a note to Cumulus Clouds' talk page, stating that he had committed suicide on December 22nd. Later on the same day, Wikipedia administrator Alison replaced the statements in these two items that Cumulus Clouds had committed suicide with ones which merely said that he had died.

This post has been edited by lonza leggiera:

[thekohser]

Two days later Cumulus Clouds took his own life. He was 25.

I hate to do this, but... {{citation needed}}.

[lonza leggiera]

Two days later Cumulus Clouds took his own life. He was 25.

I hate to do this, but... {{citation needed}}.

Good question. At the time I wondered myself what the evidence for this was. I thought I had carried out a thorough investigation of what evidence was then available and convinced myself that it was pretty conclusive. However, on reexamining the evidence still available to me, I now find it much less convincing. That Cumulus Clouds committed suicide is an inference from two prior conlusions:

1. That the person named in this obituary committed suicide; and
2. That the person named in that obituary was Cumulus Clouds.

The problem with both of these conclusions is that the earliest statement of either of them that I can find appears in the FYAD forum, which is an utterly untrustworthy source, and none of the subsequent statements of them that I have been able to find are demonstrably independent of that source. One of the pieces of evidence, for instance, to which I had attached some importance at the time was a comment left in the comments section of the above-mentioned obituary on January 9th, 2009:

I was one of Clayton’s e-friends…it is a tragedy when people can be struck down in the prime of their lives, especially because of cyberbullying. My thoughts and prayers are with his family.

The comment was subsequently removed, but it can still be found in an archived copy of the obituary. The problem with this, which I didn't notice back in 2009, is that it post-dates the announcement on the FYAD forum. So, even if the comment was sincere, it could still have been based on the commenter's credulously accepting the FYAD announcement at face value. But the commenter's given surname is also suspiciously similar to that of Richard Kyanka, the owner of the something awful website, and that would have to raise some doubts about the genuineness of the comment anyway.

The evidence for the first of the above conclusions would be much stronger if one could be sure of the second. But the evidence I was relying on for that conclusion was that it seemed to have been accepted without question by several Wikipedia admins, apparently including Raul654, John Vandenberg, Alison and Newyorkbrad, and that Cumulus Clouds himself had not reappeared to contest the announcements of his death on Wikipedia. To be fair, these admins (or some of them) might have been aware of more credible evidence than I have been able to find, but as far as I can tell at the moment they may well have been relying on nothing more than rumours ultimately traceable to the FYAD forum.

For the purposes of illustrating problems with Wikipedia's control over its content, it doesn't really matter whether Cumulus Clouds was the same person as the one named in the Issaquah Press obituary anyway. In fact, if Cumulus Clouds were not that person, the fact that Wikipedia states in its memorial listing of deceased Wikipedians that he was would make this a much more powerful illustration of the problems with its control over content.

[Peter Damian]

For the purposes of illustrating problems with Wikipedia's control over its content, it doesn't really matter whether Cumulus Clouds was the same person as the one named in the Issaquah Press obituary anyway. In fact, if Cumulus Clouds were not that person, the fact that Wikipedia states in its memorial listing of deceased Wikipedians that he was would make this a much more powerful illustration of the problems with its control over content.

Ok,

1. what specifically were the control failures that led to this incident?

2. what controls would we expect to see to prevent this kind of thing occurring

3. are those expected controls now in place, or something like them, in November 2011

It's a sad story if true, but what are the lessons we learn from it? Has Wikipedia learned those lessons?