He's ba-ack, And he's been watching Options

[msharma]

Someone claiming to be JayJG and posting from his address seems to be
taking on PrivateMusings and Co..

[Somey]

My guess would be that he felt the volume and shrillness of the BADSITES discussion was in danger of being reduced ever-so-slightly, presumably by the fact that everyone is totally sick of it already. I mean, if people actually stopped bickering about their efforts to impose arbitrary link-redaction by threat of banning, along the lines of a typical fascistic state of some kind, what would they do instead? Correct factual errors? Organize categories? Fix typos? Seriously, come on.

[msharma]

Wow, he's worse than ever.
Look at this. Notice the little monosyllabic questions, leading everyone to suppose that he is actually responding, when a closer look shows that he is actually asking questions the answers to which are bloody obvious. I swear, POV aside, the reason so many people think he's maddening is his style.

At least people don't seem to be falling over themselves in welcome. David Gerard was downright snippy.

My guess would be that he felt the volume and shrillness of the BADSITES discussion was in danger of being reduced ever-so-slightly, presumably by the fact that everyone is totally sick of it already. I mean, if people actually stopped bickering about their efforts to impose arbitrary link-redaction by threat of banning, along the lines of a typical fascistic state of some kind, what would they do instead? Correct factual errors? Organize categories? Fix typos? Seriously, come on.

This post has been edited by msharma: Wed 21st November 2007, 7:18pm

[WordBomb]

Someone claiming to be JayJG and posting from his address seems to be
taking on PrivateMusings and Co..

I must admit that for about a month I've not been paying much attention to wikien-l, much less the post BADSITES debate. So forgive me if I'm wrong, as I very likely am, but having read Jayjg's posts, I presume one of three things is true:

1- Either all the same words are now being used to describe different things, or
2- Circumstances surrounding BADSITES and the post-BADSITES era have evolved dramatically, or
2- Jayjg is attempting to reinvent history

Please know that I'm not trying to be anti-Jayjg...I sincerely want to know what's going on because I'm sorely out of touch. In fact, I think this is the first time I've been aware of a "LINKLOVE" initiative.

On his first post, Jayjg said:

BADSITES has proven to be an extremely convenient way of distracting attention from the real issues regarding offsite harassment and non-encyclopedic links; I suspect it has worked even better than its author ever dreamed it would.

Now...wasn't the ArbCom the author of BADSITES? What else could he be referring to?

Every post thereafter is a variation on this:

Who is "pushing BADSITES"? Please name them, and show where they are doing so. I've only seen people using it as a strawman, but I might have missed a supporter somewhere.

Weren't Fred Bauder and FloNight pretty much the main supporters of BADSITES?

That nobody is challenging him on such elementary subjects tells me I'm the one who's not getting it.

Bottom line: what's going on?

[Daniel Brandt]

Bottom line: what's going on?

BADSITES started as early as last February, when DennyColt appeared out of nowhere and pushed it heavily. His editing skills suggested that he was a pro, but we never figured out who he was. He did 6,500 edits between January 28, 2007 and April 13, 2007, and then disappeared off the face of the earth. Initially the SlimVirgin crowd supported his BADSITES efforts, and it soon got out of hand. The low point was a deletion from Signpost by Musical_Linguist. By mid-summer, with DennyColt long gone, Slim changed her position and suggested that DennyColt was a plant from unnamed anti-wikipedia forces, on a secret mission to create a train wreck with BADSITES by pushing it to illogical extremes. I don't buy this, but it served Slim to adopt this conspiracy theory. The code word for this is "strawman": DennyColt and others pushed a "strawman position" in order to undermine Wikipedia. Just today, Jayjg said that BADSITES fooled people on both sides — in other words, he's also claiming that it was a bogus setup job by one or more evil people.

I posted a couple of "deconstructing Jayjg" comments today on this thread that may be helpful. Today Jayjg sounds like he's busting into the WikiEN-l list as a foil for SlimVirgin. His position is poorly expressed, but as far as I can tell, it's identical to the last position on BADSITES that we got from Slim. His use of the phrase "distracting attention from the real issues regarding offsite harassment" has the paw prints of Slim's poodle all over it.

[GlassBeadGame]

BADSITES started as early as last February, when DennyColt appeared out of nowhere and pushed it heavily. His editing skills suggested that he was a pro, but we never figured out who he was. He did 6,500 edits between January 28, 2007 and April 13, 2007, and then disappeared off the face of the earth.

It seems to me that only a handful of editors ever had that level of frequency. List them out. Remove all mere vandal/new page patrollers who would lack the sophistication. Remove any editor that continued that level of frequency during the DennyColt period (impossible or at least distracting to maintain two accounts at that level.) In what remains you will find Denny.

[Somey]

Let's not jump to conclusions here. User:DennyColt may have been a sockpuppet of a more established WP'er, but not necessarily. Remember that it was yours truly, i.e., me, who originally brought him to the world's attention when he made the supremely obnoxious move of listing a bunch of web-based news articles mentioning Daniel (almost all in passing, and mostly in relation to Daniel's efforts to get himself off of WP) during one of the AfD attempts - #11, I vaguely recall. They all sort of run together...

The idea that DennyColt was one of "us" - i.e., a plant, or some sort of "agent provocateur," is totally absurd. Nobody in a trusted position here would ever have put such effort into keeping the Brandt article on WP, so Jayjg's only hope of convincing people of that preposterous yarn is to keep repeating it until they just stop trying to argue with him, hope that attrition eventually gets rid of the people who remember what really happened, and further hope that the people who replace them are even more gullible than the people running the place now.

I believed then, as I do now, that DennyColt simply got really, really pissed off that we made an issue of what he was doing during that one Brandt AfD. Maybe that was my bad for being the one to point him out, but I'd probably do it again in a heartbeat. Anyway, he didn't want the attention, and WP:BADSITES was his way of getting revenge against WR for criticizing his actions - simple as that. And revenge, of course, is what WP is all about, isn't it?

I'm surprised they don't just call it "Revengeopedia."

Slimmy and Jayjg didn't so much "fall for it" so much as they jumped in headfirst, bashed the hell out of anyone who disagreed with them, and led the charge to make it policy.

Anyway, "WP:LINKLOVE" is just a shortcut to Wikipedia:Linking_to_external_harassment, also known as "BADSITES with implied, rather than explicit, enforcement by banning." And does anyone really think that once their foot is in the door with link redaction, they'll stop there? After that it's mention-redaction, then allusion-redaction, and finally user-redaction. Guaranteed!

[Aloft]

I see now JayJG is taking the usual "Who, me?" route where his support of Dennycolt is concerned. I guess he forgot about this exchange on meta:

http://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?titl...ikipedia_review

[Daniel Brandt]

I see now JayJG is taking the usual "Who, me?" route where his support of Dennycolt is concerned. I guess he forgot about this exchange on meta:

http://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?titl...ikipedia_review

Very nice find. I made a copy of the page because it's probably headed for the memory hole.

[Alkivar]

I'm surprised they don't just call it "Revengeopedia."

several ex admins have been referring to it as backstab-o-pedia for months now.

[Poetlister]

I made a copy of the page because it's probably headed for the memory hole.

It's a bit more difficult to cover things up on Meta. It's not dominated by the same people as WP, as shown by the failure of the request. Indeed, the powers that be on Meta hate being pushed around by WP types. Still, I'm not so naive as to say it's impossible.

[BobbyBombastic]

I see now JayJG is taking the usual "Who, me?" route where his support of Dennycolt is concerned. I guess he forgot about this exchange on meta:

http://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?titl...ikipedia_review

My, my, that is a great read to get a proper perspective of this situation. There are other examples of course, maybe we should look around the month of April and collect them--Slim, Mongo, Crum and the gang all supporting Denny--the person they now refer to as evil incarnate.

[Fox]

So was this DennyColt just a regular nutburger that decided to get back at Wikipedia Review, made BADSITES in response to WR calling him to task, and then when he wouldn't back off screwed up the position forever for SlimVirgin, MONGO, and the others? So now they say he was a "spy" for wrecking their plans by being overzealous in enforcing their plans? That makes no sense. If he was a spy, that would make no sense to spend that much time just to advance... what position? That everyone on all of Wikipedia would be at each others' throats for nearly a year now, and still ongoing?

Did any Wikipedia editors that were close to SlimVirgin, MONGO, and the BADSITES people (from before it was "BADSITES") stop working on Wikipedia prior to DennyColt arriving? Someone with an interest in Brandt? It could be someone like that.

I also saw he had hundreds of edits to ATT. What was the story there?

[gomi]

I also saw he had hundreds of edits to ATT. What was the story there?

Preemptively greasing up SlimVirgin, methinks.