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Posted by: carbuncle

(mod note: "Conflicts of interest, paedophila images" subtitle added)
(mod note: See previous topic, 'http://wikipediareview.com/index.php?showtopic=35679', for background)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_comment/F%C3%A6.

Should we start a betting pool on how long it stays up and who closes/deletes it?

Posted by: SB_Johnny

I'm guessing the accusations of "canvassing on WR" will begin in 5...4...3...

Posted by: DanMurphy

Good luck. The attempted smearing of that guy kuiper (sp?) amused at least. I won't be getting involved myself as that would seem over the line (yes, I'm still noodling a piece about wikipedia).

Isn't there some time limit on getting "x" certifiers? I guess that's when they'll knock it down. The over under on you being accused of stalking and harassment? No one's gong to take that bet.

Posted by: carbuncle

I'm pretty sure I can find http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:Baseball_Bugs to certify it if need be.

Posted by: mbz1

Does somebody know what http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk%3APieter_Kuiper&action=historysubmit&diff=473179963&oldid=473179720

What "off-wiki post" he's talking about?

Posted by: Michaeldsuarez

http://wikipediareview.com/index.php?showtopic=36206&st=60&p=294965&#entry294965 (16:29)

This? The post that Fae is referring to must have been published between the following two revisions:

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:Pieter_Kuiper&diff=473175676&oldid=473169313 (16:11)

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:Pieter_Kuiper&diff=next&oldid=473177396 (16:38)

Alternatively, it's possible that Fae might have Pieter confused with someone else:

http://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Commons:Deletion_requests/File:Voidokilia_beach_location_map.png&diff=64843082&oldid=64837581

Posted by: Random832

I know nothing about the basis for this dispute other than what's listed on the page, since I haven't paid attention to Wikipedia in years. However, I can't help but think that there once was a day when being found to have had undisclosed past accounts that left under a cloud was grounds for summary desysopping and blocking.

Posted by: EricBarbour

Carb opened it about 3 hours ago, and except for some clueless nerd stumbling into the talkpage, there's not a peep from anyone. Crickets.

Did you remember to tell Fae about this, Carb? You might also poke the other WMUK principals. See if someone's stupid enough to start shit. Heh heh.

Posted by: carbuncle

Did anyone have Reaper Eternal at 13:00UTC? Come on up and claim your money!

Posted by: carbuncle

Ok, it's back. Place your bets!

Posted by: cookiehead

"outing" should be allowed in cases of WP:COI, which that clearly is. As is almost any "outing". If someone is outed due to the clues they leave in their edits, they are almost surely editing in a COI way to arise such suspicion.

See G Weiss and his cavalcade as the most famous example on WP. Also Linda Mack in regards to her romantic relations, her former employers, and her old grudges from school. I'm sure there are hundreds of stories in the Naked Wikicity like those.

I frequently see real world names un-out themselves while editing their BLP's. They start out with their real names, run into a WP:AUTO/COI brick wall, then come back either under an IP or alias or both. Then continue to successfully edit with a now undisclosed COI.

In fact, WP should require all adults to register as "real users" if they want "credibility" as does Amazon reviews, or as minors that they voluntarily disclose they are editing as a minor.

Naaahhhhh (Theodoric of York voice)........just keep on with the kabuki theater (note that it is not a Witch Hunt, unless you're the COI perp) that keeps the WP Social Network game going....

Posted by: mbz1

Does not look like there's much activity. I bet it is going to be closed.

Posted by: EricBarbour

Christ. I've been watching this crap for 3 1/2 years, and the behaviour Russavia and Will are displaying here still amazes me. It has to be deliberate, and they have to be either complete fools or pathological liars. Yes, it's settled, Ash=Fae=Ashley Van Haeften. End of story.

They just need one more troll to deny everything (Fae himself, probably), and they'll have a full set of Hear-no-evil, See-no-evil, and Speak-no-evil monkeys.

Posted by: Michaeldsuarez

Russavia mentions "harassment" and the Wikipedia Review. Shrigley endorses that comment without elaborating:

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Requests_for_comment/F%C3%A6&diff=473450860&oldid=473443184

I believe that certain posts on the following thread provides the reason for that move:

http://wikipediareview.com/index.php?showtopic=34837

Posted by: Abd

It's utterly improper in form. RfC/User has some well-established rules, not followed. Carbuncle, is this display of incompetence deliberate?

Posted by: SB_Johnny

Is Will Beback connected to WMUK? He's certainly up in arms about this.

Posted by: Rhindle

Where is this homophobic harrassment that this Russavia character is claiming? Does someone have a link? Shady behavior is shady behavior. It looks to me as playing the homophobia card and people are http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Requests_for_comment/F%C3%A6&curid=34503644&diff=473531373&oldid=473514415.

Posted by: DanMurphy

Falling for it? That account (Mattxxx whatever) has 200 edits over 3 1/2 years. Make of that what you will.

But the homophobia/harassment/stalking/antisemtic/etc/etc gambit is a popular and effective one. Mr. Van Haeften makes it his go-to tactic (back when he was Ash, Mr. Van Haeften accused various other editors of "hate crimes" for questioning his deceptive use of sources).

Why does it work?

People form alliances in the service of different agendas (see "shrigley" and probably "russavia," both of whom appear to be ethno-nationalist editors in search of admin protection), which accounts for some of the pile on. They're just playing the game.

But when you have a lot of Harry Potter's and Hermonia's running around in charge, they really are easy to fool (yes, virginia, children are much easier to manipulate and mislead than adults). Oh my God, that 40 year old is gay and he's being PERSECUTED for it! Somebody help that poor man!

Mr. Van Haeften is, of course, lucky to live in the most enlightened time about sexuality in human history, and in one of the more enlightened countries. His sexual preference is public knowledge because he's repeatedly shared information about it online. He has sought time and again to make it relevant (somehow) to his online activities and use it as a shield. That forces his sexuality into any conversation about his behavior. That was his choice.

That some grawp-like troll his written "fag" on his user page or whatever, is unfortunate, but far worse things happen at sea. It's childish vandalism of the sort wikipedia sees literally hundreds of times a day (and by everyone in history who's gotten involved in dust-ups on anonymous online forums).

Posted by: EricBarbour

Now do you see, Dan? Wikipedia, as absurd as it sounds, does have a "gay mafia". The mere existence of such "mafias" completely invalidates the whole idea of a crowdsourced reference work, because it leads inevitably to bias. It has nothing to do with LGBT people either--I suspect most of them would be disgusted to see these antics on a "neutral" operation like Wikipedia. It's embarrassing, but because it's obscure, no one knows it's happening.

Shrigley looks like a regular contributor, mostly in Chinese subjects, but "Wikiwind" and especially "Matty the Damned" smell like socks. The latter does very little other than vote on RFAs and AFDs. Sock. Period.


And that also invalidates what they're doing. If Van Haeften had kept his sexual life quiet, he might have a good case to complain about "harassment". Instead, he had to run around under the http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/Ashleyvh account, posting photos of his underwear-clad peepee on Commons. He tried to delete everything, but we've got screenshots of some of them. (Get it? Ashleyvh, Ashley Van Haeften?)

You guys wanna see obvious socking by a gay man on Commons? Try http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/Juicyyummybanana and http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/Juicybnana. No doubt those genitals are attached to the same guy---who may also be Ashley Van Haeften, for all we know. He might have 50,000 accounts for all we can know.

(and to help clean the penises from our eyes, I can't think of many photos more "encyclopedic" and "educational" than http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Angelina_Ash_4.jpg. It's for you, Horsey. )

Posted by: Michaeldsuarez

http://wikipediareview.com/index.php?showtopic=34837

I don't believe that Shrigley is a normal user. If Shrigley was simply a "regular contributor", then he wouldn't have invoked his right to vanish in November 2011:

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Changing_username/Simple&diff=462969630&oldid=462904835

Posted by: Peter Damian

You mean this rule?


As I understand, there were two editors on the user:Ash RfC who certified it. The RfC can only proceed on the assumption that Ash=Fae. The problem is that to acknowledge that is 'outing'.

'Outing' in an odd sense becaue Fae=Mr Van Haeften is not an issue, and is acknowledged. The outing involves admitting his past user account.

Posted by: MBisanz

I brought up this specific issue yesterday and it was resolved to my satisfaction with DC, AB, and NE taking responsibility for the current complaints and DR process involving the current user, irrespective of their prior identity.

Posted by: Abd

Yeah, basically. The issue I see revolves around what "the dispute" means. There was a prior dispute, with attempts to resolve it by the required users, who certified it. That could not be used in a future RfC as a certification. Otherwise a single person could keep opening new RfCs based on an old one!

If the old dispute was not resolved by the old RfC, by agreement with the parties, then the next step, procedurally, would be ArbComm. RfC was not intended as a process to generate sanctions, though I've seen that abused. It's a process intended to generate voluntary agreement, or, alternatively, to lay the due process foundation for an ArbComm filing. That's how I used RfC/JzG 3. The pile-in of users supporting JzG -- in a position where he was clearly out to lunch -- and calling for me to be banned -- simply had the effect of demonstrating a situation requiring ArbComm intervention.

ArbComm, unfortunately, didn't want to look at the real problem, that a faction could appear and call for the ban of a user who was merely raising an obvious problem with abusive use of admin tools while involved. And they could easily do this with a two-thirds majority, often adequate to get a noticeboard "community ban."

What later followed was quite to be expected, Durova predicted it. I'd be banned, in spite of following due process *exactly*. They merely needed to wait for a more believable cover.

This procedural problem has nothing to do with alleged "outing," and the alleged socking, if that's what it is, would not be handled by RfC. RfC cannot, by design, generate binding sanctions.

Posted by: DanMurphy

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia%3ARequests_for_comment%2FF%C3%A6&action=historysubmit&diff=473570720&oldid=473564708

I will be eagerly watching to see how the fair and impartial community behavior policing mechanisms spring into action on this one. Dollars to donuts that "shrigley" is in off-line communication with Mr. Van Haeften. I guess I'll have to revise my opinion that he's just building alliances for the nationalism stuff though.

Posted by: Tarc

Its nothing new, I received the same treatment when I got the Marcus Bachmann article deleted.

What people need to come to terms with is the notion that a homosexual person is capable of deception, deceit or general assholish behavior, and to call such a person out for that behavior doesn't mean you're attacking them for their homosexuality.

Posted by: Selina

Interesting, I followed a few links and he's somehow tied in with a porn baron/is a porn baron (dealing exclusively with gay male stuff)? http://wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Administrators%27_noticeboard/IncidentArchive604#Fraudulent_referencing seems somewhat of a conflict of interest but I can't be bothered to read it all the sum of it seems to be re-inserting advertising links in a way a spambot would and getting away with it?

yeah. really. ESPECIALLY gay males whose bitchiness can be aggression to the power of 10. and this is coming from the one that made http://wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Bifemale.svg and http://wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Bimale.svg which is on like a gazillion users' pages now - I think I was maybe THE most infamous bi fem on WP (http://wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_comment/Linuxbeak) anyone trying to pull that card-pulling crap on me woul get laughed at

(also was pushing against the paedophiles before anyon in charge actually started doing anything about it: http://wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:LGBT_notice_board/Archive_3#what_belongs_here "Deletion of pederasty-related topics is partisan, and you need to re-check the NPOV policy and guidelines before you (Mistress Selina Kyle, I'm looking at you) continue to remove these topics" .... yeeeaahhh. Thanks, 'Dave'

... I can't find that thread now where people were saying his user page on this Fæ guy's old account used to have childporn artwork on it too?)

Posted by: DanMurphy

Mr. Van Haeften? No, I don't think his pornography edits were remunerated or tied to anything professional (there was another guy, Benjamin Hohlman, who was deeply involved with the porn business who made common cause with him who was later blocked for sockpuppets, but their overlap was merely because of the shared interest). I came to the conclusions that for Van Haeften it was a hobby, and perhaps slightly political (porn is awesome, gay porn is even more awesome because I'm gay, and I'm striking a blow against all you prudes who think that the "grabby awards" aren't equivalent to academic papers and in-depth news articles). The attempts to create a poorly sourced article on "Rod Handle" (or whoever the porn star du jour was) under the argument that it was an "LGBT" topic, i found a rather clear illustration of the dysfunctional approach to "knowledge" at Wikipedia. In theory, there should be lots of articles on gay sexuality, and many of them on porn from an academic perspective (and there is lots of research to use if one were so inclined). But the fanboy stuff, you know, "Rod Handle is known for his relentless appetite for sex and is equally willing to be the top or bottom" was one step removed from the transformers and my little pony keyboard diarrhea, with the added benefit that presumably lots of guys in their 40s and 50s who spent 5 years in the porn meat grinder probably don't want to be memorialized that way on google (though, of course, there was a level of protection thanks to the frequent use of stage names).

His use of advertising as references was simply because those were the only "sources" available to justify writing articles on his interests.

Posted by: Selina

edited post btw, I have an annoying habit of posting then editing instead of using preview that I need to fix ^

I'd be interested if the paedophile "artwork" pics on user page thing was a proven thing and not just hearsay

Posted by: tarantino

Yeah.



That all seems regular for wikipedia.

Posted by: tarantino

Ash used to display http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:VonGloeden_6052.jpg on his user page with the caption "This is not actually my photo Sometimes a fish is just a fish... "

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special%3ALog&type=&user=Happy-melon&page=User%3AAsh&year=&month=-1&tagfilter=&hide_review_log=1, while http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:Ash/RfC_Delicious_carbuncle&action=history.

Posted by: carbuncle

I do not recall anyone seriously accusing Van Haeften of being a paedophile, nor do I think there is any basis for that charge, flying fishes notwithstanding. I think the old user page was brought up in relation to a discussion on Commons wherein Fæ stood shoulder to shoulder with Sue Gardener in proposing that user pages should not display, well, such things as naked youths fingering fishes. It was termed the "locker room" problem. I'll find a link in a second.


If I recall, the spelling was Holmann, not Holhman. Also known as Dj Pusspuss and Sister Kitty Catalyst.

Posted by: mbz1

I wonder how RFC/U works. In "desired outcome" section you said: "I would like to ask that Fæ resign their adminship ". Let's say most users will agree with this, but Fæ refuses to resign. What would happen next?

Posted by: carbuncle

A series of jubilant Twitter posts by his supporters? What do you mean what would happen next? Nothing would happen. It's WP.

Posted by: mbz1

I meant , if there are any means to enforce the recommendations made in RFC/U

Posted by: thekohser

Sigh. Why does Selina wonder about proving the "artwork" accusation? Why does Carbuncle feel the need to go "finding" the link?

All of this work has already been done for you both, right http://www.examiner.com/wiki-edits-in-national/wikimedia-uk-trustee-finds-his-hands-tied.





All right there, in the mainstream media, with convenient links pointing you exactly to an image of proof and to Ashley's hypocrisy on the Village pump.

Posted by: Cunningly Linguistic

He was just pissed that I got there first with the "waxed pudenda" that so outraged Jimbo!

Posted by: Peter Damian

Vandenberg says here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Requests_for_comment/F%C3%A6

This is correct, as I noted here http://wikipediareview.com/index.php?act=ST&f=5&t=35679&st=140# .



Who was the 'critical contributor to the discussion'? It was not Vandenberg (see below). And why did Vandenberg suggest that it would not unduly affect the outcome of the vote, given that many people were not even aware of the RfA? Vandenberg's argument was precisely that the "there would be a few people who opposed due to the prior history, but I doubt that they would number more than the number of people who are opposing now due to the fact that they can't see the prior history", which is bizarre.

Vandenberg should be the focus of this, rather than 'Fae'. Fae is simply exploiting the corrupt nature of a system that allows these favours to be traded with influential and regarded admins like Vandenberg.

Posted by: HRIP7

The RfC/U was deleted by Will Beback today. The reason Will gave was that it was not established that Ash and Fæ were the same person, and that arbcom, in response to his inquiry, failed to confirm that they were. This being so, Will concluded that therefore the RfC was based on a faulty premise, and deleted it.

Twenty minutes later, arbitrator John Vandenberg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Requests_for_comment/F%C3%A6#Undeleted http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special%3ALog&type=delete&user=&page=Wikipedia%3ARequests+for+comment%2FF%C3%A6&year=&month=-1&tagfilter= ...

Posted by: Cunningly Linguistic

Ah, I see that Australian, plane-spotting twat Russavia is in on the act now. Things can only go downhill now. His recent 'promotion' to bureaotwat must surely be coincidental, after all this couldn't be a perfect chance for him to prove that he was the right candidate now could it?

Posted by: Peter Damian

WB is demanding evidence that Ash=Fae. But they can't give evidence that Ash=Fae. Why can't they? Because it would be 'harassment'. Why would it be harassment? Because Ash=Fae



This is really stupid. 'Outing' is revealing the real-life identity of an anonmous person. But we already know that Fae=Van Haeften. That is on the record and not an issue. The issue is whether Fae= an old account that ran into trouble at an RfC and ducked out.

Posted by: Peter Damian

Says Liberal councillor for Richmond Jonathan Cardy, whose register of interests http://www.richmond.gov.uk/who_are_my_councillors?mgl=mgDeclarationSubmission.aspx&UID=404&HID=478&HPID=0 fails to include any mention of his work on Wikipedia or WMUK.

Posted by: Cunningly Linguistic

When did he start on WP or with WMUK?

Posted by: Peter Damian

WP http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Hampton_Hill&diff=prev&oldid=121411144 2007. WMUK, at least since August 2009.

Posted by: Cla68

Will Beback asks ArbCom to give him personal information about another editor and when he doesn't hear a response within 24 hours, he tries to delete the RfC? That's classic WP gaming. I suggest looking at Will Beback's editing activity from when his account first started and you might see a reason why he would get involved in something like this.

Anyway, Fae needs to come clean instead of giving the appearance of trying to privately ask other editors to intercede on his behalf. The homophobia accusations are to be expected, but doesn't make them any more acceptable. Remember, some of Cirt's defenders, and this is related, called his accusers "Nazis" and "Liars."

Posted by: Michaeldsuarez

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Censorship_of_Twitter&diff=473626202&oldid=465501034

Shrigley is a clear PRC apologist. He is known to create hatchet jobs on critics of the PRC:

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=2011_Xilinhot_incident&diff=433679524&oldid=432993255

Shrigley admits being Chinese in the following diff:

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:Quigley&diff=prev&oldid=396852685

He's editing in the interests of his beloved motherland. His "I don't have too strong a sense of Chinese identity" and "I can barely speak the language" comments are bullshit. Anyone reviewing his revisions to Wikipedia can see that he knows many, many things about China, its culture, and its languages.

Edit:

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Requests_for_comment/F%C3%A6&diff=473570720&oldid=473564708

Shrigley has decided to play the "WR is anti-gay" card.

Posted by: lilburne

Posted by: spp

The sad part of all this is there are three distinct issues at play here and one will knock the other two out:

1. Fae and Ash have been improperly editing BLP topics.
2. Ash left under an RFCU cloud, came back as Fae, and gained the bit while hiding exactly what was going on with the prior account.
3. There are homophobic elements taking advantage of the situation and bashing Fae.

All three are wrong but 3 distracts from the other two.

Posted by: Cunningly Linguistic

Hasn't WP got enough whinging queens playing the "homophobia" card without this one adding to the noise?

It's quite obvious that WR isn't a welcoming place if one is a shirtlifter, but from what I've seen recently there have not been any threads which could rationally and reasonably be described as homophobic.

Posted by: Tarc

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Requests_for_comment/F%C3%A6&diff=473531373&oldid=473514415

The Fae fans in there need a serious dose of

Posted by: Cla68

By trying to delete the RfC, Will Beback has succeeded in bringing it to the attention of the wider community. There is now enough input in it to require some kind of action.

Posted by: Rhindle

Nixon resigned because he knew he was toast. If he could come back as another persona and ran for president would he get elected(ignore the term limit issues for sake of argument)?

If Fae passes another RfA after this that means anyone can have a "clean start." How about anyone here with a sock, er "alternative account" in good standing should get some editing mojo and run for admin, espcially the ones here who are banned. After being confirmed, leave some vague reference that you were once a banned account that posts here. During an RfC or Arbcom request make accusations about being harrassed because you're a known WR poster and being discriminated against. As long as you can have a "clean start" everyone is included right?

Posted by: SB_Johnny

Just make sure to post about it on WR while you're doing it, so you'll have plenty of opportunities to accuse the opposers of "outing" you whenever they try to bring it up.

Posted by: tarantino

A frequently repeated meme by wikipedia users is that homophobia is common on WR.

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_comment/F%C3%A6

I honestly don't remember any posts on WR expressing a fear of homosexuals, or even posts disparaging people because they are gay.

Are there examples, and if there are, are they more frequent than what appears on wikipedia's various forums?

Posted by: Silver seren

Other than Kohser insulting me for being gay, I haven't seen any of you guys saying anything like that.

Posted by: Rhindle

Whenever the "OMG homophobia" crowd is asked to provide a link for examples of this, they never can come up with one and just dodge the issue.

Posted by: TungstenCarbide

I agree. Being branded in this way can have very real consequences in life. Silver seren, you need to back your statement up or retract it with an apology.

Posted by: Kelly Martin

This was a problem back in the early days of WR. But I've seen nothing worthy of concern in at least four or five years.


Nah, nobody here cares that you're gay. We make fun of you for being a furry. Totally different concept.

Posted by: Tarc

Well, some of the bleeding-hearts got a little uppity during the Bachmann debate here back when I referred to him and his avatar as "furfags". But that was a reflection on furrydom in general rather than Seren's sexuality in particular, which at the time I had no knowledge of. Political correctness is not my forte.

Posted by: Silver seren

I think Kohser has used that terminology as well. If it's not meant to mean something sexuality related, then I do take back my comment. But that's usually what the comment means, so just generally using it often seems to imply that.

Posted by: EricBarbour

Would anyone like some COI issues to hit Fae with in the RFC?

Posted by: Peter Damian

And Sam Blacketer, Labour member for Westminster council, agrees http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Requests_for_comment/F%C3%A6&diff=473757485&oldid=473755124 (At least major UK political parties are beginning to be represented on this important issue, albeit anonymously).

'Victuallers' http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Requests_for_comment/F%C3%A6&diff=473832562&oldid=473816877 also gives his support to Fae. Not of any political party AFAIK, but he is Roger Bamkin, Chair of Wikimedia UK.

Posted by: Eppur si muove

Is this anything other than writing about his partner and their colleagues and the Codex Gregorianus? This has probably received official sanction by WMUK before Fae became a trustee as they used some of that in a press release. There hasn't been any substantial change to the articles by Fae/Ash in the last year, just someone tidying up.

I do, however, find http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Simon_Corcoran&diff=463471348&oldid=463466262 quite interesting. I wonder how AGK can justify that redaction.

Posted by: Peter Damian

On Fae's contributions since his 'clean restart' it is nearly all gnome work and bot-assisted editing. He cites his work on 'Hoxne Hoard' in his RfA but on looking through his contributions it appears to be entirely edits like this http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Hoxne_Hoard&diff=370692395&oldid=370692278 i.e. linking, spell corrections, 'wikifying' and stuff like that. All very important but entirely content-free.

Posted by: Cunningly Linguistic

Hmm, that's two guns loaded in a day ready for someone else to fire.

Posted by: Selina

Well I just found it:
http://web.archive.org/web/20100317194701/http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Ash (sexually-suggestive picture of a naked child, not-safe-for-work unless you work in whatever schools this guy worked in...)
• http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/c5/VonGloeden_6052.jpg/150px-VonGloeden_6052.jpg (sexually-suggestive picture of a naked child, not-safe-for-work unless you work in whatever schools this guy worked in...)
http://uk.wikimedia.org/wiki/Board#Ashley_Van_Haeften_.28F.C3.A6.29

this reminds me of the "Haiduc" paedophile who I argued wit ha few times before giving up (in the previous links), no one listened to me I saw what they were doing because it's exactly the same kind of slimy stuff PR companies do, it was only later WP actually did anything about the paedophiles pushing it (usually as "pederasty") - http://wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Log/block?page=User:Haiduc - and the articles still tainted - I just gave up on WP, they did a few bans for show when they were getting media attention about the networks of pedo users then continued to do nothing...




I just searched up http://google.com/search?q=site%3Awikipediareview.com+pedophiles+OR+pedophile+OR+paedophile+OR+paedophiles+OR+pedophilia+OR+paedophilia:

http://wikipediareview.com/?showtopic=30094

http://wikipediareview.com/?showtopic=15438

http://wikipediareview.com/?showtopic=34313THAT IS NOT WHAT DON'T ASK DON'T TELL IS MEANT TO BE USED FOR JIMMY. CHRIST. >:|

Posted by: Michaeldsuarez

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Administrators%27_noticeboard/Incidents&diff=prev&oldid=473786040

Posted by: carbuncle

One of the mods added the "Conflicts of interest, paedophila images" line to the title of this thread. I wasn't planning on being banned on WP just at the moment (there are some issues with Prioryman that I want to get addressed first) - would you mind removing it? I'm sure it will be attributed to me by one of the more rabid fantasists over there. Thanks!

Posted by: SB_Johnny

Better now?

[edit to add:] That crap on ANI is pretty out there. Let us know when they settle on what exactly it is that they're banning you for.

Posted by: thekohser

Given the failure to provide any links to actual evidence and the wishy-washy weakness of this retraction, I ask the WR moderators/staff to remove Seren's initial libel, and any mention of it thereafter.

I strongly doubt I have ever insulted someone for "being gay", and I emphatically deny that I have ever called anyone a "furfag". It is reprehensible that these sorts of lazy aspersions can be cast here. I won't tolerate it.

Posted by: Michaeldsuarez

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Requests_for_comment/F%C3%A6#Move_to_strike_.22outside.22_view_by_IP_editor_.28101.118.25.78.29

Some users now want to censor statements.

Posted by: carbuncle

Let's talk about "blackmail" for a second, since it is mentioned in that ANI thread. Here is the "blackmail threat" posted on Fæ's Commons talk page during their RfA:

I don't know who this was (it wasn't me). Note that there is no mention of the RfA (which was sinking like a concrete warship by this point anyway). Note also that it is not even in the traditional form of unless you do x, I will do y. There isn't even any implied action that Fæ might take to avoid this. A threat, certainly, but is it blackmail or simply trolling?

Posted by: SB_Johnny

Or maybe it was just Fae himself?

Posted by: Peter Damian

I think it crossed an ethical line, as Greg would say. But anyway, why is Wikipedia Review being tarred with this brush? And it detracts from the main point, which is that there is no 'outing' in the standard sense here. That Fae=Van Haeften is public domain. What is not in the public domain is that Van Haeften = some user who left under a cloud.

The main argument now gaining ascendancy on the RfC is the 'Balloonman' one that voters at the RfA were told that it was a clean start, that they did not oppose, and so everything is OK.

Posted by: Cunningly Linguistic

It seems someone just posted something similar to the above on ANI.

It is true though, and there seems to be a pattern forming. Whenever Fae/Ash find things are going against them then out come the claims of harassment/blackmail. Either he's the unluckiest queen on the planet or it's a little to good to be true.

Posted by: Vigilant

OK, someone is having too much fun with this.

Googling "98SA447" reveals it to be the case number of some sort of ethics complaint against Fred Bauder.

This wikipedia stuff is so incestuous. It seems to me that someone inside is settling scores.

Posted by: carbuncle

This is the work of someone experienced with WP and WR. Here's the most recent threat posted (it was revdeleted and the account renamed, but Fæ has chosen to keep a copy of it on his talk page): Someone knows enough to get by the account name filters (although F4g should have been caught, surely). The reference to "burn in this world and the next" is to the Twitter fight between Fæ and whatsisname that I posted here recently. My money is either on one of WR's resident trolls, or Benjiboi.

Posted by: Selina

If that's true then Wikipedia should look at why they aren't admitting that they are doing this stuff here, presumably because they assume they'd get banned from WR too...

This idea that WR is any kind of bloc really pisses me off, it's an open discussion forum that ANYONE who isn't a complete scumbag can join in on. It's more open than Wikipedia that we allow open HONEST discussion about issues than pussyfooting around with snipes and sliminess in private email lists and locked chat channels, and they really really seem to hate that...

Ok I think that's both WR's regular LGBT posters agreeing this guy is a creep now. Nevermind that. http://wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:BADSITES, homophobic!

There was another thing I saw when I was reading it too:
I was reading over the snide little messages I got on WP earlier when I tried to bite back against the influx of paedophiles earlier, posted links a few posts up ^ It seems to be a common tactic they use to divert attention, it's not pro-paedophilia it's pro-pederasty, it's not pro-pederasty it's homophobia... ugh the cry wolf effect then makes EVERYONE who has actually had to deal with genuine harassment look bad:
http://wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Sexuality_of_Robert_Baden-Powell_(4th_nomination) - that article was basically an advertisement for paedophilia being pushed by http://wikipediareview.com/index.php?s=&showtopic=36464&view=findpost&p=295558... Haiduc later got banned but only because he openly said it, the rest started behaving the same way PR companies do on Wikipedia by being more sneaky about it...
p.s. I'm posting this as the one who wrote this: http://wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Girl_Scouts_of_the_USA#Discrimination_against_.22Infidels.22_and_Bisexual.2FGay_people:
paedophilia =/= gay/lesbian/bi
paedophilia = paedophilia

Posted by: Vigilant

Twitter fight?

Posted by: lilburne

Well wasn't the email to you in response to you asking the question wrt to the so called blackmail attempt? IOW the backmail was before you posted the email and thus could have had nothing to do with giving away Fæ's dox to nasty persons unknown.

Posted by: carbuncle

http://wikipediareview.com/index.php?showtopic=36336&hl=.

Posted by: Selina

edited my (second or third, whatever) post with more links, I need to use the preview button more, forget how fast the replies here fly sometimes

Posted by: Cunningly Linguistic

Looking at the history of ANI it seems there are some shenanigans going on with an IP user. I can't see what the revdeleted posts are. Anything interesting?

Posted by: carbuncle

No the email was in response to the "threat" made to User:Ash which caused them to state that they feared for their "safety" and was part of the reason why they were "leaving Wikipedia". I was never able to establish what that threat was or who made it. There was a suggestion that it was made here, but I could never find anything that could be interpreted as a threat.

Posted by: carbuncle

The IP posted a Google search string which would bring up the WHOIS info that I posted here. The search terms were something extremely tricky like "Ashley Van Haeften WHOIS" or similar. I suppose it was revealing the name of the domain that caused people to get uncomfortable.

Posted by: Cunningly Linguistic

{{strange thing, the first version of this post disappeared}}

That doesn't look tricky to me.

Thanks anyway, I was trying to figure out what happened from the user's http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:27.100.16.185 but wasn't getting anywhere. Being a nosey bugger it was getting frustrating. I still don't see why they blocked him/her though.

Fae's real name had already been mentioned earlier on in the thread, and a domain name is hardly personal information.

I've also just noticed that the unblock was declined by our prostitution loving lawyer Fred Bauder, what a small world.

Posted by: lilburne

Oh I see it was the prior claim of blackmail, too many to keep up with.

Personally whilst you seem to be mostly concerned about his old editing and referencing. I still think that Fæ's real problem is always going to be the WMFUK status along with the WP admin status in association with that misguided old user page image, coupled with the bondage image uploads, and the association with the swimming pool changing room images.

It has nothing to do with him being gay, or bi. The same would apply, and perhaps more so, if the image was of a female.

As for blame that lies directly with WMFUK and the belief that what happens on WP will have any bearing in the RL. When you are dealing with educational organisations and Government departments other considerations come into play. The people responsible for the organisation may come under scrutiny. I know, WP and responsibility, but there you go.

Posted by: Selina

Nothing wrong with bondage between consenting adults though. But putting pictures up of naked little boys is the glorification of paedophilia and children cannot CONSENT to having photographs taken of them like that... It's an old photo but that doesn't mean it's still not abuse that some creep got that child to hold up that fish and say "make the fish suck on it"...

I think a lot of the reason there isn't a backlash to is actually because it's a male child and http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Systemic_bias#The_.22average_Wikipedian.22, it's less shocking to them - but if he was parading around a picture of a naked little girl instead I bet there wouldn't be such apparent apathy

Posted by: Cunningly Linguistic

Ultimately, as far as I'm concerned, isn't the bondage, the sexuality or even the WP and Commons editing, but simply can he do the job properly or not?

Posted by: Vigilant

Ultimately, it's about the lulz...

Posted by: Cunningly Linguistic

I'm not sure the background you are giving to that image is altogether correct. I also don't think the lad is as young as his face would imply. His well-hung anatomy and scrotum size would point to him being 15 or 16 give or take. And in those days, and at that age he would have been no innocent.

In any case it's a nice picture that I see as non-sexual in tone. No more so than a Titan nude anyway,



I save them for Ottava and Kohs.

Posted by: Selina

oh god please can we not go there, this is the whole paedophilia/"pederasty"/"young boy lover" thing all over again. ickickick.

you said you had kids earlier in the food regulation for schools thread, would you really feel happy with someone who obviously found a picture of a child arousing to have access to Special:Emailuser with the many many many children on WP?

Posted by: Cunningly Linguistic

I have no interest in boy-loving being straight as I am. And when I said innocent, I didn't mean it in the way you suggest.

But pretty much any kid image can get a paedo off. Many get their kicks from kid's swimsuit pics in catalogues.

I'm still not convinced that images of this type were taken by, and for, paedos. Not everyone sees naked bodies as a sexual thing. You seem to be projecting fears that have been stirred up my the media over the last few decades. In some people it's a knee-jerk reaction.

And yes I agree, the thought of a paedo jacking off to this is very much an ick-ick thing. That, however, does not make the image itself an ick thing.

Posted by: Vigilant

So, being a nosy bugger and not being able to resist the puzzle aspect of this, I did a bit of digging around.

Not surprisingly, Ashley has no concept of how personal information is used and stored online. Despite his background in software, of a dubious nature related to CMM and AGILE (two of the biggest hokkum points in engineering), he is as naive as anyone I've ever seen online.

Within 5 minutes of google searching I was able to verify the ash, teahot, ashleyvh connection.
Within 10 minutes, the Fae connection was incontrovertibly made.
Within 15 minutes, I have his home address, telephone number, CV.pdf and a list of every neighbor on his street.

A paternal name registered as .com without using a privacy registrar?
while posting nearly nude photos of yourself?

And the cv....


Ashley. Dude. Seriously?

Who talks about themselves in the third person except Bob Dole?
What kind of moron puts "Change Agent" as a fucking job title?

If I received your resume, even without the CMM/Agile shit, even without your grievous google history, I'd roundfile it for the above two items anyway.

Kids these days.

Posted by: lilburne

I'd give the benefit of the doubt regarding the motivation for using the image. It could well have been for the shock value as some one said here, or even for the lulz. The problem is that the connections can be drawn, and that WMFUK has no ability to filter its candidates for suitability for ranking positions within the organisation.

You are spot on with the naked little girl observation. On flickr the picture collectors are predominately of the naked little boys, one will come across accounts with 100s of faved photos of that sort. Rarely does one see a collections of naked girls, I guess those get reported far quicker. Mostly the accounts that favour girls mix them in wearing beach wear in amongst Adult porn.

Posted by: carbuncle

Really? Google the photographer, Wilhelm von Gloeden. One of the first links that comes up for me is to nambla.org. WP states that one of his models became his lover at the age of 14. Let's not argue over whether or not that makes him a paedophile.

Van Haeften put the image on their WP user page. They were making a point. They knew that some people would be offended by that particular image of a nude adolescent (more so than, say, an older nude male). I believe they were saying "I can do this. You don't like it. You can't stop me from doing it. Nyah nyah".

Posted by: Cunningly Linguistic

I wasn't aware of the history of the image or of the photographer, but I get your point. But only because I did the shock value pic first, although I didn't use an under-age model it must be said.

Posted by: Peter Damian

Victuallers = Roger Bamkin, chair of WMUK. Also chipping in on that page is Martin Poulter, a director of WMUK.

Posted by: lilburne

See he's got firm grasp of the issue:



but has yet to see that the process that is wrong is the way that they select officers. He may well "represent the UK in the Houses of Parliment and talks to major institutions on behalf of the movement." and he may well be a jolly good chap, but those parliamentarians would certainly raise an eyebrow at the immaturity if nothing else of the Wilhelm von Gloeden pic.

They really need to get more organized. It won't be long before they have CEOP hammering on their door about putting a PANIC BUTTON on all the pages.

Posted by: DanMurphy

So it was http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia_talk%3ARequests_for_comment%2FF%C3%A6&action=historysubmit&diff=473891736&oldid=473891400 who secretly vouched for Mr. Van Haeften's RFA.

No one seems to have a problem with the "secret, self-selected, trust us, really" vetting system. And then there's the whole weird internal thing where the actions of an account are considered, rather the judgement and qualifications of the person operating the account.

Posted by: Peter Damian

And there you are holding the essence of Wikipedia in your hand. They argue that because it is completely transparent and that all you can see is the actions of the account, nothing else matters.

The bit about the secret vouching however rather fucks it up, though. "You should trust those whom you are supposed to trust", as one administrator put it.

Posted by: Fusion

We have to use WP meanings of words here. Yes, we cannot out Fae if his identity is on public display on a WMF site. However, if Ash is not publicly so identified than we are outing Ash, no?

Posted by: Somey

This Van Haeften feller is unusually narcissistic, even for Wikipedia. I realize that it's always been standard procedure on WP to blame others and try to distract people from the fundamental issue when caught red-handed doing something that's clearly against the rules, not to mention being against common sense or even common decency. But at this point, he should really resign his admin rights at least "temporarily" pending another RFA - and given that it's WP, I also don't think it's a given that he would lose in a new RFA. He'd get a lot of opposers, sure, but he's also get a bunch of supporters from the "we should be allowed to do whatever we want, no questions asked" contingent.

As for homophobia on WR, I thought *I* was the homophobic one on WR...? Did someone replace me? I know I've been a lot less active here lately, but c'mon, can't I get just a little love here, people?

Posted by: Tarc

/hug somey, pause

Posted by: EricBarbour

Well, apart from his openly supporting his boyfriend Simon Corcoran and running the website for the academic group that Corcoran is a member of......

He also worked on the article for the http://hellenicsociety.org.uk/frame.htm, whose members include all the persons listed in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Members_of_the_Society_for_the_Promotion_of_Hellenic_Studies -- all WP biographies Van Haeften worked on, including Corcoran. And no other Hellenic Society members. You'd think Corcoran was an important Society member, but he's not even listed in the "Officers & Rules" section of their website. Some of the Society's leadership have BLPs, but most are not listed in the WP category, nor in the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Society_for_the_Promotion_of_Hellenic_Studies about the Society. (That WP article, written entirely by Ash in 2007, desperately needs to be updated.)

He also worked on bios of historical people named "von Haeften" and "van Haeften", whether they are blood ancestors of his cannot be determined. (He maintains an incomplete online family tree http://www.sumgenius.com.au/van_haeften_family_tree.htm.)

He has spent enormous amounts of effort on the BLP for gay UK politician http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Tatchell, for reasons unknown. Why? Just a fan, or paid editing?

He has spent even more effort on the WP articles about http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Carphone_Warehouse and its chairman, http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Charles_Dunstone&dir=prev&action=history, mostly between mid-2006 and January 2007, for reasons unknown. Why? Just a fan, or paid editing?

All of the above work was done under the Ash account. Under Fae, he's patrolling most said articles, long after he created or heavily edited them.

There are some others, but I think you get the picture.

(I could not research the Ashleyvh account's editing history, because it's been erased. The Teahot account was mostly used to sock on the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/List_of_gay_bathhouse_regulars, and on the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Sockpuppet_investigations/Tennis_expert/Archive), for whatever reason.)

Posted by: Somey

Thanks!

The way I see it, because there is, in fact, a "gay mafia" on Wikipedia - for better or worse - the only people who are willing to call those folks on their occasional bouts of misbehavior or (in this case) uploading of pedophilic imagery are people who are not really trying to win the WP game, and of course several of the people not trying to win the WP game are also WR members. So it's very easy for the gay mafiosi (who do, in fact, exist, for better or worse) to use the guilt-by-association tactic whenever one of their in-group is threatened in some way.

Of course, by merely making this statement I'm helping them, because I'm falling for their distractionary tactic of claiming that the people who are asking for Mr. Van Haeften to undergo another RFA (in light of his now-known former account/identity) are all a bunch of "BADSITES" people who, by definition, should all be ignored. I expect to get a nice thank-you note in the mail next week, in fact.

But seriously, this is a no-brainer - whether it's a gay, straight, space-alien, or semi-intelligent plant-like organism, anyone who is known to have uploaded pedophilic imagery to WP in the past should not be an administrator, full-stop, and there should be serious consideration given to banning the person. It's not complicated!

Posted by: RMHED

Am I the only one who's starting to feel a little bit uncomfortable about the intensity of focus on Ashley Van Haeften.

The world of Wikipedia and by extension Wikipedia Review does rather have a tendency to over dramatize poor judgement into high crimes and misdemeanours.

Posted by: Somey

That's just the flip-side of playing the guilt-by-association game. People feel compelled to defend themselves, especially when it's so easy to point out that the accuser is obviously using it as a distraction.

Posted by: Cla68

The problem is that Fae is not responding in a honest way. He is trying to hide, has made disingenuous claims of harrassment, and is allowing, and perhaps encouraging, WMUK officials and gay and other activists on Wikipedia to use ad hominem attacks against his accusers. It shows a pattern of behavior that should not be tolerated in the administration of a Internet project which purports to be a serious, sober, educational endeavor. In fact, it's a comedy of errors. WR participants and others make it known that we won't be put off by these kind of tactics.

Fae needs to start acting like an adult. Resign his adminship and his position in WMUK. Stand for another RfA. Clearly explain why he was using the Ash and Fae accounts at the same time in violation of clean start procedures, why he made sketchy edits to BLPs, why he had a inappropriate photo on his userpage, why he may have violated copyright with the image of the nude beach, why his photos disappeared from Commons out of procedure, and why he hasn't been forthright and honest in his reaction to the discovery of the cover up of all of this.

Posted by: DanMurphy

Mr. Van Haeften worked for Carphone Warehouse. A CV his that appears to have been last updated in 2005 says|

Posted by: SB_Johnny

I think it's more a case of low-hanging fruit, or rather wanting to push on the tree that looks like it's just about ready to fall.

I'm sure Ashley probably sees himself as a well-intentioned fellow, and the folks at WMUK (who also see themselves as well-intentioned fellows) were sufficiently lacking in good judgement to put him into a position of responsibility. The first problem is that he's clearly not playing with a full deck and has a tendency to do things that would be inexplicable if a rational person did those things. The second problem is that his little cabal seems absolutely dedicated to the cause of backing him up as if he were acting like a rational person.

Posted by: EricBarbour

He's 47 years old, with 25+ years of experience in middle-management. This behaviour is more like a teenaged Wiki-admin, caught writing COI articles about his family. It's strange, to say the least.

If he doesn't have "good judgement" by now, he is a lost cause. More to the point, WMUK and other WP admins are displaying identical poor judgement, by blindly supporting him.

Posted by: Vigilant

Ashley works at Carphone Warehouse. It's his last job on his CV. COI much?

"September 2004 – current Carphone Warehouse Change Agent
Ashley was recruited by Carphone Warehouse to bring in an improvement program of light-weight management
processes ensuring continued leading edge response times for business demand and to gain the externally recognized
CMMI standard."

Wow, that's pretty fucked up for an admin and Director of WMUK.

Posted by: SB_Johnny

Isn't that more or less what I said?

Posted by: SB_Johnny

To be fair, making a warehousing operation work more efficiently is probably far more complicated than one might think...millions of dollars (or pounds, or euros) can be wasted or saved depending on how much productivity you can suck out of the workers you didn't happen to lay off.

Then again, from what I've seen it seems like WMUK is more or less just hiring people to do nothing in particular, so from his perspective it must be very nice to pick up a gig that (apparently) can't be outsourced or automated.

Posted by: Vigilant

I meant the editing of the article about thew company he works for.
This is a fundamental COI that WP (usually) frowns on very heavily.

The fact that he's a direct for the WMUK just screams out irony and hypocrisy.

Read the rest of his http://dspace.dial.pipex.com/town/green/apqr99/business/resume/cv.pdf and tell me he doesn't sound like the management consultants from Office Space.

Posted by: EricBarbour

Hah. Wikipedia is basically Office Space, translated to the "real world". Except most of the insane employees have never met IRL.

Office Space combined with World of Warcraft. Man, someday this will make a great animated film.

Posted by: lilburne

*hush*

Give it a while longer and they'll all be implicated.

The lack of judgement amongst the lot of them is breath taking. Clearly they don't understand that they can't just act out on a website.

Posted by: RMHED

I understand all that, but compared to really important stuff like politics and finance the 'scandals' of Wikipedia are incredibly lame. Who in the 'real world' really cares, aside from a few obsessives on Wikipedia and WR?


I guess Van Haeften models his behaviour on Jimmy. Go after the organ grinder, nobody cares about the monkeys.

Posted by: Tarc

Funnily enough, I don't think the name of this joint is "Politics and Finance Review".

Posted by: EricBarbour

Today that is somewhat true. The problem is, even though Wikipedia's editing community and admin community are both in decline AND dysfunctional as hell, the WMF's fundraising is becoming VERY successful. Which means that, in future years, Wikipedia will become an extremely hard target with regards to any kind of effective criticism. The older a well-funded nonprofit becomes, the more entrenched. Consider the Salvation Army, they've been hit with a number of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salvation_army#Controversy over the years, yet they keep going on. (I suspect that WP article is being "heeled" by Salvation Army representatives, as there have been a lot more scandals over the past 40 years than this article shows. Most of the content was added by IP addresses, and the article attracts a LOT of editing traffic. In fact, I'd call it a good example of "wiki-slobber".)

You might as well get your punches in now, before Wikipedia becomes "indispensable"--especially in the education world.

Posted by: RMHED

Right you are.

Any minute now 60 minutes will be rushing along for the exclusive. They'd be fools to let a story like this slip through their fingers.

Posted by: Cunningly Linguistic

Do you really think it wise to use the term "organ grinder" when using Ashley and Jimbo in the same sentence?

Posted by: RMHED

It could've been worse, I might've said:

"Pound the organ grinder, nobody cares about spanking the monkeys."

Posted by: Tarc

"Can I set these roses on your organ?"
"Well if it is all the same to you, I would prefer your tulips"

Posted by: Vigilant

TECHNICAL EXPERIENCE
MS Office – all products including MS Project and Visio: 12+ years
Website Development: 7 years
JavaScript and PERL: 5 years
Mobile technology: 1 year
Handheld and transponder technology: 1 year
Act! – Sales database: 2 years


That's just sad.

Posted by: Michaeldsuarez

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:Jimbo_Wales&diff=474019350&oldid=474009235:

I've decided to call Jimbo out on his BS:

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:Jimbo_Wales&diff=474041368&oldid=474040575

We all know that he was referring to Fae's defenders as the side who "should be given barn stars for patience" and to the WR as the side who "should find a new hobby and leave us alone." If Jimbo is going to criticize someone, then he shouldn't be wishy-washy about it and saying, "durr hurr I'm not going to tell you which is which durr hurr."

Edit: There's also the use of "several people on both". Is he really referring to both sides? Is he asking to non-WR Wikipedians to "leave us [Wikipedians] alone"? Can the WR be described as "patient"? It makes more sense to apply the word "patient" to those dealing with a RfC/U that a WR user created. In my opinion, Jimbo is saying, "Thank you for being patient with those WR users." If he were really including the WR, then he would've said, "[...] should be given barn stars for vigilance."

Posted by: thekohser

Trying to get Jimbo to make a clear declaration of whose side he's on in a case of Wikipedia malfeasance is like trying to get a string of boiled spaghetti to stand up straight on end. Good luck with that, Michael.

Posted by: Cunningly Linguistic

Exactly. No PHP, fucking amateur.

Posted by: DanMurphy

Wow, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1191474/Labour-councillor-David-Boothroyd-caught-altering-David-Camerons-Wikipedia-entry.html has now chimed in on Mr. Van Haeften's RFC wishing he had been given the same amount of deference as Ashley.

This is wonderful fodder for a story. I'm torn between finally writing my piece and following along to see what further hijinks they get up to.

Posted by: mbz1

I wonder what will be Jimbo's response for this http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk%3AJimbo_Wales&action=historysubmit&diff=474053077&oldid=474052466

Posted by: carbuncle

I see no reason to malign Van Haeften's technical background. Instead I will offer http://www.webcitation.org/64UXzFnho of his javascript coding. It was used by Fæ on Commons to identify changes by people on his naughty list (Pieter Kuiper, Fred the Oyster, and Ottava Rima, in this case). When someone on Commons noticed it, Fæ had it deleted and replaced it with one that didn't have that snippet.

On WP, Ash used to have a similar script that identified both friends and foes. If I recall correctly, the foes were identified by the addition of a little spider image.

Posted by: HRIP7

If you write something and mention Boothroyd in it, please note that the article you linked to contains some major misrepresentation, notably


The image Boothroyd took out was http://blogs.thisismoney.co.uk/.a/6a00d8341c565553ef01156f91c4db970c-pi, from a http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2009/05/the-cameroon-diehards-answered-though-i-suspect-theyll-just-think-of-another-excuse-to-rally-round-b.html. His crime was to make a humorous edit summary, but you can hardly accuse him of wanting to stack things against the Tories for doing that. The thing with the "consistent" lead in the polls was also wrong. I looked at the edit history at the time, and it just wasn't true.

Posted by: HRIP7

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=David_Cameron&diff=242271726&oldid=242266826 is that edit. Boothroyd inserted that "the Conservatives have been consistently ahead throughout 2008"; the opposite of what The Daily Mail claimed.

Posted by: thekohser

Everything I need to know about Boothroyd is summed up http://wikipediareview.com/Directory:David_Boothroyd#.22Sick_as_a_parrot.22.

Posted by: Peter Damian

The "Balloonman argument". This seems to be winning the day. The argument is precisely this: Fae was perfectly open in his replies to the questions asked at the RfA, he conceded that there had been a 'clean start', that there had been problems, that there would have been opposes if his identity were known etc etc. But the community took it on trust, in particular, from John Vandenberg. The RfA community utterly failed in this case by giving him a free pass, but by that token has relinquished the moral right to question the results today.

Any comments? My thoughts are

(1) Even if the system failed, does that prevent a re-run of the RfA? My example would be a doctor who obtained his qualification because a lazy examiner failed to mark his examinations or tests properly. I.e. he would have failed the exams if not for the slack marking. Would we be comfortable in his remaining qualified? Or would we have a moral right to demand a re-examination?

(2) Was Fae in fact being completely open? For example, he did not say anything about BLP problems. My examination of his edits suggest he did not actually accept the results of the RfC, and never believed he had been guilty of BLP violations (such as 'outing' members of a gay bathhouse).

Posted by: SB_Johnny

What I don't understand is why he's not open about it now, when everybody knows what happened. I just don't see the point.

Posted by: Peter Damian

Well he is now. He regrets being 'open and honest', indeed 'scrupulously honest'.



[edit] And there is now talk of deleting the page entirely.

Posted by: EricBarbour

Don't wait for a "resolution", Dan. There will never be one, most likely. Someone will close the RFC with
no resolution, they will pretend it never happened. Wikipedia is so corrupt it can't even deal with its
most obvious internal corruption effectively.

Boothroyd resigned 2 1/2 years ago because he didn't want to endure the misery of being hectored anymore.
It took http://wikipediareview.com/index.php?showtopic=21101 to get rid of him.
Six months after that, he tried to http://wikipediareview.com/index.php?showtopic=28048--and failed badly.

Van Haeften's situation is a bit different--he appears to be much more dishonest and
unbending than Boothroyd was.

And today Wikimedia UK is a going concern, with considerable money in the bank and an actual
charity licence. Plus the Boy-King Jimbo lives nearby in London, so they evidently feel more arrogant
and well-justified in pulling dirty political tricks.

Just write it up and get it published. Van Haeften is only the tip of the iceberg, and there will be another
scandal like this soon. Wikipedia is a remarkably reliable scandal generator. And remember to emphasize
the essential fact in all this: Wikipedia is like this because Wales is like this. Dishonest, manipulative slime.

Posted by: Cunningly Linguistic

So quite a good guy then?

Posted by: carbuncle

As was demonstrated most clearly at the Commons RFA and at in the discussions about that plagiarized map, Van Haeften seems to be almost a compulsive liar. It makes no difference what account name he uses or which topics he avoids, his personality is unchanged.

Posted by: radek

This is more or less why I didn't support his "statement" there. His premises might be true enough (RfA messed up, Fae was "sort of" open about it). But the conclusion don't fallow (everything's ok then).

Posted by: RMHED

So to paraphrase, you're saying that Van Haeften has a strong creative streak and a stable personality.

Posted by: Cla68

You should add this to the RfC.

Posted by: lilburne

So what was the justification for him doing that? What was the agenda there?

Posted by: Fusion

This is no good. You are citing a primary source, and one that is not a reliable source. That is worthless. You should source everything to reliable secondary sources. A British national newspaper, for example, would be a reliable secondary source.

Posted by: Vigilant

Compared to the average wikipedia functionary, sure.

Posted by: Vigilant

Makes you wonder if this http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Log&limit=500&type=block&user=F%C3%A6&hide_patrol_log=1&hide_review_log=1&month=&year= should be reviewed, given that he shouldn't have passed RFA

Posted by: Selina

So I was just looking at what schools this guy has been writing about after I read that he has worked for schools... and... found him covering up (making an edit summary of "vandalism") an account called "Anonyous Whistleblower" posting in gory detail to the article that pupils are warned not to to talk to the Police and that staff open students' bedrooms: http://wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_School_at_West_Heath?diff=prev&oldid=410341394 (09:56, 27 January 2011) ... and.... he removed this: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/kent/8635650.stm, BBC News, Thursday, 22 April 2010

I looked further into the history and the bit before the bit complaining about staff going into pupil's bedrooms using their key seems to have been posted before the paedophilia incident stuff happened... there's a rather angry rant on the talk page about it: http://wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:The_New_School_at_West_Heath#Issues_sectionhttp://mccannexposure.wordpress.com/2010/05/31/william-whillock-vice-principal-at-the-new-school-in-west-heath-guilty-of-child-porn-offencesso someone actually posted on Wikipedia warning about paedophile-enabling behaviour at the school about 4 years before it was found out and Wikipedia didn't do anything just covered it up? NONE of the other editors noticed it going on that page for years? Nice... Reminds me of http://dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1344281/Facebook-suicide-None-Simone-Backs-1-082-online-friends-helped-her.html

Kinda looks like there may be some kind of paedophile ring for years, with the school and allegations repeatedly being removed in the Wikipedia history over years... someone should seriously investigate that omg... Sevenoaks, like London, is a place where there's lots of fat old men with lots of money...

Posted by: EricBarbour

Yet another suitable item for his tombstone.

Posted by: Ego Trippin' (Part Two)

I wonder how many of the AN/I lynch-mob fell for ridiculous misrepresentations http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Administrators%27_noticeboard/Incidents&diff=prev&oldid=474279625, by Prioryman (ChrisO)?

Time and time again these people were unable to recognize the simple fact that the purpose of Carbuncle's post was plainly not to harass Van Haeften, nor to serve up his phone number and address on a platter to nutjobs, but to definitively make the connection between the Ash and Fae accounts once and for all. This should have been plain to everyone who bothered to look at the WR thread in question and saw that it was titled, "The Smoking Gun." It is incredible that it flew over so many heads.

Then again, most of the people voting in the ban discussion probably reached their decision based not on the facts before them but on their wiki-political positions on the Fae RfC and, on a deeper level, WP:BADSITES. This is most evident in http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Administrators%27_noticeboard/Incidents&diff=prev&oldid=473938429 by HJ Mitchell, as he does not disguise the fact that his opinion is rooted in his deep dislike of WR. I respect him more than the others because he came out and said it.

Posted by: It's the blimp, Frank

If the shoe were on the other foot, if DC's and Fae's roles were reversed, Prioryman and company would be arguing just as violently on the other side of the debate. It's all gaming the system.

Posted by: thekohser

Do we really want Wikipedia to be the place kids go to report that there's pedophiles at work in their school?

Good God, what is so difficult about calling the local police?

Posted by: Cla68

In the ad hominem hall of fame should reside the names of several Wikipedia editors who attempt to use the tactic time and time again in attempts to win arguments, such as Prioryman, Mathsci, and Will Beback.

Posted by: carbuncle

I'm not sure about the "and company", but Prioryman definitely would be. Of course they would never discuss another WP editor http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2010/07/i_think_that_they_might_have_t.php#comment-2655863...

Posted by: SB_Johnny

Okay, http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Requests_for_comment/F%C3%A6&oldid=474447485#General_comment_by_Wnt is an interesting worldview...

Posted by: It's the blimp, Frank

Can anyone tell me off the top of their head how many of the people who are shrieking about private eyes and stalking and so on with regard to Fae were fully in support of it when Will Beback was doing it to TimidGuy?

Posted by: No one of consequence

If you have some special way of determining which unsubstantiated allegations of wrongdoing are credible, by all means let us know. Otherwise, it is very difficult to tell whether a claim of Bad Things Happening is vandalism, libel, revenge, or truth.

Wikipedia is not the place to post such allegations, ever.

Posted by: Cla68

Wnt also posted a http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_comment/Cirt#Semi-involved_view_by_Wnt. If you're someone who wants Wikipedia to fail, you should be hoping that the WMF puts Wnt in charge of it.

Posted by: Herschelkrustofsky

There is a consistency in Wnt's anguished rants, which is that in both cases he objects to any sort of probing that would tend to reveal corrupt practices on the part of his Wiki-Allies. But it would be interesting to check whether he was similarly outraged at the treatment of TimidGuy.

This gives me an idea for the upcoming awards pageant. Stay tuned.

Posted by: iii

This is a fantastically meta-comment. The Wnt claim that sleeper-agents are working to control content on Wikipedia is indeed a rather special sort of deranged and self-important conspiracy theory that deserves a place in the catalog of why Wikipedia sucks, but the connection you make to the Will Beback campaign can be done in two separate ways: one) the claim that there is nefarious action on the part of Beback and company to hunt and stalk his chosen enemies and two) the claim that TimidGuy is a sleeper agent for the transcendental meditation movement.

I'm sorry, is this better suited to Wikipedia Review Review?

Posted by: Michaeldsuarez

http://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:Bali_ultimate&diff=66351021&oldid=64653158

Here's Wnt's comment to Bali ultimate. Since Wnt loves to have a lot of information in articles, I'm surprised that Wnt is defending someone who hid information from voters.

The following comment is also interesting:

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia%3ARequests_for_comment%2FF%C3%A6&diff=474434838&oldid=474430328



Last time I looked, it was the Wikipedian sysops who were trying to oust Delicious carbuncle from the project:

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Administrators%27_noticeboard/Incidents&oldid=474378405#Delicious_Carbuncle_harassment_and_outing:_block_or_ban_proposal

The Wikipedian sysops are so hostile to the WR that they closed it as "almost enacted" (i.e. "you're not going to be so lucky next time, punk") instead of "no consensus". It's funny how they allowed someone with a clear opinion on the subject to close the discussion.

Last time I looked, it was half of the Wikipedians who were attempting to keep Selina perpetually banned:

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Administrators%27_noticeboard/Incidents&oldid=474482178#Mistress_Selina_Kyle.27s_unblock_request

I'm surprised that that discussion didn't end in "no consensus".

Posted by: Eppur si muove

Apart from, I think, being factually incorrect, the first half of that quote is interesting. WR is anti-gay and deletes the anti-gay material. I'm sure that Wnt would frame deletion of hate speech from WP as apositive. His/her/its biases are again coming through.

Posted by: thekohser

How do they get through that whole discussion without ever addressing the http://www.examiner.com/wiki-edits-in-national/wikimedia-uk-trustee-finds-his-hands-tied about Ashley?

If there had been anything defamatory or libelous in that report, wouldn't the reporter and/or publisher have been legally challenged by now?

Posted by: lilburne

Wnt is a supreme fuckwit, lacking any redeeming features. I had a little conversation with him a year or so ago over the 1000 dicks on commons. I framed it in the context of other types of images focussing on Cyanistes caeruleus and that you didn't need 1000 images of them in order to illustrate the subject. That the 100+ out of focus, badly exposed, and multi-instance crap they had collected on commons made discovery of a decent image more difficult for the user. The lack of effective curation, is the main problem with all of the wiki projects. They are unable, either through incompetance or ignorance, to extract information from raw data. Thus they'll shove in a precise of every gossip column written about some one. 1000+ images of a penis, 1000+ images of a blade of grass, 1000+ images of a Common Blue Damselfly.

Posted by: gomi

[Mod note: some off-topic posts regarding journalism moved http://wikipediareview.com/index.php?showtopic=36650.]

Posted by: Peter Damian

Good idea. I shall create a new account called St Anselm or something and start editing medieval philosophy articles again. There will be no sanctions against me because the account Peter Damian is no longer active, the block was nearly three years ago, all the allegations are in the distant past.

Would that work, does anyone think?

Posted by: dogbiscuit

There we have the bizarre logic of the Wikipedian.

We have now moved Wikipedia to a virtual world where the editor is an entirely separate entity from the person, and all that implies.

Simply stunning.

Posted by: thekohser

Something funny I noticed just now.

Apparently, Wikipedia has a "self portrait" of George Romney that a http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:FeedbackDashboard/15751 on Romney says is not Romney, nor painted by Romney. So, he http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=George_Romney_(painter)&diff=prev&oldid=474560292 the portrait.

Of all people, Fae is there http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=George_Romney_(painter)&diff=next&oldid=474560292 to revert.

Let's follow along now, and watch how Wikipedia treats an http://www.romney-society.org.uk/contact/contact/officers.html.

Posted by: Michaeldsuarez

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:George_Romney_-_Portrait_de_l%27artiste.jpg

http://www.photo.rmn.fr/cf/htm/CSearchZ.aspx?FP=88187344&E=22S39UW25JKGQ&SubE=2C6NU0XEX2HY

Is photo.rmn.fr wrong?

Posted by: thekohser

I don't know! I'm not a painting expert! Wouldn't it be worthwhile for some Wikipedian to contact Mr. Orrom to find out what's going on? No, that would take too much care and duty, wouldn't it?

Posted by: Michaeldsuarez

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:Martinorrom&diff=474791732&oldid=474561946

If Mr. Orrom doesn't reply on the wiki, I'll Email him for more information.

Posted by: DanMurphy

Wikipedia says it's "currently" in the louvre. The louvre, http://www.louvre.fr/en/moteur-de-recherche-oeuvres?f_search_art=George+Romney(though such database searches are often crap.)

Posted by: Michaeldsuarez

http://www.museumsyndicate.com/item.php?item=27222

I'm not sure if this website is reliable, but it says that it's in the Louvre.

Posted by: lilburne

It has been re-attributed

Posted by: Michaeldsuarez

http://www.europeana.eu/portal/record/03903/E1C65D41724E74C00E604CE35A61FFA012EAB77F.html

http://www.culture.gouv.fr/public/mistral/joconde_fr?ACTION=RETROUVER&NUMBER=28&GRP=44&REQ=%28%28Vente%29%20%3aAPTN%20%29

http://www.culture.gouv.fr/public/mistral/joconde_fr?ACTION=RETROUVER&FIELD_98=APTN&VALUE_98=Vente&NUMBER=22&GRP=44&REQ=%28%28Vente%29%20%3aAPTN%20%29

In order to avoid confusion, the image we're discussing (Portrait de l'artiste) is RF 1720, not RF 1095.

Posted by: DanMurphy

So the French government, which owns the painting, says that it's uncertain who painted it, and equally uncertain that it's a self-portrait of whoever the painter is. And yet wikipedia's incorrect attribution has been repeatedly rebroadcast. Aint "knowledge" grand?

The stupid is strong in http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=George_Romney_%28painter%29&action=historysubmit&diff=474800978&oldid=474800451.

Posted by: lilburne

Ha! There is a photograph of a hoverfly on WP which the photographer correctly labelled as Leucozona glaucia, but someone argued that it was L. laternaria and got the damn fool ChristianBier to change the file name etc. So for two years the WP page had the wrong image, and even today Commons has the file miss identified:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_talk:Leucozona_laternaria.jpg

Posted by: Abd

Fascinating issue, in fact. Wikipedia commonly doesn't apply RS standards to images. It looks to me like a possibly controversial "fact" is being asserted, without being found in a reliable secondary source. The catalog of a museum would be a primary source, even if compiled by a museum.

On the other hand, the newbie editor in question, if that's really who they are (likely so), should be considered an expert, and ignoring the expert's explicit's advice -- and attempt to correct a possible error -- would be a classic Wikipedia error. The expert's opinion was deprecated as OR, but that missed that the *inclusion* might also be considered OR. A kind of OR that is commonly allowed, i.e., the identification of images as being this or that.

That expert should be welcomed, there should be an apology for the rather rude rejection and the nonsense about "test edits," and the editor should be engaged in a discussion on the article talk page.

Experts can generally tell you how they know what they know. If you ask!

I argued that anyone claiming expertise should be considered COI, and there was outraged opposition to this idea, because "COI" to many editors means "shoot on sight." That's the problem .COI editors should be welcomed, but restrained to participating in discussion aimed at finding consensus. Not necessarily agreement with Randy from Boise, but with editors willing to examine the evidence and make a decision without being involved personally. Experts are almost always involved personally.

Silly beasts! They imagine that their expertise means they know something that others don't know.

However, generally, they do.

When I said that expertise should imply COI, I did not mean that anyone claiming expertise should therefore be given the keys to article approval. The encyclopedia is for general readers, not experts, so the expert should be able to create the ability to verify. Sometimes expert knowledge isn't publicly verifiable, and an expert would just have to be patient, and not expect to be accepted merely because they say so.

But they should be *heard*. And where an article is being maintained contrary to (alleged) expert opinion, the talk page, at least, should reflect that.

It's also possible to vet experts, that could have become part of the Wikipedia structure. Yes, not easy, but it could be done.

Posted by: Abd

Mmm... the file says that the commanster web site is the original source, but http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_talk:Leucozona_laternaria.jpg. As noted, the image is of Glaucia. It looks like the uploader, correctly uploaded the file to use the Glaucia name, and this was moved to Laternaria by the damned fool, indeed. This is noted on the the talk page by Nastytroll.

Now, maybe the damned fool is correct, though it's seeming unlikely. But what is the source for this information? The file history doesn't give any clue, but the change was approved by ChristianBier, allegedly. I was unable to find, in the time I could give, what justification was given, but the actual change was made by bot, so there must be some control file or something like that. The Laternaria file appears under the Category:Leucozona glaucia.

Looking at CB contributions, I see the massive contributions record of a wikignome. I saw large piles of blue-linked deletion requests. Very active user, and large numbers of unsuccessful deletion requests, probably semi-automated, can reflect vast wastes of time. But I didn't investigate.

I've claimed that massive deletion requests should never be made without prior discussion of the issue, with, say, an example. If deletion of some category of images, articles, etc., is confirmed as within consensus, *then* large numbers of deletions can be requested or done. Better requested, because it gives more opportunity for someone with an interest to object.

Posted by: Michaeldsuarez

http://www.commanster.eu/commanster/Insects/Flies/SuFlies/Leucozona.laternaria9.jpg

http://www.commanster.eu/commanster/Insects/Flies/SuFlies/Leucozona.glaucia9.jpg

I believe that the confusion with the bug images might have occurred when Sarefo accidentally uploaded "Leucozona.laternaria9.jpg" (instead of "Leucozona.glaucia9.jpg") onto Commons as "Leucozona.glaucia.wing.detail.jpg".

ChristianBier then had the misnamed "Leucozona.glaucia.wing.detail.jpg" re-uploaded as "Leucozona_laternaria_wing_detail.jpg":

http://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special%3ALog&type=upload&page=File%3ALeucozona_laternaria_wing_detail.jpg

ChristianBier probably mistakenly believed that "Leucozona.glaucia.jpg" was misnamed as well and had had it reuploaded as "Leucozona_laternaria.jpg":

http://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special%3ALog&type=upload&page=File%3ALeucozona_laternaria.jpg

I can't tell for certain since I can't view the deleted history, but it appears to be an honest mistake.

Posted by: Abd

My, my, revert warring based on an error. Oops!

Yeah, Bkonrad failed to notice the question mark after the painter's name.

This is the kind of idiocy that editors fall into when they rely exclusively on primary sources.

When the question mark is pointed out, Bkonrad then attempts to explain it away. He gets even stupider. He thinks a question mark means "assumed to be true." No, no question mark means that! A question mark means there is some question, eh. Question mark. Get it? Apparently he doesn't.

Discussion by revert. Just going back and forth, no attempt to really understand the issue. He's assuming he's right and that the newbie (the claimed expert, or seriously interested person who consulted an expert) and Bali ultimate are wrong. He's not merely allowing questionable material in the article, he's *insisting* on it, as if it would be an emergency to temporarily allow the image to be removed. There are other images claimed to be self-portraits of Romney.

The mention of the controversy in the caption, though, is a bad idea. That's not the way to report a controversy.

Posted by: dogbiscuit

The trouble with ABD's suggestion that experts could be adopted into Wikipedia is that Wikipedian rationality is now so far departed from the real world that you cannot engage in meaningful conversation about the topic.

We can accept that self-proclaimed experts are little better to a serious reference work than any other body editing - indeed it becomes clear that many Wikipedians are just that and we see the problems they cause.

The problem for Wikipedia, as ABD rightly asserts is that when someone who can reasonably be taken to know a thing or two about a subject, Wikipedians cannot accept that the real world criteria for assessing that expertise. Just a few quotes ago, we had the assertion that it was a total irrelevance as to who people were in the real world, all that matters is their Wiki-persona. If Wikipedia were to allow experts, then they would either have to erect massive Chinese Walls to allow some system of verification and yet retain the golden chalice of anonymity (because otherwise there would be an "unfair" advantage in revealing your identity on Wiki and boring little twats wouldn't get heard) or they would have to accept that the real world exists populated with human beings Who Know Things not just web pages or (God forbid) books. Then it still would not be fair, because an expert could trump your "everybody knows" edit.

Posted by: Abd

The two alleged errors here are different in kind, as to our topic of interest here, Wikipedia and Wikipedia process. The fly images, sure, an "honest mistake." I didn't see any example of someone revert warring there, and the problem could simply be that the original uploader wasn't paying attention. There was some notice of the problem by a user with a trolling username, which might have caused it to be deprecated, or maybe it just escaped attention, that happens a lot. I'd fix it if I had time. This isn't affecting the encyclopedia, that was fixed long ago, apparently, it's just a misleading label on Commons that could cause more confusion down the line.

The alleged Romney "self-portrait," however, has triggered a revert war, for no good purpose. If it's questionable, and it obviously is questionable, then it should not be featured in the article, unless the controversy or issue is covered by reliable secondary source. But the Wikipediots commonly use primary sources when it serves them, and maybe that's okay, when it's not controversial. It has obviously become so among editors.

I have no idea what the real situation is here, but it's quite likely that the new editor and the expert allegedly consulted do know, and they should be asked, for backstory on Talk, if nothing else, and for possible annotation of the file. And maybe something encyclopedic will be developed out of that.

Instead we have a lazy Wikipedian demanding that the article be his way. 3RR, in a little over 24 hours. Obviously he cares a great deal, about being right. 1RR, my view, is bad enough, I only did even 1RR when I was expecting that it would be accepted, and more than that when I was already backed by consensus, and usually that wouldn't approach 3RR violation. There might have been a couple exceptions in my entire Wikipedia career, where I was flummoxed by some totally stupid, senseless reverts and kept thinking that sanity would prevail. Bad Idea. There are good reasons to back off and discuss, no matter how stupid it seems.

Meanwhile, a dedicated revert warrior, skilled at using RfPP to nail down his edits for a while, who deliberately did it to stir up trouble, suffered few or no sanctions for a long time, and is still making a great deal of trouble. Hipocrite. Interesting user name, eh?

Posted by: thekohser

One thing I'm absolutely certain of, had I not been looking one last time at the MoodBar feed (thanks to having written about it for Examiner), Orrom's plight likely would not have been noticed by anyone with the gumption to even discuss the nature of the portrait.

How many of the other 15,000 MoodBar comments over the past 6 months that reported trouble with Wikipedia went ignored?

Posted by: DanMurphy

Mr. Orrom is http://www.romney-society.org.uk/contact/officers/officers.html more qualified to identify a Romney painting than "lol19" or whatever anonymous wikipedia editor uploaded the file. The reverter of my edit demonstrated he should be nowhere near a project dedicated to disseminating knowledge. And yes, the strange alchemy by which lol19s assertion about the provenance of a painting becomes "fact" and attempts to correct it from outside the bubble becomes unacceptable "original research" lies at the heart of the game. Who are these disruptive heathen outsiders meddling with the status quo!?

Posted by: Abd

Ouch! Really, this is much longer than I'd like, and no time to boil it down. Please skip this if allergic to Abd's Walls-o-Text. Or read it or skim it if you like. Please do *not* quote the whole damn thing with tl;dr at the end. If it's too long, it's even more than too long in such a quoting post. I already assume that many or most people won't read my stuff. But some do.

Well, the suggestion was made long ago. Maybe it was still too late, but the suggestion would stand for anyone considering developing better structure, whether for Wikipedia or for a replacement. It's actually like what print encyclopedias do: they respect experts, but actual editorial decisions are made by the publisher. Sometimes the publisher has turned over all editorial decision-making to an expert, for some area of the project. Or so it might seem. In fact, there would always be the possibility of appeal to the publisher or managing editor or to a board.
I'm suggesting that there be a cost to claiming to be an expert. And a benefit. The benefit would be as should exist with any COI editor. Note: COI editors are almost always far more expert on the topic where they have a conflict than are general editors. That's part of the problem! It's true for POV-pushers in general, they tend to know more about the topic.

So, okay, let them know more, and let them express what they know, in the form of advice,but then treat them as COI. Welcome their (alleged) expertise, even encourage it, but then restrict how they can express it. Not through revert warring, not through incivility, not through article ownership. I was not, in fact, suggesting that COI editors (experts or not) be given *control* or the ability to assert control or ownership of articles. The opposite!

You may be right that it's impossible, because "Wikipedian rationality" is so far gone. So what? Impossible on Wikipedia, that is. If Wikipedia is indeed frozen into its dysfunction, sooner or later, it will be replaced, that's the natural order. But with what? What would be better?
Garbled. I think it means that Wikipedia has no means of assessing the expertise. Hence I was proposing to make assessing it irrelevant. Let expertise demonstrate itself, as an ability to explain, to set up conditions for verifiability.

Experts also like to discuss their topic, typically. So send them to Wikiversity, where they could actually do this. And consult experts (self-identified or otherwise) about the article. And verify what they claim. Where there are conflicting experts, keep them from insulting each other, keep them civil, but set up process where discussions are *completed*. That takes facilitation. "Conflicting experts" are unlikely to be able to do it by themselves, they will tend to be highly attached to their positions. And that happens whether they are real experts or merely self-deluded. Real experts may disagree very strongly!

I've never argued for that. I do think that, under some conditions, anonymity may be allowed, but I'm actually uncomfortable with a claim of expertise by someone anonymous. It's possible that in a mature system, non-anonymous and anonymous self-proclaimed experts would be treated differently. There should definitely be more protection for open experts with some kind of verifiable evidence of expertise, i.e., credentials, publications, official recognition, etc.

If the system is going to give any kind of authority to experts, beyond the right to suggest sources and review their implications, then it becomes essential that they be identified and credentialled. Some people may have few credentials, some experts are self-taught, etc., so credentials aren't everything. But they can be important.

You've missed the point. If Wikipedia routinely treated experts as being COI, they would then follow sensible COI rules, which are actually quite decent as written. Anonymity is a separate issue. I've seen editing from people who were obviously expert on cold fusion, and I've seen them blocked for this reason! I.e., because they presented information that had been provided previously by a blocked editor, who was also an expert, they were assumed to be socks. Even if the IP made no sense at all, even if it was obviously not the blocked editor. JzG was known for doing this.

It's the duck test, really. It assumes that a particular point of view is characteristic of an individual; JzG really believed this, and it might sometimes be true, but it obviously breaks down when the "particular point of view" is what is found in recent peer-reviewed literature. It's common knowledge, among the knowledgeable. Or maybe that point of view is a widespread, common error. Both would produce this apparent quacking, to someone who is firmly convinced that no sane person could express such.... only "believers" and "POV-pushers."

The problems with COI editors happen from two directions: first, they aren't identified, sometimes, yet act with COI bias. Second, even if they follow COI guidelines, they may be blocked based on "POV-pushing," which shouldn't ever be an offense at all. Tendentious argument, maybe, it depends on how and where!

All that, really, would be a matter for good facilitation, but Wikipedia never developed a respect for the need for this. It never developed standard procedures that would have lengthy discussions as subpages, only seen by those specifically interested, and sometimes linked from higher level discussions (i.e., that involve more users).

Basically, Wikipedia process was never actually designed, it just grew in place. Things that worked, reasonably well, when the scale was small, were simply kept long beyond their time. AN/I is completely insane, the editor who created it later concluded that. I've described what functional AN/I process would look like. You would *never* have lengthy discussions there, the purpose should only be to bring administrative attention to a situation, the situation would be discussed elsewhere. I've made the analogy with 911. There is no discussion in a 911 emergency call. An officer is despatched, and the investigation is by that officer. Executive decisions are never made on the 911 line. They are made, ad hoc, by investigating officers, and these results are never -- in theory -- punitive. Punishment or enduring sanction is never decided by the investigating officers, either, that's for an independent system.

So, imagine: you think there is something needing immediate admin attention. So you file a report on AN/I, which is only watched, for the most part, by administrators who are available to investigate and act. An admin responds, very quickly, with boilerplate, taking the case and affirming lack of conflict of interest and prejudgment, and links to a discussion started on the admin's own Talk page, which might be linked to a user subpage if it starts to become lengthy. The admin asks for evidence, if it's needed, and reviews it, reviews arguments, and makes a decision, implementing it if appropriate. Someone disagreeing with the decision can ask the administrator and attempt to negotiate a satisfactory solution. When the admin declines further review, and/or someone wants it, there is then an administrative review process.

Administrators are not expected to be perfect, or should not be, and a substantial number of later reversals would be fine, as long as it wasn't the norm. Recusal policies would become more detailed and explicit, so admins would know when they are expected to recuse, absent emergency. If they declare an emergency, it better really be one!

That's the idea, anyway. Nobody would ever be banned through an AN/I discussion, though there might be some indef blocks issued from an administrative investigation.

Here is why AN/I should never be used for that: beyond active administrators, only serious troublemakers and a few people with lots of time watch AN/I. I'd have it on my watchlist for a while because I'd comment on something, but it was always way too much traffic to keep there. It should be what it was originally intended to be, a place to gain neutral administrative attention. Not to hold a massive and highly contentious debate, creating enormous traffic, causing massive waste of time at best.

And then, when decisions are made based on "consensus" there, the making of decisions heavily influenced by participation bias. I saw this happen on meta, I was effectively banned there, through a discussion on the administrative requests page, and it wasn't clear what the offense was, except that I'd obviously come to be disliked by quite a few administrators. But one of the things I'd done was to discuss block requests there, and one of the admins who wanted me gone had objected to my discussion since that was a page for administrative requests, and I wasn't an adminstrator.

He'd acknowledge that this wasn't a place to decide bans based on general community input! Yet he was happy to decide what were effective ban decision there. Quickly. Michaelsuarez noticed, and objected, but, basically, there are way too few general community members who are willing to investigate and review administrative decisions. Further, if you do so, and if your comments are considered critical, you can then be blocked for disruption. That block request was by a steward, and I'd not been warned. I was suprrised, because I'd not been particularly critical of that steward. I began to suspect that his English was poor, that he literally didn't understand what I was writing, because his evidence absolutely made no sense. But those admins voting to block or ban, they didn't read the evidence, they didn't need evidence, they already knew what their position was. People like Raul654, for example.

Posted by: Michaeldsuarez

http://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special%3ALog&type=upload&page=File%3AGeorge_Romney_-_Portrait_de_l%27artiste.jpg

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=George_Romney_%28painter%29&diff=171584436&oldid=162882270

"Guil2027" uploaded the image, and "Wetman" inserted it into the article.

Posted by: lilburne

Oy! My user name there is not trolling at all. It is a valid pseudonym for keeping track of images released under the BY-SA license rather than the BY-NC license. That some arsehole didn't like it on en.wp isn't my problem. Rather it is the problem of those that keep coming to my flickr account asking for changes in licenses from NC to SA.

Also its only in the last few months year that the change was made on the wiki, for 2 years they had that stupid photo on the wrong page. Some one that isn't familiar with organisms or can't damn well check the keys shouldn't be renaming stuff.

Posted by: lilburne

See none of the buggers have a clue what any of it means. They can't even cut and paste without ballsing it up.


that crap lasted more than 5.5 years.

Posted by: SB_Johnny

Just out of curiosity, I did some random sampling of Fae's deletion logs (to see what he was deleting), and there wasn't anything wrong there. One thing that stuck out, however, is that he does a lot of "revdeletions" of teenage-ish homophobic vandalism (i.e., vandal edits that involve inserting "<male person's full name> loves to suck cock" into random articles, and so on). I rolled back plenty of edits like that back in the day, but I wasn't aware that revdelete was used that way now (we didn't have it back when I did "RC patrolling").

The pattern was distinctive enough to give me the impression that the guy really does see himself living in a hostile and homophobic world, which might explain why he's so quick to conclude that people who oppose him are homophobic. In turn, that might explain why he always seems to jump into "fight or flight" mode when he's confronted.

Not that this necessarily excuses the rather shady way he does things, but maybe he deserves some slack when it comes to making assumptions about his motivations.

Posted by: thekohser

You mean when he responds to evidence of wrongdoing by lying some more (as in the Google Maps coastline case), we should extend him a break?

Posted by: EricBarbour

It's a routine practice by patrollers now. They're all slowly learning the tricks of the worst ones.

Posted by: Michaeldsuarez

http://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File%3ALeucozona.glaucia_female.jpg&diff=66512137&oldid=41555090

http://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special%3ALog&type=move&page=File%3ALeucozona_laternaria.jpg

Fixed.

Posted by: SB_Johnny

I meant about the "homophobic conspiracy" stuff. Up until now I thought that was purely smokescreen, but maybe it's only partly smokescreen.

Posted by: Vigilant

It's a smokescreen. Permission to do anything he wants.

Some turd makes a nasty comment online and "OMG Persecution!"

He's a stereotypical drama queen looking to play the time honored victim card.

Just look at what he deems a 'threat'. 'Someone might send my own pictures to my husband.' Look at the way he hides behind that.

No slack for you!

Posted by: carbuncle

Recall that one of the issues with Ash and Benjiboi was that lists of awards for gay porn performers were pointing at the wrong articles. If John Smith won an award, they would happily type in [[John Smith]] thus linking it to the biography of some other John Smith who was now listed on one of the most popular websites in the world as an award-winning gay porn performer. They didn't see this as a serious problem.

Cut to 2012, that same person is now removing playground taunts from a place that is pretty much invisible to the general public. Selectively. I don't know how common this is. After a discussion on ANI where I requested permanent semi-protection of List of serial killers (or it might have been List of HIV-positive people), someone went through and revdeleted all the bogus additions from history. Sadly, even that example didn't make people take any notice of the problem.

Hey, did you know this? I guess Van Haeften isn't watching that article anymore....

Posted by: Michaeldsuarez

For those interested, here's the revision:

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Grabby_Awards&diff=474790791&oldid=472767817

Posted by: Eppur si muove

I've only just made sense of the Steffans business. Looking at the discussion in Talk:Karrine_Steffans/Archive_2#Blanking_of_contentious_material_from_a_BLP and the article talk page, I see that, shortly before Fae had his self-portraits suppressed, he was happily linking pictures Steffans did not like from WP. Complaining about the mention of his self-portraits here is pure hypocrisy.

Posted by: carbuncle

Well, he was able to cite the New York Daily news gossip section, so I don't see why people were complaining about the sourcing...

Ah, Wikipedia, you never fail me. Vivid Entertainment contains a reference to "Karrine Steffans Superhead", which is linked to her biography. It was put there by http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/71.249.243.112 who has preened the articles on Vivid and the company founder for years. Articles about porn companies are pretty much created and maintained by paid editors or company employees. I say this without any evidence but long experience on the topic.

Posted by: EricBarbour

May I quote you? We haven't done much on paid editing, because most of it appears to be done by IPs in a sort-of sneaky fashion. As sneakily as it is possible to be on WP, anyway. Even making a rough estimate of the amount of it is impossible.

One would think the Wik-Nabobs would do something about this, if they're so opposed to paid editing. But of course, they won't, because they would have to implement changes that would keep THEM from using Wikipedia to defame people.....

Oh, yeah, wanna see a userpage that appears to defame someone, and has been sitting unchanged since June 2009?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Smashcraft

Posted by: Fusion

I have not investigated this point myself and have no wish to! Yet it is no doubt very plausible.

Posted by: Abd

Brilliant. No excuse for allowing that page. SPA user, only edits are to that page, plus one edit to the user talk page. May very well refer to a real life person with the name given.

Posted by: SB_Johnny

Killed it. I assume you don't need that page for anything, Eric? I'll send you a copy if you need it.

Posted by: Abd

Good work.

Posted by: EricBarbour

Thanks no, I don't need it.

You see, boys'n'girls? I can get things on Wikipedia deleted, without going anywhere near it.
Ha ha ha, isn't that "funny".

Anyone care to guess how many other defamatory userpages or talkpages there are?

Posted by: Abd

3,127.

Posted by: Michaeldsuarez

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=George_Romney_%28painter%29&diff=475400865&oldid=474810310

Hopefully, this revision will put an end to the revert war.

Posted by: lilburne

Trading in stolen goods now?

Posted by: SB_Johnny

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk%3AF%C3%A6&action=historysubmit&diff=475769073&oldid=475768971?

Posted by: Rhindle

From what I observe, it's the ones trying to stick up for him that are causing him the most problems. Homophobia? No links to examples. Harrassment? Dodging getting in trouble and being questioned about why this happened is apparently harrassment. Fae could have made a statement and let that be that. If some weren't so gung ho about the Banned means Banned policy it probably wouldn't have been a big deal. Some tried to frame it as a question about process which is what the focus should have been on in the first place if you wanted to defend the guy.

Posted by: Michaeldsuarez

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia_talk:Requests_for_comment/F%C3%A6&oldid=475810666#Suppression_requested_for_fairness

What the oversighters did was unjust. Censoring my comment alone will slant everyone against Delicious carbuncle. A counter-argument should be available. A defense of Delicious carbuncle is made inaccessible, while a severe and flawed condemnation of him is still accessible.

Posted by: Peter Damian

The logic of that whole thread is bizarre, especially the comments from 'Wnt'. I've always had the belief that human beings are essentially logical, rational creatures. These events are seriously eroding that belief.

Posted by: Michaeldsuarez

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia_talk:Requests_for_comment/F%C3%A6&oldid=475830167#Suppression_requested_for_fairness

Fred Bauder wasn't really protected anyone by suppressing my comment; all he accomplished was pure censorship.

Posted by: Silenteditor

...and Wnt's response is that the whole RfC be deleted. Which is presumably the plan, whether discussed or not.

Posted by: Abd

Aw, c'mon, that's not fair. He indicated he'd accept suppressing his own comment, which is one possible response to the situation, accepting the argument of Michaelsuarez, and then just added a suggestion about deleting the whole RfC. Joke. Sure, maybe he'd like that, but, in context, this is hardly the core of his "response." The core was quite civil and within reason, within what Michael was suggesting. If deletion of the RfC was the "plan," it seems that it failed, he's not arguing for deletion, and seems to accept equal treatment, either deletion of both comments, his and Michael's, or the restoration of Michael's comment.

At least that's how I read it.

Posted by: Eppur si muove

And Rich Farnborough http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Requests_for_comment/F%C3%A6#Wikipedia_Review_2. Presumably a letter has been sent to the Joint Committee on Privacy saying "Ignore the critical comments about Wikimedia, they were written by WR readers." And a letter is on the way to every editor under the Sun, saying "Don't print anything Dan Murphy says. He may be Middle East Correspondent of an important magazine but he's a member of WR."

Posted by: SB_Johnny

Wnt for Witch-hunt?

All of the homophobia/knight-in-shining-armor stuff was either complete insanity or a very clever way to prevent the actual issues from receiving any attention. Maybe some of them really think there's an anti-gay cabal at work, but I have a hard time believing that some of them aren't just making a game of it.

It looks like Ashley finally figured out the flaw of letting his minions go to war for him, because it's effectively created a small google bomb that's going to be very hard to defuse.

Posted by: lilburne

Pfftt He already was a googlebomb. The name isn't common and as such his dox were already up for the taking for anyone that could paste his name into google.

Posted by: radek

They're making a game of it, that's what they're in it for, I'd put good money on the table that most of them don't even care about Ash himself but are just using him. Half are in it for the drama and fun. Other half (-2%) are in it to pursue their own agendas (like Priorymen) and this is just an opportunity for them to do so.

Sad thing is, whatever Ash/Fae's problems, and there was sketchy stuff with his RfA etc, he's become a pawn here. It's not just that his supporters are creating a google bomb, but just simply that some of them are so over the top and idiotic that they're managing to hurt whatever credibility he's got left simply by virtue of association.

I'd feel sorry for him actually, except that he's had and still has the option to step into this and say to his supporters "ok guys, thanks for the support but I don't think this is about homophobia and you need to stop being crazy here" or something like that.

Posted by: The Joy

I keep seeking references to "harassment" and "homophobic attacks" on Wikipedia regarding Fae. Could someone point out these specific posts? (Maybe not here, but in one of the non-public forums?) It's maddening to say WR is engaging in harassment and hate speech with no evidence to back up the assertions.

Posted by: lilburne

Its gone on for too long, for any backing off from that claim now.

http://wikipediareview.com/index.php?s=&showtopic=36464&view=findpost&p=296323.

Posted by: thekohser

Farmbrough says:

First, he can't even type "Gregory" correctly.

Second, did I actually "boast" of having bought an admin account?

Third, did I even admit to having bought an admin account?

Posted by: Cla68

And even if you did, it's WR's fault somehow? Talk about dishonest discourse.

Sometimes, you just gotta http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia_talk:Requests_for_comment/F%C3%A6&curid=34522911&diff=475885316&oldid=475885236 against that garbage.

Posted by: Selina

RE my previous post which is a bit long to quote ( http://wikipediareview.com/?showtopic=36464&view=findpost&p=296124 ) why is everyone still ignoring that a) he had a sexualised picture of a child on his user page (and if it was a female child I'm sure there would have been an outcry, it seems a bit like because https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Systemic_bias#The_.22average_Wikipedian.22 they think it's more acceptable) and b) what no one else seems to have noticed in his history, I looked and found him later deliberately deleting mentions of a paedophile caught working in a school for years and deleting the news references to it? He said he worked in schools before, and if you read my previous post, there's quite a few dodgy things seemingly connected with that school, with a whistleblower adding stuff to the article then getting it removed repeatedly by anonymous accounts BEFORE the time of any of the news articles about it — meaning either some employee (or a student? from the personal tone of the edits it sounds like a teenager waswrigint it as complaints) was trying to get the word out without speaking to the police about it because it says they were threatened not to talk to the police - both on Wikipedia and the comments on that blog... and then that other site with employees saying it was a deliberate coverup... how was he involved? To me it looks a bit like he might have been involved in the repeated removal of the whistleblowing from the page, then a few years after it happens considers it safe to remove it with his own account instead of a sockpuppet (or an accident) ... Did this Ashley Van Haeften work at the school too? Wikimedia UK is looking like a pretty creepy organisation at the moment ugh.

As mentioned in my previous post I'm no stranger to dealing with paedophile sockpuppets I was one of the ones who called out Haiduc on abusing the LGBT group for slimily twisting articles to make them sound more like child abuse is normal and ok (links in prev post) way way before Wikipedia would lift a finger and later banned .... and just a few days back http://wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Administrators%27_noticeboard/Incidents?diff=prev&oldid=475357695#Paedophile_POV-pushing_mass-sockpuppeeteer without even really trying (just saw on watchlist) (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Mistress_Selina_Kyle#Paedophile_POV-pushing_mass-sockpuppeeteer_is_back_but_I_don.27t_want_to_post_on_WP:ANI_in_case_I_get_in_trouble_again)




I was just looking at the history of the "Pederasty" article that the paedophiles love to make edits to justify paedophilia (He seems to use a lot of automated editing to try hide his editing patterns, is there any thing to filter out edits with certain edit summaries to get rid of the automated spam)/minor edits from a contributions list?) and it looks like Fæ's being taking over from Haiduc on reverting when he got banned:
http://wikipedia.org/wiki/Pederasty?action=history&limit=1000
• http://wikipedia.org/wiki/Pederasty?diff=next&oldid=409482956
• http://wikipedia.org/wiki/Pederasty?diff=next&oldid=421349083
The big question is how many sockpuppets are there...

• http://wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/Ash?namespace=0&dir=prev&limit=1000 — http://wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_aggressive_personality?action=history
... This seems rather relevant: http://wikipedia.org/wiki/Victim_playing#By_abusers

• http://wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:GLAM/BL — "The main Wikimedia contact is https://wikipedia.org/wiki/User:F%C3%A6 (http://wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:F%C3%A6 · http://wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/F%C3%A6)." — So he will be having a lot of contact in private without supervision with the many schoolchildren who edit Wikipedia on a regular basis...

• http://uk.wikimedia.org/wiki/Meetings/2011_election:_Ballot_Instructions#Ashley_Van_Haeften — "manager and director [..]an 'ambassador' I am acting as a default point of contact for our the relationships with the British Library and British Museum and have recently started contact with the Wellcome Trust and English Heritage. At an international level our expectations for how such collaborations is maturing and I sit on the GLAM steering committee [..]UK budget holder for GLAM"
• http://theyworkforyou.com/calendar/?d=2011-11-28 — "Monday, 28 November 2011 — Commons: Select Committees — Joint Committee on Privacy and Injunctions: Privacy and Injunctions 2:15 pm; The Boothroyd Room, Portcullis House — Witnesses: Professor Andrew Murray, Professor of Law, London School of Economics (with special interests in cyber-regulation and information technology law); Dr Ian Brown, Senior Research Fellow, Oxford Internet Institute; Ashley Van Haeften, trustee, Wikimedia UK; Nicholas Lansman, secretary general, Internet Service Providers Association (at 2:15); Richard Desmond, chairman, Northern & Shell Network Ltd; Paul Ashford, editorial director, Northern & Shell Network Ltd; Hugh Whittow, editor, Daily Express (at 3:15)"

Posted by: Vigilant

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia_talk:Requests_for_comment/F%C3%A6&diff=next&oldid=475879520

When does it come to be Ashley's turn to take some public responsibility for his actions and inaction?

Posted by: lilburne

Ha you'll be lucky to get any of that answered:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/?diff=prev&oldid=64537255

Posted by: Abd

This is the wash/rinse/repeat cycle on Wikipedia. Process is set up, is vulnerable to manipulation. So rules are created against manipulation. Then what is described as manipulation is protected against abuse by creating sanctions. And then the sanction are applied without any reference to the original problem

WP:CANVASS was developed to fix what would be, in theory, a non-problem. In theory, decisions are made on Wikipedia by preponderance of arguments, not preponderance of votes. Canvassing, then, would bring in more votes, maybe, but would not do harm, and, in fact, could be beneficial, because new users, canvassed, may present evidence and arguments that would otherwise be missed.

RfC is not a decision-making process. Or at least it wasn't supposed to be. RfC is not supposed to decide upon sanctions, it merely makes recommendations. Now, the harm of canvassing would be, in this case, that discussion gets longer and more complex, but that is truly only because any discussion that gets wide attention becomes unwieldy on Wikipedia, but instead of working to fix that problem (clerking, refactoring, summarization, and, yes, hatting), complaints are made about "canvassing." And then all editors who read Wikipedia Review are slammed with accusations that are based on the alleged behavior of a few on WR.

In AfD, because closers sometimes do consider vote counts, and with other processes where a definitive decision is being made, it could be considered that canvassing is a problem. It's a problem with RfAs, I've seen it. Even there, though, the solution would not be sanctioning canvassing, per se, but, again, considering the *balance of arguments*, not votes. More work! It just isn't done.

But with an RfC, results are advisory, in theory. Fae would not be dysopped, for example, based on the results of the RfC. Sanctions are not supposed to be decided there. However, Fae might take advice. Fae, then, is the "decider." And Fae, if he wishes, can deprecate anything or everything. It's up to him!

What the wikipediots are doing is trying to control the advice that Fae receives. (And it's not only Fae who is advised, its anyone interested. ArbComm will, however, if asked, make an independent decision, and the evidence in the RfC may be incorporated in a case, but, in that event, it would either be refactored or specific items would be referenced.)

So the whole flap is crazy. Wikipedia.

Posted by: Ego Trippin' (Part Two)

Here's a question for Carbuncle or anyone better-versed in the Fae affair than me. We know that Van Haeften disclosed the identity of his prior account to John Vandenberg and Lar when he ran his successful RfA. But do we know anything about how he became a WMUK trustee? For example, do we know whether he disclosed the prior account and related details (that he was about to undergo a RfC for misrepresenting sources) before he was hired? I think it's safe to assume he didn't mention anything about the bondage photos.

Bamkin and Poulter have defended Fae in the current RfC, although that's probably an instinctual protection of a friend and fellow official, and not necessarily an indication that Van Haeften was honest about his past from the get-go.

Posted by: HRIP7

You become a trustee by being a member of Wikimedia UK, and standing for election. The vote was http://uk.wikimedia.org/wiki/Annual_Conference_2011 at the WikiConference UK 2011.

Candidate statements were http://uk.wikimedia.org/wiki/Meetings/2011_election:_Ballot_Instructions. There were 7 slots to be filled, and 8 candidates; so basically http://uk.wikimedia.org/wiki/Annual_Conference_2011_AGM_Minutes#Announcement_of_the_election_results. From the Wikimedia wiki, it seems about 30 people attended the meeting and voted (unless there were others who didn't bother signing in).

Posted by: Ego Trippin' (Part Two)

Ah, I didn't realize that it was an elected position. Thanks for the info.

Posted by: carbuncle

I can't recall seeing Van Haeften be honest about very much at all. It is certainly possible he disclosed that he had prior accounts and repeated the narrative of having to make a "clean start" because of "harassment". I think it is unlikely that anyone knew the full extent of the situation.

Posted by: Michaeldsuarez

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia%3ARequests_for_comment%2FF%C3%A6&diff=474501715&oldid=474493300

Posted by: Vigilant

http://wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_comment/F%C3%A6?diff=next&oldid=476013473

Balls and integrity.

Posted by: dogbiscuit

A lot of this stuff is about people believing that Wikipedia is some brave new world casting off old fashioned views of society and that if the new rules of Wikipedia are followed, then you will be part of something new and special.

What this view fails to recognise is that there are reasons why there is a general acceptance of most basic rules that we are governed by in the real world. It is because over generations they are known to work. Being accountable for your actions is a pretty fundamental principle across societies, because if you are seeking to be unaccountable you are normally acting in a destructive way.

In standing for a position of trust, it is important to be able to demonstrate that you are trustworthy. Fae is a trustee in the real world, so the fact that he can be shown to be less than straightforward in his dealings is pretty good evidence that he is not suitable material to be trusted, especially as Wikipedian morality seems to migrate into the real world.

Over the past year I've been involved with problems which have affected some local charities. The bottom line of these issues is:

a) If you don't run an organisation in an open and accountable way then there are always people who will take advantage.
b) As an organisation, you can never take people on trust or be seen to take people on trust.

Rules on accountability have to be slavishly followed so when the shit does hit the fan, there is at least very little shit to spread about.

Where Wikipedia will always run into problems is that because of its culture of "Secrecy Is Good" it becomes very difficult to get across that they have lost accountability, and it then becomes impossible to trust anyone. When they then stray into the real world, as with the Chapters running charities, they have a real problem because they have to do a double-think where they have to divide someone like Fae into three - Ash, who no longer exists and should not be associated with anything, Fae who is a flawed Wikipedian but in the world of AGF we are apparently required to ignore concerns (and his supporters are working overtime to do so), and then the person in the real world who actually we are supposed to know nothing about yet he has been put in a position of trust over millions of pounds by 30 people, of which 8 were seeking those positions.

Stepping back - what do we really know about the Fae character? What good has he done for Wikipedia? I don't get any sense that he is either productive or a helpful administrator. He is a gamer rather than an editor. So having achieved nothing but a certain amount of embarrassment for the project why are people so keen to support him? Is it that he has earned his WikiPoints in supporting other people in their gaming or is it that if he goes down, other people recognise that they behave in similar manner and are also at risk if someone applies a dose of rationality to the project?

Posted by: Michaeldsuarez

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia_talk%3ARequests_for_comment%2FF%C3%A6&diff=476121842&oldid=476119359

Wnt brings up a good point. The full version of the image wasn't uploaded until March 28, 2010:

http://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special%3ALog&type=upload&page=File%3AVonGloeden_6052.jpg

Ash added the VonGloeden_6052.jpg to his userpage before it was overwritten by the version with the penis:

http://web.archive.org/web/20100317194701/http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Ash

Ash's userpage was deleted before the VonGloeden_6052.jpg was overwritten:

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special%3ALog&type=delete&page=User%3AAsh

Posted by: lilburne

What the fool Wnt is saying is that a head and upper torso photo of a naked Vietnamese Girl by Paul Gadd would be acceptable on a user page. The nature of Wilhelm von Gloeden's work is well known.

Posted by: dogbiscuit

Aaargh! Where's Ottava when you finally need him?!!!

Posted by: Abd

The unexamined idea that wiki process was new permeated the project from the beginning, and as people came in with understanding of standard process, they were seen as "outsiders" who were clueless. So either they subserviently "got some clue" or they were rejected, spit out. Of course, the whole concept of "insider" and "outsider," again unexamined, was contrary to the wiki vision. Wikipedians were importing common social structure, and not the most efficient or enlightened structure, they were importing, as someone wrote, fifth-grade society.

There are adhocratic societies that work, that even work very well, and very efficiently, and they have been my subject of study and practice for many years. What I saw, when I became active on Wikipedia, was that the rules and guidelines were very good. Those represented the best thinking of the community, and there were only a few details with which I'd quibble. However, there were missing elements, and mostly this was about implementation, how do you *manifest* the policies and guidelines, so that actual practice follows the best designs.

However, the structure allowed elements in the community to define "actual practice" as trumping the policies and guidelines, as if the "community," whoever shows up for a particular decision or discussion, would be smarter and more reliable than those working on the policies and guidelines. There is a principle in common law, Public Policy, that the effect of enforcing a law may be considered and can trump the law. It's the real-world equivalent of IAR. However, a judge who relies upon Public Policy better be prepared to defend it!

Wikipedia enshrined IAR and used it as an excuse to avoid expanding the policies and guidelines in ways that would have made administrative response to situations predictable. Thus Rule of Law was discarded in favor of unpredictability, but then users are sanctioned for violating what amount to informal rules that are often made up post-facto.

Wikipedia has made almost every mistake that nascent democracies have made, without learning from them, because it has no institutional memory, that's what an accumulated body of law represents. Law can be changed, just as consensus can change.

Wikipedia developed another trope, a conflict between freedom and bureaucracy, so any structure that would make decision-making more reliable was seen as confining and restrictive. Sure. It would be. Whether this is a good thing or not depends on details!

Posted by: lilburne

von Gloeden was making classical references in his photos. That particular photo seems to be a reference to Suetonius commentary of Tiberius' on Capri.

http://www.livius.org/su-sz/suetonius/tiberius.html

Posted by: HRIP7

I think this must be the first time I find myself having to agree that Wnt makes an excellent and salient point.

Posted by: thekohser

That's very strange, because when I was sent a link to the Internet Archive, for March 17, 2010, http://www.wikipediareview.com/File:User_Ash%27s_fishy_user_page_censored.jpg I saw rendered.

Does Internet Archive draw on a current feed of any image references, or does it capture images as they were seen on the date of publication?

Posted by: lilburne

You tell me!
http://web.archive.org/web/20010331173406/http://www.solidcamonline.com/

Posted by: tarantino

If they don't have a page archived they will load a live page if available. I don't think they do that for individual images, but possibly they may use an image archived at a different date.

FWIW, the image no longer displays on archive.org. I remember seeing it there also.
http://web.archive.org/web/20100317194701/http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Ash

Webcitation.org also deleted their cache of the page.

Posted by: thekohser

I don't want to sound too much like a conspiracy theorist, but is it possible that this notion that the image of flying fish boy "changed" after Ash had the image on his user page has somehow been cooked up with a little trickery?

Posted by: HRIP7

It explains why the image appears vertically compressed in the screenshot on your site. It's the result of fitting the new, portrait-format image into the old, landscape-format image frame.

Posted by: thekohser

Ah, I see! Well, score one for Van Haeften. Still about seven or eight marks against him, though. And even still, it's kind of pervy to be displaying even a cropped version of that picture on one's User page.

Here's another question: Why is there no File History tab for http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:VonGloeden_6052.jpg&redirect=no?

Posted by: Michaeldsuarez

http://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:VonGloeden_6052.jpg&redirect=no

Because the page and its history exists on Commons, not Wikipedia.

Posted by: lilburne

You are focussing on the nakedness, or not, of the image. The image could just of been of the fish and there would still be a problem. The inappropriateness of the image lies in it being by von Gloeden, and the associations that come with it, as far as I can tell this particular photo is of the youngest model that WP had a photo of at the time.

A fully clothed image of Traci Lord aged 15 would be just as inappropriate for a prospective director of a educational charity to have sported on their user page.

Posted by: SB_Johnny

Posted by: mbz1

or else
Btw could you provide the link for the lazy ones

Posted by: Selina

http://wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_comment/Fæ?diff=prev&oldid=476197869

a famous quote about censorship from the UK comes to mind:
"I haven't seen it [http://wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Weddings_and_a_Funeral]†, of course, but I've heard that the opening three minutes contains a stream of four letter obscenities"
—http://wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Whitehouse
† "Film critic Roger Ebert gave the film three-and-a-half stars out of four, calling it "delightful and sly", and directed with "light-hearted enchantment"

He is on the Board and steering committee of Wikimedia UK with the purse strings of millions of pounds of Wikimedia's donations in the UK, it could well have been "someone edit that NOW to try protect WMF's reputation" — It's very easy to change a line like that in the database (I'm not sure what database they use but any of them might as well be a giant Excel spreadsheet of text to someone who knows what they are doing, you can change any of the dates to whatever you want if you wish) — Brion VIBBER used to do a lot of requests to change stuff like that back in the day when stuff like user renames were done manually similar to what OTRS do now. It could have just taken a minute or two, if anything it's probably even easier with better tools to edit the database as needed these days. There's no WMF policies against falsifying data, if anything the culture encourages messing around with the history. Don't believe everything you see on Wikipedia, this is why stuff like The Internet Archive is important - and even then they sometimes remove stuff due to requests like Wikipedia and Webcitation too... You had the right idea using your own site...Also true, yeah. That guy seems to be considered somewhat of a martyr for the pro-paedophilia movement... https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Taormina_-_Tomba_di_Wilhelm_von_Glodden_-_foto_di_Giovanni_Dall%27Orto_-_crop.jpg which remains in the article to this day:
• http://wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilhelm_von_Gloeden?diff=41553172&oldid=39789585 as well as a "nice" little comment just in case we weren't sure: "Il Moro had been Von Gloeden's lover since the age of fourteen"
As well as the "helpful" category, http://wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Pederasty — Certainly not the other P word...
• http://wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilhelm_von_Gloeden?diff=prev&oldid=110174983 - also by http://wikipediareview.com/?showtopic=36464&view=findpost&p=296124That link before where I reported Haiduc on the LGBT Wikipedia board, no one on Wikipedia did a thing for more than 3 years, they (http://wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Systemic_bias#The_.22average_Wikipedian.22) just turned a blind eye...

Posted by: TungstenCarbide

back in the day ... there even used to be a Wikipedia page where you could type in your own sql script and run it on the database, used mostly for queries and searches and stuff like that. Maybe 2002 or so.

Posted by: radek

This is one of these weird coincidences but as it happens one of my favorite magazines is National Geographic. Just a few minutes ago I looked through a collection of "best of NG photographs" for completely unrelated reasons, and then realized - completely unrelated to all this stuff, just a coincidence, like I said - that there's actually two of this guy's von Gloeden's photographs in there. Looking it up, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilhelm_von_Gloeden and if what lilburn and others are saying that's probably a good article to put on your watchlist if you want to catch some sketchy editors.

Posted by: Selina

nambla.org/gloeden.html [NSFW - paedophile site!]... woah. Recognise that from anywhere?
http://web.archive.org/web/20100317194701/http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Ash (commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Gloeden,_Wilhelm_von_(1856-1931)_-_n._1764.jpg [NSFW])

http://wikipedia.org/wiki/NAMBLA

...

http://youtu.be/RsB6ppFf94k http://wikipediareview.com/?showtopic=36464&view=findpost&p=297171)

http://youtu.be/B7O7vibrBSE#t=1m50s "at times we wanted to say stop the joke, this is real.. this really exists"


newgon.com/wiki/Boys_in_photography [NSFW - paedophile site!]boywiki.org/wiki/Wilhelm_von_Gloeden [NSFW - paedophile site!]http://joshuap2pblog.wordpress.com/tag/boy-lover child abuse, child porn, pederasta, pedofilia, pedophile, slygremixed, Solondz, todd, WikiLeaks, will McBride

Posted by: EricBarbour

I would post my list of offensive image categories on Commons, but Selina's doing a fine job of it.

Posted by: EricBarbour

And http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Requests_for_comment/F%C3%A6&diff=next&oldid=476115153 ten hours later, at Fae's insistence, apparently.

Posted by: Eppur si muove

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk%3AJob101010&action=historysubmit&diff=403603701&oldid=403596658 a curious post about someone who had been dead several years. The relevant article talk page (Harry Hay (T-H-L-K-D)) shows that there has been a long standing dispute related to this.

Posted by: lilburne

BTW for completion the internet archive site is referencing a cached image. Which is:
http://web.archive.org/web/20100317194701/http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:VonGloeden_6052.jpg

Which the IA doesn't appear to have cached any longer

And if you put that url into a browser you get redirected to the live web page.

Posted by: Peter Damian

Hmm. Well

1. my research establishes beyond all doubt that uncovering the Essjay fraud was entirely the work of the Review. Brandt spotted it the previous year, and it was his persistence with the New Yorker that finally paid off. on 20th January 2007: Brandt remarked on Wikipedia Review that Stacy Schiff's interview with Jordan in The New Yorker had therefore got it all wrong. He said he would write to the paper "and complain about their fact-checking, and ask for a retraction and investigation. "

2. Getting the infamous 'spanking wiki' removed was largely the result of Greg Kohs' work, with a bit of help from me.

3. Some administrators and at least one Arbcom member defrocked as a result of campaigns here.

This is off-topic, however, I may start another thread on this. "What has Wikipedia Review ever done for us..."?

[PS on 'anything positive' coming out, I don't know what Jonathan regards as 'positive'. If it's disruption he is worried about, then of course uncovering Essjay was hugely disruptive. I wonder if that is what he means?]

Posted by: EricBarbour

You may do so if you wish, but I seriously doubt that you can justify WR to him. Nor is the effort even conducive to anyone else's understanding of the situation--if they're WP insiders.

The eminent Mr. Cardy is displaying mafia-like attitudes. "They ain't made men, well I'm a made man, and I don't like the bums". When you get out of the Wikipedia-as-drug and Wikipedia-as-wargame paradigms, you come down to the admin structure as resembling a Cosa Nostra gang--complete with omerta, the code of silence. And just like the real-world Mafia, they show extraordinary levels of incompetence, arrogance, backstabbery, and exclusionism.

The only bonus: if you point out a Mafiosi's personal inadequacies, he's liable to bash your head in with a chair. The Wiki-Mafiosi are such cowards and pussies, all they will do is block your account, and perhaps speak harshly of you. Hah.

Posted by: Peter Damian

More justify to ourselves. There have been a few posts recently expressing lack of confidence in WR and questioning whether it actually has achieved anything. I think it's achieved quite a lot, and it might be worth enumerating those achievements somewhere. The post below captures a bit of it.

Posted by: Detective

I don't quite see the logic here. it is entirely possible for a film to be "delightful and sly" and yet contain an isolated "stream of four letter obscenities". As far as I remember, Mary Whitehouse was totally correct there. Yet it was a fairly good film if you have a thick skin for profanities, so there is no contradiction.

Posted by: Selina

Well, I thought it would be kind of ironic to say it without watching it She was pretty famous for saying stuff about films she hadn't watched

Posted by: dogbiscuit

The trouble Fae has is similar to ex-English football captain John Terry. He was filmed on pitch saying "Black c**t" Jwhich was not considered to being used in a down the pub between mates Wikipedian way) to another player. There has been a fuss because he lost the captancy before he was convicted of a crime he has been chrged with. The chattering classes go along with the argument that he has not been convicted , but the fact remains that he does not deny saying the inappropriate things and as capain, he has brought football into disrepute.

Fae is in the same position. Nobody has managed to pin him down explicitly, but he has left a long trail of undesirable actions. The Wikipedian mindset is that they must ignore dubious behaviour until someone is thrown to the dogs. In thereal world, such people get warned about their conduct and if they betray their honorary positions of trust then they tend to lose them.

Posted by: Eppur si muove

Let's see what happens to JT. He has a pretty seedy history and I am sceptical about his account but I think the FA got themselves in a twist with Capello because he gave way over the pressure to sack JT over the alleged affair with Wayne Bridge's ex. She obtained apologies from a number of papers and it remains unsubstantiated that it ever happened. This time around Capello stood his ground.

But back to Fae. One of his heroes is Peter Tatchell who is famous, amongst other things, for outing hypocritical gays who criticised homosexuality in public while living it up in private. Fae complains about his life being gossiped about while engaging in publicising what women sex workers are up to. Steffans tried to suppress a sex video she took part in and Fae linked the video from the Wikipedia article about her. Similarly he tried to prevent a picture of prostitutes being deleted from Commons despite it being illegal to take it under German law. Russavia seems to have believed some nonsense about Fae not realising that the Reeperbahn was a red light district. But does anyone believe that it never crossed the mind of someone as sex-obsessed as van Haeften that a picture of prostitutes most likely was taken in a red light district? He is thus exactly the sort of hypocrite that Tatchell exposed.

So, Ashley van Haeften, you are not a campaigner for sexual liberties. You are a slimy slug who exploits sex workers and denies them any rights. Now slither away back under the stone you came from and leave Wikipedia alone.

Posted by: thekohser

Just a point of information, on my Examiner blog/spam site, the Google Analytics indicates that (over the past two weeks) the most-frequently queried search term that brings people to any of my articles was:

"ashley van haeften gay"

Not that there's anything wrong with searching for that!

Posted by: Fusion

With the search string

"ashley van haeften" gay

(note position of quotes) I get only two results:

Ashley Van Haeften caught copying a map and lying about it - The ...
wikipediareview.com › ... › Wikimedia Discussion › General Discussion
30 Dec 2011 – Ashley Van Haeften caught copying a map and lying about it, (and ... No one noticed the obvious, that map is of a "gay-friendly" nudist beach?

Wikimedia UK trustee finds his hands tied - National Wiki Edits ...
www.examiner.com/.../wikimedia-uk-trustee-finds-his-hands-tied?...
29 Nov 2011 – According to the available evidence, Mr. Ashley Van Haeften began his ... and added to feverishly was called "List of gay bathhouse regulars".

Posted by: Kelly Martin

Ashley just admitted (on G+) to having been the author of the gay bathhouse thing. I'm not sure if he's still denying that on Wikipedia.

He also claims on G+ that his "real name" is Fae.

Posted by: Fusion

Define "real name"! As I understand it, in England you can call yourself anything you like as long as it is not with intention to defraud. But is that the name under which he is registered as a trustee of WMF UK? If not, there is a discrepancy that may be of concern to the authorities. (NB: This is not a legal threat!)

Posted by: mbz1

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia%3ARequests_for_comment%2FF%C3%A6&action=historysubmit&diff=479327413&oldid=479323667

Posted by: Selina

Surprised this hasn't been picked up by anyone yet -.- Someone literally reported a real-life pedophile stuff going on at Wikipedia and their response was revert and not even tell anyone...