Slimvirgin gets slashdotted, No place to hide... Options

[JohnA]

Link to slashdot[

"International Humanitarian Law professor Ludwig Braeckeleer thinks so. In an article published yesterday in the Korean newspaper OhMyNews, he reveals a discovery he made while researching a story on the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Scotland. It turns out that a Wikipedia administrator named SlimVirgin is actually Linda Mack, a woman who as a young graduate in the 1980s was hired by investigative reporter Pierre Salinger of ABC News to help with the investigation. Salinger later came to believe that Mack was actually working for Britain's MI5 on a mission to investigate the bombing and to infiltrate and monitor the news agency. Shortly after her Wikipedia identity was uncovered, many of her edits to articles related to the bombing were permanently removed from the database in an attempt to conceal her identity. This discovery comes only months after another Wikipedia admin was caught lying about his credentials to the press. What can Wikipedia do about those who would use it for their own purposes?"

Bring popcorn. This one could get interesting.

[badlydrawnjeff]

See, I feel like that's the most damning part of the whole thing - there's more than enough circumstantial evidence there, and it seems...odd not to address it.

I mean, the more controversial issue here isn't "Is SlimVirgin actually Linda Mack," but "Is SlimVirgin someone who's involved with intelligence agencies and editing Wikipedia with that in mind." I could honestly care less as long as the edits are sound - I only had one rotten encounter with her in my time at WP, and it had nothing to do with anything you guys discuss here.

But let's be serious for a second. Outside of the accusations of cabalism and article ownership (the latter of which I haven't investigated, don't really care about, and are really only meta issues), is there evidence she's really done anything wrong other than mislead some people into thinking she was someone else? And this isn't like a "I said I was a professor, but I'm really a 24 year old" misleading, but "I said my name was Sarah when it's really Linda," which is, well, a big "so what" in my book.

And let's put it a step further here - we're seeing accusations that she's working as an intelligence agent or operative or whatever. If this is so, do we see definitive edits which show her pushing some governmental/intelligence POV? If she is working for some governmental agency, or at least working with that agenda in mind, but there's no evidence of her making poor edits, why is this even a story for us outside of "omg wikipedia admin uses a pseudonym and may have worked for the government!"

I mean, there are far, far worse administrators and editors doing severe damage to the credibility of the project who don't cover their tracks as well than someone who might have a predisposition to detailing Nazisim and a horrific terror attack.

What's the point here?

This post has been edited by badlydrawnjeff:

[guy]

Outside of the accusations of cabalism and article ownership (the latter of which I haven't investigated, don't really care about, and are really only meta issues), is there evidence she's really done anything wrong other than mislead some people into thinking she was someone else?

She's destroyed I don't know how many good editors, whose only crime was to believe in the self-proclaimed principles of Wikipedia. I can only speculate on her motives, but if she really believes that she was doing anything other than damaging the project, we should ask Jimbo if he really wants admins who lack a grip on reality.