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_ SlimVirgin _ Slimvirgin gets slashdotted

Posted by: JohnA

http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/07/27/1943254[

QUOTE
"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. http://english.ohmynews.com/articleview/article_view.asp?no=374006&rel_no=1 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 http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/03/01/1313251&tid=95 to the press. What can Wikipedia do about those who would use it for their own purposes?"


Bring popcorn. This one could get interesting.

Posted by: GlassBeadGame

QUOTE(JohnA @ Fri 27th July 2007, 5:03pm) *

http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/07/27/1943254[
Bring popcorn. This one could get interesting.


You seldom get such good seats to watch a story move up the journalistic food-chain.

Posted by: Infoboy

ATTACK SITE AIR RAID!

Wow.

Posted by: Kato

Take a look at the comments. One WP apologist named sepluv (641107) writes

QUOTE
In Wikipedia, appeals to personal authority don't work at all, unlike Britannica, which bases its entire approach on these. They are at either end of these extremes, and both work to some extent. Being in the middle would like not work at all.

What new nonsense is this? Yeah, Britannica's methods of employing numerous experts and fact checkers is "extreme" and worked "to some extent".

Posted by: GoodFaith

QUOTE(Infoboy @ Fri 27th July 2007, 4:15pm) *

ATTACK SITE AIR RAID!

Wow.


File an RFC -NOW-. This woman may have THOUSANDS of WP:COI violations. This should be investigated. Seriously.


Get filing!!!!

Posted by: JohnA

http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=256781&cid=20017159

QUOTE
Wow, I was just banned from editing by Crum375 for posting a question to her talk page, asking if she was Linda Mack/Sarah McEwan and part of an intelligence agency. I guess Crum375 doesn't feel that is relevant to an editor's NPOV considerations so my reason for banning was "Harassment and attempted outing of a fellow editor".

It might qualify as harassment if it wasn't totally relevant to her NPOV and should be known by fellow editors but as far as I can find, "attempted outing of a fellow editor" isn't even in the policy guidelines. I really do believe this is just a sockpuppet of hers.


cool.gif

Posted by: Infoboy

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Administrators%27_noticeboard/Incidents&diff=next&oldid=147547715

Deleted thread on ANI;

QUOTE
User talk:SlimVirgin

Due to edit wars on User talk:SlimVirgin, I've protected the page for 24 hours. If you disagree, feel free to revert, but I submit that SV can revert whenever she returns and wants to, until then email is available, and it is possible that we do not want certain topics posted. I really don't have an opinion either way, but I wanted to get protection in ASAP. Also, remember that WP:OVERSIGHT is an option if we want it. Questions here are:

* Reverts by Crum: Good or bad?
* Protection: Leave it or remove it?
* How do we proceed?

--ST47Talk·Desk 22:17, 27 July 2007 (UTC)

Note: Additionally, Crum375 has removed related comments from his/her talk. --ST47Talk·Desk 22:20, 27 July 2007 (UTC)
Reverts against me and you [ST47] - bad. I hardly doubt either of us would dream of outing her. Then again, Crum is acting in hers and the project's best interests and protection seems acceptable given it's on the front page of Slashdot. Will (talk) 22:22, 27 July 2007 (UTC)

Posted by: JohnA

QUOTE(Kato @ Sat 28th July 2007, 12:17am) *

Take a look at the comments. One WP apologist named sepluv (641107) writes

QUOTE
In Wikipedia, appeals to personal authority don't work at all, unlike Britannica, which bases its entire approach on these. They are at either end of these extremes, and both work to some extent. Being in the middle would like not work at all.

What new nonsense is this? Yeah, Britannica's methods of employing numerous experts and fact checkers is "extreme" and worked "to some extent".


Yes, if you mean "has served as a beacon of scholarship for more than 200 years" by "extreme", then of course. unsure.gif

Here we see the full fruits of Slimvirgin's attacks on Daniel Brandt (and everyone else) - her past life is now be blasted around the world and she can't delete or ban the perpetrators.

Posted by: Infoboy

How long until we see an article called [[SlimVirgin controversy]] on Wikipedia to go with [[Essjay controversy]]? We can then get [[Category:Former wikipedians who edited under false pretenses]] and add [[SlimVirgin controversy]] to {{Template:History of Wikipedia}}.

Posted by: GoodFaith

QUOTE(JohnA @ Fri 27th July 2007, 4:26pm) *


Here we see the full fruits of Slimvirgin's attacks on Daniel Brandt (and everyone else) - her past life is now be blasted around the world and she can't delete or ban the perpetrators.


The Linda Mack story is common knowledge, I thought.

Posted by: Kato

According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slashdot(which could mean anything quite frankly) "famous or well-known active Slashdotters" include Der Jimbo himself. I wonder how Der Jimbo will feel about having his very own Miss Moneypenny outed in one of his favorite hang-outs. happy.gif

Posted by: GlassBeadGame

QUOTE(Kato @ Fri 27th July 2007, 6:01pm) *

According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slashdot(which could mean anything quite frankly) "famous or well-known active Slashdotters" include Der Jimbo himself. I wonder how Der Jimbo will feel about having his very own Miss Moneypenny outed in one of his favorite hang-outs. happy.gif


I just perused wikien-l. They are in the "Essjay is our boy and we're sticking with him" phase of denial.

Posted by: Daniel Brandt

QUOTE(Infoboy @ Fri 27th July 2007, 5:29pm) *

How long until we see an article called [[SlimVirgin controversy]] on Wikipedia to go with [[Essjay controversy]]? We can then get [[Category:Former wikipedians who edited under false pretenses]] and add [[SlimVirgin controversy]] to {{Template:History of Wikipedia}}.

There is a case to be made that Linda's editing of the PanAm 103 article is the equivalent of Essjay's editing of articles on Catholicism. Both made edits under false pretenses.

First of all, you have to admit that no one who knows anything about Lockerbie claims that the Libyans did it. This includes Robert Baer, who was the CIA officer closely involved with the investigation. The Libyans were used to redirect the investigation away from Syria, because Syria's support for the Gulf War was considered more important than an honest investigation. The one Libyan who was convicted will probably end up getting a new trial. The CIA, the FBI, Scotland Yard, and MI5 and their friends planted evidence in order to focus on the Libyans.

How do you reconcile these three items:

1) John K. Cooley said, "Once the two Libyan suspects were indicted, she seemed to try to point the investigation in the direction of Qaddafi, although there was plenty of evidence, both before and after the trials of Maghrebi and Fhima in the Netherlands, that others were involved, probably with Iran the commissioning power."

2) Daniel and Susan Cohen lost their daughter on PanAm 103. They have aggressively supported the "Libya did it" theory, to the consternation of many with an interest in the case. In their book, on page 233, they state that "with Linda Mack taking the lead, we helped to organize a petition against the film." The film they're referring to was a 1994 documentary by Alan Francovich titled "The Maltese Double-Cross," which presented a conspiracy theory that was at odds with those pushing the Libyan angle. The point is that this item supports Cooley's statement that Linda Mack was working to push the Libyan angle (or at least working to suppress points of view that did not support the Libyan angle).

3) All of a sudden, by 2005, Linda no longer buys the Libyan angle. Her comment http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Pan_Am_Flight_103&diff=prev&oldid=15150972 refers to the convicted Libyan as a "miscarriage of justice which has put a man in jail for 27 years."

This evidence suggests that Linda was indeed working for outside interests when Pierre Salinger locked her out of her office at the London bureau of ABC News in the early 1990s. Either that, or sometime between 1994 and 2005 she had a "come to Jesus" moment and realized that she was on the wrong side of the truth. But if you look at her editing on Wikipedia on the Lockerbie tragedy, it seems that Linda is engaged in damage control more than anything. The keyword here is "control." She needs to control that article, because it has the potential for considerable damage.

Unlike the Essjay situation, this is not an amusing case of Catholicism for Dummies. This is a fundamental perversion of the editing process. Linda should have recused herself from all editing on any Lockerbie article, because she has conflicts of interest and zero credibility.

Posted by: Kato

QUOTE(Daniel Brandt @ Sat 28th July 2007, 1:19am) *

Either that, or sometime between 1994 and 2005 she had a "come to Jesus" moment and realized that she was on the wrong side of the truth.

Recall that by 2005 Gaddafi had http://www.mg.co.za/articlePage.aspx?articleid=309838&area=/breaking_news/breaking_news__africa/ and friend of the Slim generation. Generation doyen Nelson Mandela had brokered various deals, and the business community needed Gaddafi's oil. It became acceptable at dinner parties to deny Libya's involvement, and blame more topical foes - Iran, Palestinians and so on. It is unsurprising that someone like Slim, the embodiment of the liberal zeitgeist and the chattering class, would change her tune.

Posted by: dtobias

QUOTE(jwales on Slashdot @ Fri 27th July 2007, 8:10pm)

A new low for Slashdot
(Score:2)
by jwales (97533) Alter Relationship on Friday July 27, @08:10PM (#20018335)
(http://search.wikia.com/)
This story is demented and broken on so many levels, it is quite difficult to know where to begin, even.

Here we have an excellent Wikipedia administrator who has been victimized by lunatic conspiracy theorists, a private person who has absolutely no relation to the wild stories that this article promulgates.

Slashdot, you have been trolled.
--
Wikia Search [wikia.com]


Posted by: GoodFaith

Why are these people so obsessed with Lyndon Larouche? He is a minor, isolated eccentric. Who cares?

QUOTE(jwales on Slashdot @ Fri 27th July 2007, 8:10pm)

Slashdot, you have been trolled.


A troll is anyone who wins an argument against an admin.

QUOTE(GlassBeadGame @ Fri 27th July 2007, 5:14pm) *

I just perused wikien-l. They are in the "Essjay is our boy and we're sticking with him" phase of denial.


There are dozens of Essjays and SlimVirgins. You have to become a complete public nuisance to be held accountable.

Posted by: BobbyBombastic

JUST A PARANOID ANNOUNCEMENT:

Save everything that is posted related to this, code and/or screenshot

there may be a disappearing act shortly......

Posted by: CrazyGameOfPoker

QUOTE(Kato @ Fri 27th July 2007, 7:17pm) *

Take a look at the comments. One WP apologist named sepluv (641107) writes

QUOTE
In Wikipedia, appeals to personal authority don't work at all, unlike Britannica, which bases its entire approach on these. They are at either end of these extremes, and both work to some extent. Being in the middle would like not work at all.

What new nonsense is this? Yeah, Britannica's methods of employing numerous experts and fact checkers is "extreme" and worked "to some extent".


Forgive me, but I thought they meant extreme as in opposite ends of the spectrum.

Wikipedia works by anti-intellectualism. Britannica works by intellectualism.

I'd disagree on the "to some extent" though.

Posted by: FNORD23

LOL ! I knew this was going to spread like wildfire.

The Cabal must be freaking out.

One of their most important members and the co-administrator of the 'Israel / Mideast disinfo bureau' (and her sock) have been outed!

LOL !

Karma.

429 comments so far!

Ouch.

Posted by: blissyu2

Is WR even mentioned there? I mean we're basically responsible.

And Slashdot - thank you! I had hoped that this story would get bigger. For a brief period I thought that it might manage to be swept under the carpets. But it is a big issue, and needs to be exposed.

Posted by: everyking

Doesn't look like she's going to be able to hide from this anymore.

Posted by: badlydrawnjeff

QUOTE(everyking @ Sat 28th July 2007, 2:03am) *

Doesn't look like she's going to be able to hide from this anymore.

They're trying like hell over there to make that happen, though.

I don't know if it's true or not, but there's really no better way to have people assume guilt than to play games like this.

Posted by: Nathan

And now, I've blogged it too under the subject http://nathanr.ca/internet/wikipedia/notorious-wikipedia-administrator-gets-slashdotted/.

If she thinks Daniel Brandt and Wikipedia Review outing her is bad, now the press have done it and it's probably all over the blogosphere.

If she thinks intimidating Wikipedia Review will silence the "outings", it's gone wayy beyond that now.

In fact, I would like to see her try to intimidate the press to remove the article - or intimidate me to remove the blog post, neither have any chance of working.

Posted by: Daniel Brandt

On the Wikipedia mailing list, they are arguing about possible oversighted edits by SlimVirgin that were done to protect her identity.

That reminded me of an old post of mine, where I described Slim's very first edit on Wikipedia. The only record of this is on Wikipedia Review, naturally. (Is it a good idea to keep the search engines out of the Editors forum? I had to use the WR search engine to find it! Horrors!)

This is a hot item, it seems to me — primarily because the edit history is completely missing now from Wikipedia and it was an edit that is revealing about SlimVirgin's identity.

Here is the http://wikipediareview.com/index.php?showtopic=2235.

If you look at the current Pierre Salinger history list, you will see that nothing at all happened on November 5, 2004 to this article, in direct contradiction of my post of 13 months ago. Yet the edit done by SlimVirgin remains in the current article.

Pffft! Down the memory hole. Winston Smith (1984) would be proud. Can someone with better Wikipedia forensic skills than mine recover more information about who deleted this history?

Posted by: blissyu2

Selina kept a lot of information, but Selina sadly is on holiday at the moment. We must wait until she returns. And hopefully Selina hasn't wiped it in the meantime or forgotten where she put it.

Posted by: BobbyBombastic

Hmm, well http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/2007-July/thread.html should be required reading here, and I'm sure most of you have read it.

It seems that it is WR's fault that this information was on the front page of slashdot? Will they realize that maybe some people outside of wiki land may care about who is disseminating knowledge and what their motivation may be?

After all, it is awful strange to be in the same camp as a fool who http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/2007-July/078221.html. Again, there may may be a story here and there might not be. That is why there is investigative journalism.

"I regard it as an attempt to manipulate information and don't really have a problem with it." - Jwales

Posted by: blissyu2

Well, if it is Wikipedia Review's fault, then surely they'll link to us when describing it in their article about it?

We did put out an awful lot of information which assisted people to find out about this. Its just that Wikipedia was able to keep a lid on Wikipedia Review. Sadly, when it got to more mainstream press, the lid came off.

Actually, there is a law in many countries that the true names of secret agents can never be uncovered. I don't know what the laws are in USA, if its the same, or if this case is one where its okay to uncover their identities. So on that basis, perhaps that's why they are going to lengths to protect her? After all, SlimVirgin is doing her bit for her country. Or for a country at least.

Posted by: Daniel Brandt

QUOTE(blissyu2 @ Fri 27th July 2007, 9:56pm) *

Actually, there is a law in many countries that the true names of secret agents can never be uncovered. I don't know what the laws are in USA, if its the same, or if this case is one where its okay to uncover their identities. So on that basis, perhaps that's why they are going to lengths to protect her? After all, SlimVirgin is doing her bit for her country. Or for a country at least.

The Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982 is the law that applies in the U.S., and therefore is relevant to U.S.-based Wikimedia Foundation.

It protects CIA officers and agents to some extent, but the provisions are fairly narrow. If you don't have access to classified information, the chances of violating this law are rather slim. A journalist, for example, does not normally have access to classified information. No journalist has ever been prosecuted under this law.

The Valerie Plame case was different. Those who exposed her were connected with the White House and presumably had access (i.e., security clearances) to this information. The penalties are more severe in this case, and the law is broader.

The shoe is probably on the other foot. If, for example, Wikimedia Foundation is aware that SlimVirgin is an agent of a foreign power (yes, Canada and Britain are foreign), then one could make the case that Wikimedia Foundation is obligated to register as a foreign agent under the Foreign Agents Registration Act of 1938. This is a fairly simple disclosure statute. I haven't researched the issue, but as far as I know the Foundation is most likely under no obligation to pursue the issue with SlimVirgin to determine if registration is required. Even if the Foundation was fully aware that Slim was an agent for Britain or Canada or Israel, and tried to cover it up, I doubt that any U.S. prosecutor would get very excited about the issue. If she was an agent for Al-Qaeda the situation might be different.

We're in vague territory here, particularly when you add the transnational nature of cyberspace into the equation. But I think we're very far from a situation where an investigative effort to uncover Slim would run afoul of any U.S. laws.

Posted by: BobbyBombastic

QUOTE(blissyu2 @ Sat 28th July 2007, 3:56am) *

We did put out an awful lot of information which assisted people to find out about this. Its just that Wikipedia was able to keep a lid on Wikipedia Review. Sadly, when it got to more mainstream press, the lid came off.

Agree. What I am thinking though is that this information was always here for someone to find, whether or not WR existed or not. Daniel Brandt of course did a lot of work in this, as did WR, but I'm of the opinion that if WR and Mr. Brandt weren't around, someone would have picked it up.

Although, the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchronicity of Daniel Brandt looking into this SlimVirgin matter is amazing to me, but maybe I read too much into things. That's another esoteric rant for another time.

Back on topic though, I wonder if when an investigative journalist with a mainstream media entity picks this thing up and at least reports on the idea of an intelligence agent spreading disinformation via Wikipedia, if it will still be nutty, and still be WR's fault.

Posted by: Infoboy

92 Blogs and counting:

http://blogsearch.google.com/blogsearch?hl=en&client=news&ie=ISO-8859-1&q=%2Bslimvirgin+%2Bwikipedia&btnG=Search+Blogs

The information is spreading like wildfire. Essjay actually spread slower than this initially.

Posted by: Disillusioned Lackey

Regular Wikipedians are mocking her

== Guess who's in the news? ==
An IRC friend left me this nifty link to an article on [http://english.ohmynews.com/ArticleView/article_view.asp?menu=A11100&no=374006&rel_no=1&back_url= english.ohmynews.com] that rather mentions you by name. Didn't know if you've seen it yet, and granted it's not exactly the AP or Reuters... Oh, by the way, "R" says "Code 14 Olive". Meeting is at the usual place. <b><i><font color="#FF00FF">~Kylu ([[User:Kylu|u]]|[[User talk:Kylu|t]]) </font></i></b> 03:22, 27 July 2007 (UTC)

== You've been in the news a bit. ==
read on Slashdot that you've been accused of being a secret agent. There is an article about it at [http://english.ohmynews.com/articleview/article_view.asp?no=374006&rel_no=1]. Care to comment on this, or am I just going to get reverted as "trolling"?

== You and MI5 ==
Just in case you didn't know, someone mentioned this link to me: [http://english.ohmynews.com/articleview/article_view.asp?no=374006&rel_no=1] . Apparently you're an undercover spy working to infiltrate the wiki. Enjoy, --[[User:ST47|ST47]]<small>[[User talk:ST47|Talk]]&middot;[[User:ST47/Desk|Desk]]</small> 21:45, 27 July 2007 (UTC)

== Have you seen this? ==
[http://english.ohmynews.com/ArticleView/article_view.asp?menu=A11100&no=374006&rel_no=1&back_url= FYI.] —[[User:Cleared as filed|Cleared as filed.]] 11:47, 27 July 2007 (UTC)

And of course, a troll

== MI5 ==
Is it true? I've always known you were a piece of shit, but god damn.

Posted by: Infoboy

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=256781&threshold=-1&commentsort=0&mode=nested&pid=20018335

Jimbo's post on slash about this, and replies.

Posted by: everyking

QUOTE(Infoboy @ Sat 28th July 2007, 6:01am) *

92 Blogs and counting:

http://blogsearch.google.com/blogsearch?hl=en&client=news&ie=ISO-8859-1&q=%2Bslimvirgin+%2Bwikipedia&btnG=Search+Blogs

The information is spreading like wildfire. Essjay actually spread slower than this initially.


To be fair, it looks like only two have picked up the story (after Slashdot). The others are older stuff, although some of them may be dealing with more or less the same thing, since it has been around for a while.

Posted by: Somey

I remember the MC5, led by guitarist Wayne Kramer, were one of the hardest-rockin' bands of the late-60's/early-70's era, with songs like "Kick Out the Jams" and "Shakin' Street." Man, they rocked! But I doubt that SlimVirgin was ever a member... or if she was, she did a much better job of keeping it off the internet.

We all have to remember that this has occurred as the result of a confluence of extremely unusual circumstances and coincidences. What are the chances that Slimmy would have bought a copy of Namebase in the early 90's by asking her boyfriend to physically go to Daniel Brandt's office to buy one? And that she'd then start an article about Brandt, only to delete it a few days later, but then have it restored by some Google-fan she probably had never heard of before? And what are the chances that she'd run into yet another editor who just happened to be obsessed with attacking a corporate CEO whom she'd known 20 years before, in Oxford-Cambridge of all places, and who had offended her by asking someone to pass him some French Fries using a phony British accent? And on top of that, to have someone affiliated with said CEO be one of the most tenacious and dedicated IP-address and sock-puppet trackers any of us have ever encountered in our entire online lives? And that he and Brandt would both end up on the same message board?

In spite of it all, I actually expect this to blow over, probably within a week or two, followed by the usual denials.

At the same time, I often wonder... What would a post-Slimmy Wikipedia be like? Would editors finally be able to take the Nazis out of the Martin Luther article, for example? Would they be allowed to make references to Bosnian Holocaust victims? Would it even become acceptable to make links to the Animal Rights article from the Animal Liberation Front article actually say "animal rights"?

Personally, I doubt it, but life is full of surprises, I suppose!

Posted by: Nathan

QUOTE(Infoboy @ Sat 28th July 2007, 1:01am) *

92 Blogs and counting:

http://blogsearch.google.com/blogsearch?hl=en&client=news&ie=ISO-8859-1&q=%2Bslimvirgin+%2Bwikipedia&btnG=Search+Blogs

The information is spreading like wildfire. Essjay actually spread slower than this initially.


I remember I had multiple posts on the Essjay thing. I wonder if I'll have multiple posts on the SV thing too...

QUOTE(everyking @ Sat 28th July 2007, 1:28am) *


To be fair, it looks like only two have picked up the story (after Slashdot). The others are older stuff, although some of them may be dealing with more or less the same thing, since it has been around for a while.


Mine is one of them.

Posted by: blissyu2

It's still relatively slow going. It is yet to be picked up by a major news source. When that happens, then it will be out there for real. But ultimately if Wikipedia can avoid that ever happening then they will have escaped this one intact.

Posted by: WordBomb

This would explain why, though the world sleeps, about 40 uniques per hour (and growing) are arriving at http://antisocialmedia.net having googled SlimVirgin and/or Linda Mack.

This story has officially broken through from ultra-niche to niche, and I see too much momentum to not transition to quasi-proto-mainstream via mass media within the week.

Yes, I'm predicting a large jump in the number of qualifying "attack sites" very soon.


Posted by: Cedric

QUOTE(Infoboy @ Sat 28th July 2007, 12:26am) *

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=256781&threshold=-1&commentsort=0&mode=nested&pid=20018335

Jimbo's post on slash about this, and replies.

I liked this one in particular:
QUOTE
A new low for Jimbo Wales(Score:1)
by BiteMeJimbo (1133965) on Friday July 27, @11:54PM (#20019959)

Jimmy, you've been looking the other way while your Wikipedia project has been going up in smoke. SlimVirgin/Linda Mack is an unbalanced control freak with an agenda to push. Multiple agendas, really. But to you, she's "an excellent Wikipedia administrator." Pierre Salinger, who only gave her a job, a platform, resources and instant credibility, decided that he couldn't trust this duplicitous bitch. But you think Wikipedia can because -- ? It's because you're a dumb-ass, Jimmy. It's possible that systemic problems with the wiki format will always lead to a wiki becoming crap if it expands too much, but your stewardship has actively advanced destructive forces at Wikipedia. You should've stuck with the porn, Jimmy. Instead, you've made yourself permanently associated with a crap enterprise; Jimmy, you're the Ahab of the Internet.

Needless to say, the Slashdot crowd didn't find Jimmy's whine very convincing.

Posted by: Nathan

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=256781&cid=20021395

I probably could've said something wittier if it wasn't past 5am.

(I should probably abandon that account because it says nathanrdotcom but I really can't be bothered)

Posted by: groody

Oh my word. SlimVirgin had an agenda to push? But she hid it so well...

f

Posted by: WordBomb

QUOTE(Nathan @ Sat 28th July 2007, 5:18am) *

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=256781&cid=20021395

I probably could've said something wittier if it wasn't past 5am.
Can you imagine how funny it would be to see Slim read a comment like yours, reflexively try to delete it, only to be reminded that, away from her sordid Slim Lair, she's just like us (or lower, considering she lives in Saskatchewan)?

Posted by: JohnA


QUOTE
Tsk tsk.. Jimbo

{{Warning}}

Your edit is a violation of [[WP:AGF]] [wikipedia.org] and [[WP:TROLL]] [wikipedia.org]. If you continue to troll you could be temporarily banned.

Posted by: Daniel Brandt

QUOTE(Somey @ Sat 28th July 2007, 1:02am) *

We all have to remember that this has occurred as the result of a confluence of extremely unusual circumstances and coincidences. What are the chances that Slimmy would have bought a copy of Namebase in the early 90's by asking her boyfriend to physically go to Daniel Brandt's office to buy one? And that she'd then start an article about Brandt, only to delete it a few days later, but then have it restored by some Google-fan she probably had never heard of before? And what are the chances that she'd run into yet another editor who just happened to be obsessed with attacking a corporate CEO whom she'd known 20 years before, in Oxford-Cambridge of all places, and who had offended her by asking someone to pass him some French Fries using a phony British accent? And on top of that, to have someone affiliated with said CEO be one of the most tenacious and dedicated IP-address and sock-puppet trackers any of us have ever encountered in our entire online lives? And that he and Brandt would both end up on the same message board?

One breakthrough was the connection showing that one S.McEwan in Swalwell, Alberta had registered the domain slimvirgin.com, and that this was probably the same as one Sarah McEwan from Canada who wrote a couple of letters to a newspaper in Britain defending animal rights on the foxhunting issue. That domain was created in May, 2002. The email address on the domain registration was already bouncing; it was slimvirgin1@yahoo.com. Slim signs the name "Sarah" on Wikipedia. Unless my memory is faulty, her IP address geolocated to Alberta when she first got involved with my biography. But in recent months, her IP address geolocates to somewhere in Saskatchewan. She's somewhere in central Canada, at any rate.

But the biggest breakthrough of all came from a member of this board in June, 2006. Knowing that SlimVirgin on her user page had identified herself as an alumnus of Cambridge, this board member found an obscure page on the Kings College, Cambridge web site. Twenty pages deep, and seen only with a mouseover (to keep the search engines out), this board member discovered that a mouseover on the name of alumnus Linda Mack showed an email address of slimvirgin1@yahoo.com. This board member sent me an email informing me of the discovery. I recognized the name Linda Mack instantly.

Then by looking at SlimVirgin's early edits on Wikipedia, it was obvious that she was obsessed with PanAm 103, just as Linda Mack was known to be obsesseed with PanAm 103. I started looking for stubs she created and found a couple of ABC-affiliated journalists among these stubs. One of them was reachable on the web, and he generously gave me contact information for John K. Cooley in Athens. I wanted to contact Cooley because in a book written by someone who was involved in the PanAm 103 investigation, he mentioned getting a call from Cooley requesting an interview, and then Cooley passed the telephone to Linda Mack, who asked the questions.

Cooley responded to my email quite quickly. I had already posted on this board that I had found Cooley and was hoping to get a response. That response revealed the information about Salinger's suspicions and Mack getting locked out of her office by Salinger. About a day after I got this smoking gun, Cooley sent a second email, saying that Mack had just contacted him and asked him to not talk to me.

Just as Slim's edits on Wikipedia have slowly but surely been oversighted to obscure the Linda Mack connection, so too has some of the above information. Cooley seemed very nervous after Mack contacted him, and while he didn't retract anything he told me earlier, it was obvious to me that I wouldn't get anything more from him, even if he had more to offer, which I doubted. I didn't bother him again.

The Kings College website listing of Linda Mack was deleted within the last six months, and the domain registration for slimvirgin.com was changed to an anonymous registration by proxy the last time it was renewed. (By the way, I emailed SlimVirgin at gmail.com anonymously in late October 2005, asking if she would be interested in selling the slimvirgin.com domain name. In two separate responses, she flatly denied that she was the owner.)

Someone was trying to keep the lid on this thing, which of course made it much more interesting. It was starting to read like an Eric Ambler spy novel. (Ambler's heroes are amateurs who stumble into these hairy situations. They're not stupid or clumsy, but shit happens and they find themselves smack in the middle of it all without quite knowing how or why they got there. Then they have to use their wits against hardened bad-guy spies to get themselves out of the situation.)

To all those on the Wikipedia mailing list who are insinuating that our evidence about Slim is weak or nonexistent, my response is that our evidence is much, much stronger than the evidence that sent that Libyan to prison for 27 years.

Posted by: blissyu2

Perhaps someone will write a book on SlimVirgin once this is all over.

Posted by: 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?

Posted by: Daniel Brandt

QUOTE(badlydrawnjeff @ Sat 28th July 2007, 7:41am) *

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?

The point is this: If the evidence suggests that the content on Wikipedia is getting shaped by unacknowledged influences, then the people who use Wikipedia have the right to know this. Accordingly, there should be no tolerance for anonymity when it is used to protect powerful administrators such as SlimVirgin, particularly when evidence suggests the potential for serious conflicts of interest.

The "so what?" attitude is better reserved for Essjay, who was backed up by Catholicism for Dummies instead of two doctorates. At least Essjay was merely playing with trivia about Catholicism. That was funny — a delightful human interest story.

Slim is dealing with geopolitical issues that, in the case of Lockerbie, involve Western intelligence agencies and the conspiracies that they arrange to protect Western interests. There is, at a minimum, the appearance of a potential conflict of interest when Slim edits content about Lockerbie.

It's not merely an issue of rigorous sourcing. It's also an issue of which sources are selected in the first place. Slim is in the habit of declaring certain sources substandard. She declared me to be a substandard source on the topic of one Chip Berlet, even before she started that stub on me.

There's a reason why newspapers list publishers and editors in a staff box, and why many articles contain bylines. It's called "accountability."

"Anonymity" is the opposite of "accountability."

Posted by: guy

QUOTE(badlydrawnjeff @ Sat 28th July 2007, 2:41pm) *

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.

Posted by: blissyu2

Here's some problems with SlimVirgin's use of Wikipedia, that are of serious relevance to people:

* She refuses to acknowledge sources, choosing which sources you can use, none more so than on List of British Jews, in which she has added to the edit the article space this message: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=List_of_British_Jews&action=edit and has http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:List_of_British_Jews.

This is relevant because, in many cases, she chooses which links are okay to include, and hence decides what kind of truth is acceptable to her.

* She routinely refuses to answer messages to her on her user talk page, instead deleting them and then getting someone to punish the person who wrote to her. We have seen in relation to this recent issue several cases of this, but there are many others as well. Sometimes she hides these http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk%3ASlimVirgin&diff=147197960&oldid=147194008, when in reality she is refusing to answer a question...

This demonstrates a lack of transparency. That she is above public comment.

* She also goes around Wikipedia changing the rules to suit herself. The amount that she has changed to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Verifiability for example are monstruous. She has a clear agenda to make sure that only the truth that she wants people to read is what people read. This is truth-changing at its worst.

* She edits http://tools.wikimedia.de/~interiot/cgi-bin/Tool1/wannabe_kate?username=SlimVirgin&site=en.wikipedia.org. The articles that have the least amount of consensus, with sometimes 5 or 6 or even more opposing views. She controls these articles. She doesn't control some Spongebob Squarepants article that everyone pretty much agrees on, or a purely factual article like something about Nuclear Physics. She controls articles about the Middle East, Terrorism, Judaism, and articles of this kind.

* She rarely does something herself. Instead, she claims at how abused she has been, and then hey presto Jayjg or Crum375 or someone else does it for her, and then she says "Thank you so much for rescuing me" and everything is fine. Thus she can't be instantly tracked back for what she is doing.

It doesn't matter what SlimVirgin's real name is. Who cares if she is Sarah McEwan or Linda Mack or Popeye the Sailor Man. And indeed, if a spook was editing Wikipedia for his or her own private reason, who cares? What we care about is that SlimVirgin is changing history. She is changing reality.

Lockerbie bombing was changed to present a different sense of reality on the topic to what exists elsewhere. There are many other examples of articles that have done this, not all controlled by SlimVirgin. But why do we care if the Celine Dion article is perverted to incorrectly make Celine Dion look worse than Mariah Carey? We don't care. But we do care if she is presenting a false history on topics of major relevance to everyone.

For the record, I didn't have any run ins with SlimVirgin either, and as at when I left Wikipedia I thought that she was a great person, and I felt sorry for her. That opinion has changed, however, since that time.

Quite frankly, who gives a shit if Snowspinner is spinning some lies, and abusing people? It doesn't matter to the world, just so long as he isn't actually murdering classmates. Who cares if Raul654 is abusive? It doesn't matter to the world, so long as that's all he's doing. Who cares if MONGO is abusive? But SlimVirgin is changing history. That in itself is bad, but if she is doing it with a major agenda, then we need to wake up and take serious notice. That's why this issue is so much more important than issues like the Essjay scandal or Seigenthaler or any previous scandal before this.

Posted by: JohnA

QUOTE(blissyu2 @ Sat 28th July 2007, 3:39pm) *

Quite frankly, who gives a shit if Snowspinner is spinning some lies, and abusing people? It doesn't matter to the world, just so long as he isn't actually murdering classmates. Who cares if Raul654 is abusive? It doesn't matter to the world, so long as that's all he's doing. Who cares if MONGO is abusive? But SlimVirgin is changing history. That in itself is bad, but if she is doing it with a major agenda, then we need to wake up and take serious notice. That's why this issue is so much more important than issues like the Essjay scandal or Seigenthaler or any previous scandal before this.


Actually that is my point about Wikipedia: it is changing history right before our eyes. I think that one fact is scary beyond belief. Thousands of anonymous people are talking into their speakwrites altering history moment by moment and then consigning previous history to the memory holes (oversight).

Wikipedia was and is a clear threat to liberal democracy and freedom. If even the case of Slimvirgin was the end of it, it wouldn't be so bad, but even SV is the thin end of a very large wedge of vandalism of the historical record.

Posted by: Daniel Brandt

QUOTE(blissyu2 @ Fri 27th July 2007, 9:42pm) *

Selina kept a lot of information, but Selina sadly is on holiday at the moment. We must wait until she returns. And hopefully Selina hasn't wiped it in the meantime or forgotten where she put it.

You might be referring to http://wikipediareview.com/slimvirgin/

What we really need is Slim's complete "user contributions" listing as of about June 2006. That's when she began to get nervous about exposure. With a list like this, we could then compare it to the current history, and see if anything existed in June 2006 that no longer exists on her user contribution list.

I don't know if old dumps of Wikipedia can deliver complete histories. What I have in mind is forcing a dump of 5000 by changing the "500" in the URL to "5000" or more. (I know 5000 works, but I haven't tried anything more.) If you had two complete lists in plain text, you could run a "file compare" to spit out the differences, and then you could investigate the differences.

If anyone has an old dump of Wikipedia, they might be able to do this. It would be a lot of work, but it would also be quite interesting.

Posted by: badlydrawnjeff

So, I mean, what's the point, then? That she mgiht have a conflict of interest? Oh, shucks, she'll be one of ten thousand, then - big whoop.

I guess I don't get it. Unless she's actively working to provide misinformation based on privileged information, I'm not sure why this is more important than any other administrator who can't seem to control themselves.

Posted by: WordBomb

QUOTE(Daniel Brandt @ Sat 28th July 2007, 1:11pm) *
If anyone has an old dump of Wikipedia, they might be able to do this. It would be a lot of work, but it would also be quite interesting.
As it happens, I've been accumulating dumps over time, for just this purpose, but have yet to completely expand any of them (400 Gb is a lot of space). However that will all change on Monday, as I've made arrangements to get query access first to the 7/23/07 dump and then to several preceding it (going back to last summer to just before oversight was instituted), each captured soon after it was made.

I'll try to find some way to make a manageable subset of the data available so you folks can join the fun. Suggestions are welcome.

Posted by: Daniel Brandt

QUOTE(WordBomb @ Sat 28th July 2007, 11:51am) *

I'll try to find some way to make a manageable subset of the data available so you folks can join the fun. Suggestions are welcome.

I think a complete list of Slim's user contributions as they appeared on Wikipedia as of June 2006, or as close to that as possible, is the most useful thing right now. This would start on November 5, 2004, the date of her very first edit (which is also, by the way, an edit that is no longer listed in her user contributions because it got memory-holed). A list like this can be compared to the current version of the same list, which we can get ourselves from Wikipedia.

The important thing is to develop a listing of differences between these two lists. Both lists will cover exactly the same time span. Any differences are immediately suspicious. Then we can order the differences by subject. Any politically-charged subjects are more important than animal liberation issues, for example.

This ordered list of differences will provide a starting point for further research. It will probably be a fairly small list — I'd be surprised if it was more than 100 items. Once the list is this manageable, pulling the actual diffs from the memory hole will give us some insight into the types of edits that Slim did not want scrutinized.

Posted by: LamontStormstar

QUOTE(Daniel Brandt @ Sat 28th July 2007, 11:11am) *

QUOTE(WordBomb @ Sat 28th July 2007, 11:51am) *

I'll try to find some way to make a manageable subset of the data available so you folks can join the fun. Suggestions are welcome.

I think a complete list of Slim's user contributions as they appeared on Wikipedia as of June 2006, or as close to that as possible, is the most useful thing right now. This would start on November 5, 2004, the date of her very first edit (which is also, by the way, an edit that is no longer listed in her user contributions because it got memory-holed). A list like this can be compared to the current version of the same list, which we can get ourselves from Wikipedia.

The important thing is to develop a listing of differences between these two lists. Both lists will cover exactly the same time span. Any differences are immediately suspicious. Then we can order the differences by subject. Any politically-charged subjects are more important than animal liberation issues, for example.

This ordered list of differences will provide a starting point for further research. It will probably be a fairly small list — I'd be surprised if it was more than 100 items. Once the list is this manageable, pulling the actual diffs from the memory hole will give us some insight into the types of edits that Slim did not want scrutinized.



What about her two main meatpuppets (that some have considered socks) Jayjg and Crum375? They must have some oversighted or at least hidden edits, too.


Posted by: Daniel Brandt

QUOTE(LamontStormstar @ Sat 28th July 2007, 12:14pm) *

What about her two main meatpuppets (that some have considered socks) Jayjg and Crum375? They must have some oversighted or at least hidden edits, too.

Slim first. We have one example already of an interesting memory-holed edit, which I explained earlier in this thread. Also, Slim joined Wikipedia and charged ahead, assuming that no one would ever make any connections between her real identity and her editing. That all changed when we discovered that she was Linda Mack of PanAm 103 fame. That discovery was made in June 2006. This gives us an approximate date to distinguish the charge-ahead SlimVirgin from the go-back-and-cover-up SlimVirgin.

We're looking for a pattern of cover-up. If we find one, then the next question is the extent to which other admins at Wikipedia helped Slim with this task. She probably needed support from above to pull this off, if it was at all systematic.

If we don't find anything interesting with Slim, then I doubt that we'd do very well with Jayjg and Crum375.

Posted by: A Man In Black

QUOTE(blissyu2 @ Sat 28th July 2007, 9:39am) *

Here's some problems with SlimVirgin's use of Wikipedia, that are of serious relevance to people:

* She refuses to acknowledge sources, choosing which sources you can use, none more so than on List of British Jews[...]

* She routinely refuses to answer messages to her on her user talk page, instead deleting them and then getting someone to punish the person who wrote to her.

* She also goes around Wikipedia changing the rules to suit herself.

* She edits http://tools.wikimedia.de/~interiot/cgi-bin/Tool1/wannabe_kate?username=SlimVirgin&site=en.wikipedia.org.

* She rarely does something herself.

News flash! WR has damning, conclusive evidence that demonstrates she's editing Wikipedia to push MI5's interests!

Oh wait. None of this has anything to do with that. So why are you copy-pasting the same old rant, Zordy? ¬_¬

Posted by: LamontStormstar

QUOTE(A Man In Black @ Sat 28th July 2007, 12:42pm) *

QUOTE(blissyu2 @ Sat 28th July 2007, 9:39am) *

Here's some problems with SlimVirgin's use of Wikipedia, that are of serious relevance to people:

* She refuses to acknowledge sources, choosing which sources you can use, none more so than on List of British Jews[...]

* She routinely refuses to answer messages to her on her user talk page, instead deleting them and then getting someone to punish the person who wrote to her.

* She also goes around Wikipedia changing the rules to suit herself.

* She edits http://tools.wikimedia.de/~interiot/cgi-bin/Tool1/wannabe_kate?username=SlimVirgin&site=en.wikipedia.org.

* She rarely does something herself.

News flash! WR has damning, conclusive evidence that demonstrates she's editing Wikipedia to push MI5's interests!

Oh wait. None of this has anything to do with that. So why are you copy-pasting the same old rant, Zordy? ¬_¬



MI5? What about MJ12?

Posted by: BobbyBombastic

http://digg.com/tech_news/Are_Intelligence_Agencies_Secretly_Censoring_Wikipedia 856 diggs right now

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:SlimVirgin&curid=11845122&diff=147740146&oldid=147740013

Posted by: LamontStormstar

QUOTE(BobbyBombastic @ Sat 28th July 2007, 3:53pm) *

http://digg.com/tech_news/Are_Intelligence_Agencies_Secretly_Censoring_Wikipedia 856 diggs right now

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:SlimVirgin&curid=11845122&diff=147740146&oldid=147740013


http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Administrators%27_noticeboard/Incidents&diff=prev&oldid=147676255

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Administrators%27_noticeboard/Incidents&diff=prev&oldid=147674997


As usual, saying anything bad about admins there is a crime:

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:Oleg_Alexandrov&oldid=147688176#Please_stop

Hmmm Oleg Alexandrov is an admin, though, or else he'd get banned for criticizing SlimVirgin. Maybe DcDemiv, Jayjg or somebody will claim something like saying Oleg Alexandrov is Runcorn and then ban him.

Posted by: Infoboy

What we really, really need are the oversighted edits of [[User:Slimv]], her originally username. Jayjy removed them all. That's where the real evidence was.

Posted by: blissyu2

QUOTE(Infoboy @ Sun 29th July 2007, 10:36am) *

What we really, really need are the oversighted edits of [[User:Slimv]], her originally username. Jayjy removed them all. That's where the real evidence was.


We certainly don't have them.

What we also need is the oversighted edits of SlimVirgin.

Posted by: everyking

Have any of the higher-ups been spotted acknowledging that that this is something more than a paranoid delusion? I don't see how any rational person can dismiss this kind of evidence out of hand. And while I'm not fond of editors being outed, I think the problem in SV's case reaches the level that it really needs honest on-wiki discussion. She doesn't need to be named on there, but there's a desperate need for a discussion about her behavior and what she's been up to all this time.

Posted by: LamontStormstar

QUOTE(everyking @ Sat 28th July 2007, 9:26pm) *

Have any of the higher-ups been spotted acknowledging that that this is something more than a paranoid delusion? I don't see how any rational person can dismiss this kind of evidence out of hand. And while I'm not fond of editors being outed, I think the problem in SV's case reaches the level that it really needs honest on-wiki discussion. She doesn't need to be named on there, but there's a desperate need for a discussion about her behavior and what she's been up to all this time.



This is so like how The Ministry of Magic in the Harry Potter books keep denying all these truths and then lying about them.

Posted by: Nathan

Oh, no, of course not, Voldemort isn't alive! How dare you spread such lies! wink.gif

(Change to suit in this case)

Posted by: guy

QUOTE(LamontStormstar @ Sun 29th July 2007, 12:10am) *

Jayjg or somebody will claim something like saying Oleg Alexandrov is Runcorn and then ban him.

Clearly Oleg (who is a mathematician) is in fact Poetlister. She is also a mathematician and obviously decided to have two accounts, one for maths and one for her other interests. As for the link to Runcorn, Oleg is from Moldova and Runcorn once edited a list of Jews from Moldova:

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=List_of_East_European_Jews&diff=86367426&oldid=86235705

It's at least as good as the rest of the evidence.

Posted by: blissyu2

QUOTE(BobbyBombastic @ Sun 29th July 2007, 9:23am) *

http://digg.com/tech_news/Are_Intelligence_Agencies_Secretly_Censoring_Wikipedia 856 diggs right now

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:SlimVirgin&curid=11845122&diff=147740146&oldid=147740013


1404 diggs and counting...

Posted by: Poetlister

QUOTE(guy @ Sun 29th July 2007, 8:34am) *

Clearly Oleg (who is a mathematician) is in fact Poetlister.

Put the names one under the other

poetlister
oleg alexandrov

Notice the similarity in the letters. How could a mathematician be so stupid as to make the sockpuppetry so blatantly obvious? tongue.gif

Posted by: Infoboy

QUOTE(blissyu2 @ Sun 29th July 2007, 12:57am) *

QUOTE(BobbyBombastic @ Sun 29th July 2007, 9:23am) *

http://digg.com/tech_news/Are_Intelligence_Agencies_Secretly_Censoring_Wikipedia 856 diggs right now

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:SlimVirgin&curid=11845122&diff=147740146&oldid=147740013


1404 diggs and counting...


1610 diggs and counting...

Posted by: Jonny Cache

QUOTE(blissyu2 @ Fri 27th July 2007, 9:44pm) *

Is WR even mentioned there? I mean we're basically responsible.


Can you prove that by anything that remains on file here?

Jonny cool.gif

Posted by: blissyu2

QUOTE(Jonny Cache @ Mon 30th July 2007, 1:21pm) *

QUOTE(blissyu2 @ Fri 27th July 2007, 9:44pm) *

Is WR even mentioned there? I mean we're basically responsible.


Can you prove that by anything that remains on file here?

Jonny B)


Prove what? That we've been linked from the main article as being the people responsible? That we've got dozens of posts about SlimVirgin? What proof do you require?

Posted by: Jonny Cache

QUOTE(blissyu2 @ Sun 29th July 2007, 11:06pm) *

QUOTE(Jonny Cache @ Mon 30th July 2007, 1:21pm) *

QUOTE(blissyu2 @ Fri 27th July 2007, 9:44pm) *

Is WR even mentioned there? I mean we're basically responsible.


Can you prove that by anything that remains on file here?

Jonny cool.gif



Prove what? That we've been linked from the main article as being the people responsible? That we've got dozens of posts about SlimVirgin? What proof do you require?


The last time I searched the Wikipedia Review for "Mack" — it was a couple weeks ago — all I got was a few of my own sideways allusions to "loopholes big enough to drive a Mack truck through". All of the detailed legwork by DB and others on the subject had been "redacted" by our "moderators".

Obviously there have been some additional 2nd hand and 3rd hand references in the mean time — for the moment — but the primary data has been disappeared so far as I can see.

Jonny cool.gif

Posted by: blissyu2

We've only redacted her real name, not the content of the posts.

Posted by: Jonny Cache

QUOTE(blissyu2 @ Sun 29th July 2007, 11:52pm) *

We've only redacted her real name, not the content of the posts.


I wish that some people would think about what they write before they write it.

But maybe Wikipedia has gotten everybody out of the habit of doing that.

Jonny cool.gif

Posted by: LamontStormstar

QUOTE(Poetlister @ Sun 29th July 2007, 3:18pm) *

QUOTE(guy @ Sun 29th July 2007, 8:34am) *

Clearly Oleg (who is a mathematician) is in fact Poetlister.

Put the names one under the other

poetlister
oleg alexandrov

Notice the similarity in the letters. How could a mathematician be so stupid as to make the sockpuppetry so blatantly obvious? tongue.gif


I thought we established that Poetlister due to being British:

1) Is a sock of everyone in Britain according to Wikipedia, which is as everyone knows is innacurate. (I mean Encyclopedia Britanica or Encarta doesn't claim Poetlister is anyone's sock.)
2) Is an orphan (All British are. Read Charles Dickens?)
3) Has done theatre, been on masterpiece theatre, and been on some Doctor Who episodes
4) Personally knows JK Rowling or is JK Rowling because Runcorn is in Harry Potter 7.
5) Has British-style teeth
6) Her accent is Cockney
7) Either lives in a small cottage that her family has owned for centuries and passes it down and that's where they all live because real estate is expensive in Britain. ...Or... Is rich and British and lives in a mansion somewhere, eats Grey Poupon, has a Butler named something British like James.
8) Travels to "the states" to buy levis and then returns to Britain to resell them where they sell for 10x when they sell for in the USA.
9) Speaks French as a second language.
10) Gets really upset when someone insults The Queen.


All but #4 also count for Lir.

Posted by: Somey

QUOTE(Jonny Cache @ Sun 29th July 2007, 10:22pm) *
All of the detailed legwork by DB and others on the subject had been "redacted" by our "moderators". ... Obviously there have been some additional 2nd hand and 3rd hand references in the mean time — for the moment — but the primary data has been disappeared so far as I can see.

I disagree. Simply removing the name(s) doesn't invalidate the rest of the information presented in those posts, it only makes it harder for people to check it for accuracy, since they have to follow the same path "we" did - i.e., not track it backwards from the name to the evidence.

It's quite possible that I've been wrong about this whole thing from the get-go, but my impression was that the purpose of our not respecting the privacy of anonymous Wikipedians was to show them that there's a difference - a huge difference, in fact - between being talked about negatively as a pseudonym and being talked about negatively as yourself. If that had any motivational effect at all on their decision to relax their BLP deletion policy, then it was worth it - even if we ended up being labeled a "hate site" or an "attack site" for it, or whatever they're calling us these days.

In this case, we tried to follow suit as best we could when they changed their policy, ever-so-slight as the change was. I should also add that I was rather P.O.'d about the fact that Ludwig Braeckeleer chose to misquote the postings here as they stood, and currently stand - instead of leaving the words "name redacted" in there verbatim, he changed them to "name redacted but known to be..." (you-know-who, I'm just trying to make less work for myself later on). That struck me as irresponsible, if not downright rotten, especially for a supposedly bona fide academic and journalist.

Ultimately though, among the many things we can't control here is the sheer degree of anger and resentment people bear towards SlimVirgin and her allies for all the things they've done on Wikipedia. It's unfortunate that so many people are inspired by that anger and resentment, but it doesn't automatically make the allegations untrue or their actions unjustified. At the same time, though, the question remains: Why is it necessary to keep repeating the real name of a person when what you really should be criticizing is the system that makes it possible for that person to do bad things, and even be rewarded for them?

Talking about the person to such an extent only makes it easier for everyone to blame everything specifically on the person, not the institution.

Posted by: WordBomb

QUOTE(Infoboy @ Sat 28th July 2007, 1:26am) *

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=256781&threshold=-1&commentsort=0&mode=nested&pid=20018335

Jimbo's post on slash about this, and replies.
Something I find very interesting is to observe how people respond when accused of something like sockpuppetry, because the guilty ones will typically fail to argue the points that the innocent naturally do.

For example, if I accuse Infoboy and Somey of being the same person, and lacking IP data to back it up (which I never am), I would say that Somey by design is uniquely like X, and as can be observed on these occasions, Infoboy approximated or was identical to X, and thus the simplest explanation is that the same person is behind both Somey and Infoboy (which I do not believe...it's just an example).

If in response, both Somey and Infoboy attacked the premise, that would be a strong signal to me that I'm right and one person is behind both IDs. After all, what have I claimed with regard to Somey? Only that Somey is uniquely Somey-like, and why would he argue that point? That Infoboy is also Somey-like wouldn't be something Somey could control, and so there'd be no use arguing those points.

But most guilty sockpuppets aren't thinking like two people. They're thinking like one.

I keep this in mind as I read Jimbo's response to this weekend's Slim-Slam on Slash-Dot:
QUOTE
Here we have an excellent Wikipedia administrator who has been victimized by lunatic conspiracy theorists, a private person who has absolutely no relation to the wild stories that this article promulgates.
Jimbo miserably failed to answer like someone would if what he says is true.

Think about it: does anybody ever actually know if someone is an agent for an intelligence service? Of course not. That would end their cover and career. So regardless of one's status as an operative or asset or agent or whatever, the answer to the question "are you a spy?" will always be "no."

Instead, Jimbo acts like he knows that Slim is not working for an intelligence service, when a reasonable person would know better to deny something they couldn't know the truth of to begin with.

Point being, Jimbo's comment on Slashdot is not what I would expect of someone answering the question sincerely.

Posted by: LamontStormstar

QUOTE(Somey @ Sun 29th July 2007, 10:15pm) *

I disagree. Simply removing the name(s) doesn't invalidate the rest of the information presented in those posts, it only makes it harder for people to check it for accuracy, since they have to follow the same path "we" did - i.e., not track it backwards from the name to the evidence.



Doesn't it violate GDFL?


Posted by: Jonny Cache

QUOTE(Somey @ Mon 30th July 2007, 1:15am) *

QUOTE(Jonny Cache @ Sun 29th July 2007, 10:22pm) *

All of the detailed legwork by DB and others on the subject had been "redacted" by our "moderators". ... Obviously there have been some additional 2nd hand and 3rd hand references in the mean time — for the moment — but the primary data has been disappeared so far as I can see.


I disagree. Simply removing the name(s) doesn't invalidate the rest of the information presented in those posts, it only makes it harder for people to check it for accuracy, since they have to follow the same path "we" did - i.e., not track it backwards from the name to the evidence.

It's quite possible that I've been wrong about this whole thing from the get-go, but my impression was that the purpose of our not respecting the privacy of anonymous Wikipedians was to show them that there's a difference - a huge difference, in fact - between being talked about negatively as a pseudonym and being talked about negatively as yourself. If that had any motivational effect at all on their decision to relax their BLP deletion policy, then it was worth it - even if we ended up being labeled a "hate site" or an "attack site" for it, or whatever they're calling us these days.

In this case, we tried to follow suit as best we could when they changed their policy, ever-so-slight as the change was. I should also add that I was rather P.O.'d about the fact that Ludwig Braeckeleer chose to misquote the postings here as they stood, and currently stand - instead of leaving the words "name redacted" in there verbatim, he changed them to "name redacted but known to be..." (you-know-who, I'm just trying to make less work for myself later on). That struck me as irresponsible, if not downright rotten, especially for a supposedly bona fide academic and journalist.

Ultimately though, among the many things we can't control here is the sheer degree of anger and resentment people bear towards SlimVirgin and her allies for all the things they've done on Wikipedia. It's unfortunate that so many people are inspired by that anger and resentment, but it doesn't automatically make the allegations untrue or their actions unjustified. At the same time, though, the question remains: Why is it necessary to keep repeating the real name of a person when what you really should be criticizing is the system that makes it possible for that person to do bad things, and even be rewarded for them?

Talking about the person to such an extent only makes it easier for everyone to blame everything specifically on the person, not the institution.


Yet more proof that overXposure to Wikipedia causes brain damage, even among people who think they are immune.

Xorcise 4 the Reader:

Adapt the above "reasoning" to a subject matter chosen at random from the real world, and see if you can hear how silly it sounds.

If you cannot, please seek professional help immediately.

Since I have myself recited the standard cautions against Fundamemtal Attribution Bias time and time again, you are merely chanting to the choir on that score, but how does that excuse censorship of the facts so far as we may rationally suspect them to be?

Jonny cool.gif

Posted by: Somey

QUOTE(LamontStormstar @ Mon 30th July 2007, 12:22am) *
Doesn't it violate GDFL?

I suppose it might, if we actually operated under the GFDL. Luckily, we don't!

Indeed, everyone here technically retains copyright on their own postings, within the boundaries set by the site's posting rules and terms of service. The posting rules are somewhat nebulous by design, but the terms of service are not (which is why so many of your threads get moved to the Tar Pit, Lamont!)....

Once something is posted here, the site technically retains the right to keep it here, barring legal action or whatever. And I'm afraid the site's moderators are, indeed, allowed to alter or remove content to bring it into compliance with whatever the site's rules or terms happen to be at any given point in time. That doesn't violate your copyright, unless the meaning of what you posted is substantively changed to the point at which it would appear that you're no longer saying what you meant to say. If anyone believes that's happened to them, please point it out - but name redactions alone don't really qualify, IMO.

Posted by: Somey

QUOTE(Jonny Cache @ Mon 30th July 2007, 12:25am) *
Since I have myself recited the standard cautions against Fundamemtal Attribution Bias time and time again, you are merely chanting to the choir on that score, but how does that excuse censorship of the facts so far as we may rationally suspect them to be?

It doesn't. I never sought an excuse for doing that (and I take full responsibility for it, should that ever become an issue). I did it to promote what I thought were the best interests of the website, to maintain some claim to a "moral high ground" that may be, as it turns out, completely illusory.

The question now is, if I had known that this would happen anyway - i.e., people making references to postings here in which names were redacted as if they hadn't been redacted at all - then sure, what was the point? Maintaining the moral high ground isn't all it's cracked up to be, especially when others completely ignore the existence of any "ground" whatsoever, right?

And the fact is, one person, and only one person, ever wrote to me to express thanks for my having redacted those names. That person was SlimVirgin, and what good did that do her? Zero, it looks like. There was also a period of time when Slimmy's user page carried a quote from some Oriental philosopher or some-such, to the effect that words once spoken are like the feathers of a torn-up pillow - it's easy to scatter them everywhere, but really hard to get them all back into the pillow. I hate to say it, but she had a fairly good point there.

I know it's immoral and unethical to claim you're writing a "neutral" and "open" encyclopedia when in fact you're doing no such thing, but look at it from a psychological perspective. These people probably believe that's exactly what they're doing, and they've been conditioned and indoctrinated to ignore and dismiss anyone who says otherwise. I may be a complete sucker, but I actually feel some pity for them, even the worst of them - maybe the worst of them especially.

Posted by: Daniel Brandt

QUOTE(Somey @ Sun 29th July 2007, 11:15pm) *

I should also add that I was rather P.O.'d about the fact that Ludwig Braeckeleer chose to misquote the postings here as they stood, and currently stand - instead of leaving the words "name redacted" in there verbatim, he changed them to "name redacted but known to be..." (you-know-who, I'm just trying to make less work for myself later on). That struck me as irresponsible, if not downright rotten, especially for a supposedly bona fide academic and journalist.

I think it was perfectly proper of for Ludwig Braeckeleer to do this. He has his insert inside of brackets, which every literate person understands is separate from the quotation. What the hell was he supposed to do? The only alternative would have been to skip the WR information entirely. Without those two names, it is hardly worth reading. Perhaps he could have quoted the geocities page, but that doesn't have as much prestige as this site, since it is published anonymously and is apparently a one-person effort.

Here is the relevant paragraph from Ludwig's article, where he is quoting John K. Cooley:
QUOTE
Salinger came to believe that [first name redacted but known to be Linda] was working for [name of intelligence agency redacted but known to be Britain's MI5] and had been from the beginning; assigned genuinely to investigate Pan Am 103, but also to infiltrate and monitor us.

If you are pissed at Ludwig for doing this, then Cooley has the right to be pissed at you for editing his quote. (That's just an abstract comment — in fact, Cooley sent me that email and I made the decision to post it. He didn't ask me not to, so I did it without asking him for permission.)

This is the problem: By trying to be nice to Wikipedia, we redact names and we have been keeping search engines out of the Editors forum (the latter was happening before Somey came on board, and all of us failed to object, mostly because we weren't fully aware of it).

All we end up accomplishing by doing this is to risk making ourselves irrelevant in the real world. If I didn't feel that the main purpose of this Board is to juxtapose Wikipedia against real-world ethical and informational standards, using real-world evidence, I would have lost interest a long time ago.

Posted by: LamontStormstar

QUOTE(Somey @ Sun 29th July 2007, 10:37pm) *

QUOTE(LamontStormstar @ Mon 30th July 2007, 12:22am) *
Doesn't it violate GDFL?

I suppose it might, if we actually operated under the GFDL. Luckily, we don't!


I meant Wikipedia hiding several months of contributions just to hide stuff from SlimVirgin (of course obviously it's Jayjg who oversighted it, but Wikipedia still has to bear the responsibility, too, and not just Jayjg). Not something here.

Posted by: Somey

QUOTE(Daniel Brandt @ Mon 30th July 2007, 1:08am) *

I think it was perfectly proper of for Ludwig Braeckeleer to do this. He has his insert inside of brackets, which every literate person understands is separate from the quotation. What the hell was he supposed to do?

Fair question... I guess I don't assume that everyone browsing the web is "literate," though that's probably the elitist in me. Still, this is how it reads here on WR:

QUOTE
Salinger came to believe that (first name redacted) was working for (name of intelligence agency redacted) and had been from the beginning; assigned genuinely to investigate Pan Am 103, but also to infiltrate and monitor us.

And this is how it reads on http://english.ohmynews.com/articleview/article_view.asp?no=374006&rel_no=1:

QUOTE
Salinger came to believe that [first name redacted but known to be Linda] was working for [name of intelligence agency redacted but known to be Britain's MI5] and had been from the beginning; assigned genuinely to investigate Pan Am 103, but also to infiltrate and monitor us.

I guess what I'm saying is that the post here, in spite of the redactions, still manages to make its point about Salinger's suspicions without specifically mentioning Slimmy's name or the name of the intelligence agency. The OhMyNews version could have referred to the names outside of the quoted material, like in the next (non-quoted) paragraph, but De Braeckeleer didn't do that - he put them inline, so that people coming here to check out the story would see something different, and wonder why it's different. Of course, your own idea of linking the words "name redacted" to an explanatory page somewhere is probably what I should have done in the first place, except that I was just lazy, busy, and/or couldn't be bothered.

QUOTE
If you are pissed at Ludwig for doing this, then Cooley has the right to be pissed at you for editing his quote. (That's just an abstract comment...

Of course he does. And if he sent us a note saying "put the name back in," I'd probably do it, or somebody would...

QUOTE
All we end up accomplishing by doing this is to risk making ourselves irrelevant in the real world.

And don't worry, I'm definitely starting to agree with you on that one!

QUOTE(LamontStormstar @ Mon 30th July 2007, 1:44am) *
I meant Wikipedia hiding several months of contributions just to hide stuff from SlimVirgin (of course obviously it's Jayjg who oversighted it, but Wikipedia still has to bear the responsibility, too, and not just Jayjg). Not something here.

Ahh, sorry, I misunderstood. Actually, that would technically be a GFDL violation, except that the violation is mostly against User:SlimV, who presumably isn't going to object to it. One might also say that by oversighting all those edits on http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Pan_Am_Flight_103&diff=7144119&oldid=7112063, they violated the IP rights of User:81.152.209.34 by effectively assigning all of SlimV's edits to him/her - but I suspect that this was deliberate, since an AnonIP isn't going to come back two years later and press a claim to that effect.

Posted by: The Adversary

On another note: shouldn´t we do some more research into the Lockerbie bombing? Searching on google-books for "lockerbie linda mack" brings up two books where she is mentioned:
*Susan Cohen, Daniel Cohen (2000): Pan Am 103: The Bombings, the Betrayals, and a Bereaved Family's Search for Justice
(DB mentioned this one earlier; http://wikipediareview.com/index.php?showtopic=10991&st=0 )

*Micheal T. Hurley (2004): I Solemnly Swear: Conmen, DEA, the Media and Pan Am 103.
-quite extensive parts of that book is on google-books, including a part of the interaction between Hurley and Mack.
This book is not mentioned in the wikipedia article on Lockerbie. Briefly: this book seem to paint one of ABC´s sources in quite a negative way. I have ordered both books, does anyone have other books on Lockerbie /Pan am 103? I believe there are close to 20 books on the subject. (It is possible that not all of the books are in google-books yet.)

Posted by: blissyu2

QUOTE(The Adversary @ Mon 30th July 2007, 7:51pm) *

On another note: shouldn´t we do some more research into the Lockerbie bombing?


Indeed we should. I personally don't know a thing about it. It's probably best left to someone who lives in the area, or at least lived somewhere near it at the time that it happened. I feel very uncomfortable researching things that I don't know anything about.

Posted by: Jonny Cache

QUOTE(Daniel Brandt @ Mon 30th July 2007, 2:08am) *

QUOTE(Somey @ Sun 29th July 2007, 11:15pm) *

I should also add that I was rather P.O.'d about the fact that Ludwig Braeckeleer chose to misquote the postings here as they stood, and currently stand - instead of leaving the words "name redacted" in there verbatim, he changed them to "name redacted but known to be ..." (you-know-who, I'm just trying to make less work for myself later on). That struck me as irresponsible, if not downright rotten, especially for a supposedly bona fide academic and journalist.


I think it was perfectly proper of for Ludwig Braeckeleer to do this. He has his insert inside of brackets, which every literate person understands is separate from the quotation. What the hell was he supposed to do? The only alternative would have been to skip the WR information entirely. Without those two names, it is hardly worth reading. Perhaps he could have quoted the geocities page, but that doesn't have as much prestige as this site, since it is published anonymously and is apparently a one-person effort.

Here is the relevant paragraph from Ludwig's article, where he is quoting John K. Cooley:

QUOTE

Salinger came to believe that [first name redacted but known to be Linda] was working for [name of intelligence agency redacted but known to be Britain's MI5] and had been from the beginning; assigned genuinely to investigate Pan Am 103, but also to infiltrate and monitor us.


If you are pissed at Ludwig for doing this, then Cooley has the right to be pissed at you for editing his quote. (That's just an abstract comment — in fact, Cooley sent me that email and I made the decision to post it. He didn't ask me not to, so I did it without asking him for permission.)

This is the problem: By trying to be nice to Wikipedia, we redact names and we have been keeping search engines out of the Editors forum (the latter was happening before Somey came on board, and all of us failed to object, mostly because we weren't fully aware of it).

All we end up accomplishing by doing this is to risk making ourselves irrelevant in the real world. If I didn't feel that the main purpose of this Board is to juxtapose Wikipedia against real-world ethical and informational standards, using real-world evidence, I would have lost interest a long time ago.


Good example.

The no-wake plodders of the Podunk Picayune Presses who we ridicule for being so slow off the mark about the facts of Wikipediot life neverthless follow the rules of real world journalism — of saying what they know and how well they know it — and so they are bound to overtake any Ace Achilles who heels to the hare-brained infantasies of Wikipediot Arbnormality.

My question is:

Should I censor my references to "loopholes big enough to drive a [name redacted] truck through" by substituting "Peterbilt" for [name redacted] or would it be better to say "Dickbilt" intead?

Jonny cool.gif

Posted by: blissyu2

This is my post http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=256781&cid=20022061. My first ever post to Slashdot. I do find Slashdot to be seriously confusing though, and difficult to get through. There's just way too many people posting on there for my liking.

Posted by: Somey

QUOTE(Jonny Cache @ Mon 30th July 2007, 6:50am) *
Should I censor my references to "loopholes big enough to drive a [name redacted] truck through" by substituting "Peterbilt" for [name redacted] or would it be better to say "Dickbilt" intead?

If you really think the Peterbilt Corporation would be seriously harmed by your reference to their company name, and you feel that there are people who might be associated with the Peterbilt Corporation who might be harmed as a result, then why not? After all, the truck manufacturer isn't all that important to the context of that sentence, is it?

Look, Jon, I'm certainly not trying to suggest that we should follow WP's rules or allow ourselves to be guilt-tripped into treating their higher-ups like fragile little flowers who will blow away at the slightest breeze of criticism. Redacting the names was a moral decision, but it was also an experiment. And regardless of the tangible results of the experiment (i.e., nada), we nevertheless learned something from it - namely, that Wikipedia isn't going to publicly acknowledge or support any efforts we make on their behalf as regards privacy. For the most part, they either don't care, or are secretly cheering us on. The fact that they didn't support us is suggestive not only of their enmity for us, but of their enmity for SlimVirgin, Jayjg, and the rest of their crew. I suspect the number of people who would like to see those people leave Wikipedia forever is vastly greater than we thought.

Meanwhile, there's plenty of nasty and speculative stuff here that doesn't get censored, if you know where to look for it. But as for the stuff that does, I understand that I'm going to be seen as the Mean Old Censorship Lady in certain cases, and I accept that... Just remember that on some level, bringing down Wikipedia -- which some of us would love to see happen, as unrealistic a goal as that is -- could in some ways be the single greatest act of censorship in human history. Seen from that perspective, a few real names aren't really that big a deal, are they?

Posted by: BobbyBombastic

here is something interesting

QUOTE
I went and looked at the Slashdot discussion. It's not about the kooky accusations, but about significant issues. Our users would find the discussion interesting and it would help if they weighed in. I think we are shooting ourselves in the foot removing links to the Slashdot page. It's certainly an initiation into the kind of nonsense we've been dealing with privately for the last two years. Time everybody got baptized.

Fred


http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/2007-July/078329.html

I do wish that Fred would take the time to read about what he is commenting.

And what Somey touches on above is that there are probably "Wikipedians in good standing" that realised this needed evaluated when it was discovered last year.

All the people digging that story at http://digg.com/tech_news/Are_Intelligence_Agencies_Secretly_Censoring_Wikipedia are not from WR. There is a silent population of people that evidently support this type of stuff and are unwilling to offer support vocally (textually). biggrin.gif

Posted by: Jonny Cache

QUOTE(Somey @ Mon 30th July 2007, 12:21pm) *

Look, Jon, I'm certainly not trying to suggest that we should follow WP's rules or allow ourselves to be guilt-tripped into treating their higher-ups like fragile little flowers who will blow away at the slightest breeze of criticism. Redacting the names was a moral decision, but it was also an experiment. And regardless of the tangible results of the experiment (i.e., nada), we nevertheless learned something from it - namely, that Wikipedia isn't going to acknowledge or support any efforts we make on their behalf as regards privacy. For the most part, they either don't care, or are secretly cheering us on. The fact that they didn't support us is suggestive not only of their enmity for us, but of their enmity for SlimVirgin, Jayjg, and the rest of their crew. I suspect the number of people who would like to see those people leave Wikipedia forever is vastly greater than we thought.

Meanwhile, there's plenty of nasty and speculative stuff here that doesn't get censored, if you know where to look for it. But as for the stuff that does, I understand that I'm going to be seen as the Mean Old Censorship Lady in certain cases, and I accept that. Just remember that on some level, bringing down Wikipedia -- which some of us would love to see happen, as unrealistic a goal as that is — could in some ways be the single greatest act of censorship in human history. Seen from that perspective, a few real names aren't really that big a deal, are they?


What has happened is that "moderators" of The Wikipedia Review have overstepped the bounds of "moderation". They have done this in a way that violates one of the principles that made the Review what it was, namely, a place where contributors took personal reponsibility for what they wrote.

This means that The Wikipedia Review, unlike Wikipedia, had no Editorial Point Of View (EPOV).

This means that The Wikipedia Review, unlike Wikipedia, was free of the dogmatic distortion that requires Wikipediots to disguise their EPOV as the one and only NPOV.

The minute that we abandon this principle, the minute that "moderators" arrogate to themselves the role of Editors In Chief, we become nothing more than Yet Another King/Queen Of The Hill Soapbox (YAK/QOTHS), like Wikipedia.

Jonny cool.gif

Posted by: GlassBeadGame

QUOTE(Somey @ Mon 30th July 2007, 10:21am) *



Meanwhile, there's plenty of nasty and speculative stuff here that doesn't get censored, if you know where to look for it. But as for the stuff that does, I understand that I'm going to be seen as the Mean Old Censorship Lady in certain cases, and I accept that... Just remember that on some level, bringing down Wikipedia -- which some of us would love to see happen, as unrealistic a goal as that is -- could in some ways be the single greatest act of censorship in human history. Seen from that perspective, a few real names aren't really that big a deal, are they?


No it's not, Somey. The WR Crits are not interfering with WP's speech. They are profoundly concerned with various WP abuses. They may think that WP cannot redeem itself and ought not to exist. They may encourage others to question or even withdraw their support for such an institution. But they do so by countering WP's speech with their own speech. That's not censorship at all.

I'm not myself burdened by the redacting of identifying information. It doesn't have much impact on the governance and social responsibility matters I mostly post about. I greatly appreciate the freedom or expression that this forum permits me. Still, to the degree that redaction is a burden on the expression of others posting on WR it is troubling. I also know that it is the success of those developing personally identifying information about controversial Wikipedians that gives me an audience for my ideas. They have given WR the success which it enjoys. I could blog about my thoughts on WP on my own domain but nobody would listen.

Posted by: Somey

QUOTE(Jonny Cache @ Mon 30th July 2007, 11:54am) *
What has happened is that "moderators" of The Wikipedia Review have overstepped the bounds of "moderation". They have done this in a way that violates one of the principles that made the Review what it was, namely, a place where contributors took personal reponsibility for what they wrote.

But how does that square with the fact that not all of us are identifiable? Besides, to simply slough off the "responsibility" for what's posted here to the poster would, in many cases, lead to all sorts of problems. There have to be standards and there have to be limits, and those standards and limits are subject to change on occasion. Morality demands it, the law often demands it, and for that matter, the membership would probably demand it too, if things started to get really out of hand.

I'm not saying it was right to do what I did in this particular case, but to generalize based on that is just-plain wrong. The posts now say, "Pierre Salinger suspected that (name redacted) may have been associated with (name of intelligence agency redacted)." They don't say "Pierre Salinger suspected that Nancy Drew's sister Eunice may have been associated with the Teletubbies Liberation Organization," and they certainly don't say "Pierre Salinger felt that all of his female assistants, especially the one now thought by people who should really know better to be a Wikipedia admin, were all nice, wonderful people who should be allowed to do anything they want, anywhere they want, forever and ever, completely free of any sort of scrutiny or criticism."

(I mean, as long as we're throwing out strawmen.)

QUOTE
The minute that we abandon this principle, the minute that "moderators" arrogate to themselves the role of Editors In Chief, we become nothing more than Yet Another King (or Queen) Of The Hill Soapbox, like Wikipedia.

I agree, actually. So are you saying we've now abandoned that principle, then? And assuming the choice had been between redacting the names and deleting (or perhaps hiding) the material altogether, as Slimmy herself would have certainly preferred, it would have been better to delete/hide the material altogether?

Posted by: Jonny Cache

To the best of my recollection, we are talking about a case where a couple of people contributed or conveyed information under their own real names, so the responsibility for those assertions rested solidly with them, until such time as the moderators of this Forum usurped that responsibility.

Lay reasoning would probably guess that the moderators of this Forum were on safer legal ground before doing that than they became after doing that.

Of course there are standards of conduct, but up until recently they have been solidly grounded in global community standards, enforced by peer pressure and near universal assent, not some peculiar code of silence of which the average citizen of the world could hardly guess the (ir)rationale, enforced by a privileged cabal.

Jonny cool.gif

Posted by: Somey

QUOTE(GlassBeadGame @ Mon 30th July 2007, 12:23pm) *
Still, to the degree that redaction is a burden on the expression of others posting on WR it is troubling.

Okay, I'll agree with that... but we have to define "burden," assuming that's the word we should be using (as opposed to "limitation" or "restraint").

My position on it has always been that we don't place any kind of moral judgement on members who post things that purport to identify anonymous Wikipedians. In other words, if member "Yakboy" posts that "User:DingDongDoodle is actually Mr. Wally Warburton of Swansea," we're not going to reflexively suspend Yakboy's account, nor are we necessarily going to warn him that he's done something bad, particularly if the same post contains some fairly decent justification for having identified User:DingDongDoodle. We're going to try and look at the situation objectively, weigh the pros and cons of carrying that information, and act accordingly. We might well come down in favor of trying to respect User:DingDongDoodle's anonymity, but we're not going to impose sanctions on the member for it, regardless.

So if Yakboy goes back a day or a week or several months later, and discovers that his post has been edited by changing the name "Wally Warburton" to "(name redacted)," is that a burden or restraint on Yakboy? The fact is, I don't know - psychologically, it might be. That's the thing we have to decide here.

Obviously I'd like to think that our success isn't based primarily on identifying people on Wikipedia who are trying to be anonymous, but I could be wrong ab out that... and if this little "experiment" has taught me anything, it's that Wikipedia as an institution doesn't really care one way or the other. They're just looking for scapegoats and stalking-horses. It's still not what I'd prefer to do, but if these are the people who are supposed to be benefiting from our respect for their so-called "privacy," then they haven't exactly shown themselves to be particularly deserving so far.

Posted by: Somey

QUOTE(Jonny Cache @ Mon 30th July 2007, 12:54pm) *
To the best of my recollection, we are talking about a case where a couple of people contributed or conveyed information under their own real names, so the responsibility for those assertions rested solidly with them, until such time as the moderators of this Forum usurped that responsibility.

If you're talking about Daniel Brandt and Patrick Byrne, then I can say that I did ask Daniel about it in advance, but not Mr. Byrne, though I'm fairly certain he would have said, "Sure, whatever."

QUOTE
Lay reasoning would probably guess that the moderators of this Forum were on safer legal ground before doing that than they became after doing that.

The problem there is that prior judicial precedent simply doesn't exist to the extent that one can be certain about that, one way or the other. And we're not talking about anything illegal here anyway - compared to the average videogame forum, for example, this place is a paragon of civility.

Also, don't forget that during various periods we've denied members the ability to edit their own posts after a certain period of time, including now, which effectively removes some degree of responsibility from the posters without necessarily transferring it to the moderators.

QUOTE
Of course there are standards of conduct, but up until recently they have been solidly grounded in global community standards, enforced by peer pressure and near universal assent...

I don't see the near-universal assent one way or the other, but maybe I'm not looking for it hard enough. That's why we're talking about it now, right? Everything I did is reversible, after all.

But let me ask you this: Do you not think it matters that the material in question was posted (in some cases) over a year ago, and that the situation (WRT Wikipedia's respect for the privacy of others, as well as the behavior and sentiments of the involved parties) has significantly changed since then?

Posted by: Jonny Cache

Let me explain it this way.

I am simply not going to waste my time contributing to a forum where people edit my posts after the fact without even asking me first.

Jonny cool.gif

Posted by: Daniel Brandt

Two reprints of the Ohmynews piece appeared today on Canadian websites:

http://www.canadafreepress.com/2007/ludwig073007.htm

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=6444

Can you http://www.wikipedia-watch.org/cgi-bin/wtraffic.htm we'd be getting at WR if we had better information?

Posted by: GlassBeadGame

QUOTE(Jonny Cache @ Mon 30th July 2007, 12:30pm) *

Let me explain it this way.

I am simply not going to waste my time contributing to a forum where people edit my posts after the fact without even asking me first.

Jonny cool.gif


Regardless of what happens concerning redacting information, this forum is simply the best place for Jonny Cache to express his view on issues relating to WP. Any other site is not even close. People that admire your ideas and writing look for you here.

QUOTE(Somey @ Mon 30th July 2007, 12:12pm) *

Also, don't forget that during various periods we've denied members the ability to edit their own posts after a certain period of time, including now, which effectively removes some degree of responsibility from the posters without necessarily transferring it to the moderators.


Hey, what's up with that? Do you think I can possibly explore all the ways I want to spell words, or use non-standard grammar, within those confines?

Posted by: LamontStormstar

QUOTE(Somey @ Mon 30th July 2007, 12:10am) *

QUOTE(LamontStormstar @ Mon 30th July 2007, 1:44am) *
I meant Wikipedia hiding several months of contributions just to hide stuff from SlimVirgin (of course obviously it's Jayjg who oversighted it, but Wikipedia still has to bear the responsibility, too, and not just Jayjg). Not something here.

Ahh, sorry, I misunderstood. Actually, that would technically be a GFDL violation, except that the violation is mostly against User:SlimV, who presumably isn't going to object to it. One might also say that by oversighting all those edits on http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Pan_Am_Flight_103&diff=7144119&oldid=7112063, they violated the IP rights of User:81.152.209.34 by effectively assigning all of SlimV's edits to him/her - but I suspect that this was deliberate, since an AnonIP isn't going to come back two years later and press a claim to that effect.



I'm not sure suing over a GDFL violation is possible unless someone tries to claim GDFL as their own copyrighted work and make money off it. GDFL violations, though, I think would invalidate the GDFL claim so GDFL wouldn't count and people then could copy GDFL content without attributing it.

Posted by: Somey

QUOTE(Jonny Cache @ Mon 30th July 2007, 1:30pm) *
I am simply not going to waste my time contributing to a forum where people edit my posts after the fact without even asking me first.

That's duly noted, and I think we all respect your position. However, it is, or was, an all-or-nothing proposition. If there had been only one or two people objecting out of the two dozen or so people whose posts were affected, that would have meant minority-rule, right? (I mean, putting aside the issue of who's really responsible for what around here.) By not asking you, I/we essentially prevented you from possibly being put in that precarious position. Also, Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers.

So now the situation has changed, again, and we have to decide - in retrospect - if what I did was justified. Please, let's not jump the gun or operate under the assumption that I/we could have known in advance that all this stuff was going to happen.

QUOTE(LamontStormstar @ Mon 30th July 2007, 1:43pm) *
GDFL violations, though, I think would invalidate the GDFL claim so GDFL wouldn't count and people then could copy GDFL content without attributing it.

First of all, quit transposing the D and the F - it's GFDL! General Free Distribution Liquor! angry.gif

And no, it wouldn't invalidate the license just because someone who was responsible for enforcing it did something questionable... that's actually kind of a silly assertion, I'm afraid. However, one might easily suggest that it was grounds for taking away "oversight" powers from the person responsible for the questionable act in question.

Posted by: Jonny Cache

If the moderators, custodians, whatever of this Forum do not understand the distinction between moderators, custodians, whatever, and editors — in that fine old sense of the word that denotes people who exercise editorial control — then I fear that their judgment is beyond repair.

There is no question of majority versus minority rule — because The Wikipedia Review is not now, nor has it ever been, a community. That is yet another one of those contagious delusions of Wikipedism that we had until recently managed to avoid.

Jonny cool.gif

Posted by: LamontStormstar

QUOTE(Somey @ Mon 30th July 2007, 12:01pm) *

And no, it wouldn't invalidate the license just because someone who was responsible for enforcing it did something questionable... that's actually kind of a silly assertion, I'm afraid. However, one might easily suggest that it was grounds for taking away "oversight" powers from the person responsible for the questionable act in question.



The person would have to do something bad enough to get lots of press coverage before they'll de-oversight someone. Even then, Wikipedia wouldn't reverse any damage the abusive oversight person had done, they'd just leave it.




Posted by: JohnA

QUOTE(Jonny Cache @ Mon 30th July 2007, 8:08pm) *

If the moderators, custodians, whatever of this Forum do not understand the distinction between moderators, custodians, whatever, and editors — in that fine old sense of the word that denotes people who exercise editorial control — then I fear that their judgment is beyond repair.

There is no question of majority versus minority rule — because The Wikipedia Review is not now, nor has it ever been, a community. That is yet another one of those contagious delusions of Wikipedism that we had until recently managed to avoid.

Jonny cool.gif


True. I guess we are more or less united in the currently unpopular view that Wikipedia is generally a bad idea, or at least a partially good idea which has been very badly managed.

But a community we ain't.

cool.gif

Posted by: Robster

From Dictionary.com - and I refer you to #8:

QUOTE

com·mu·ni·ty –noun, plural -ties.
1. a social group of any size whose members reside in a specific locality, share government, and often have a common cultural and historical heritage.
2. a locality inhabited by such a group.
3. a social, religious, occupational, or other group sharing common characteristics or interests and perceived or perceiving itself as distinct in some respect from the larger society within which it exists (usually prec. by the): the business community; the community of scholars.
4. a group of associated nations sharing common interests or a common heritage: the community of Western Europe.
5. Ecclesiastical. a group of men or women leading a common life according to a rule.
6. Ecology. an assemblage of interacting populations occupying a given area.
7. joint possession, enjoyment, liability, etc.: community of property.
8. similar character; agreement; identity: community of interests.
9. the community, the public; society: the needs of the community.


There is a community of interests here -- an interest in the future of Wikipedia (in one form or another), an interest in the general concept of wikis.

Now I realize, Jon, that you have no interest in being part of a community. Your style here, and elsewhere, has made it clear that you function best as a party of one. However, whether you like it or not, there is a community of interests here.

Now are we a "community" in the sense WP uses the word? Umm... hell no. I don't think there's any Flavor-Ade here.

As to editing the message board -- I guess I've seen it so often in so many places that it no longer surprises me that message board owners/custodians/administrators edit posts. They consider part of their responsibility. I haven't thought, in a long time, about whether or not I agree. It's just... there.

Posted by: Nathan

I'd agree, we're all a community in the sense that we all have common interests/goals (well most of us are all here for a common reason) but not in the Wikipedia sense.

Posted by: blissyu2

Awww but I feel like this is my home on the internet. It's the number one place that I visit every time I log on before I do everything else. I would think that for the 20 or 30 most regular people, they feel much the same way. Whether we get along with everyone or not doesn't really matter. We aren't totally united, but we are still overall having one over-riding purpose.

Posted by: Infoboy

If everyone here says its a community, but one person insists its not, what does that make it?

Posted by: Jonny Cache

QUOTE(Robster @ Mon 30th July 2007, 8:56pm) *

From Dictionary.com — and I refer you to #8:

QUOTE

com·mu·ni·ty –noun, plural -ties.
  1. a social group of any size whose members reside in a specific locality, share government, and often have a common cultural and historical heritage.
  2. a locality inhabited by such a group.
  3. a social, religious, occupational, or other group sharing common characteristics or interests and perceived or perceiving itself as distinct in some respect from the larger society within which it exists (usually prec. by the): the business community; the community of scholars.
  4. a group of associated nations sharing common interests or a common heritage: the community of Western Europe.
  5. Ecclesiastical. a group of men or women leading a common life according to a rule.
  6. Ecology. an assemblage of interacting populations occupying a given area.
  7. joint possession, enjoyment, liability, etc.: community of property.
  8. similar character; agreement; identity: community of interests.
  9. the community, the public; society: the needs of the community.

There is a community of interests here — an interest in the future of Wikipedia (in one form or another), an interest in the general concept of wikis.

Now I realize, Jon, that you have no interest in being part of a community. Your style here, and elsewhere, has made it clear that you function best as a party of one. However, whether you like it or not, there is a community of interests here.

Now are we a "community" in the sense WP uses the word? Umm ... hell no. I don't think there's any Flavor-Ade here.

As to editing the message board — I guess I've seen it so often in so many places that it no longer surprises me that message board owners/custodians/administrators edit posts. They consider part of their responsibility. I haven't thought, in a long time, about whether or not I agree. It's just ... there.


Yes, the word community is flexible enough to mean many things, but the context of the present usage had to do with group decision making in the relatively small population of Wikipedia Review members. More specifically, it had to do with majority rule versus minority rule in questions of consensual editorial control.

I think it's clear that The Wikipedia Review has not traditionally been the sort of Wik-minded group-think-tank where a cabal of arbiters or a poll of people present and pressing buttons on a given day gets to tell an individual contributor what to write.

The thing is, an Encyclopedia or a Newspaper is not that sort of political community, though scholars and journalists no doubt regard themselves as members of communities much larger than the gang of folks they happen to be working with on a given project at a given time.

You totally misunderstand me if you think that I have anything against communities — far from it. It is only forced communties and thus false communities that arouse my ire. The fact is that I am already a member of many overlapping communities, all of which have priority over anything so fleeting as an Internet Forum, much less the sort of Lonely Hearts Club that Wikipediots are so busy running into the ground. So I hardly need another community, much less a forced or farced one.

Jonny cool.gif

Posted by: Nathan

1,724 Diggs and counting.

Posted by: Joseph100

All of this make me recall a poem from my
much younger days.....
It makes me happy, seeing what is now happening
to slimvirgin (sic) and those like her.

It's going to be very gratifying to see what happens
to wkipedia when the attention of the blue water internet
and real life media as well as real people's realization of
the way wikipedia truly operates states to get out
in to the main stream culture.

Thinking about what is about to pour
down upon the numbnuts and sociopaths, who think
they can apply wacky wiki rulez to to the world at large and It's
citizens will be truly an interesting show to watch.

any rate, the poem...

The Walrus and the Carpenter
by Lewis Carroll


"The sun was shining on the sea,
Shining with all his might:
He did his very best to make
The billows smooth and bright --
And this was odd, because it was
The middle of the night.

The moon was shining sulkily,
Because she thought the sun
Had got no business to be there
After the day was done --
'It's very rude of him,' she said,
"To come and spoil the fun!'

The sea was wet as wet could be,
The sands were dry as dry.
You could not see a cloud, because
No cloud was in the sky:
No birds were flying overhead --
There were no birds to fly.

The Walrus and the Carpenter
Were walking close at hand;
They wept like anything to see
Such quantities of sand:
'If this were only cleared away,'
They said, 'it would be grand!'

'If seven maids with seven mops
Swept it for half a year,
Do you suppose,' the Walrus said,
"That they could get it clear?'
'I doubt it,' said the Carpenter,
And shed a bitter tear.

'O Oysters, come and walk with us!'
The Walrus did beseech.
'A pleasant walk, a pleasant talk,
Along the briny beach:
We cannot do with more than four,
To give a hand to each.

The eldest Oyster looked at him,
But never a word he said:
The eldest Oyster winked his eye,
And shook his heavy head --
Meaning to say he did not choose
To leave the oyster bed.

But four young Oysters hurried up,
All eager for the treat:
Their coats were brushed, their faces washed,
Their shoes were clean and neat --
And this was odd, because, you know,
Thay hadn't any feet.

Four other Oysters followed them,
And yet another four;
And think and fast they came at last,
And more, and more, and more --
All hopping through the frothy waves,
And scrambling to the shore.

The Walrus and the Carpenter
Walked on a mile or so,
And the they rested on a rock
Conveniently low:
And all the little Oysters stood
And waited in a row.

"The time has come,' the Walrus said,
"To talk of many things:
Of shoes -- and ships -- and sealing wax --
Of cabbages -- and kings --
And why the sea is boiling hot --
And whether pigs have wings.'

'But wait a bit,' the Oysters cried,
'Before we have our chat;
For some of us are out of breath,
And all of us are fat!'
'No hurry!' said the Carpenter.
They thanked him much for that.

'A loaf of bread,' the Walrus said,
'Is what we chiefly need:
Pepper and vinegar besides
Are very good indeed --
Now, if you're ready, Oysters dear,
We can begin to feed.'

'But not on us!' the Oysters cried,
Turning a little blue,
'After such kindness, that would be
A dismal thing to do!'
'The night is fine,' the Walrus said,
'Do you admire the view?

'It was so kind of you to come!
And you are very nice!'
The Carpenter said nothing but
'Cut us another slice.
I wish you were not quite so deaf --
I've had to ask you twice!'

'It seems a shame,' the Walrus said,
"To play them such a trick,
After we've brought them out so far,
And made them trot so quick!'
The Carpenter said nothing but
"The butter's spread to thick!'

'I weep for you,' the Walrus said;
'I deeply sympathize.'
With sobs and tears he sorted out
Those of the largest size,
Holding his pocket handkerchief
Before his streaming eyes.

'O Oyster,' said the Carpenter,
'You've had a pleasant run!
Shall we be trotting home again?'
But answer came there none --
And this was scarcely odd, because
They'd eaten every one."

Posted by: Infoboy

Check the first link here:

http://news.google.com/archivesearch?q=%22linda+mack%22+pan+am+103&btnG=Search+Archives&ie=UTF-8&oe=utf-8&um=1

Posted by: blissyu2

QUOTE(Infoboy @ Tue 31st July 2007, 2:18pm) *

Check the first link here:

http://news.google.com/archivesearch?q=%22linda+mack%22+pan+am+103&btnG=Search+Archives&ie=UTF-8&oe=utf-8&um=1


Perhaps you really meant this link: http://news.google.com/archivesearch?q=%22linda+mack%22+%22pan+am+flight+103%22&btnG=Search+Archives&ie=UTF-8&oe=utf-8&um=1

And perhaps specifically http://nl.newsbank.com/nl-search/we/Archives?p_product=MN&p_theme=mn&p_action=search&p_maxdocs=200&p_topdoc=1&p_text_direct-0=0F389C2CF1A49E67&p_field_direct-0=document_id&p_perpage=10&p_sort=YMD_date:D&s_trackval=GooglePM.

Posted by: dtobias

QUOTE(blissyu2 @ Tue 31st July 2007, 12:13am) *

And perhaps specifically http://nl.newsbank.com/nl-search/we/Archives?p_product=MN&p_theme=mn&p_action=search&p_maxdocs=200&p_topdoc=1&p_text_direct-0=0F389C2CF1A49E67&p_field_direct-0=document_id&p_perpage=10&p_sort=YMD_date:D&s_trackval=GooglePM.


...which that site charges you $2.75 to actually read.

Posted by: Viridae

QUOTE(Daniel Brandt @ Sun 29th July 2007, 4:11am) *

QUOTE(WordBomb @ Sat 28th July 2007, 11:51am) *

I'll try to find some way to make a manageable subset of the data available so you folks can join the fun. Suggestions are welcome.

I think a complete list of Slim's user contributions as they appeared on Wikipedia as of June 2006, or as close to that as possible, is the most useful thing right now. This would start on November 5, 2004, the date of her very first edit (which is also, by the way, an edit that is no longer listed in her user contributions because it got memory-holed). A list like this can be compared to the current version of the same list, which we can get ourselves from Wikipedia.

The important thing is to develop a listing of differences between these two lists. Both lists will cover exactly the same time span. Any differences are immediately suspicious. Then we can order the differences by subject. Any politically-charged subjects are more important than animal liberation issues, for example.

This ordered list of differences will provide a starting point for further research. It will probably be a fairly small list — I'd be surprised if it was more than 100 items. Once the list is this manageable, pulling the actual diffs from the memory hole will give us some insight into the types of edits that Slim did not want scrutinized.


Don't forget legitimately deleted edits.

Posted by: Jonny Cache

QUOTE(GlassBeadGame @ Mon 30th July 2007, 2:36pm) *

QUOTE(Jonny Cache @ Mon 30th July 2007, 12:30pm) *

Let me explain it this way.

I am simply not going to waste my time contributing to a forum where people edit my posts after the fact without even asking me first.

Jonny cool.gif


Regardless of what happens concerning redacting information, this forum is simply the best place for Jonny Cache to express his view on issues relating to WP. Any other site is not even close. People that admire your ideas and writing look for you here.

QUOTE(Somey @ Mon 30th July 2007, 12:12pm) *

Also, don't forget that during various periods we've denied members the ability to edit their own posts after a certain period of time, including now, which effectively removes some degree of responsibility from the posters without necessarily transferring it to the moderators.


Hey, what's up with that? Do you think I can possibly explore all the ways I want to spell words, or use non-standard grammar, within those confines?


Thanks for the note of appreciation.

My theory is that our old moderators have been abducted by Wikipediot Body Snatchers and replaced by Wikipodpeeple.

Then again, maybe there's just something about having a few extra buttons that drives people KooKoo for KokoPuffs.

No doubt we'll think of other theories as time goes by ...

At any rate — advanced or retarded — The Wikipedia Review has always been at risk for swirling down, down, down that same Wikiphecal No Exitude that Wikipedia WarpWraps about itself and everything in its SlimVicinity.

Que Sarah, Sarah ...

Yours truly,

[name redacted] [emoticon redacted]

Posted by: blissyu2

What posts were edited? I think its only ever done in extreme circumstances. Perhaps you should start up a post on WRR.

And I agree that for most people when you get more power then it goes to your head at least a little, even if you try not to let it. This isn't something that is unique to Wikipedia. Go to any online community and you will see it. Work anywhere and you'll see bosses throwing their weight around. As they say "Power corrupts" and "Absolute power corrupts absolutely". It is good to always have some kind of a check to see if you are misusing that power.

That's why its good to have a system whereby the power is shared somewhat, and where there are checks and balances. Its why when we first started Wikipedia Review we always agreed to have whoever was the root admin to not be a regular administrator or moderator, nor would the legal owner be. Sadly, it seems that Selina made herself administrator so that she could ban Igor, and for one reason or another has kept that position. I don't agree with that at all, but I guess its out of my control really.

Wikipedia's system in terms of admin abuse is pretty darn good really, when you think about it. There are so many checks and balances for admins that they should never be abusive. For most of the admins they aren't abusive either. The problem is that some particularly sneaky people have found ways to still abuse the system, through getting others to do their bidding, to playing the victim, and so forth. SlimVirgin is a great example of this. Others have found more obvious ways to abuse their power, by simply going after "known enemies" and then add a few others to that list every so often.

Well, I am sorry that you feel this way anyway, Jonny Cache. I guess that I would recommend that the best thing that you could do would be to find somewhere else as an alternative to Wikipedia Review, or even start up your own one. I think that it is probably about time that we had 2 forums, just in case someone doesn't agree with the way that this one is run. Its always good to have 2 options.

I don't think that it is possible, actually, to have a non-corrupt power system, no matter what you do. The best that can happen is that you benefit from the corruption, or that it doesn't adversely affect you.

But for now, this is the only forum that exists that lets you criticise Wikipedia, so until someone else starts up a new one, I am going to keep coming here. And if someone else starts up a new one, I'd probably go to both.

Posted by: BobbyBombastic

it seems like this thread has veered a little and that's ok, just wanted to point out that the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2007-07-30/In_the_news has covered this with an outgoing link to the slashdot article, http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2007-07-30/In_the_news&diff=148048097&oldid=148045055.

QUOTE
Other mentions of Wikipedia in the online press include:
<!-- Please do not be tempted to redact the link. That's almost getting to the point of censorship. --> [http://yro.slashdot.org/yro/07/07/27/1943254.shtml Wikipedia Infiltrated by Intelligence Agents?] - Slashdot generated a lot of heat and not much light when it linked to a Korean website, which claims to have evidence suggesting that a certain Wikipedia administrator is, or at least was, an intelligence operative.

Posted by: blissyu2

QUOTE(BobbyBombastic @ Wed 1st August 2007, 7:09am) *

it seems like this thread has veered a little and that's ok, just wanted to point out that the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2007-07-30/In_the_news has covered this with an outgoing link to the slashdot article, http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2007-07-30/In_the_news&diff=148048097&oldid=148045055.

QUOTE
Other mentions of Wikipedia in the online press include:
<!-- Please do not be tempted to redact the link. That's almost getting to the point of censorship. --> [http://yro.slashdot.org/yro/07/07/27/1943254.shtml Wikipedia Infiltrated by Intelligence Agents?] - Slashdot generated a lot of heat and not much light when it linked to a Korean website, which claims to have evidence suggesting that a certain Wikipedia administrator is, or at least was, an intelligence operative.



That's a great link! Now that Jimbo http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/2007-July/078336.html (although, in typical Jimbo fashion, he worded it so it sounded like he was supporting SlimVirgin - in reality he was stabbing her in the back), Wikipedia has a green light to bring it out in to the public arena. This is only going to get bigger from here. Jimbo has covered his bases, and is all ready to abandon SlimVirgin to the masses. Of course, if she somehow manages to survive beyond this, then great Jimbo was always supporting her.

Posted by: Jonny Cache

Though it sounds very likely from what I've read here and elsewhere, I could not say for sure whether this Linda Mack person operates the SlimVirgin account on Wikipedia.

But I can say for sure that this Linda Mack person, whoever she be, and independently of all that, has now crossed the threshold of notability for a Wikipedia Bio, at least, to judge by the likes of such notables as Ryan Jordan (hiker) and Ryan Jordan (singer).

Jonny cool.gif

Posted by: blissyu2

And that's the thing. If they created an article on Linda Mack on Wikipedia, then should they censor it? After all, SlimVirgin insists its not her, so there should be no problem with it. So long as it doesn't mention SlimVirgin, all is fine. But if its censored, then there's a big problem.

Posted by: blissyu2

These are all my replies:

http://yro.slashdot.org/~Blissyu2/

I really do find it amusing that even after Jimbo has confessed, still people on Wikipedia are trying to pretend that it wasn't oversighted.

Posted by: guy

If anyome writes an article on Linda Mack, they'll allege that whoever wrote it is a troll, though it will take considerable ingenuity to justify that!

Posted by: blissyu2

I just noticed this post to the mailing list:

http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/2007-August/078383.html

QUOTE
It's actions like this that make Wikipedia Review a better news source
about what is happening at Wikipedia than Wikipedia itself.

It's very useful too that they link liberally to Wikipedia, so you can
get both sides of the story just by following WR alone.

Eugene


Wow, we are getting praised on WikiEN-l! Eugene, where are you?

Posted by: Infoboy

QUOTE(guy @ Wed 1st August 2007, 12:47pm) *

If anyome writes an article on Linda Mack, they'll allege that whoever wrote it is a troll, though it will take considerable ingenuity to justify that!


Except that there are a lot of open proxies, it's really easy to open sleeper accounts, and if it's sourced enough, even if it's deleted just the once by some admin it goes right on DRV, and it will get kept if it's sourced correctly and meets their qualifications. I am loathe to the idea of using proxies and sleepers, but for those of us with legitimate accounts that post behind a layer of secrecy here for our own protection...

...bold acts require bold measures, at times.

Posted by: blissyu2

I still think that the best way to do it is to put things up on our own sites, and then wait until such time as a Wikipedia high up, someone like Linuxbeak or Fred Bauder, decides that it is high time that an article is made. People like that can't get in to trouble for doing it, and right now even they are wavering. David Gerard and Tony Sidaway aren't, but that's more because they like SlimVirgin (or maybe even are attracted to her?)