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

[JohnA]

Link to slashdot[

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

Bring popcorn. This one could get interesting.

[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.

[Daniel Brandt]

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.

[WordBomb]

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.

[Daniel Brandt]

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.