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

[JohnA]

Link to slashdot[

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

Bring popcorn. This one could get interesting.

[badlydrawnjeff]

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

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

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

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

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

What's the point here?

This post has been edited by badlydrawnjeff: Sat 28th July 2007, 1:42pm

[Daniel Brandt]

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."

[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: <!--PLEASE DO NOT ADD ANY MORE NAMES TO THIS PAGE WITHOUT INCLUDING A CREDIBLE SOURCE FOR THE INFORMATION. SEE [[WIKIPEDIA:VERIFIABILITY]] AND [[WIKIPEDIA:NO ORIGINAL RESEARCH]], WHICH ARE POLICY. THE SOURCE MUST SAY THAT THE PERSON IS ACTUALLY JEWISH.--> and has a similar insistence on the talk page of the article.

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 by claiming that she is archiving, 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 WP: 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 primarily the most controversial articles. 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.

[A Man In Black]

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 primarily the most controversial articles.

* 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? ¬_¬