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[blissyu2]

In light of the recent SlimVirgin scandal, and Wikipedia Review's heavy role in exposing the truth, a lot more people have been looking at Wikipedia Review posts, and we have had a number of new people sign up. To those people: welcome.

Signing up is risky, as Wikipedia currently lists Wikipedia Review as an attack site, hence if you join here, then they are well within their rights to ban you for joining here, and/or to use anything that you say on here against you on Wikipedia (including de-sysopping you, as they did for Guanaco, Karmafist and Everyking). Also note that Karmafist was banned because of a post that he made here as well. However, you can get around this by quite simply not revealing your Wikipedia username. This is up to you of course, and if you plan to make volatile attacks against Wikipedia Review, then its probably a good idea to use your Wikipedia username (Snowspinner never got in to any trouble for posting here, because he never said anything nice about Wikipedia Review). Of course, we won't be too impressed if your only reason to join here is to attack us, and we reserve the right to ban you if it gets out of hand. However, if you're already banned from Wikipedia, then you're free! Free to say what your username was, protest your ban, and so forth. The freedom of being banned!

So then why sign up? Over 75% of people who read this forum do not sign up. But one important reason to sign up is that then you can add your story to all of this. In relation to the current story, if you publish it on Wikipedia then it'll be deleted, if not perma-deleted (e.g. Kylu's posts) and in some cases they have even banned people for daring to post it (e.g. Hexrei). But here you can post freely and not worry about it being wiped.

Wikipedia has given Wikipedia Review a Parental Advisory Sticker, and we hope that you take that in the same way that you would if it was on a music compilation. It means that we are so good that Wikipedia has to censor us!

[Julie]

Western half of the USA for the first two posts, actually... I hope Julie will forgive me for narrowing things down just slightly, but you can never be too careful with those Londoners!

I actually sent PM's to both posters in which I hope to have clarified things, so you revealing the western US isn't too much info at all.

In a PM with another forum member, I tried to explain exactly what I am hoping to achieve. In cultural anthropology, anthropologists create an ethnography through various ways. Hands down, the most effective way (ok, so I am biased here) is through participant observations. The anthropologist joins a society and eventually becomes enough of a participant that they are no longer observers and their presence no longer changes the behavior. The example I used was Dian Fossey and her gorillas. Not that I am equating myself with Dian Fossey or WR with gorillas, but it's an analogy that is usually effective.

I have to admit that there is a little tiny bit of me that is slightly hurt that what I posted wasn't taken at face value, but then the logical side says, 'if you were in their boat, you'd do the same thing, Jules - suck it up and turn it into opportunity to establish trust.'

I'm still doing a lot of reading here, but once I decide the first topic of my ethnography I'll do as was suggested earlier and start a new thread

[Somey]

I actually sent PM's to both posters in which I hope to have clarified things, so you revealing the western US isn't too much info at all.

I'll still probably be accused of "spying" on you by a certain person over at Encyclopedia Dramatica, but hey, in for a penny, in for a pound...

In cultural anthropology, anthropologists create an ethnography through various ways. Hands down, the most effective way (ok, so I am biased here) is through participant observations. The anthropologist joins a society and eventually becomes enough of a participant that they are no longer observers and their presence no longer changes the behavior.

That's actually something I've been saying for a couple of years now - we've been seeing a lot of data (and related conclusions) about Wikipedia coming from statisticians, and quite a few of them appear to agree with what we've been observing, but IMO the only proper way to study a system like WP is to gather as much anecdotal and experience-derived evidence as possible and try to extrapolate as best you can. Statistics are too malleable in an environment where you never know who anybody is (or how many accounts they're using) or why they do it. Creating proper control groups and base points is next to impossible.