JoshuaZ, Stalker Extraordinaire, He's trying to resurrect that redirect Options

[Daniel Brandt]

JoshuaZ is trying to restore that redirect again. I've been waiting for this for almost three weeks. On April 3 he told User:Prodego that he was planning to do this. I have already expanded the hostmask database from 26,000 lines to 33,000 lines in anticipation of this, but now I'm dusting off the IRC logs for January through April.

If the redirect goes through I will reinstall that old IRC search engine. This is not because IRC is interesting — indeed, compared to 2006 the #wikipedia IRC channel is almost tame these days. But it does give me an excuse to add about 700 HTML pages to Wikipedia-Watch. Based on past experience, this will double the overall traffic to my Wikipedia-Watch homepage.

That's because anytime you add 700 pages to a site, and these pages are filled with a wide variety of keyword-rich content that's interesting to web surfers, you get a lot more clicks once that content is indexed by search engines. Moreover, the two links in the footer of each page will go back to my homepage and to hivemind. These links help direct traffic from those who landed on an IRC chat page, and who find themselves wondering what they're looking at. That's a very common question, as you can imagine if you've ever seen about 600 consecutive lines of chat from #wikipedia on IRC. (These 700 files will average about 600 lines of chat each.)

The links in the footer also tend to give more Google juice to the two target pages, although not a whole lot because they're internal links. Do you know why every few words in Wikipedia articles are linked to another Wikipedia article? It's for the Google juice. Same thing here. (A lot of sites do this sort of thing just so that they have pages that can carry their Google ads, but I've never had any ads on any of my sites. I wonder if other sites will scrape my IRC logs? Google sure encourages a lot of pollution on the web, but then Wikipedia has never done anything to stop scrapers either.)

I'm actually looking forward to doing this if that redirect goes through. Wikipedia-Watch in general, and hivemind in particular, deserve more traffic. It's a quid pro quo because if the redirect is reinstalled, the PIR page in Wikipedia — the one with my name on it in seven places — will be getting more traffic too.

[KamrynMatika]

For what it's worth, I've read the email he's spamming around and I'm now pretty much on the fence.. it is a bit complicated and confusing but seemingly plausible. The story about someone having a rootkit on his laptop is a bit far fetched I guess, but it could happen.. I like to give people the benefit of the doubt. (I can give a summarised version if anyone is that interested)

[Derktar]

For what it's worth, I've read the email he's spamming around and I'm now pretty much on the fence.. it is a bit complicated and confusing but seemingly plausible. The story about someone having a rootkit on his laptop is a bit far fetched I guess, but it could happen.. I like to give people the benefit of the doubt. (I can give a summarised version if anyone is that interested)

Well please post it here, I would love to see it since the Arb conversation evidence is damning.

[KamrynMatika]

He gave me permission to post this:

The main evidence for my story is as follows:

0) I've been involved with Wikipedia for over two years and been involved
with many other Wikimedia projects. The idea that I would risk this sort of
thing is a bit absurd.

1) The sockpuppeting if it had been done would have been grotesquely stupid;
no attempt was made to hide the IP addresses at all. It would be easy to use
a different browser along with AOL, or dual boot and use a distinct machine
or something like that.

2) The accounts in question did not edit the Seth Finkelstein DRV despite
editing almost every BLP DRV I was involved in. By all accounts there are
two
articles that I think we really screwed up on and should be restored;
Finkelstein and Brandt. Now, if I we're going to sock, why wouldn't I edit
the Seth article? Especially in contrast to the Barbara Schwartz article
where in my comment I explicitly said that I thought that this might be one
where deletion wouldn't be unreasonable and only called for overturning
weakly. On that article, not one but both the accounts in question -Gothnic
and Miles Naismith voted to overturn. However, if there was a rootkit on my
machine then there's a good explanation for what happened: I was away from
home at the time of the most recent Finkelstein DRV. Although I brought my
laptop with me, I had minimal internet access at the time and when I did
have access I generally edited using other computers. So whoever was running
the rootkit did not have the opportunity to edit from my machine there.
(Checkuser confirms that I was away during that DRV).

3) I've been told that none of these accounts edited from a Yale IP address
as far back as the checkuser data goes. Now, given that I frequently edit
from Yale IP addresses why wouldn't these accounts do so as well if they
edited from all other locations that I edit from? There's a simple answer to
this and I'm glad that whoever was doing this overlooked this issue; my
laptop hasn't connected to the Yale network for over a semester. [He
provided a good, extremely plausible reason for this] This detail should be confirmable both by checkuser data looking at user-agent strings.

4) Checkuser has confirmed that all the edits made by these two accounts appear to be coming from a single machine (unfortunately they haven't given me the user-agent data other than to say it was consistent with a single machine using firefox that updated more or less regularly. However, given the times of some of these edits and some of the overlapping IP addresses the only possible machine these could have come from is my laptop.

5) Checkuser has confirmed (I think. They still aren't be very cooperative
in letting me know what they know which hasn't helped in trying to figure
out what happened) that at some of these locations that overlap I've used
other computers as well. The socks haven't.

2,3,4 and 5 are the really important points. They are only reasonably
explainable by the hypothesis that we're dealing with a rootkit on the
laptop, not by sockpuppetry. 2 in particular has a very good explanation
consistent with the rootkit hypothesis and with checkuser data (and if
necessary, credit cards and other receipts that I could supply demonstrating
that I was away). 2 is not easily explainable by the sockpuppetry
hypothesis.

6) Some of the edits made by the alledged socks don't fit my editing
patterns. For example see
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=...ldid=183006529I
always make edits adding in refs to in two steps first adding
<ref>http//whatever. </ref> and then adding a template (this can be easily
verified by looking at my history of edits).

Some fairly private info that confirms point no. 3 has been removed... make of it what you will.