[X] My Assistant

[Patrick Byrne]

Joey,

I commend you on the intelligence of your post.

Dan Brandt,

I am with you except for the "right to exist" stuff. I assume you would not seriously propose having the government shut such entitites down. (?!?!) I agree that it is a monster, but clever folks have gotten together to figure out how to slay monsters before.

I know how irritating it can be when someone comes into an arena where one is trying to make one point, and tries to connect it to some other private battle of his. However, a remarkable simiarity is emerging between our two respective battles (mine on Wall Street corruption, yours on Wikipedia).

My view is that we are on the edge of exposing the greatest financial crime in US history: hedge funds and broker dealers have been making money by destroying companies through an illegal technique called "naked shorting" (the details of which can be found at thesanitycheck.com). It is a scandal that will dwarf Enron if it ever breaks through the bad guys' attempts to contain it. In the process of trying to expose this I came to see how badly our social institutions are failing us: the financial press, the SEC, the Senate Banking Committee, the US Congress. With rare exception (and there are good men and women in DC, I promise, I've met some), DC seems to be a facade for something malevolent. It is though an image of democracy and represenitive government is projected to the masses: "Here's the Constitution, and it lays out all this plumbing nad machinery for amalgamating the desires of millions of citizens." But behind the scenes, that machinery has a bunch of levers and buttons on it, and those have been seized by a bunch of gangsters to the extent that it cannot function to correct an obvious and lethal manipulation in the marketplace.

Your view (as I understand it, having spent just some time in the last week becoming familiar with what you are saying here) is that Wikipedia is more or less the same thing. It presents a facade of consensual "neutral point of view," but that behind that facade there is a bunch of plumbing that is supposed to combine and amalgamate the knowledge of millions, but that plumbing has been gangstered by some bad guys, so that they can manipulate it into saying what they want it to say, and hide their machinations behind its authoritative "neutral point of view."

It is the damndest thing, and I do not want to come in and try to make my fight your fight, but I just want to tell you folks this: your gangsters turn out to be connected to our gangsters. That is, for two years there has been a group of folks (bloggers, clean stock brokers, lawyers, economists, etc.) trying to unravel an enourmous financial crime on Wall Street. It has been a battle of the Swarm (that being us) versus the mainstream financial press (who have downplayed and denied and been part of the cover-up). I do not want to distract any of you here from the fight you are fighting, and you may think that Wall Street is just a bunch of rich guys sticking it to rich guys anyway. But if you have any time you should check out this fellow's blog and his site in general: thesanitycheck.com/BobsSanityCheckBlog/tabid/56/Default.aspx

If you want to spend an hour really understanding it in depth, go to businessjive.com and see the narrated PowerPoint I did there.

Again, apologies if I am distrcting you from your cause. I thought I would point out to all here how similar our fights are (in a deep structure kind of way), and also, how odd it seems that the bad guys some of us are fighting turn out to be connected to the bad guys the others are fighting.

And Dan, back to your point: we don't have to challenge their right to exist. There may be other ways to set things aright.

Regards all,

Patrick

[Somey]

And on top of all that, now I learn that Sid Vicious isn't considered "hip" anymore! This just hasn't been my day... Now I'm going to have to get a whole new wardrobe...

In all seriousness, though, this really does provide further proof that Wikipedia is susceptible to a variety of subtle and devious manipulations by its own administrators. And in the face of this, what do we get - a "new BLP policy" that provides for "aggressive enforcement of WP:CITE" and "suspension of WP:3RR" for uncited additions in living-person biographies?

Not good enough. Nothing less than full opt-out is acceptable, or even tolerable, in a civilized society, wired or otherwise, that's faced with the problem that Wikipedia has become.

Last but not least, I too would like to thank Mr. Byrne for joining and participating here... It even sounds like he, SlimVirgin, and I are all roughly the same age. That would probably explain the Sid Vicious references, at least!

[Herschelkrustofsky]

My view is that we are on the edge of exposing the greatest financial crime in US history: hedge funds and broker dealers have been making money by destroying companies through an illegal technique called "naked shorting" (the details of which can be found at thesanitycheck.com). It is a scandal that will dwarf Enron if it ever breaks through the bad guys' attempts to contain it.

It may all go broke before the public ever realizes it exists. With something over a quadrillion dollars in derivatives on the books, you may soon see a chain reaction of defaults that simply leaves a giant crater where there was once a financial system.

[The Adversary]

Just a quick note to wish Patrick Byrne: welcome, a fascinating story!

Some information: Fall of Pan-Am 103: Inside the Lockerbie Investigation (ISBN: 0708883478)
by Steven Emerson, Brian Duffy, can be bought on http://www.abebooks.com/ for 1USD +shipping.

As for Slim and Lockerbie: I wonder if she was enough "Inside the family" to receive compensation? Each family got 10 mil USD, minus fees for law firms; 8-9 USD. Is it possible to find out which persons benefited? Could it be that Slim received, say, 2-3 mill. ..so she does not have to keep a payed job. Now, that would be irony: Libya has perhaps payed for Slims edits at Wikipedia...

This post has been edited by Surfer: Sun 1st October 2006, 2:01am

[Jonny Cache]

Well, this is all very fascinating stuff, and of course I never believe anything I read on the Internet anymore, but it does give me clues to follow up one day on my own. I wouldn't want Wikipedia Review to slide down the slippery slope of becoming nothing more than SlimVirgin Review, but that particular anonymph was a major convulsant in the ASOTAC that ended my Brief Life at Wikipedia. And the hill on which I died was the hill of Factual Reporting And Responsible Scholarship (FRARS), which the ASOTAC is still attacking with all its might, with no quarter given to anybody who gets in the way of their WikiPutsch to decimate the accountability of Wikepedia articles, even in such far-flung and seemingly de"tetched" houses as the Mansion of Philosophy. So the question that is really important to me here is this: Why Is That ? Any hints will be duly considered, with the usual quantum of saliciousness.

Jonny (IMG:smilys0b23ax56/default/cool.gif)

This post has been edited by Jonny Cache: Sun 1st October 2006, 2:30am

[TabulaRasa]

I wouldn't want Wikipedia Review to slide down the slippery slope of becoming nothing more than SlimVirgin Review...

I have a comment on your point about becoming overly Slim-centric, and and then an observation that might make my first point moot.

1- There will always be more to discuss here than SlimVirgin, but that we examine her in particular depth seems appropriate, given her status as the embodiment of all that's wrong with wikipedia in toto, and that directly observing or being directly affected by her excesses is one thing almost all of us have in common.

2- That said, I have this nagging feeling that SlimVirgin has morphed into something much bigger than we know. Her 27 hour edit-a-thon earlier this month, which (without first showing any loss of momentum) ended abruptly only when Bhouston pointed it out publicly, forces me to wonder whether "she" even really exists any more.

Remember Wordbomb's chart showing how email he sent SlimVirgin was opened by Gary Weiss? Wordbomb seems to believe that SV sent the email to Gary and he opened it. Mr. Ockham (you may know him by his Razor) might suggest that the simplest explanation is that Gary Weiss IS SlimVirgin, at least part of the time.

And ultimately, that might not matter, because be she an army of editors or just an army of one, Wikipedia will not change until she does.

This post has been edited by TabulaRasa: Sun 1st October 2006, 2:40am

[Somey]

I wouldn't want Wikipedia Review to slide down the slippery slope of becoming nothing more than SlimVirgin Review...

I wouldn't worry about that too much... This is just one of our "SlimVirgin flare-up weekends," really. After this one, I don't think we're due for another round for almost an entire fortnight!

...That said, I have this nagging feeling that SlimVirgin has morphed into something much bigger than we know.

I dunno, folks. Maybe it's because I haven't had any direct contact/confrontation with Slimmy, but let's not be too quick to race headlong into conspiracyland here. Lots of people stay up for 2-3 days straight - it's called insomnia, and it's often part-and-parcel with various personality issues, the names of which I wouldn't care to speculate on at the moment.

The reality is that there are 1.3 million articles over there on the Wikimedia Foundation's website, roughly half of which are actually articles about something, and Slimmy can't get involved in every topic that's covered over there. Clearly she's not at all interested in, say, experimental botany, or Tibetan tantras, or podiatric medicine. I daresay there are all sorts of topic areas that she hasn't touched at all, or even considered touching.

The way I see it, the problem isn't her extensive reach; the problem is that she, and the people who support her, create an atmosphere of negativity that infects and spreads through the entire project, no matter what the topic area is. And when her motives and manipulations are exposed, it makes everyone involved in Wikipedia look bad, and it devalues their efforts, even if those efforts are completely unrelated to any topics she's involved in.

To be sure, we've clearly explained why Slimmy is so fond of User:Mantanmoreland, and sure, Mantanmoreland is probably Gary Weiss, yada yada yada. But the whole Weiss business is just one of many irons she has in the fire, and if you don't mind my mixing metaphors a bit, she's frying a lot of fish... But that still doesn't mean she's some sort of multi-person "Wikiteam." And actually, Surfer's "multi-million-dollar Lockerbie payoff" theory could explain her apparent lack of any need for regular employment.

[Jonny Cache]

Myself, I swear by Maxwell's Razor:

Don't abduct a demon as a hostage to entropy.

But never mind that now.

For the rest of this discussion, and those to follow, let me introduce a form of brevity that stores a bit of wit for me:

• STIB (s) = State Transition Indexed By (s), where s is a character string.
• Let X be the state space of a database, for example, the state of a wiki.
• A state transition t is a transformation of X, a mapping of type t : X -> X.

My own experience confirms the gist of what Tabula Rasa says, as my first encounters with the set of Wikipedia state transitions indexed by the string "SlimVirgin", in symbols, the set {t : X -> X | t = STIB ("SlimVirgin")} were quite benign, but for reasons that remain beyond my ken, though a subject of so far futile speculation, they radically altered all of a sudden when I began to work on the WP:NOR policy page.

But assigning too much causality to single individuals is a prediction of a well-known theory in psychology, the theory of "Fundamental Attribution Bias" (FAB), and falling into that error has the effect of causing us to ignore the role of the rest of the population that winks at these acts. I mean, you can't blame the leader for the stupidity of those who follow. Okay, thare are leaders who slash education funding, so I guess that's an exception to the rule.

Jonny (IMG:smilys0b23ax56/default/cool.gif)

This post has been edited by Jonny Cache: Sun 1st October 2006, 6:04pm

[Somey]

Myself, I swear by Maxwell's Razor: Don't abduct a demon as a hostage to entropy. But never mind that now.

Good, because I have absolutely no clue as to what that means...

But assigning too much causality to single individuals is a prediction of a well-known theory in psychology, the theory of "Fundamental Attribution Bias" (FAB), and falling into that error has the effect of causing us to ignore the role of the rest of the population that winks at these acts.

Agreed! And to some extent, I've advocated all along that we focus less on Slimmy, salacious as all this is. When you think about it, the fact that in another thread we're chiding Larry Sanger, and to some extent the rest of the Faithful, for "blaming it all on Lir" while we're over here doing practically the same thing with SlimVirgin could very well look rather untoward to an outsider, sincere though it may be.

The other point I've sometimes tried to make, probably unsuccessfully, is that even if you can get rid of the worst of the worst, somebody else (presumably User:Cyde, in this scenario) just becomes the worst of the worst to take that person's place... And then you get rid of that person, and someone else comes along, ad infinitum. That isn't to say that every society has to have its bad guys, but the fact is, every society does have its bad guys. And it's easy to spend too much time going after the bad guys, to the point where you don't spend enough time trying to figure out why there are so many of them.

[guy]

Myself, I swear by Maxwell's Razor: Don't abduct a demon as a hostage to entropy. But never mind that now.

Good, because I have absolutely no clue as to what that means...

Read up on James Clerk Maxwell and what is known as Maxwell's demon.

[Daniel Brandt]

SlimVirgin started a stub on John K. Cooley in December, 2004. Around 1989-1990, Cooley was an ABC News correspondent in London. A book that Google recently scanned, I Solemnly Swear by former DEA agent Michael T. Hurley, is about the Pan Am 103 investigations. It relates that Cooley, who knew Hurley in Cyprus when both were stationed there earlier, tracked Hurley down in Seattle to ask him about the Pan Am 103/Cyprus/DEA connection. Hurley reports that Cooley passed the phone to Linda Mack, who was working on the story for ABC News. Linda Mack came on the phone with her English accent.

SlimVirgin is almost the only person interested in the Wikipedia bio of Cooley. Unlike Steven Emerson, who wrote a prominent book on Pan Am 103, Cooley has not written about Pan Am 103, as far as I know. Why would SlimVirgin start a stub on Cooley one month into her Wikipedia career if he had nothing to do with the Pan Am 103 story?

The answer is that Cooley worked at ABC News London, and so did Linda Mack. This is more evidence that SlimVirgin is identical to Linda Mack. Cooley is retired now and reportedly lives in Athens, Greece. I haven't been able to find contact information for him.

[Herschelkrustofsky]

Does anyone live close to a local library that has its card catalog available online? You should check to see if they carry this book, and then visit them to pull it and check the index, and the pictures (if any), for Linda Mack. It's probably in a lot of libraries, but it has not been scanned by Amazon or Google. I believe there's a 50/50 chance that Linda Mack might be mentioned in the book: Steven Emerson and Brian Duffy. The Fall of Pan Am 103: Inside the Lockerbie Investigation (Putnam, 1990), ISBN 0-399-13521-9

OK, I have the book now. There are no references to Linda Mack in the index or acknowledgements, and the book has no photos.

It dawned on me, as soon as I had the book in my hands, that I know who Steven Emerson is. He's somewhat notorious, and SV writing a "glowing stub" on him for Wikipedia fits her M.O. He notes in his acknowledgments that he worked closely on the book with Oliver "Buck" Revell, who I know as a noted Iran-Contra figure, and an operative in the government/private sector task force that came after LaRouche back in the '80s.[1]

[Daniel Brandt]

Thanks, HK. That's one more thing that doesn't need to be checked. I noticed today that SlimVirgin started a stub on Charles Glass on September 6, 2005. Mr. Glass is another Middle East specialist, formerly with ABC News. He even has an email address. On the theory that he knows something -- or at least knows how to contact Mr. Cooley -- I've emailed him and hope to get a reply soon.

[Somey]

Sorry, I just had to take note of this:

Tony, you are wrong, both about yourself and about Friday, who has an extremely good understanding of Wikipedia. The problem we're left with is that you won't trust anyone else's judgment about yourself. Every rational person harbours some self-doubt, but you are displaying none. I asked you on the talk page whether there was any degree to which you felt there might be some truth — even a sliver of truth — in other people's view of you, namely that your adminstrative involvement in the Giano thing exacerbated it, as your involvement in several incidents has done, and you replied no. You said: "I just happened to be the whipping boy. Of course I got rid of some of the more ridiculous noise, and this was a net benefit to the discussion." This is exactly the opposite of the truth, in every regard, in the opinion of many good editors and admins. So what do we do with such diametrically opposed views of your admin style? What is your suggestion about how we resolve them? I'm asking these questions in the spirit of trying to be constructive, by the way, and not in the spirit of attack.

Yes, this is clearly not an attack at all. It's almost a kindness, relatively speaking!

And three days later, just after Tony's request to be de-opp'd:

I think my self-assessment is so wildly divergent from the general view that it cannot possibly be correct. Therefore my judgement is very poor.

Now, it could be said that I'm trying to give the impression here that SlimVirgin was responsible for Tony's decision to give up adminship. This is, of course, not true - many editors and fellow admins have complained about Tony, not just SlimVirgin.

What it suggests, though, is a complete lack of self-awareness on SlimVirgin's part. If there was ever anyone on Wikipedia who was, and is, unwilling to trust anyone else's judgment about him- or herself, it's SlimVirgin. And there she goes, pointing the finger at poor Tony, as if the problem couldn't possibly apply to her, no sirree!

Everybody Loves SlimVirgin!

[EuroSceptic]

Indeed. Anyone noticed the relative low contribution level of SlimVirgin?

[Somey]

Indeed. Anyone noticed the relative low contribution level of SlimVirgin?

I noticed a full two-day break before she came back to delete something on her talk page, but I didn't want to say anything for fear of jinxing everybody!

I generally try to keep my theories about peoples' actual mental states to myself, though I often don't succeed, especially in Slimmy's case. But it may be no coincidence that this latest 48-hour break coincided with Patrick Byrne's arrival on this site... So at the risk of appearing too sympathetic, it might be best if we try to take a wait-and-see attitude, just for a little while?

[Daniel Brandt]

Bad news: I heard from Syracuse University, and there's nothing in that archive box that would interest us. Specifically, no video tape and no picture.

Good news: I got contact information for Mr. Cooley thanks to Mr. Glass, and sent off an email asking for help with anything he knows about Linda Mack.

[IronDuke]

Indeed. Anyone noticed the relative low contribution level of SlimVirgin?

I had written it off to Yom Kippur.

[TabulaRasa]

Indeed. Anyone noticed the relative low contribution level of SlimVirgin?

I had written it off to Yom Kippur.

I've cross referenced her editing patterns with other Jewish high holy days and have not observed what would seem to be a direct relationship one way or the other, either up or down. She just edits like a machine.

Just to get some perspective here...is it the case that the entire Linda Mack connection goes back to the single instance of "slimvirgin@@gmail.com" being tied to that name on the King's College alumni site? Barring that, would we still be calling her Sarah McEwan? Or might we have derived the name and circumstances by combining Daniel's interaction with her in the early 90s and Patrick's experience?

[Daniel Brandt]

The Kings College email discovery was the tipping point, but the connection is stronger than that.

Go to http://www.namesbeyond.com/cgi-bin/Registrar?action=whois and search for "slimvirgin.com". You see the same email as on the Kings College site.

Do a forensic analysis of her first month or two of edits: Pierre Salinger, Pan Am 103, etc. She has more than a passing acquaintance with these topics.

Her IP address, when we've been able to catch it, is (IP address redacted). She uses a Mac, which she brags about on her User page (see the categories below). Elsewhere she described herself as using a Mac with Firefox. The user_agent on that IP address was:
Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.7.10) Gecko/20050716 Firefox/1.0.6

While her IP address now appears to geolocate to somewhere in Saskatchewan, that wasn't the case a year ago. Back then it geolocated to the Calgary area, which matches with the slimvirgin.com domain registration. Database glitch, probably.

Her domain registration lists a "S. McEwan)" but if you poke around Google, you will find a letter to the editor of the UK Telegraph where a "Sarah McEwan, Canada" protests fox hunting. SlimVirgin is very pro-animal rights.

Finally, her poodle looks very sad to have ended up with such a mean owner.