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I'm sure Fat Phil will explain he was just jerking around, not revealing his unsavory self.

(Of course, he'll explain that his plea to "give jackbooted fascism a chance" on his user page is just a harmless joke too.)

He's quite strange. Very misanthropic.

More like schizophrenic...

Yes, back in late 2004. He also mentions that he can speak Klingon, and it was regarded by commentors as a joke.

I think we are taking this too seriously.

Snowspinner may be the real-life model for Comic book guy.

Yes, Sandifer appears to be an English Ph.D. student at the University of Florida. One of his papers there:

One of his lines on his Wikipedia user page:

Lol, superiority complex much...

"Terminal stupidity"...he's so obnoxious and egotistical he almost seems like a caricature. I remember him bragging about what a good arb he'd be based on the "bullshit detector" he'd developed from working with his students. What a guy.

If I know anything about how grad school works, it wouldn't take much to put him in a position where he either decides to leave Wikipedia or decides that he doesn't need a Ph.D. after all.

Its a pity really. Snowspinner's views on Expert Users are a good thing, or at least close to what I would suggest. Wikipedia needs to move away from the culture of ignorance and to respect people who actually know what they are talking about. Sure, we can all edit on things that we know nothing about, but if there is an expert about, or even someone who knows what they are talking about more than us, then they should be given preference.

But for Snowspinner to extend that to referring to people by the archaic notion that some people are superior to others is just stupid. IQ tests were popular in the 1950's, 1960's and 1970's but have long since been superceded by more accurate models, such as Gardener's Multiple Intelligences and the related EQ tests, as well as derivatives. The current normal belief is that we are all overall equal, but that we each are good at some things and bad at others. This of course is not only scientifically a better way of looking at things, but its also a nicer way to go and coincides with most religious beliefs.

So why is Snowspinner stuck 50 years ago? Because he's an idiot? Or at least, this isn't his field of expertise. Who is the joker that gave let him be a PhD student on it?

Let me just say that I don't think "outing" Fat Phil as Snowspinner would be the right thing to do. Let's not stoop to his level.

The user formerly known as Snowspinner now edits Wikipedia under the username "Phil Sandifer", and the user page of Snowspinner is a redirect to the user page of Phil Sandifer, so this doesn't really count as "outing".

Anyone that writes stuff like this has some serious mental issues hidden very deep... and should be watched

It doesn't matter if he is being serious or not. As it is written, without any disclaimers, this page constitutes "terroristic threats" (has nothing to do with terrorism). This is Illegal. People can and DO get arrested for stuff like this.

Which still means he has alot of mental problems when they write this shit. If they enjoy writing it the way he did then there is a real threat that is waiting to be unleashed at some point.

To be fair to Phil, his blog is clearly intended for literary/artistic purposes and I'm sure a claim that it's "terroristic" wouldn't be taken seriously for a second. I will grant that it could be something of an insight into his mind that he would write that kind of thing, but I don't need his weird musings to tell me there's something wrong with his head; I've been pretty sure of that for a good while now.

I'm not ignorant...... I was just a shocked as the Uni was and the police.

I am not sure if I trust Snowspinner's 2 latest Live Journal entries. I mean, is he allowed to report on something like that in such explicit detail in public? I am not sure if that is permitted. He even mentioned their names which surely is a breach of privacy. Something tells me that we are being set up over this, and that those two entries are fakes.

Of course, if it is true, then it raises another question. Was it right for him to be investigated over such a thing? I mean, lots of people talk about killing someone (teachers, especially high school teachers tend to be the main fall guy, but also parents, siblings, and step parents are high up there) but how many people do it? It must be like 1,000 to 1 for every person that thinks of killing someone compared to every person that did it. And even if we write it down, so what? Does it really mean that you are going to do it? Is it really worth an investigation?

We can say that its "just to make sure" but unless someone actually died, or there was some more explicit source of it, why are we worrying about it? It is the kind of thing that should be used as evidence if someone dies, but without something definite surrounding it, its just a wild guess.

But then, should he then get praise over being "wrongly investigated"? Absolutely not. Next he'll be saying that he is the poor innocent guy that was harassed. Bullshit. He was the stupid idiot that wrote such a thing and then kept it up there when it was like that. I suppose next he'll say that he's been libelled on here and that he is the victim.

I'd rather see us go after Snowspinner for his crimes on Wikipedia, not clutch at straws on something like Live Journal, where we don't know him very well. We are better off when we are experts on a topic, not novices.

And now perhaps we've made things worse.

But actions, including history of the person, and state of mind are accountable. Any court of law will agree with that also.

Dear god.

Had I know this would get so out of hand, I'd never have posted a link to Snowy's story here.

Don't misunderstand me: I find Snowspinner an unsavory young bully, far to fond of throwing his weight around on Wikipedia, and perhaps capable of overly enjoying writing fiction about victimizing homeless people.

But the operative word is fiction.

Informing the police and his university about Snowy's screwy slash fiction, suggesting it's criminal evidence, goes too far. As I've said before, there's no good in sinking to Snowy's level.

Snowy's an online poseur, a big man when he's behind his keyboard. He's no real-life murderer.

I don't know - you seem to fashion yourself quite the criminal profiler.



Creepy as I find your still caring enough about me to be on this thread, thank you.



Why wouldn't I be? One is generally assumed to be allowed to report upon and talk about one's activities and conversations.



I don't particularly see how being the passive object of a stupid police investigation is worthy of praise.

As for writing such a thing, come off it. Of all the idiotic accusations I've seen made against me on this board, the idea that writing a story featuring a mentally disturbed protagonist means that I myself am mentally disturbed is by far the most idiotic.



Well, you've certainly drawn attention to my journal, and given me a hell of a story to tell at parties.

Oh, and hey everyone. Like the color scheme you've got on the board here.

According to the police, apparently that's inconclusive.

But no, I haven't.

As for the rest of your questions, having spent a good chunk of the last week defending my right to privacy, it seems silly to fritter that right by answering questions here.

Though actually, I'm tempted to open another Q&A thread...

I can't decide which part of this is funnier, but since it is better if snowy is telling the truth I'll just go with it.
1) Someone cares enough to actually report this
2) People calling Phil's wikipedia actions crimes
3) Phil letting the police into his apartment, and then complaining when they see things and not having a witness.
4) Phil then complaining that they are lying, oh toes!
5) Phil thinking anyone would give a shit even if this was reported by someone he wronged on Wikipedia
6) The blogosphere reaction of FIGHT THE MAN!!!! FIRST AMENDMENT!!!!
7) The bit about comma usage
I can't decide which is the best. =(

Being on a list of potential suspects would imply, you know, an actual crime - something they did not have.



I think we have very different conceptions of the right to privacy. I consider it to be the right to choose what I reveal and where. I will reveal that there were, on May 16, 2006, several empty prescription medication containers on my desk. I will not reveal what they had once contained.



Are you diagnosing me as manic based on a single photograph? Because if so, you're the Bill Frist of mental illness.



It could also cause me to change into an invisible pink unicorn. We shall, however, never know, since I do not intend to fill in these details.



7. Definitely 7.



Not my advisor, to be clear. Director of writing programs, and general administrator of the TAs in the department.



Good to know your knowledge of professional ethics in my field is as strong as your understanding of the DSM-IV criteria for mental illnesses.



Actually, one of y'all described my actions as crimes in a reply on Pulp Decameron.

I don't think their right to free speech is the most important thing protecting their right to knock on my door and ask questions.



Of course asking doesn't violate the right. My not answering, however, exercises the right.



That did not make your case seem stronger.




Dude. I use surreal jest for just about anything. It's kinda like duct tape.

True, if wholly uninteresting.



And I'm Xenu the Space Conquerer.



"Let loose?" Which post am I letting loose in?

This is funny.... Now where are my wiki power tools....... LOL

How is that story "letting loose?"

Interesting idiom.



I dunno, I feel like answering that would be anti-climactic after all this.

Don't be silly. It's a loaded question with only one possible answer. You want me to give the answer so you can make a reply that starts with some form of "Then why do you..."

I see no particular reason to do this.

Oh, by the way, I wrote to Snowspinner to warn him. I probably wrote a bit much on there, but hey. I thought he should know about this.

I already knew, actually.

I take kind of a broadly spiritual approach towards duct tape. Everything is duct tape. Nothing is duct tape. There is no spoon.



I don't feel as though the question can be usefully answered in the general case.

I do not appreciate every action that has been taken in the name of getting murderers of the street. I also do not condemn every action that has been taken in the name of getting murderers off the street. Therefore, the general case is pretty uninteresting.



I pretty much feel similarly.

I am generally supportive.

I did not post it on a page where nothing else implied fictional context.



Neither - every LJ post can be accessed as an individual, out of context page, but this is not the way that it would normally be encountered. The issue is probably this blog post: http://www.websnark.com/archives/2004/12/h...lls_it_mic.html which links directly to that story. Though if you actually followed that link, you'd notice that it is prominantly described as fiction there too.



This question does not make sense.



No. I do, however, question the sense of continuing an investigation after the fictional nature of the piece has been pointed out to you. More specifically, I do not believe that self-professedly fictional writing would ever constitute reasonable suspicion on its own.

Let's explore who is being "stupid" in this whole case. We're in a political climate where a patron of a public library notices a penciled-in quote from Osama Bin Laden in the margins of some book, and shows it to the librarian, and the FBI is called in and eagerly grabs the records of everyone who recently borrowed that book.

In other cases, librarians have acted more professionally. The FBI serves them with a national security letter (no judge's signature required), and under Patriot Act One they were required to cough up borrowing records. If the librarian told anyone the FBI had been there and done this, it's a felony. (Patriot Act Two has modified this, after much lobbying from the American Library Association, so that librarians have slightly more protection now.)

Now we have Snowspinner. I think everyone acted reasonably in this case. The original complainer may have been sincerely worried, and it is their right to notify the proper authorities. The UF president took it seriously on its face, and properly referred it to the campus cops. The cops followed up and behaved reasonably. Snowspinner properly insisted, to an extent, on his right to remain silent and refuse fingerprinting.

What was unreasonable? Surely something was unreasonable, because a lot of people got activated in a situation where Snowspinner says it was all silly and unnecessary.

Let's look at two hypothetical situations where we have a crowded theater. Someone gets up and shouts, "Ladies and gentlemen, I'm going to yell 'Fire!' as loud as I can. Please do not get alarmed. This is only a test. I'm trying to see how far my voice carries."

In the second situation, the person gets up and just yells "Fire!"

What's the difference? In the first situation we have a meaningful disclaimer. In the second situation the perpetrator is properly hauled off to jail because when people stampede out of a crowded theater someone can get hurt. One is free speech, and the other is a crime.

It is clear to me that Snowspinner should have included a fairly elaborate disclaimer on his blog post. He should have explained that he is a grad student and is exploring creative writing, and assuming the role of an unbalanced and dangerous protagonist in a purely fictional presentation. This disclaimer should have been on top, in a typeface that is larger than the rest of it. Better yet, don't even publish the damn thing on the web. Keep it in a drawer until it's time to show it to your professor if you're looking for constructive criticism. Or email it to your friends. Don't publish the thing on the web. Cops are cruising Myspace looking for child porn leads, and you think your blog is off-limits?

It was stupid to do what you did. I think this stupidity came from the rush you've acquired from being an admin on Wikipedia. You owe your English Department, and the president of UF, an apology for doing something stupid.

By the way, Snowspinner, as someone who has had some experience in these situations from the COINTELPRO days of the 1960s, let me give you some advice. If the next time you decide to be stupid you find the FBI knocking on your door instead of mere campus cops, you should do this: Politely ask them what it's about, and then politely confirm that they are not there to arrest you, and that they have no warrant to search, and politely say that you refuse to talk to them. You see, it's a felony for you to lie to the FBI, but it's okay for the FBI to lie to you and trick you. And they are damn good at it -- they do interviews all day long.

They might present you with a waiver form, and ask you to sign it, and you refuse, and then they say, "Well, can we talk to you anyway?" Frequently it works, because you think you were smart for refusing to sign. What really transpired is that the FBI was smarter, because if you talk to them anyway, it makes zero difference that you refused to sign. This happened to me. In my draft trial, we introduced this issue. The judge would have none of it. He said, "You're a college graduate, and you shouldn't have been so stupid."

The bottom line is this: Don't try to pull your Wikipedia tricks in the real world. It's not worth the trouble it will cause you.

Martha Stewart will back me up on this.

More than one rapist/serial killer has kept a blog about it; its really not terribly surprising that the police would come asking about something like that -- its not like they arrested you.

Actually, I didn't start this forum. Igor Alexander did. I didn't even have the idea for a paid for version. I am pretty sure that was Lir's idea. I may have had the idea for the name, but that was fairly obvious. I just paid for the domain name. Selina set up the forum, and did most of the work, and deserves more credit than me. Thanks for the thanks though . I like to think of this more as a group effort. I won't pay the fees next year, and I hope that someone, or a group of people, will treasure the forum enough to put their hands up to put up the money. I hope so at least. I certainly don't think that something like this should be seen as the work of one person. It is a group effort.

I hope it's not bad form for a random person not previously involved in the conversation to answer this one. (I came across this thread via BoingBoing this morning.)

These are the markers I took as evidence of fictionality when I read the livejournal page you link to:

* The final line: "My resume is attached." No resume is attached.
* The copyright and creative commons notices.
* Clicking on the user profile and journal main page links, both of which are obvious if you're familiar with the livejournal interface, but perhaps less obvious if you're not familiar with it. On the user profile page, it's made pretty clear that the posts are works of fiction:


If you'll excuse a bad analogy, it's my opinion that confusing that livejournal post for nonfiction is like coming across a copy of American Psycho with the cover and first few pages torn out on the street, and treating that as nonfiction. I should try tearing the cover and copyright notice out of a copy of that book and leaving it somewhere. I wonder how long it would be before the police were called to investigate Bret Easton Ellis?

And, uh, I forgot to mention the most obvious one: the name "Pulp Decameron".

Well, he's certainly got most of you folks nailed.

50 bucks says that sudont will be a WP admin within a month for his comment.....

Are you including Cory Doctorow as one of the media interests you reference? He's the "UK journalist" mentioned in connection with this, and it's pretty clear that he understood the piece to be a work of fiction.

First of all, the user info page wherein the scope of the fiction project is laid out is linked directly from each individual post, not "two links away". I agree that the link is not obvious. But if your browser displays the target of a link when you mouse over it, I don't think it's unreasonable to expect that someone with a modicum of curiosity about whether the page they are reading is fiction or the ramblings of a deranged person might explore a "profile" link to see if there were any clues there.

You say that he presents as a disorganized mind. I say that he presents as a writer of ultra-compact fiction. It seems that this is a matter of opinion, not objective fact. My first impression of the piece was that it was derivative of something Stephen King wrote in one of his short story collections, but I didn't mention it in my first post because I can't think of what story that might have been. As for asking when there's doubt, I'm all in favor of that. However, I'm even more in favor of taking five minutes to investigate for yourself before calling the police. After all, the post was written in 2004. It's hardly an emerging threat.

You mean like going up a directory from a questionable web page to see if there's any explanatory text in the parent page?

The pseudonyms here don't tell me anything much. But when I'm reading something that feels like a short story in the pulp fiction style, and the author uses a pseudonym that refers to both pulp and a collection of short stories, I think it's reasonable for my first assumption to be that it's a short story, not a confession of a real-world crime. But then, I'm familiar with The Decameron. If you're not familiar with it, I can see how it wouldn't have influenced your initial assessment of the story.

Next time I see a copy of How to Good-Bye Depression: If You Constrict Anus 100 Times Everyday. Malarkey? or Effective Way?, I'll have to keep that in mind. I'd already figured the author of that probably wasn't homicidal, but it's good to know he's not disorganized or impulsive, either.

Where is the rest of Snowie's paper? I bet it doesn't live up to the expectations set by the grandiose synposis.


Lol! Maybe you can get Snowie's signature if you ask nicely!

Disclaimer: I too came through a link in a blog to this thread and i admit i am fairly ignorant about the relationship between postes in this thread. Therefore i do not believe i'd have any justification for commenting on them; however, there are some things i want to comment on.

Informing the police that you have reasons to think someone is a criminal is a very important act of civil courage, a quality that has become far to seldom in our society where everyone thinks it is "just easier" to idly watch and do nothing about. However, one should keep in mind that doing so might have very serious consequences for the accused and should never be done lightly and without a reasonable amount of research. This holds doubly true if the accusation is a severe one. Everyone has the right to be treated as an innocent human until being convicted -- even if you are convinced that he is guilty. The job of finding someone guilty is the job of a court of law, everything else is tantamount to lynch law and/or character assassination.

I am sorry, but i for one think in this case it would have been perfectly justified to invest a few minutes to acertain if this was a work of fiction or not. In this case it is not that hard; and even if it was, you'd expect that given the potential severity of it investing 20 minutes before crying "witch" are not a too high demand.

But the most important reason i am posting this is because i believe such course of actions very damaging. I know quite a few who work with law enforcement (you tend to get to know a few of them if you live next to a bridge that is frequently "targeted" by drunk drivers) and many of them are among the most decent people i ever met. Yet, exactly such methods are creating a climate in which the most prudent course to interact with law enforcement personel seems to be a most undesireable one: To, in most cases, politely inform them that you will check with legal counsel before answering any questions and request that they return after that has happened.

@Hushthis: Have you ever tried to ask those questions real persons you do not really good to their face? Most of the people i know wouldn't ... appreciate beeing asked those by a stranger.

So your assertion that "several media interests [...] were not sufficiently familiar with the interface to appreciate the meaning you derive from that context", what's the basis for that?


I'm afraid I'm still not making the leap from "Phil Sandifer wrote some [literature]" to "Phil Sandifer confessed to stalking and murder". According to your reasoning, as far as the reader can tell, pulpdecameron is a homicidal maniac who has confessed to a crime and then attempted to frame Phil Sandifer by placing a copyright notice attributing authorship to Phil. But the police were called to investigate Sandifer, not pupldecameron. Hmm.


Like I said. It's hardly an emerging threat.


You don't seem to have had an issue with resolving the problem of ambiguous authorship by placing absolute trust in information found online. I find it interesting that you were willing to do the research to link the pulpdecameron livejournal page with Sandifer's UFL.edu page, and believed that Sandifer was the author of the piece based on that evidence, but present as questionable the belief that a few paragraphs a reasonable person could conceivably read as fiction published on a livejournal with a profile describing it as a fiction project might actually be fiction.


And I'm glad that there are still people who apparently believe that the police don't investigate someone without having a good reason to. In these days of dark-skinned people being aggressively questioned for photographing public buildings while white tourists photograph the same buildings without incident, warrantless wiretaps, and data mining of domestic phone call records, it's refreshing to know that there's still someone out there who isn't worried about whether the country is edging towards a police state.


I must have missed the part where it was explained how he owes that to anyone. Certainly if it had been me in his place, and someone who didn't understand how livejournal works had taken a short story of mine as a murder confession, I wouldn't feel responsible for their lack of understanding. But I'm not him, and I don't speak for him.

I don't have any stake in your little Wikipedia turf battle. As an outside observer, here's how this whole thing looks to me: in an attempt to retaliate against Sandifer for some online offense, someone here dug up something he wrote which could--given certain mental contortions--be interpreted as a confession of a crime, and passed that information, devoid of context, along to the authorities. You were never really worried that Sandifer had killed someone. You just wanted to get him in trouble for having been on the other side of the battle for control of Wikipedia. All this retroactive justification is just a smokescreen to cover your motivations.

That's how it looks to me. Am I that far off?

Are you suggesting that the police came across the short story on their own, and on the strength of their investigation decided to lean on Phil for fingerprints and DNA samples? Because it seems a lot more likely to me that someone from this board took to heart Daniel Brandt's suggestion that "it wouldn't take much to put [Sandifer] in a position where he either decides to leave Wikipedia or decides that he doesn't need a Ph.D. after all".

I'm not trying to suggest that once the police had a possible lead on an unsolved murder, they shouldn't have followed up on it. I'm saying that if someone from this board reported the short story to the police, that person failed to exercise the minimal initiative required to determine that the short story was most likely a work of fiction, and not a murder confession. If the report came from here, it was pretty clearly a case of retaliation against Sandifer over Wikipedia control issues, not a legitimate concern that someone had been murdered a few years ago and the killer was still at large. The police shouldn't have had to waste their time with this to begin with. If every online short story which contains a murder were reported to the police, they wouldn't have time to respond to legitimate threats. (That the university police may have behaved inappropriately is a completely separate issue.)


Really? Your motives were entirely pure, and in no way related to Sandifer's involvement with Wikipedia? You had only concern in your heart that someone somewhere had been killed? Please excuse me if I find that difficult to believe.


And now you're painting me as some Wikipedia Cabal sympathizer, when my sum involvement with Wikipedia is making minor edits to maybe five pages. Until I read this thread, I didn't even know that there was Wikipedia infighting. Which one of us has joined a cult of paranoia, again?

And your commenting here why then? I see the only reason your here is to get into a fight no matter how you came across this thread.

I'm commenting here because I find the whole thing fascinating. I have zero interest in the wikipedia infighting, but I am very much interested in someone getting leaned on by the police for writing short fiction. That the police were almost certainly used as a tool of retaliation against an internet foe adds a certain zing. If Phil had dug up something on one of you guys and set the police on you, I'd have the same reaction. (Which is: WTF?)