I sometimes wondered if SV was able to succeed and maintain the massive levels of support she had was because of the religious, as opposed to the sexual, conotations of her username. If Jimbo was "the God-King," and if the early masses were willing to buy into that, the success of SV's "Vestal Virgin" persona could be attributed to the need of people to have a sort of religious iconic "virgin-mother figure," however harsh or imperious. In relating her personal security to the integral security of Wikipedia, SV adopted the same basic sort of "image" or PR strategy Queen Elizabeth I relied on to maintain power, relating her own body to divinity and the body politic, although Slim employed this in a far more hysterical fashion.

While still influential with the old guard, if only because Jimbo has not contravened his support for her, her histronics on the whole have been less successful lately. I would say this is because WP necessarily became less of a cult as it grew into a more simply massive social phenomenon, with more unanointed eyes in the system. Currently the cult is struggling to maintain power and consistency at the top levels. But the show's not over until the fat lady sings, as they say.

I was going to post this in a response to Milton Roe in Lar's thread, but it seemed more appropriate here.

We've discussed some of that on WR already. Yes, I think that SlimVirgin originally named herself that out of some claim for the sliming effects of virgin olive oil, not exactly intending to be the return of Elizabeth the Virgin Queen, but she certainly projected the eternally-thin-girl avatar, and eventually the eternal-virgin archetype was bound to come in. We've had far more than the Christian two millennia of this, of course-- there were vestal virgins of a cult instituted by Numa Pompilius of Rome, circa 700 BC. They were the representatives of Hestia, virgin goddess of hearth. But there were also Greek and Roman virgin goddess for hunting, and intelligence, who long predate the Christian era.

With boys and girls I think there is a sort of "eternal youth" metaphor being looked to here. There's lots about it in both Frazier and Campbell. There are tie-ins with worship of agelessness, and also the "cult of the evanescent." The early Christians found it necessary to venerate Mary as a virgin even after the sacred birth, with the intactus restored through divine intercession. Thus, long before "Like a Virgin" Madonna, there was the original Madonna! She didn't need to "reinvent" herself-- her "fans" did all that for her.

Alas, Slimey Slimmey of the Olive Oyl's personality comes through her avatar as more the Wicked Witch of the West than QE I or Joan of Arc. She is eternally short-tempered and damaging. Thus, Artemis more than Athena, and Athena more than Hestia. And no Madonna, by a long-shot.

Why the heck should anyone care what someone's nom de plume means? Your speculation is amusing but irrelevant. No, take that back, it's insulting but irrelevant.

(wondering what my nom de plume means...)

I'm sure it's only hysteria. Her success in getting people to go along with her, I think, has to do with her strategy of associating or equating her "personal security" with the security of Wikipedia as a collective. "Slim" codes for "frailty," and the "virgin" metaphor reenforces that, as in "The body of this community is frail but pristine and shall not be breached by WR trolls!" Why people went along with it is tied in with these archetypal metaphors that the SV account was mentally registering, in her own mind as well probably, that facilitated group identification and turned them all into "wiki-defenders" that primarily acted as her defenders, before she squandered it all on Mantanmoreland and made the large disconnect between what she was doing and what most of them believed they were doing more transparent. (GW played them all, Arb Com and Jimbo included, and for that, I really appreciate that guy!)



It only means you are not particularly creative, oh bland one.

Like lots of Wikipedians, I coined my username when I expected that my wiki career would consist of writing two or three articles, so I didn't put too much creativity into it. I felt hopelessly outclassed months later when I came across [[User:Radiant!/Classification of admins]].

Some people put a lot of thought into a nom de plume. And a frame. And why should anyone care? Because others do. I've seen a lot of people either blocked or forced to change a username that was merely annoying. Yes, we've all noticed Radiant (which worked better and was more physical in reds), and the Transhumanist. On the other hand (just to consider pictures), I saw a user once whose name was framed in a series of alternating black-red-black bands, yellowjacket/coralsnake style. That gets your primate blood pumping. You probably remember them, but they didn't last long, which means either they quit or somebody made them quit. Anybody help me out, here?

I, too, chose the world's most boring Wikiname, but that's because I too didn't start out intending it to be even a hobby, much less the career that some have turned it into. But if you see some people start to edit, you know they're from somewhere else, and this is not their first time around. They are very "old souls" in Wikispeak. Or were set up with so much hand-holding it might as well have been meat-holding. Crum375, for example, didn't start out in the sandbox, learning to make pipelinks. Perhaps he's not SlimVirgin, but he did spring out full-formed, like Athena.

I had two lovely usernames over the years and had to rename my account each time due to security concerns. I used the first two names on other sites as well as wiki, which was a big mistake as then the names are encountering a larger number of people with whom you can fall out, who can rant about you/cause you trouble.

Yes, there's plenty of evidence that Slim is psychologically pretty vulnerable, spy or whosoever she might be!