User:Janeyryan first appears at Wikipedia on July 10 of this year, with the usual surprisingly complete knowledge of Wikipedia methodology. Take a look at the user contributions -- the first edits are to Wikipedia Review, followed in short order by edits to Lyndon LaRouche, Chip Berlet, Patrick Byrne, and Naked Short Selling. By the pricking of my thumbs...

That would be John Nevard, who recently quit editing related articles.

There is an article probation on Patrick M. Byrne and Talk:Patrick M. Byrne that says:

Shit. Someone should request CU. Socks are not allowed there--NYB is right that ArbCom's remedy was not totally toothless.

I agree it's probably Nevard, but there's a nonzero chance it's Mantanmoreland. Someone should check for proxies.

Entirely plausible. But isn't the John Nevard account itself also a sock account? One of the so-called "legitimate" ones?

Well, that's a completely bizarre result. Wish I knew how to interpret Alison's result post (I'm not going to ask because she won't tell me)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:RfCU#Janeyryan

I have my own suspicions, but I'm going to leave it there, because all they are, are suspicions.

I really hate double negatives in a situation like this. What the devil does she mean? "Not to declare this unlikely...?"

I don't think it's Gary Weiss, because to my knowledge he has never taken an interest in the LaRouche vs. Berlet controversy. I also don't think it's Cberlet, despite the timing (User:Janeyryan put out her/his shingle on the same day Berlet announced his retirement,) because Berlet has never taken an interest in the Byrne vs. Naked Short Selling controversy. John Nevard's editing overlaps both controversies, and I can't think of any other editor that fills the bill.

I won't go into details here, lest I be hanged for my crimes.

Basically, I'd like to call it {{unlikely}} but feel I cannot due to some technical quirks. There's some stuff I just cannot rule out. And I think I'll leave it at that. I'd said, "lead[s] me to not declare this unlikely" - which is not quite what you said!

Yeah, convoluted

So basically all that this is accomplished is that whoever it is is now on notice, and therefore knows to be more careful.

Remember, Mantanmoreland only screwed up once with Bassettcat - he'd never have been caught if the matter of whether or not he was a sockpuppet had been considered settled after the first check.

To be honest, they're already on maximum alert. Bringing an early checkuser request pretty-much ensured that and they're already working in a maximum-scrutiny area, under the auspices of dozens of ArbCom cases. It doesn't get much better

"new" User:Janeyryan.

Interests?

Chip Berlet
Patrick Byrne bashing on Naked Shorting talk page
Lyndon LaRouche
OhMyNews (did story on linda)
Wikipedia Review (LM's 2nd favourite website)

Gary Weiss or Linda Mack?

I believe it to be Linda after further Wikireview.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/Janeyryan

Disgust amongst your detective selves...

note: if it's gary, it wouldn't be his first dance in wikidrag. See User:EmilyWelles
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contr...ons/Emilywelles

one wikisleuth believes janey to be one john nevard. Could be.
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=...oldid=228387111

This has been discussed in this thread. Checkuser result is a US dial-up ISP.

Well, that probably eliminates SV. Some dialup ISPs are national (AOL, Earthlink) where others have more limited coverage. Is this one of the the ones that can be semilocalized?

I'm guessing it's neither SV NOR Weiss. Possibly CBerlet tidying up after flouncing out. Weiss doesn't really care about Berlet or LaRouch that much.

Other possibility is it's a sock of somebody on WR who was involved in the LaRouche wars, and is long banned.

For such a fresh, new editor, Janey has become very tendentious very fast. She is focussing her firepower on removing the OhMyNews citation from [[Wikipedia Review]], which brings to mind another ostensibly female editor who has a history of sockpuppetry. And then again, she likes to post whole essays in the edit summary box, a trademark approach of Cberlet (so that other editors must read his opinions on their watchlists without even clicking on the talk pages.)

Posting the first few sentences of whatever he's saying is something Tony Sidaway was doing, with his last account at least.

User:Risker is now doing a bit of probing on JR's talk page, in light of the ArbCom ruling.

Yes, Janeyryan appears to be Tony sidaway.

Could be, but CBerlet, as troll extraordinary, certainly had his opinions on Weiss. Some of them quite funny in light of later history, as Mantanmoreland/Weiss was indeed finally caught socking redhanded. But BEFORE that, here is a prime Berlet quote from none other than the Weiss TALK page:



Yeah, those trolls, stalkers, and whiners. And what's Berlet doing on Weiss' TALK page? Trolling, stalking and whining. The rest of the page is funny also, with Tony S, Crum, Jayjg and all our old friends weighing in against the POV pushers and sockers who've supposedly infested the nice neutral Naked Short Sale article and ruined a classy place. Ah, god.

It is true that sometimes you cannot possibly fathom what is going on at WP without reading WR. The gamers have truly gamed the system so well that somebody from the inside never would figure it out.

Does Sidaway fit the interest profile? Janey's interests are few: LaRouche, Berlet, Naked Short Selling, Wikipedia Review. An actual new editor, or a seasoned sockmeister, would try to diversify a bit for experimentation or keeping up appearances. But not our Janey.

Those edit summaries scream out Tony Sidaway.

Tony loved Mantan, and he's among the most fixated on WR. His edits are very often WR-related.

Also recall that he goes from one contraversy to another. I wouldn't be surprised if he branches out later as his attention moves. If it's not Tony, it's someone apeing him.

If you want evidence of long Overstock interest:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Anticipa...s/Overstock.com

And yes, this is generally following the likes of Slim around, the way some birds follow trains or water buffalo to see what they scare up as they clomp or tromp or clatter along. The Kabal Kadre. I figured Tony should be renamed "Anticipation of a new Jay in my username" a long time ago.

Interesting. Of course, that (if true) means the clarification of the reply to Risker is an outright lie. Problem is, looking at the comments from the original CU request, it won't be possible to ever prove this editor has had other identities.

Is it possible, then, that [[User:John Nevard]] is also Tony Sidaway?

FWIW, here's a link to the checkuser case on WP. The result was .... well, weird, really.

Oh. A USA ISP. Oops. Back to the drawing board.

Editing times span 1251 to 0409, or 8:51 AM to 12:09 AM EDT, which makes a hell of a lot more sense than Britain to me.

EDIT: Actually, looking at it again, the 0400 edits are on a Saturday/Sunday, so it's not impossible that a Brit could make them, especially a student. Tony made edits that late at times.

John Nevard was also prone to occasional all-nighters from 1200-2000 (assuming NZ time for Nevard). I think it would be a bit harder for someone from that part of the world because most of Janeyryan's edits are between about 1-8 AM NZ/AUS.

I don't think it's either Tony or Nevard unless they're calling up ISPs in the states using their subscriptions paid in US dollars and sleeping like an American for the purposes of socking. Dollars and long distance are cheap, but I doubt either cares enough to do that. I especially doubt Nevard would become a vampire for the opportunity. On NSS he's still pushing POV totally unopposed, and he's not even involved with WR or Larouche right now.

So my thoughts turn back to Mantanmoreland, a writer with at least some ability to imitate styles and interests, and who has apparently obscured his location with remote ISPs in the past. So far he hasn't touched the actual articles that MM lived for, but this is certainly an account to watch.

'Weird' is an interesting turn of phrase, but obviously we're not going to find out any more on that one right now... :|

Edit: Oh damn, should have checked the times.

With this edit, Janey establishes herself as a genuine fan of Chip Berlet, not just POV-pusher who finds Cberlet a useful foil. Remember that the Janeyryan account had its coming out party on the same day that Cberlet announced his resignation. This follows the hallowed example of User:Sunsplash, who appeared the moment that SlimVirgin said she was leaving. I also note that Janey posts in haste, leaving many typos in her wake -- a Berlet trademark. Have the checkusers looked to see if the IP number geolocates to anywhere in Massachusetts?

They have and it doesn't. Can't say more than that

It's quite easy to edit using a dial up and have the ISP located in a different city, or even a different country. It's easy to fool checkuser if one is determined enough. Some of the bestest of the best editing is done by socks. Yups, Wikipedia has a lot to be thankful to those socks for!

Can't argue with proof like that.

That might be what's strange about the results.

See, the checkusers say that it's very weird, but what could be so unusual about a bunch of edits from the same ISP range? Some theories:

1. Perhaps the user does not always geolocate to the same location. That might suggest that the user is accidentally calling up different cities, but it might also be travel, or an ISP shuffling its ranges. That would probably not be actionable, but would look very odd.
2. Thatcher refers to a blocked user with the range most similar to this account. I can't imagine how that would be very strange; we expect blocked users to evade. Unless the POV of the blocked user is surprising compared to the edits. For example, a tentative match to Wordbomb would be weird indeed.

Any other ideas in re: weirdness?

lots of folks travel around in the summer, and especially august. some even edit on wikipedia from places other than their homes. gasp. good luck, checkusers. until you WP'ians adopt an Amazonish "Real Name" verification situation, and prohibit editing from alias, you're not going to keep away determined (i.e. crazed or just overly motivated, neither of which is good for npov editing lol) people from socking all over you.

And that's exactly what Mantanmoreland did with his last sock, Bassettcat. Only his edits weren't necessarily the "bestest of the best", were they?

wait until october and see if janey edits from varkala, lol.

Didn't you see how Mantanmoreland was finally caught socking? MM's normal DSL IP range was known. Bassettcat made 3 edits within six minutes, with the end ones being in BC's normal dialup range 500-1000 miles away from MM, and the middle one (wups) from MM's DSL IP range. So either Bassetcat teleported >500 miles in 3 minutes to log onto MM's normal IP, then back, or else BC is a sock of MM using a dialup proxy >500 miles away from his usual DSL where he normally edits as MM. And that got him.

WP:NMFTSB (No Moving Faster Than a Speeding Bullet) when editing WP. In this case, it was at least 10,000 mph and anywhere up to 20,000. Bassettcat could have been using a really good cell phone from low Earth orbit, but unfortunately had to reverse this speed in the 3 minutes to go back. I calculate the acceleration to go 500 miles from a standing start in 3 min to be about 5 g's, and you have to take that for the whole 6 minutes to get back. Bassettcat, even with the right rocket (non-existant) would obviously be a flatcat.

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=...oldid=215595422

Heh. I've not seen such entertaining writing about Weiss since G-Dett's evidence section.

Janey's contributions to the project lately have been almost exclusively focussed on a very obscure point, that of her opposition to using a quote from the blog of one Kathryn Cramer in the article on the Wikipedia Review. Janey is all over Wikipedia talk:Verifiability and the Reliable Sources noticeboard on this topic. Again, not typical newbie behavior. But more interestingly, why is Janey so fixated on the Review, and what is her relationship (if any) to Kathryn Cramer?

I don't know, but on looking now at the sum total edits of "Janeyryan" who comes the day after Berlet leaves, and certainly has a "chip" on her shoulder about Berlet-- this editor indeed appears to be Berlet and not Sidaway. Using the Wikistalk tool, the number of common articles between Tony Sidaway and Janeyryan is 2, both in TALK. For Janeyryan and Cberlet, it's now up to 12. Most of them on topics somewhat obscure, and none of them vandalism reversions.

And by the way, I'd love to get hold of BJWeeks or whoever developed the Wikistalk tool so that I could request an additional "all articles" category. Since this tool started to get used for Kabal-counts somebody helpfully broke out the "mainspace articles" as a search category (and if you put in Jpgordon, SlimVirgin, and Jayjg, it prints out "Kabal count 9000!" ), but in the process they took out the old "all articles" feature which made it useful for the Jimbo-1-degree count, and for purposes like here, where I have to go through the first 5 categories and add them up, cut and paste .

I know that if I ever socked I would make sure that it wouldn't geolocate to Massachusetts. Because the Spirit of Massachusetts is the Spirit of Americia.

I also would make any checkuser analysis on me nice and straightforward. No sense in making things weird to prove a point.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:EmailUser/Bjweeks – set up a sock with a freemail account if you don't want to disclose your WP identity/email address. There might be a technical reason to do with server load as to why it can't be done.

No, for "all articles" was the way it originally worked, and that's all you got was that list. The way it runs now is more complicated. The "all articles" is merely the sum of the subcategories, but it's not automatic.

Thanks for the WP username-- I should have checked to see if there was one.

It appears that Janeyryan's attitude is starting to wear thin on someone. The discussion in question is on the Naked Short Selling talk page.

Janeyryan appears to particularly concerned with how the DTCC is portrayed.

One other thing, Janeyryan did some maintenance work on Chip Berlet's talk page today. Weird.

i'd hope by now that gary has finally found a CU-proof method to his wikiness. he has years of practice, and has certainly attained a B.S., Bachelor of Socking.

hazy janey and good johnny have certainly become WP:BOLD at the same time, suddenly....note which one has the annual varkala vacation break in their editing history. you'd think that part of india would have gotten better net access by now.

NSS article was getting 40K hits a day during the stock market meltdown recently. There are a lot of people who's careers directly depend on it being allowed, and they're not very happy about the "temporary" time-out on it around the world.

the part about it being argued that "Shapiro is one of the people suing the DTCC" and so is not an expert is hilarious. The guy was the US undersecretary of Commerce or something, not an ambulence chaser. And the protest is coming from the same guy who used to post "studies" naysaying NSS's effects from some canadian sources of very dubious neutrality on the matter.

one "tell" that gary is having fun on NSS either directly or indirectly is the renewed emphasis on the incredible coflicting acrobatic verbage of the SEC's own website....the 2005-ish FAQ vs SEC Chairman Cox's statements and actions on NSS since (specifically in the last 14 months). He cherry-picked that FAQ and held onto the parts he liked, for dear wikilife. While skewering the same SEC on his blog, lol. The only person he hates worse than Bagley/Bynre now is Chris Cox, who has taken the precious away from gary gollum's ringwraiths.

Fans of irony will enjoy the latest at Talk:Lyndon LaRouche, where a new batch of pro-LaRouche socks have been caught up in Will Beback's dragnet, and Janey and Johnny are holding forth on how socks must never be allowed to comment on the talk page.

Also, Janey is making with the talk-page blanking schtick, just like John Nevard. One wonders if there is some sort of training camp they attend before they can be accepted into the Sacred Order of the Slim Virgin.

This is rather odd.

The mostly inactive David Gerard had quietly blocked four accounts as checkuser-confirmed sockpuppets of Gnetwerker (now known as 7265 (T-C-L-K-R-D) ). Two of the accounts, Guillermo Ugarte (T-C-L-K-R-D) and ClarkLewis (T-C-L-K-R-D) , were interrupting the status quo on LaRouche-related pages. In the 4 years and 3000 edits before being blocked, Gnetwerker (or his various prior socks that I checked) never touched those.

A day later, Cirt tags ClarkLewis but not the other 3 and recreates "Category:Wikipedia sockpuppets of Gnetwerker".Did he check with SlimVirgin who deleted that page along with dozens of others last year "as agreed". I wonder what was agreed, and if it has now been breached?

Will Beback had been so sure that the account Guillermo Ugarte was a returning Herschelkrustofsky.




Using the intersecting contributions tool, we see that three of the four newly blocked accounts, besides editing LaRouche stuff, do share some common interests with Gnetwerker.

Gnetwerker and Hiro Antagonist (135 edits | registered at: 2008-09-09)
1. Portland,_Oregon
2. Reed_College
3. Sea_kayak
4. Talk:Reed_College
5. Wikipedia:Administrators'_noticeboard/3RR

Gnetwerker and ClarkLewis (146 edits | registered at: 2007-03-17)

1. Intel_Corporation
2. Microsoft
3. Reed_College
4. Steven_McGeady
5. Talk:Microsoft
6. Talk:Reed_College

Gnetwerkwer and Guillermo Ugarte (10 edits | registered at: 2007-06-28)

1. Plan_9_from_Bell_Labs
2. Wikipedia:Requests_for_arbitration

So ¿Quién es mas macho? The checkuser wielding David Gerard or Will Beback with his finely-honed linguistic skills?

Let me get this straight.

There's a WP article spefically called "Views Of Lyndon Larouche".

And any material coming from a Lyndon Larouche run website can't be cited on it?

huh?

Maybe I'm reading that article title wrong. Does it mean "Other People's Views Of Lyndon Larouche", or does it mean "Lyndon Larouche's Views"?

That's like saying the "Gary Weiss" article can't use gary-weiss.blogspot.com as a source for gary's own views on his own BLP.

That's nuts.

If WP doesn't want Lyndon Larouche's Views known, then don't have an article on it.

And just what is the big fucking deal with Lyndon Larouche on Wikipedia? Who gives a shit really? This isn't 1980 any more, and he hasn't been in the public eye since.

And Dennis King.

How in can anyone justify allowing a WP editor to cite themselves on articles other than their own BLP, if even then?

Really?

Willbeback is a hypocritical wanker.

Former SEC lawyer Brent Baker has a blog, and has an issue to take up with Gary Moreland.

http://www.sectales.com/2009/02/gary-weiss...s-straight.html

This part is especially good:



Baker's done some work with the folks on the opposite side of Mantan. As opposed to the on-call SEC lackeys who were hoping to get cushy hedgie/brokerage jobs by doing on-demand "investigations" of stocks that were not oddly just added to the short lists of their friendlies. Well those SEC lackeys are shit out of luck in the new world order of wall street. The good ones like Baker, and the good ones that the SEC pushed out like Gary Aguirre, are being vindicated. Aguirre's son is famous for his Donnie Darko soundtrack cover of "Mad World" and sports a WP BLP himself.....

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_Aguirre

time for some Gary Aquirre disambiguation and give Gary Jules Aguirre's dad his own WP:BLP:

http://www.sandiegomagazine.com/media/San-...d-Gary-Aguirre/

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/conte...9010703894.html

http://judiciary.senate.gov/hearings/testi...437&wit_id=5941

http://www.portfolio.com/news-markets/top-...gation-Reopened

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=ema...id=amVY3Ff01cD8

Aguirre is a cool dude. I was familiar with him because of this interview on Truthout, where he strongly implies that the real agenda behind Paulson's bailout policy is to cover up all the other Ponzi schemes out there that haven't been exposed yet.