I found some concerning shenanigans around the page concerning the USS Liberty incident, the page about the attack by Israel on a US warship during Israel's Six-Day War with Egypt, an attack that killed 34 US sailors, and an accompanying article on Robert MacNamara, the then-current Secretary of Defense.

Someone (a SPA called "WorldFacts") added this para a week or so ago (somewhat de-wikified here):


This information, in addition to being in the Congressional Record here, is also the subject of a BBC article (here), and an extensive Chicago tribune article.

But Jayjg wants it out, and no "Reliable Source" is going to convince him otherwise. In those diffs, he throws the wiki-book at the two sentences, labeling them "dubious POV" and "WP:NOR and WP:BLP violations" while reverting 3 (but not 4!) times. At the same time he (stalks WorldFacts over to the Robert McNamara page and) again reverts three times (here, here, and here), his last reversion the one that stands as of this writing.

But that's not all! Jayjg then tells WorldFacts that "this is your last warning" (turns out also his first warning), and labels the IP involved a sockpuppet of "FearNoTruth", a user with only three edits back in March'08. Also interestingly, we see admin Balloonman parachuting (no pun intended) into the situation to supply reverts and warnings without any previous involvement or notification. Jayjg, in placing the sock tag on FearNoTruth, simply cites the McNamara page as "evidence" for this socking charge, despite posessing the checkuser bit, a tacit acknowledgment that he has no evidence.

He then marks the IPs page and WorldTruth's as "patrolled" (I have no idea what this means, but it is more than vaguely menacing).

Now, certainly people can disagree over the historical record regarding the USS Liberty. Veterans of that incident claim, with near unanimity, that the attack was deliberate, and Israel denies it, mostly with a "why ever would be do that?" defense. The US government, in its more official pronouncements, has denied a cover-up. But the text being inserted is from a notable US Senator reading into the Congressional record a sworn statement from a Navy JAG officer with contemporaneous knowledge that "I know from personal conversations I had with Admiral Kidd that President Lyndon Johnson and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara ordered him to conclude that the attack was a case of ‘‘mistaken identity’’ despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.". Whether one accepts that evidence or not, the statement certainly seems "reliably sourced"!

And if you look into Jayjg's edit history, you can find an incident this blatant every month or so -- simply hammering down on facts in the encyclopedia that he doesn't like, using threats of banning and any other tool at his disposal to make the editor go away. The concern here is for exactly the opposite of either truth or verifiability -- it is to exclude opposing viewpoints and including his own. In virtually all of these cases, Jayjg prevails.

Yet another reason not to trust anything you read in Wikipedia. Obvious vandalism may be funny or offensive, but this kind of thing is sneaky and pernicious.

gomi - 1st take - if its just Rep. Conyers' opinion, then present it as such. If multiple sources report Conyer's opinion, that's fine, but it still needs to be presented as that. If other reliable sources make statements that say they also share Conyer's opinion, as opposed to just reporting Conyer's statements, that adds more weight to it changing from a reliable source-reported fringe theory towards a "fact".

so what's the probelm with jayjg and his "got his back"ers in this case? he appeared to have handled it correctly.

Narson and Jayjg are in the right, imho, on the Liberty page. For MacNamara's bio, I'd just refer to the main article on the incident and not go into details on recent theories of congressmen, etc, on the Mac BLP page.

I'm with Jayjg's edits on this. He's doing the right thing on the BLP and allowing this relatively obscure item about conyers to be included on the main incident page. That level of detail on Mac's BLP is not necessary. See <main article> suffices.

I don't edit WP, I merely report on it (really!)

What I find interesting that you think the addition of well-sourced material, with slightly incorrect phrasing, should correctly result in threats of banning against the editor adding it, rather than "I've looked at your sources and here is how to add that in a WP-compliant way". This is not a matter of collegial encylopedists collaborating to find the best way of including a contentious fact, it is a heavy-handed conspiracy to keep those facts from being considered at all, through the use of admin-derived threats and tag-teaming.

Do you really not see anything wrong with that?

I think Jayjg was wrong to simply erase the entire paragraph, and I reverted him, because the sources are reliable. If the sources are misrepresented, then he should have changed the wording of the paragraph instead of reverting it en todo.

I've always been interested in the Liberty incident, so I've placed the article on my "to do" list. It'll be awhile before I get to it, but when I'm finished with it, it will give, in my best effort, a fair representation of what the sources say happened in that event.

i said '1st take', gomi. i haven't studied the WP activity/bullying outside of the edits of the article. I don't see any whitewashing. Conyer's relatively low weight is represented on the main article. Mac's article shouldn't go down to that level of details any more than Jackie O's BLP should detail JFK Grassy Knoll stuff.

If someone's putting the Conyer's speech all over every Viet nam related article, esp. BLP's, beyond just a mention in some sort of "other opinions" section of the main incident itself, I'd also call into question the motivation of the editor(s) doing that.



looks like it belongs in a section on the incident article. i see its there right? For Mac's article? No. Although Mac's "Fog of War" is a great movie ;-), this thing is just too much down in the details for his BLP.

I apologise for yet another plunging into something with only glancing at the material. It usually doesn't help as I have found out myself on other WP issues that I was more studied on, only to have the slrubenstein's of the world to drop by and say "you dissed David! you stay banned!" ;-)

No problem, I appreciate you pointing out that it is just one guy's opinion, so I just went back to the Libery article and made that clear.

I remember people fighting over the Liberty incident on FidoNet echomail conferences back in the 1980s... some things will never end. At least back then, neither side in the arguments generally had the power to ban the people on the other side, so there was a more level playing field.

apologise for not reading your kickoff more closely. you're right, there are more sources including major new pubs from US/UK about this, not just some lone congressman. The UK source does approach it from a conspiracy theory angle, the US source seems more open to it.

sorry about that, gomi. There was some bad stuff on the side of the usual suspects there. There's usually a grain of truthiness in what jayjg does, but mixed in with a boulder of overreaction that would make the mossad blush. If they specialised in hunting down wackipedians and not just palestianians with extremely bad sportmanship habits.

i'll crawl back over to nekkid short selling and blp threads, where i can be just a little less off-base*



*Yo gary, regulators are going on-base all over some nekkid shorties. Like the Wikipedia article once sourced soley (other than your odd book) to the SEC's old Denial Denial Denial FAQ page, they seem to have seen the naked light. Make sure you update the article in the coming year(s) with the naked perpwalks. Or just get johnny nev to do it whenever your latest sock gets nailed again.

Like I've always said, if the Israelis even know about it, they're probably even more appalled by Jayjg's behavior than we are.

This, in a nutshell, is why the Wikipedia Review is necessary, and why WP:NOT is a joke in poor taste.

I've never swallowed the "Jayjg is paid by Mossad" line. He's too unsubtle to be a professional.

Maybe that's what they want you to think!

Apology accepted, and let me make myself clear -- I am not taking a position on the USS Liberty incident. Other, wiser and better-informed people can continue to argue about what happened forty-one years ago. My concern is that Jayjg and his ilk are allowed to continue doing this over a wide swath of articles on Wikipedia. The process doesn't come within 100 miles of serious academic history -- it's a partisan joke, and whose partisan side things come down on is a matter of WP's broken power structure and the level of tenacity of its participants, rather than either scholarship or common sense.

This is why Wikipedia, however good it is as a repository of facts about Gilligan's Island plot turns and Pokemon characters, simply cannot be trusted for anything resembling scholarly truth, even for events long past current.

Yes. And it's amazing how many times we've pointed out the problem, in little short words, and yet WP still does not get it. In matters of history or science or philosophy, when you have disagreement between people who've written about it, you need considerable independent judgement to decide who knows what they're talking about, and what the major positions of the major players in the field are, and how to summarize and give them space. Your sources alone can't do that for you. It has to be done at the level of the writing itself. But Wikipedia forbids it because it is, strictly speaking, synthesis. Thus all decent articles on Wikipedia which involve any controversy whatever, are written by people who aren't following Wikipedia's rules. They're only lucky if they're writing about El Greco's paintings or something not very controversial, and haven't hit a war.

For places where there is disagreement among Wikipedia's editors, and ALSO disagreement among people publishing on a topic (the JFK assassination or USS Liberty attack, or whatever), there are no good mechanisms to resolve the problem, except that editors with the most Wiki-social power simply stomp the ones with less. This has no relationship at all to what the academic decission on writing the article would have been, had it been left to one or more of the acknowledged experts in the field.

The Featured Article forum comes closest to achieving the goal of scholarly verification of Wikipedia articles, and the FA editors and administrators, like SandyGeorgia and several others who consistently help review the articles, are doing a good job. But, they can only go so far with the time and limited numbers that they have.

Of all the 20+ articles that I've submitted for FA consideration, only one time did one of the reviewers actually go to the library and look at some of the book sources that I was citing and then gave me feedback on how I was representing what the books said. I don't think that it's realistic to expect too many article reviewers to put that much time and effort into reviewing Wikipedia articles. But, that's probably the level of review necessary to reach anywhere near the "scholarly" level. If Wikipedia, however, really wants to believe that it should be treated as an encyclopedia, is a scholarly level of review of articles necessary for that?

Yes. Or more precisely, in the absence of discernible editorial distance and professionalism, which Wikipedia will (definitionally) never attain, then a scholarly level of review seems the only alternative, at least for serious topics.

Jayjg seems to be lying low now unless he's trying to avoid 3rr or is talking behind the scenes. Cla, are you becoming the Robin Hood of wikiland?

Cla was runner-up for the coveted Cojones de latón award in last year's Wikipedia Review awards pageant.

Here's an update, Jayjg is back on the page (presumably after a couple days of atonement for his nefarious WP activities), reverting three times, before enlisting a crony to take a further chainsaw to the page.

Of tangential interest is that Jayjg edit wars on an article about a including a list of those killed in a massacre of Israelis, but fails to revert similar edits on this page. More evidence of a double standard, as though more were needed.

I heard someone at a coffeeshop the other day suggesting that the solution to all problems in the middle east was to nuke the whole region. "You can drill through glass..."

How apt that "nuke the whole thing" applies to the problems of middle east related Wikipedia articles.

Check out the latest on the USS Liberty PAge --- JayJG and Narson and JzG teaming up on the editors who present the anti-Israeli truth. 24 hour bans. indefinite bans ... these guys trump all.

Just document the whole affair, and leave it here.

Supposedly Jayjg does in fact read this subforum.
But would die rather than admit it.

The article does actually appear to be a target of some POV pushers trying to use less-than-reliable sources.

This is universally true of controversial articles, including those related to the Israel/Palestine conflict, Northern Ireland, Turkey/Armenia, and many others. They are the targets of partisans and fanatics from both sides, and those trying to sniff out some sort of academic middle ground generally get run off pretty quickly.

The difficulty comes in when an administrator -- indeed, one of WP's most powerful admins -- takes one of the partisan sides, rather than the side of academic distance and neutrality, and uses his tools, along with tag-teaming and other sub-rosa tactics, to tilt the article in a particular direction.

Truly, Wikipedia is beset by partisans, but I hold IP-vandals and pseudonymous admins equally to blame.

Eloquently stated. However, there are simple means of dealing with IP vandals, including semi-protection or range blocks. What Wikipedia needs now is a mechanism for restraining POV-pushing admins.

Jayjg is at it again. Citing "talk page consensus" (which definitively doesn't exist), he removes this paragraph from the article on the USS Liberty incident (T-H-L-K-D):

complete with six (count 'em!) references, including statements from the memoirs of S'cty of State Dean Rusk (T-H-L-K-D) and CIA director Richard Helms.

Jayjg just doesn't want this in the article, and no amount of sourcing is going to get in the way of his removal.

Wow, probably one of the dumbest reasons to remove a part of an article I've ever seen: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=...oldid=267072745

If we're allowed to do that, then how come we still have articles?

I think the problem is that the Moorer report is already covered several times in the article and the above was seen to be piling on the weight and unbalancing the article. I might be wrong in this though and I haven't given it a close look.

One of the regular things I noticed about weighty Wikipedia's history articles is that someone new carefully crafts a paragraph to explain some issue, not realizing that someone else has carefully written about it elsewhere - and all the smoothing and grafting has already taken place to add that previous section. When the new paragraph gets removed because of duplication, it is easy for people to suddenly appear shouting OMG censorship, without taking into consideration the flow of an article and the fact that the issue had already been covered elsewhere.

That article is way too long anyway. It barely made any sense on reading.

I agree with the length, namely the lead. If you're going to have an article with several sections requiring a ToC, I would like to see it even when I have my screen on highest res (1440 x 900)

Why doesn't one of those editors set to improving this article by making it look more professional, such as by making it more coherent, better organized, and non-repetitive? Like I said before, it's on my list to bring it up to FA-level quality, but it'll probably be at least six-months to a year before I get to it.

And Jayjg knows it, and feels free to act with impunity.

There's enough information out there (I've already checked, and Greg Kohs has helped me out also) to easily take that article to FA-level quality. It just needs someone with the time and motivation to do so. Once completed, it will, to the best of my ability if I'm the one that does it, present the entire issue, including the debate over whether the attack on the Liberty was an accident or intentional.

There's no reason why more Israeli history related articles can't also be taken to FA-level quality (Jayjg, by the way, has been the primary editor on four FAs). It just seems that many, if not most, of the editors involved in that subject are more interested in pushing their POV than in producing quality articles. In fact, that's a problem throughout Wikipedia and may be one of the biggest issues facing any collaborative wiki project.

Just a side note: http://ussliberty.wordpress.com/2009/01/14...emy-number-one/
From one of the survivors.

Another note -- one of the active editors on the article, and not accidentally one that had the temerity to revert Jayjg, has blocked WorldFacts (T-C-L-K-R-D) for "legal threats". What the guy said was "litigation is in order" -- referring, as is regularly done the stupid Wiki-newspaper, to ArbCom. For his trouble, he's now blocked forever.

This is how scores are settled on Wikipedia.

Well, apparently it could and should be Israelipedia. The Hebrew Wikipedia is not enough; it's not necessarily read by all the right people.

I didn't have Jayjg (along with SlimVirgin and Jpgordon) define the Klassic Kabal for nothing!

The Mossad doesn't need to pay people to do that; too many people would willingly do it for free. It is much easier to find an American citizen harshly criticising the American military or politics, than the Israeli military or politics.

I don't know why, and no, I don't believe in a Jewish conspiracy.

Luís Henrique

I don't know if I mentioned this publicly, but I had written a rather shabby college paper about the USS Liberty incident, comparing it to the USS Stark incident. I posted it in PDF form to Wikipedia Review, so that Cla68 could take a gander.

Well, I just think it's kind of eerie how Google even "spies" into PDF images and is able to transcribe the shapes of words into only-slightly-disjointed text for search purposes.



It's hard not to be impressed with our Google overlords.

Heh. Well, you could always:

(1) not post it online
(2) post it in encrypted or encoded form
(3) join Brandt in Unabombering Google. I'm kinda tempted to do that myself.