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MaliceAforethought
From: John Vandenberg <jayvdb@gmail.com>
Date: Fri, Dec 31, 2010 at 00:06

This is the most recent email

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Subject: In strictest confidence
Date: Fri, 24 Dec 2010 09:08:46 +0000
From: Londoneye <wendy.appleby@uclmail.net>
To: Jack Merridew <wiki.jack.merridew@gmail.com>

Jack

I believe that I can trust you, because you will understand what I am
talking about.

I am Longfellow.

Are you familiar with the case of Poetlister? This was one of the
great sockpuppeting cases. I was, admittedly partly through my own
fault, charged with being one of the socks and blocked on both WP and
Commons. Quillercouch (Poetlister renamed) was an admin on WS and had
to resign, though the account was never blocked.

One of the people involved had his e-mails hacked and was identified.
Poetlister's enemies smeared him with a lot of nonsense and
half-truths, and made him an object of ridicule across the Internet.
He had to resign from his job. He very gallantly took full
responsibility for everything, even though he was scarcely acting
alone, so my name has - thankfully - never come out.

You will realise that I very firmly don't want it revealed that I am
Longfellow. The checkusers and bureaucrats all know, and that's a few
people too many already. If Poetlister's enemies were even aware of
my existence, they might try to cause me trouble; while I believe that
there is nothing they could possibly find against me, it would be
seriously annoying.

On the basis of this, you may or may not want to vote in the RfA;
that's your decision. However, I would please ask you not to mention
this e-mail to anyone, or hint that I have contacted you.

With best wishes for the festive season.

Wendy

--
This e-mail was sent by Londoneye to Jack Merridew by the "E-mail
user" function at Wikisource.

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From: Herby <herbythyme@fmail.co.uk>
Date: Fri, Dec 31, 2010 at 03:44

Fascinating. I confess this was a quick read and it is early but...

Is this guy still trying to make out he is a woman for a start - it was
his inability to sustain this illusion that made me realise what he was
up to last time among other issues. Londoneye was someone I kept a very
close eye on on Commons and was - I think - a declared puppet account of
PL. I don't recall the name Wendy from any emails I had though. It is
always possible that this is disinformation but the user was highly
devious and may have decided enough of the active CUs from the time are
not around much and it is worth another try. Londoneye persona told us
on Commons that they wanted to be an admin though I doubt that would
have happened. I can only echo comments on other mails - any project
should be careful about rights being granted and certainly advanced
rights which is what this user was after. Last time the fact that I was
fairly sure a sock had CU rights stopped me posting some things on list.

N

On Fri, 31 Dec 2010 16:06 +1100, "John Vandenberg" <jayvdb@gmail.com>
wrote:
--
Herby
herbythyme@fmail.co.uk

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From: Sydney Poore <sydney.poore@gmail.com>
Date: Fri, Dec 31, 2010 at 08:13

Your memory is correct. Before I made my oppose comment on WS, I reviewed our old emails from Londoneye. He was signing with the name Anna back then.
ALL Wikisource need to be alert for his attempt to elevate a pack of users to admin and higher perm. Since he is using a variety of IP we are going to watch to other little signs that it is him.

Sydney aka FloNight

On Dec 31, 2010 3:44 AM, "Herby" <herbythyme@fmail.co.uk> wrote:

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From: Sydney Poore <sydney.poore@gmail.com>
Date: Fri, Dec 31, 2010 at 08:17


(Correction)

ALL wikis need to be alert.....

Sydney


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From: Herby <herbythyme@fmail.co.uk>
Date: Fri, Dec 31, 2010 at 08:32


Didn't think Wendy rang a bell - although I think Amy was used at some stage, there were a variety of female persona's.

Nice to know the info retrieval system is not too impaired smile.gif

N

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From: Nicholas Michalowski <nmichalo@gmail.com>
Date: Fri, Dec 31, 2010 at 15:52

For those interested: I am one of the people Poetlister contacted me
at some point using wikisource's email user. Back when Kalki was
being investigated for sockpuppets at WQ.

Here is a quick description of our interaction. Poetlister randomly
asked me if I was interested in any further information about Cirt and
Kalki. I didn't notice his email until the matter was resolved. But
when I did I had asked him about past tensions between Cirt and Kalki
(he said there were none.), I also asked him to tell me about his own
story and why thekohser was happy to see Poetlister in trouble. The
first place I had ever heard of Poetlister was a blog link found at
thekohser's WQ talk page. I thought the list might find it
interesting how he described his own past behavior. So that part is
quoted below.

Effectively at this point I invited him to wikibooks. For which I
will probably justly receive some guff. More exactly what I said was
that thekohser's case made it clear that WB's community consensus was
not to look at other WMF wiki's (or elsewhere) when determining
blocks, and he was still in good standing at WB as far as I knew. He
then told me which book he planed to edit and which username he
planned to use, and mentioned a couple links I never got around to
looking at until his name popped up on this list again this week. It
seemed a bit much to copy all the back and forth emails, but if people
really curious I could share.

--thenub314

----------
From: "Poetlister ." <poetlister@gmail.com>
To: Thenub314 <nmichalo@math.uchicago.edu>
Date: Fri, 26 Nov 2010 18:44:46 +0000
Subject: Re: Wikisource e-mail
From poetlister@gmail.com Fri Nov 26 12:44:52 2010

I see that you are a fellow mathematician. :-)

[Edit - removed opinions about Cirt and Kalki not relevant to this
conversation.]


My own history is very
complex, so apologies for the length of what
follows. I was one of a group of editors who were in contact with
each
other and one or two of them may have used each other's accounts. I
managed
to annoy SlimVirgin. She asked Kelly Martin to checkuser me. This
led to
us being blocked. There was a howl of protest from people who said we
were
all good editors, and we were unblocked. (Later, Kelly said that her
initial view was that her checkuser did not justify the block and she
had
been bullied into saying that it did.)

We made a very stupid mistake: some of us used photos on our user
pages that
were not us. This was to have major consequences.

I became an admin on WQ. I also became active on Wikipedia Review and
was
made a staff (roughly, bureaucrat and checkuser). This was a stupid
move;
as the only admin in the history of the Review with an identified
unblocked
WP account, I was the main target for the anti-Review people on WP,
even
though I was generally acknowledged as a moderating influence on the
Review. I was blocked again. For the second time, there was a howl
of
protest.

On the Review, Greg Kohs was angry that there had twice been all these
protests against my blocks but not against his block. Further, there
were
many grumbles at the way he was using the Review to push his
commercial
website and he wrongly held me responsible for this. I never wanted
any
animosity, but he has a very long memory for every slight or perceived
slight. Meanwhile, I had become a bureaucrat on WQ and was in the
middle of
a RfA on WS. The powers that be on WP capitulated and unblocked me.
Greg
was the only prominent member of the Review not to congratulate me.
He
repeatedly argued that I should not have pressed for an unblock, still
less
edited WP after the unblock. He even criticised my article on Paul
Cohn, a
labour of love to my favourite lecturer.

At this point, certain e-mail accounts were hacked. I don't know who
did
it, though I'm told that there is evidence that it was User:Antidote,
who
had been exposed as a sockpuppet master by User:Runcorn. Information
from
this hacking reached Proabivouac and FT2. They used this to identify
Runcorn, a senior British civil servant with his own article on WP.
They
pretended to have proof that several accounts, including me, were the
same
person. FT2 approached Runcorn's employers and made a fuss. Runcorn
felt
obliged to resign. He very nobly agreed to pretend that he was indeed
all
of these accounts, though in fact his only other account was Cato, a
checkuser on WQ. FT2 got a blogger called Cade Metz to post an
article
about this, which would be screamingly funny if it didn;t have such
serious
consequences for Runcorn. The article on Runcorn was speedy deleted,
and
attempts were made to delete the one on his brother, though that was
defeated at AfD. I had to leave WP, WQ, WS and the Review, though I
still
follow events closely.

Sorry for the length, but you did ask!



Milton Roe
Okay, folks, count the lies in this Poetlister letter from above. laugh.gif


From: "Poetlister ." <poetlister@gmail.com>
To: Thenub314 <nmichalo@math.uchicago.edu>
Date: Fri, 26 Nov 2010 18:44:46 +0000
Subject: Re: Wikisource e-mail
From poetlister@gmail.com Fri Nov 26 12:44:52 2010

I see that you are a fellow mathematician. :-)

[Edit - removed opinions about Cirt and Kalki not relevant to this
conversation.]


My own history is very complex, so apologies for the length of what
follows. I was one of a group of editors who were in contact with
each other and one or two of them may have used each other's accounts. I
managed to annoy SlimVirgin. She asked Kelly Martin to checkuser me. This
led to us being blocked. There was a howl of protest from people who said we
were all good editors, and we were unblocked. (Later, Kelly said that her
initial view was that her checkuser did not justify the block and she
had been bullied into saying that it did.)

We made a very stupid mistake: some of us used photos on our user
pages that were not us. This was to have major consequences.

I became an admin on WQ. I also became active on Wikipedia Review and
was made a staff (roughly, bureaucrat and checkuser). This was a stupid
move; as the only admin in the history of the Review with an identified
unblocked WP account, I was the main target for the anti-Review people on WP,
even though I was generally acknowledged as a moderating influence on the
Review. I was blocked again. For the second time, there was a howl
of protest.

On the Review, Greg Kohs was angry that there had twice been all these
protests against my blocks but not against his block. Further, there
were many grumbles at the way he was using the Review to push his
commercial website and he wrongly held me responsible for this. I never wanted
any animosity, but he has a very long memory for every slight or perceived
slight. Meanwhile, I had become a bureaucrat on WQ and was in the
middle of a RfA on WS. The powers that be on WP capitulated and unblocked me.
Greg was the only prominent member of the Review not to congratulate me.
He repeatedly argued that I should not have pressed for an unblock, still
less edited WP after the unblock. He even criticised my article on Paul
Cohn, a labour of love to my favourite lecturer.

At this point, certain e-mail accounts were hacked. I don't know who
did it, though I'm told that there is evidence that it was User:Antidote,
who had been exposed as a sockpuppet master by User:Runcorn. Information
from this hacking reached Proabivouac and FT2. They used this to identify
Runcorn, a senior British civil servant with his own article on WP.
They pretended to have proof that several accounts, including me, were the
same person. FT2 approached Runcorn's employers and made a fuss. Runcorn
felt obliged to resign. He very nobly agreed to pretend that he was indeed
all of these accounts, though in fact his only other account was Cato, a
checkuser on WQ. FT2 got a blogger called Cade Metz to post an
article about this, which would be screamingly funny if it didn;t have such
serious consequences for Runcorn. The article on Runcorn was speedy deleted,
and attempts were made to delete the one on his brother, though that was
defeated at AfD. I had to leave WP, WQ, WS and the Review, though I
still follow events closely.

Sorry for the length, but you did ask!

[Poetlister]
========================

Comment from Milton:

The last paragraph is very precious. sick.gif

Shoiuld this be put it in the Poetlister file, as a denial appendix?

At this time, "Londoneye" is pretending by mail to be "wendy.appleby@uclmail.net." And Poetlister is referring to "the senior civil servant" who is Runcorn, in the third person. sick.gif All of this is only 6 months ago.
powercorrupts
MB (I strongly suspect) has been emailing a bunch of people on WR as Wendy Appleby via thegibbon and Gruntled at least. He's got a few other obvious socks here too. In total he's probably got stacks of accounts here, and who knows on Wikipedia - he's certainly capable of getting another admin account. As I said here a few days ago (on this Cirt page), he still seems to have some semi-admirers. I've been in two minds about ringing UCL just in case the appleby is a nicked email - although I can't believe he's quite that stupid. He really pissed me off a few weeks ago when he sent me a picture of a young woman to try again to prove who he was. The guy's primarily a pervert if you ask me - a female impersonator and control freak. There was nothing to gain in the lengths he went to emailing me other than impersonation/power-related kicks, primarily because he knew Kohs was winding me up at the time. He clearly hates that guy, though I don't know the actual reasons why.
Herschelkrustofsky
QUOTE

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Subject: In strictest confidence
Date: Fri, 24 Dec 2010 09:08:46 +0000
From: Londoneye <wendy.appleby@uclmail.net> PoetThing
To: Jack Merridew <wiki.jack.merridew@gmail.com>

...Poetlister's enemies smeared him with a lot of nonsense and
half-truths, and made him an object of ridicule across the Internet.
He had to resign from his job. He very gallantly took full
responsibility for everything, even though he was scarcely acting
alone, so my name has - thankfully - never come out.


This is a classic Poetlisterism. He would often have one of his socks write tear-jerking tributes to the courage and selflessness of one of his other socks.
Somey
QUOTE(powercorrupts @ Wed 29th June 2011, 3:12pm) *
...has been emailing a bunch of people on WR as Wendy Appleby via thegibbon and Gruntled at least. He's got a few other obvious socks here too.

Obvious and active, or are you including obvious and inactive? I agree that "thegibbon" was probably him, but that account only posted 7 times and hasn't posted in over a year. Though now I see he's been logging in with that one, apparently... I guess if people are getting annoying PM's from him, that would be a good reason to suspend it.

I mean, to some extent there's value in keeping "communications channels" open, but only if he isn't going to needlessly annoy people. And of course, it's annoying to have one's intelligence insulted.

QUOTE
I've been in two minds about ringing UCL just in case the appleby is a nicked email - although I can't believe he's quite that stupid.

I suspect he might do it if he thought he could get away with it. A lot of people stop using their "campus" e-mail addresses after they graduate, assuming they ever used them at all, and forget all about them - and passwords can often be very easy to guess, if the person doesn't think that could happen to him/her.

QUOTE
...he knew Kohs was winding me up at the time. He clearly hates that guy, though I don't know the actual reasons why.

Yeah, how did that get started, anyway? You'd think I'd remember that, but other than his taking exception to a remark Mr. Kohs made about how "Poetlister" should quit Wikipedia-related activities altogether because it was a waste of time and a constant source of needless personal abuse, I can't think of anything. The sad thing is that GK meant that particular remark out of sincere concern for "Poetllister's" general well-being, still thinking (at the time) that he was probably a she, and of course the reaction was far more male-like than female-like - again proving that he wasn't as clever as he believed he was.
thekohser
QUOTE(Somey @ Wed 29th June 2011, 10:01pm) *

Yeah, how did that get started, anyway? You'd think I'd remember that, but other than his taking exception to a remark Mr. Kohs made about how "Poetlister" should quit Wikipedia-related activities altogether because it was a waste of time and a constant source of needless personal abuse, I can't think of anything. The sad thing is that GK meant that particular remark out of sincere concern for "Poetllister's" general well-being, still thinking (at the time) that he was probably a she, and of course the reaction was far more male-like than female-like - again proving that he wasn't as clever as he believed he was.


MB making me an enemy of his team of socks was lacking in any rationale. It was a bad move, frankly, in his game of charades.
The Joy
In an e-mail to me, he claims that he has no socks on WR. He also wanted me to give this message:

QUOTE(Poetlister)
There are a couple of things I'd like said on WR, if you'd be so kind please. Alison is busy denying anything to do with my last ban, but she worked actively with Timothy Usher to "out" me via the PoetGuy article on ED until the other ED admins slapped her down. Don't let her pretend that she wasn't worse than other ED admins. And don't let her pretend that she was motivated by sympathy for "real Poetlister". She refused to remove [G.H., (redacted)]'s photo and a link to her place of work from Talk:PoetGuy. (Michael Suarez eventually did that.)

And if Tarantino isn't Timothy Usher, they're totally hand in glove. Minor4th asked Tarantino if he was Timothy Usher, and he just laughed. He needs to be asked "Are you Timothy Usher, and if you aren't him, are you meatpuppeting by posting his comments?"
Milton Roe
QUOTE(Somey @ Wed 29th June 2011, 7:01pm) *

QUOTE
...he knew Kohs was winding me up at the time. He clearly hates that guy, though I don't know the actual reasons why.

Yeah, how did that get started, anyway? You'd think I'd remember that, but other than his taking exception to a remark Mr. Kohs made about how "Poetlister" should quit Wikipedia-related activities altogether because it was a waste of time and a constant source of needless personal abuse, I can't think of anything. The sad thing is that GK meant that particular remark out of sincere concern for "Poetllister's" general well-being, still thinking (at the time) that he was probably a she, and of course the reaction was far more male-like than female-like - again proving that he wasn't as clever as he believed he was.


QUOTE("Poetlister")
Meanwhile, I had become a bureaucrat on WQ and was in the middle of a RfA on WS. The powers that be on WP capitulated and unblocked me. Greg was the only prominent member of the Review not to congratulate me. He repeatedly argued that I should not have pressed for an unblock, still less edited WP after the unblock. He even criticised my article on Paul
Cohn, a labour of love to my favourite lecturer.


Greg didn't CONGATULATE Poetlister on his unblock! huh.gif ohmy.gif How horrid.


Actually, what happened was that in August 2008, WR had become polarized over whether Poetlister was being abused on WP, and whether or not Yehudi was somehow in cahoots with her. John A and a number of other editors began to feel that there was a certain cabal on WR. Greg got crap from a number of people defending a number of (what we now know as) Baxter socks.

One should read this August thread. In this message:

http://wikipediareview.com/index.php?s=&sh...ndpost&p=123693

Greg said: The situations are so different, and your inability to thoughtfully consider this fact, leads me to give up on trying to explain it to you, Yehudi/Taxwoman/Poetlister/Guy

A lot of people, including Somey and others, had been laughing at, or hating on, JohnA and Greg for being so paranoid as to make connections between ANY of these people.

Okay, flash forward a week to Sept 1, Der Tag: suddenly everybody notices Guy is gone and has taken all his messages with him. Very odd. A week after THAT, in early September, Poetgate begins and it's suddenly clear WHERE Guy went, and WHY his messages were gone. We've been royally screwed and Greg was totally correct.

Reading this thread from August, it becomes clear that Greg is the ONLY person to be making these connections on this board at the time, although Proabivouac immediately chimes in and confirms. He had started the thing a couple of weeks earlier, with suggestions that Yehudi and Poetlister were somehow connected. But at the time, he had no hard info. Greg Kohs simply realizes before anybody else, that not only is Proab right, but it's even worse than he imagines.

Read this thread in hindsight. It should make some people humble and it should totally clarify why Baxter hates Kohs right behind Usher.

http://wikipediareview.com/index.php?s=&sh...ndpost&p=119164

Enjoy.
Somey
QUOTE(The Joy @ Wed 29th June 2011, 10:13pm) *
QUOTE(Poetlister)
There are a couple of things I'd like said on WR, if you'd be so kind please....

This is the sort of thing I mean, actually. Why make a point of repeating this stuff? Everyone who's interested has already made up their minds, and the last thing he should want is more people getting interested, especially now. But every e-mail and PM and post-from-an-alternate-account just increases the chances that someone is going to "look further into it," thinking they're going to "get to the bottom of it." It only makes sense if we assume that he's only doing it for the attention, but if that's true, then he should be doing this stuff on Wikipedia, not here on WR. (That's not to say he isn't doing it on Wikipedia, just that he really should leave us alone unless he's got something new and exciting, and presumably also exculpatory.)
Alison
QUOTE(Poetlister)
There are a couple of things I'd like said on WR, if you'd be so kind please. Alison is busy denying anything to do with my last ban, but she worked actively with Timothy Usher to "out" me via the PoetGuy article on ED until the other ED admins slapped her down. Don't let her pretend that she wasn't worse than other ED admins. And don't let her pretend that she was motivated by sympathy for "real Poetlister". She refused to remove [redacted - G.H's] photo and a link to her place of work from Talk:PoetGuy. (Michael Suarez eventually did that.)

What a load! laugh.gif laugh.gif Myself and Suarez were in contact during that time and I agreed to it. Which is also why I thanked him on his talk page after it was removed. He's on here, so he can speak for himself. I also worked directly with G.H., your ex-colleague, to clean up the shit you dished out in her name. Needless to say, she was upset and annoyed, to say the least. Some people on here already know the details and frankly, this mewling 'poetlister-as-victim' is making me ill.

I also personally deleted from commons, those images that you claimed were of you;

QUOTE
(show/hide) 17:03, 5 September 2008 Alison (talk | contribs | block) deleted "File:Poetlister2.jpg" ‎ (Out of project scope: Likely copyright issues) (view/restore) (global usage; delinker log)
(show/hide) 17:02, 5 September 2008 Alison (talk | contribs | block) deleted "File:Londoneye user.jpg" ‎ (Out of project scope: Dubious circumstances behind source of original image. The uploader is not at fault here, but there is strong evidence to indicate that the subject/owner has not consented to its use here.) (view/restore) (global usage; delinker log)
(show/hide) 17:02, 5 September 2008 Alison (talk | contribs | block) deleted "File:Poetlister.JPG" ‎ (Out of project scope: Likely copyright issues) (view/restore) (global usage; delinker log)
(show/hide) 17:02, 5 September 2008 Alison (talk | contribs | block) deleted "File:RachelBrown.jpg" ‎ (Out of project scope: Dubious circumstances behind source of original image. The uploader is not at fault here, but there is strong evidence to indicate that the subject/owner has not consented to its use here.) (view/restore) (global usage; delinker log)
(show/hide) 16:05, 5 September 2008 Alison (talk | contribs | block) deleted "Commons:Deletion requests/Category:Taxwoman" ‎ (Empty category or gallery: Deletion requested) (view/restore)
(show/hide) 14:33, 5 September 2008 Alison (talk | contribs | block) deleted "Category:Taxwoman" ‎ (Empty category or gallery) (view/restore)
(show/hide) 14:32, 5 September 2008 Alison (talk | contribs | block) deleted "File:Taxwoman.jpg" ‎ (Copyright violation: Dubious circumstances behind source of original image. The uploader is not at fault here, but there is strong evidence to indicate that the subject/owner has not consented to its use here.) (view/restore) (global usage; delinker log)


You've been repeatedly on (the old) ED, spilling dirt on other people. I know this, tho' you'll deny it. Let's not forget Latexwiki, etc, etc. And on it goes. Every word that spills out of your mouth is laced with pure lie tongue.gif And remember - it wasn't me that posted the pictures of those women all over the internet - it was you angry.gif
Alison
And another thing; can we please remove references to the RL name of one of PoetGuy's victims above, please? It's not fair to have her name associated with all this, esp. given that PoetGuy misappropriated it in the first place, and she was totally innocent in all this?
The Joy
QUOTE(Alison @ Thu 30th June 2011, 1:44am) *

And another thing; can we please remove references to the RL name of one of PoetGuy's victims above, please? It's not fair to have her name associated with all this, esp. given that PoetGuy misappropriated it in the first place, and she was totally innocent in all this?


Redacted on my post.
Jack Merridew
The email at the top is what I got, and flipped. PoetGuy seems to have missed that my en:unban was delayed by several months because the whole Sept+/-'08 investigation was ongoing/about to land. The "water was hot", and not suitable for an unban while a prior unban was blowing-up in their faces. And reading that thread, I found:
http://en.wikisource.org/w/index.php?title...30&oldid=765419
where I also gave the Ottava-psycho credit for Horace wink.gif
SB_Johnny
Apparently "Poetlister" is now globally locked, though I have no idea where one would find the discussion on that.

He's asking to have his account detached on WV. laugh.gif
Milton Roe
QUOTE(SB_Johnny @ Fri 1st July 2011, 1:07pm) *

Apparently "Poetlister" is now globally locked, though I have no idea where one would find the discussion on that.

He's asking to have his account detached on WV. laugh.gif

Where is mike.lifeguard when you really NEED the *^%$#?
Milton Roe
Methinks the "leaked" arbs were feeding their CU's in 2008 some IPs that they got off WR:

In particular see this message from Sept. 10, 2008

http://wikipediareview.com/index.php?s=&sh...ndpost&p=128858

Anyway, Londoneye isn't just some chick named Wendy, who got "caught up in" MB's editing of lists of British Jews. Londoneye is the user who added MB's dead brother to List of British Jews 19 Dec. 2005. Then, two days later, after SlimVirgin deleted him, saying there was no evidence he was Jewish, user:Londoneye RE-ADDED him. Which provoked Slim's wrath, which was one of the things that ended up nailing part of the MB sockfarm.

So-- MB has never met this woman who is bent on memorializing his own dead brother? ORLY?

You could say that Londoneye just got caught up in Jewish topics, but it goes into MB's private life, also. Ilford County High School, where MB and his dead brother went to school, has been edited by MB socks Poetlister, Rachel Brown, Runcorn, AND Londoneye. blink.gif And also by MB sockfarm IPs IP:81.134.14.236 and IP:84.9.13.191. The last two are interested in the Totteridge article, which is about a small former suburb of London where MB lives. As also are Poetlister (as Quillercouch), RachelBrown, Runcorn and Londoneye. An even smaller article on the Totteridge and Whetstone tube station is interesting for having been edited by Quillercouch/Poetlister, Runcorn, RachelBrown AND Londoneye. The rest of that article about that small tubestation (often edited within hours of RachelBrown) is added by an IP address IP:204.155.226.22 which gave us all some puzzlement. We very strongly suspected this IP was PoetLister/Quillercouch because it made an edit within 4 minutes of a Poetlister edit, to a gay rights legal article that hadn't been touched for 5 months (and wouldn't be edited for 5 months more), and it was interested in Totteridge. Yet it belongs to the lawfirm Dechert LLP, yet MB work(ed) at the Dept of Health (one of the other IPs). But we found out today, from the ArbCom leaks, that Dechert LLP is where MB's wife works (or worked then). So now that fits.

So that's the skinny. This sweet little Wendy/Londoneye has supposedly never met MB, but memorializes his dead brother in a list of Jews, edits on the the high school of MB and his deceased brother, edits on the London suburb where they live, AND the article on the tube station they use to get there. And the last is rarely edited except by MB socks, including IP edits from the workplace of MB AND the (different) workplace of his wife.

Cute little Wendy, not a family friend, has been stalking their articles, stocking their old schools, their suburb, AND the little tube station article which they edit from two workplaces, and their dead relative. Riiiiiiight.

Look, the Wendy/Londoneye that emerges from THAT fantasy, is creepier even than MB! Anybody reading this is invited to use their brain to guess whether or not this story holds water.

Poor MB. The internet never forgets. A shame WR keeps all this crap in the tarpit, since MB himself refuses to stay submerged, and keeps coming up into the real world in a sort of Lovecraftian way. Or like some fossil from the La Brea tarpits here in Los Angeles. And every time it happens, we need to clean off some more goop from our own tarpitted stuff, and sling it up here again.

Milton Roe (Curator of the Paged Museum)
Abd
Okay, about Poetlister's global lock, I asked.

Matana responded with this:
QUOTE
hello, the discussion is here Requests for comment/Poetlister and Cato. You may also see theose local blocks on those accounts. best Matanya 22:24, 2 July 2011 (UTC)


So, I've now asked the obvious question, from that discussion.

Should I be ducking?
Zoloft
QUOTE(Abd @ Sat 2nd July 2011, 3:52pm) *

Okay, about Poetlister's global lock, I asked.

Matana responded with this:
QUOTE
hello, the discussion is here Requests for comment/Poetlister and Cato. You may also see theose local blocks on those accounts. best Matanya 22:24, 2 July 2011 (UTC)


So, I've now asked the obvious question, from that discussion.

Should I be ducking?

Poetlister is a con man. He's obsessed with controlling people from his keyboard. I'd roll away from him, or if I was an admin on WV, ban him and every one of his socks there. Trust me, there will be socks.
EricBarbour
QUOTE(Zoloft @ Sat 2nd July 2011, 4:02pm) *

QUOTE(Abd @ Sat 2nd July 2011, 3:52pm) *
Should I be ducking?

Poetlister is a con man. He's obsessed with controlling people from his keyboard. I'd roll away from him, or if I was an admin on WV, ban him and every one of his socks there. Trust me, there will be socks.

Yes, Abd, you have got to realize what a crazy person PL is. He is completely toxic, and you absolutely cannot trust him.
Do not believe anything he says, or that anyone else says in his support. He is a remarkably adept user of sock accounts--more so than anyone else I've seen lately.
Ottava
I hope people realize why things regarding Poetlister on Wikisource, Wikiversity, etc, was so troubling for many of those with first hand experience with him.
thekohser
QUOTE(Milton Roe @ Wed 29th June 2011, 11:23pm) *

A lot of people, including Somey and others, had been laughing at, or hating on, JohnA and Greg for being so paranoid as to make connections between ANY of these people.

Okay, flash forward a week to Sept 1, Der Tag: suddenly everybody notices Guy is gone and has taken all his messages with him. Very odd. A week after THAT, in early September, Poetgate begins and it's suddenly clear WHERE Guy went, and WHY his messages were gone. We've been royally screwed and Greg was totally correct.

Reading this thread from August, it becomes clear that Greg is the ONLY person to be making these connections on this board at the time, although Proabivouac immediately chimes in and confirms. He had started the thing a couple of weeks earlier, with suggestions that Yehudi and Poetlister were somehow connected. But at the time, he had no hard info. Greg Kohs simply realizes before anybody else, that not only is Proab right, but it's even worse than he imagines.


Milton, that's some of your best work on WR, right there. Thank you, man.
Milton Roe
QUOTE(thekohser @ Mon 4th July 2011, 8:20pm) *

QUOTE(Milton Roe @ Wed 29th June 2011, 11:23pm) *

A lot of people, including Somey and others, had been laughing at, or hating on, JohnA and Greg for being so paranoid as to make connections between ANY of these people.

Okay, flash forward a week to Sept 1, Der Tag: suddenly everybody notices Guy is gone and has taken all his messages with him. Very odd. A week after THAT, in early September, Poetgate begins and it's suddenly clear WHERE Guy went, and WHY his messages were gone. We've been royally screwed and Greg was totally correct.

Reading this thread from August, it becomes clear that Greg is the ONLY person to be making these connections on this board at the time, although Proabivouac immediately chimes in and confirms. He had started the thing a couple of weeks earlier, with suggestions that Yehudi and Poetlister were somehow connected. But at the time, he had no hard info. Greg Kohs simply realizes before anybody else, that not only is Proab right, but it's even worse than he imagines.


Milton, that's some of your best work on WR, right there. Thank you, man.

You're welcome but it's a simple matter of history. However, I hadn't actually realized till going through the history, that you'd first made the full Yehudi/Taxwoman/Poetlister/Guy connection on WR, sometime after Proab suspected only on the basis of behavior that Yehudi might be a WR Poetlister sock. And that all this came a week before Guy and Poetlister disappeared together, and it became clear a week AFTER THAT that WR had been had by all of them, after a realworld investigation showed Taxwoman was a fake.

And yes, I find in the Poetlister saga that you DID say "I told you so" two weeks after you first put it together by behavior-only. And here you are saying it:

http://wikipediareview.com/index.php?s=&sh...ndpost&p=126944

But I think it made no impression then (including on me, who by that time did realize that WR's Guy must be Poetlister) because at the time Proab hadn't yet put down the entire case, and Somey hadn't yet admitted publically how screwed WR was (but all this was to happen, very shortly).

The punishment of Cassandra.
Milton Roe
Experience is a hard teacher, for it gives the test first and the lesson only after. But a fool will have no other.

Pain is educational; education is painful.

Ta de moi pathemata eonta axarita mathemata gegone, says Heroditus (Histories 1.207.1). Our sufferings, by their bitterness, became our teachers.

In Strophe III of Aeschylus' Agamemnon it says:

'Tis Zeus alone who shows the perfect way
Of knowledge: He hath ruled,
Men shall learn wisdom, by affliction schooled.
In visions of the night, like dropping rain,
Descend the many memories of pain
Before the spirit's sight: through tears and dole
Comes wisdom o'er the unwilling soul-
A boon, I wot, of all Divinity,
That holds its sacred throne in strength, above the sky!

I think the official Roman Catholic translation of that is the one Bobby Kennedy used perhaps his most famous speach, in speaking semi-extemporaneously of the assassination of Martin Luther King (two months before his own!). And which even now is inscribed on a little concrete shrine near RFK's grave in Arlington National Cemetary:

And even in our sleep,
pain which cannot forget
falls drop by drop upon the heart,
and in our own despite,
against our will,
comes wisdom to us
by the awful grace of God.

How strange it is that we're discussing all these different people saying the same thing about pain and wisdom, and evidently-- here we still are. The reasons we don't learn lessons of history, is that we're not the ones that got bitten by it. ermm.gif Perhaps the problem is that the perspective of pain is a false one. No pain and you have a bad idea of how much attention you should pay. But if you get full pain and direct expericene with no filter, very often you got just as bad an idea about importance in the opposite direction-- now you're fixated on something that shouldn't hold that much of your attention. Post-traumatic stress disorder, now we call it, and you're paralyzed with anxiety.

Gee, Mother Nature surely fucked up their nervous systems, didn't she?
SB_Johnny
QUOTE(SB_Johnny @ Fri 1st July 2011, 4:07pm) *

Apparently "Poetlister" is now globally locked, though I have no idea where one would find the discussion on that.

He's asking to have his account detached on WV. laugh.gif

And now unlocked, 3 hours after Ottava weighs in. It's probably a conspiracy. fear.gif
The Joy
Moderator's note: Numerous posts relating to the subject of this thread, his continuing activities on Wikimedia wikis, and the problem of convincing people as to the truth of the story when much of the evidence has been deleted in the name of victims' privacy were moved to this thread, which is accessible only to WR contributors. Some posts were kept here, in public view, out of respect for the posters and the effort they made in writing them.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------


Once, there a sociologist who wanted to see if mental hospitals were biased in diagnosing people with mental issues requiring treatment. So, the sociologist got a sample of mentally healthy people of all walks of life to go to a certain mental hospital (I forget if it was one or more hospitals, maybe more). He discovered that individuals that were wealthy or appeared wealthy tended to be diagnosed (especially with "silly" illnesses like "intense writing behavior" and such) with mental illnesses while poor or seemly poor people were dismissed as crazy for thinking they were crazy. In other words, the doctors liked sick wealthy people because they had money and not poor people.

Now the hospital (or hospitals?) didn't take too kindly with this study. They said to the sociologist that he should send a new group around a certain date and they were positive they could identify his fake patients from those that were really crazy. So on that date, about 50 (?) people came asking for mental help at the hospital and a large number of them were turned away as the hospital figured most were the fakes sent by the sociologist. The psychiatrists called the sociologist and said they caught most of his fake patients and sent them away. They asked him how many "patients" he sent over.

The sociologist replied "Zero. I sent no one over at all." The hospital turned away a large number of people who actually needed help! This was a story my sociology told me. I thought of this when viewing this thread.

Now, how can one distinguish a sock and an honest account? Almost nigh impossible. PL says he is not socking here, but we doubt that. Hence, like the mental hospital, we will forever have trouble distinguishing the crazies and the normals. Every social media site has this problem and how to stop it is a conundrum.
MZMcBride
QUOTE(The Joy @ Wed 6th July 2011, 12:26am) *
Now, how can one distinguish a sock and an honest account? Almost nigh impossible. PL says he is not socking here, but we doubt that. Hence, like the mental hospital, we will forever have trouble distinguishing the crazies and the normals. Every social media site has this problem and how to stop it is a conundrum.
The only way to win is to not play, of course.

Do you see Twitter or Facebook or other social media sites trying to play the sock-hunting game? I don't know of any such efforts, but I'd be fascinated to hear about any. Wikipedia and Wikipedia Review have cultivated a culture of trying to figure out who's who. Most other sites either rely on real-life identification or don't give a damn about who's behind an account, or both. (Both Twitter and Facebook are fantastic examples here.)

For those who simply read posts on this site as coming from Just Another Crazy On The Internet (JACOTT) and pay little mind to who is actually posting what, I think there's very little conundrum to be had.

You'll go mad trying to figure out this place or Wikipedia. Don't bother. smile.gif
radek
QUOTE(The Joy @ Tue 5th July 2011, 11:26pm) *

Once, there a sociologist who wanted to see if mental hospitals were biased in diagnosing people with mental issues requiring treatment. So, the sociologist got a sample of mentally healthy people of all walks of life to go to a certain mental hospital...


This is really good.
NuclearWarfare
QUOTE(The Joy @ Wed 6th July 2011, 4:26am) *

Once, there a sociologist who wanted to see if mental hospitals were biased in diagnosing people with mental issues requiring treatment. So, the sociologist got a sample of mentally healthy people of all walks of life to go to a certain mental hospital...


This would be the Rosenhan experiment (T-H-L-K-D). And I have never heard of the first paragraph of your summary, though I admit that I haven't read the original paper.
Emperor
You guys have no idea how much Wikipedians and WRers love their witch hunts. I haven't really advertised it, but there is no (official) sleuthing done on Encyc. I don't even have checkuser. Every once in a while a sock appears. I'm sure of it. I've been roundly condemned for allowing these socks to be there.

When I ask people here what's the number one reason they don't use Encyc they usually say it's full of Poetlister socks. I wonder if they'd actually feel better about the place if I gave my admins checkuser and opened up a sooper-seekrit forum where we'd attempt to ID every new account. They'd probably contribute like mad just to get access to that forum. Freaks.

Yes there's a cost to allowing socks to run rampant but I'll take that any day of the week over a committee full of Riskers, Newyorkbrads, and FT2s.
thekohser
QUOTE(MZMcBride @ Wed 6th July 2011, 2:19am) *

Do you see Twitter or Facebook or other social media sites trying to play the sock-hunting game? I don't know of any such efforts, but I'd be fascinated to hear about any.


Twitter's terms of service include in their entirety the "Twitter Rules", which include:
QUOTE
Impersonation: You may not impersonate others through the Twitter service in a manner that does or is intended to mislead, confuse, or deceive others


Facebook's Terms of Service include:
QUOTE
Facebook users provide their real names and information, and we need your help to keep it that way. Here are some commitments you make to us relating to registering and maintaining the security of your account:
  1. You will not provide any false personal information on Facebook, or create an account for anyone other than yourself without permission.
  2. You will not create more than one personal profile.
  3. If we disable your account, you will not create another one without our permission.
  4. You will not use your personal profile for your own commercial gain (such as selling your status update to an advertiser).
  5. You will not use Facebook if you are under 13.
  6. You will not use Facebook if you are a convicted sex offender.
  7. You will keep your contact information accurate and up-to-date.
  8. You will not share your password, (or in the case of developers, your secret key), let anyone else access your account, or do anything else that might jeopardize the security of your account.
  9. You will not transfer your account (including any page or application you administer) to anyone without first getting our written permission.
  10. If you select a username for your account we reserve the right to remove or reclaim it if we believe appropriate (such as when a trademark owner complains about a username that does not closely relate to a user's actual name).


You may say that these don't constitute play in the sock-hunting "game", but at least the terms are clear, and they would have easily put MB in violation of both sites' policies, had he elected to play the Poetlister scheme there.
MZMcBride
QUOTE(thekohser @ Wed 6th July 2011, 9:34am) *
QUOTE(MZMcBride @ Wed 6th July 2011, 2:19am) *
Do you see Twitter or Facebook or other social media sites trying to play the sock-hunting game? I don't know of any such efforts, but I'd be fascinated to hear about any.
Twitter's terms of service include in their entirety the "Twitter Rules", which include:
QUOTE
Impersonation: You may not impersonate others through the Twitter service in a manner that does or is intended to mislead, confuse, or deceive others
Facebook's Terms of Service include:
QUOTE
Facebook users provide their real names and information, and we need your help to keep it that way. Here are some commitments you make to us relating to registering and maintaining the security of your account:
  1. You will not provide any false personal information on Facebook, or create an account for anyone other than yourself without permission.
  2. You will not create more than one personal profile.
  3. If we disable your account, you will not create another one without our permission.
  4. You will not use your personal profile for your own commercial gain (such as selling your status update to an advertiser).
  5. You will not use Facebook if you are under 13.
  6. You will not use Facebook if you are a convicted sex offender.
  7. You will keep your contact information accurate and up-to-date.
  8. You will not share your password, (or in the case of developers, your secret key), let anyone else access your account, or do anything else that might jeopardize the security of your account.
  9. You will not transfer your account (including any page or application you administer) to anyone without first getting our written permission.
  10. If you select a username for your account we reserve the right to remove or reclaim it if we believe appropriate (such as when a trademark owner complains about a username that does not closely relate to a user's actual name).
You may say that these don't constitute play in the sock-hunting "game", but at least the terms are clear, and they would have easily put Michael Baxter in violation of both sites' policies, had he elected to play the Poetlister scheme there.
I wasn't saying any site (Wikipedia, Facebook, Twitter, etc.) didn't have policies against certain types of behavior. But do you see Facebook actively hunting down every fake account? (I know several dogs, pigs, and pieces of furniture with accounts.) Do you see Twitter actively hunting down every fake account? (I saw the account "Queen_UK" today. #ginoclock) These are two large companies with more than enough resources to make a concerted effort to keep their stats accurate and playing field level and both have more than enough targets to hit. But you don't see many witch-hunts.

Wikipedia makes sock-hunting a game. Other sites seem to largely ignore it, and with good reason.

Facebook isn't nearly naïve enough to believe that nearly any of these rules are followed. The point of unenforced rules is to ensure legal liability, surely?

I should also note that impersonation of a public individual is different than creating socks. I still don't understand the (legitimate) fascination that people have with the sock-hunting game on Wikipedia or Wikipedia Review. On the Internet, everybody is a dog. Seriously, just leave it at that.
No one of consequence
QUOTE(MZMcBride @ Wed 6th July 2011, 9:01pm) *

I still don't understand the (legitimate) fascination that people have with the sock-hunting game on Wikipedia or Wikipedia Review. On the Internet, everybody is a dog. Seriously, just leave it at that.

Sensible advice, as long as you are willing to give up the consensus-based editing model. If not, then it certainly does matter if some people are more than one dog at a time.

There are many other sensible arguments (verified real-name registration, for example) but all of them are in fundamental conflict with one of Wikipedia's core principles. I express no formal opinion--other than the one I have expressed in how I chose to spend my time the last 18 months--I simply note this for further consideration.
lilburne
QUOTE(thekohser @ Wed 6th July 2011, 2:34pm) *

Facebook's Terms of Service include:


One would be unwise not use a false name there, and one shouldn't use a live email address on any social media site either. None of the family kids have FB accounts in their realname, or have their exact DoB. Oh no, no,no.
thekohser
Food for thought, too, MZ...

Maybe Facebook and Twitter don't make a big "game" out of sockhunting or impersonator squashing because they make it pretty easy for users to "report abuse". And I know (at least from personal experience on Yahoo! Answers) that they simply "shoot first, and maybe possibly ask questions later".

Wikipedia's different in that they only "shoot first" in cases of WMF criticism, boyish vandalism, and commercial puffery. Everything else, including "avowed pedophile socialists who create excellent articles about defunct railroads", gets a 3-week discussion, followed by a tribunal, wrapped up by a bureaucrat declaring "Keep" or "48 hour block" as the solution.
melloden
QUOTE(thekohser @ Wed 6th July 2011, 11:35pm) *

Food for thought, too, MZ...

Maybe Facebook and Twitter don't make a big "game" out of sockhunting or impersonator squashing because they make it pretty easy for users to "report abuse". And I know (at least from personal experience on Yahoo! Answers) that they simply "shoot first, and maybe possibly ask questions later".

Wikipedia's different in that they only "shoot first" in cases of WMF criticism, boyish vandalism, and commercial puffery. Everything else, including "avowed pedophile socialists who create excellent articles about defunct railroads", gets a 3-week discussion, followed by a tribunal, wrapped up by a bureaucrat declaring "Keep" or "48 hour block" as the solution.


Someone has been impersonating me off-and-on for the past two years on Facebook. I have reported them at least four times, and nothing happened. Instead, my own (first) Facebook account that I used to report the guy was blocked for suspicious activity and that email address banned from creating a new account.

I definitely agree that how Wikipedia handles many problematic users is ridiculously insensible, but it's not really worse than the rest of the bureaucratic nonsense on the site. The problem is they want to maintain some sense of "openness" and "anyone can edit" while still saying "it's a private site, there's no 'freedom of speech' here".

I do like how spammers are usually dealt with quickly on Wikipedia, though. Many other sites don't have url or word blacklists (edit filter) and that's why you don't see userpages full of SEO words on them stick around very long.
thekohser
QUOTE(melloden @ Wed 6th July 2011, 11:41pm) *

Someone has been impersonating me off-and-on for the past two years on Facebook. I have reported them at least four times, and nothing happened. Instead, my own (first) Facebook account that I used to report the guy was blocked for suspicious activity and that email address banned from creating a new account.


Maybe I could help you out? Let me know what's your real name. I have a close friend who is connected with a customer operations honcho at Facebook.


QUOTE(No one of consequence @ Wed 6th July 2011, 3:06pm) *

...Kohs raises quite a good point above...


Thanks. That's what I do. All in a day's work.
Kelly Martin
QUOTE(No one of consequence @ Wed 6th July 2011, 4:17pm) *
Sensible advice, as long as you are willing to give up the consensus-based editing model. If not, then it certainly does matter if some people are more than one dog at a time.
There's nothing wrong with consensus-based editing. It's consensus-based governance that is the problem. The problem is that Wikipedians don't recognize the difference between editing and governance; frankly I think they deliberately conflate the two. I've seen Kim Bruning do this often enough; he's probably the most obvious example of someone who not only doesn't get it, but is constitutionally incapable of getting it.

The solution is to let anyone who wants to edit, but require fairly solid identification to participate in governance. That could have happened if it had been implemented early on (like when the WMF was created originally as a membership organization), but Jimmy was opposed to it because it would have made him accountable to someone and he can't stand for that.
No one of consequence
QUOTE(Kelly Martin @ Thu 7th July 2011, 3:45pm) *

QUOTE(No one of consequence @ Wed 6th July 2011, 4:17pm) *
Sensible advice, as long as you are willing to give up the consensus-based editing model. If not, then it certainly does matter if some people are more than one dog at a time.
There's nothing wrong with consensus-based editing. It's consensus-based governance that is the problem.

I was responding to McBride who questions the whole point of sock-hunting in the first place. Even if you changed the governance model but left the editing model alone, you need sock-hunters, because consensus based editing doesn't work if the editors don't believe they are playing on a level field.

Getting back to the issue at hand, "Cato" did have to provide identification to get access to checkuser. We don't know to this day whether "Cato" provided valid identification (as MB) because Cary never answered the question. As well, the validation method (faxing or mailing a pdf of a drivers license) does little to guard against impersonation.

And, even if MB provided true and valid identification to get checkuser access for his account "Cato", there was no procedure to verify that MB was not using or abusing other other accounts, and it is not clear that such a procedure could ever be effective even if it was initiated.

Finally, we need to acknowledge that the concept of keeping each project separate and responsible for its own affairs contributed to the tone of FT2's threatening letter and to the release of much private information. It was not possible under existing WMF policy, for the english wikipedia Arbcom to get wikiquote to pull Cato's checkuser access and deadmin his accounts. It should have been possible to quietly give the evidence to Cary or someone else at WMF and have them close his accounts with the barest of explanations.
Abd
QUOTE(Kelly Martin @ Thu 7th July 2011, 11:45am) *
QUOTE(No one of consequence @ Wed 6th July 2011, 4:17pm) *
Sensible advice, as long as you are willing to give up the consensus-based editing model. If not, then it certainly does matter if some people are more than one dog at a time.
There's nothing wrong with consensus-based editing. It's consensus-based governance that is the problem.
Kelly is right on here, though it does depend a bit on what "consensus-based governance" would mean.

Good governance fosters consensus, but it does not make decisions by consensus. There are many models that can work.The simplest is trustee-based, i.e., trustees are dedicated to governing in ways that are advised by consensus, that communicate with it, but who retain their own independent decision-making power. True consensus is powerful, but Wikipedia doesn't seek true consensus, it seeks what it calls "rough consensus," which is often very rough, in many ways!
QUOTE
The problem is that Wikipedians don't recognize the difference between editing and governance; frankly I think they deliberately conflate the two. I've seen Kim Bruning do this often enough; he's probably the most obvious example of someone who not only doesn't get it, but is constitutionally incapable of getting it.
God? Kim Bruning?
QUOTE
The solution is to let anyone who wants to edit, but require fairly solid identification to participate in governance. That could have happened if it had been implemented early on (like when the WMF was created originally as a membership organization), but Jimmy was opposed to it because it would have made him accountable to someone and he can't stand for that.
He could have retained control, if he wanted it. I think he was ambivalent.

Kelly's suggestion is one possible approach, quite a decent one.

By giving anonymous editors administrative privileges, the WMF allows anonymous editors to represent Wikipedia, and when an editor blocks you, that's a very clear form of "representation."

A hybrid system might still allow anonymous administrators, but they would be responsible to a named administrator. Perhaps require ID for crats, with a responsible crat for each anonymous admin. Anonymous admins would only make ad-hoc, temporary decisions, with ready appeal to the Real Thing being available.

The politics could get horrific, but ... it's already horrific. It would depend on overall supervision. I'm suggesting a Wikipedia Assembly, and to have a vote before the Assembly (i.e., to be on it or to be represented on it), one might have to be openly identified.

Lots of hybrids are possible; often in thinking about this, people assume it's this or that, excluding hybrids.

The Assembly would really be an advisory body, advising the general community, on the one hand, and the WMF board, on the other.
melloden
What would work is no consensus, just a group of staff/mods who decide what stays and what goes. Like every other major social website in the world.
Kelly Martin
QUOTE(No one of consequence @ Thu 7th July 2011, 11:17am) *
Getting back to the issue at hand, "Cato" did have to provide identification to get access to checkuser. We don't know to this day whether "Cato" provided valid identification (as MB) because Cary never answered the question. As well, the validation method (faxing or mailing a pdf of a drivers license) does little to guard against impersonation.
I've heard rumors that Cary routinely gave a free pass on the identification requirements to people he liked. I imagine we'll never know.
LessHorrid vanU
QUOTE(thekohser @ Thu 7th July 2011, 12:35am) *

Food for thought, too, MZ...

Maybe Facebook and Twitter don't make a big "game" out of sockhunting or impersonator squashing because they make it pretty easy for users to "report abuse". And I know (at least from personal experience on Yahoo! Answers) that they simply "shoot first, and maybe possibly ask questions later".

Wikipedia's different in that they only "shoot first" in cases of WMF criticism, boyish vandalism, and commercial puffery. Everything else, including "avowed pedophile socialists who create excellent articles about defunct railroads", gets a 3-week discussion, followed by a tribunal, wrapped up by a bureaucrat declaring "Keep" or "48 hour block" as the solution.


Are you one of those defenders of democracy who has a problem with people of a socialist mindset, Greg? I, as a woolly, pinko loving, liberal, believe you have an absolute right to wish to extend freedom of expression and thought only to those who agree with you... even if I do not share that view.

ps. Sorry I couldn't save your userpage.
thekohser
QUOTE(LessHorrid vanU @ Thu 7th July 2011, 5:18pm) *

Are you one of those defenders of democracy who has a problem with people of a socialist mindset, Greg?


Nah, I just thought I'd throw that in there -- it seemed to fit a certain sector of Wikipediot.
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