QUOTE(Casliber @ Thu 7th July 2011, 7:46pm)
QUOTE(Wikileaker @ Fri 8th July 2011, 8:29am)
You all assume too many things. What if I said I'd lost arbcom-L access as an act of misdirection, designed to throw suspicion on the people listed above? What if I'm not even an ex-arbitrator, but a friend of one who gets gossip forwarded to them? What if I'm some hacker type? (Although I suppose my knowledge of even the existence of the Google group makes that scenario unlikely.) What if I actually am who I've said I am, and this post is misdirection itself? I'm already a piece of shit for publicly posting information that was supposed to remain in confidence -- why would lying about my identity be below me?
Anyway, I woke up this morning and discovered a couple empty bottles of Evan Williams... then eventually figured out that I'd had a WikiRelapse during a moment (day?) of weakness. I apologize for being a tease, but I won't be posting any more mailing list threads or arbwiki stuff. MaliceAforethought seems to have that covered anyway.
Well, er - duh.
Okay then Wikileaker, I might have missed this (did you post this somewhere?), but what was your motivation? anger at perceived arrogance of the committee? a sense of injustice? or just teh lulz? Just asking, before you dissapear again off into the aether..
Cas
Cas, if you look carefully through Wikileaker's posting history, he wrote that he tried to reform Wikipedia's power structure from the inside, failed, and decided to take private matters public. I'm paraphrasing and interpreting. If you go to "Members" then type "Wikileaker" then click his name, then click the drop-down box on the upper right-hand corner to "Find member's posts" and go to the second page, you'll find it there. I'm too preoccupied to do it right now.
To Wikileaker, yes, I did make assumptions, and I believe those assumptions are reasonable. I started with a process of elimination to eliminate any Arbitrators who I thought could not be Wikileaker. I did not exclude anyone from the search, not even Newyorkbrad. I checked to see who was active recently. Most of anyone who's ever been an arbitrator, even in 2004 and 2005, has edited Wikipedia in 2011, and most of those have edited in July 2011.
A few former arbitrators didn't edit in 2011. This was consistent with Wikileaker's statement that he "hasn't touched Wikipedia in several years." Wikileaker posted this yesterday. I read the list of arbitrators, former arbitrators and incoming arbitrators as of December 2008 on an old version of
Wikipedia:Arbitration Committee. Again, you can trawl the page history for yourself. My process of elimination yielded several "UNLIKELY" and one "POSSIBLE". That "POSSIBLE" was Sam Korn.
I looked for positive evidence linking Sam Korn's Wikipedia activity with Wikileaker's posts on Wikipedia Review. I found some suggestive links. Wikileaker wrote about Aitias and Majorly on WR. Sam Korn was involved in their user conduct issues on Wikipedia in March or April of 2009. Wikileaker posted from an IP address some nasty citations about Majorly. It's hard to believe any active user would do this and expect not to get checkusered and busted, but who knows, maybe he was away from home and unlinkable to his usual wiki identity. Pretty much, the same guy who had access to the Arbcom-L list did post to Majorly's talk page while not logged in, and boasted about it at WR, and since that did happen, one must accept that whoever did it took the risk of getting caught. There's also two diffs on Jimbo's talk page in February 2009 where Sam Korn posts snarky one-line comments in a thread about Kelly Martin's leaks of Arbcom-L. One day later (or earlier?) Wikileaker boasted about having archives on Wikipedia Review.
Deskana's claim that he lost Arbcom-L access in March 2009, not January 2009, casts reasonable doubt on this situation. However, one can say like this: Wikileaker said in early February 2009 that he had the list through 2/16/09 which hadn't happened yet. Commenters suspected a typo, which should have read 1/16/09. It's possible that Wikileaker had not been removed from the list but only updated his list as of 1/16/09, or may have removed himself voluntarily while Deskana waited to get kicked out.
I don't know if fishing out links and diffs will convince anyone here. I find that people on Wikipedia Review either don't read what I write, or don't react to the substance of what I write. I do maintain a "more likely than not" confidence that Wikileaker is Sam Korn. Whoever wrote what Wikileaker wrote, when he wrote it, had to know certain things and project a certain attitude, that only Sam Korn is likely to have done. It could be some long-time inactive arb like Filiocht or Flcelloguy but it seems far more likely that the culprit is someone who was involved with dramatic affairs on a daily basis, as Sam Korn was for an extended time.
Clarification: Sam Korn's last edit to Wikipedia was in late 2009. He hasn't touched Wikipedia in almost two years.