Something very interesting but totally under the radar started and ended earlier this week...and I have a feeling it could amount to something significant.

In one of those VH1 "where are they now?" moments, I checked on the status of the anon who took Jimbo to task for taking another bullet for Gary Weiss. His userpage shows that, as expected, he got banned as WordBomb, "verified by CheckUser," no less.

Where it gets interesting is on his talk page, which is a mess but looking though the diffs you see that s/he used the Unblock tag to request access to the CheckUser data that was used, insisting that there was a mistake.

After two quick declines, he cites the WP policy that actually authorizes release of CheckUser data in response to a subpoena or if the affected user requests it.

The next move was a tagteam by two users (fresh from a tagteam revert and within about 90 seconds of each other, oddly) which first declined that request and second locked the page to prevent further "abuse."

If I had to guess, I'd say there is no CheckUser data to begin with. After all, someone so adamant must know the data won't support Jayjg (the original blocker) and the supposed findings of CheckUser. And yet, contrary to WP policy, s/he is denied access to data to which s/he is entitled.

I may be overly optimistic, but this could be the beginning of the end of the Jayjg CheckUser lie.

The only problem is, I don't know how to contact the victim, who was unregistered and thus has no email.

Any ideas? Or is this something so common as to be unworthy of pursuing?

Wikipedia admins ALWAYS do that kind of abuse. They always violate policy. They always libel people as trolls/abusers as an excuse to shut them up.

A kangaroo court within Wikipedia that decides which rules will be followed and when. Who'd a thunk it?

Like one person uses socks to vote on an AFD and not only do they all get banned without warning, but the account gets a community ban decided by three admins with an agenda and padded two of their non-admin sock puppets (One the first link, the article is really long and the socking story is the 4th to last paragraph), but then Gary Weiss uses socks on AFDs all the time and only got a warning, none of the socks were banned, and the person who tried to make him come clean and confess the socks (Pmccain) gets banned.

Many admins are protecting Weiss and his socks, but why? It's like those movies of where your child / sibling / friend / lover is a horrible monster (e.g. turned that way in a horror movie) and you are protecting them by keeping them alive and not telling anyone, but in doing so you can't handle them and they only cause more trouble and bring more negative attention like killing people or turning them undead. In Weiss's case, he's been embaressing himself.

While I don't blame him for wanting his bio to be the way he wants it, since the Wikipedia hivemind is protecting him, that means something is afoot!

My guess? It has something to do with money.

They refuse to give the details even to the people who they accuse of using the same ips (as happened in Poetlister's case), therefore we have to rely on their integrity- the integrity of people whose faces and identities we often know nothing about (i.e. in Jayjg's case) to be telling the truth about their findings. What precautions are there against someone with a criminal record becoming someone with checkuser?

I'm sure it's already happened.

Indeed. I often wonder what society would be like today, here in this bright, shiny, enlightened era, if we all still lived in the Age of Darkness and Ignorance that existed before we discovered The Truth About Rebecca - and finally scratched and clawed our way into the New Renaissance.

Heh heh...

/

sry to brign up tihs thread but is it true abot checkuser taht it doesnt work adter a month ot so?

At the moment, I'm fairly sure that's true - WP deletes IP address data for edits made by registered users after a period of time described as, variously, "a couple of weeks," "six weeks," or (as you say) "a month or so," depending on who you're asking. Presumably that also includes the IP address used to register, though I'm not as certain about that.

I concur. I've seen "too late for checkuser" comments a number of times, and have seen the two-weeks-to-a-month statement in a number of places. Legally speaking, it might mean trouble down the road. While there is no law requiring any data retention in the U.S., the combination of Wikipedia's actual bragging that logging in as a user before you edit will help make you more anonymous, together with the short retention period, means that they are in a position to laugh off almost any subpoena or court order. "Sorry, we don't have that information." Justice denied.

But I also suspect that this would make any judge just more pissed off than usual, and he'd start chewing Brad's ear off from the bench, and the court would hold the Foundation responsible for the behavior of a user. Maybe not a lowly editor-type user, but probably for an admin or above.

This is why a system for (confidentially) sharing our "sleeper" accounts would be so helpful. If we traded them in a round-robin, with a quiet period of 6 weeks between rotations back to the same individual, they would be nigh on untraceable. Of course, they don't need a reason to block ...