good riddance to 1 of teh wordt wp has.

Oh, he'll be back... He does this every couple of weeks! He just forgot to delete and protect his user page the last several dozen times.

But when he says "trolling wins," he isn't referring to us, is he? He can always ignore us, I should think. Our ignoring him (and others like him) is a bit more difficult - he's the main reason several of us are here!

Still, I'll support moving any genuinely offensive MONGO-related material to the Tar Pit (or the trash), of course, if he's serious this time... There isn't really that much of it here, though, in my opinion. I'll check, but other than our speculating on the true nature of his Federal employment, I don't think there's anything much worse than the usual "he's a terrible admin" sort of thing. Hey, we say that about practically all of them, right?

true but he is coming close to being desyssed in tehnew arbcomm case taht is ongoing too. even if he comes back hell be back with less power and cahnce to bully ppl.

and tihs thread is not intrnded for teh 'mongo did wtc' crowd nor do i suggest tuning it into one.

Ah, well... The people responsible for the ArbCom case must be the "trolls," then. Whew! For one ghastly moment there, I thought he didn't love us anymore!


Agreed. This whole thing about him being behind the massive international 9/11 conspiracy, well... that's just a crock of BS, isn't it? Everyone knows it was evil criminal mastermind Rainbow Brite who destroyed the Twin Towers, along with her nasty little friends Hello Kitty, and "Po" from the Teletubbies. (I also believe actress Claudine Longet was somehow involved.)


Dang, that's twice I've used that sort of gag in the last two weeks... I'm becoming really predictable, aren't I?

But, in today's version of the page, it looks like the same group of shills is assembling that begged SlimVirgin not to leave during her tantrum.

Oh, I think I get it now! Have I got this right? Apparently there a bunch of 9/11 conspiracy theorists are hopping mad at MONGO and another admin named "Seabhcan," for insulting and banning a large proportion of them - and also the folks at Encyclopedia Dramatica are still upset with him for his ill-considered "trolling" efforts over there. So now, in addition to the ArbCom case against Seabhcan for being uncivil to the former group, in which Dmcdevit suggested that MONGO be de-opped, all the ED'ers have launched a big sock puppet lynch-mob campaign against him, correct? And he's upset because the other admins won't help him out more than they have been?

Am I even close?

It's too bad, really. If only there were a way to get these folks to resign from Wikipedia out of compassion for others, and remorse for their actions, rather than just the sheer weight, size, and ferocity of the opposition.

And I couldn't help noticing:

Hope springs eternal!

And it worked - she didn't quit.

MONGO is one of the biggest jerks on Wikipedia -- in the top 5. I think he is just leaving temporarily to gain attention or sympathy like those attention whores who made a big deal about leaving wikipedia a few months ago only to come back in 2 days. Wikipedia is such a soap opera -- but it is almost a necessity that it is is a soap opera for those who spend so much of their lives on it and need the stimulation or meaning or sense of superiority. In a way, it is merely livejournal for the nerdy crowd. Meh.

MONGO's still has his admin powers.

I'm not sure if Cplot was an ED sock or not, but it might have been that way.

You also forgot one other group, the Wikipedians who hated Mongo getting a free pass during the last ArbCom case, and made it their duty to get Mongo desysopped during this one...

Also, a rare slapping on Fred Bauder by TravisB, pointing out that while Freddy was writing another free pass for MONGO and condemn Seabachan, that Seabachan hadn't actually yet posted any counter evidence on the page and was on vacation. (see findings 2 through 5)

Interesting. So the ED'ers weren't really all that involved, then? They'd moved on to bigger and better things already, mostly forgetting about MONGO's attempts to, uh, do whatever he was trying to do over there? (Which may be the biggest mystery of all, now that I think about it...)

I'm not sure if I should apologize to the ED'ers for misassuming, or chide them for not following up!

I've seen first-hand that on a wiki, a person can become a highly divisive and troublesome figure even with the best of intentions. The problem seems to be that intentions, at least in that context, are largely meaningless. Even the actions themselves are immaterial at the end of the day... The essential thing is the effect of the person's actions - if the effect is to produce ill-will, general discord, "drama," and increased enmity from outside sources, then you get turned into a scapegoat, and everyone just piles on.

After that, people see the results of the person having stuck his neck out, and fewer people stick their necks out. It's a key part of the process whereby wikis are taken over by people who are better at "gaming the system" than they could ever possibly be at things like writing, editing, or researching.

Oh, there I go, getting all philosophical again! We should start a poll on how long it will take for MONGO to be de-opped... If they manage to do it before Christmas, they could put a nice pink ribbon on his user page and call it their "gift to the interwebs."

Looking at MONGO's talk page, his false goodbye got a lot of responses.

MONGO really let his POV on 9/11 'conspiracy theories' and other topics dear-to-his-heart, like George Bush, get the better of him. He frequently violated NPA and CIVIL himself, encouraged and cheered-on similar behavior from his cohorts like Morton Devonshire, but would punish others with opposing POV's for the slightest infraction.

I really didn't peg him for a 'cut and run' 'surrender monkey' though. (using descriptions MONGO would have used if he could have gotten away with it)

About everyone who signed MONGO's talk page saying it was bad for him to go was who is egging him on.

No doubt this is old news to most of you, but in my brief time on Wikipedia I have noticed how even (if not especially) the worst people have amazing cliques of followers.

I'm afraid it is, but anyway welcome to you and to FNORD23.

mongo bongo has just re-created his userpage and making a few edits, says he is only going to do minor things and not sure if he wants to be on Wikipedia right now.

The pattern of behavior is predictable. Take SarahPoodleVirgin. She storms out in an angry huff, there is a ritual flurry of "oh please don't go, we love you here at Wikipedia, we need you here, have a barnstar, have a pizza, have a bigfootogram, we LOVE you, don't let the trolls win". She re-creates her userpage with a sickening display of barnstars and other ego-boosting "me me me, I'm important" decorations, and makes a few minor edits. Within a week she is back in full 24/7 wiki-addiction.

Mongo bongo will be back on a 24/7 basis by Christmas if not before. His type of personality is so predictable and obvious.

See MONGO's talk page.

Well, there you go!

Of course, I think it's important to note here that the reason MONGO can be said to be "trolling" in this case is because he's encouraging the very behavior he's seemingly so upset about, and thereby making things worse for everyone else, including the people who are inexplicably trying to get him to stick around.

In other words, a legitimate, and smart, Wikipedia admin who really cared about the well-being of the website would never post the statement, "trolling wins" - simply because the act of doing that makes the statement true. He simply handed them a victory. The correct way to handle it would have been to just protect his user page and disappear for a while, or at least scale back his activities, with no scene-making. Instead, by making a spectacle of himself and fishing for sympathy, he puts everyone else in the position of either supporting him (bad) or becoming one of his enemies (worse) simply by virtue of their having not asked him to "please stay." Thereby, he divides the community into pro-MONGO and anti-MONGO, effectively making them fight each other, which is (according to Jimbo) what "trolls" do.

So yes, MONGO is trolling.

We'll see how it goes from now. The majority of arbitrators support desysopping MONGO in the Sebachan case. When it closes, he's gone.

If he wants it back, that means RFA, and judging by the ArbCom voting...that's not going to happen.

what a fcuking idiot. palaying teh victim when he shuld have taken teh orignal arbcom case with teh 'excessive zeal' as a sgn to back off. insted he is repremanded for waht he got away with b4 and btiches.

For a handy check on the current status of User:MONGO's Sysop flag, click here (the first is from meta, which is apparently the official record now - the second is just WP, which apparently isn't. (ed. 12/26, sorry for any confusion)):

http://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?titl...AMONGO%40enwiki

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=...ge=User%3AMONGO

Meanwhile, a posting to WikiEN-L in defense of User:MONGO started an avalanche of controversy over there:

http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikien...ber/058221.html

At first I thought "ConcernedWikipedian" must be User:Cyde, since he's really the only person so consumed by the need to defend his own sysoppiness that he'd write such a lengthy diatribe about a fellow admin who's almost as unpopular as he is. But Cyde would never write something like this:


Obviously anyone reading that would immediately think of Cyde, since he'd be the list-topper, and Cyde's probably smart enough to realize that. Other possibilities include MONGO himself, newish admin User:Doug Bell, fellow admin User:Durin, and also non-admin User:Elaragirl, who went so far as to refer to us here at Wikipedia Review as "ghouls." All of them (the WP'ers that is, not us) have presumably egged MONGO on over the last year or so in his apparently self-proclaimed War on 9/11 "Truthers," and have recently appeared on MONGO's talk page to offer moral support. (I dunno, I think I actually like "ghouls" better than "trolls." Much scarier! What do you all think? I sense a poll coming on...)

I, for one, have mixed feelings about this whole situation. To some extent, I would think that an organization like Wikipedia, being practically all-volunteer (as far as we know), should reward loyalty, even at the expense of popularity. Not to do so could suggest that Wikipedia is rising to a new level of corporate arrogance, for want of a better term. But here's where MONGO really gets it wrong:


There's also a lot of "nobody's perfect" talk going back and forth in general, of course. If anything, I see this as further proof that MONGO works for the government. In private industry, you're judged by things like sales volume, earning performance, cost-cutting ability, and so on. Government workers (and, I'll admit, assembly-line workers and proofreaders) are among the only ones routinely judged on the basis of mistake percentage... In a typical private corporation, you can make all the mistakes you want, and as long as you keep contributing to increased revenue, you're fine. If you don't do that, just one mistake can be your last.

However, I have to admit that MONGO is right about the 1 percent thing, as it applies to Wikipedia. But if MONGO has 26,000 edits, does that mean he's made 260 mistakes? That's a lot of mistakes, even for them.

So I'm not sure what I would do if I were Jimbo... Probably nothing, which I'm sure is what he'll do.

It makes perfect sense for Wikipedia to reward (some definition of) loyalty in editors. The problem is that when "loyalty" gets interpreted for admins, the collective gets it wrong, and the reinforcement cycle grows a group of brownshirts. The brownshirts, when they get tired of executing the others, turn on themselves, using ever-more-spurious definitions to "loyalty" to justify periodic purges.

Originally, Wikipedia sort of got it right, considering admins the "mop-and-bucket brigade". The ability to easily revert vandalism and perform other janitorial acts is just fine. It is the pseudo-Police (bans, blocks. checkuser, sock-hunting) and pseudo-Justice (Arbcom) functions of admins that are most prone to abuse, and most abused.

This is one of the clearest, most succinct summaries of the situation that I have read in a long time.

I award you the

Jonny

Aw shucks, .... you like me! But can I have it as a barnstar for my home page?

I don't see why not... Still, if they come from us, maybe they should be called "ghoulstars"!

Back to the subject at hand, though... How then do we interpret this particular situation? Nobody would suggest that User:MONGO isn't loyal to Wikipedia. The issue seems to be that MONGO has put himself in some sort of psychological jeopardy by making himself into their attack-dog, to fight tooth-and-nail against the 9/11 conspiracy theorists, and also the ED'ers. Phrases like "his mental state" are being used in the current discussion... He put himself in this position by choice, of course - I doubt that anybody twisted his arm. But ultimately, Wikipedia needs people like that.

Don't get me wrong, of course; Wikipedia is a corrupt and culturally-damaging institution, no question about it. But that doesn't change the fact that they need people like MONGO to keep going. What's really happening here, IMO, is that in order to maintain the illusion of neutrality, Wikipedia either has to ruthlessly attack any and all alternative-history types who come along, or use "improved technology" (i.e., tighter up-front editing restrictions and "smart" content filtering) to defend itself. Presumably, such technological controls would make Wikipedia less "open" and would "compromise its core principles." Can't have that! So, instead, they put their unpaid, psychologically ill-equipped admins out on the front line, drawing fire from people who, for good or ill, won't take no for an answer when it comes to getting attention for their extreme-minority ideas and theories.

I realize that by saying this, to a certain extent I'm actually agreeing with some of the most hard-line cabalists WP has to offer. (Sorry, folks!) Indeed, here's what MONGO uber-defender User:JzG has to say about it:

But think about it. He wishes he had some idea how to fix it? Has he never read a single word posted to this website, which I might add is just one among many?

People keep saying things like "Wikipedia can't survive," and "the system will collapse under its own weight," i.e., the weight of arrogance and anti-humanism, in a few more years. But it seems to me that it could survive almost indefinitely, as long as people like MONGO are willing to mess themselves up, and I mean seriously mess themselves up, defending it. And for what? That nice feeling you get when you compile lots of knowledge, without getting paid, to be given away for free?

Of course not. They're doing it because it makes them feel powerful, it's as simple as that. Wikipedia will survive as long as it can convince people that adminship is power, and that such power is obtainable by anyone who wants to play the game. And once you've won, the game still isn't over, because you have to keep your position, or else you lose.

How do they deal with that? Can they convince these loyal, mostly well-intentioned people they've hoodwinked that now the opposite is true, and that the system they've built isn't really a game? That adminship isn't "power" in any real sense of the word (important note: it isn't)? I don't see how they can. It's what the whole thing is founded upon. (Or co-founded, as the case may be.)

That's why it's a corrupt system. It doesn't just attract nutcases - it turns perfectly sane, productive people into nutcases, who wouldn't be otherwise.

If this is Web 2.0, I think we should either downgrade, or get Web 2.1 up and running as soon as possible!

Power-tripping autocrats. Power-tripping anarchists.

It's called symbiosis.

Jonny

Sure, hang our Banshee Star on your Home Page door at Passover and your first-born child will be safe from the WikiPerils of the WikiPlague. Plus, the wider distribution of auto-shibboleths like that is guaranteed to swell the ranks of us Retching Refusniks in the Ghoulag Archipelago.

Jonny

This is all first-rate analysis, and I think that its main principles need to be abstrated from the concrete particulars of these more peculiar cases.

I never encountered MONGO myself, and as I slowly back away from the Amalgamated Jimbo-Larry Big Top, I'm losing what little fascination I once had with the Ins & Outs of their individual Wiki-Pathos-&-Bathos.

So, the Quest that would pass from the Futile to the Future demands that we try to articulate the general thematics of the underlying dynamics. I made one of my own last best efforts to do that at the outset of the Citizendium project, as I could see that train going down a parallel track to obliviousness, if not sheer oblivion. Alas! A lack of attention to good faith critical reflection seems to be the symptom to end all symptoms, and so that try of mine was a short-lived trial indeed.

Jonny

You keep referring to Wikipedia as a thing that uses admins and makes certain choices. Wikipedia is a group of people, all with different goals. You are making a significant error in assigning coherent motives to this amorphous thing that is Wikipedia. It is particular editors that feel they need to promote or remove specific content from Wikipedia, sometimes these editors gain allies and sometimes they don't. In the end, what ends up in Wikipedia is roughly a statistical reflection of what the relatively literate and internet savvy portion of society believes.

It is mistaken to think that Wikipedia has significant causative effect, it is more like a mirror of society. If society believes the Truthers then it makes sense to document their theories in Wikipedia, and they probably will end up in Wikipedia because there are enough people who push to get that topic included. It's not the end of the world, because remember that Wikipedia is more of a mirror of the current state than a true cause of societal beliefs.


Again you are assigning collective intentions to Wikipedia -- "as long as it can convince people that adminship is power." Wikipedia is not convincing people that adminship is power -- it is the people, some of them admins, who believe that it is power and a status symbol, and they are self-reinforcing. This is the normal way things happen in any group -- people seek out status symbols and attempt to gain power. The orientation on Wikipedia towards admins, arbitrators and bureaucrats and what not are just the manifestation within the confines of Wikipedia of this universal human need for power and status.

The real source of Wikipedia's power comes from the amount to which the general public reads wikipedia articles, which is closely related to the Google ranking afforded to its articles. Everything else is just details resulting from the over-analysis of internal Wikipedia politics.

Just to be clear, there is a very large segment of society that does believe the truthers:
9/11: The Roots of Paranoia

It is less fringe that one would expect. The only way to fight off the masses of truthers is to engage in the worst Cabal-like excesses.

"In the end, what ends up in Wikipedia is roughly a statistical reflection of what the relatively literate and internet savvy portion of society believes." ???

Screeching halt. That's a nice recitation of the Wikipedia Mythos -- The Way It's Posed 2B -- some of us can even remember reciting that stuff ourselves. But actually believing it betrays a lack of acquaintance with the types of incidents that actually prevail in the Wikipedia system. No doubt some people are lucky enough to escape the experience of those sorts of occurrences -- more likely it's just a matter of time until they encounter them.

And, yes, it's evidently a big part of many Wikipedians self-images that they are "the relatively literate and internet savvy portion of society", but the fact is that the prevailing power elite of the Wikipedia system is a bunch of Usenet boobs who show no evidence of having seen the inside of a real world library, who are so disenculturated to normal intellectual society that they have yet to discover the necessity of using their real world names in discussions, much less being aware of the long-running dialogue that has been going on about the nature of knowledge and inquiry in an open society.

Jonny

If you were right, it would be an example of what Thomas Jefferson called "the tyranny of the majority." However, you discount the Internet as an empowering tool for nutcases everwhere; it has become something more like "the tyranny of the paranoid believer". Never before have Hyde Park box-standers had such a large audience.

I honestly believe that Wikipedia can aspire to little more than a mirror of certain segments of society, with more weight given to committed and/or coordinated activists groups like the truthers -- thus it is completely a victim of the tyranny of the majority. This is related to why Wikipedia is targeted by committed fan groups that fill it with articles on TV show trivia, computer game characters, descriptions of minor roads and every elementary school ever to exist. To think that the current structure can aspire to something higher is to set oneself up against the statistical flow of society, and its a recipe for a lot of work and almost requires one to descend into the gross excesses of Wikipedia Cabalism to be successful.

it may be more accurate to call it the "tyranny of those have the most time and dedication and ability to work within the system." Paranoiacs or simple majorities isn't really who wields the power on Wikipedia -- although that may be true in specific cases.

Okay, fair enough...

It's easy to fall into what Jonny refers to as the "Group Identity Myth" with Wikipedia, but that really is unfair to the people who are working from the inside to fix and/or improve things. (Sorry, people! I got carried away there.)

So, what I really should have written was that a person like MONGO probably has a motivating concept going through his head, which to some extent is a misconceptualization, in which Wikipedia is a single, monolithic entity - an institution, to be precise. I doubt that he sees himself as defending Wikipedia's admins or Wikipedia's editors or even Wikipedia's content. Instead, I suspect that he sees himself as (and this is the second time I've used this term in just one week) a "Knight Errant," or maybe something like a Japanese ronin samurai warrior, defending the kingdom from outside invaders. He's frustrated that "nobody else understands" how important it is to keep the conspiracy nuts out, because once they're in, they'll ruin everything, and therefore the end (getting rid of them) justifies the means (repeated incivility and rule violations).

Maybe the question really should be, when someone like MONGO is faced with an ArbCom case and the strong possibility that he'll lose his admin status, who or what does he think is betraying him and refusing to recognize his loyalty and hard work? The people, or the institution? That might not seem all that important, but I'd say that if he thinks the institution is betraying him, he's much more likely to suffer real psychological damage from it.


Agreed, but tell that to MONGO!


Well, the same applies here, which is to say that you're correct, but I'd still say that Wikipedia is unusual in terms of social and power dynamics - it's like an "attractive nuisance" as far as its relationship to society goes. That is to say, in the so-called "real world," you need more than an IP address, a lot of spare time, and a willingness to play by the rules to obtain power and status... In fact, in most cases, those things are a major hindrance!

I agree with the majority of your comment except for the above. I think that you suffer from "Wikipedia exceptionalism", the belief that Wikipedia is unique in the way its human dynamics plays out. I've worked in business environments that have been politicized because of egotistic but fragile leaders and it isn't all that different on Wikipedia if you happen to encounter the right admin. A lot of people I've seen get banned from Wikipedia, while they felt personally like they were fighting for all that is right and just, were engaging in head-on confrontations with fragile but egotistic admins, a recipe that is just as guaranteed to fail if you tried it in real life against a person with authority who has similar characteristics.

The very idea that Wikipedia content or Wikipedia user conduct has any sort of valid statistical relationship either to objective reality or to the opinions of society is just total nonsense. Wikipedia has no positive resemblance to legitimate journalism, opinion polling, or scholarship in any sense of the words.

There's a double disconnect in many of the assertions being made above:

• First, an encyclopedia is not an opinion poll, that is, a statistical average or a weighted summary of the beliefs that a given population is willing to express about a given selection of subjects.
• Second, if one really were serious about conducting an opinion poll, the hit-or-miss screaming matches and Ouija Board wars that are carried on by a given day's motley of Wikipedia participants would be just about the most utterly absurd and invalid way to do it that anyone could imagine.

Jonny

To be fair, I don't hear anon1234 saying that Wikipedia should be the way he describes. I actually think it is an interesting analysis, though I don't entirely buy it. One of the chief problems with Wikipedia is indeed that it is a dung-heap of sordid, unsorted opinion. What, if any, section of the Internet, America, or the world it might statistically resemble is another argument. However, observation of the reality distortion field surrounding certain topics, ranging from Mid-East politics to Canadian politicians to Animal Rights activists and beyond, would indicate that creation of an objective, scientific, journalistic encyclopedia is not what is actually going on in many places. Hell, there have been edit wars and Arbcom cases about flat-earthers, anti-Einstein activists, and other aspects of well-settled science, not to mention the articles that give the tin-foil hat crowd a woody (9/11, JFK assasination, etc).

What I disagree with, most vociferously, is that this is a cross-section of any "relatively literate" crowd, whether Internet-saavy or not. Perhaps anon1234 has a different definition of "relatively literate" than mine, but much of the Wikipedia crowd seems to be high-school aged, out of their field, or damaged in some other fundamental way. Most of them can't research their way out of a paper bag, even with google.

So to bring this back to MONGO's departure, I don't get the chest-thumping. The good people should leave, or perhaps limit themselves to minor policing in limited areas. Getting involved in the administrative bureaucracy is just abetting the crime. The Wikipedia model is broken: "anyone can edit" means that there will never be a way to trust Wikipedia as anything other than a glorified blog written by a million monkeys, and the administrative structure that exists now works, at best, orthogonally to accuracy and credibility and, as in this case, most often much worse than that. If this is anon's thesis, then I heartily agree.

Hmm... By "fragile," do you mean people with weak ego facades, who become defensive and hostile when challenged? Or are you thinking more about people who just have a tendency to overestimate themselves, particularly with respect to their talents and abilities? (Or something else entirely?) I guess I'd assume the former, but to be honest I've been assuming too much lately!

Earlier I pointed out that some of what I've been saying about MONGO is in full agreement with some of the nastier cabal-types WP has to offer. Check out this quote from Greg Maxwell - he's in favor of desysopping MONGO, and is cleverly trying to spin it as a form of mercy, given that MONGO is burned out and behaving erratically:

What Maxwell is calling "sole defender syndrome" actually has a name already, IMO - "hypervigilance" - and it usually arises out of post-traumatic stress. Also, it eventually goes away, if the person is removed from the stress-causing situation for a long-enough period of time. However, it can also be associated with addictive behavior, of various kinds. Now, the people who obsessively edit Wikipedia day-in-day-out are, for the most part, probably not the sort of people who are prone to dependence on alcohol, hard drugs, or things of that nature... But if they were, they might have a better understanding of what happens inside the addicted brain when something, or someone, threatens the supply.

How does this tie in, you ask? It ties in because addiction weakens the mind, makes it more fragile - indeed, crumbles one's inner strength - all while having very little noticeable effect on the person's ego facade. Whether or not this is affecting MONGO is an open question, as it would be for anyone on WP, given that we don't really know who the f**k any of them really are. But these people ignore the effects of wiki addiction at their utmost peril, and all the while, Jimbo & Co. laugh all the way to the bank. (And then they wonder why we criticize the system to such an extent.)


It almost makes you wonder why anyone would want an encyclopedia to be any of those things, doesn't it!

A while ago there was a news article by a guy named Andy Updegrove who used the term "the end of archaeology" to describe what he saw as the "real" value of WP, i.e., that of a cultural snapshot of sorts:

http://www.consortiuminfo.org/standardsblo...061030173044439


I didn't know what to make of it at the time, and I guess I still don't. On the one hand, he's probably right. On the other, it's this kind of apologist spin-doctoring that's going to ultimately result in our having nothing left but anonymously-produced collaborative websites left as information resources in the future, which is really not something to look forward to.

At the same time, if people generally accept that sort reasoning, then I suppose MONGO really should be desysopped. After all, by trying to keep the conspiracy-theorists out of Wikipedia, he's actually reducing the accuracy of the cultural snapshot, isn't he? It's like the very height of irony, in a way.

???

or·thog·o·nal /ɔrˈθɒgənl/ Pronunciation Key - Show Spelled Pronunciation[awr-thog-uh-nl] Pronunciation Key - Show IPA Pronunciation
–adjective 1. Mathematics. a. Also, orthographic. pertaining to or involving right angles or perpendiculars: an orthogonal projection.
b. (of a system of real functions) defined so that the integral of the product of any two different functions is zero.
c. (of a system of complex functions) defined so that the integral of the product of a function times the complex conjugate of any other function equals zero.
d. (of two vectors) having an inner product equal to zero.
e. (of a linear transformation) defined so that the length of a vector under the transformation equals the length of the original vector.
f. (of a square matrix) defined so that its product with its transpose results in the identity matrix.

2. Crystallography. referable to a rectangular set of axes.




Uhh.....

I remember having an exchange with some ArbCom member a few years ago, where I was fuming about some editor introducing falsehoods into Wikipedia, and said ArbCom member pointed out that Truth was not an objective of Wikipedia, only source-verifiability. Or words to that effect. So with respect to the "accuracy of the cultural snapshot," the struggle at Wikipedia is not so much to reflect it as to create it. The one who dies with his POV imposed on the most articles wins. This is a variant, perhaps, on the old saw that history is written by the victors. In this modern-day world of cyberspace and virtual reality, someone like MONGO may aspire to be a cyber-godling, by creating a tidy virtual microcosm of the universe, where all the forbidden viewpoints may be excluded by a gang of semi-demiurges.

MONGO is not the only one who has been screwing up the 9/11 articles. There's a guy Peephole and some more that have been refusing to even acknowledge that the Loose Change Video used Wikipedia as its sources and the person could have even made a temporarily vandalized version of the site and video taped it as their evidence. Some watered down version of this eventually got in for a while.

It's lots of people. Sure MONGO hides facts like the JFK assasination was more than Harvey Oswald, the US government hides its knowledge of extraterrestrials of which it has some amount of X-Files like knowledge, and 9/11 happened because the Bush administration either let it or caused it to happen (I mean these guys always hold fake meetings with the public where they screen people who ask scripted questions like "I love you Mr. President")

I think that by "orthogonally" gomi means "at right angles to" which can be stretched to mean "uncorrelated with".

No, once they die those who disagree with them immediately go and fix the articles.

At the moment, the only thing preventing User:MONGO from being desysopped is the failure of the ArbCom to "close" the case. This is mostly because JayJG, having apparently recused himself earlier, showed up at the last minute to oppose closure:

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=...&oldid=93914192

It should, of course, be noted that the "great deal of concern" he refers to stemmed from an anonymous (aren't they all, though) pro-MONGO e-mail to WikiEN-L from someone calling himself "ConcernedWikipedian." This e-mail was clearly meant to stir things up and start a huge amount of infighting and controversy - which it succeeded at, quite effectively. The person not only didn't identify himself (and was even criticized by Jimbo for it), he essentially dropped out of the discussion after the e-mail was posted, sat back, and no doubt laughed long and hard at all the brouhaha he'd caused.

Apparently, if the ArbCom can't get 4 "clear" votes to close the case, the whole thing is dropped, right? So, in effect, trolling wins again!

Isn't that nice.

Guy correctly translates my geek-speak. Sorry for being opaque. In the future I will eschew obfuscation.

Well, you should always eschew before swallowing, or you'll get a tummy-ache!

Anyway, I'm not sure what to make of this situation. I mean, you saw it, we all saw it... I went back and wasted precious minutes of my life that I'll never, ever get back counting the e-mailers on WikiEN-L, for and against the desysopping of User:MONGO. (By the way, I'm finally getting used to the idea of not putting the word "desysopping" in quotes, which probably means I've completely lost touch with reality.) It came out to 16 in favor of desysopping and 9 opposed. Several of the respondents were too equivocal to be counted, including Jayjg himself - he really only showed up in order to attack "Parker Peters," who seems to be a decent sort of person... so, no wonder!

Many of them were, shall we say, waffling just a smidge, so you have to read the e-mails carefully - disconcerting as that is - to figure out where they stand. It's possible that I've got it wrong in one or two cases. Maybe even three... But here's how it broke down, as I read it:

In favor of desysopping, though not necessarily hostile to MONGO:

Jeff Raymond
The Cunctator
Alphax
Thomas Dalton
George Herbert
Matthew "Morven" Brown
NSLE (Where have you been, man? The "idiots" miss you!)
Andrew Gray
Rob "nobs" Smith
Ray Saintonge
Rob (gamaliel)
Gregory Maxwell
Stephen Bain
Theo Clarke
M Roget
Michael Bimmler

Against desysopping, though not necessarily friendly to MONGO:

ConcernedWikipedian (who probably shouldn't count)
Fred Bauder (who definitely shouldn't count)
KillerChihuahua ("Puppy")
Jim Schuler
Guy "JzG" Chapman
Brian Haws
Parker Peters (sort of)
Guettarda
Stan Shebs

Personally, I think these people should all just accept the imperfections of the system they themselves have created, and just let it do its thing. Letting it drag on, which is what Jayjg seems to be doing by opposing the closure, really just prolongs the agony for everyone else. MONGO, meanwhile, is probably a nervous wreck over this. Even if he does retain his admin privileges, he probably isn't going to be the same ultra-loyal attack dog after this experience that he's been in the past. He may just drop out entirely.

Anyway, it's an interesting problem! For them, that is.

Does that mean Fred Bauder should recuse himself from any further ArbCom discussion of MONGO?

My Boy Scout troop had a rectangular set of axes.

Fred Bauder should recuse himself from any further ArbCom discussion, period, although as a disbarred attorney he occupies a position of singular prestige in that august body. He seems to write most of the decisions.