There is a whole lot to say about this case, but rather than puke out the whole thing here I thought I'd post that link. Go from there to the website and to the article, and you'll see the whole disaster.

I'll be the first to acknowledge that I could've been more patient with these people, but I honestly believe that they've got a "first you drive 'em crazy, then you call 'em crazy" strategy. The end result is that the Wikipedia article on this guy omits key verified facts. I'll have more to say about it later on, but my quick take is that Wikipedia is unable to publish articles about living persons and should stop doing it.

When it comes to anodyne World Book Encyclopedia-style material, Wikipedia's probably fine. But not for anything controversial. They can't handle it.

Welcome to WR. The Matt Sanchez scandal fits right into the whole scenario currently taking place on Wiki - a coordinated effort by the Right Wing Cabal to scrub as much negative info as possible from as many RW articles as possible. The unusual thing about this case though is that the subject himself - who has a clear CIO - has been feverishly editing his own article and has had free reign to insult and harass other editors at will. He is also in contact with some RW editors like Elonka who are running defense for him. Keep up the good work exposing this fraud, PWOK!

What does "CIO" mean? I'm not up on all the acronyms.

I believe that's a typo - it should be "COI," for "Conflict of Interest." Normally "CIO" is a corporate title that stands for Chief Information Officer, though it's also used to refer to "Common Idiots Online," the popular web-based encyclopedia.

URL please

I think Somey was referring to WP

Whew! I had been thinking "Congress of Industrial Organizatons." Now, more seriously, I did a bunch of reading on this site before posting, and saw some stuff about a "cabal." When I accused them on my now-blanked out user page of being a pack of wingnuts, I was engaging in hyperbole. Is this really the case? And who are Elonka and her big supporter, "WJBscribe?"

What happened to the four or five posts that used to be here?

It's happening all over the forums - either it's a bug or we been hacked....

I hope this post makes it. I've been seeing weirdness for the last four hours. It looks like a cache problem — sometimes I see the latest posts on a thread, and sometimes I don't. Sometimes I log in, and then it tells me five minutes later I'm not logged in and I cannot do what I'm trying to do.

I tried two different ISPs, and three different browsers — same results.

Bug? Hacked? But I haven't been anywhere near the computer for nearly three hours!

I'll have a look...

I noticed that one of the threads I started (the Dmcdevit vandal thread) went briefly to the Tarpit (at my suggestion) but when it returned to the Editors forum, several posts were missing.

At one point I came here and it was like the forum had briefly reverted back to an earlier version where all the topics I had read were shown as not having been read. The Dmcdevit thread was also in the Editors and Tarpit forums at the same time.

Weird.

I thought WP has a guideline on incidents like this — WP:SPADE (T-H-L-K-D) and WP:CENSORED (T-H-L-K-D). We should call a spade a spade, if he says he is a prostitute, smells like a prostitute, looks like a prostitute, and quacks like a prostitute, then he's a prostitute. There is nothing wrong, except WP is trying to censor the info out. Typical right-wing stupidity.

The article is about as balanced as Faux News, and this Sanchez person strikes me as one of the most worthless piles of walking excrement to grace the surface of our planet. No wonder WP loves him.

If someone tried to extend NPOV officially to say that no one political party, doctrine, or such viewpoint is allowed to have any specific sway over an article's content, and codify it so people can use it to keep shit out of Wikipedia (like this), how much people would scream and cry about it.

Most of my posts to this thread are disappared... but can I reiterate my request that pwok takes a look at the McCann family?

I'll give this thread one (and only one) more try. Let's hope this site's software is fixed.

For starters, no, I'm not going to "take a look at the McCann family," whoever they are. I think you've mistaken me for someone who's interested in chasing down everyone's grudge for them. Sorry. 'Taint me.

I just looked at Wikipedia's Sanchez article again, and they keep oozing toward their goal of a complete whitewash. Wikipedia's editors continue to eliminiate verified sources on the grounds that Sanchez doesn't like them, amid self-congratulatory chatter about their good faith. Sanchez is editing his own article by proxy, and personally attacking his opponents with impunity. That article is a pristine example of why Wikipedia is institutionally incapable of handling controversy.

But you know what? I don't think it's going to matter. After reading yesterday's New York Times about Wikipedia being edited by and for corporations, I think their fate is pretty much sealed. The dry husk will be there for a long time, sort of like that soon to be abandoned mineshaft in Utah. But make no mistake: No one who counts is going to be counting on Wikipedia. From now on, no student in a respectable high school or university will be able to get away with citing them as a source. Come the start of the 2008-2009 school year, Wikipedia will be widely recognized as the encyclopedic equivalent of a Thomas Kinkade masterpiece: fake research, fake editors, fake administrators, and eventually a fake foundation, fooling no one who we care about not being fooled.

As for Sanchez, I've been getting ready to put my site on automatic pilot and move on to more meaningful uses of my time. I think even his wingnut sponsors are getting the message about his general craziness. Until yesterday, I thought it was important to put some pressure on Wikipedia to fix their article, but now that they've been nudged off the cliff by The New York Times and Jimmy Wales's insouciance, I don't think it's worth the effort. The heavy lifting's been done.

I just want to establish that the forum software (IPB) and the data used by it are two different things. The forum software stores all the entries, threads, subforums, user data/preferences, passwords, etc in an SQL database. Every time you hit a Wikipedia Review.com page, there are lots of hits to that database. No database = no Wikipedia Review.

The forum serves as a pretty interface to view the data, which is stored in the database.

If entries or entire threads go missing, it is not the fault of the software. It's a database issue.

If, however, you have problems posting or PM'ing someone (or doing anything relatively easy to do), then it's a user interface/forum issue.

Is a database issue or a software issue? You say to-MAY-to, and I say to-MAH-to. But if my posts keep disappearing, I'll call the whole thing off.

See, you could have been having a field day today

Although I wonder whether they'll have the sense to stay silent, or whether they'll be stupid enough to concot another story and inevitably crack under interrogation. I studied the Reid technique once (as I was interested in a related subject, cold reading).

Sorry, but my latest obsession interest is the ongoing real estate crash. This is something I've been predicting for five years, and now the snowball is really rolling. I don't have time for the missing white girl of the week, or even much time for Matt Sanchez or Wikipedia for that matter. The Category 5 financial storm is starting to move ashore. So many scandals, so little time!

Yeah, but to be fair, was it really that hard to foresee? The formula I use:

1) Greedy sellers and realtors
+
2) Greedy mortgage brokers
=
3) Profit! (for buyers at foreclosure sales)

True, the sellers, realtors and mortgage brokers more directly profit at the expense of the investors and mortgagors. But the bigger winners are likely to be the sale buyers who later flip the properties--if they have proper capitalization and patience.

I was reading some far-right forum last night (can't remember which) and they recommended another forum 'abovetopsecret' than is the typical far-far-right forum (so far that it almost turns full circle and becomes left) In between the posts about the NWO and Illuminati and North American Union, there were several posts about the coming collapse. The predict another depression unrivalled in history. (but then again these folks predicted that the world would collapse over Y2K.

It's very easy to foresee a crash. The trick is to know when and how bad it's going to be. I don't see this being anything like as bad as Pwok seems to think it's going to be, but in truth noone knows. If it does turn out to be that bad, then it's because it will have combined with some other "black swan" event shortly.



abovetopsecret isn't far-right as such, it's just full of lunatics.

No need for whackjob wingnut websites. There are all kinds of good ones out there.

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/laland/

http://blownmortgage.com/

http://calculatedrisk.blogspot.com/

http://paper-money.blogspot.com/

http://www.irvinehousingblog.com/