OUTRAGEOUS. Jenny G ahangs out with Wikipedians and probably is a volunteer. Here's her story about London meetups. COI anyone? Gah! I hope he sues them purple.

You guys have got to take the good with the bad... increasing press scrutiny of things related to Wikipedia, with increasing skepticism, will on the whole be good for your causes of wanting the antics of the WikiClique exposed, but at times people you like will also come under criticism there. This is normal.

This makes no sense. You want people to cover Wikipedia, I assume... but at the same time, you don't want these people to go to any Wikipedia meetups, or anyplace else where Wikipedians will be. Are they just supposed to get all their information from here?

I believe what DL is saying here is simply that Kleeman seems biased in favor of Wikipedia, not that Wikipedians should avoid going to meetups or anything like that. (Which isn't to say that they should go to such events...)

As for Kleeman being a Wikipedia "volunteer," I can tell you that she once contacted us here at WR via the board's public e-mail address, to discuss her possibly writing an article about the Runcorn case. When we told her that we didn't know Runcorn's real name (though Poetlister's name could still be found on WP at the time), and that I wasn't going to reveal my own real name for such an article, she seemed to completely lose interest. More than likely that was because she realized that the whole thing wasn't likely to be especially newsworthy, but to me it was somewhat... suspicious. Especially since that was right around the time SlimVirgin was publicly announcing that she was going to hire "private detectives" to find out who we are.

Call me paranoid...

No, really? Someone should tell Wolfe...

But the only evidence I see for that bias is that Kleeman went to some meetups. You can't expect journalists to cover Wikipedia and not do that.

Have you guys lost all sense of reason? The guy clearly got mauled on wiki. Probably he cited his stuff and argued for 'whatever' (I dont even need to look, because the details aren't important) but he got in fights with kids about things he clearly needed a three-letter-acronym vocabulary to fight. And he got creamed.

So he tried to get his bio off, and he's subjected to bio torture, while he can't edit. Then, in the midst of it all, some woman who goes to Wiki-meetups, chats with a very charming Charles Matthews, who gets the impression that if someone gets creamed on ANI, they must have done something bad - and she writes an article completely slanted by Wiki-rules.

Look at how it is written. She took the info off his Arbcom case, and wrote about it. Christ.

And she quotes some Kowalski (or something) who she doesn't even say who it is. And she alleges that "the colleagues of Pf. Hewitt think he is overstating his importance" (Not a quote, just the sentiment) but no attribution.

Its a smear. I dont care if Hewitt is the biggest, selfish, self-important, whatever in the world. I know how these people operate and the fact that he was citing himself means he was subject to attacks.

Come on. It doesn't matter if she went to a Wiki meetup. But she clearly thinks that Wikipedians are the cat's meow, and she's written an article slanted against this man, because she thinks that Wikipedia is a fair deal and if he lost his Arbcom case (or whatever he lost) he was "bad".

It makes me sick. Really.


I don't care where they get their information from, as long as they get the full picture. This woman is writing as if Arbcoms are fair, and as if anything were fair on Wikipedia, and since the guy got creamed that he did someting wrong.

We all now that's not true. Period.


In the current situation, you have every right to be paranoid. We still don't know what the hell "investigations" was about, or "cyberstalking". I think that you have every, every reason to be careful Somey. This woman is a fool. She could read things and figure it out. She's not smart enough, but most people aren't very smart, so there you have it. But to do this to a professor at MIT is unforgivable.

Anyone feel like writing to her?

Well, I live in constant fear of private investigators, so
at least you can comfort yourself by noting that you
are not as paranoid as some.

By Wikipedia's own standards, the Arbitration Committee is harassing Professor Hewitt. First they set up an attack site, the Arbitration case page, now they're retaliating off-site for an on-site dispute.

By Wikipedia's own logic, all members of the Arbitation Committee and other administrators who engaged in this harassment campaign should be banned (along with their sockpuppets.)

Alternately, they can just take the mask off and say, "Hey, alright, you caught us. It's only bad when you do it to one of us. When we do it to others, it's just grand. Happy now?"

Oh I think it is WAY worse that that, Prov. They are paying "US "back. They are using this ridiculous unwarranted story to try to down out the corruption stories that are rolling out of the Register like boulders during a landslide.

This is big time payback. Press payback. They threw Pf. Hewitt to the media "wolves" (named Jenny), to try to mask the two big Register stories with real corruption being revealed. If "Jenny" had half a brain, she'd have contextualized that story (which was all about the corruption of the Arbcom) with this man's story.

Does it occur to anyone to be a coincidence that Wikimedia is in London? That Jimbo and Sue Gardiner and David Gerard are sitting around trying to make up ways to cover their collective asses? No coincidence here.

Wikipedia has never gone to the media with a story of a ban, or of whatever. Obviously, they did this time. This woman doesn't know an ANI from an MRI. She doesn't know an ARBCOM from her armpit. Someone fed her this story, and she wrote it without even the attribution of a Wikipedia pseudonym, and she misunderstood "conflict of interest" to mean that he was "overstating his own importance" and didn't contextualize that he'd been arguing with 16 year olds. She said "all his colleagues think he's trying to make himself more important than he is" but I don't think she's been interviewing professors at MIT or in the Ivy league. I think she met (again) with (maybe) Charles Matthews, and suddenly he's the judging colleague, because he's a math professor (and a billion times less distinguised that Hewitt, and in no position to judge him). The "colleagues" of Hewitt she writes about are Wikipedians.

She maybe met with Jimbo, who maybe told her "how serious this is" or some ridiculous thing. There had never been an Arbcom session that got leaked to the press. Jimbo and company are scared. The Guardian was had. HAD. Had like a turkey at Thanksgiving. Hewitt is media cannon fodder in the Wikipedia wars, after the Battle of Durova (which they lost) and the stock market story of Byrne.

It makes me sick, but Jimbo is revealing his hand.

On what planet? Professor Kyle Gann spoke of his frustration of being harassed by a 15 year old.
Reliable or trustworthy? Because he didn't follow Wikipedia's not-clearly published COI guidelines?

Get me a bucket. No, get me a big giant stick.


Anyone feel like throttling her? Writing her. How about physically holding her stupid face next to a computer and showing her evidence of their vile disgusting practices that she's given approving Guardian sanction?

"And we would have gotten away with it if it wasn't for you meddling kids."

"The banning of Hewitt shows that the academic community is in fact actively involved in editing Wikipedia "

So she takes the example of one person, and expands that to "the academic community"?

In that first puff piece from the meetup, didn't one person explain how they loved writing feature articles about their heroes?

And then others love to write hack biographies about people they despise.

It occurs to me that it's hard to write objectively about oneself, about those one idolizes, or about those one despises.

Sure. Well if he was banned, then it had to be a banning by his peers and intellectual equals, right? A logical conclusion. <smirk> This woman is a MOron to end all MOrons.

Oh, I'd have loved to be a fly on the wall with whoever told her to write this. I'm thinking Jimbo. Or Gerard. With Slim and Matthews chiming in.

I'm also taking a wild (highly credible) guess that she went to THIS Wikimeetup, and met with the godking and his goon squad (who'd feverishly been burning the midnight oil, plotting how to bury the "mailing list Wikipedia corruption story"), who graced her with his wonderful presence, and talked "off the record" with her. She's obviously quite "bowled over" with something - as she doesn't even bother to excuse the complete lack of referencing. Except for one VERY SLOPPY mention of a name Kowalski with no linkage of the name to any part of Wikipedia (Kowalski who??? is that the gardener of the hotel hosting Wikimeetup? Is it the maid? Who?) Talk about a crank.

The standard for what makes a "journalist" in continental Europe is usually much lower in Europe than in the U.S. Many French, German, etc. journalists never even finished university. I had thought that it was pretty high in the U.K., but maybe I overestimated.

Having said that a good university education never stopped a human being from writing like a blathering moron - much in the manner of Jenny G. Look at Durova, Jimbo, etc etc etc.

That was pretty much my point with Wikipedia Review. As a paid encyclopedist, working for between $49 and $99 a shot, I honestly felt that my team and I would bring to the table just the right amount of indifference to the subject, and just write a factual, impartial article about a notable entity that wasn't yet in Wikipedia. Less than $100 for a couple hours of work, it would be nearly impossible to generate any level of idolatry or spite, which in the end would provide for a reasonable expectation of NPOV to emerge.

A pretty simple concept, but Guy Chapman was hell-bent on snuffing it out.

Greg