I almost put this in the blog forum, but that is merely the means, not the meat, of the topic.

Kelly Martin claims in her delightful blog that she has leaks on the Foundations internal mailing list, a list of about a hundred members if I remember correctly:

http://nonbovine-ruminations.blogspot.com/...f-wikicult.html

She's become such a sockpuppeteer, as admitted in many of her posts, even going as far as to have had a list on a text document, so it's obviously quite a few. She tells Jimbo that he can find leaks but it won't solve his problem, since there will always be more leaks. Maybe it's just a shadow of loyalty of the "old crowd" to Kelly combined with newfound respect that many WP doubters have for her. However, my theory is that she has a sockpuppet who was trustworthy enough to get on that internal list.

So, thoughts? Or can someone maybe explain more about this list?

I think everyone who has been around Wikipedia for a while has a number of sockpuppets. It is allowed. It all depends on whether you abuse them or not. My experience is that most long-time Wikipedians who are not ideological warriors do not abuse their sockpuppets. Rather they use their sockpuppets to compartmentalize their edits to disuade problem users from stalking them around to unrelated subjects. I can say that this strategy has saved me a significant amount of grief and time/energe on Wikipedia.

As for Kelly's source[s] - remember that her blog is widely read and she's perhaps the loudest Wikipedian in history. If someone on those secret lists wants something leaked, the obvious solution is to use Kelly.

Also, I know Kelly and (board member) Kat used to be very tight; I think Kat nominated Kelly for adminship.

Finally, Kelly is an expert social climber, having risen almost to the top of Wikipedia's power structure despite having created almost nothing of value to the project. So I'm sure she has lot's of peoples ears and is an expert manipuator.

Kelly Martin video

"Never again," indeed!

There's a topic?

Oh, I see - it's supposed to be about whether or not Kelly has actual "informers" passing her stuff from internal-l, or whether her "sources" are actually her own alternate accounts/identities. Well, I think it's the former - if they were her own accounts, she wouldn't be so cavalier about revealing the fact that there are leaks. Instead, she'd probably use an alternate identity to pass the info on to someone else, who would then post about it, and she'd pick up on that person as the leak recipient.

Whereas, if people are passing info to her surreptitiously, then she has little to lose by using the info, and indeed it behooves her to point out that there are leaks, because there will presumably be a purge/shakeout campaign during which people's loyalty is questioned, yada yada yada. The source might be "caught" eventually, but that's very unlikely under the circumstances.

Ultimately, internal-l will probably become something more like a private announcement list for the more prominent long-term admins, arb-commers, and OTRS volunteers... and the really internal foundation discussions will move to a new list.

I moved the irrelevance to a new thread and there's not much left!

There's a lesson here there somewhere....

It might be as simple as "You can't maintain an interesting thread on rumors without the generation of additional facts." Of course that never stopped Fox News.

There will always be leaks and rumors of leaks. What can you do?

Does Jimbo honestly think that he can get a group of people together to collaborate on something and expect no one to be concerned enough to leak information?

Bad things have and likely are being discussed through these mailing lists. Eventually someone's going to get disgusted at what is discussed there and leak it to Kelly Martin or someone else.

That's what whistle-blowing is.



Never say anything about Wikipedia on a private mailing list or private venue because eventually it will get out?

Is that a question? A power-mad control freak who thinks he has the right to publish whatever he wants about whoever he wants, including kings, princes and president's men, is worried about the rank and file of the troops? Come on.
And they'll be booted out on.... their booty.

(or some poor innocent sucker will be, having been duely falsely accused by...... )

and it is NOT welcome here (hangs out virtual sign on the mailing list)


My "lesson" was actually "when you delete the off topic conversation, there's not much left of a thread" (to Guy), but since you mention it, yeah, whatever you say to anyone, can and will be repeated. So if you don't want it told, don't tell it. For written material, multiply that advice times 20. For a mailing list, multiply it by 1000.