Several editors on Sir Fozzie's investigation page are calling for a ban of Mantanmoreland/Samiharris et al.

I don't think this is necessary. Mantanmoreland is a longtime contributor to many subjects besides just Overstock etc., and often a good one.

Suggested remedies:

1) Mantanmoreland, under any username, is banned from short selling-related and Overstock-related articles and their talk pages.
2) Mantanmoreland, under any username, is forbidden from posting potentially defamatory or otherwise derogatory comments about Judd Bagley or Patrick Byrne on Wikipedia.
3) Mantanmoreland, under any username, must strictly observe COI related to his bio (whether or not he publically acknowledges who he is.)
4a) Mantanmoreland must admit to his sockpuppetry.
4b) Mantanmoreland must provide a complete list of his sockpuppets, past and present.
4c) Mantanmoreland must disclose which administrators (if any) knew about it (since ordinary editors are not charged with enforcing policy.)

Of theses, 4a-4c are arguably the most important. He's hardly the only entrenched sockpuppeteer, or the most powerful. "Assuming good faith" fails in the face of concerted socking. The community needs to understand that this is happening, and see how it's done.

Without such an admission, or if any part of said admission is proven inaccurate or incomplete, a total ban is in order.

WordBomb, you stated earlier that, once Weiss goes away, you'll follow. Many Wikipedians would like very much for you to go away. Would you have any problem with Mantanmoreland continuing to edit Wikipedia under the conditions I've suggested above?

Speaking for myself:

A) Gary already was told to stop socking abusively in 2006. He didn't.

B) F-ck him like WP f-cked me, PtMcCain, Cla68(Rfa), and probably others who ran into this odious person on Midddle East Articles, Religion articles, Financial articles, and his own BLP.

C) No one editor, no many how many film noir BLP's he creates, is that important out of 10,000's of others, to let continue while others are banned for farting in the wrong direction.

He was given much more rope than many more productive, civil, and fair editors were.

I'm not going back to work for jimbo for free either way, so this is coming from someone who is free to speak their mind and not intimidated by the culture of fear that some really good but quiet editors are under as they kiss the ring and smell the glove, and get bullied around.

And you guys check out his "buddy" DoRight that just reared his SPA head back up; Gary's probably got an admin sock too for all I know.

* administrative note: disabled emoticons - Nathan

Actually, I think you're being too hasty Piperdown. The quality of his edits are a good excuse for allowing 4a-c as an alternative. If Mantanmoreland actually named accounts, it would practically be an indictment against certain administrators. To inject Law & Order parlance into this--It would be very wise for Wikiprosecutors to flip this witness. That way they could instead go after the bosses who knowingly allowed him to operate.

How is this not amazing and comical all in one fell swoop??? !!!

Why not ask an even more important and more prudent question...(i.e., how is that
anyone "banned" and deleted and blocked, can't simply start a new account and move on?)

How insane is it for anyone to spend a minute worrying about a throw away account?

This is why places like Wikipedia make no sense in any real world course of events.

Not a soul can truly be held accountable for anything.

A fake profile and puppets of same, are all, in fact, fake and cannot be held as reliable or anything else.

The whole scheme of things is dellusional and not at all sane.

I am quite certain that anyone editing under any name can come back at anytime and

be a new fake person.

I'm with WoW on this one... Even if they do decide to impose some sort of sanction on ol' Gary for what he's done, would it really matter? He's been known to use all sorts of proxies and anonymizing services, mobile broadband connections, even remote connections to colocated (and presumably virtual) machines. He knows perfectly well how to evade detection by IP or software configuration, and all the evidence piling up against him now only serves to teach him how to avoid making the same mistakes in future.

Wikipedia has a built-in imperative to protect this dude, if only to ensure the cult's survival and keep the acolytes free of unpleasant doubts and rebellious thoughts. His mastery of them is too complete - it's well beyond simply having them ignore or deny the accusations of collusion... I don't see how they can change this situation without accompanying changes to their culture, not to mention the dressing-down or even removal of several key "cabal"-level old-guard admins.

Basically, they're never going to get rid of him.

Somey, between this and the 14 Daniel Brandt Affairs, is it just me or is Wikipedia run by a bunch of poll-taking teenage idiots who will cater to whatever is the easy way out?

I see no rudder, no inherent ethical standards whatsoever, no consistency; it's a high school class election but with Watergate firepower.

All run by a smalltime porn site operator and his unstable band of unemployable sociopaths who are out of their league.

Why don't they just throw in the pretense towel, go reality show, and capitalize on something for once? Lol.
This is like watching a family of Ozark Mountain Lottery Winners darwin themselves off the planet.

So involved was my response to your questions I thought it might make sense to start a new thread on the topic of what WordBomb wants. <----- (click that link to go there).

I hope you don't mind.

Cool Hand Luke:

A little less than what I'd suggested, but a similar way of thinking. In the scheme of things, it doesn't really matter what happens to Mantanmoreland. More important is the self-knowledge that the community will either admit or not admit to itself. The best thing that Mantanmoreland can do for the project at this point is to tell the truth. A community which understands the value of self-knowledge will rightly welcome him as the prodigal son for having told it.

in what way has Gary or any of his socks been "productive"? Have you looked at his editing history? Are you serious?

Productive is inciting wikiriots, productive in flaunting every rule in the book in good editors' faces, and productive in intimidating his opponents and wikipedia. Productive in making WP out to be a joke as the media expose's hit the fan. So how many times has he legally threatened Wikipedia? Ask.

Study the Ptmccain - Matanmoreland incident.
See any patterns?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/Ptmccain
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=...&action=history



FloNight is a liar.

And User:heatedissuepuppet did the same thing to Sparkzilla/Devlin, and with a puppet to boot, and got full approval from Slimmy to do so. And was editing from Japan in a very similar way to the COI'ed editor going up against Devlin in a POV war.

The Ptmccain incident is especially perverse.

Early on, when Mantanmoreland was still pretending to be a Catholic (and thereby uniquely suited to mediate the "Martin Luther was an anti-Semite" debate in which Doright (Weiss's first account) was stalemated, Lutheran scholar Ptmccain gave Mantanmoreland a barnstar.

However, about two weeks later, Mantanmoreland pulled the rug out from under Ptmccain and became rather adversarial toward him, at which time the barnstar was "de-gifted."

In response, Mantanmoreland dropped what would go on to become one of his trademark bombs: rv vandalism.

Two days after that, apparently having barnstars on the brain, Mantanmoreland gave one to Doright.

The conflict with Ptmccain escalated with SlimVirgin apparently getting relevant evidence Oversighted along the way.

As you can imagine, Ptmccain was banned. Yet Mantanmoreland keeps the barnstar on his page to this day.

I find the Catholic personae very Essjay-ish. But I don't think even Essjay stooped to socking abusively combined with a false POV personae.

Putting forth erroneous information on your user page to give the appearance of neutrality in swaying a debate.
He wouldn't do that, would he? Nah. Too unethical. Too Essjayish.

It's one thing for people to offer biographical details of themselves on their WP pages. Usually it is to establish credibility, or to make friendsters. In the case of Slimmy, I still don't know wtf is up with the bouncing balls, dancing girlies, and fluttering birds.

But when it's done to deviously put on NPOV airs, well, I just find that to be something that shouldn't be allowed on WP. The people who ran off Essjay thought so to.

And this was to done to help ensure that a large portion of Luther's BLP was full of a clique's agenda on WP - to "expose" whehter somewhat justified or not in practice more suitable to other places - as many historical and popular figures as possible as contributing to an eventual mass genocide, in some sort of WP-revenge jihad.

Why not go over to Muhammad and write "he beats chicks!" while you're at it, right?

and they say this guy is a benefit to WP.

This is a really smart suggestion. I think that this witness should be flipped for the greater good. Mantanmoreland has always been very obvious and fairly restricted in his abuse. As someone else mentioned, FloNight flagrant lying and abuse of adminship in an attempt to cover for Mantanmoreland is much worse.

Like with Nixon and Watergate or Bill Clinton and Lewinski or even I Lewis Libby and Valerie Plame, it is the cover up of minor crimes by those with power and community respect that are often the bigger issue than the original minor crimes themselves.

RfC opened: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Req.../Mantanmoreland

Now Durova is "neutral" even though she suspected socking three days ago, and evidence has only piled up since then. I hope this isn't buried.

Durova is there to do her best to put on the appearance of a fair trial even though the game is Jimmyrigged. Don't forget that. She is not going to turn against the team. Ever. Do not AGF when you've already been once bitten. We're talking about the person that banned innocent people on the flimsiest of the flimsey (like the rest of the team does), and only apologised/es about it to suit her WP career. She's seen Wordbomb's stuff. They all know what the score is. And it's funny to watch the posing. I don't mean to demean the others who are trying their best to carry out a fair due process. For once. I realise that on-WP investigators have their hands tied behind their backs with what evidence is admissable, and are getting beaten over the head with a wikistick the whole time this is going on.

Given the evidence (dovetailed editing, similar phraseology, shared interests, past history of sockpuppetry, lack of past remorse) any other user would have been banned using the "duck test". Hell, any other user would have been banned if he or she showed the same pattern of denial that was evidenced in the the LastExit sockpuppet incident unless s/he fessed up and begged for forgiveness If he isn't banned now the ArbComm is going to lose whatever credibility it has left. I wouldn't be surprised if ArbComm inaction against Mantanmoreland results in a Community Ban being used instead.

What should be giving Mantanmoreland cause for worry is SV's failure to publicly intervene on his behalf. That shows he's fucked himself to such an extent that not even SV can spin a tale to save him (or she's not willing to put whatever reputation she has left on the line for him). JzG blew his reputation a long time ago so his backing of Mantanmoreland is completely worthless.

I have no doubt though that SV is burning up the backchannels with emails to ArbComm and other emails to FloNight with detailed instructions on how to proceed.

Oh and I forgot the "Classic Sockpuppet Mistake" ™ - forgetting who you are logged in as and referring to an earlier edit made by "you" that was actually made by the other sock.