So here I am looking at the origins of the "Gary Weiss" article, and I can see that it was indeed largely edited at first by Mantanmoreland and one of his aliases, and all of a sudden it jumps from MM editing it on 19 May 2006 to SlimVirgin protecting it on 24 July 2006. Am I reading it correctly that they erased two months of editing history? Can someone give me the story here, minus the drama?

I think the edits before the protection were probably Wordbomb's in which he notes that Mantanmoreland is Gary Weiss and is editing Wikipedia. SV deleted the revisions, protected the article and indef blocked Wordbomb.

Does that help?

(someone correct me if i'm wrong, please)

It's not unusual for articles to go long periods of time between edits, but in theory protection is supposed to be applied for a reason. The two month gap between the last visible edit and the protection thus suggests that some edits were deleted. I suppose it's possible that someone saw some conversation about editing the article elsewhere on the Internet and decided to preemptively protect, but that seems unlikely.

Incidentally, the edits were oversighted as opposed to standard delete-and-restore, so they are not accessible to anyone without the oversight permission.

The article has no deleted edits, so if there were at somepoint they have been memory holed since.

Yep, looks like about 19 edits were siphoned off by SV in July and August 2006, then they were oversighted in September. Who knows what they said. Probably the same damn thing that we all know now anyway. Mantanmoreland=Weiss.

Oh I didnt notice that.

Surely just a coincidence that a person that PatrickByrne once made cry, 20 years ago, over a chip (french fry!) and a put-on accent is doing all that Byrne-hater supporting on WP. But, staying classy, swalwell, has unofficially recused themselves from the JzG-Does-His-Best-Chris-Crocker Show

I'd like to see a statistical analysis on what are the chances of that.