Wow. Patrick Byrne reads the wikipediot act for David Gerard. Fascinating to see yet another intellectual heavyweight wade into Jimmy's Kiddie Pool full of usenet freaks, teenage shut-ins, and quiet-house refugees from life....
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Well, David Gerard, I see precisely the same old "Argument from Stern Authority" that corrupted the discourse so badly that it took your community about a year to see something that is blindly obvious to everyone now. I would have thought that having on your hands three articles whose history more or less indicts this project (including one on me) would have taught you a little humility. Instead, you repeat tired claims in the hope it makes them sound true. The fact is, Judd followed the rules in trying to expose MM, and SlimVirgin posed as a neutral arbiter but betrayed that role. Your founder, Jimbo Wales, interceded and asked the entire community to take his word that he had checked into it, and MM was not a sock-puppet. Judd/WordBomb got crafty, indeed, but in the end proved that SlimVirgin was wrong and Jimbo's word was false. Bombast all you please, but the fact remains: Judd proved that your system itself was in the wrong, but had to step outside your system to prove it. Was he right to do so? I think yes: The fact that Wikipedia still holds as a constitutional principle that WordBomb is wrong, but prevents precisely one person from engaging in that debate (WordBomb himself), tells me not only that he was right before, but also, that the deeper significances of ''l'affaire du MM'' has still not sunk in. Until you permit a free debate on this subject, you may as well be lecturing me sternly about the unanimity of popular support for Kim Jong-il in North Korea. Besides that, most of your claims about Judd are just flat falsehoods, which everyone would understand if Judd was actually permitted to defend himself in the discussion rooms of "The Encyclopedia that Anyone Can Edit!" And lastly, No, I will not intercede with the press and Judd. Partly that is because Judd is his own boss these days. Partly because they are calling him these days, trying to get their heads around this story, and he has waited for that for a long time. But mostly it's because it appears that Dave Gerard's kind of nonsense still corrupts the discourse here, so Wikipedia will never address some fundamental truths about itself, so someone else is going to have to write it for them. I regret that - I am not a vengeful guy - I don't give a toss about the page on me. I see many here are honest and straight, and seem to want to do what is right. But I still see other playground bullies toss their weight around here, and as a result this community let a cover-up persist. You have taken care of the MM problem, but you do not yet see that this all happened because you jettisoned basic procedural fairness, and until this community reclaims it I am not inclined to request that Judd not answer the phone. As far as I can tell, the free press is the only thing that got this community acting with any decency so far. Respectfully [[User:PatrickByrne|PatrickByrne]] ([[User talk:PatrickByrne|talk]]) 10:00, 31 May 2008 (UTC)
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=...oldid=216160861read User:PatrickByrne's recent user contribution history, that's one wikiportfolio I really enjoy wikistalking. These days he's showing John Nevard up for the shallow Fox-News-Depth moron that he is.
