Wikipedia kills Greatest Show On Earth
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By Cade Metz in San Francisco → More by this author Back in December, we told you the tale of an epic online spat pitting the cult of Wikipedia against the ...

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From the lede by Cade Metz:

A must read article.

Lesson Learned? —

Any Abuse That Can Happen, Does Happen.

I apologize to those readers who have already learned this lesson.

Jon

And here is a whole thread of abuse - JzG and others' historical statements on Wordbomb's claims

For obvious reasons, I have a problem with FT2 saying (quoted in the Register article) that the handling of the Mantanmoreland case was dealt with "as routine". If the Mantanmoreland saga with all its cover-ups, retaliation, and deception is "routine", then Wikipedia truly is in big trouble.

That gets back to what WAS 4.250 called "the way we do things around here."

The dictionary term for "the way we do things around here" is culture.

Many observers have remarked that I'm not well-adapted to the prevailing and predominant culture at the English Wikipedia.

In fact I'm quite allergic to that culture, as it has manifested itself to me over the past 10 months.

Byrne's boys have emails written by/to Gary detailling all his Mantan/sock shenanigans.

The elephant in the room still, lol.



but its ok for IPtittiesGuy to say all that on WP about a real life person without anything resembling facts to back it up.

Because Bagley uses "sitemeter", just like Gary does, just like WP does, just like any blog does, to track IP hits. and that's called "spyware" and dirty tricks by the WP idiots.

Doing what Linda Mack, Gary Weiss, Jimmy Wales, David Gerard, and others have tried to pull off on honest wikipedians in all this is a dirty trick.

Let's be perfectly fair here.

It's expected that a website you visit will be able to see your IP address. This is normal. What's not expected is that someone will be able to get your IP address by sending you an e-mail. Using an embedded invisible image to do so is called a 'web bug' and is widely seen as a dirty trick - one most people associate with spammers.

Or were you not aware that he had done that?

Let's be perfectly fair here.

It was unheard of for the originating IP address to be missing from the headers in an email until Gmail came along. Yahoo web mail, as well as Hotmail web mail, both go to the extra trouble of re-inserting the originating IP address, since any web-based email service isn't automatically bound to the SMTP protocol.

Gmail doesn't bother doing this. That's why Wikipediots who need to hide their high crimes and misdemeanors are careful to only use Gmail. Google is the original culprit here. Wikipedia admins were quick to take advantage of this, making them accessories after the fact.

Under such circumstances, the recipients of messages from miscreants that arrive under the cloak of Gmail are entitled to use any and all means necessary to obtain an originating IP address.

That includes collecting IRC hostmasks and making them available to anti-Wikipedia researchers. I now have 33,000. They are searchable on Wikipedia-Watch and it looks like Google has also indexed them by now.

By the way, I'm curious about a couple of IRC hostmasks that show up for you:

Random832 (n=random@mail.[redacted, but begins with the letters "cal"].com) 63.173.[rest redacted]
Random (n=random@mail.[redacted, but begins with the letters "cal"].com) 63.173.[rest redacted]

Is this your employer in Indianapolis, or what?

Well, I hope this is the coda to the whole story, and trust me, I was NOT angling for a quote in this whole thing.

This is a disappointing coda though.

ArbCom was clever to give him a hard slap on the wrist and shrug it off to the community. If they had done anything more or less, it might have been a story back then. "Financial reporter convicted of Wikicrimes" or "Wikipedia blind to blatant Wall Street abuse" (the evidence was absurdly strong).

Instead they kinda said, "yeah, there's a problem, but we're not going to say it's a conflict of interest problem, we just think a topic ban is best at this time." By taking the third way, they avoided publicity, and let the story dies a quiet death months later, taking only one page of coverage from Cade Metz, who almost certainly cares more than any mainstream media.

Nothing will change, which is sad.

i was aware that he had done that, and I'm also aware that before gmail, you could see anyone's IP address in the headers. If I send an email to someone, I think it's only fair they can find out what IP it came from.

Associated with spammers? Really? How so? Spammers don't harvest IP addresses, they harvest email addresses. IP addresses don't do shit for spammers. For "hackers", that's another story.

and are you aware of what transpired between Judd Bagley, Gary Weiss, and Linda Mack immediately prior to Judd sending an email with a sitemeter image in it?

And are you aware that Gary and his buddies were doing the same thing? LOL.

You WP assholes getting uppity about what Judd did to give you a taste of your own medicine makes me laugh. It really pisses off the IP Checker Gods at WP when they get put on equal footing.

Judd did nothing wrong. Linda Mack pulled a crappy stunt against him first.

On WikBack (remember that place?) Tony Sidaway, in his new persona as "Anticipation of a New Lover's Arrival" reads that Mantanmoreland has eventually been banned, and writes:

That statement illustrates how insane the prominent Wikipedians are about this business. I mean, that statement is surely insane? After all the bullshit - Sidaway simply wipes himself down and carries on with the abuse.

Wikipediots are really weird people.

Gary is a committed sockpuppeter, and apparently a rather ingenious one, so he may yet find ways to manipulate the project. However, manipulating the particular articles at the center of the controversy will be harder than ever, perhaps impossible, given the number of eyes now watching them and the intense scrutiny to which any new editors on those articles will be subjected. One would also think that Gary would now be extremely wary of further involvement in Wikipedia for reasons related to his reputation, but one would also have thought that before his latest sockpuppet was revealed. Perhaps the most crucial difference, though, is that it will now be politically impossible for anyone to defend him. Gary would have to be truly ingenious indeed to find a viable way to pursue his agenda on Wikipedia now.

That's the kicker. Enough people were watching him before, but he had powerful friends willing to protect him. It took a long time to erode that base, but the relatively uncontroversial indefinite ban conclusively shows that he spent his last cent of political capital on the last sockpuppet.

"Wordbomb" is still a profanity, mind you, and no one would ever admit that undisclosed COI like Mantanmoreland's will infect the project no matter how many Gregory Kohs they ban, but Gee Dub's protectors are no longer interested in defending him.

Sunlight is a great disinfectant.

The spotlight has turned of late to a number of shady corners of Wikipedia.

To my mind, that's all to the good.

Tomstoner-Mantanmoreland-LastExit predated wordbomb.

Sidaway is an idiot.