That's it exactly, isn't it?

In the days before The Social Web Revolution™, there was a reasonably clear distinction between recognition and notoriety. The distinction is still there, but it's obscured by the web's immediacy and cheap accessibility. So, the classic hypernarcissist personality can't see the distinction, or doesn't want to.

And to make matters worse, everything on the "social web" is so hopelessly based on instant gratification that a hypernarcissist who's in his mid-20's - who grew up with this state of affairs and perhaps can't actually remember a time when things were any different - is simply lost in it. It might not even have occurred to him that some people wouldn't respect and admire him merely for his ability to get attention by behaving in ways that demonstrate moral bankruptcy and sociopathic tendencies.

Ultimately, that's the genius of Wikipedia: It panders to precisely that sort of person, and the pandering is built right into the software. It's literally the very core of the system.

Good, that's settled, this Turkey's done — let's accord him now his richly deserved oblivion and move on to mo bettah subjects.

Jon

Well, it's 404'd now, so I guess David saw sense and took it down. I've no idea as to what he was trying to achieve with that blog entry in the first place, other than trying to garner attention

I don´t really want to start a new thread, "Shankbone vs. Alison", so I post it here:
Shankers have been trolling Alisons talkpage, claiming his innocence in posting pictures of Palestinian kids with toy guns; he claims he only put that picture on the "Toy gun" article.
Not true.
On Christmas eve (no less) he put the picture of the boy with the toy gun into the "Nazareth" article see here.
An editor who, if we are to believe her user-page, actually lives in Nazareth, angrily removes the picture, with the edit line removing image of boy with toy gun and restoring image of souvenir shop - what the hell kind of POV photo is that exactly Shankbone?

Shankbone has also been low-level edit-warring over at Children and minors in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, trying to insert the same picture there. And again. (With help from User:Canadian Monkey.)

And why I have spend 5 minutes of my life on this, I really don´t know

Yeah; let´s move on.

Yeah, I've been ignoring the guy and his nonsense. No sense in feeding him & besides, I've much better things to do in RL

What he doesn't realize re. Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez is that I became involved with her article as a result of a distraught message relating to oversight. While I cannot discuss the details of course, and it didn't fall under Oversight remit, but I did my best at the time to limit the damage that David had been doing with her BLP on Wikipedia. He's pretty-much had it in for me since then. Ms. Valdes-Rodriguez was concerned at the time that he was beginning to obsess with her. Needless to say, Mr. Shankbone is totally unaware of the oversight background to this, nor of the subject's pleas. This was last February or thereabouts. It's all in the edit history.

She said on her blog at the time;

QUOTE

I stupid[ly] set about trying to rid Wikipedia of the sexuality stuff, in hopes of minimizing the very real danger to me and my family at the hands of these obsessed and dangerous detractors. It only made the issue bigger, in particular because a man named David Shankbone, who is a self-proclaimed editor at Wikipedia (and frustrated writer) became obsessed with me too.

This is the kind of stuff that Mr. Shankbone thinks is okay to place, unsourced*, into someone's BLP, and explicitly against their wishes. Folks already know all this. And what's missing from this picture? Kindness, consideration, decency.

BTW - he's back messing about with Seth Finkelstein again. Why???

(* yes, unsourced. The 'sources' cited were utterly unacceptable)

Notice how he misspells the word "gun" in the photo's filename as "guy," so that it would get past the POV-patrollers when he uploaded it. He's clever, I'll give him that much!

Unfortunately, as you say, he's also a self-serving liar. If only he could use his innate cleverness for goodness, instead of badness...


Because the in-game reputational capital he grew by "uploading 3,000 photos" has been spent, and now he needs a new source.

If you'd read the request, you'd have noticed that it was not on the basis of being offensive, but on the basis of not being wikimedia-related - and, indeed, except for a few "Image via Wikimedia Commons", there is no mention of anything "wiki" at all in seven pages of archives.



To be fair, libeling a publication by claiming that something said on the record in an interview was a fabrication doesn't show a lot of kindness, consideration, or decency, either.

His lack of empathy just continues to surprise me. It shouldn't, but it does.

That's true, but there's the matter of two wrongs an' all that ...

(and the 'fabrication' was her own, according to herself)

If Shankbone isn't careful, he'll go and piss off a genuine spin-smearer and then he'll realise how amateur his attempts really are.

Mutual Perplexity


When two antagonists exhibit either a lack of mutual empathy, or a degree of perplexity over the other guy's lack of empathy, it is plausible to suspect that both parties are in a state of perplexity.

And if both parties acknowledge that they are in reciprocal and complementary states of perplexity, then they can have empathy for the other's comparable state.

Why is afterellen.com an unreliable source, Allison? Is Viacom not subjecting its online content to editorial review?

Hmmmm. It looks as though User:Seth Finkelstein and his "on wiki" contributions got "wished into the cornfield". How very convenient for Slim Shanky.

From Seth's talkpage:



Shanky has no idea about the UK media. The Guardian caring about COI when God-knows how many of their staff are card-carrying members of the Labour Party? Ha ha ha!

And now its back. Sanitized for our protection?

People will expect a picture of Mr. Chapman, then... or at least a toy version.

Probably not - this is Viacom we're talking about - but I think you're missing the point. In the interview in question, "AVR" sez:

Why would you assume that a person who claims to be a bisexual and then claims to be "living a straight life" in the exact same sentence is a reliable source about her own sexual orientation? Only an adamantly pro-LGBT person would make that assumption. She sure sounds pretty damn inconsistent, and therefore unreliable, to me, but in any event Shankers never mentions the "living a straight life" part at all in his attempts to change the article, does he? Ehh, nope.

At the same time, this inconsistency was characterized as a "struggle," and that she was "embroiled in a bitter controversy," which is basically "original research" at its worst. For all we know, she might be maintaining or even promoting the inconsistency just for the hell of it - doesn't that sound like it might be loads of fun to you?

Mr. Shankbone is now on the ArbCom's radar. In the past, that wouldn't have meant anything. With this new ArbCom, however, it does. Since Shankbone is unable or unwilling to change his attitude, I predict that he will eventually be banned from the English Wikipedia.

If, as has been suggested, David "Shankbone" Miller is an incorrigible remorseless sociopath and a bully lacking empathy for his objectified victims, then his case could become a template for addressing the rest of the Cluster B crowd that has long dominated WikiCulture.

David, I think you should carefully consider what FayssalF just told you.

I think she's the most reliable source possible about her own sexual orientation. Perhaps short of getting out the probes and Shanky-style pics As a bisexual it can't always be counted on that you will have partners of both sexes at all times, and anyway you might not feel like it that year/decade or whatever. If a straight person isn't in a relationship, does their orientation become 'asexual'? No, because they still have the same thoughts etc.

Not saying I agree with Shanker's actions though- this highlights the whole problem of the wiki or of the media in general, the cost of 'fame' perhaps.

He seems to think all the media should go by the NPOV policy of wikipedia. Do you see Ben Goldacre spending half the time refuting homeopathy for instance, and the other half defending it?

Oh I just thought- Seth was open about his interactions with wiki from quite early on. He wrote a whole article called I'm on wikipedia, get me out of here a whole two and a half years ago. So he doesn't have any relationship with wiki that he hasn't made known.

It's a wiki-sense of the word 'objective'- 'objective' is used as a synonym of wiki-neutral, and it's said that Seth cannot be 'objective' about wikipedia, whereas to other people objective means real, and describing his experience is objective; describing what exists and happens on wiki.

Objective reporting is one of the holy grails of journalism. The concept of objective reporting is widely appreciated among mass media professionals (even if it is unevenly practiced).

The problem with NPOV is that it sets up a tug-of-war among factions with biased points of view. A tug-of-war is in a neutral state if all competing forces are in net balance. If one side increases their tug, the other side has to increase proportionately to counterbalance it. But a high-tension shouting match is not the same as objective reporting on the contest.

An objective report would describe the tug-of-war without amplifying it.

WikiCulture tends to amplify the contest rather than characterize it in an objective manner.

What's gotten into Moulton with these concise, highly insightful posts?

As soon as HE starts following the NPOV policy ON-WIKI, then I'll take him seriously.

One day, maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, and probably not soon, Moulton will discover the triode — and then we'll really get cranking.

And I mean that in the good sense of the word …

Ja Ja