FOXNews

Wikipedia has become home base for a loose worldwide network of pedophiles who are campaigning to spin the popular online encyclopedia in ...

http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2010/06/25/...e-on-wikipedia/

Working Link

What's the deal with the GøøGøøNøøs Middle Man no longer working?

Jon

Oh, this is going to have the Foundation in a tussle for the next week or two.

Hey, I didn't know Squeak was a pedo?

Sue Gardner obviously has no idea what "zero tolerance" means. I wonder if she ran her reply past her Assistant Director before sending it out?

She probably thinks "zero tolerance" means something like "really cheap drunk".

Jon

Yet another hit for "Wikipedia is NOT censored." Well, yes it is, but only crappily and patchily.

To put it more correctly: it isn't censored as well as its CEO claims to the media, but it is more censored than its official policy page states.

It's rare that you get official hypocrisy simultaneously, in both directions. Hey, it's Wikipedia. If anybody can be dishonest in two different ways on the same subject, it's them.

Rut roh, Raggy! It looks to me that Jana owes Squeakers a BIG apology. Squeak was actually the "hysterical antiped" who nominated the bio of notorious pedo Marthijn Uittenbogaard "for wikipedia scrapheap". Even more ironic in light of Squeak's last post here at The Review. As far as I know, SqueakBox has been a clear and consistent anti-pedo voice at Wikipedia.

I hope this is not indicative of the accuracy of the rest of the article. It otherwise seems better researched and written than her first two articles.

Ms. Winters seems to be talking about a "BoyChat" user using the pseudonym "SqueakBox." There is no reason to think that that is the same guy using the pseudonym here and on WP. In fact WP User:Squeak Box seems vaguely right headed in such matters although he has lots of problems letting go of WP preconceptions.

To make matters more confusing the PJ guy interviewed is Von Erck who's name so vividly suggests, at least to me, Erick Moeller, the Dr. Strangelove who advises Sue Gardner on free culture things from his position as Assistant Director of WMF.

It's pretty coincidental that one squeakbox would be on WP nominating the AFD, while another, evil squeakbox would be on a pedoforum rallying the forces of darkness. I mean, it's not even that great a pen name. Much more likely that she misread her own notes and transposed a character. Ruh roh, indeed.


While they're both ercksome in their own way, they're not easily confused - totally different species of jackass.

I agree with all of this except the first sentence. While it is possible that the editor trying to have a pedo's bio deleted and the pedo activist trying to stop the deletion were both using the same pseudonym, it seems to me far more likely that Winters mentioned the wrong pseudonym in the article by mistake. On Von Erck's "Wikisposure" site, there is no "SqueakBox" mentioned on his list of BoyChat members. The only mention of a "Squeakbox" on the site was to a "Wikipedian" who was threatened by some pedos ("Anyone visiting the Caribbean could do Wikipedia a favor: there's a Squeakbox there that needs fixing to ensure it no longer squeaks."). That has to be the Squeak we know. This time, at least, I will take Von Erck's word for it. I do not intend to take my browser anywhere near BoyChat to do a search.

That occurred to me too. But Ms. Winter makes no mention that this is WP User:Squeak Box or even any mention of him at all. I can easily imagine, as you suggest, a mix up in her notes. I can also easily imagine some pedophile or lulzer from WP going onto the pedophile site using the same pseudonym to cause mischief.



Yes, the absence of Squeak Box in the list does argue for a mix up in the notes.

Conceded. But if that were the case, her minimal diligence (ie skimming the AFD) would have revealed the doppleganging, and been noted at least in passing. Still, you're right, I never really considered that. But I'm very knaive and trusting.

Correct link, for those who can't figger out how to strip off the Googlecrap.

Golly, I posted a ton of stuff about this months ago, and now Fox News is discovering pedos-on-wiki.

The most important part of this article centers on... "Hemanshu Nigam, who headed security divisions at Microsoft and MySpace and now runs SSP Blue, an online security consulting firm."



As a friend commented to me, that should have been in the article lede.

For aught we know, it originally may have been. Editors!

Indeed, if this person actually has significant authority in the Obama administration, and the person said that, that's very interesting indeed, and far bigger news than the "discovery" of pedophiles on WP.

God, that would cause some real action around the WMF office.
Whatta great YouTube video that would make.

"Sue? The White House is on line 3....and they sound angry."

A site search shows there is a "Squeakbox" who posts on boychat.

http://www.boychat.org/messages/1214421.htm [WARNING - NSFW]

They all hate the Wikipedia Squeakbox over there for his work on cleaning up, so I imagine this account was a sort of revenge. They are discussing it now.

The President certainly has bigger fish to fry and I tend to be over all supportive of his policies and action. Still after his recent Twitter-fest with Medvedev I'd be pleased if he ever got angry over anything at all concerning social media. In this area he is enamored of technology and naive about the limits and pitfalls of web 2.0.

This is good ... has anyone actually spoken to Jana yet just to ask why she and Fox are still pursuing the Wikipedia?

And has anyone contacted the "expert consultant" guy whom Sue recent fluffed up for the WMF?

Presidents are over-rated when it comes to this kind of stuff ... BUT ... players such as these can make small changes that start tanker sized turns, e.g. aim for blocking from federal and educational facilities etc. They can grab the attention of big opinion formers.

Is anyone going to approach Nigam?

Hemanshu Nigam does not seem to have a Wikipedia page ...

Not to mention the limitations of Rolling Stone Magazine 1.0. Still made of cheap tree pulp last I saw.

Wikipedia is such an easy target, through their own inaction, that I am amazed that senior politicians haven't lept on it before.

It is always worth political points to bash an unpopular minority, and an unpopular criminal minority - well, who is going to come above the parapet to fight for their freedom? (OK, I underestimate the rose-tinted world of the freedom advocates, but hey).

Good on Fox News, they scented a story, and have kept working behind the scenes until they've managed to get some traction. Dare I say that is proper journalism, even if the presentation sucks.

Jimbo has personally probably done enough to avoid taking the fall for this with his pronouncements, even though he has been ineffective. Makes Sue's appointment of a consultant to advise the WMF at this time rather obvious. I guess the phone calls started after the last round of publicity and Sue, in typical corporate fashion, has appointed an external advisor to blame for the lock down to try and keep WMF in line with Teh Communteh.

I noted elsewhere on Commons the wonderful quote that it was unacceptable for Wikipedia to "tag inappropriate content". I thought that had all the insightfulness that we expect of a typical Wikipedian response - the tacit acknowledgement of the problem, and the refusal to accept any responsibility for a problem of its own making.

Yes quite. Get onto your school board now.

Interesting. Fox seems to think it can smell blood with Wikipedia. Btw whats up with the Google news feed? Most of the links no longer work. Wikisposure's campaign has shown little activity since last year, which is surprising given Larry Sanger's FBI letter and Fox coverage.

Who ... Erik 'the Child' Moellester?

No, Sue does not know ... but she knows what it means AND get someone to photocopy the PR letters and send them out. She is looking more as if she was hired because she is able to say the right things rather than do them ... and spending the Wiki donators' money on hiring "consultants" is typical. 99% of adults would know what to do put in the same situation. Kids, and hard core porn and extreme sexual advocacy do not mix. So, if you want to do the hard core porn and extreme sexual advocacy, you got to remove the kids.

Now, what we really need is some intern inside the WMF office to start leaking what is going on in there ...

Sue is gradually slipping down towards Fucksville ... if she cannot sort this one out (and she cannot) from now on, and for the next 20 years of employment interviews, she will be

That puts Jimbos actions into a different light too.

Was he just "doing something" and "being seen to do something" ... just enough ... to lie convincingly without twitching or touching his nose?

To be able to say, "I spent hours deleting images but they just put them all back". What was it ... 70 odd images in total of which 40 odd were reverted? It sure was hyped up in the media.

The big joke will be 'Teh Consultant' tries to tell 'the Community' what to do ... but now they know they have us and Fox with our fingers up their pokies reminding them.

... and some reinforcements are on the way.

Just noticed Squeakbox (Wiki user) is threatening to sue Fox News:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:SqueakBox

Given the two layers of pseudonyms involved good luck with that even if an error was made. I think he should get an apology and clarification. But once again Wikipedians will make this about their grievances not their responsibility to deal with the pedophiles. With the knowledge that this (re-focus on their grievances) you would think there would be a very high standard of fact checking before running the story.

Surprising the right-wingers on WP didn't been ban him for legal threats against Fox.

Wow, Fox news got something right for a change...

Glad this is finally going public, took damn long enough! There's been loads of discussion on this for years...

The discussion on Jimbo's talk page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Jimbo#Fox_News_report is bizarre. The main line of reasoning is that Fox News is right wing and bad, ergo everything in the article is false. No one seems actually to have read the article. The claims in the article are as follows

1. Chat room posts show efforts by pedophiles to use Wikipedia. This is correct, as anyone who visits the chat room (boychat) can verify.

2. Message boards include links to Wikipedia articles that 'need to be edited'. This is easy to verify.

3. (Quoting von Erk) Pedophiles have campaigned to push their POV on Wikipedia. Absolutely true. I myself earned a block for opposing their point of view. Or rather, for saying perfectly true things that were deemed 'personal attacks'.

4. (Quoting Sue Gardner) 'Wikipedia has a zero tolerance policy' - that is the one thing that is clearly false, but then they are quoting Sue Gardner.

5. A series of recent postings from the message board itself, which I can verify are true.

6. Some three-year old postings from Girlchat.

7. Mention of Wikipedia's critics (horror!). True: Wikipedia has critics.

8. The claim that the NAMBLA article has links to the NAMBLA site. True.

9. A quote from Hemanshu Negam, who works in IT security.

10. The claim that 'anyone can edit Wikipedia'. Surely not?

11. A claim about a post on Boychat by a user called 'Squeakbox'. Also perfectly true. There is such a user who names himself after the Wikipedia user (who is clearly not the same person, but anyone can give themselves an anonymous user name - that's the whole problem with anonymous user names).

12. Wikisposure has identified many convicted pedophiles who have been Wikipedia users. True. Many have been kicked off, but they just return under different user names. True. There is even one who was called 'Dominique' who returned calling themself 'DominiqueEncore'. Clever eh? Well none of the admins spotted it.

13. More claims by Nigam, who is co-chairman of President Obama's Online Safety Technology Group.




No, read the article, idiot. The criticism is that Wikipedia allows outbound links to pedophile propagandist organisations and message boards.



Read the guy's biography, idiot. http://sspblue.com/wp-content/uploads/2010...-Nigam-Bio-.pdf

Can you provide confirmation of (11)? This has been puzzling and would be good to verify. For myself I'm not willing to do research required if it means going directly to the pedophile sites. This wouldn't be the first time that you have done yeoman's service by going to some of the darkest corners of the internet. If it can be confirmed WP's Squeak Box and WR posters (including myself) would seem owe Jana Winters an apology rather than the other way around.

If you read an earlier post to this thread, you will see I provided a link to the very user. that is probably enough!

I think Jana Winters owes clarification on this. But not an apology. If I use my real name on the net, and someone copies it, I get very angry. But why shouldn't someone steal a stupid alias? What is there to steal?

-------------------------------

Some more about Nigam. This could be big. The guy clearly knows what he is on about, and he is an authority. It will be less easy for the Wiki-idiots to play this down. Well done Nigam. Respect.

Thanks I missed that post. I'll take your word for the link. My apologies to Jana for doubting her. This shows how strong the "Fox can't do anything right" narrative that WP drums upon. It has even her fans second guessing her accuracy without good reason. Let me say again that her work on WP has been on the whole excellent.

Ha! I've read the Tweets of the man behind the Wikipedia Squeakbox - won't like as it connects the dots - but it's fair to say he is right-of-centre himself, in a "damn the lefties" sort of way. Not that I'm saying that's a bad thing. At all.

Wikipedia Squeakbox has always come across as one of the good guys, from what I've seen.

Fox News may well be right here, but it's a shame such a shitty news corporation like them are reporting this information. True it may be, it's difficult to find it credible.

In all fairness there is no evidence I'm aware of he is a child molester. Friend of the pedophile, pedophile enabler, apologist for pedophiles, yes to all. But he never acknowledges or evidences the behavior himself AFAIK.

I think the revelation that there are actually two SqueakBox's involved in this story is significant, if for no other reason it shows how much the pedos hate WP SqueakBox. Thanks to Peter for that; also, I agree with him that what appears to be called for here is a clarification, not an apology. Such news will probably not be greeted with joy by WP SqueakBox ("Good Squeak"), but he does need to know that the BoyChat SqueakBox ("Evil Squeak") is out there.

I am also relieved that my first impression appears to be correct that Jana Winter really did a solid job on this piece. This is so overdue, even if it comes originally from Fox.

Still, not a bad pun.



Case 1: impostor B claims to be A, whilst A cites harassment and denies being B.
Case 2: A is B claiming to be A, whilst A cites harassment and denies being B.

In what way would these be distinguishable?

Ah yes, now I see it:

Do these word-links grow like weeds or do users put them there?

Thank you.

Yah, such are the limitations of internet discussion ... please note the nick I was giving him was "The Child" because I think issues relating to "The Child" and sexuality will become a determining factor in his life. -ster is a common suffix come sobriquets. Or in the case of the Wikipedia 'cum sobriquets'.

My feeling is that unless Sue "we-have-zero-tolerance-for-looking-at-all-this-porn-so-we-just-let-them-get-on-with-it" Gardner, Erik and the rest of them finally do something right, their careers are going to be tarnished by this forever more. Sue, as a woman, might escape by making a dramatic volte face and jumping ship ... if she does it soon ... a guy like Erik might forever be marginalised. Locked in a backroom of the Pornopedia for life.

I was actually giving a nod to the work of the good Dr. HS Thompson whose seminal work included a character called 'Charger Charlie the Child Molester'. Now, Charger Charlie was not a child molester either but the name kind of stuck.

So, just to clarify, it was ... Erik 'The Child' Moellester? And another seriously dubious decision of Team Jimmy Wales to hire the guy.

What the Wikipedia Foundation is doing is making collective decisions about what 'The Child' is ... and moellestering it.

Yes, to quote that phrase so hate by them "... what about the children?" ... the Pornopedia is targeting with their extreme sexual advocacy and a system that allow pedophile activists to reincarnate online time and time again.

Bear in mind that many of the admins who are left to police these individuals and materials are children themselves.

Stillwaterising has come in for much criticism at WR but he is saying the right thing here, isn't he?

Agreed.

Stillwaterising occasionally says something that seems quite reasonable and with which I might agree were it not for the other things he says. If this isn't a deliberate attempt to subvert any real reform around the area of questionable pornographic images on WP and Commons, it might as well be. Stillwaterising argues that a manga-style illustration of hermaphroditic figures is child porn in part because "The character on the right has long hair suggesting maturity". Future attempts to deal with the issues underlying similar concerns will invariably be related to this - for example, Niabot, the creator of this image is one of the opponents of the WMF study of objectionable content (WR discussion of that study starts here)...

Short of the getting the actor (or actors) who voice the remarks of A and B in the same room in meat-space, I don't know of any reliable way of distinguishing the two cases.

If you had enough commentary from the two characters, you might be able to do some kind of statistical analysis (e.g. "fingerprint") of their idiosyncratic writing styles to assign probabilities to the two cases, but that's a lot of (highly technical) work. Voiceprints of spoken remarks and videos showing uncostumed faces would be much better evidence.

"Be ye not bamboozled." --The Big Bamboozler

Thanks, that's what I figured.

Otherwise if A claims to be B and B claims to be A you can establish that they are the same person (or at least are actively conspiring together against you).

Game theory, gotta love it.

False.

To him the important thing is be some kind of "sex expert" so that he can engage in discussion. The discussion is what is important to him. He has learned to say many moderate things to keep himself in the thick of it. It is not an accident that he favors a detailed case by case analysis and categorization. He has learned how to get Wikipedia to feed his pathology.

Right, but putting his underlying motives aside for the moment, it's impossible to entertain the notion that the person who uploaded the Futanari image did so in a "good faith" attempt to educate people about a significant aspect of Japanese culture. (Not leastwise because it's not a significant aspect of Japanese culture.) And it's fairly clear (to me, at least) that the two naked she-male characters are supposed to be adolescents, aside from the fact that they don't look all that human to start with. The dismissive arguments against what he's saying, especially the "it's irrelevant" comments, remind me more of User:JoshuaZ than of anyone who might have a legitimate objection to deleting these images on anti-censorship grounds...

I guess what I'm saying is that I can accept that Stillwaterising is both strongly pro-adult-porn and strongly anti-child-porn, because my own views on the subject are somewhat similar, and I tend to think it's not an especially uncommon set of views to hold (though I'm not saying adult porn is "healthy" or should be more readily available to people, mind you).

Either way, the real problem he's up against here is that there are a lot of WP'ers who really, really, really dig those sexually-twisted Japanese porn-manga drawings, and like all WP'ers they don't like being thwarted. There's also a non-negligible possibility that someone's using the porn-manga material as a "wedge strategy," to eventually get similarly-explicit photorealistic material uploaded and kept - but IMO most people don't think that far in advance.

There's Nobody But Audreys In That Shop —



Jon

Yah, interesting point.

Is it Japanese culture, pornography culture or underground comic culture? We all tend to "play football" with national teams if it suits our prejudices, but why? The actions of a tiny few within another nation can hardly be ascribed to an entire nation, most of whom might well be appalled by them.

It is like saying "pedophilia is part of Belgian culture" because of fairly recent events there (false), pedophilia is part of the culture of Roman Catholic or Scout leader priesthood (possible true) ... do all Wikipedians see the hard core amateur pornography the part of Wikipedian culture which it has become?

Certain cultures are entirely transnational bearing little to no connection to their host cultures and it could be argued that they are entirely parasitical ... which in the body, they are not off it. Are the Wiki-pornographers not that and should they not be dealt with as that?

I am still forced to see it all as some kind of inappropriate and (albeit perhaps fairly mildly) abusive sexual exhibitionism ... The Joy of Corruption rather than The Joy of Sex. The Joy of Sex is worth mentioning in this context as pretty much the turning point in popular publishing as its "illustrations and text are titillating as well as illustrative, in contrast to the bland, clinical style of earlier books about sex".

Much of the counter-argument to the unfettered sexualisation of an encyclopedia targeting children and educational facilities is that, perhaps, if the topics have to be covered and illustrated, they should return to that " bland, clinical" style. I'd wonder if the division between the various protagonists as Pre-JOS and Post-JOS.