It's not so much that he is a liar. It's just that he cannot understand why people should worry about lying. He is totally indifferent to the truth.

Thus, the perfect spokesmodel for Wikipedia!

Indeed. He should have been a lawyer, except that would have involved actually paying those legal secretaries to do 95% of his work. In the legal world, a brief is sort of is all about "verifiability, not truth." Where verifiability refers to your citations to statutes and rulings.

If you want a judge to rule in your favor, you make the judge emotionally WANT to, and then give the judge legal "reason" to cover his ass. The hilarious thing is that all the whining about Wikilawyering actually captures what is closest to the essense of WP, which is legal debate, not scientific debate. And the same with a jury, but fewer cittaions needed. Open court work (a very small minority of law) isn't really about truth, either. Instead, it's more like an ArbComm case, with theatrics and stuff about bringing in evidence of past dastardly deeds, for maximal shock value.

Jimbo is in politics, but a type of politics in which you never need to debate. Perhaps closer than to law, would be show business. If Jimbo in a former life had been an engineer, WP would not be as we know it. Instead he comes from a world where perception is reality. Yet another irony, as that that world is the one that Ayn Rand hated most of all (or claimed to-- the similar irony in her case is that her "Objectivist" movement eventually got ensnared in the very same thing, but that's another story).

In my experience, lawyers are very careful about how they tell lies, and very often, as they have some sort of reputation to preserve, they tell the truth.

Wales has none of that. Complete indifference both to the lie, and to its consequences. Quite a different matter.

----- Original Message -----
From: "Jimmy Wales" <jwales@wikia-inc.com>
To: "Peter Damian" <peter.damian@btinternet.com>
Cc: "Will" <wjbscribe@gmail.com>; <User.CoolHandLuke@gmail.com>; <arbcom-l@lists.wikimedia.org>
Sent: Tuesday, January 04, 2011 7:44 PM
Subject: Re: Fw:


>On 1/4/11 2:33 PM, Peter Damian wrote:
>You're saying that lying doesn't matter, then. Just as I thought. You
>surround yourself with liars, you lie to yourself, you are indifferent
>to the truth. Fair enough.



>

Any way we can get a link to this conversation, or is it all a private dialog?

Wales emailed me out of the blue this morning, asking about a question I had put to Arbcom in December.

I said I was simply looking for the truth about my block of Dec 2007 - I was annoyed on learning recently that Boddy had blocked me while knowing about the oversights, and while at at the same time denying all knowledge of them. More recently Boddy had written to me (see below) apologising for the block, regretting everything that had happened, and saying that he 'had been misled about certain key facts'. Fair enough, but then I learned that, at least according to FT2's statement here http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=...oldid=400248828 , Boddy had known all along.

Wales' reaction was to ask why I was obsessing about something that had happened 3 years ago, and that both FT2 and Boddy were telling the truth. I replied that, since the accounts contained internal contradictions, and that both could not be telling the truth (in logic we call this the Principle of (non) Contradiction or PNC). Moreover I suffer from a personality disorder that means I get angry when persistently lied to.

According to Boddy





According to FT2



There is a long thread about Boddy here http://wikipediareview.com/index.php?s=&sh...indpost&p=93994 . There is a link somewhere about his defending Essjay.



" I passionately support the truth" - my arse.