As predicted by Somey, it was only a matter of time until someone created an article on Marcus Bachmann, husband of Michele Bachmann, future President of the United States of America. So whodunit? Noted gay Republican citizen journalist and amateur photographer David Shankbone.

At this point the article doesn't contain any speculation on Marcus Bachmann's own sexuality, but I imagine that it is coming soon, as the issue has broken into mainstream consciousness. And, frankly, I think we've seen how this plays out with an endless stream of anti-gay religious leaders - how long before someone steps into the waiting spotlight to claim their 15 minutes of fame in exchange for details of 15 minutes spent with Bachmann?

One might think that after the very unsubtle work of Cirt on the "santorum" article and a masked stranger on the now deleted Lewinsky (neologism) (the snooze alarm for those who missed the wake-up call), WP would be better placed to deal with the Wikibomb™, but no.

The obvious point which is being coatracked here is that federal funds are allegedly being used to try to un-homosexualize people, which is certainly grounds in some people's minds for creating an attack article. This should be added to the "cults" arbcom case, and that case should be re-named "attack articles."

I'm waiting for someone to add the Dan Savage material to the article.

• 12 July 2011 - Dan Savage podcast in which he mocks Bachmann's lisp
• 14 July 2011 - Dan Savage blog post "Marcus Bachmann's Big Gay Problem" in which he calls Bachmann "a lying closet case who's made convincing other gay people to join him in the closet his life's work"
• 14 July 2011 - Slate article "Dan Savage: Bully" critical of Savage's mockery of efeminate traits
• 15 July 2011 - "Read My Lisp", another Slate piece talking about Savage's comments and gaydar

I must say, I am enjoying the coincidences around WP's Marcus Bachmann article. First, it is created by David Shankbone, who has been discussed here quite a bit. Then we get a Dan Savage injection to help cement the connection to Cirt's "santorum" wikibomb. And now Johann Hari (William Saletan namechecks Hari in his Slate piece for describing Saletan as a gay writer). Who's next?

You, probably, if you keep chasing after Benjiboi's socks/non-socks/whatever......

Frankly, Benji-whatever was probably justified in cutting Larry Norman down in size.
Thanks to crazy Christian Smjwalsh, it's now the second-longest, second-most-excessively-referenced bio on Wikipedia.
262k bytes, 635 bloody references.

Hmm, perhaps this will lead to evangelical-vs-gay editwars? Is Benji the new Grawp?

Ha! I'm hardly chasing Benjiboi's socks - they seek me out. I don't bother doing anything about them most of the time. It usually doesn't take very long before he gets caught.

There has been a lukewarm evangelical-vs-gay editwar going on for some time now. User:Lionelt was very actively slashing gay-related material at one point, but I haven't been keeping up.

Nominated for deletion.

I despise wiki-activism of any ideological bent, whether it is the Zionists, the anti-abortionists, or the gay agenda drivers doesn't matter. All of them need to be kicked to the curb.

Isn't that nice. Shanker's learning to Wikilawyer his way thru the "community".

As predicted, the toads come out, and vote "keep" because "notable" like little robots.
Not a goddamn word about the article's defamatory nature.

Once again, I will point to Phil McGraw (T-H-L-K-D) as the paragon of a Wikipedia article being used to intentionally shit on someone.

Why not simply despise Wikipedia, and urge it to be "kicked to the curb"? It is the enabling function for wiki-activism. I would proffer that virtually all editing on Wikipedia consistutes wiki-activism of some form or another. Some are simply more benign than others.

He's right, Tarc. Everytime you log in and start cleaning up some mess or other (usually messes you had nothing to do with, right?) you enable.

And you help keep the place cooking, so Cirt and Shankbone, and people even worse than them, will have a "playground-thing" to play in. Even opposing them will not help. They need to be dragged off their heroin, forcibly. I keep saying that Wikipedia is a drug, okay? As you've seen, over and over again, people use it like an opiate.

So stop enabling.

Bleedin hell. I remember him. When I was a youngster, I used to go to the local manse for a biscuit, coffee, and an argue after they had finished their Sunday whotsit. Used to go the Sunday thing but got banned for dropping the hymn books on their heads of those below the balcony. Still they didn't mind the arguing, and one of them was keen on me playing for the Chrysler chess team.

Anyway I recall Larry Norman doing a gig at the Methodist Central Hall 1970-71 and went along to see what it was all about. Highly amusing with them all swaying along doing peace signs man. But the best bit was when they waved a finger in the air and chanted "one way Lord, one way". I stopped going shortly after that, still played chess for the Chrysler for the next 4 or 5 years though.

After 30+ years of marriage to Michelle Bachmann I could understand if he was no longer interested in women.

hurr hurr.......

Ever seen the list of top Google+ users?......

Would you mind explaining what Google+ is?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google%2B

Google's new social networking website ("invite-only" at the moment). I prefer their Google Wave idea.

Edit: You may have noticed some changes to the look and feel of Google.com; Google+ is the reason.

Oh. It looks like Betty White's famous mockery of Facebook would apply just as well to this.

"Not that there's anything wrong with being homosexual," he added quickly, "just as long as they don't actually, you know, have ,um, urges."

I can't believe I'm about to throw some support at someone with such a distasteful opinion, but y'know, being opposed to homosexuality isn't a crime. If bible-thumpers want to run these dumb clinics, then they're within their right to.

Except WP is the "opiate" of very many different groups, all at the same time. It's the opiate of social activists too lazy to make placards and march and sing. It's the opiate of social retards who enjoy revenge cyberbullying. It's the opiate of obscessive-compulsive knowledge curators. It's the opiate of Asimovian Saganish explainers who have no natural outlet in today's world of squashed authorship profits. It's the opiate of teachers who couldn't stand the pain of navigating into the viscous social politics and unionism of the formal K12 system (which makes WP itself look like kindergarten).

Different pains, different brains. Tell me what a given editor spends his/her time doing on WP, and I'll tell you what itch they scratch by doing that.

Whew! You don't usually see that kind of invective around here.

Indeed. That is why Wikipedia is so successful: it scratches any number of different itches. And so many of the people whose itches are being scratches are those who are otherwise marginalized in society, so they are really defensive of their backscratcher and will find tooth and nail to keep it. They literally do not have anywhere else to go.

One of the other things this does for Wikipedia is that it allows them, for any criticism of their motivations, to trot out someone who clearly doesn't fit the ascribed motivation. That's because there is no universal motivation for participating in Wikipedia; there's way too many different motivations and there isn't even a large plurality of editors all sharing the same one.

I spend my time preventing the latest "did you hear about Person X?" headline on the front page of Google News from becoming an article. Same with every new porn starlet or ax-murder in the Occupied Territories that comes along. Most recently, I have bene trying to thwart dirty liberals from creating hatchet job BLPs on people they don't like.

What's my itch, Professor?

And now this:
Judging from the comments, no one has told them that Shankbone is not a liberal...

Maybe someone has already mentioned this, but there is an Articles For Deletion debate about this article. I always look forward to Will Beback's comments on these matters, and he makes the argument that maybe we should wait and see it the subject becomes more notable before discussing deletion. Of course, by creating a Wikipedia article about him which shoots to the top of the Google hit parade, you know you are making him more "notable."

And the article is such a handy place to hang one's hat and coat!

Even as a stinkin' liberal I couldn't keep my mouf shut. The article is basically a Google-fueled attack page.

From the AFD

Thanks Tarc, that was wonderful.

From the article:

All these things may be true, but they arent exactly relevant to a biography of Bachmann. If people want to cover this "clinic" they should do that, but not in a supposed biography. This is one of the problems with Wikipedia, if this crap was removed it would be reinserted with an edit summary of "its sourced".

You're a Catcher In the Rye type like Alison. I predict much frustration on WP for you!

You're doing a great job on the Marcus Bachmann AfD. Looks like that's headed straight for "delete", just as your cesspool work advised.

Ugh, the freerepublic? How on earth do you stomach that? I logged in there once years ago seeing if there was any tolerance for something not fully bible thumpy Christian + wargazming across the free world and was pretty instantly "zotted", their word for the ban-stick.

LOL. Thankfully I don't have to stomach it. I set up a Google alert with "shankbone" some time ago when I considering promoting the band of the same name just to annoy the other Shankbone. I never bothered doing that, but I didn't bother to turn off the Google alert.

I have to admit, I really liked this comment by Mr. Tarc in the deletion discussion:

The thing is, I just bought a new vacuum cleaner myself recently. It was one of those new-fangled bagless "cyclonic" vacuum cleaners, with a transparent plastic canister instead of a bag. They look really nice in the store, and when you get them out of the box and set up, they still look nice. But then you start sucking up several hundred square feet of old pet hair, dead ants, bits of snack food, and god-knows-what-else, they don't look so nice anymore. The nice thing about old-fashioned vacuum-cleaner bags is, they hide all that stuff. But they're not as environmentally friendly, and having to replace the bags is inconvenient, so people are turning away from them.

I guess what I'm basically trying to say is that to me, Marcus Bachmann looks a lot like a vacuum cleaner bag, and his article looks like something you'd find inside a vacuum cleaner bag. Does Wikipedia really want the contents of their vacuum cleaner bag exposed to the world? Do they even want people to know they're still using the old-fashioned bags, and not the new, environmentally-friendly cyclonic canister doo-hickeys?

I think not! And yet there they are, arguing that their vacuum cleaner bag should be spilled back out onto the floor for all to see. I mean, what's the point in having a vacuum cleaner in the first place, if you're just going to dump the bag back out onto the floor?

Funny you should say that.

That is a good metaphor for Wikipedia BLP.

Similarly I ask you to consider the Roomba robotic vacuum cleaner from iRobot, also bagless. It's fairly intelligent. It has a microprocessor that makes it nearly as smart as a paramecium, which it reminds me of, when watching it. It hits things, backs up, tries again, then tries something completely different if THAT doesn't work. Unlike a paramecium, however, it only runs at one speed, cannot bend and flex to get out of tight spots, gets stuck easily, and has no panic mode-- but then again, all it has is a dinky 300,000-transistor microprocessor.*

Most of the time it works great. One of the few things that kills it is to run over a plate of canned cat food. The sticky food gets up into the wheels and gears and into places where you can't clean and aren't meant to clean. It's like toothpaste. And then your robotic vacuum cleaner no longer is so magic. It is either dead or runs in circles as though it has had a massive stroke.

Alas, I have discovered the OTHER Roomba-killer: cat shit. Or dog shit. Also sticky and causes much the same problem. If the Roomba scares your animal, you'd better be there when it happens.

Basically, this is the problem with Wikipedia. It's not as intelligent as a Roomba, and shit affects it the same way. It's a shame there is no responsible person to hit the off button when the excrement hits the rotating cylindrical sweeper module.

Milton

* An ARM7TDMI, in fact. I leave to the thoughtful student how a paramecium can have such complex behavior with no brain at all. Not even ONE neuron. Well, maybe one, if you count the entire cell. Which of course you must.

Funny, I was just thinking that about the economy the other day, that the excrement is about to hit the rotating sweeper module.

Suck! Suck! Suck!

Yes. Congress is also about as intelligent as a Roomba vacuum cleaner. These things are really a fine metaphors as semi-automatic mechanisms that not only cannot avoid shit because they cannot detect shit, and are thus bound to end up amplifying and spreading shit when they encounter shit.

Ah, simple robots, mobs, and politicians. So much power, so little wisdom.

That's nothing, if you want excrement spreading functions, there's nothing like the "media thing".

Thus.

Hmmm. A group of people dressed as "barbarians" wikibombed glitter-bombed Marcus Bachmann's office.

• Miami Herald
• New York Magazine
• Minnesota Independent
• The Atlantic
• Slate
• The Advocate

Will Shankbone and Silver Seren add these links to the article now, or wait until the AfD is over?

Talk page discussion first, I would think.

I'm really rather apathetic about the whole AfD. If it ends in a delete, the article will be remade soon enough because i'm quite certain that Marcus will remain a newsworthy item for some time to come. Especially if Michele gets the nomination (god forbid).

Oh no Silver! Someone less apathetic must have hijacked your account. Quick call the Arbcom! Call Jimmy! This must be fixed.

Well, I would say this is closer to Campaign for "santorum" neologism than Lewinsky (neologism). Which is to say that there are plausible reasons for the article existing, and so it will remain as a battleground for people with an axe to grind. ArbCom sat on their hands and watched the santorum debacle, hoping that Slim Virgin's rewrite would take. And it has, for the most part, but it could very easily go the other way at any time.

Shankbone is a far better player than Cirt. He created the Bachmann article and will argue enough to make sure it doesn't get deleted, but he will let some other sucker add in all the salacious details that people will complain about. When the nastier stuff that is yet to come gets added, I'm sure someone (Tarc?) will start a second AfD, but then you and Shankbone will just say "but we just had a AfD a week ago" and it will be that much harder to get rid of it.

From where I stand, it looks to me like you, Silver Seren, are using a WP BLP to slam someone you dislike. Would you agree with that assessment?

I don't believe I would. The controversial information about him, such as the Views section, should really be re-written and minimized. There's certain things that should be changed to make the article better, but i'm not sure where to start and other people aren't really being specific when they spout off "POV and BLP issues".

I have no real opinion about Marcus, beyond that I find him amusing.

And now....Glitter bombing! Jokestress, having learned the tricks of the wikibomb, makes sure to create a disambiguation page at Glitterbomb, as well as redirects at:

• Glitter bomb,
• Glitterbombing,
• Glitter bombed, and
• Glitterbombed.

Currently number two Google result for "Glitter bombing".

I don't think the Glitterbomb cocktail or either of the two Glitterbomb songs are really all that important.

So why exactly shouldn't it be one of the top links in a search for the term? At this point, practically 100% of the people Googling it will be searching for that exact article and information.

All all of this just fits in to the cycle of activism that you and the Shankster and a few others are engaging in. At least he was honest enough to state what his agenda was the other day. Are you still clinging to the "just an article that has sources" facade?

Will be interesting to see how this closes, it seems like the same witless coalition of conservative-haters and ARS enablers (one could draw an interesting parallel between this and the unholy alliance of states' rights conservatives and religious conservatives that fueled the GOP revolution of the 90s) may carry the day, but a good half-dozen or so of the keeps are of the intellectually devoid ilikeit/itsnotable variety

Then there is the inevitable DRV to look forward to.

Are people really so stupid that when they want to see an article on Wikipedia, they type their search into Google rather than just going straight to Wikipedia? Really, if someone is taking the trouble to type a phrase into Google, they are likely looking for more than just the basic stuff that should be in an encyclopedia. Personally, I find the number of sites that have scraped WP to be an impediment to finding what I'm looking for (but that isn't really WP's fault).

Interestingly, "glitter bombing" (with quotes) is still number two Google results (behind a Huffington Post piece), and number one without quotes.

As has often been pointed out, Wikipedia is not a newspaper. It's just not the function of Wikipedia to have articles like this. Yes, no doubt it does wonders for the pageview totals. But is that really more important to you than the (alleged) mission of Wikipedia - to build an encyclopaedia?

[Modnote: I split out a comment (to Wikipedia Review Review) that was objected to by another member. Conversation on it can take place in WRR while we sort it out. It is an internal discussion, and doesn't belong here. -- gomi]

The fact that Marcus Bachmann runs a clinic offering what is not only pseudo-scientific hogwash, but what amounts to brainwashing and psychological torture ("reparative therapy"), is one of the most widely-known facts about him. Additionally, he lied about having it, proving that he knew what negative connotations this brainwashing has. Now, I have no opinion about whether there should be a WP article about him; if the info is included on his wife's article, an issue of how relevant it really is will be raised. But if he is to have an article, why censor the most notable facts about him out of it? Maybe if Bachmann doesn't like media reports of his dishonesty being mentioned, he should be more transparent next time, or just not offer the "service" of brainwashing people into self-loathing.

And someone who has such an obsessive hatred for gays is usually bound to be a repressed closet case. Welcome to reality, Marcus. Gay people exist, and you're probably one of them. So, maybe you should be compassionate and quit trying to fuck up people's minds for your authoritarian, coercive proselytization campaign. If you can't take the heat...

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=...oldid=441296932

Deleted by Aaron Brenneman (T-C-L-K-R-D)

The emphasis, believe it or not, is Aaron Brenneman's, not mine. If he imagines that the article's subject is female, I suspect that he has not studied the debate very closely. So how can he close it?