My objective here is to explain and document some of the expressions that have found their way into the popular lexicon, and provided so much mirth for us at the Review. I am soliciting the help of others to complete the historical research on this.

"The Cabal" -- Jimbo Wales first proposed the formation of a "cabal" in this post on the Wikipedia mailing list. He expressed a desire to "empower some shadowy mysterious elite group of us to do things that might not be possible for newbies."

"Exceptional Well-Honed Linguistic Analytic Skills" -- the classic phrase posted by SlimVirgin here on Jimbo's talk page, explaining why she don't need no stinkin' evidence to convict other editors of sockpuppetry.

"Living in England in a Very Similar Way" -- another gem, this time from W.Marsh, illustrating another method for convicting someone of sockpuppetry without evidence. This one came from the celebrated ANI discussion of the blocking of Poetlister.

“I regard it as a pseudonym and I don’t really have a problem with it.” -- Jimbo's comment to The New Yorker, upon discovering that Essjay was not really “a tenured professor of religion at a private university” with “a Ph.D. in theology and a degree in canon law.”

"Will you be able to watch my back?" -- (Jayjg, in an email to wikien-l, December 20 2007) Jayjg's clarion call to his tag-team troops was mistakenly posted to the public email list, instead of his private one. "I'm planning to go in tonight and do some re-adding and tagging. Will you be able to watch my back?"

"Wikipedia is nothing more than the biggest and most prolific defamation machine that the world has ever known, run by people with varying degrees of personality disorders." -- Rachel Marsden, after Jimbo, having dumped her and announced it on-Wiki, withdrew his special BLP protection from her bio. Rachel, demonstrating once again that Hell Hath No Fury, posted this on Jimbo's talk page.


I welcome proposals to add to this little glossary.

"Der Jimbo's face" : A musical tribute to Jimmy Wales.

"Dysfunctional Social Network Community": Wikipedia

"Lunatic Social Drama" : Wikipedia again

"MONGOs elk lodge" : (see also Team America) A clique of US based conservatives and nationalists centered around unwitting drama-magnet, User:MONGO. Originally bonding to ward off wearisome 9/11 truthers from the 'pedia, this coordinated SWAT-TEAM then proceeded to flex its muscles on all manner of legitimate topics throughout the site. With predictably disastrous consequences.

"Nasty Nine" : The Nine Wikipedia editors whose online antics have been so heavily criticized that they eventually warranted sub-forums of their own. (now Ten)

"Stroynaya Deva" : Russian translation of SlimVirgin, Wikipedia's most controversial / notorious admin.

"Charlie Manson defense" a classical recurring wikipediot argument which asserts that Seth Finkelstein, Brandt et al are public figures on a par with the likes of George Bush, Bill Clinton and convicted murderer Manson. "If we delete the Seth Finkelstein article, what is to stop Charlie Manson asking for the same?"

("Living in England" was Wmarsh on the Poetlister / Londoneye / Runcorn nonsense, not Slim.)

Sleuthing: Durova's self-described method of divining which well-meaning editors are "bad" sockpuppets.
Sooper-Sekret Mailing Lists: hosted on Wikia, where discussion of said sleuthing occured. Includes the Cyberstalking list with extensive links to Slimvirgin. Defended to the death by Jimmy Wales.

"...and I don't have a problem with it" : Jimbo Wales on the discovery that his new employee, the eminent religious professor User:Essjay, was actually some kid huddled over a screen scratching his balls through his PJs. Now applicable to any blatant act of Wiki-absurdity that comes to light. Sekrit Lists? "They weren't secret they were private ...and I don't have a problem with it". etc. etc.

One of the most extraordinary threads ever even by WP:ANI standards

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Adm...oetlister_block


Besides anything else, Taxwoman had umpteen photos of herself in a corset, as a schoolgirl, as a policewoman, ... And to say that because they had discovered proof that Poetlister was who she's always said she was, that's evidence that she's a sockpuppet of someone else - that's Monty Python.

And the climax of the thread:

That of course was followed by her ArbCom candidacy, which centred on her brilliant sleuthing in the Runcorn case, and was terminated by the !! case. Pride goes before a fall...

Let's put this up on the blog when the list is complete. =)

Yes, it's "living in England in a very similar way"

Not "a similar way"

Ripened sock - Apparently, we at Wikipedia Review do this to "game the community's good faith" and then launch into attack mode. Part of Durova's evidence against !! in which he claimed he was an agent of the Wikipedia Review sent to cause trouble.
Obscene trolling; knows German - Another phrase used in Durova's evidence.

Ah the google hits

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%22Ripened+sock%22

I was thinking of that. But I'd like to have the original diffs, or other relevant links, to establish the actual historical origins of these expressions or sayings that have become the stuff of legend. A priority would be the WMarsh post, "living in England in a very similar way," so if someone can find the diff for that it would be an important contribution.




This would be another prime example. Got diffs?

In fairness, the quote was obviously "describe themselves...in a very similar way." The modifier was a little misplaced, but I can't see how one could conclude, except through the most literal reading, that it was intended to be "living in England in a very similar way".

HK: Guy already gave you the "living in England" diff above. Here is the thread where we started riffing on it.

I'm not sure about the Jimbo quote--I think it was from his talk page. I'll see if I can find it.

That, as far as I know, was a quote The New Yorker got from Jimbo. It is in the correction they printed (at the bottom of the article if that link doesn't work).

Bobby is correct. It was also picked up by The New York Times. The Essjay "controversy" article on WP cites yet another source: a blog post on ZDNet (fn. 17). It was probably all over the place at the time.

Who accused whom of "living in the same state as WordBomb"? That would seem to be another notable quote like the one about "living in England in a similar way".

They most certainly didn't describe themselves in a very similar way (unless you mean that they all used Wikipedia user pages). Unfortunately, Sandahl (have we heard of him?) has wiped the history of User:Poetlister, but it's quite easy to compare others' pages and see the differences.

David Gerard banned some IP in Basingstoke England for "living in a similar way" to Wordbomb.

http://wikipediareview.com/index.php?showtopic=12847&hl=

Ach, so. I have now corrected my initial post. Damn, that was only last year?

I also added Jimbo's comment on the Essjay affair, with link.

I found this on a mirror. I can't see it still on WP itself.

http://medlibrary.org/medwiki/Wikipedia:Re...r_comment/Cla68


However, Cla68 seems to have written it himself!

It's still on Wikipedia. It was a reference to this brilliant SV deduction: "Also, I forgot to say earlier that, judging by some of Cla's edits, he appears to be based in the same state as Wordbomb."

As far as I remember, Newport was the only one to mention where she lived. That was because she'd originally said (truthfully of course) that she was from (i.e. born in) Newport. Jayjg had noted, as proof that she was a sockpuppet, that her IPs were all in London not Newport. Apart from the fact that you can't reliably geolocate some ISPs within England (or Wales), "from" Newport does not mean "in" Newport. Thus she stressed that she was in London. Nobody else did. Surely just being in England isn't proof of sockpuppetry; even the average WP editor must know that there are more people here than in the whole of New York State.

Newport never mentioned her occupation; nor did RachelBrown, though to my amazement several people have Googled her and found it. Londoneye said that she was a student and Taxwoman that she was an accountant. How is that a remarkable similarity? And of course there's the nonsense that we could not produce more photos. Taxwoman, as Guy said, strewed them round Wikipedia. Nobody ever asked us for more that I know of. After my block I sent photos to various people to prove who I was - not that it did any good.

SlimVirgin, who double voted in a FA nomination as SweetBlueWater-SlimVirgin, likes to lie on WP to get her way.
Read that Cla68 RFA.

The S.S. Slimmy Meatpuppets torpedo'ed a successful RFA at the last minute.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Req...adminship/Cla68

And it was over something that Cla68 turns out to have been right about in the first place. Someone named Jimbo owes Cla68 an apology, and WP owes Cla68 another RFA.

The above edit she just couldn't get JayJG to oversight, or Crum375 to delete/restore for her.

And the reason SlimVirgin is personally involved in Cla68-Mantanmoreland-Wordbomb is that she personally knew Patrick Byrne, and he made her cry one day in school.

Here's an updated version. More work needs to be done.

"The Cabal" -- Jimbo Wales first proposed the formation of a "cabal" in this post on the Wikipedia mailing list. He expressed a desire to "empower some shadowy mysterious elite group of us to do things that might not be possible for newbies."

"Exceptional Well-Honed Linguistic Analytic Skills" -- the classic phrase posted by SlimVirgin here on Jimbo's talk page, explaining why she don't need no stinkin' evidence to convict other editors of sockpuppetry.

"Living in England in a Very Similar Way" -- another gem, this time from W.Marsh, illustrating another method for convicting someone of sockpuppetry without evidence. This one came from the celebrated ANI discussion of the blocking of Poetlister.

“I regard it as a pseudonym and I don’t really have a problem with it.” -- Jimbo's comment to The New Yorker, upon discovering that Essjay was not really “a tenured professor of religion at a private university” with “a Ph.D. in theology and a degree in canon law.”

"Will you be able to watch my back?" -- (Jayjg, in an email to wikien-l, December 20 2007) Jayjg's clarion call to his tag-team troops was mistakenly posted to the public email list, instead of his private one. "I'm planning to go in tonight and do some re-adding and tagging. Will you be able to watch my back?"

"Wikipedia is nothing more than the biggest and most prolific defamation machine that the world has ever known, run by people with varying degrees of personality disorders." -- Rachel Marsden, after Jimbo, having dumped her and announced it on-Wiki, withdrew his special BLP protection from her bio. Rachel, demonstrating once again that Hell Hath No Fury, posted this on Jimbo's talk page.


I welcome additions to this little glossary, with appropriate diffs.

"he appears to be based in the same state as Wordbomb." -- Slim Virgin, about Cla68

For newcomers, Cla68 is in Japan. The context is that SV is opposing his RfA and says "I don't know what Cla's intentions were, but there's no question that he was repeating libelous and toxic claims made on Wordbomb's attack site and on Wikipedia Review. Also, I forgot to say earlier that, judging by some of Cla's edits, he appears to be based in the same state as Wordbomb."
__________________________________________________________________

Jayjg explains why he needs Bulldog123 as a meatpuppet to move AfDs:

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=...oldid=138422149

To be completely fair, the entire quote is "They also all describe themselves as having generic occupations and living in England in a very similar way". The phrase 'in a very similar way' appears to modify 'describe', not 'living'.

Now, that's not to say that the argument against Poetlister or the other users - or even this particular point of the argument (What the fuck is a "generic occupation"? Are there non-generic occupations? Are people perhaps expected to name their employers?) - is valid - I think I've made it pretty clear that I don't think it is. But there are enough ridiculous quotes that I don't think they need to be taken out of context. I could probably find several instances of people describing tag-team edit warring as a feature rather than a bug in 3RR.

I think the ludicrousness of the quote was enhanced by its cultural naivety. Tens of millions of people living on a small island do tend to "live in a similar way". It's not as though one of them could be Cattle rustler in The Great Plains plains, a Ski Instructor or some Banana picker on the plantations. No. They each lived under the grey skies doing mundane office jobs like every other fucker in the place.

PL did name her employer, and it was a particular organization. But that didn't make any difference to the Inquisitors.

"Likes Mozart, knows German"

This is basically the same genre as the "living in England" quote, but less funny. It's a good one for SlimVirgin connoisseurs.

Ah, but ambiguity is the soul of poetry. If the grammar had been more meticulous, the saying could never have come to occupy its present exalted place in Wikipedia folklore.

Context and diffs, please? It looks almost like SV indicting someone for allegedly being my sock.

It was Durova! How could you forget ...

P.S. dunno about the diffs

C'mon please. I thought people would have this as their desktop by now.

http://wikitruth.info/index.php?title=Duro...Sekret_Evidence

and it's obscene trolling; knows German. As already mentioned by Derktar in this thread.

Yeh, sorry you're right. The obscene trolling was Mozart related though..

David Gerard on the WP outcry after Essjay is revealed.

"Seriously. This RFC is all but meritless. You're embarrassed by Slashdot?"

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

Gotta get "Jimmy has never done anything wrong" in there, but there's no text evidence. Just video.

My impression of the gist of these gems is that they serve to call into question the probity of the kind of evidence-based reasoning that Wikipedians are inclined to employ when seeking to establish or refute some haphazard theory du jour.

I discussed this earlier in the thread.


It is on the authoritative English Wikiquote, courtesy of (in part) Mr Kohs.

http://en.wikiquote.org/w/index.php?title=...er&oldid=722844

You forgot the part about that "Jimmy is a very good guy" and "he's a very humble guy, very down to earth"

(still rolling on the floor laughing)

Yep. The IP was indefinitely blocked by David Gerard in order to support SamiHarris aka Gary Weiss who was deleting my comments on a talk page complaining that what they were doing was against the laws and spirit of Wikipedia.

It's still blocked. One IP address.

David Gerard is an arsehole.

"Wikipedia is nothing more than the biggest and most prolific defamation machine that the world has ever known, run by people with varying degrees of personality disorders." -- Rachel Marsden, after Jimbo, having dumped her and announced it on-Wiki, withdrew his special BLP protection from her bio. Rachel, demonstrating once again that Hell Hath No Fury, posted this on Jimbo's talk page.

For a place which is supposedly not censored they made quick work of censoring Rachel Marsden. Fortunately they couldn't block eBay

I just read this for the first time. It's very entertaining. Durova refers to "The Joy of Trolling" -- wasn't that a bestseller?

The Joy of Trolling might be a term of art for Schadenfreude.

*gulp*

While that evidence was very very funny, lets not forget the obscene German speaking troll was one of Wikipedia's longest standing and very respected editors, a mentor of mine, who for personal reasons had merely changed his name. His edits under his new name were without exception all completely honourable and valuable. His new name had been checkusered by an Arb in early November 2007, before he was blocked on 18 November 2007, so it was known who he was. Yet that block, (far more obscene than his knowledge of German) was implemented. He was, understandably, upset by it, he has not edited since. It is imperative Wikipedia never allows such ignorance to prevail again.

Giano

I wish that Durova would say things like "the joy of trolling" and "Here's the sock helping the team, along with some free range sarcasm and troublemaking" on NotTheWikipediaWeekly. It would be pretty entertaining. At the very least, she should release a spoken word version of this masterpiece.

Here's an updated version. More work needs to be done.

"The Cabal" -- Jimbo Wales first proposed the formation of a "cabal" in this post on the Wikipedia mailing list. He expressed a desire to "empower some shadowy mysterious elite group of us to do things that might not be possible for newbies."

"Exceptional Well-Honed Linguistic Analytic Skills" -- the classic phrase posted by SlimVirgin here on Jimbo's talk page, explaining why she don't need no stinkin' evidence to convict other editors of sockpuppetry.

"Living in England in a Very Similar Way" -- another gem, this time from W.Marsh, illustrating another method for convicting someone of sockpuppetry without evidence. This one came from the celebrated ANI discussion of the blocking of Poetlister.

“I regard it as a pseudonym and I don’t really have a problem with it.” -- Jimbo's comment to The New Yorker, upon discovering that Essjay was not really “a tenured professor of religion at a private university” with “a Ph.D. in theology and a degree in canon law.”

"Will you be able to watch my back?" -- (Jayjg, in an email to wikien-l, December 20 2007) Jayjg's clarion call to his tag-team troops was mistakenly posted to the public email list, instead of his private one. "I'm planning to go in tonight and do some re-adding and tagging. Will you be able to watch my back?"

"Wikipedia is nothing more than the biggest and most prolific defamation machine that the world has ever known, run by people with varying degrees of personality disorders." -- Rachel Marsden, after Jimbo, having dumped her and announced it on-Wiki, withdrew his special BLP protection from her bio. Rachel, demonstrating once again that Hell Hath No Fury, posted this on Jimbo's talk page.

"Obscene trolling; knows German." -- This memorable phrase comes from Durova's Sekret Evidence which was leaked to WikiTruth. She is describing the clues which lead her to indict User:!! as a Ripened Sock, a disturbing term to anyone but Dr. Scholl. User:!!'s "obscene trolling" was in reality an explication of a rather common German insult, "Leck mich im Arsch," also the title of a canon by Mozart which has its own Wikipedia article.



I welcome additions to this little glossary, with appropriate diffs. Please correct any errors I make in explaining these precious historical vignettes.

Here's one that ought to be better-known:

It includes many pictures of Taxwoman dressed as a ... to put it midly... a dancer, although the userpage says she is an accountant.

SakotGrimshine, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Adm...board/Archive89

I just wonder how many people turn up to wild fetish parties in their work clothes. Adjacent to that is another version of W.marsh's comment:

All of the socks were UK-based and had generic occupation claims (accountant, chemist, mathematician, etc.)

W.marsh is a member here. I do wish he'd explain that nonsense, given that most of the user pages have no mention of occupation.

There aren't any pictures there now, unless I missed them somehow

Indeed not. After Poetlister's first block, we were able to point to the pictures and saying "Look, these are obviously different people". WPans do learn from experience so they deleted them all. I think though that they have all been re-posted on Encyclopedia Dramatica and elsewhere.

Can someone please explain what is a "generic occupation?"

What did they expect? Gogo dancer? MI5 operative? Snake juggler?

--- and I think that at this point it is safe to conclude that Poetlister's block was some kind of weird personal vendetta, even one which has nothing to do with what she "did", i.e. maybe some jealousy, or projected opinion, or supposition about her.