http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/12/18/zo...ia_wikiscandal/

Not a good week to be FT2, evidently.

Yuck. This riff-raff could make Tim Curry gag.

Eeeeexcellent.

Cade Metz must be reading WR threads. Hi Cade!
Wanna see some REAL horror stories?.........

I'm still trying to figure out if he made the word "farmsex" up himself, or if he just forgot that it's two separate words. The one-word term "farmsex" isn't even in the Urban Dictionary. I checked - which I might add is something I prefer not to do if I can help it, because it can expose me to other fascinating terms like farmer's delight, which sounds perfectly nice and pleasant until you actually read what somebody out there seems to think it means.

Out here in Iowa we have lots of farmers, and I can tell you that none of the ones I've had any dealings with would ever dream of doing such things. So at the very least, this kind of material is highly offensive to farmers.

That Farmer's delight entry is rather inventive.

No pun intended but hasnt this dead horse been beaten enough?

Oh hey, Seddon. Welcome to Wikipedia Review

There really seems to be an influx from WP now

Just to say that Metz interviewed me a while ago and, like a journalist, sat on the story for a while. He originally got hold of it from someone else.

As far as I am concerned, the story is over. They admitted they oversighted the edits, the story is public, that's it. At the time, namely on Saturday 8 December last year when I realised the edits had been oversighted, I knew straight away that the story would come out somehow, and that whoever organised it was a fool. The whole disaster could have easily been averted. The way 'it' was dealt with afterwards says far more than the 'it'.

End of story, as I say.

Ugh. Cade Metz's "opinion pieces" are utter trash.

thanks for your wonderful opinion

care to elaborate?

Does the job for me. What's the matter with you?

The Register seems pretty obsessed with Wikipedia. Even the Guardian doesn't go into this level of petty detail about the habits of Wikipedia editors, thankfully - it's just not newsworthy information.

You should see what the Rural Dictionary has to say about "Hedge-Fund Manager's Night Out."

I would think that the Register measures how many hits their different articles get and decides which subjects to write more about accordingly.

Sure. I've read a few of Metz's opinion pieces on Wikipedia, and they're, in my opinion, a combination of lies, half truths, and rumors, with little or no truth in them. Most of them border on attack articles, and if they were on Wikipedia, would probably be deleted as a BLP violation.

See this piece, for example. It targets an admin on enwp, Jossi. Now, I had dealings with Jossi, as well as most of the Prem Rawat editors, when i handled a medcab case back in April to August. Sure, Jossi was apparently a student of Prem Rawat for some time, and whether he is still involved with Rawat personally, I do not know. I talked to Jossi now and then, and what I observed at the time, is that he spend little to no time editing the actual articles, and more time in discussion. I found a lot of people yelling "COI COI", and a link to the Metz article was on the talk page, something that was removed, thankfully.

I think that while Metz, as any writer has a right to free speech, that Metz lacks clue and tact, and the material he writes regarding to Wikipedia should be ignored, and should never be used on wiki in any context.

Are we "on wiki"?

Metz' pieces are not "opinion pieces" but news items. I prefer my prose on the dry side, letting facts speak for themselves - but, then, Metz is the reporter, not me. Ideally, we'd have the New York Times covering these events. In the meantime, we should all appreciate Metz and the Register bringing these disturbing truths to the attention of the public.

Also, Jossi was not merely a "student" of Prem Rawat, but a senior member of his organization.

Dude, that kool-aid you've been drinking has obviously gone to your thinking engine.

I prefer ValleyWag Even more insightful.

This site is reaching critical mass of pro-wikipedians spouting garbage and clogging up threads with inane tripe. Steve Crossin doesn't seem to know anything about the detailed Jossi case - "a student of Prem Rawat for some time" - "he spend little to no time editing the actual articles". Oh good grief.

I maintain that anyone who looked at the Jossi - Prem Ruwat case and didn't think it was preposterous has no understanding of How The World Works. Third party publishers attempting to create a neutral overview of a subject are not normally overseen by the subject's press officer. And if it is discovered that the article has received 1000s of competing contributions from that press officer, yet is still claiming to be "neutral", that is perceived to be a conflict of interest and a scandal. That is how the world works.

Jossi confessed to his PR work for Prem Rawat back in 2006, and admitted a Conflict of Interest. Yet he was still adding sources to the article and removing critical links in January 2008 when Metz's story broke. That will be perceived to be a Conflict of Interest and a scandal. That is how the world works.

Cade Metz's articles about Wikipedia are accurate and tame. Wikipedios are simply not living in the same world as the rest of us if they think they are controversial. Cade Metz is not controversial nor out of place in our world. Wikipedia is the freakshow aberration.

The feeling is discernible in your subtext that, boy-oh-boy, if you could you would silence Cade. I think this comes from spending so much of your life in what is basically a closed system. Maybe sometime you could talk some more about "medcab" which, it seems to me, is a whole other layer of made up "dispute resolution" nonsense on Wikipedia which we don't much address here. From what I can tell it is a bunch of high school kids and other posers meddling into things they know nothing about on both a substantive and process level.

Steve Crossin is a 20 year old (IIRC) kid from Australia with basically no experience in the real world. I've dealt with him on IRC and he is basically as much an idiot there as he is here. He's a vandalism patroller who believes that he has some capability for mediation, but the real reason he's pretending to be a mediator is that that's one of the paths for leveling up. He's also a dedicated admin coach, and has spent countless hours tweaking his user page and user boxes. It's plainly obvious that he's here as a wikicheerleader, and it was old the moment it started.

Fortunately, those types burn out fast.

In my own dealings with Mr. Metz, I've found that he actually shows a considerable amount of restraint in what he publishes about WP - he seems to reject at least half of what he hears on the rumor mill, or what people present to him as possible stories. His evidenciary standards are fairly high, especially for a web-based media outlet...

There's no question that he takes a negative slant against WP in nearly all cases, and it would probably be fair to say he's biased against them, but it's not like there's a shortage of webzine writers who are biased in their favor, is there? After all, WP allows journalists these days to be lazier than ever!

But Kelly, that is the whole purpose of the kool-aide-- to shut down the thinking engine. Rational thought prevents the reception of The All-Holy Wiki-Truth™ as revealed by The God-King.

Oh, he thinks Wikipedia is an MMORPG?

So far, he's been right.....

May I suggest some here are being trolled by a teenage editor who has been banned from Wikipedia for using not one, but two admin accounts?

of whatever age, the guy has acknowledged breaking the rules and seems to wish to return to wikipedia

Yeah, it all makes sense and follows the usual routine.

Do something stupid, get caught, become apologetic (and toss in some claims about blacking out at the computer if possible!), then go to Wikipedia Lite under a different name, post here without ever going off the official Wikipedia stance on issues, before going back to EN, where I presume he already is, despite the ban, under a different name.

Hah, the cargo cult at simple-wiki has a policy stub for BLP:

http://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia..._living_persons

Good luck explaining BLP in simple English. You can create a [[Cade Metz]] article while you're at it.

Actually, no. I don't edit English Wikipedia under any name. Ban evasion gets your ban extended, and I don't want that.

That's a rather odd way of looking at it, surely?

The chances of your passing an RfA with the Steve Crossin (T-C-L-K-R-D) account, under these circumstances, are negligible at this point - if you really want to be a WP administrator, your only rational choice now is to start over. And don't call yourself "Creve Tossin," either, if you know what I'm sayin'. That's just common sense.

Of course, my assumption would be that that's exactly what you're doing, and the above statement is only being made "for display purposes," but I figured I'd post it just in case.

And remember, people in glass houses shouldn't throw stones - your story is almost on the cusp of the sort of thing Cade Metz might actually write about, but since you don't appear to have done anything controversial (or socially damaging) with the admin accounts in question, I suppose he won't really care all that much.

Starting over was something I considered at one point, but in the end, I decided against it. I have a rather obvious editing pattern and areas of interest, and would be unable to abandon my areas of interest, specifically the TV series 24. No doubt I'm checkusered every month or so, but I don't know this for a fact.

It's true, I wanted to be an admin, badly. I really have no interest in +sysop anymore. I probably don't have the right character to be one, anyway.

As for Mr. Metz, my "case" isn't overly interesting, I don't think.

How come, in your view of "how the world works", some people, like Daniel Brandt, have the unquestioned right to manage what is said about them online (and anybody who opposes them is "harassing" them), but others, like Prem Rawat and his followers, have a COI when they try to do this? Sauce for the goose and the gander, and all that...

----------------
Now playing: Bangles - If She Knew What She Wants
via FoxyTunes

In that vein we can turn your question around, and ask why Prem Rawat (until recently) and Jimbo Wales have people to massage their bios and keep them reasonably sanitary, when everybody else (most especially people like Lyndon LaRouche and Mel Gibson) get crapped on daily?

Somewhere back in the archives, there's an extraordinary ruling by ArbCom which not only topic bans certain people from making edits on the LaRouche bio, but topic bans them from making any edits to anything even vaguely having to do with LaRouche. That should have happened to Jossi and Rawat years ago. It didn't. For a long time, he gamed the system. Admit it.

Yes, it's often people who somewhere have been accused of antisemitism whose BLPs are allowed to be pilloried on WP, even after many complaints. But the process of using BLP as punishment (and buffing a BLP as a reward, as in Marsden's case) is by no means limited to a small number of people. Most BLPs are targets not because somebody in power on WP either likes or dislikes them. Most BLPs come under attack from outside, and WP simply does not have the resources to make sure they are treated fairly. Knowing that, WP should have done away with BLPs. Instead, they've done what they usually do, which is admit that they can't do the job, but continue to take it on anyway, blaming somebody else for the piss-poor results.

Finally, Brandt is an anomaly who really is not useful for either side of this argument. You KNOW the only reason Brandt made it to the ordinary status that Jimbo and Rawat (and Marsden..) enjoyed automatically as a result of having powerful friends on WP, is because Brandt raised an unholy stink, and caused WP infinite trouble. He has the resources to do that, but almost no other BLP victim does. Pointing to him as getting "special treatment," is really, really low. Come on.

[Edit addition] I realize I also didn't add something that goes without saying, which is that a person having a "COI" about their own BLP on WP, is quite different than somebody having a COI about somebody else's BLP (or any other article). The first kind of COI is expected and unavoidable; there should be special rules allowing it. Part of the reason WP has such trouble with BLP is that it can't quite make its own OR and COI policies fit when it comes to personal bios, and rather than recognize that there must be exceptions to these general rules, it has simply refused to admit this, and steamrollered over all objections, mindlessly. That's Jimbo-think.

Putting aside the fact that the term "unquestioned right" is a strawman-level exaggeration, you have to remember that Jossi doesn't have a COI because he wants to prevent negative information about Rawat from appearing in Wikipedia. He has a COI because he's a Wikipedia Administrator who's using his status to prevent negative information about his employer from appearing in Wikipedia.

Brandt doesn't currently have any WP admins on his personal payroll, does he?

If Prem Rawat wanted his biography deleted from Wikipedia, I for one would support that idea wholeheartedly. I'd be all over that like a cheap suit!

Meanwhile, Brandt never expressed a preference for "managing" the article about him over deleting it - he simply pointed out all the errors, undue emphasis, and various bits of nasty material being inserted as reasons for deleting it. If a few blinkered, Kool-Aid-addicted Wikipedians misinterpreted that as his wanting to "manage" what was being said about him, that's their problem.

I don't think I can put it any more simply than that - we supported Brandt because he wanted out, and we bash Rawat (and Jossi, as his proxy) because he wants to stay in as long as he gets to dictate the terms, as he's doing now. Needless to say, his ability to dictate his own terms is inherently unfair to all the other BLP subjects.

Even the very few of us (myself not included) who insist that deleting all BLP's is the only effective answer to the problem aren't claiming to do so on behalf of those who want to stay in and maintain the status quo - that would be ridiculous. If Rawat (and Jossi, as his proxy) were like most BLP subjects, and accepted Wikipedia's usual terms of engagement as the price of whatever increased status Rawat might get by being included, then nobody here would be saying boo about him.

Well, it's certainly not unquestioned, but I think it's a fair characterization of what he would like to have, judging by his demand that Alison "not refer to me by name or by reference anywhere on the world wide web" and the fact that he added me for apparently nothing more than - well, questioning him.

He might be required to make his payroll records public. I wanted to check PIR's tax status, but noticed the article has been deleted, so I really don't know.


Prem who?



Nah, every celebrity's got somebody working for them. Most are stuck with slackers and incompetents but some are more lucky. I seriously doubt this is proportionate to the wages.

Perhaps a more dispassionate and less capricious list of the power words for Wikipedia admins, Wikimedia stewards, etc. is called for. :)

It's all about power, control and massive egos. Daniel Brandt sounds like some Wikipedia admins, betimes.

Well, the Germans combine separate nouns into single words all the time. Perhaps the English language is regaining its Germanic origins.



No. This is hilarious shit.



Are you Cade Metz?



Indeed, Wikipedia is an MMORPG. And it's free! That's why it's so appealing.

Of course it's not proportionate, and I'd certainly be lying if I said I wasn't impressed by Jossi's skill at manipulating WP content on behalf of his employer. But what does that have to do with how we react to such incidents of unfairness and double-standards when we see them?

All I'm saying is that Daniel Brandt wanted out, and if WP had given him what he wanted on or around Day One, that would have been the end of it - things would have worked out waaaay differently, "Hivemind" would never have existed, there'd be less yammering from both sides about so-called "harassment" and "stalking," and who knows, Wikipedia Review might not exist now either. Anything Daniel does now - onerous though it may be to some of us - could easily be passed off as sabre-rattling to intimidate those who would try for a restoration of the article, and hence further conflict. They could do it at any time, any time they want.

So, to compare him with Jossi & the Prem Rawat-cats is disingenuous at best. "Silly" is probably the most appropriate term for it, actually.

And some of us - those who came along later - kinda stumbled into that, I guess. Such is the way ....

Hivemind runs on fear and intimidation. If it brings the Amorrows of the world out of the woodwork, then all the better, from what I can glean from Daniel Brandt's attitude. Which is one of the reasons he refuses to remove my name from there, though I've asked repeatedly. Google Juice and Phear Juice!

Fact is, I guess, they could restore the article and the redirects. A few of us are still on there basically keeping watch to make sure those with a grudge don't succeed in doing just that. We all know the names, don't we? Bad and all that Brandt has treated me, he's still right about opt-out and I still need to defend that because I know it's right.

You mean like how he originally claimed the article was unfair because it focused on his recent Internet-related activity and not the fullness of his 40-year crusades for truth, justice, and the American way including his fight against the draft in the 1960s... and he even provided editors with links to news articles from back then which mentioned him... then, when his bio was revised to include mention of this stuff complete with the references, he started squealing about how it was harassment to mention his anti-draft activism where potential employers, government agents, etc., might see it.

No, it was mostly because the process of refusing to delete my bio was so pathetic. I wouldn't wish it on anyone.

It began in October 2005, and in June, 2007 the bio was redirected to the PIR article.

As SlimVirgin described it on a mailing list on June 14, 2007:
I objected to the redirect, because the way the redirect works in Wikipedia, it's actually a 100 percent substitution. That means all the previous Google juice for the article was now added on top of all the juice for the PIR article. In a search for my name, now the PIR article came up on top. Content added by Chip Berlet, who used the PIR article for his barely-disguised crusade against me, was suddenly more prominent than before. (At that time there were several articles about other websites I run, most of which still exist. They were more specific in focus and generally safe from malicious editing.)

All this time I was not only banned, but typically any comments I had to offer on a Talk page about the content in the articles that named me were summarily deleted, on the grounds that any edit by a banned editor is forbidden.

After several AfDs and DRVs the PIR article was still there. The only thing that got the redirect taken down was an insider intervention as a quid pro quo for a hivemind deletion. After that there was the Newyorkbrad hivemind entry. The thing that got the PIR article itself deleted was another cabal quid pro quo, this time in exchange for the NYB take-down.

After more than three years, I finally discovered what works and what doesn't work if you want your name out of Wikipedia. I guess I'm rather slow. In the early days of the article, it's true that I'd offer information about my early career in an effort to show that the article was slanted toward the Internet activism, and that I've always been an accountability activist more than a privacy activist. Then when this extra information was cherry-picked and edited into the article to make me look like an ex-con instead of someone practicing public civil disobedience, I realized that there was no way to win against Wikipedia.

At that point is was simply a matter of getting everything deleted, using any and all means at my disposal.

Remember, I didn't start this. Wikipedia did. I barely knew that Wikipedia existed until one day in October 2005 I discovered a stub on me that used a citation from a search-engine spammer who loved Google, as well as a reporter from Salon who was shocked (in August 2002) that there was a creature on earth who didn't love Google. This reporter pegged me as a quaint tin-foil hatter, and figured it was alright to make me look stupid in his article by claiming that I said things in the interview that I never said.

I saw those citations in the Wikipedia stub, at a time when I was already aware of the significant Google juice behind those citations. By the end of October 2005, negotiations with SlimVirgin failed and I knew that I did not want a Wikipedia bio. Jimbo was no help at all, so I started developing Wikipedia-Watch. A couple months later I joined this Board, when it was still under the original management.

My experience with Wikipedia is a good case study of how Wikipedia should not handle BLPs.

Speaking of taking old facts and distorting them...

From your "old Hivemind" page on me:



A very biased way of saying that I raised questions about how, under legal theories you were using to try to imply illegality on the part of other sites you disliked, your own site might possibly have trouble. Sauce for the goose and the gander...



There I was mistaken (I believe I misunderstood something you said that I thought claimed responsibility for that user but actually denied it; I corrected my own assertion once I realized it was incorrect). If you want to take an honest error as a malicious defamation campaign, go ahead.

And you see, Wikipedia is capable of learned behavior. Never let it be said otherwise. Lesson: "This case shows how we should not handle Daniel Brandt's BLP."

As I've tried to tell you, REAL redirects (HTTP 302) get all the google juice for the previous URL too. It's a distinction not worth making, and a battle not worth fighting, for this reason - If they'd fixed it to be a proper redirect, what would you have done when (not if) you discovered this had no effect on the google ranking?



Rather, you've discovered something that works. Your experience does not qualify you to claim that some tactic you have not in fact tried is something that doesn't work. You are not "the expert in what works and what doesn't".



And remind us again... in precisely what way did those negotiations fail? As I heard it, she was this close to going outside of process and deleting the article herself when you ordered her not to touch the article anymore (on the strength of HerschelKrustofsky's claims that she was in league with Chip Berlet). Is my understanding (of your actions, anyway) correct?

Actually, if you want your name out of WP (and all sister sites), you have to admit that what I did (post utterly artless song parodies on my own personal blog) works better than just about any other tactic.

Perhaps I can open a consulting business, coaching people on the shameless art of writing utterly atrocious song parodies, in the hopes that Jimbo will afford them the same courtesy he extended to me.

A 302 is a temporary redirect. A 301 is a permanent redirect. Google has always claimed that 301 redirects preserve Google juice, but I spent two years on Webmasterworld.com reading posts from webmasters who found out that Google is very flakey about this. The bottom line is that you cannot believe anything Google says.

Do a Google search for "namebase" and you will see pir.org about five links down on the first page. I sold the pir.org domain to the Public Interest Registry in December 2002, and the contract stipulated four full months of 301 redirects to namebase.org for all pir.org fetches that requested a NameBase filename. I wrote the program to handle this, and they ran it for four months. Yet NameBase never recovered from the domain change because the new domain didn't get the old pir.org juice. I also spent a lot of effort getting webmasters to change their links from pir.org to namebase.org.

It's almost six years later and Google still doesn't get the message, so please spare me the lectures about how Google works. There has never been a single mention of "namebase" on pir.org, and that's the way it should be. The Registry won the ICANN contract for administering the ORG top-level domain, and they were willing to pay my price for the pir.org domain — their other alternative was publicinterestregistry.org, which wasn't as cool. Besides, I know Marc Rotenberg from the early 1980s, when we both lived in the DC area, and he was the head of Public Interest Registry in 2002.

I knew it would be difficult getting my juice back after selling the domain, but the Registry had money, I needed money, I named my price, and they accepted without even bothering with a counteroffer.

___________________


I don't know where you got that story about what happened with me and SlimVirgin in October 2005. I noticed the stub in early October and emailed her, complaining that I wasn't consulted about this thing I discovered on Wikipedia. She politely pointed out that "we tend not to do that." She and I worked together to improve the stub for a few days, and in the end she took out one of the two citations I objected to, but wouldn't take out the other one.

By then I knew about her dissing me months earlier on a Wikipedia Talk page, and felt that her starting the stub on me was probably politically motivated. I then asked her to delete the bio entirely and she did so, explaining that she could do this because we were the only two people involved with the article. At the same time she added that her deletion could be overruled, and that she had no control over this possibility.

Prominent Google-lover Philipp Lenssen noticed that the article was deleted, and ended up posting a message on Jimbo's talk page complaining about this. He wasn't an admin, just an editor. But he had juice — at that time his blog often ended up in Google News, for example. That shouldn't happen with one-person sources, according to Google's own criteria for inclusion in Google News.

That same day Canderson7 undeleted my bio. SlimVirgin basically lost interest. The kiddies from Lord of the Flies began expanding the bio. I registered as a user, but whenever I tried to contain the madness, it backfired on me.