Here's a link to Kelly Martin's rolling revelations, as she releases extracts from the Arbitration Commitee archives while she was a sitting member. A kind of "The Arbcom years 2005-6" retrospective, if you will.

http://arbitrary-notions.blogspot.com/

Discuss.

Kelly's time on the ArbCom mailing list neatly coincides with the period in which the ArbCom treated me most severely, and I look forward to seeing exactly why (and how) the ArbCom decided to place me under a litany of restrictions, culminating in a two-week ban and desysopping.

Intensely boring so far. I'm not going to bother following it, I'll wait for others to point out interesting things [if there are any]. I'm struggling to see why anyone would be interested in arbcom emails from 3 years ago anyway [unless your name is everyking]. Are we going to find out anything about the arbcom that we don't already know? I think that the emails will only be interesting to those with specific grudges or bones to pick with arbcom. They might show that the arbcom is a corrupt, incompetent bunch of losers, but we already knew that.

Information Wants To Be Free —

No One Said It Wants To Be Interesting …

Jon

I'm afraid Kelly's time on the ArbCom list also coincides with Dave Gerard's mistaking me for Lir on Uncyclopedia. I'd be a little surprised if he posted any details of his Dirty Tricks Campaign™ to the list, though he probably would have mentioned it, since he thought it involved Lir, and Lir had been a major headache for ArbCom around that time.

That all would have run from December 2005 through March 2006, so at the rate Kelly's posting it, we should see some stuff on it by June/July, I would imagine...

I'm a little curious what they might have said behind the scenes about the infamous MONGO case, which launched the BADSITES concept. Did they have any secret ulterior motives for imposing an "attack site" link ban? That came around the end of the period she's got archives for, so it'll be a while before it comes up.

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Now playing: The Rembrandts - I'll Be There For You (Theme From Friends)
via FoxyTunes

I think the first "interesting" episode that will come up as I post these will be the Stevertigo Affair, whch is coming up pretty soon. I admit that much of this stuff is dreadfully boring.

Just a thought: you can always skip anything not of a really controversial nature.
I trust you to do a proper job.

I posted a comment to the ABC News story by Michael S. Malone —


WOW — I haven't had this much fun since the Pentagon Papers.

Ja Ja

Tagged for Web Searches under • Wikipedia Transparency •

It looks from here like the comment I posted this morning has been deleted from the ABC News site. It's hard to tell because the site is so klunky, or maybe ABC has got some beef with anything called Fox, Fire or Ice. So I was just wondering if anyone else sees the comment that I've quoted above?

Jon

The only quote I see from you is: "A systematic study of problems with biographical articles on Wikipedia, focusing on Wikipedia's treatment of the 100 U.S. Senators, can be found at the following location: http://wikipediareview.com/Wikipedia_Vandalism_Study
Jon Awbrey Feb-6" It's followed by two other comments, both from the 6th, the last from SarcasticIdealist.

That's what I thought. They display them latest on top, so Sarcasticides's is actually the first comment. They also deleted the comment from my neighborhood personal page.

Why is it that everything in the Wikipedia Warp Field seems to suffer from this brand of Stealth Censorship?

Ja?

Gerard has hundreds of toadies following you around online,
defaming and destroying you at every opportunity. Of course.


(Didya ever consider that maybe, the operators at go.com are
moderating these comment areas carefully, and you said something
that violated their "terms of use"?)

Well, I read that 17-paragraph Terms Of Use as carefully as any layman could be expected to do, and I cannot think of anything I wrote that might have violated it. Can you?

Jon

The only possibility in my mind would be that the link was considered spam, but I think that would be a far stretch, as it was clearly relevant.

A stretch indeed, since my earlier comment also included a link.

But I went ahead and tried another comment without a link — much less informative, of course, but maybe they can't handle too much information at once.

Yawners!

maybe wordy or some ex-arbies will start re-leaking all those Sami Moreland emails to all those still in-tact idiots running WP....Chapman, Wales, Double WP-WR Agent Mack, and Baudy would especially enjoy it.

yuk yuk yuk!

That has got to be the nicest thing DG has ever said about anyone.

Ja Ja

For followers of the inside play, the comments by Gerard and Raul about Bishonen back in 2005 indicate the rift that ultimately exploded again this year - when Bishonen banned FT2, and eventually saw him having to resign, humiliated.

It was all to get back at David Gerard, and was another act in these tedious Giano wars.

People who supported Bishonen, thinking that the anti-FT2 stuff was a noble act of justice-fighting, were completely duped.

There's a lot of it about at the moment.

Lately, people were duped to attack FT2 who had become the mark, using Peter Damian's complaints as their cover. Gameplayers like Bishonen, Giano and SlimVirgin were all at it, and too many people - including Reviewers here - fell for it.

It is still going on now with the attacks on Lar, another mark who challenged the "wrong people" last year. Basically, we're watching a long drawn out Revenge Drama, orchestrated by the same old manipulators as always.

Oh, and here I thought it was all based on principle.

Yup, they really fooled me.

Ja Ja

So which reality are you in?

Why, The Real Oneâ„¢, Of Course.

Ja Ja

I don't see comments from Raul or Gerard about Bishonen...the last post I see is dated Oct8, the one after the haiku. Did the blog go private after that?

No activity for a while. I begin to wonder if she got served.

Jon

Nah, just busy with other things.

I think there's a lot of truth in your assessment of what occurred with FT2 and is occurring with Lar.

Peter Damian had been banging on about FT2 for a year, with little to show for his troubles. It was only when FT2 challenged the gameplayers that he started to slip. Likewise, Charles Matthews, Jehochman - trashed after dissing the wrong people. Now Lar.

It is like watching Godfather II.

Here's the thing about it all. I'm fairly certain that volunteers like FT2 and Lar were/are not seeking positions of authority in Wikipedia in order to push POV. FT2 may have made a couple of POV edits to some article awhile ago, but he didn't appear to be trying to become an arbitrator to control any particular subject area (I'll leave his treatment of Peter Damien as a separate issue). Lar also genuinely appears to want to participate in high-level administrative work because he genuinely enjoys it and believes that he can be effective at it, not because he has any kind of nefarious agenda or has a narcissistic personality disorder screaming for gratification.

So, when two editors like FT2 and Lar get attacked and hectored by other power brokers in Wikipedia, I think it's a cause for concern if you want Wikipedia to succeed. I don't think that Giano has an agenda to control any content or reinforce his ego, but some of the other editors who have been allied with him lately apparently do.

Couldn't it just be that sometimes people do some things wrong, rather than them having challenged the 'wrong people'? I for instance haven't been challenged myself (unless it's challenged by sleaze and nastiness) and don't have anything for which I need to get revenge on the Lar front. Or are some people flawless in your eyes? I partly agree about FT2, though.

No, but it's possible you're being manipulated by those who have set themselves up as his enemies.

Anyway, are you ready to either put your name on a specific accusation against Lar or clarify that you do not mean any such thing? What you're doing right now is kind of sleazy itself.

I wonder who has been manipulating Pedro?

Note that when he admits that he reads Wikipedia Review that he quickly adds that when he does he struggles to find anything good here among all the garbage? Perhaps he was ensuring that he stays politically correct with a certain group of Wikipedians. Is there a Sellout Barnstar that someone could award him that says something like, "For proving you are a true tool of the Wiki-cult."

Per request, thread on scale of WP "success" split to here.]

I struggle to find anything good in here among the garbage. But I keep struggling. Maybe it is like living in Canberra and getting all your news from the New York Times, maybe there is somebody finds it all interesting, and it just does not cater to your interestes. But maybe it is like trying to see the Big Bang by setting your TV to channel 1 - you know the signal is there, you are just not sure how to extract it from the noise.

I think you and a lot of folks are missing the point.

The very existence of Closed Opaque Wikiprocedures (WP:COWs) and other ∗-Court Chambers puts the lie to Wikipediot claims of Openness and Transparency.

Jon

Tagged for Web Searches under • Wikipedia Transparency •

Wow. Pedro is becoming increasingly uncivil and unapproachable. That is how I found myself commenting in situations. I recommended he take a break as I was going out. I now hope he reads this, a stronger recommendation for him to take a break. Better to take some time away from the project, making comments off-wiki, than to spend your reputation points on petty comments and insults.

Also, why do people always bring up the Nazis?

It is a good thing you are not under a Everyking-esque restriction on familiarizing yourself with circumstanes before commenting.

Oh, good! \o/

Godwin's Law

Yes, yes, I know. But it doesn't explain why!

Ja Ja

Jon

I am starting to worry you may have a case of what Wikipediots call "Edit count-itis". Have you read WR:DOCTORB ?

The Nazis are one of the worst villians of history (not the worst, but third behind Mao and Stalin in murder), plus they were as efficient as they were ruthless. They killed the mentally ill, handicapped, and the gay, and their dissenters, so in one sense they were the ultimate anti-liberals even if they hadn't mass murdered Jews also. And there was a definite comic book villiany to them: they invented and put into use all kinds of new villainous war stuff from the Blitz to V-weapons to jet aircraft, and had an effective and complicated propaganda organ and excellent sense of theater, all the way from the color of the uniforms to the archetecture and the huge Nuremburg torchlight rallies. Hitler was a big Wagner fan, so you can see how that worked. I'm tempted to suggest the Nazis were into "guerilla theater," but simply on a mass scale.

Okay, take all that, and you get the chance to have the ultimate evil villains. Not just a murderously efficient agenda against the helpless, but also technologically advanced with a great sense of presentation and drahwma. Thus, they can employed for nearly any rhetorical purpose. If your enemy is besting you in the propaganda and drama game (LaRouche, say), or even in the invention department, you can always compare him to the Third Reich. In every large public argument, there are bound to be some Jews, who naturally hate the Nazis worst of all villains in history, who will be especially tempted to do this.

Thus, Godwin's law. A metaphor for badness that flexible, hardly ever misses a chance to be used as a weapon by anyone who thinks their intellectual opponent is insufficiently liberal or flexible in any way.

• Bull •

It has to do with very specific distinguishing features of Nazi and Fascist mindsets that people just naturally detect in embryo whenever they do the ultrasound on WikiPrägnanz.

Jon

Annnnd what do we have today?.......


Forgive my stupid, but there's almost nothing about XAL on the
Review, and WP has purged almost every discussion. What evil horror
was she accused of committing, other than getting into it with Bishonen?

What a silly thing to get into a ban-war over.....
but then, it's par for the course.

The first known violator of Godwin's Law was Erich Fromm in 1941. He still has a thing of two to offer social media.

Does this Pedro guy actually write any content? Or does he just vandal hunt and bicker with others?

Deep down, the way they want to see themselves (and to be seen by others) slips and they see themselves as they really are.

He seems to be an intense little shit. I'd say he just vandal hunts and bickers with others.

Thank you, Milton!


I don't think Pedro does much in the area of content creation. The wannabe 'Wannabe Kate' results. He's more into RFA and other site politics.

Wannabe Kate doesn't work properly any more; these are Pedro's actual stats.