> The disappearing of Ariel Glenn

carbuncle

Fans of Mersenne primes will likely recall the heartwarming story of Laura A. Nickel and Landon Noll discovering the 25th known Mersenne prime while still high schoolers. Who will ever forget where they were when they heard that news?

Whatever happened to those sweet kids, you ask? Well, Landon Noll grew a beard, and Laura A. Noll got married and became Ariel Glenn. Yes, there probably is a good reason for using her middle name, but it's not really germaine to this post.

I happened to notice that [[Ariel Glenn]] was a red link. It was deleted by Daniel with the edit summary "â€Ž(Biographies of living persons concerns. Please contact me via email if you have any questions.)". Of course this piqued my interest. Googling Ariel Glenn I found the cache of the article and there appears to be nothing terribly provocative in it:

QUOTE

Ariel T. Glenn (nÃ©e Laura A. Nickel) with Landon Curt Noll discovered on October 30, 1978 that 221701 âˆ’ 1 was the 25th Mersenne prime. This made international news because Noll and Nickel were still high school students. For the verification of this number alone, the pair used almost eight hours of time on a CDC Cyber 174 at California State University [1]. They consumed over 4000 hours of computer time in their search double testing M21001 through M24481, along with a test of M65537 using a custom implementation of the Lucas-Lehmer test.

Ariel worked as a public key infrastructure specialist at Columbia University, and is now a member of the Midnight Special Law Collective, a radical law collective.

I was confused until I noticed this in the Google results. Today's lesson: if you want your BLP deleted but don't fancy having sex with Jimbo, start working for the Wikimedia Foundation.

Somey

I seem to recall that "get hired by the WMF" was already on our too-short list of successful BLP opt-out methodologies, but I could be wrong about that. Hard cheese on people who are older and don't have an IT background, of course...

Interestingly though, the Landon Curt Noll (T-H-L-K-D) doesn't appear to have ever mentioned Ariel Glenn at all - it's like she never existed. And FWIW, I'd also be willing to bet that this edit was made by Noll himself... Later on, he registered an account under his full name and made this edit, which was later reformatted but has otherwise gone unchallenged.

Yikes, and there's even an edit by Amorrow in there!

carbuncle

QUOTE(Somey @ Mon 29th June 2009, 5:14pm)

I seem to recall that "get hired by the WMF" was already on our too-short list of successful BLP opt-out methodologies, but I could be wrong about that. Hard cheese on people who are older and don't have an IT background, of course...

Interestingly though, the Landon Curt Noll (T-H-L-K-D) doesn't appear to have ever mentioned Ariel Glenn at all - it's like she never existed. And FWIW, I'd also be willing to bet that this edit was made by Noll himself... Later on, he registered an account under his full name and made this edit, which was later reformatted but has otherwise gone unchallenged.

Yikes, and there's even an edit by Amorrow in there!

If this is another Amorrow thing, please delete this thread.

thekohser

QUOTE(carbuncle @ Mon 29th June 2009, 12:51pm)

Today's lesson: if you want your BLP deleted but don't fancy having sex with Jimbo, start working for the Wikimedia Foundation.

I'm checking by e-mail with admin Daniel, per his instructions, if anyone questions why the article was deleted. We'll see what he has to say!

Greg

thekohser

QUOTE(thekohser @ Mon 29th June 2009, 3:06pm)

QUOTE(carbuncle @ Mon 29th June 2009, 12:51pm)

Today's lesson: if you want your BLP deleted but don't fancy having sex with Jimbo, start working for the Wikimedia Foundation.

I'm checking by e-mail with admin Daniel, per his instructions, if anyone questions why the article was deleted. We'll see what he has to say!

Greg

Response received from Daniel, but on condition that I not repeat its contents to anyone. On the scale of 0 = completely lame, to 10 = completely understandable, I rate his rationale as about a "3" or "4". In fact, I could imagine a scenario where the removal of the article only inflames the "situation" surrounding it.