[tt] [FoRK] Secret mailing list rocks Wikipedia

[Eugen Leitl]

----- Forwarded message from Sat N <sateesh.narahari at gmail.com> -----

From: Sat N <sateesh.narahari at gmail.com>
Date: Fri, 7 Dec 2007 09:18:40 -0700
To: Friends of Rohit Khare <fork at xent.com>
Subject: Re: [FoRK] Secret mailing list rocks Wikipedia
Reply-To: Friends of Rohit Khare <fork at xent.com>

More....It gets interesting....

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/12/06/wikipedia_and_overstock/

Wikipedia black helicopters circle Utah's Traverse Mountain
By Cade Metz in San Francisco
Published Thursday 6th December 2007 21:35 GMT

Exclusive "We aren't democratic." That's how Wikipedia founder Jimmy
"Jimbo" Wales described his famously-collaborative online encyclopedia
in a recent puff piece from The New York Times Magazine. "The core
community appreciates when someone is knowledgeable," he said, "and
thinks some people are idiots and shouldn't be writing."

This is true. Despite its popular reputation as a Web 2.0 wonderland,
Wikipedia is not a democracy. But the totalitarian attitudes of the
site's ruling clique go much further than Jimbo cares to acknowledge.

In early September, the Wikipedia inner circle banned edits from 1,000
homes and one massive online retailer in an attempt to suppress the
voice of one man.

His name is Judd Bagley, and when the ban came down, he hadn't edited
Wikipedia in over a year. He was merely writing about the site, from
his own domain. The Wikipedia elite blacklisted Judd Bagley because he
accused them of using their powers to hijack reality.

Talk of Wikipedia admins trying to seize "the truth" may sound
familiar. Famously, comedian Stephen Colbert has poked more than a few
holes (http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060801-7396.html) in the
site's commitment to democratic consensus, making fun of its efforts
to clamp down on edits deemed less than factual. And the web is still
abuzz over the secret mailing list
(http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/12/04/wikipedia_secret_mailing/)
used by top administrators to silence inconvenient voices.

But what happens when, say, the Wikipedia elite decides to take a
topic as weighty as the health of US financial markets under its
control without informing the public of its decision?

How far will Wikipedia's arbiters of truth go? Come with us down the
rabbit hole.
One thousand innocent bystanders

One sleepy evening this October, Cory Hogan stumbled onto Wikipedia
while trawling the web for information on US Vice President Dick
Cheney. He read the site's extensive screed on the curmudgeonly veep,
and before he knew it, he was inclined to contribute his own thoughts
to the discussion. But when he clicked on the "edit this page" tab, he
was told he wasn't allowed.

A rather menacing message filled his web browser, announcing that
Wikipedia edits were forbidden from his IP address. His address, the
message said, was a favorite "open proxy" of Judd Bagley and
Overstock.com.
Judd Bagley Wikipedia Block Warning

Wikipedia bans Traverse Mountain, Utah

Cory Hogan shares his IP range with about 1,000 other homes in
Traverse Mountain, Utah, a neighborhood twenty miles south of Salt
Lake City, and one of those homes belongs to Judd Bagley. The two men
live within two blocks of each other, and they're members of the same
church.

When that message turned up on Wikipedia, Hogan's first thought was
that Bagley was some sort of shady political henchman for the Vice
President of the United States. But the truth is far stranger.

That Traverse Mountain IP address is not an open proxy. It would seem
that the address was banned because Judd Bagley has accused
Wikipedia's uber-administrators of skewing the contents of four online
articles. Yes, just four. But those four articles may sway the fate of
billions of dollars spilling through America's stock markets.
When short selling gets naked

Judd Bagley is the head of communications at Overstock.com, the web
clearance house based in Salt Lake City, and his boss is the
irrepressible Patrick Byrne. Since early 2005, Byrne has waged a very
public crusade against a Wall Street trick known as naked short
selling. This controversial campaign came to a head in February when
Overstock filed a $3.48bn lawsuit
(http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/02/06/overstock-com_sues_wall_street/)
against 12 New York brokerage firms, alleging a "massive, illegal
stock market manipulation scheme."

For those of you who slept through your school lessons, a short sale
is way of making money when the price of a stock goes down.
Anticipating a price drop, you borrow shares from someone else and
promptly sell them off. Then, once that drop kicks in, you buy the
shares back and return them to the original owner.

A naked short sale works much the same way – except you don't really
borrow the shares. Three days after the sale, when it's time to
actually deliver shares to the buyer, you fail to do so. Naked
shorting isn't always illegal under Securities and Exchange Commission
rules, but it is if you're attempting to manipulate stock prices. And
Patrick Byrne is sure that such manipulation occurs on a grand scale.
Patrick Byrne, Overstock.com CEO

Patrick Byrne

Using this scheme, Byrne claims, nefarious Wall Streeters can
eventually drive entire companies out of business. "You can destroy
these companies, and when that happens, you don't have to pay the IOUs
off," he says. "It's basically a system for being a serial killer of
small companies."

In March, Bloomberg Television aired a mini-documentary
(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bfi3Hxasm2s) on naked shorting, and
Byrne's views were prominently featured. But for the most part, the
mainstream press has painted the Overstock CEO as a raving madman.

"The New York Post ran a picture of me with UFOs coming out of my
head," he says. "And CNBC became the I-hate-Patrick-Byrne channel." In
fact, he's received much the same treatment from The Register
(http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/12/03/overstock_issues/).

One of his most vociferous - and unrelenting - critics is a Forbes.com
columnist, book author, and former BusinessWeek reporter named Gary
Weiss. If you visit Weiss's blog (http://garyweiss.blogspot.com/),
you'll see that he spends much of his bandwidth badmouthing Byrne,
Overstock.com, and its crusade against naked shorting.
Enter Wikipedia

In late 2005, before he was officially hired by Overstock, Judd Bagley
joined Patrick Byrne's crusade. He was working as an online journalist
at the time, and that November, he interviewed Byrne for a website he
was running called Businessjive.com.

"I started doing a podcast series interviewing entrepreneurial
figures," Bagley says, "and Patrick was the first person I
approached."

During the interview, naked shorting was discussed, and Bagley soon
agreed to host a PowerPoint presentation that Byrne had put together
detailing his views on the subject. "The information he gave me [about
naked short selling] sounded kinda implausible," Bagley explains. "But
the journalist in me started digging a little bit to learn more about
this thing, and I managed to bump into all the things he predicted I
would see."

A few days later, on January 28, 2006, while checking his site's
server logs, Bagley noticed that at least one person had accessed this
presentation by way of Wikipedia. Visiting the online encyclopedia for
the first time, he found that someone had linked to Businessjive from
Wikipedia's article on naked shorting - and that someone else had
removed the link.

Bagley soon discovered that this person - identified only by the IP
address 70.23.85.112
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/70.23.85.112) -
had made multiple edits to Wikipedia's naked shorting article, and in
his opinion, these edits were patently biased. He believed that
someone was preventing the article from telling the whole story.
Judd Bagley, Director of Communications

Judd Bagley

"It didn't take long to realize that this was a part of the 'anybody
can edit' nature of Wikipedia, which I recalled having heard about,"
Bagley explains. "A little digging revealed that the user...who
removed the links to my site did so as part of a rather sweeping
series of edits that greatly skewed the article against what I had
learned to be the truth."

Bagley restored the link to Businessjive. A few hours later, the same
person removed it. So Bagley restored it again. And it was removed
again.

Clearly, someone didn't want Wikipedia referencing Patrick Byrne's
rather extensive PowerPoint presentation on naked shorting. So Bagley
decided to figure out who was doing this. And why.
SlimWeissGaryVirgin

After digging for six months, Bagley decided that his Wikipedia
nemesis was none other than Gary Weiss. He was sure the 70.23.85.112
IP address belonged to Weiss, and he was sure that Weiss later used a
Wikipedia account called "Mantanmoreland" to control not only the
encyclopedia's naked shorting article, but three others as well: the
Overstock.com article, the Patrick Byrne article, and the entry on
Gary Weiss himself.

The Mantanmoreland (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Mantanmoreland)
account was created just after Bagley dueled with that 70.23.85.112 IP
address. The account's first act
(http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Naked_short_selling&diff=next&oldid=37118220)
was to edit the naked shorting article, and it later created
(http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Gary_Weiss&diff=171477771&oldid=48341962)
the article on Gary Weiss.

"Gary is deeply conflicted," Bagley insists. "He controls the article
about himself, and he controls articles dedicated to things he is the
avowed enemy of."

Weiss vehemently denies these charges. In fact, he told us that he's
never edited Wikipedia. "I really find it deplorable that you're
repeating all these crazy charges," he said, "and would appreciate it
if you'd leave my name out of the article entirely."

Nonetheless, Bagley felt he had the evidence to prove his claims, and
he decided to bring it to the attention of Wikipedia's top
administrators.

His first attempt at this was ill-advised. Using a Wikipedia account
called WordBomb, he posted a reference to a lawsuit brought against
Weiss. "On July 7, 2006, I decided to alert the Wikipedia community to
Weiss's activities," Bagley says. "I did this by adding some true but
unflattering details to the Gary Weiss article, expecting
Mantanmoreland to object and escalate the matter to the official
Wikipedia dispute resolution process, resulting in Mantanmoreland's
banning from Wikipedia."

But that didn't happen. Instead, a Wikipedia administrator known only
as SlimVirgin swooped in and immediately banned
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:WordBomb/) Bagley's account.
Bagley goes to school

After some additional back and forth on the site, Bagley got smart. Or
so he thought. He went straight to SlimVirgin with evidence he'd
collected.

In this case, he was trying to show that the person behind
Mantanmoreland was "sock-puppeting" - pretending to be more than one
person - in an effort to promote his own views. "I had links to diffs
- the basic units of Wikipedia that show the difference from one edit
and the next," Bagleys explains. "Basically, these diffs showed
Mantanmoreland having conversations with himself on the site. I
figured that was enough to get Mantamoreland booted."

SlimVirgin soon wrote back, saying that the evidence meant nothing.
But Bagley questioned whether she even looked at it. So he sent her a
few more files, and this time, he included a small script - spyware,
in other words - that would ping his server whenever the files were
opened.

A few minutes later, he got the ping. But according to Bagley, it
didn't come from SlimVirgin. According to Bagley, it came from Weiss.
"All I wanted was to know SlimVirgin has opened my files," Bagley
says. "Well, it did get opened, but it was opened by Weiss."
SlimVirgin Wikipedia icon

SlimVirgin (as she appears on her Wikipedia page
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:SlimVirgin))
AntiSocialMedia.net

"That's the day I knew something rotten was afoot at Wikipedia,"
Bagley says. He quit trying to edit the encyclopedia, but he spent the
next year collecting additional evidence against Weiss and Wikipedia
and posting it to a new site called AntiSocialMedia.net.

More than twelve months later, he acquired a Wikipedia database dump -
from the site itself - that he saw as proof that SlimVirgin and
another administrator called "JayJG" were misusing their authority.

On August 22, Bagley posted information from this database dump to
AntiSocialMedia.net (http://antisocialmedia.net/?p=115). And two weeks
later, after other Wikipedia users accused the site's elite of
undemocratic behavior, Bagley's IP range and the range used by
Overstock.com were banned by Wikipedia's UK press officer, David
Gerard.

Overstock employs about 800 people, and since Bagley uses a shared IP
range, run by an ISP called Broadweave, Gerard also ended up banning
about 1,000 additional homes in Traverse Mountain, Utah.
The BADSITES initiative

Days later, the Wikipedia Arbitration Committee began discussing an
effort (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_arbitration/Attack_sites)
to ban the mention of certain "BADSITES" on the encyclopedia. And
AntiSocialMedia.net was at the top of the list.

"Sites such as Mr. Bagley's - sites that strongly criticize members of
Wikipedia - were being associated with stalking and harassing and
practically everything up to threatened rape," says Dan Tobias, a
regular Wikipedia contributor based in Florida. "People were greatly
exaggerating what the danger was from these sites, and even going so
far as to insist these sites were so evil that shouldn't be able to
link to them under any context, for any purpose, anywhere."

Tobias refuses to take sides in the Bagley-Wikipedia squabble, but
he's adamant this initiative was ill advised. "I don't want to be
portrayed as being on Bagley's side. I'm just in favor of being fair
and balanced with everybody," Tobias says. "I very strongly dislike
censorship and any attempt to control what people can say and what
they can read."

"I thought this whole thing was vastly overblown and unfair," he adds,
"especially on a site that's devoted to the free exchange of
information and neutral point of view and considering all view points.
It just made no sense."

Meanwhile, Bagley is sure that this initiative was launched simply
because Wikipedia's inner circle didn't want anyone to see the
evidence he'd posted against SlimVirgin. "They were trying to make
sure that if I published more evidence, no one would ever hear about
it - because no one could link to it from Wikipedia."
Bagley is not alone

In the end, thanks to objections from Tobias and others, the Wikipedia
Arbitration Committee decided against an official ban on
AnitSocialMedia.net and other BADSITES. But it would seem that an
unofficial ban is very much in place.

Another regular Wikipedia writer, Charles Ainsworth, confirms that
anyone outside the site's inner circle is not allowed to edit the
articles on Overstock.com, Patrick Byrne, naked shorting, or Weiss.

"If you compare Wikipedia's Byrne article to the Weiss article, the
difference is huge," says Ainsworth, an American editor living in
Japan. "Weiss and his friends have added tons of negative information
to the Byrne article. They really don't like the guy. But the Weiss
article? It looks like it came off the jacket of one of his books."

Ainsworth has contributed more featured articles to Wikipedia than all
but six other writers. But in October, when he attempted to edit the
Weiss article, he was immediately banned
(http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Gary_Weiss&diff=prev&oldid=165916446)
from the site for 24 hours by an administrator known as "Durova" - the
administrator at the heart of the secret mailing list scandal
(http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/12/04/wikipedia_secret_mailing/).

And Durova's ban was seconded by none other than Jimmy Wales.

"Durova [has] my full support here. No nonsense, zero tolerance, shoot
on sight," Wales wrote on the site. "No kidding, this has gone on long
enough."
Wikipedia responds

What does the inner circle say about all of this? When we contacted
SlimVirgin via email and asked for a phone interview, she referred us
to UK press officer David Gerard.

And when we asked David Gerard why he banned Bagley and Overstock from
the site, he told us he'd banned Overstock's range because the company
was guilty of "abuse of the wiki". Via email, he indicated that
someone else had banned Bagley's IP range.
David Gerard and Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia UK &quot;Bootstrap Meeting&quot;

David Gerard (left) and Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales (center), in a
photo from David Gerard's

Wikipedia page (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:The_Royal_Oak_bootstrap_meet.jpg),
reproduced under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 license
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/)

He then pointed us to a blog post where he said we would find evidence
of Overstock's abuses. This blog post
(http://o-smear.blogspot.com/2007/11/spam-what-spam.html) explained
that Overstock was banned because someone was flooding Wikipedia with
references to five urls assigned to an online travel company called
Ski West. In 2005, Overstock.com purchased Ski West, but it sold the
company in the spring of this year, well before Overstock.com's IP
range was banned from Wikipedia.

When we first corresponded with Weiss for this story, he pointed us to
the same blog post.

Meanwhile, posts to Wikipedia show that David Gerard has a personal
beef with Bagley. "Bagley's case is that he's been stalking people
with quite some viciousness for commercial gain. He even got writeups
in the NYT and NY Post, so I can state he's an odious stalking
arsehole with Reliable Sources!" Gerard writes
(http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Administrators%27_noticeboard/Incidents&diff=prev&oldid=155722944#Overstock.com.2FWordBomb.2FJudd_Bagley).
"I urge you to start reading up - he's really at a new and exciting
level of odiousness." Elsewhere he adds
(http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:David_Gerard&diff=prev&oldid=157139762):
"ps: Fuck off, Bagley."

When we responded to Gerard's email, asking for more specifics on the
banning of these IP ranges and requesting a phone interview, he did
not reply.
Connecting the dots

So what exactly is going on here?

Without a doubt, Judd Bagley has seriously angered the powers that be
at Wikipedia. He's even received an email from Jimbo Wales saying:
"Your feigned innocence is not very endearing" and "It would be
helpful if you could come to terms with the fact that you have behaved
very very badly over a long period of time."

There's no denying that Judd Bagley is, shall we say, overzealous when
it comes to Wikipedia. We've witnessed his fervor first hand. In this
respect, he's a lot like our favorite CEO, Patrick Byrne. But
overzealousness is hardly a reason to ban Wikipedia edits from 1,000
homes and an entire dotcom.

Wikipedia's David Gerard says that Judd Bagley and Overstock were
banned because they were "spamming" - i.e. posting self-serving
messages to the site. But Bagley hasn't edited Wikipedia in over a
year, and any spamming from former Overstock subsidiary Ski West is
completely irrelevant.

Gerard also calls Bagley's IP range an "open proxy." As Dan Tobias
told us, Wikipedia frequently bans open proxies because people can use
them to make edits without identifying themselves. But according to
Broadweave, the ISP that runs Bagley's IP range, it's not an open
proxy - and never has been.

Clearly, this ban isn't about spamming. It's about something else.

If you ask Judd Bagley and Patrick Byrne what's going on, they'll tell
you the ban is part of much larger attempt to discredit their views on
naked shorting. They believe that a small group of people is using
Wikipedia as means of controlling public opinion.

"When you think of how the public consciousness of an issue can
develop, one of the first things that's going to happen in today's age
is people are going to Google the issue and then read the Wikipedia
article that comes up," Byrne says. "So if you can control that
article, you can really deflect the discourse."

Whatever the motives behind it, there's no doubt that the Wikipedia
inner circle rules those four articles with an iron fist. And as
Charles Ainsworth points out, this puts a cloud over the entire
encyclopedia.

"Wikipedia, in its way, is of great benefit to the web community," he
says. "But I've also been greatly dismayed that Wikipedia has
apparently attracted some intelligent but problematic personalities
with ambition, secret personal agendas, and cold, ruthless behavior
towards other editors and ideas that they perceive as threatening
their power, position, or agendas. What's disheartening is that Jimbo
and the rest of the Wikimedia Foundation not only don't do anything
about it, but they appear to support these charlatans to some degree."

"When Bagley attempted to level the playing field, he was banished
immediately," Ainsworth continues. "Obviously, there's something
seriously wrong with the way Wikipedia is being managed and
administered. I don't know if it threatens the long-term viability of
the project or not, but it is cause for concern among those of us who
spend a lot of hours actually trying to write quality articles." (R)


On Dec 4, 2007 3:22 AM, Eugen Leitl <eugen at leitl.org> wrote:
>
> (Took them much longer than I expected).
>
> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/12/04/wikipedia_secret_mailing/
>
> Secret mailing list rocks Wikipedia
>
> By Cade Metz
>
> Published Tuesday 4th December 2007 00:48 GMT
>
> Exclusive On the surface, all is well in Wikiland. Just last week, a headline
> from The San Francisco Chronicle told the world that "Wikipedia's Future Is
> Still Looking Up," as the paper happily announced that founder Jimmy "Jimbo"
> Wales plans to expand his operation with a high-profile move to the city by
> the bay.
>
> But underneath, there's trouble brewing.
>
> Controversy has erupted among the encyclopedia's core contributors, after a
> rogue editor revealed that the site's top administrators are using a secret
> insider mailing list to crackdown on perceived threats to their power.
>
> Many suspected that such a list was in use, as the Wikipedia "ruling clique"
> grew increasingly concerned with banning editors for the most petty of
> reasons. But now that the list's existence is confirmed, the rank and file
> are on the verge of revolt.
>
> Revealed after an uber-admin called "Durova" used it in an attempt to enforce
> the quixotic ban of a longtime contributor, this secret mailing list seems to
> undermine the site's famously egalitarian ethos. At the very least, the list
> allows the ruling clique to push its agenda without scrutiny from the
> community at large. But clearly, it has also been used to silence the voice
> of at least one person who was merely trying to improve the encyclopedia's
> content.
>
> "I've never seen the Wikipedia community as angry as they are with this one,"
> says Charles Ainsworth (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Cla68), a
> Japan-based editor who's contributed more feature articles to the site than
> all but six other writers. "I think there was more hidden anger and
> frustration with the 'ruling clique' than I thought and Durova's heavy-handed
> action and arrogant refusal to take sufficient accountability for it has
> released all of it into the open."
>
> Kelly Martin, a former member of Wikipedia's Arbitration Committee, leaves no
> doubt that this sort of surreptitious communication has gone on for ages.
> "This particular list is new, but the strategy is old," Martin told us via
> phone, from outside Chicago. "It's certainly not consistent with the public
> principles of the site. But in reality, it's standard practice."
>
> Meanwhile, Jimbo Wales has told
> (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Administrators%27_noticeboard/IncidentArchive330)
> the community that all this is merely a tempest in a teacup. As he points
> out, the user that Durova wrongly banned was reinstated after a mere 75
> minutes. But it would seem that Jimbo has done his best to suppress any talk
> of the secret mailing list.
>
> Whatever the case, many longtime editors are up-in-arms. And the site's top
> administrators seem more concerned with petty site politics than with
> building a trustworthy encyclopedia. "The problem with Wikipedia is that, for
> so many in the project, it's no longer about the encyclopedia," Martin wrote
> in a recent blog post
> (http://nonbovine-ruminations.blogspot.com/2007/11/on-durova.html). "The
> problem is that Wikipedia's community has defined itself not in terms of the
> encyclopedia it is supposedly producing, but instead of the people it
> venerates and the people it abhors." Bang! Bang! You're dead
>
> On November 18, Durova banned a Wikipedia editor known as "!!". Yes, "!!".
> Some have taken to calling him "Bang Bang." At Wikipedia, everyone has the
> right to anonymity, and user names are often, shall we say, inexplicable.
>
> In banning (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:%21%21) this account, Durova
> described it as an "abusive sock puppet," insisting it was setup by someone
> dead set on destroying the encyclopedia. "This problem editor is a
> troublemaker whose username is two exclamation points with no letters," read
> the block. "He is a ripened sock with a padded history of redirects, minor
> edits, and some DYK work. He also indulges in obscene trolling in German, and
> free range sarcasm and troublemaking. If you find this user gloating, or spot
> his nasty side, hit him with the banhammer." DYKs are edits made to the "Did
> You Know" section of the Wikipedia home page.
>
> Durova then posted a notice
> (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Administrators%27_noticeboard/IncidentArchive330)
> to the site's public forum, insisting the ban was too important for
> discussion outside the purview of the Arbitration Committee, Wikipedia's
> Supreme Court. "Due to the nature of this investigation, our normal open
> discussion isn't really feasible," she said. "Please take to arbitration if
> you disagree with this decision."
>
> But it was discussed. At length. Countless editors were nothing less than
> livid, many arguing that the banned user was actually a wonderfully
> productive editor. "Durova, you're really going to have to explain this,"
> wrote one editor. "I see no transgressions of any kind on the part of this
> user; indeed, with over 100 DYKs, he seems to be a pretty positive force
> around here."
>
> Meanwhile, Durova continued to insist that she had some sort of secret
> evidence that could only be viewed by the Arbitration Committee. "I am very
> confident my research will stand up to scrutiny," she said. "I am equally
> confident that anything I say here will be parsed rather closely by some
> disruptive banned sockpuppeteers. If I open the door a little bit it'll
> become a wedge issue as people ask for more information, and then some rather
> deep research techniques would be in jeopardy."
>
> Then someone posted a private email from Durova in which she divulged her
> evidence - and revealed the secret mailing list.  Wikiparanoia
>
> Basically, Durova's email showed that Bang Bang was indeed a wonderfully
> productive editor. She was sure this was all a put-on, that he was trying to
> gain the community's "good faith" and destroy it from within.
>
> We're not joking.
>
> This sort of extreme paranoia has become the norm among the Wikipedia inner
> circle. There are a handful sites across the web that spend most of their
> bandwidth criticizing the Wikipedia elite - the leading example being
> Wikipedia Review (http://wikipediareview.com/) - and the ruling clique spends
> countless hours worrying that these critics are trying to infiltrate the
> encyclopedia itself.
>
> Bang Bang was a relatively new account. Since this new user was a skilled
> editor, Durova decided, he must be "a vandal" sent by Wikipedia Review. "I
> need to show you not just what Wikipedia Review is doing to us, but how
> they're doing it," she said in her email. "Here's a troublemaker whose
> username is two exclamation points with no letters: !! It's what I would call
> [a] 'ripened sock'...Some of the folks at WR do this to game the community's
> good faith."
>
> Former Arbitration Committee member Kelly Martin confirms that this bizarre
> attitude is now par for the course inside the Wikipedia inner circle. "Anyone
> who makes large changes to anything now is likely to get run over by a
> steamroller," she says. "It's not a matter of whether your edit was good or
> bad. All they see is 'large edit my person not known to me' and - boom! They
> smack you on the head because vandals are so bad."
>
> As it turned out, Bang Bang was an experienced user. He had set up a new
> account after having privacy problems with his old one. Once her secret email
> was posted, Durova removed the ban, calling it "a false positive."
>
> Durova then voluntarily relinquished her admin powers, and over the weekend,
> the Arbitration Committee admonished her "to exercise greater care when
> issuing blocks." The secret mailing list
>
> But this particular false positive was only part of the problem. With her
> email, Durova also revealed that the ruling clique was using that secret
> mailing list to combat its enemies - both real and imagined. "The good news,"
> she said, was that the Wikipedia Review "trolls" didn't know the list
> existed. And then she linked to the list's sign-up page.
>
> The list (http://lists.wikia.com/mailman/listinfo/wpcyberstalking) is hosted
> by Wikia, the Jimmy Wales-founded open source web portal that was setup as an
> entirely separate entity from the not-for-profit Wikimedia Foundation that
> oversees Wikipedia.
>
> The sign-up page explains that the list is designed to quash "cyberstalking"
> and "harassment." But it would seem that things have gotten a bit
> out-of-hand. Clearly, the list is also used to land "the banhammer" on
> innocent bystanders.
>
> "The problem is that their false positive rate is about 90 per cent - or
> higher," says Kelly Martin. "It's possible that every last person Durova has
> identified is innocent."
>
> Recently, in another effort to quash "harassment," several members of the
> Wikipedia elite tried to ban the mention of certain "BADSITES" on the
> encyclopedia, and naturally, Wikipedia Review was on the list. Dan Tobias
> (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Dtobias) was one of the many editors who
> successfully fought this ban, and as he battled, he marveled at how well
> organized his opponents seemed to be.
>
> "Over the months that I've been fighting people over issues like the BADSITES
> proposal, it looks like a lot of these people I was fighting were on this
> secret email list - at least I suspect they were," says the Floridia-based
> Tobias. "They always seemed to be show up in right place, at the right time,
> to gang up on people."
>
> Yes, it all sounds like the most ridiculous eams. Many of its core
> contributors are extremely unhappy about Durova's ill-advised ban and the
> exposure of the secret mailing list, and some feel that the site's well-being
> is seriously threatened.
>
> In a post
> (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Administrators%27_noticeboard/IncidentArchive330)
> to Wikipedia, Jimbo Wales says that this whole incident was blown out of
> proportion. "I advise the world to relax a notch or two. A bad block was made
> for 75 minutes," he says. "It was reversed and an apology given. There are
> things to be studied here about what went wrong and what could be done in the
> future, but wow, could we please do so with a lot less drama? A 75 minute
> block, even if made badly, is hardly worth all this drama. Let's please love
> each other, love the project, and remember what we are here for."
>
> But he's not admitting how deep this controversy goes. Wales and the
> Wikimedia Foudation came down hard on the editor who leaked Durova's email.
> After it was posted to the public forum, the email was promptly "oversighted"
> - i.e. permanently removed. Then this rogue editor posted it to his personal
> talk page, and a Wikimedia Foundation member not only oversighted the email
> again, but temporarily banned the editor.
>
> Then Jimbo swooped in with a personal rebuke
> (http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk%3AGiano_II&diff=173593364&oldid=173588881).
> "You have caused too much harm to justify us putting up with this kind of
> behavior much longer," he told the editor.
>
> The problem, for many regular contributors, is that Wales and the Foundation
> seem to be siding with Durova's bizarre behavior. "I believe that Jimbo's
> credibility has been greatly damaged because of his open support for these
> people," says Charles Ainsworth. And if Jimbo can't maintain his credibility,
> the site's most experienced editors may not stick around. Since the banhammer
> came down, Bang Bang hasn't edited a lick. (R) Related stories
>
> Braindead obituarists hoaxed by Wikipedia (3 October 2007)
>
> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/10/03/wikipedia_obituary_cut_and_paste/
>
> If surgery was like Wikipedia... (9 March 2007)
>
> http://www.theer.co.uk/2007/03/02/wikipedia_fraud/
>
> Wikipedia defends Reality (2 February 2007)
>
> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/02/02/colbert_wikipedia_reality/
>
> Wikipedia semen shortage filled by User Generated Content (20 December 2006)
>
> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/12/20/wikipedia_aphrodites_araldite/
>
> School sues over Wikipedia posts (26 July 2006)
>
> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/07/26/wikipedia_school_lawsuit/
>
> Avoid Wikipedia, warns Wikipedia chief (15 June 2006)
>
> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/06/15/wikipedia_can_damage_your_grades/
>
>
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Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org
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