Slashdot Mirror

No kidding.

Wikipedia tried to hush up scandal after scandal after scandal. The Durova "hit-list" scandal. The Essjay scandal. The "Jimmy was cleansing his girlfriend's wikipedia page" scandal. The "Jimmy was embezzling money" scandal. The Wikia/Wikimedia financial embezzlement scandal. "Sam Blacketer", Sockpuppet Admin. Wikipedia Scanner's revealed abuses. The Siegenthaler scandal. Gary Weiss as "Mantanmoreland" and Wikipedia administrators' refusals to investigate and accept evidence on the problem.

The ongoing behavior of the harassing, abusive assholes who call themselves "administrators" on Wikipedia and operate in ways that have been well documented, over and over again.

Why don't people donate to Wikipedia? Let's face it, if Wikipedia deserved it - if it were a worthwhile institution - they wouldn't be nearly having this much trouble. But they don't deserve it, so people don't donate. It's really that simple.

I left for the similar reasons. The administrators are abusive of their power and connections. An admin (I didn't know at the time, not that it should matter) was mass reverting large numbers of edits calling me a "sockpuppet" (a second account created by a user who wants to hide their identity). Some of my edits didn't support the admin's politics, others did, but he didn't read them; he just reverted them all. Some were just footnotes on otherwise unsupported statements.

I carefully followed procedures to notify the admin to stop reverting and posted about the problem in the appropriate forum. Another admin deleted my forum post (a unique occurrence, as far as I could see in the history) and banned me. Sure, I could spend many hours appealing, but who has time for that nonsense -- I have better things to do.

As in many organizations, the cultural problems start at the top. You can read about Jimmy Wales corruption, editing his own pages, excising comments he doesn't agree with from the history, editing his ex-girlfriend's page. If Jimmy Wales does it, why would people one level down from him hesitate to abuse their power, and then the people below them, etc. Remember when the Arb committee banned someone on 'secret evidence' (which turned out to be nothing more than the following: The new user was editing too well, so they must have been another 'sockpuppet', and were therefore banned) -- that was the highest authority in Wiki-land except for Wales.

Here are some links for you:
http://www.wikitruth.info/index.php?title=Jimbo_Wales
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/12/06/wikipedia_and_overstock/
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/12/04/wikipedia_secret_mailing/
http://antisocialmedia.net/category/wikipedia/

As mentioned in the Register story, the emails are reproduced here.

The BADSITES pseudo-policy, which for a time led Wikipedia editors to be threatened with being blocked or banned for daring to link to antisocialmedia.net or Wikipedia Review (among other things), was a sterling example of Wikipedia's concept of "openness".

Jeff Merkey may very well be litigious, but in my experience, he's not a liar. Let's be sure to separate the two issues. Jeff first told me about being shaken down by Jimbo Wales for Wiki-protection money in November of 2007. We discussed it multiple times in the interim, until I first wrote about this situation last week on my blog, AntiSocialMedia.net. Over the months, Jeff's story has remained consistent and the facts as he describes them to me are easy to correlate with the historical record. That, combined with the recent revelations of Jimbo trading favorable article treatment for "female companionship", convinced me that I could confidently blog about this situation. It's my hope that now others, similarly extorted, will find ways to tell their stories.

At some point I picked up in slashdot comments about the whole antisocialmedia.net/Gary Weiss/Judd Bagley/Overstock.com mess and decided I was interested enough to spend the time (several hours) reading everything I could about it and trying to figure out what the heck was going on. I haven't got the several hours more it would take to try to recreate and document my findings here in a slashdot post, but I came into this with no preconceived notions, and if I had any leanings, I really like wikipedia and wanted it to be in the right. But I mostly concluded otherwise. Yes, Judd Bagley took many inappropriate actions- but who cares, he's just some guy. It looks like Wikipedia took many more incorrect actions, and it's a foundation that is supposed to behave appropriately.

I found the documentation of rampant editorial abuse to pursue personal agendas, going all the way up the support of Jimbo, to be very convincing. Read anitsocialmedia.net, examine the documentation, look at attempts to counter Bagley's arguments on the web, and draw your own conclusions, but I came off extremely disappointed in Wikipedia, and will be even more suspicious of its content in the future. I already was prepared to take Wikipedia content with a grain of salt because it can be edited by anyone, but it's much worse to know that an editor can have their own petty dictatorial custodianship of an article where they deliberately delete well documented and referenced relevant facts, perpetuate falsehoods, don't let anyone else edit it or even discuss it on the discussion page, ban even extremely well-established editors with good reputations if they try to touch these articles, and even delete the history of the article and the history of their own edits and contributions. I still think wikipedia's valuable, because most articles aren't run this way, but I always have to keep in mind that some are, and I don't really know if I'm looking at something people were free to edit and debate on the talk page and try to work towards a consensus on, or the biased opinions of a single dictatorial editor.

Today, Durova... tomorrow, the world! Or at least SlimVirgin, one hopes. Talk about the inmates running the asylum... or, er, inmates running Wikipedia, whatever...

There is a clique in Wikipedia that has tried to censor links to sites they think are "evil". Some people don't like this.

Jayjg was even banned from the Italian Wikipedia for abusively deleting edits. The problem on English Wikipedia is that it is the co- founder of Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales, himself who personally approved the controversial appointment of Jayjg to the powerful Oversight Committee for English Wikipedia despite numerous objections from other editors about Jayjg's abusive edit-warring. This is hardly surprising given that much of Wikimedia Foundation's funding comes as anonymous donations often from dubious political foundations.

Some very revealing studies of Wikipedia from the outside:

wikipediareview.com

wikitruth.info

antisocialmedia.net

SlimVirgin gets banned along with her enablers. Grow some balls Jimbo.

Anyone worth their salt uses private proxies now. Either get a collocated machine at an ISP anywhere in the world or more simply, buy a webhosting package anywhere in the world that supports PHP (most do) and then install one of the many PHP proxies (such as this one) and you are set.

A webhosting package is the best way to go as you can get those monthly and thus you can switch IPs/locals quite rapidly (or have many on the go at a cost of less than $10/month each), where as a collocated machine is much more costly and more time consuming to setup.

One of the individuals that first perfected this technique was a Wall Street message board addict Gary Weiss who brought the technique to Wikipedia a couple years ago. It's fairly common knowledge within some communities (such as WikipediaReview.com) and is understood as the preferred way to get around Wikipedia administrator hassles.

http://antisocialmedia.net/070714-antar.jpg

Hi Sam the Crook,

"If you truly wish to clear up this issue, why not respond to each of my questions individually in a clear, unambiguous, and truthful manner?"

Ummm, could it be because collecitvely they number in the thousands, and I cannot say I've ever actually read one of your postings closely?

I really want to help you here, Sam, but I just need to know how you are using the English language, because it seems a little disjoint to me. When you answer this question, I will be able to understand your verb tenses, and general sense of reality, enough to answer your questions. So let us try again:

When I, on May 9, said that I was the first CEO to celebrate receiving an SEC subpoena, was I telling the truth about being a CEO who had received a subpoena, or not?

Get back to me with an answer, and I'll be able to make sense of your questions, Sam.

Patrick

PS In case any member of the public wanders by, please understand that this guy I am conversing with is a convicted felon who ratted out his own family to reduce his own jail time. Recently he was kicked off of YAHOO (no easy feat, that) for threatening children (see below). Because he apparently has absolutely no moral center, Sam has in recent months become a favorite of hedge fund choagies like Herb Greenberg, who is promoting Sam so he can have someone new with whom to practice crony journalism. Next will be, I am sure, a flattering pieces in DJ by Carol Remond, a write up in NYPost by Roddy Boyd, a Fortune cover by Bethany McLean, and a special WSJ profile by Karen "We-can-do-this-the-hard-way-or-the-easy-way" Richardson (that is, that pack of independent journalists who randomly happen to cover precisely those firms shorted by Rocker, Cohodes, Ackerman, Steve Cohen, Einhorn, Dan Loeb/Jim Caruthers, etc., over and over with complete regularity in a way that is, all observers are clear, entirely coincidental). Seriously, check it out: http://antisocialmedia.net/070714-antar.jpg

Jimbo Wales has gone out of his way, up to and including violating Wikipedia policy on content retention, to keep Mantanmoreland and SlimVirgin slashing and burning the contributions (and often, ability to edit Wikipedia) of those who disagree with them.

When confronted with his ponderous defense of Weiss, Jimbo said, "...the claims have already been investigated and dismissed."

This should be kept in mind when evaluating Jimbo's ability to credibly state, as he has above: "This story is demented and broken on so many levels, it is quite difficult to know where to begin, even."

Abuse on wikipedia is systemic and ridiculous. The number of people who have been through it are numerous. The number of reliable, credentialed academics who've been abused, voluminous. The number of times they have covered up their abuses, the number of sheer scandals. (note that they've deleted all of the Essjay material, to cover up and try to hide what he pulled; a long-running scam to abuse and mistreat and demean Catholics).

Wikipedia administrators regularly abuse their power - in any way possible. The caste system of wikipedia is set up this way; gather thousands of mindless edits (and they keep pushing the boundary upwards, for fear that someone might get in and try to fix the system from within). Decry anyone who rightly points out that the system is broken and needs fixing as a "troll."

Abuse and attack; ban and call them a "troll" later; lie about the results of "CheckUser", lie about what a user said and what a metric really means, attack attack and do your best to smear anyone who says anything at all.

This is the method by which wikipedia administrators exist; this is the methodology by which the caste system is enforced. It used to be, way back when, that users were encouraged to seek out another administrator if one was giving them grief for redress: now the policy is against "wheel warring", and no administrator is allowed to undo the action of another for fear of being accused of such, and administrative policies have been changed to enforce this.

In the Wikipedia system, the administrators are the pigs of animal farm - "more equal than others."

Jason Scott put it very well indeed.
So did Jerry Holkins: "a kind of quantum encyclopedia, where genuine data both exists and doesn't exist depending on the precise moment I rely upon your discordant fucking mob for my information."

However, the core of it is worse than that. Wikipedia is not merely controlled by "consensus": it is actively controlled by cliques whose goal is to bias the hell out of articles and keep them in their biased mode. They operate by getting their friends, members of their clique, elevated to admin status and then patrolling these articles, ostensibly for "trolls" but really for anyone who might try to un-bias them. They abuse these newcomers, make false accusations against them, hurl insults and then have their friend ban the newcomer for fighting back. They abuse the prohibitions on "multiple reversions" like a game; instead of a real consensus, all you have to have is one more guy than the opposing viewpoint and you completely control the damn article - and since you have a sympathetic admin on your side, you can have them block the new user for "edit warring", which comes in real handy when you have your buddy bring them to the drumhead trial system called "Arbcom" and say "see he should be banned he's got X blocks already."

Wikipedia is beyond broken - at its best, it is a worthless pile of crap with some whipped cream sprayed on top to try to make it look presentable. At its worst it is a classic case of letting the inmates run the asylum, of the Lord of the Flies syndrome; the worst abusers of the system are those who are "highly-ranked" and "respected" administrators, who operate by fiat, who can and regularly do abuse anyone else without mercy.

The caste system is mercilessly enforced by the admins - without it, they would not have nearly so much power. The whole point of being an administrator of wikipedia is not to make the encyclopedia better but rather to protect your friends, protect your clique, rise in