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"DonorGate" Is Latest Scandal To Hit Wikipedia
MSTCrow5429 writes "In the latest of a long train of scandals to hit Wikipedia, the Sydney Morning Herald reports on an accusation that founder and Wikia President Jimmy Wales traded a multi-thousand dollar donation for an article re-write. Jeff Merkey, formerly of Novell, claims that Wales approached him in 2006 and said that for a fee, Wales would personally see to it that the article on Merkey, which had cast him in a negative light, would be re-written in Merkey's favor. Merkey claims that after he donated $5,000, Wales followed through on this quid pro quo. The Wikipedia edit history does indicate that Wales wiped out the article on Merkey, and then personally re-wrote it. The SMH reports that Wales has called the allegation 'nonsense.'" Merkey filed a harassment lawsuit in 2005 against a number of people and organizations, including Slashdot. Slashdot was removed from the suit on 2005-07-20.
Update: 03/12 00:39 GMT by KD : Wikimedia Foundation spokesman Jay Walsh provided this official statement: "Current allegations relating to Jimmy Wales soliciting donations for the Wikimedia Foundation in order to protect or edit Wikipedia articles are completely false. The Wikimedia Foundation has never accepted nor solicited donations in order to protect or make edits to a Wikipedia article — nor has Jimmy Wales. This is a practice the Wikimedia Foundation would never condone."
Update: 03/12 00:39 GMT by KD : Wikimedia Foundation spokesman Jay Walsh provided this official statement: "Current allegations relating to Jimmy Wales soliciting donations for the Wikimedia Foundation in order to protect or edit Wikipedia articles are completely false. The Wikimedia Foundation has never accepted nor solicited donations in order to protect or make edits to a Wikipedia article — nor has Jimmy Wales. This is a practice the Wikimedia Foundation would never condone."
Jeff Merkey got banned from Wikipedia for making legal threats. I'm not terribly surprised to hear he's making accusations like this.
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Requests_for_arbitration/Jeffrey_Vernon_Merkey&oldid=148079940
Let's not forget this was the person who wanted to buy Linux because the GPL would be its doom, so he could re-issue it under a Cherokee license.
This is the person who demanded that all homosexuals recuse themselves from dealing with the ArbCom case the last time he was banned from Wikipedia.
He demanded special treatment the last time he was on there, because he was such a big donor. (didn't get it mind you, but he wanted it, real bad).
This is a person who:"In 1998, the Fourth Judicial District Court of Utah found that Merkey "regularly exaggerates or lies in his comments to others about events happening around him. It is as though he is creating his own separate reality" (From SCOFacts)
JVM is a smart guy, no one denies that.
But he's also nuttier then a fruitcake.
People Talking in Movie shows.. people smoking in bed.. people voting republican.. GIVE THEM A BOOT TO THE HEAD!
Didn't he also offer to pay $50,000 if they'd BSD-license Linux or something? I remember some crazy scheme mentioned, but I thought he mostly vanished after the suit against PJ went away. I'm reasonably sure that Groklaw was dismissed from the suit, but PJ quit talking about it once it was filed except for one update which I think was the suit being settled.
I think he also filed an anti-GPL lawsuit alleging anti-trust concerns that was dismissed for, IIRC, failure to state a claim upon which relief may be granted (i.e. even if everything he'd claimed was true, there was nothing wrong with the GPL). So, the lawsuit actually did unintentional good by having a judge who was an expert in anti-trust law vet the GPL and rule that there was nothing wrong with it.
In other words, while I'm not sure about his motives, his antics have been mostly harmless except for some nuisance lawsuits that in one case actually did a little good.
Most peoples' edits are anonymous on Wikipedia only to the most surface of observations. Even minimal digging can reveal an IP, and then the Virgil scanner can do the rest. Of course, there are a some folks out there that can purposefully hide their IP identity. But still, I wouldn't call Wikipedia edits "anonymity guaranteed"
I judt got a nre Kinesis keybiartf so please excusr ant egregiou typos.
He's long since lost any semblance of credibility.
Good for the occasional internet soap opera though.
However, I don't know how common this is. If we are to assume innocence, then it might be that wikipedia was just trying to avoid being a location for mud slinging.
If not, then yup, it's a bit odd. I don't have time to follow wikipedia closely anymore, but AIUI article locking has become fairly common over the past few years, as a way of stamping out edit wars.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Go to mr. Wales' blog, scroll right to the bottom and press the "powered by wordpress" link.
:P
I get "therightpills.com" (tested on 2 computers, so i doubt its adware). Has the self proclaimed dictator of history been hacked?
No kitty, this is my pot pie!
(fair notice: I am an administrator on Wikipedia, same nick)
There's two types of protection:
Semi-Protection: Where all anonymous editors (those without accounts), and those whose accounts are less then four days old (I believe) are kept from editing these articles. This is to prevent someone from registering a new account, and going on a vandalism spree.
Full-Protection: What the JVM article was for a while. That means only administrators can edit the article. This is GENERALLY used only for short periods, where vandalism/edit-wars are too great. This is generally to make the folks take it to the articles talk page and hash things out. In GENERAL (not saying every circumstance, or what have you), when an article is full-protected, the only edits that are done, even by administrators, are either to remove vandalism, material that violates Wikipedia's policies on the Biographies of Living People (Libelous material, etcetera), or things that have full consensus on the talk page.
Once tempers cool down, the article is unprotected. The problem is: There's a great amount of people who take great pleasure in poking Mr. Merkey with sticks, just so they can get a reaction out of him (the Yahoo SCO Message Board took great pleasure in trying to drive him insane, for example). In the ArbCom case that Mr. Merkey was banned from Wikipedia (again), three of his main annoyances, were also banished.
In this specific case, I can understand why the page was full-locked for a while, because these people were taking great pleasure in their attempts to make JVM lose the plot.
People Talking in Movie shows.. people smoking in bed.. people voting republican.. GIVE THEM A BOOT TO THE HEAD!
Ah, the "it's only sex" brigade is already out in force.
Spitzer was under investigation for "structuring" transactions to stay under the $10,000 limit for reporting them to the IRS. The bank reported them anyway, and the IRS brought in the FBI when they were concerned that he was being blackmailed. This is also a known tactic for laundering money either collected or spent for illegal purposes. Spitzer knew that as AG, and prosecuted some of his targets for doing the same thing.
Ironically, he also prosecuted the operators of a couple of escort services while AG, allegedly while he was utilizing the services of this one. That's spelled H-Y-P-O-C-R-I-T-E.
Like the "Jimbo ordered people to fix Marsden's bio" thing, this is a non-story. Jimbo has frequently taken the initiative in stubbing down crappy articles and asking editors to start afresh. Good practice. Nice of Jeff to give a donation, but stubbing down a bad biography is standard practice.
The reason for temporary protection (locking the article to stop edits by some users) is given by Wales as "an attempt to keep trolling to a minimum during an experimental rewrite" which is pretty sensible.
One thing that does look very odd is that the protection was not removed until this story broke. We're as partial to kool-aid as the next guy, so we do tend to defer to him perhaps more than he would like. :/ But this did NOT stop anybody editing the article, and I'll explain why.
There are two main modes of protection on the open source mediawiki software on which Wikipedia operates, usually called semi-protection and full protection, and in addition to that, protection applies to both editing and renaming/moving (because a common form of vandalism used to be to rename an article to something nasty). In the edit summary of Jimbo Wales' edit timestamped 20:58, 23 May 2006 , you'll see "[edit=autoconfirmed:move=autoconfirmed]". This indicates normal semiprotection ("autoconfirmed" users are those who have registered a username and waited about three days--there's nothing more to it than that--no vetting, no human intervention at all). So anybody patient enough to wait three days could edit that article.
So it's really a non-story. We protect articles against people who want to write "WEE WEE WEE JACK IS GAY!" all the time and this is precisely the mode of protection we use for, say, "George W. Bush"
Any Wikipedia editor with an account over three days old could edit that article for the whole of its post-Jimbo existence.
If an article is deleted, all history, both of article edits, and discussion are fully deleted. so no, the past version wouldn't be in the history, if the article was deleted then rewritten.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
"BTW: you never mentioned whether wikipedia accepted a donation from Merkey - or one of Merkey's sponsors."
That's because I have no particular knowledge whether Merkey is a donor to the Wikimedia Foundation, other than JVM's words. I am an administrator, but last I checked, there was, I want to say, about 2,000 of us (administrators) on the project. So, there's people who are in the know about various things, but I'm not one of them.
I did comment on JVM on some of the previous steps prior to the Arbitration Committee(as I said, there's no doubt that there is a bunch of folks who travel around trying to troll JVM into losing his cool, but to be quite honest, it doesn't take much prompting, as you can see from some of the other posts that have surfaced.
And as for the whitewashing, well, first off I didn't do it, or review it at the time, but the rules in general, are that on BLP (Biography of Living Persons) articles, if information is contested, or controversial, and it's not highly sourced, it comes out of the article, and should not be added back in unless it's properly sourced. While usually a request doesn't get Jimbo's attention straight out, it's not uncommon for intense scrutiny to be focused on an BLP article by a cadre of volunteer editors who answer complaints by people or companies via email about their article (it's called the OTRS system), where they consider information to be incorrect. Sometimes, when a vast majority of the information in the article is either incorrect, or presented in a biased manner, it requires a total re-write of the article, which may have happened here.
Again, I'm not trying to say what did, or did not happen, I'm just trying to explain how things should work. Whether it is how it works in practice, as well as it does in theory, is something I won't venture to guess on.
People Talking in Movie shows.. people smoking in bed.. people voting republican.. GIVE THEM A BOOT TO THE HEAD!
Well, people say this but the reality is that Linux has has two significant license modifications, Wikipedia has had one, and not all parties were contacted when these things happened. Many Open Source projects go through similar changes. Until you get a court case, it's not going to be 100% sure, but as far as I can tell right now, the absent, dead, etc. can't hold up the majority of the Open Source developers if they decide to make a change to their collective work.
Bruce Perens.
Was the stuff about Merkey really of that nature? I saw the original article, and it did not look like that to me.
I did not see the original article. My point is that the kind of protection Jimbo used was nothing special. Every ordinary Wikipedia editor with an account (you don't even need an email address to set up an account, just make up a unique username and a password) that is more than about three days old can edit that article any time he wants.
If a politician sees a hooker, that has very little to do with his ability to govern the state
Although, prostitution is still illegal and people in office (that we should be able to trust) shouldn't be doing illegal things. Next to that, the problem with Spitzer is that he embezzled money to pay for his prostitution.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
Pamela Jones, creator and editor groklaw.net.
The MoGTroll - aka Maureen O'Gara - a SCO shill masquerading as a writer, asked the same question. So did SOC's Minister of MisInformation - Darl McBride, again in an attempt to discredit PJ by intimating she was (among other allegations) a bunch of people from IBM.
This is exactly why pornographers and masturbators shouldn't be allowed to found anything.
After all, I am strangely colored.
Bruce Perens wrote in Slashdot comment #22722890: "Jeff Merkey filed suit against me, and against PJ, some years ago. His family eventually convinced him to withdraw the suit against me, I don't know how his suit against PJ was resolved."
I (Al Petrofsky) was also a defendant in that case, Merkey v. Perense, et al., No. 2:05-cv-521-DAK, D. Utah, filed June 21, 2005. You can find full details here: http://scofacts.org/merkey
Merkey voluntarily dismissed his case against Pamela Jones. In the written dismissal notice he filed with the Court, he said that he was dropping it in favor of "pursuing criminal prosecution in the various states these offenses occurred". Needless to say, I am not aware of any such criminal prosecutions ever taking place.
The above comment, that Merkey's "family eventually convinced him to wihdraw the suit against" Perens, is the first I've heard of there being any involvement by Merkey's family in Merkey's decision-making in the case. At the time, Merkey wrote an entry on his website, which he later filed with the court, stating that he was dropping the action against Perens in exchange for Perens having allegedly made a written statement about "a large number of written attacks with violent connotations made against [Merkey]":
Are you kidding? That document is on wikipedia.com right now! At the link in the GP post. Now go read it and understand the context, then feel stupid and ashamed. You wiki apologists really need to take a breath or two before you lash out at anything you perceive as anti-wiki (especially when it's incorrectly, in this case.)
everything in moderation