The Weakest Link of a Badly-Rusted Chain: the BLP

What should have been banned from Day One on Wikipedia are the Biographies of Living Persons because it's too easy to write an autobiography under an IP address or an assumed name, or "guarding" an article under a Single-Purpose Account. Beyond the hoaxes like the Bicholim Conflict and the incompetent Administrators, the biographies have been doing their fair share of damage to the project, thanks to their use of uncredited paid writers, Wikipedians slandering people they don't like, etc. The following are some of the more obscure examples:

Luis González-Mestres. Spanish physicist with a still-existing page on Spanish Wikipedia, "LGM" (as he was dubbed by Wikipedian Beyond My Ken*) created an English-language Wikipedia page in 2010 which was noticed by Dr. Michel Aaij a year later and reposted to the BLP Noticeboard. Kevin Gorman (yes, the UC Berkeley Wikipedia "ambassador") decided to obliterate it and started an Article for Deletion page, which was constantly lectured at by sockpuppets from France (because González-Mestres works at CNRS**, headquartered in Paris.)  Through an IP address, González-Mestres published a long rant claiming that "dissident" editors are "investigated" and "punished" by Wikipedia. Other outbursts by socks of LGM were hidden by Aaron Passley, and Beyond My Ken showed up during the AfD to fight with the sockpuppets. At the end of May 2011, the Luis González-Mestres article was deleted, and the following (alleged) sockpuppets were blocked: Haeretica Pravitas (supposedly the main account), Jaumeta, Queleralo, Boulgre, and 83.199.115.9 (which is an IP address either in Colombes, a suburb of Paris, or in Gourin, which is near Lorient on the Bay of Biscay.) LGM's Spanish page was started in 2006, and added onto in 2011 by three French IP addresses and then by an SPA called Cerquet lo mon....nobody on Spanish Wikipedia has doubted Luis González-Mestres "notability."

Sandy Frank. Long-time TV creator-producer, Frank has had a Wikipedia page since 2004, and a lot of edits from then until October of 2014, when interest just petered out. Why all the action? Because Frank had imported a number of Japanese TV shows that he choppily edited down into dubbed direct-to-video movies....which were shown on the cult TV show Mystery Science Theater 3000. So it's fanboy nonsense plus sticking it to backroom Hollywood. In 2013 the page has this tacked to it: "....on August 24, 2010, Frank was involved in an altercation with his wife, Brenda Frank. Both were arraigned separately and obtained orders of protection against the other." A man named Don Waller sent Jimbo this plea on August 11, 2014:

Hi, Jimbo,

I recently did s site re-design for a client named Sandy Frank, and he contacted me last week about having his Wikipedia page removed from your system. I referred to your procedure for having this done and inserted the necessary code on the page to request removal, then gave it a week as your instructions state.

I got a call from the client this morning informing me that the page is still up, and when I went to the page I saw your explanation that you couldn't rely on an anonymous user's request to remove a page (understandable) and the link to message you, so here I am.

The client does not know who initially set up the page (it may have been a former employee who is now deceased), so they've tasked me with trying to get this done. My question to you is this - if the person who set up the original page is now deceased and no one in their organization has any knowledge of an account corresponding to the page, how do we go about proving to you that our request is legitimate? Would providing contact information to the company or the subject of the page help? I'm at a loss as to how to prove that my request is legitimate, and would really appreciate any pointers on how to provide you with sufficient proof to legitimize the request.

Thank you in advance for your assistance.

Don Waller seems to be DW Interactives, a web designer who works with "entertainment industry" types. Asking Jimbo was a useless gesture, because the war continued until it stopped, probably because Shout! Factory released more MST3K re-runs on DVD. 

Google employees. There are a number of these such as:

Chris DiBona, article started by Jacoplane (Jaap Vermeulen) in 2006, edited by a number of people including Vanessafox (ex-Google SEO consultant Vanessa Fox.)

Tim Bray, article started by one-shot IP address 219.95.29.142, repeatedly edited by Tim Bray himself, plus a number of `bots and gnomes.

Harald Tveit Alvestrand, biggest wheel on this list; member of the ICANN board of directors and the Internet Engineering Task Force, presently a Google employee, edited his own article under the account Alvestrand, along with articles on Carl Malamud and John Seely Brown (among others.)

Mark Pilgrim, article created by a one-shot SPA (Jack McAngus), article looked over by MarkPilgrim2, a MarkPilgrimRSA who turned out to be another person with the same name (!) and gnomed by Tim Bray for good measure. Interestingly, Mark Pilgrim himself ditched the Internet altogether. Good for him.

Fernanda Viégas, article created by Samuel Klein the WMF employee/Board member in 2006. Article was expanded by an SPA called VisualStory, who also wrote article on Viégas' partner Martin M. Wattenberg, and an unrelated article on artist Nina Katchadourian.

Amit Singhal, a man whose article was created by yet another SPA, Poshakag, and mostly looked over by `bots like Alaibot, CmdrObot, Luckas-bot (who tacked on a link to a Russian version of the article), and a bot run by Rjwilmsi.

The Paid Editing Clusterfuck of Wifione

One of the biggest problems with Wikipedia since The Popularity began has to be the paid editing of articles on corporations, private colleges, the bios of any living person, and so on. As with most things Wikipedia, paid editing breaks their rules on conflict of interest but it happens so much, all the ever-shrinking army of editors do is ban the most egregious cases.

One such case is Wifione. He/she/it/they was banned a month ago or so for being a sockpuppet army of paid editing, though knowing socks, Wifione will re-emerge with another lame pun for a handle and a slightly-different IP. So who were "they"? One of my sources thinks Wifione was possibly a former Wikipedia admin called "Nichalp" who was also "Zithan" and the Zithan account was a paid editor (which was banned in 2009, and Nichalp lost IP oversight privileges.) Whatever the username, the paid editor was allegedly a University of Mumbai electronic engineering graduate named Nicholas Alphonso who now lives in Australia. He started appearing online in 2002 at the age of 19, possibly using a college computer. But there are complications with that claim of ownership, because it turns out Wifione had more predecessors, all of them from India. But first, who were they allegedly working for?

The Indian Institute of Planning and Management is an MBA school based in New Delhi, with 18 campuses across India, that has been in operation since 1973. It's a father and son affair; the founder is Malayaenda Kisor Chaudhuri, the "honorary dean" is his son Arindam. The IIPM has been ruthless in censoring its online critics in India (Cory Doctorow called it a "diploma mill" in a 2013 BoingBoing post), though it and Arindam Chaudhuri were censured last September by the Delhi High Court for "misleading students" into thinking it had the power to issue Bachelors of Business Administration or Masters of Business Administration qualifications (i.e., they were unaccredited by Indian standards.) Worse yet, the IIPM was claiming it had been recognized by a Belgian "International Management Institute" that had been set up by the Chaudhuris, an "institute" that is not even legal in Belgium. As of this writing, the Wikipedia article on the IIPM has been locked for "new" or unregistered users so that "sockpuppets of blocked or banned users" can't edit the article.

So now we get to the repetitious part of the article, listing all the alleged former Wikipedia handles of Wifione. Thanks should go to Eric Barbour and some others for the legwork......

First there was "Drnoamchomsky" who came and went in 2005. Edited in a fake claim about IIPM using subscription-only Business Week as a source, was found out. This account identified itself as being a part of IIPM (".....Other institutes don't organize any lectures - we do.") The Wikipedia userpage has been scrubbed by somebody from the www.chomsky.info site for "impersonating" noted linguist and political commentator Noam Chomsky.

Next was the more open "Iipmstudent9", which as finally blocked in February 2007. There was no pretense of being unassociated with IIPM ("Yes, this id [sic] is used by multiple students from the New Delhi campus. We were not aware this was against Wiki policy, and have agreed to get new accounts for each of us.....we're looking to protect our institute's interests.....unsubstantiated allegations by bloggers on a Wiki page make our institute look bad!")  Was kicked out for threatening Wikipedian "MakrandJoshi" with a visit from the Mumbai (Bombay) Police for allegedly revealing his identity. Also edited from IP address 61.16.233.196. On September 8, 2006, signed as "Mrinal", who later became true separate account.

During the same time but separate were "Iipmalum" and "Dipali Sakhare." Iipmalum  used the same IP address as Iipmstudent9, Sakhare was an employee of Arindam Chaudhuri. She was involved with setting up the PR division of a company called Planman Consulting, whose webpage calls it "an IIPM initiative". Iipmalum was autoblocked in 2007.

"Mrinal Pandey" had "her" user page created on Christmas Day, 2006 by Iipmstudent9....whom she denied being (....."For the sake of clarity :-) I'm not iipmstudent9 or whomever the person is".....November 29, 2006.) She made the November statement from the IP address 203.76.132.74. That address was one of nine used by Mrinal; one of them (58.68.49.70) is the IP of a journalist named Mr. Onkareshwar Pandey, of The Sunday Indian. Which is "associated" with IIPM and Arindam Chaudhuri (i.e. Chaudhuri owns it.) Mrinal was indefinitely blocked in 2008 for using 43 accounts to edit IIPM related articles. No worries; Arbcom unblocked "her" a year later, she changed her name to "Empengent", and blanked her user page. "MakrandJoshi" and Tarantino of the Wikipediocracy board watched her online activities for years. Either O. Pandey is Mrinal, or Mrinal is somebody else (office assistant? girlfriend?) using that last name for editing ID purposes. In any case, they work directly or indirectly for the Chaudhuris.

More minor accounts were:  "Dean.A.Sandeep" who appeared and disappeared on March 31, 2009; he wanted page protection. "Suraj845" was never blocked, worked with Wifione, still around in 2013. There's also "Carlisle Rodham" with a blanked user page.

 "MakrandJoshi" stopped following Mrinal in 2010 despite threats to his property and life; I guess seeing people constantly get away with their schemes must have been too much to take.

List of Wifione Sockpuppets (no links, aforementioned in bold)

RAVIRAWAT
Deborah Fernandes
Kumarsingh
Newsexpress
Matthewlocker
Doublecover
Carlisle Rodham
Empengent
MfginIndia
Bigbangboom 
Abhinaw01 
Atul005
Ravindra Sing Rawat
Rawat2008
Addy kundu
Joshua Artgobain Benedict
Maheshbopara
lanchappell
Richapatell
Sumitpatel12
Solankikumar
PreetiSehgal
PramodMehta
NamithaSahu
Nancy1986
Mohit006
Sanjay Acer
PromilaGaur
Shilpanayar12
Highestheight
Whitepaperr
Editorrahul
Mrs.hidden
Missshivani
Arjunsingh11
Fastmovement
Articlesheet
Smartarticle
Amazingarticle
Articlerelease
Articlexpert
Newsexpert
Strongreader
Deverma
Radhika15
Puneet27
Manojkartik
Gangachauhan
Heenasrivastava
Aakritiverma
Bhadrikajain
Nainasrivastava
Dharakashyap
Kanishkachopra
Kristinakaif
Trishnaroy
Amaritarona
Mayankchopra
Anirudhodja
Karangupta
Jigneshmerhra
Parthaagarwal
Pratikshamehra
Prayushagarwal
Rakshitchopra

Notes:
Accounts Fastmovement through Articlexpert were all minted 11-27-08; all were blocked on 12-1-08.

Account Newsexpert began the next wave 12-18-08.

Account Deverma began editing IIPM article after protection ended 1-5-09.


Postscript

After this post was linked to the Wikipediocracy board, Tarantino wrote this: "Wifione isn't Nichalp. We know who both are." If you actually do, please tell, so that they can be shamed out of paid-editing of Wikipedia or anywhere else online and popular.

Despite Appearences.....

.....this blog isn't dead yet. I've been busy elsewhere, and the truth of Wikipedia is that it isn't going to dissapear shortly. Jimbo may want bits and pieces to vanish, but if the Internet could find the 1993 "The IRS War is Over" Scientology video, anything can be found.

Watch this space for new posts shortly.

January Grab-Bag

Looking for Wikipedia criticisms sites, ran across Wiki-HELL, a Blogspot site last posted-to in August of 2009. Run by a hater of "SlimVirgin" (Linda "Sarah McEwan" Mack).....it gets the real identity of "Herschelkrustofsky" wrong, but it might be right about the others it names.

Speaking of "Hersch", right now there is this game of Internet "dozens" being played at the Wikipediocracy message-board over Wikipedia's coverage of the Charlie Hebdo massacre. For the n00bs, the thing you have to keep in mind while reading/commenting on that board is that the broad majority of users are banned Wikipedistas and they want back in but Jimbo's commissariat say "No" or "HELL NO" depending on the asker. So they do as the PLO did in the 1970s, pretend Lebanon (WO) is Palestine (Wikipedia), and continue their battles elsewhere, hoping that the fight can move south somehow. I have no idea why somebody as smart as Eric Barbour wastes his time on Wikipedocracy, while Mancunium is the Alex Montagu we need, but not the one we deserve (tears for Manchester and Sputnik 2.)

Reddit is the future of the hell around us*; if you are a "redditor" and know something awful going on behind closed doors there, the subreddit /r/RedditCritiques is the place to go. Reddit is getting too much of a free pass, and there is a great overlap between Wikipedia users and redditors.....that needs to change.


*with apologies to Hans-Jürgen Syberberg and the cast of Hitler: A Film From Germany

Some last-minute sucker punches.....Averted!

Originally I was going to use this space to cattily mention some skeevy facts about the private life of Derrick Coetzee (Wikipedian "Dcoetzee") but files on the person he did things with are still easily available on the Internet, and I'm not ruining that person's life just to lash out at the nincompoop who caused THIS. I will write that the skeeviness I'm keeping to myself is probably the main reason why Coetzee has been banned "from editing Wikimedia sites" according to a Wikimedia Foundation tag here. I will write that the Wikipediocracy crowd thinks "Demiurge1000" was a sockpuppet of Derrick's, because it has the same WMF "talk to legal" tag. Tarantino (of Wikipediocracy, not the film director) deserves a medal of some sort, but I'm not saying why.

This little link is a lot of fun if you know something about Neo-Tech/Zonpower; for the confused, this ancient FAQ page (which is a copy of a copy) should tell you more than you need to know about that "ethical card-cheating" mixture of Ayn Rand and L. Ron Hubbard.

Never forget that Paul de Man was a Nazi mouthpiece, a swindler, and unworthy of his American college position.

Wikipedia Tags and Eastern European Politics

If you look at Wikipedia, you notice at the top of article pages (and sometimes within articles!) these goofy tags chiding the nameless editors to "merge" this with that, or calls for deletion or extreme rewrites because of bias, etc. It would have been far more intelligent to make these tags visible only to the editors/contributors than leaving them out for the hoi-polloi to see, but then true intelligence has never been a Wikipedian strong suite.

Notice in this article on the fringe political ideology of National Bolshevism (which combines Fascism with a degraded Marxism-Leninism) we have two tags from June of 2007 and one from April of this year. In seven years they haven't been able to figure out if the article contains "original research" or what additional citations it needs.

Above is a sub-section of the same article, on the Russian National Bolshevik Party run by novelist/provacateur-intellectual Eduard Limonov (Savinko), a party which has been banned from participating in Russian presidential elections; Limonov himself used to write hilarious broken-English columns for the defunct eXile magazine in Moscow. Notice the circularity of the section below the tag, and the fact that the "verification" request was posted in 2010; my screen shot dates from late 2014.


But enough of the introduction, let's hit the center-mass of this flabby moose: the Holodomor and Ukrainian nationalism - as seen on Wikipedia. The Holodomor was a famine in the Ukraine in 1932-33, and that's as far as you can get before everything becomes contested and people are willing to label you a "Holodomor denier" if you don't go along with all of it.....because unlike the Nazi-run Holocaust, there were no Holodomor camps with crematoria, piles of shoes, etc., just photos of starved people and others of dead bodies on streets with unheeding passers-by. There are no "verification" tags on the Holodomor article, but there are tags on this:

Possibly because it mentions famine in other areas of the USSR at the same time as the Holodomor, but then if you read the article, it re-uses photos from the Holodomor article! Related to this is are the articles on Douglas Tottle and Lubomyr Luciuk, who are handcuffed together in Wikipedia-land. Both are Canadians; Tottle was a trade union activist who wrote a book on the famine, Luciuk is the Canadian-Ukrainian history professor who called Tottle's book "...a particularly base example of famine-denial literature..." The book in question is Fraud, Famine, and Fascism: The Ukrainian Genocide Myth from Hitler to Harvard (1987), a work that is now very hard to find outside of harsh-looking pdfs, and badmouthed on Wikipedia, Amazon.com, and Metapedia. The Wikipedia page on Luciuk has this:

at the top of it (because it reads like a semi-hagiography), while Tottle's BLP is mostly a denunciation of his book, and right now has defaced quotations. As far as I can tell, Douglas Tottle is either quietly dead, living under another name, or avoiding the Internet entirely because it is impossible to find any reference to him outside of his book and the storm it caused (it was examined by the 1988-90 "International Commission of Inquiry Into the 1932–1933 Famine in Ukraine"; one of the participants thought Tottle had Soviet help, Tottle was invited to speak but declined.)

The article above features a bit of weirdness at the end of lumpy writing:

"Yevhen Konovalets, the former commander of the elite Sich Riflemen unit of the Ukrainian military, led the UVO. West Ukrainian political parties secretly funded the organization. Although it engaged in acts of sabotage and attempted to assassinate the Polish Chief of State Józef Piłsudski in 1921, it functioned more as a military protective group rather than as a terrorist underground.^[12] When in 1923 the Allies recognized Polish rule over western Ukraine, many members left the organization. The legal Ukrainian parties turned against the UVO's militant actions, preferring to work within the Polish political system. As a result, the UVO turned to Germany and Lithuania for political and financial support. It established contact with militant anti-Polish student organizations, such as the Group of Ukrainian National Youth, the League of Ukrainian Nationalists, and the Union of Ukrainian Nationalist Youth. After preliminary meetings in Berlin in 1927 and Prague in 1928, at the founding congress in Vienna in 1929 the veterans of the UVO and the student militants met and united to form the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists. Although the members consisted mostly of Galician youths, Yevhen Konovalets served as its first leader and its leadership council, the Provid, comprised mostly veterans and was based abroad.^[13][14] 9+10 =21"

Does that bit of weird math have some symbolic meaning, like the fraction 14/88 does to Neo-Nazis?

***

I've been told that all of the Slavic-language Wikipedias are run by flaming nationalists, and that the Hungarian Wikipedia is full of direct translations from the English-language Wikipedia with anti-Semitic gobbledegook thrown in to make the Arrow Cross wannabees happy. Wikipedia dysfunction: a feature, not a bug.

Before Wikipedia: Search Bastard and 3Apes

Jimmy Wales has been desperate to hide "Search Bastard"; it probably reminds him too much of his days with the "Brotherhood of Old Men In Suits" before Wikipedia and the WMF swept him into the stratosphere of being the "Internet-savant guy" the rich idiots invite to their parties.

Search Bastard (www.searchbastard.com) existed from August of 2000 to the summer of 2006; it was like a dirty version of Ask.com, or Netscape Navigator if you are old enough.

As it says, Search Bastard was considered "the best motherfucking search engine on the net"....probably by the dateless college freshmen the site was aimed at. It had an obnoxious front page:

As you can see, it was all insults, calling the potential user a "dumbass", a "motherfucker", and a "pussyass motherfucker" for good measure. Somehow this was to trick or goad "websurfers" to use Search Bastard, and it would have been seen as revolutionary had the website come out in 1996. But this was 2000, and the web was flooded in search engines already, and links to porn websites were easy to find. Did I mention that the site had odd, "photo phunny" style joke ads? Well it did.

Later on the website was linked to a similarly-named site called "Stock Bastard" which gave out stock quotes. That site was the product of a Canadian company called Samcom, which like Bomis is now defunct. Bomis' name and URL is featured prominently at the bottom of Search Bastard's page

"Another Demented Production of Bomis.com" indeed. SB was one of the last things Bomis made at 4455 Lamont Street in the Pacific Beach neighborhood of San Diego, California. Down the street from the now-defunct taco stand where "bros" Jimbo Wales and Larry Sanger came up with Wikipedia.

Above is an example of 3Apes, which was Jimbo's first attempt at a search engine (registered in October of 1999.) It did "pay per clicks" like a number of websites in the pre-2000s, and died a year after Search Bastard, in 2007.

That was from Trademarkia.com; 3Apes was cancelled under Section 8 in late April of 2007, and this confirms that Bomis of San Diego was behind it.

And something I found in the ruins of geekvillage.com.

***

My point isn't to harass Jimbo (though he will take this that way); it's that everything has echoes, predecessors, and failed prototypes. Mr. Wales has gone out of his way to wipe Search Bastard off the Internet; you have to ask Mr. Peabody nicely to get what I have brought here. He should just fess up.