Sunday, July 5, 2015

Wikiscuttlebutt: SlimVirgin and Others

Let's drag up some rumors and unconfirmed facts for the pure hell of it.

SlimVirgin: The short story is that Linda Mack/Sarah McEwan is dying from cardiomyopathy, allegedly due to stimulant abuse. The longer one is that the 007 of Swalwell, Alberta has been physically falling to pieces for some time, I knew about it, but I didn't say word one because I didn't have any details. For those people not in the loop, she was the Queen Shit of Fuck Mountain from 2004-2008 and still involved with "the project" to this day. Fought Hershelkrustofsky over Lyndon LaRouche articles, editwarred over the Lockerbie (PanAm flight 103) bombing, got Hershelkrustofsky kicked from Wikipedia with Chip Berlet's help. When she dies, one of the kingpins of the Hot Time (2004-2007) will take all the hidden edits she did as Slimv in 2003 that were deleted out of the system, and all the backroom nonsense she was involved in (including which country she was a spook/disinfo agent for) to her grave.

Erik Möller: We're not going to talk about Herr Kinder sind Pornos' support of man-boy love, or Visual Editor, or even that he was shite-canned two months ago. Nope, we're talking about his greasy relationship with fellow former Wikimedia Foundation employee HIS BOSS Sue Gardner.  Subordinates wanted to leak it for years (because Möller ran the WMF "like a baron") though it came to light in 2013, but only on Encyclopaedia Dramatica. In reality none of this truly matters to the running of Wikipedia because Gardner and Möller are ex-employees of the WMF....I bring it up in case ED vanishes again.

The 2006 Wikipedia database crash: Sometime in August or September 2006 the site crashed, millions of editing "diffs" were lost, the backup files were corrupted, and the SQL database had to be rebuilt using random pieces, most belonging to Brion Vibber. Little to nothing is known about this fiasco, and my source thinks there was a possible coverup. Kelly Martin said this about the rickety state of the system nine years ago:
You're asking about operational reliability from an organization that used to serve the entire PHP codebase for all of Wikimedia from a single, nonredundant NFS root server with no backup? The only reason they don't do this anymore is because it once failed and they had to scramble to fix it. Only after they'd been burned did they take any proactive measures to ensure uptime.

Wikimedia Engineering is a laughingstock. Especially given the budget and degree of loose cash that they have. Even today they tend to run with far less redundancy than would be considered acceptable in a reputable organization. (WO messageboard, January 2015)

The closest we get to an official statement is this "technology report" from The Wikipedia Signpost:

All Wikimedia projects were briefly locked down after most users were unable to access the site. The reason, according to developer Brion Vibber, was the readvertising of Wikimedia's IP space by Cogent.  As a result of the IP snafu, which occurred on Friday at about 17:30 UTC, few users (mostly AOL users) were able to access the site, while most others were blocked. Developers made the decision to put all databases into read-only mode until the route was restored around 19:55 UTC; write access was enabled shortly afterward. A new IP space was given to Wikimedia, and the old space is or will soon be unavailable. River Tarnell said that developers were looking into obtaining a permanent IP space.

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