Is this paid editing, or just some very strange fanboy? Back in 2008, Henry T. Nicholas, III was in a lot of hot water for securities fraud and also building an underground sex-and-drugs space beneath his Laguna Hills mansion, a mansion patrolled by three guards who were a mix of ex-military and ex-police officers, while Nicholas' wife and three children went about their lives. The organization Nicholas was lying to shareholders for was Broadcom, a microchip manufacturer he had co-founded. There was a tizzy of coverage, mostly over the "orgy cave" and the fantastic amounts of drugs Nicholas was ordering/doing. In the end, everybody else seemed to take the fall, and Nicholas emerged a divorced dad with time at the Betty Ford clinic but still in charge at Broadcom somehow. None of this is is the story we are interested with today (you could tell because I didn't even mention that the "orgy cave" plan was abandoned and HTN III converted a warehouse to the same purpose), we are interested in how certain Single Purpose Accounts tweaked Nicholas' BLP ("biography of a living person") so that the events of 2008-2011 are totally buried.
The Who-What-When
According to Eric Barbour, the original Henry T. Nicholas, III article was "not complementary" to the man in 2009. There was a bunch of fiddling with it in 2010 and it changed into a bio of "Henry Nicholas", a 16th century German sect founder ("Family of Love"). Then the name was changed to "Henry Nicholis" and the article was moved by Toweltoweltowel, an SPA who had edited the crap out of the original. Another SPA (Littlebrownpill) dropped the original article back into "Henry Nicholas".
Once all of this dance was completed, then other SPAs moved in to smooth the article down, make it duller. They were Beahero, Worrytrap, Silvergoldsilver, plus Dstringer71, who liked to edit the article on Marsy's Law, a victims' rights law passed in 2008. Who was "Marsy"? Marsilee Nicholas, sister of Henry Nicholas, who was killed by an ex-boyfriend in 1983; HTN III was one of the promoters. Now the reader can see why we are asking if this is paid editing or fanboyism.
It add to this, in June 2010 noted dimwit administrator Ohnoitsjamie tried to demolish the article, then SPA Phoneyplayer showed up to defend it:
(cur | prev) 18:54, 26 June 2010 Ohnoitsjamie (talk | contribs) . . (16,397 bytes) (+16,369) . . (oops) (undo)
(cur | prev) 18:54, 26 June 2010 Ohnoitsjamie (talk | contribs) . . (28 bytes) (-16,369) . . (yes it does; we only need one article, the one at Henry Nicholas) (undo)
(cur | prev) 18:50, 26 June 2010 Phoneyplayer (talk | contribs) . . (16,397 bytes) (+16,369) . . (Undid revision 370285439 by Ohnoitsjamie (talk) redirect didn't go anywhere?) (undo)
(cur | prev) 18:35, 26 June 2010 Ohnoitsjamie (talk | contribs) . . (28 bytes) (-16,369) . . (redirect (we don't need three pages on the same subject)) (undo)
What I find interesting about the name Phoneyplayer is that the "phoney" is spelled the same way as IAmAPhoney, the "Paul [McCartney] is dead/Faul" editor/musician who may or may not be part of a 2010s viral marketing campaign to promote the Beatles. Anyway, the Henry Nicholas BLP is now being watched over by Patapsco913, who Barbour alleges is a paid editor. Finally, archive.org has a couple early copies of the article saved from 2009 and 2010. Both of them have section headings mentioning the sex cave. With Wikipedia, you always have to check your sources.
