On Nov 13, 2007 1:47 PM, Alec Conroy alecmconroy@gmail.com wrote:
That's quite a charge. Only sporadic edits the first few years. Spending 4/5ths of his edits on talk and project pages. Lots of involvement in controversial areas. Sure sounds bad. Thank goodness only those of us who opposed BADSITES are subject to such microscopic examination-- if such judgements were unleashed on the Wikipedia population at large, who knows what portion of us would be found without sin.
I suspect most of us started off article editing and only got into Wikipolitics and Wikidrama later. I certainly did and most serious contributors to the project did the same. Getting into that kind of stuff practically from the first edit is (IMO) a strong red flag for having worn another name before, and that it's Wikidrama that brings someone back is also troubling. Most of us are addicted to contributing, first, not drama.
Given that practically the first edit after returning was about the Essjay affair - and this was BEFORE the thing really blew up or became all that visible outside of a very small group of fanatical WP-watchers. This suggests, to me, that this person was involved in that group, which reinforces my troubling feeling.
That someone with a frankly short editing history and already willing to engage in controversy feels the need for a shielding sockpuppet account is also quite bizarre. I could understand it from someone who'd never before engaged in that kind of stuff.
I can only think of two reasons for it, one admittedly paranoid - that one being that claiming to be the sockpuppet of an established editor adds a sense of legitimacy that the first account would not have had - a feeling that the original account must be someone with a lot to use. The second is that PM felt he'd not be taken seriously with the edit history he had, and felt that a sockpuppet would escape that. That could be a sincere attempt to start afresh and do things right, OR deception.
As I've said before, from MY point of view, people didn't try to indefblock PM for using an avowed sock puppet account or for edit warring or for being john awbrey. The block surely looked motivated by PM's side in the BADSITES dispute.
From my point of view, making a sockpuppet account in order to engage
in policy debates is already a breach of at least the spirit of the sockpuppet policy; taking a step further and joining in edit wars is worse.
I can't speak for anyone else's motivation, and certainly people are more likely to see problems with the behavior of their opponents than their friends, but I'd have been unhappy with someone on ANY side of this debate doing so with an admitted sock account.
-Matt