Regarding Will be Back's comment on Dec 9, 2007 and the
subsequent thread, which was initially in reply to my
comment dated Nov 14, 2007
(
http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/htdig/wikien-l/2007-December/087116.html)
I notice a number of misconceptions and some confusion
about the whole issue of a secret forum, so I thought that
I would clarify a few things. As it seems that my account
on WR (both as owner and even as member) has been hacked
by Somey, and hence I will be forced to start a new WR, I
cannot say for certain whether this is still the case,
however I can tell you what the situation was for the
first 2 years that WR existed. This is something that was
never a secret - I had always been open about this. Somey
however has in recent times tried to hide this.
Wikipedia Review found the need to have a special
sub-forum for "trusted users". This was Blu Aardvark's
idea (and perhaps a bit of my idea) and was started as
soon as we had
WR.com running, 16 February 2006. The
initial members of this group was myself, Selina, Blu
Aardvark and Lir, otherwise known as the founding members
of Wikipedia Review. Later we added more people, always
at the request of existing members. Over time this group
included Guy, Hushthis, Sgrayban, Herschellekrustofsky,
Poetlister, and a number of others.
The initial plan for this group was "everyone who we knew
was not an administrator of Wikipedia" and it was intended
to be for all established users. However, over time the
group became increasingly exclusive, and it became a group
that was "all administrators of WR plus 1 or 2 others who
will probably become administrators later on anyway".
The point of this group was not to coordinate attacks on
Wikipedia, indeed it had never been used for this purpose.
The point of it was to talk about things privately
without fear that we would have our names smeared about
it. For example we might complain about other members of
WR, or we might complain privately about how so-and-so on
Wikipedia was a jerk, etc.
When Kato was made a moderator of WR, he immediately used
the sub-forum to try to coordinate attacks against
Wikipedia, something that I objected very strongly
towards. He lied about it, set people up, and then forced
all of us to lie. The end result of that is that a lot of
innocent people were banned from Wikipedia, and a lot of
people got really confused about the whole thing. This is
why I was so angry at Kato, and told them to get rid of
him completely, because he was making WR the bad guys.
The kinds of attacks he was doing were completely
unethical, they were the kinds of things that Wikipedia
has for years accused us of doing, but we had never done.
Now suddenly we were, thanks to Kato. And this is why
Somey saw the need to hack my account, entirely over this
issue.
Now, this sub-forum was initially called "Wikipedia Review
cabal" but it was later changed to be known as "Wikipedia
Review anti-cabal" because someone (I can't remember who)
said that cabals are evil, and we wanted to be known as
the good guys (as opposed to Wikipedia, who we regarded as
the bad guys).
Now, you should note that the hypocrisy is almost entirely
done by the people who tried to usurp the initial founding
members - Selina and then more recently Somey. The people
who started WR, people like Igor and Lir and Blu Aardvark
and the like, never wavered from the initial intentions.
But all of these people have now been banned. Hence why
we are going to start a new, ethical WR.
Now I will explain all of the different levels on
Wikipedia Review:
Guests (without an account) - you can view all of the
public forums
Members (once you sign up) - can also view the Tar Pit and
Feather Barrel and that's about it
Anti-Cabal (sometimes known as the trusted users forum) -
can also view one extra forum, the Anti-Cabal sub forum,
used so abusively by Kato, and I believe is now used to
coordinate attacks against Wikipedia, but for the 2 years
prior to this it never was
Moderators (once you're a moderator) - Primarily used to
decide whether to ban someone from WR, also talking about
new rules, people who are applying, etc
That's it for the secret forums. There are 3. 1 for you
when you register (not a particularly exciting one), 1 for
when you are liked enough, and one as a moderator. Also
note that Moderators can see all deleted messages.
As part of the deal that I got because I owned the site
but didn't want to be an administrator, they let me view
all of these sub forums, and I could comment on
administrative decisions, yet I couldn't actually do
anything.
When I said that I thought that Kato should be banned from
WR for coordinating attacks on Wikipedia, Somey decided to
hack my account and change my passwords. And now our
hosts, GoDaddy (for the domain) and Lunarpages (for the
software) believe that Somey is me, and I am some
imposter. I can forward on their e-mails about it. Its
all a very ugly situation now, all thanks to Kato.