On Wed, May 7, 2008 at 8:03 AM, George Herbert george.herbert@gmail.com wrote:
On Tue, May 6, 2008 at 6:49 PM, David Goodman dgoodmanny@gmail.com wrote:
This group, however fringy, is a very well organized professionally-run enterprise devoted to lobbying, with immense influence and a history of considerable success in influencing media, fairly and perhaps otherwise. We have not previously encountered any organization with its resources.
The Church of Scientology.
Even more of a problem on-wiki, Lyndon LaRouche's supporters.
It is entirely clear from the evidence that there was not a vast whatever-wing conspiracy here - the number of people contributing in the email threads was quite limited, as are the number of en.wp accounts which were IDed as being associated by edit patterns.
It is possible to handle the (signifiant and real) policy implications of such attempts to unduly influence Wikipedia without inflating those who organized the attempts into superhuman individuals or monstrous malign organizations.
Everyone repeatedly confuses what could have happened with what did happen. There is no reason to suppose that the next time something like this happens the groups' ideological opponents will conveniently let us know.
I also have no idea how George can know with such confidence that "it is possible to handle" these situations. I haven't seen him on Eastern Europe or India-Pakistan stuff. I do know that that the Scientology people used a role account and multiple IPs registered to them. That is precisely the opposite of what a determined effort to subvert our processes of consensus would look like, so I don't know why it would even be brought up as a sign of our resilience..
We do not know if the CAMERA organization, as an organization, did more than let one of their staff look into doing this and host the email list. Even if they had, they are in fact smaller and not as rich as and not as well organized as other groups that have sought to do similiar things on and off.
We're not really much at risk from small off-wiki organizational efforts. What CAMERA could have pulled together if this got going seriously would be in a risk zone, where it's not a handful of editors, but enough that the pattern of behavior may not be evident unless you live and breathe that set of articles (if then). But if you get too large, then the pattern is easily evident again.
Again, I have no idea how you know this is true. You are clearly unaware that dozens of articles over the past six months have been turned into CAMERA quotefarms. How do we know that this is being done by a regular editor or a recruited one? I really wish that you would provide support for at least one of your assertions ,so I'd have something to chew on.
The difference between this and other groups is that they knew our processes and were prepared to subvert them in an atomistic way. If you can demonstrate that happening earlier, except by one or two individuals, I'd like to know.
As demonstrated by the ANI response, if detected, such groups can be identified and characterized and rather thoroughly stomped on in short order.
You're joking. In this case emails were available and not questioned. In Hkelkar2 emails were available and questioned. Nothing happened. In any such situation there will be people who will say "why the witch-hunt"? The claim that they can be easily identified is completely divorced from reality.
We're equally at risk from anyone who has a clue how to create well-separated sockpuppet brigades. And we have many of those about.
Not equally at risk in terms of subversion of articles, I'm afraid. Individuals tend to have more modest aims.
RR