I'm not so interested in the whether the "Sooper Seekret" mailing list is evidence for a cabal, regardless how suspicious it looks. What does jump out at me is how it essentially demolishes all of the circumstantial arguments made to justify sockpuppetry blocks.
On Nov 29, 2007 2:02 PM, The Mangoe the.mangoe@gmail.com wrote:
I'm not so interested in the whether the "Sooper Seekret" mailing list is evidence for a cabal, regardless how suspicious it looks. What does jump out at me is how it essentially demolishes all of the circumstantial arguments made to justify sockpuppetry blocks.
What arguments are you referring to, and how does it "demolish" them?
Incidentally, Gmail has a new group chat feature so we can have our cabal meets in real time! /sarcasm
On Nov 29, 2007 1:06 PM, jayjg jayjg99@gmail.com wrote:
On Nov 29, 2007 2:02 PM, The Mangoe the.mangoe@gmail.com wrote:
I'm not so interested in the whether the "Sooper Seekret" mailing list is evidence for a cabal, regardless how suspicious it looks. What does jump out at me is how it essentially demolishes all of the circumstantial arguments made to justify sockpuppetry blocks.
What arguments are you referring to, and how does it "demolish" them?
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On Nov 29, 2007 3:18 PM, Navou Navou navouwiki@gmail.com wrote:
Incidentally, Gmail has a new group chat feature so we can have our cabal meets in real time! /sarcasm
On Nov 29, 2007 1:06 PM, jayjg jayjg99@gmail.com wrote:
On Nov 29, 2007 2:02 PM, The Mangoe the.mangoe@gmail.com wrote:
I'm not so interested in the whether the "Sooper Seekret" mailing list is evidence for a cabal, regardless how suspicious it looks. What does jump out at me is how it essentially demolishes all of the circumstantial arguments made to justify sockpuppetry blocks.
What arguments are you referring to, and how does it "demolish" them?
A thread concerned with the harmfulness of "omg we're part of a cabal" jokes was similarly marginalized not too long ago. I think the result was:
omg we're pretending that we're part of the cabal, which of course doesn't exist, wink wink, because we're joking about it.
Very believable, I must say.
On Nov 29, 2007 2:06 PM, jayjg jayjg99@gmail.com wrote:
What arguments are you referring to, and how does it "demolish" them?
I'm looking at the "sooper seekret" message (as it appears on Wikitruth), and I see a list of signs that one is dealing with a troll/sockpuppet, generally in the form of "new people don't act this way." !! was held to fulfill every one of them, and yet the identification turned out to be faulty. The conclusion which one may well make is that these are not necessarily good assumptions to make about how new users act. Looking back at my early edits, my first really substantial edit was to split one article in two. I got into an RFD within my first fifty edits. The expectation that new editors don't know what they're doing is evidently not entirely warranted.
Which is not to say that Jon Awbrey shouldn't be banned at every opportunity.
Quoting The Mangoe the.mangoe@gmail.com:
On Nov 29, 2007 2:06 PM, jayjg jayjg99@gmail.com wrote:
What arguments are you referring to, and how does it "demolish" them?
I'm looking at the "sooper seekret" message (as it appears on Wikitruth), and I see a list of signs that one is dealing with a troll/sockpuppet, generally in the form of "new people don't act this way." !! was held to fulfill every one of them, and yet the identification turned out to be faulty. The conclusion which one may well make is that these are not necessarily good assumptions to make about how new users act. Looking back at my early edits, my first really substantial edit was to split one article in two. I got into an RFD within my first fifty edits. The expectation that new editors don't know what they're doing is evidently not entirely warranted.
On the contrary. The editor in question was not a new editor just as the Durova's evidence suggested. The editor not being new was not the issue here.
On Nov 30, 2007 4:18 AM, joshua.zelinsky@yale.edu wrote:
Quoting The Mangoe the.mangoe@gmail.com:
On Nov 29, 2007 2:06 PM, jayjg jayjg99@gmail.com wrote:
What arguments are you referring to, and how does it "demolish" them?
I'm looking at the "sooper seekret" message (as it appears on Wikitruth), and I see a list of signs that one is dealing with a troll/sockpuppet, generally in the form of "new people don't act this way." !! was held to fulfill every one of them, and yet the identification turned out to be faulty. The conclusion which one may well make is that these are not necessarily good assumptions to make about how new users act. Looking back at my early edits, my first really substantial edit was to split one article in two. I got into an RFD within my first fifty edits. The expectation that new editors don't know what they're doing is evidently not entirely warranted.
On the contrary. The editor in question was not a new editor just as the Durova's evidence suggested. The editor not being new was not the issue here.
Yes, but once again, Durova's evidence was interpolated with editorial remarks indicating she thought it implied more than just that !! was a 'new editor'', that !! was a returning troll. It is in that leap that the faulty logic comes in.
RR
On Thu, 29 Nov 2007 23:05:47 -0500, "The Mangoe" the.mangoe@gmail.com wrote:
I'm looking at the "sooper seekret" message (as it appears on Wikitruth), and I see a list of signs that one is dealing with a troll/sockpuppet, generally in the form of "new people don't act this way." !! was held to fulfill every one of them, and yet the identification turned out to be faulty.
No it didn't - !! *is* a returning user.
Guy (JzG)
On Fri, 2007-11-30 at 07:11 -0500, Guy Chapman aka JzG wrote:
On Thu, 29 Nov 2007 23:05:47 -0500, "The Mangoe" the.mangoe@gmail.com wrote:
I'm looking at the "sooper seekret" message (as it appears on Wikitruth), and I see a list of signs that one is dealing with a troll/sockpuppet, generally in the form of "new people don't act this way." !! was held to fulfill every one of them, and yet the identification turned out to be faulty.
No it didn't - !! *is* a returning user.
But Durova wasn't simply giving a cookbook in the identification of a returning user (even there, it might not be a false positive here, we already have argument in the rest of unquoted part of the post as to how it could easily provide false positive). The sooper seekret evidence starts off in the first paragraph indicating the following example was one of a returning WR-related troll/abuser.
Please remember this thread started with the message by The Mangoe about the circumstantial arguments that were used to justify sockpuppetry blocks, not whether it correctly or not identify someone as a returning user (in good standing or otherwise).
KTC
On Nov 30, 2007 8:21 AM, Kwan Ting Chan ktc@ktchan.info wrote:
On Fri, 2007-11-30 at 07:11 -0500, Guy Chapman aka JzG wrote:
On Thu, 29 Nov 2007 23:05:47 -0500, "The Mangoe" the.mangoe@gmail.com wrote:
I'm looking at the "sooper seekret" message (as it appears on Wikitruth), and I see a list of signs that one is dealing with a troll/sockpuppet, generally in the form of "new people don't act this way." !! was held to fulfill every one of them, and yet the identification turned out to be faulty.
No it didn't - !! *is* a returning user.
But Durova wasn't simply giving a cookbook in the identification of a returning user (even there, it might not be a false positive here, we already have argument in the rest of unquoted part of the post as to how it could easily provide false positive). The sooper seekret evidence starts off in the first paragraph indicating the following example was one of a returning WR-related troll/abuser.
The evidence that it was a returning editor was correct; the evidence that it was WR-related was not.
Please remember this thread started with the message by The Mangoe about the circumstantial arguments that were used to justify sockpuppetry blocks, not whether it correctly or not identify someone as a returning user (in good standing or otherwise).
And how does the fact that Durova incorrectly identified !! as a WR editor "demolish[] all of the circumstantial arguments made to justify sockpuppetry blocks."? To use an analogy, if the courts were to incorrectly convict an individual on circumstantial evidence, would that mean *all* such convictions were incorrect? And, by the way, almost all criminal convictions involve circumstantial evidence.
In reconsidering, my original statement was too strong. Nonetheless, it still seems to me that there is an awful lot more confidence expressed in the ability to deduce what users are up to than seems to me to be merited, and Durova's argument seems to me to exemplify how this can happen. Just my opinion, it seems.
On Nov 30, 2007 8:33 AM, The Mangoe the.mangoe@gmail.com wrote:
In reconsidering, my original statement was too strong. Nonetheless, it still seems to me that there is an awful lot more confidence expressed in the ability to deduce what users are up to than seems to me to be merited, and Durova's argument seems to me to exemplify how this can happen. Just my opinion, it seems.
Now that is a statement I can agree with, and this whole incident should serve to remind us all about caution.
-Matt