On 11/29/07, jayjg jayjg99@gmail.com wrote:
I suppose you're technically correct. Rather, these sockpuppets shout "REVERT BLATANT CENSORSHIP" http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Robert_Black_%28professor%29&d... in their edit summaries, then advertise their activities on Wikipedia Review in the hopes it will draw a crowd.
Actually, it's "Irony Time!" (cue cheesy game show music)
Yes, that's right! I knew nothing about this case until you brought it up! And youy know, it's rather funny, because this is a perfect repetition of the TNH case, modulo Jon Aubrey and another unidentified BADUSER. Robert Black dropped one of the Forbidden Identifications into his blog, based on a month-old post somewhere else, which if we are feeling conspiratorial can be assumed to have been somehow prompted by the Evil WR-ites. The next day, someone unidentified (and subsequently banned as a "sockpuppet" (meaning really a user of multiple identities)) creates a user and BADSITES the links to the blog that were already there. Jon Aubrey pops in, using an account he had created over a month earlier, to revert (and make a bunch of other minor edits along the way). At that the BADSITES furor was off and running.
The curious thing is that (a) the original reverter against Jon Aubrey was quite unconcerned with the fact that the original erasure was blatantly single purpose as well. After another BADSITES supporter got in a few licks, the slack was taken up by yet another (admitted) sock of someone else who got banned for that. In the end, the conclusion was practically foreordained: modulo a few positive edits along the way, Black's involvement in the Lockerbie matter dictated that the blog reference stayed, and the mention of the blog obviated giving its URL.
I haven't looked for reference to this on WR, but if the admins who got involved had simply put the thing back the way it started and protected it while they investigated, the whole thing would have blown over quickly with even less fuss (not that there was much). Instead, they took advantage of Jon Aubrey's presence to push BADSITES themselves, backing off again when someone took up the cause for them. The thing seems to have drawn a crowd of one, and I don't see anything wrong with his edits. If WR was responsible for alerting him, then to that degree they performed a service towards Wikipedia.