On Feb 13, 2008 2:41 AM, Cool Hand Luke failure.to.communicate@gmail.com wrote:
On Feb 13, 2008 4:20 AM, George Herbert george.herbert@gmail.com wrote:
I still disagree with the consensus that's developing that Sammi and Mantan are necessarily the same person. I've never seen an actual sock IDed that had that range of overlap and yet was consistently able to keep other edit patterns outside the overlap range separate.
And I've never seen two separate editors who edit during the same time of day not once edit simultaneously over a year and other 1400 edits each. The depth of evidence is really quite good.
Look, it doesn't even matter what the identity is. What's outrageous is how inquiries into these account's behavior has been suppressed by users who suspected a COI all along. If you suspected it, you should have encouraged an investigation just to make sure everything was above board. Instead, users like Moven continue to Wikilawyer against it. This is outrageous.
We're going to have to agree to disagree on the quality of the evidence. There's always been suggestive evidence that they're connected - but also suggestive evidence that they aren't. Your interpretation of the analysis you've done is suggestive, but I still object to insufficiently rigorous math and statistics and dataset sizes for comparison. Your evidence isn't qualitatively changing the situation, just quantitatively. A large mound of low-grade goo isn't better structural material than a small mound of it.
Again - Even assuming the worst case, that these two accounts are the same person, and that person is Gary Weiss - the COI issues that would raise have never been persuasive to me. They just don't seem to edit in a problematic manner in general, only on controversial topics.
Encouraging an investigation of everyone we suspect of something on Wikipedia, to avoid any COI issues, is tantamount to blowing the pseudonymity and user real ID protections we have and most people hold rather dear out of the water. We *do* block people for that. And we probably should.
If you intend to challenge the generally pseudonymous operating mode, feel free to start with yourself, by letting us all know who you are and where you work. Then, we have a few million other users to convince to similarly identify themselves, some core policies on user privacy to junk and rewrite, and eventually around 2035 we can get back to working on the encyclopedia.
I personally am perfectly fine with people using real names on Wikipedia, and I think it will improve the project. As you may note, I have used my real name online for ... oh dear lord, it's 20 years now. Other than the infrequent "edited without remembering to log in" from IP addresses that are publically registered to a company I admit freely to owning, I don't do any IP or sock edits, and am happy to have anyone who doubts that take a look at me. I have nothing to hide other than the fact that I am sadly overly heterosexual for a San Francisco Bay Area resident. Well, had nothing to hide.
However...
Forcibly outing people who fall into disfavor with our critics, however, seems like a short road to destroying the project. A large number of editors and admins I otherwise respect have happily run to do Bagley's bidding on this one, and that's highly disturbing. If we're going to enforce all the policies equally, then a number of people have met the policy definition of "acting as proxy of banned user" in this, in addition to attempts to reveal the real-life identity of a Wikipedia user in public.