[Foundation-l] Cabal?

[Chris Down]

Ipatrol has just came on IRC claiming that he has been told that the WMF is
hiring people to "validate" articles, and that the foundation is doing it in
secret by using thousands of IPs and academics. He claims that the WMF has
contracted colleges all across the US have been recruiting academics to
"validate" articles, and states that admins are involved in this 'cabal', or
whatever.

[[Afghan Hound]] is going to be rewritten soon by someone being paid
$1000/month from the foundation, according to his 'source'. His source is
apparently "an ex-teacher from Wright State University". According to
ipatrol, the source claims that they have thousands of closed proxies
operated through closed sites, and that the board are well aware of this.
Apparently "the site's director" does not know, however. Apparently they
showed ipatrol a pay stub from "Wikimedia Foundation". Apparently the person
can also modify the content of diffs, which of course would imply that the
person had root access.

Yes, this sounds like complete and utter nonsense to me too, but I figured I
should bring it up here since it is a pretty serious accusation (if
ridiculous). Ipatrol is apparently going to release the name of the person
to the WMF in private (naturally -l is not the best place to do such a
thing), so hopefully that will sort everything out.

Can anyone shed some light on whether this is even feasible? I really don't
see how it could possibly be construed as being such.

- Chris Down