[LomodiorCon]

[Aaron757]

This does not surprise me at all.



Spec.

[TOPERink]

When asked whether it could confirm whether the changes had been made by a person using a CIA computer, a spokesperson responded: "I cannot confirm that the traffic you cite came from agency computers.

"I'd like in any case to underscore a far larger and more significant point that no one should doubt or forget: The CIA has a vital mission in protecting the United States, and the focus of this agency is there, on that decisive work."

Of course. And if we for a moment thought it wasn't, all those precious government jobs might be in jeopardy.

-Arrian

[fedordzen]

Obviously it was a random employe who was editing something funny in.

[Heacechig]

This is probably the least of Wikipedia's problems. At least one administrator is suspected of being an intelligence agent, or a former intelligence agent, and one of her friends has a similarly dubious record of edits there.

Wikipedia is a great idea, but it is run by an idiot, who has allowed his own idiocy to affect the way the project is run.

[Anfester]

it looks more like CIA employees having fun to me

[freevideoandoicsI]

Originally posted by MRT144


I am editing the NCAA 07 Football Championship to reflect an OSU win. I will be using an OSU computer. Good idea, I'm editing in that Auburn won in 2004 since we all know that the SEC is BY FAR the best conference and that the USC wimps were terrified that they'd have to play the tigers and fixed the voting so they wouldnt have to.

[panholio]

Originally posted by Japher
The Culinary Institute of America is editing wiki articles? Man! Oh, the huge Manatee... with herb butter... please

[MYMcvBgl]

Originally posted by Agathon
This is probably the least of Wikipedia's problems. At least one administrator is suspected of being an intelligence agent, or a former intelligence agent I'm going to be generous and assume you didn't see anything more than a ridiculously biased summary of that story.

[HedoShoodovex]

"I'd like in any case to underscore a far larger and more significant point that no one should doubt or forget: The CIA has a vital mission in protecting the United States, and the focus of this agency is there, on that decisive work."



Just like Arrian, this part strikes me as especially scurile.

[Hmntezmb]

wouldn't it be better that instead of encouraging online vadalism through boredom they let them play civ while working instead

[valentinesdayyy]

Originally posted by Darius871

Suspected by whom, and on what grounds? It's a long and interesting story. Here's the outline, as I understand it (there's some additional juicy details that I am hazy about, so I will omit them). I've seen most of the evidence myself, although the target has spent a great deal of time trying to have it removed (I think the wayback machine may have some of it).

SlimVirgin has long been known as one of the most abusive administrators on Wikipedia. I'm not a Wikipedia editor (I have authored precisely one article), but I read the site a lot and have followed it out of interest in the Wiki ideal for a few years now. Even I had come across some of her handiwork. Many decent editors have been driven from the project by her and her abusive friends, who tend to gang up on anyone who doesn't agree with them.

A while back many people became concerned about Wikipedia's policies on the biographies of living persons. Wikipedia is a perfect conduit if you want to libel someone, and the organization doesn't really do enough to prevent it (as Apolyton's own Alez Koroknay-Palacz discovered when someone vandalized his article and proclaimed him a white supremacist). So various people began to campaign to get it changed and to assert some sort of control over whether they could be featured in the encyclopaedia. Now I don't agree that people should be able to remove themselves, but Wikipedia clearly has poor policies when it comes to protecting living persons from defamation, and people are right to complain about it.

Anyway, one of the people who is heavily involved in Wikipedia's biography policy is SlimVirgin (who spends more than people with a full time job editing Wikipedia). One of the reasons she does this is to protect the current POV of the Lyndon LaRouche article, which is one of the most blatant examples of a bad article on Wikipedia. The LaRouche article is basically controlled by SlimVirgin and her allies, notably one CBerlet, who turns out to be Chip Berlet, a journalist who has made his career attacking LaRouche. Unsurprisingly, the article is a hatchet job on LaRouche (a person with whom I have no sympathy, but the article is clearly ridiculous). Berlet uses his own articles as source for Wikipedia, which means he can basically write what he wants on his own LaRouche attack site and then use it as referenced source material on Wikipedia. Unsurprisingly, many people have objected to this practice, but SlimVirgin and her friends exert a lot of control over Wikipedia's sourcing policy and have rigged it so that Berlet's practices are considered acceptable. So she's pissed off a lot of people.

One guy she pissed off was Daniel Brandt, a conspiracy journalist who is actively involved in trying to make Wikipedia accountable for the things it publishes about living persons (I think she was involved in writing his article). So he tried to find out who she was, because her actions seemed so strange (part of his project to make Wikipedia more accountable).

One thing that is weird is that she is obsessed with the Lockerbie bombing, and engaged in all sorts of pathological edit wars over that article (which screwed it up as well). Based on this, people just thought she was some kind of random obsessive nut.

Brandt discovered that an email address and a domain name that were involved with the SlimVirgin account were registered to someone called Sarah McEwan from Alberta, Canada. But later on, by following up some stuff SlimVirgin had said on Wikipedia, he discovered that the same email address was listed as a contact (it displayed when you rolled over the name) for an alumnus of Cambridge University called Linda Mack. "Sarah McEwan" was a complete nobody, but "Linda Mack" was not. Evidence pointed to them being the same person.

Brandt actually had met Linda Mack. One of the things he does is sell an index of names of known intelligence operatives and so on. She'd been a customer. Brandt managed to discover quite a bit more about her by emailing old colleagues and the like. It's basically certain that they are the same person, since a former colleague who emailed Brandt with all sorts of juicy information quickly emailed him saying that he had been contacted by Mack and told not to say anything more (but the cat was out of the bag). It's unlikely that they are two different people since LM would have no reason to be following Brandt's Wikipedia work (there is more evidence as well, but that's enough).

Linda Mack had been a graduate student at Cambridge, but had quit after the Lockerbie bombing, claiming to have been the girlfriend of one of the victims (his girlfriend for about two weeks, but LM was regarded as weird and obsessive by former students at Cambridge). Apparently, she inserted herself right into the investigation and became a "spokesperson" for the victims. She ended up working for ABC news journalist Pierre Salinger (former White House Press Secretary) who was working an angle on the Lockerbie bombing.

Now, if you've followed the news of that event, you'll know that the whole thing stinks. The Libyans were blamed for it, even though the evidence pointed to a Syrian group which was a splinter of the PFLP. You may note that the Libyan who was convicted of the bombing has been granted a retrial, and if you read around, it is pretty clear that the case against him smells pretty bad.

ABC news, in particular Salinger, were frustrated in their pursuit of the Lockerbie story by British Intelligence. They felt that they were being pressured into pointing the blame towards Libya, when the blame clearly pointed elsewhere. Documents were confiscated IIRC, and other "things" happened. Because of her odd behaviour, Salinger became convinced that Mack was an MI5 plant, so he fired her. She was also named as an agent by Michael Morris of Air Incident Research, and there are other people who found her suspicious.

Basically, there's a heap of suspicion from various people that surrounds this person. Whether or not she was actually an intelligence agent is uncertain, but there were various different people who were convinced of it, or at least convinced she wasn't kosher.

When this came out (about a year ago), SlimVirgin had a friendly editor (who is also suspected of being paid to edit Wikipedia and shares many of her prejudices) "oversight" a huge amount of her previous edits. This is a special power that very few people have and which completely removes the edits from the Wikipedia database. It's not supposed to be used for this, but it has removed a large amount of evidence from Wikipedia. The whole thing absolutely reeks. Since people already knew who she was, it can't have been that, so there must have been something in those edits that was incriminating.

So we are left to wonder why this person changed her name, why she was interested in purchasing lists of intelligence agents, why she has engaged in such pathological behaviour to influence Wikipedia, and why such extreme actions were taken to remove evidence of her contributions to the Encyclopaedia. Most of the other Wikipedia admins aren't paranoid to this degree about their identities (although some of them are pretty weird - one is a disbarred lawyer who tried to get a client in a divorce case to have sex with him).

I've been following the case out of interest for a while now (it would make a pretty good novel, I think). While I think there is no certain evidence that this person is or was an intelligence agent, it is certainly not unreasonable to speculate that she was at some time involved, and it is clear that people who knew her were certain that she was.

[infarrelisam]

Originally posted by Agathon
This is probably the least of Wikipedia's problems. At least one administrator is suspected of being an intelligence agent, or a former intelligence agent, and one of her friends has a similarly dubious record of edits there.

Wikipedia is a great idea, but it is run by an idiot, who has allowed his own idiocy to affect the way the project is run. As long as idiots spend their time adding informations to the internets i don't give a **** what idiot is running the show!

[Pypeassesty]

Originally posted by Agathon


It's a long and interesting story. Here's the outline, as I understand it (there's some additional juicy details that I am hazy about, so I will omit them). I've seen most of the evidence myself, although the target has spent a great deal of time trying to have it removed (I think the wayback machine may have some of it).

SlimVirgin has long been known as one of the most abusive administrators on Wikipedia. I'm not a Wikipedia editor (I have authored precisely one article), but I read the site a lot and have followed it out of interest in the Wiki ideal for a few years now. Even I had come across some of her handiwork. Many decent editors have been driven from the project by her and her abusive friends, who tend to gang up on anyone who doesn't agree with them.

A while back many people became concerned about Wikipedia's policies on the biographies of living persons. Wikipedia is a perfect conduit if you want to libel someone, and the organization doesn't really do enough to prevent it (as Apolyton's own Alez Koroknay-Palacz discovered when someone vandalized his article and proclaimed him a white supremacist). So various people began to campaign to get it changed and to assert some sort of control over whether they could be featured in the encyclopaedia. Now I don't agree that people should be able to remove themselves, but Wikipedia clearly has poor policies when it comes to protecting living persons from defamation, and people are right to complain about it.

Anyway, one of the people who is heavily involved in Wikipedia's biography policy is SlimVirgin (who spends more than people with a full time job editing Wikipedia). One of the reasons she does this is to protect the current POV of the Lyndon LaRouche article, which is one of the most blatant examples of a bad article on Wikipedia. The LaRouche article is basically controlled by SlimVirgin and her allies, notably one CBerlet, who turns out to be Chip Berlet, a journalist who has made his career attacking LaRouche. Unsurprisingly, the article is a hatchet job on LaRouche (a person with whom I have no sympathy, but the article is clearly ridiculous). Berlet uses his own articles as source for Wikipedia, which means he can basically write what he wants on his own LaRouche attack site and then use it as referenced source material on Wikipedia. Unsurprisingly, many people have objected to this practice, but SlimVirgin and her friends exert a lot of control over Wikipedia's sourcing policy and have rigged it so that Berlet's practices are considered acceptable. So she's pissed off a lot of people.

One guy she pissed off was Daniel Brandt, a conspiracy journalist who is actively involved in trying to make Wikipedia accountable for the things it publishes about living persons (I think she was involved in writing his article). So he tried to find out who she was, because her actions seemed so strange (part of his project to make Wikipedia more accountable).

One thing that is weird is that she is obsessed with the Lockerbie bombing, and engaged in all sorts of pathological edit wars over that article (which screwed it up as well). Based on this, people just thought she was some kind of random obsessive nut.

Brandt discovered that an email address and a domain name that were involved with the SlimVirgin account were registered to someone called Sarah McEwan from Alberta, Canada. But later on, by following up some stuff SlimVirgin had said on Wikipedia, he discovered that the same email address was listed as a contact (it displayed when you rolled over the name) for an alumnus of Cambridge University called Linda Mack. "Sarah McEwan" was a complete nobody, but "Linda Mack" was not. Evidence pointed to them being the same person.

Brandt actually had met Linda Mack. One of the things he does is sell an index of names of known intelligence operatives and so on. She'd been a customer. Brandt managed to discover quite a bit more about her by emailing old colleagues and the like. It's basically certain that they are the same person, since a former colleague who emailed Brandt with all sorts of juicy information quickly emailed him saying that he had been contacted by Mack and told not to say anything more (but the cat was out of the bag). It's unlikely that they are two different people since LM would have no reason to be following Brandt's Wikipedia work (there is more evidence as well, but that's enough).

Linda Mack had been a graduate student at Cambridge, but had quit after the Lockerbie bombing, claiming to have been the girlfriend of one of the victims (his girlfriend for about two weeks, but LM was regarded as weird and obsessive by former students at Cambridge). Apparently, she inserted herself right into the investigation and became a "spokesperson" for the victims. She ended up working for ABC news journalist Pierre Salinger (former White House Press Secretary) who was working an angle on the Lockerbie bombing.

Now, if you've followed the news of that event, you'll know that the whole thing stinks. The Libyans were blamed for it, even though the evidence pointed to a Syrian group which was a splinter of the PFLP. You may note that the Libyan who was convicted of the bombing has been granted a retrial, and if you read around, it is pretty clear that the case against him smells pretty bad.

ABC news, in particular Salinger, were frustrated in their pursuit of the Lockerbie story by British Intelligence. They felt that they were being pressured into pointing the blame towards Libya, when the blame clearly pointed elsewhere. Documents were confiscated IIRC, and other "things" happened. Because of her odd behaviour, Salinger became convinced that Mack was an MI5 plant, so he fired her. She was also named as an agent by Michael Morris of Air Incident Research, and there are other people who found her suspicious.

Basically, there's a heap of suspicion from various people that surrounds this person. Whether or not she was actually an intelligence agent is uncertain, but there were various different people who were convinced of it, or at least convinced she wasn't kosher.

When this came out (about a year ago), SlimVirgin had a friendly editor (who is also suspected of being paid to edit Wikipedia and shares many of her prejudices) "oversight" a huge amount of her previous edits. This is a special power that very few people have and which completely removes the edits from the Wikipedia database. It's not supposed to be used for this, but it has removed a large amount of evidence from Wikipedia. The whole thing absolutely reeks. Since people already knew who she was, it can't have been that, so there must have been something in those edits that was incriminating.

So we are left to wonder why this person changed her name, why she was interested in purchasing lists of intelligence agents, why she has engaged in such pathological behaviour to influence Wikipedia, and why such extreme actions were taken to remove evidence of her contributions to the Encyclopaedia. Most of the other Wikipedia admins aren't paranoid to this degree about their identities (although some of them are pretty weird - one is a disbarred lawyer who tried to get a client in a divorce case to have sex with him).

I've been following the case out of interest for a while now (it would make a pretty good novel, I think). While I think there is no certain evidence that this person is or was an intelligence agent, it is certainly not unreasonable to speculate that she was at some time involved, and it is clear that people who knew her were certain that she was. Very interesting, but as you concede the actual evidence is awfully thin. Per Occam's Razor the simplest explanation appears to be that she's just another obsessive nutcase, of which there are plenty on the internet in general and Wiki in particular. The possibility that someone emotionally close to her was on the Lockerbie flight makes the obsessive nutcase theory even more likely.

Even if she hypothetically was briefly in MI5's employ at some point, it's possible she was booted and ostracized by the intel community for being an obsessive nutcase. Her having been an agent at one time in the past wouldn't even imply that she's now guided by nefarious puppetmasters behind the scenes. To say otherwise is taking an allegation founded solely on rumor and extrapolating it to an allegation founded on nothing.

It would make for one helluva novel though.

[Amomiamup]

The main problem with Wikipedia is that the admins are incredibly unaccountable. It's like the House of Lords. They only get removed in exceptional cases, so low-level abuse (like SlimVirgin) can continue more or less indefinitely. Half the admins are Halo-playing teenagers, but in 10 years time, when those teenagers are working for governments and PR companies, the situation will be ripe for abuse.

[jeockammece]

[markphata]

Originally posted by Alexander's Horse

Okayyyy, so you believe in conspiracies and cocktails of gossip like the above but you don't believe that Jesus even existed I've personally verified to my own satisfaction every claim I made about the Wikipedia loon. I don't know how much of it is still on the web, but it was there at the time I looked. There were various people submitted mutually confirming material. Every categorical claim in my post I have seen the evidence for. Every non-categorical claim is speculative and is noted as so by me.

Notice that I didn't claim she was an intelligence agent, only that it was somewhat likely (a lot more likely than for the average Wikipedophile), and that numerous others had said so.

Still feeling burned over your inability to defend the origins of your blood-drinking hippie cult?

The feeble attempts of Christian retards...

[ZIZITOPER]

Originally posted by Agathon

Still feeling burned over your inability to defend the origins of your blood-drinking hippie cult?

The feeble attempts of Christian retards... now, now, no need to get snippy

[furillo]

hi trev, most of em are private - people goofing off - the defence dept is full of history buffs for example

[iiilizium]

I will personally guarantee that defense dept personnel never use the internet during working hours.