Re: Paid Editing on WP is permissible

Good, bad, biased, paid or what-have-you. There's an endless supply.
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Re: Paid Editing on WP is permissible

Post by ericbarbour » Mon May 03, 2021 9:06 pm

Fanatical audiophile; fanatical fan of The Absolute Sound; or fanatical fan who was paid by The Absolute Sound and/or Oswald's Mill Audio to venerate them (badly) on Wikipedia? You tell me.

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?ti ... bertromejr

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Re: Paid Editing on WP is permissible

Post by ericbarbour » Fri May 07, 2021 11:51 pm

I have never heard of this stupid gothy Canadian band. The article is 55k bytes plus an obsessive discography plus separate articles for each album--loads more content than is usual for an (obscure) stupid gothy Canadian band, regardless of how many albums they have put out.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Birthday_Massacre

Show me their chart hits. Their industry awards. Their gold records. (You can't? Then how are they "notable"?)

Only noticed because of this fan/member/paid freak who has spent the past 13 years glorifying them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:TBMforeverNowhere

Band members have unquestionably edited it. There may be other sock accounts in the history.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:C ... aymassacre

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Re: Paid Editing on WP is permissible

Post by ericbarbour » Mon May 17, 2021 2:17 am

Absolutely typical of what a music industry "minor figure" gets when they pay someone to sweeten their WP content. Note the amazing lack of references.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vincent_Herbert

Created in 2012 by a questionable editor who likes to grind female-singer content. Ask him if he's paid. Ask him how much Kelly Rowland is paying him.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:EricEgo2012

Have some other "single purpose account things" and "professional reputation management" etc
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:C ... lkbuddafly
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:C ... 87.121.165
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:C ... hazikanaan
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:C ... /Thinkzulu
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:C ... ons/Erin93
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:C ... Erickaamor

But also there is lulz
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:C ... nnyherb101
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:C ... enbuttcube
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:C ... ons/NeSims

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Re: Paid Editing on WP is permissible

Post by ericbarbour » Sun May 30, 2021 3:51 am

Never heard of this guy--until a synth nerd mentioned him in a discussion. Note that this is NOT the notorious right-wing blogger, but a minor IT consultant in the UK. A VERY obscure computing figure. Except in his own enormous head.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Molyneux

And this is the sock account he used/paid/? to glorify himself in 2006.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:C ... ion~enwiki

Someone who loves him also used this IP address in Ruislip for a time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:C ... .37.229.28

Even funnier. By 2007 it was more than 30,000 bytes long. A tedious, cringey, trivia-filled and self-fixated autobiography.

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?ti ... =130062924

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Re: Paid Editing on WP is permissible

Post by ericbarbour » Sun Jul 04, 2021 8:59 pm

Several years ago I recall pointing this out. NO ONE has done anything about it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jammer_keyboard

Mostly the work of Jim Plamondon, the inventor of the Jammer keyboard. And his friend, Ken "MusicScienceGuy" Rushton, a blogger who loves to talk about isomorphic music keyboards. If it's an alternative keyboard, Ken is ready to venerate it on Wikipedia. Albeit not very well, since references can be scarce.

(Frankly, this is a pointless area to discuss, partly because C-Thru Music, the most successful maker of isomorphic keyboards, went out of business years ago. Only accordion players and a few fanatics seem to care about alternative keyboards today. The concept failed as "mass market".)

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Re: Paid Editing on WP is permissible

Post by ericbarbour » Sun Jul 04, 2021 10:12 pm

Mantak Chia has that sweet flavor of "we paid a lot of money for that article"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:C ... ns/Bitcalc

The second major contributor was Peter "Vassyana" Sienkiewicz, an early arbitrator who appeared to have quit Wikipedia entirely in 2012. He showed up briefly in 2019 and posted a few comments, then disappeared again. You might remember he was blackmailed back in 2010, and we only found out due to the Arbcom leaks on WR.

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Re: Paid Editing on WP is permissible

Post by ericbarbour » Wed Jul 14, 2021 4:28 am

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Re: Paid Editing on WP is permissible

Post by ericbarbour » Wed Aug 11, 2021 8:56 pm

I've been watching some YouTube content, for "self-education and some amusement". As you might expect, actual "education" is a bit scarce on YouTube. But screaming egomaniacs and "influencers" and "wannabe influencers" are ten-a-penny.

You can't look at YT content about cars without being exposed to the ravings of Scotty Kilmer. Warning, do not watch. Since 2007, Kilmer has been living proof that posting "useful knowledge" on YouTube is unlikely to bring you big viewer/follower figures and YouTube Bux. No, you have to do the Kilmer routine: scream, yell, splutter, throw your half-baked opinions around, post new crap EVERY DAY.......and occasionally threaten to quit. His act is stupid beyond belief and some of his "facts" are outright wrong. Unfortunately it WORKS. He now has 4.4 million followers and 1.5 billion views. Later I'm going to post more on my worthless blog, having found critics and enemies of the great Scotty Kilmer.

Kilmer currently lives in Arlington, Texas (I gather). Guess where this IP address is.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:C ... 189.206.81

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Re: Paid Editing on WP is permissible

Post by ericbarbour » Thu Aug 12, 2021 9:50 pm

A small aside and follow-up.

If you remember Gary "Mantanmoreland" Weiss, Patrick Byrne's longtime battles with "naked short sellers" (one of whom was Gary Weiss OF COURSE), and "ps fuck off bagley", recent events will give you some deja vu.

Only this time Byrne handed the Gary Weiss Fan Club a great fat cudgel to beat him with: two years ago Byrne became a ranting Trump-o-stan and started spouting conspiracy stuff. And left the company he helped found, just a few days later. So OF COURSE his WP bio started to explode with "new fax".

https://xtools.wmflabs.org/articleinfo/ ... k_M._Byrne

This time you get a BONUS: someone hating on Byrne, AND doing apparently-paid editing on other bios. I smells me a Gary Weiss sock. A TWOFER.

Also in the history: this obvious sockpuppet of someone "prominent". Edited for only a few months in 2013 but was obviously "out to get" Byrne AND was very friendly with insiders. The asshole went around and openly canvassed for help with shitting on Byrne's head.

Later the same day, this alleged "inexperienced new editor" performed a massive rewrite of Byrne's article. The Aristocrats?

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Re: Paid Editing on WP is permissible

Post by ericbarbour » Tue Aug 17, 2021 2:00 am

My freind Batz, a dedicated professional cynic, recently discovered the "Adam Something" channel on YouToob.
"Don't know where to start? Try his latest. Jeez is he asking for a
fatwah or what? Dubai Is A Parody Of The 21st Century
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SacQ2YdVOyk"
And I must respond:
"Once again: I saw Dubai back in 1976 long before the first skyscraper. It was literally a filthy medieval duchy. The largest building (and the only clean and well-maintained one) was the sheik's palace. He owned most of the commercial real estate AND the port AND all the public roads. Dirt roads. Electricity was only available in the central city and only for 5 or 6 hours per day. Water was scarce and costly. In the classic third-world manner, people brushed their teeth with Coca-Cola, because you couldn't get typhoid from it. Open sewers drained into the bay. It stank. And this was after several years of "improvements".
"Until the 1960s the "airport" was a dirt runway that was too short for jetliners. Most people lived in abject poverty in mud-brick shacks and fished for survival, despite the country swimming in oil money. And yes; outright slavery was still commonplace in the Emirates at the time. The royal family would bring in a shipload of Indian or Pakistani workers, telling them lies about all the "money" they would make, and what a "beautiful place" the emirate was. Then they were slapped into irons and made to work until they died. If their governments or families asked what happened to them, the usual line was "the ship sank", or "they were murdered by terrorist insurgents". The Emirate leaders are still doing this shit today though it's a more advanced and subtle form of "guest worker"ism.
"Even the Saudis, who are really no better, made jokes about the Emirates. Sheikh Rashid bin Maktoum got his "job" the same way his father and grandfather did: the Maktoums were installed by the British in the 1830s. The UAE were a standing joke and remained a set of miserable vassal states of British Petroleum until the 1990s. Oil wasn't even discovered there until the 1960s. The 1971 UAE "independence decree" was not worth the paper it was printed on. The various petty sheiks had been squabbling over territory for centuries and that continued under the UAE. It's SHIT land too--90% utterly worthless desert.
"Nothing really changed in Dubai until Rashid took over in 1959 and slowly forced some modernization. He was the first "wise ruler" they'd ever had. Rashid built a proper airport and the first actual paved highway in and out of the emirates. (Before that, if you wanted to go there, it was either by boat or on a seaplane.) His sons Muhammad bin Rashid and bin Maktoum took over in 1990 and cranked it up. Muhammad, who is still the sheikh AND the president of the UAE today, told BP to fuck off (or bribed them?) and went on a demented construction spree. He took on loads of foreign debt to build all that crap--AND brought in millions of "they-can't-leave guest workers" to build it and run it. A masterpiece of mismanagement and idiocy. Muhammad is a total sleaze. He LIKES the trust-fund babies and "influencers". And he STILL has not built a proper sewer system.
"I suspect when he dies the whole thing will collapse. Then the gulf will swallow it.
"Have told people about this and they refuse to believe me. You can't read about the true history in Wikipedia because the sheikhs are paying people to edit it. People like this."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:MoHasanie
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:AreJay
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alexandermcnabb
(Also don't ask them about the ongoing rumor that Muhammad had his brother murdered in a Melbourne hotel in 2006, and it was not a "heart attack". Won't see THAT on Wikipedia. Plus any attempt to add the "poop trucks" is removed for "lack of reliable references".)

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