Daniel Brandt helping the Wikipedians Do No Harm

[CrowsNest]

If you can believe it, Daniel Brandt is back, engaging with the Wikipedians on his favourite topic, how Wikipedia supposedly protects living people from harm. Or more accurately, how he can avoid Wikipedia being a conduit in allowing the world to know anything about him via Google (since he successfully ensured there is no actual Wikipedia result when entering his name directly).

Firstly, he has spotted a flaw in how they make sure Google doesn't scrape the contents of talk pages, namely by ensuring the page includes the code "__NOINDEX__" if deemed appropriate. The bug occurs when talk pages are archived, which apparently drops the code, thereby allowing Google to scrape what it contains. As we know, once that happens, it's out there, forever.

A more effective method might have been to have developed a culture, technology framework and safeguarding system by now where they can be reasonably sure that libel or other harmful content doesn't even make it onto their servers, let alone stick around long enough to be dumped into an internal archive page. Even the busiest of talk pages don't get archived for days (and worryingly those are probably the more likely places where harmful content can be seen, since on Wikipedia talk pages, controversy equates to traffic), so they really have no excuse, other than the excuse they use to explain away all their faults - it's a big website with many pages that anyone can edit, and they're all just volunteers.

Pending the US adopting some effective legislative means to ensure people have a right to be forgotten, Brandt is instead engaging with the Wikipediots through their bug reporting system, as a first attempt to get it fixed.

https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T194561

He also has higher aspirations, namely to modify Wikipedia's Biographies of Living Person's policy to define content as eligible for immediate removal if the supporting source is dead or is only available via an internet archive. He's suggesting this on the basis that Wikipedia's use of automated technology to rescue all dead links with internet archive urls where they exist, doesn't fully take into account the reasons why a source might become dead (such as due to a retraction). And because the internet archive services are themselves are often simply automatically generated and often never removed even in cases like a retraction, any automated technology used to add their links to Wikipedia, will simply end up perpetuating information that a victim might have previously successfully got taken down in the original source.

Again, the question has to be asked, surely a better system would be to ensure any and all sources are proactively archived by Wikipedia at the point of insertion (which could in turn be integrated with a reliable source whitelist feature), and if the contents of the source changes against their internal copy (or hash, given it doesn't need to be human readable), as determined by a periodic automated review, their system should ensure the source is removed unless or until it can be ascertained the change was for non-harmful reasons, which typically would be the source being updated or moved. Whatever the reason, under their own model, it is unlikely summoning a human eye to it, would be a waste of their time, and in a small number of cases, would actually ensure it is prevented.

Given what is obvious about the Wikipedia cult, namely for reasons of PR, they will do anything to meet their aspiration of Do No Harm, as long as it doesn't interfere with the basic business model. Which, of course, necessarily makes it easy to do harm, and hard to prevent it. Doing anything remotely responsible, undercuts the very thing that made them a success, namely not having the overheads of a traditional encyclopedia, or indeed any kind of media company which doesn't hide behind Section 230. Which cost money. Lots of money.

As such, Daniel may well get the archiving bug fixed for free by the volunteer code monkeys, if it really is as easy as it sounds to fix, but not the BLP change he wants. Or anything remotely like it. He seems to think there is a legal imperative for the WMF to intervene here and force such a change, but I would argue, for all the usual reasons, they'll be more than happy to stand by the position that they are only obliged to act in individual cases which are brought to their attention, and have no jurisdiction over how Wikipedia uses internet archive services as a matter of policy, not even ones they have arguably contributed to the problem as a liable publisher, through initiatives such as this....

https://blog.wikimedia.org/2016/10/26/i ... ken-links/

[ericbarbour]

Firstly, he has spotted a flaw in how they make sure Google doesn't scrape the contents of talk pages, namely by ensuring the page includes the code "__NOINDEX__" if deemed appropriate. The bug occurs when talk pages are archived, which apparently drops the code, thereby allowing Google to scrape what it contains. As we know, once that happens, it's out there, forever.

Old history. The WMF began to implement NOINDEX back in 2006, but only got serious after Larry Sanger tried it on Citizendium first. NOINDEX was enabled for things that were "embarrassing" at first, like BLPs for "important people", then for AFDs and SPIs and the infamous "spam blacklist", plus things that Arbcom and assholes like SlimVirgin and Jayjg wanted hidden. It became universal all over WMF projects in 2012, after this charming little discussion replete with the stench of Oliver Keyes:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia ... nt/NOINDEX

Pending the US adopting some effective legislative means to ensure people have a right to be forgotten, Brandt is instead engaging with the Wikipediots through their bug reporting system, as a first attempt to get it fixed.

https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T194561

He's tried this route before--"official channels". In the 2000s they simply jeered at him, but the place is run by a very different gang of fools today. Might work. Not betting on it.

Whups, one of the nerds closed it on Sunday as "this can easily solved by the archiveheader parameter of the bot’s template which should be change to the needed talk page header or (which is much more simple) to include the noindex tag into the corresponding talkarchive template where {{talkarchive}} is the default content of the archiveheader parameter which is placed on every new archive talk page." Bullshit. Exactly what I would expect them to feed Brandt.

He also has higher aspirations, namely to modify Wikipedia's Biographies of Living Person's policy to define content as eligible for immediate removal if the supporting source is dead or is only available via an internet archive. He's suggesting this on the basis that Wikipedia's use of automated technology to rescue all dead links with internet archive urls where they exist, doesn't fully take into account the reasons why a source might become dead (such as due to a retraction). And because the internet archive services are themselves are often simply automatically generated and often never removed even in cases like a retraction, any automated technology used to add their links to Wikipedia, will simply end up perpetuating information that a victim might have previously successfully got taken down in the original source.

Also tried that for years in the past. Until Section 230 is repealed or modified to remove the WMF's protection from abuses committed by its userbase, I don't expect much real change to happen. There has to be POLITICAL WILL to force such a large modification to their miserable little "policies" and I don't see any such will--not in their insider gang.

[Daniel Brandt]

Yes, they quickly closed the ticket, by pretending that a little fix is what's needed. Just stick the "noindex" tag in the header from now on, going forward! But what about going back and fixing all the Archive /wiki/Talk pages by creating a special bot to do this? Oh no, too hard; they've been breaking BLP policy ever since BLP started in 2006 and apparently the programmers like it that way.

This is getting ridiculous. My name is on numerous /wiki/Talk pages, and it's not only on the Talk pages attached to living persons. There are many /wiki/Talk pages where the subject of the article is not a living person, but rather a general category that may include persons of interest. In other words, even if they went by the letter of the BLP policy, and went backwards to fix all the old Archive pages by inserting a "noindex" tag for the Talk pages where the subject of the mainspace article is already flagged as a living person, and then waiting to see if Google drops the page the next time their crawler comes around, it wouldn't solve the problem. My name and lots of other living person's names would still be all over those Talk pages.

Why are ANY mainspace Talk pages in Google? You can learn a lot about someone by just scanning Google for /wiki/Talk pages for a name of a person. Furthermore, the typical Wikipediot can get away with anything on a Talk page because no one is watching!

[Daniel Brandt]

I should hasten to add that it's not me in that picture. Encyclopedia Dramatica couldn't find a picture of me, so they chose a picture of a sexual predator and stuck a tin-foil hat on it. Google comes along and looks for "/wiki/Talk" and "Daniel Brandt" like I requested in their search box, but the GoogleBrain wants a picture to top it off. It ends up with that bogus photo from ED because there's no photo of me on the web.

Now you know why the European Union has the GDPR; this sort of high-tech crap must stop sometime and somewhere.

By the way, wouldn't the /wiki/Talk search be somewhat useful for any researcher who started a new Hivemind page? Consider, for example, a search for Philip Cross.

A few hints on forums about how we doxed this or that editor using Google and /wiki/Talk might be the only way we will ever get the Foundation to take action.

[ericbarbour]

This is getting ridiculous. My name is on numerous /wiki/Talk pages, and it's not only on the Talk pages attached to living persons. There are many /wiki/Talk pages where the subject of the article is not a living person, but rather a general category that may include persons of interest. In other words, even if they went by the letter of the BLP policy, and went backwards to fix all the old Archive pages by inserting a "noindex" tag for the Talk pages where the subject of the mainspace article is already flagged as a living person, and then waiting to see if Google drops the page the next time their crawler comes around, it wouldn't solve the problem. My name and lots of other living person's names would still be all over those Talk pages.

Why are ANY mainspace Talk pages in Google? You can learn a lot about someone by just scanning Google for /wiki/Talk pages for a name of a person. Furthermore, the typical Wikipediot can get away with anything on a Talk page because no one is watching!

And all anyone would need to do (assuming they were not idiots, like certain journalists I could name!) is to go to Wikipedia and use the search function carefully. They did a good job of concealing their long attempts to shit on you, for unsophisticated users. But type "WP:AFD Daniel Brandt" into the searchbox. And the top hits from that include numerous AFDs, plus:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia ... ndt_merger
Which links to the FOURTEENTH AFD for the Brandt article. Which they "hid". Because their endless attempts to piss on Daniel Brandt were stupid and insane and they damn well knew it. After a year and a half of constantly creating, deleting and recreating the damn article, with as many personal attacks as they could manage, they gave up. Little fuckers.

[ericbarbour]

Here's a little pop quiz: anyone care to guess who created the first Brandt bio in 2005? Don't bother searching for it--all the evidence was later oversighted.

[Strelnikov]

I should hasten to add that it's not me in that picture. Encyclopedia Dramatica couldn't find a picture of me, so they chose a picture of a sexual predator and stuck a tin-foil hat on it. Google comes along and looks for "/wiki/Talk" and "Daniel Brandt" like I requested in their search box, but the GoogleBrain wants a picture to top it off. It ends up with that bogus photo from ED because there's no photo of me on the web.

That's a Zaiger move; when Eric Barbour wrote a piece on Encyclopaedia Dramatica on my blog in 2015, Zaiger showed up anonymously to spread damaging false claims about Mr. Barbour, then vanished. And now Zaiger has been driven from EDland entirely.

A few hints on forums about how we doxed this or that editor using Google and /wiki/Talk might be the only way we will ever get the Foundation to take action.

They deserve it; tarantino and a number of others who are deep in there need to be exposed. Wikipedia cannot go under without all the major anonymous patrollers/editors/moderators being named - the goal should be like British intelligence in WWII, where they knew who all the German agents were.

Thank you for joining this board.

[Daniel Brandt]

tarantino and I worked hard to dox Encyclopedia Dramatica hotshots, starting with Sherrod DeGrippo and her friends, and continuing through the Ryan Cleary era. Sherrod gave up on ED, whereupon Ryan grabbed thousands of articles from the Wayback Machine to restart it. Ryan was soon arrested in Britain in for DDoSing Britain's organized crime agency. There is also an outstanding federal grand jury indictment for him in the USA, but the USA didn't file for extradition.

Needless to say, Ryan stopped all ED activity around that time, and that's how Zaiger took over. We had half of the active ED participants, past and present, doxed by then. I was monitoring their chat channel around the clock. I have Ryan to thank for my continuing interest in CloudFlare. He set up ED by connecting through CloudFlare, at a time when CloudFlare was so new that no one had even heard of it.

A little known fact: tarantino is still the only one who has the password for http://josephevers.blogspot.com -- I helped him set it up and both of us did lots of ED doxing, but I never had the password. If I had something I thought should be in there, he always agreed with me.

I never had a clue who tarantino is -- he was all-Tor, all-the-time. His research abilities when it comes to doxing are outstanding. We were out of touch for about four years. We got in touch a month ago when I emailed him on a whim, and in his reply he said that he had unblocked me on Wikipediocracy. (In late 2013, Zoloft blocked me on Wikipediocracy, and it lasted a long time. I vaguely recall trying my old password about two years ago, and I was still blocked.)

tarantino and I together doxed Tarc. He found Tarc's real name initially, and later I found out where Tarc worked. When tarantino replied to my email last month and mentioned that he had unblocked me on Wikipediocracy, he added that he had checked with Tarc, and Tarc had no objection. I thought it was strange that he consulted Tarc about me, but I didn't pursue the matter.

[Strelnikov]

....A little known fact: tarantino is still the only one who has the password for http://josephevers.blogspot.com -- I helped him set it up and both of us did lots of ED doxing, but I never had the password. If I had something I thought should be in there, he always agreed with me.

I never had a clue who tarantino is -- he was all-Tor, all-the-time. His research abilities when it comes to doxing are outstanding. We were out of touch for about four years. We got in touch a month ago when I emailed him on a whim, and in his reply he said that he had unblocked me on Wikipediocracy. (In late 2013, Zoloft blocked me on Wikipediocracy, and it lasted a long time. I vaguely recall trying my old password about two years ago, and I was still blocked.)

tarantino and I together doxed Tarc. He found Tarc's real name initially, and later I found out where Tarc worked. When tarantino replied to my email last month and mentioned that he had unblocked me on Wikipediocracy, he added that he had checked with Tarc, and Tarc had no objection. I thought it was strange that he consulted Tarc about me, but I didn't pursue the matter.

I utterly agree that tarantino is an excellent investigator, however I think he's also involved with the WMF on some level. It doesn't help that he was either given information by Zoloft or he (easily) sussed it out and he doxxed me on Wikipediocracy, which lead (in the end) to me being the only person on the Global Ban list who never edited Wikipedia at all. All because James "I live for Taco Tuesdays" Alexander thought he had nailed a sock-puppeteer or potential online problem by presenting me with a ban letter, thanks to my cover identity not willing to play along. Thus my wish to see tarantino named.

[ericbarbour]

I utterly agree that tarantino is an excellent investigator, however I think he's also involved with the WMF on some level. It doesn't help that he was either given information by Zoloft or he (easily) sussed it out and he doxxed me on Wikipediocracy, which lead (in the end) to me being the only person on the Global Ban list who never edited Wikipedia at all. All because James "I live for Taco Tuesdays" Alexander thought he had nailed a sock-puppeteer or potential online problem by presenting me with a ban letter, thanks to my cover identity not willing to play along. Thus my wish to see tarantino named.

Agreed. Watch your step, Daniel: some weird shit is happening on Wikipediocracy. Tarantino has been behaving more like a Wikipedia admin sockpuppet than a researcher lately.