How to "dox" Wikipedia insiders/fanatics

Editors, Admins and Bureaucrats blecch!
User avatar
ericbarbour
Sucks Admin
Posts: 4547
Joined: Sat Feb 25, 2017 1:56 am
Location: The ass-tral plane
Has thanked: 1099 times
Been thanked: 1797 times

Re: How to "dox" Wikipedia insiders/fanatics

Post by ericbarbour » Fri Jul 23, 2021 4:07 am

THIRD:

Is another seemingly-obvious trick that often works well. Because Wiki-Addicts are usually not especially clever.

Look at their earliest listed edits, and look at their earliest talkpage versions. Quite a few of them betrayed their interests by grinding certain content, and revealing personal details. Many started out writing articles about the schools they attended, their professional speciality, etc. The only reason some admins and longtime fanatics have never been outed is partly because they had edited WP before under other IDs. And realized how to hide their personal history. Most of the recent vandalism patrollers started out doing nothing but patrolling and posting threats on talkpages, little/no content work. Since they usually showed their experience by setting up a patrolling bot like Huggle or ClueBot or whatever (there's a LOT of bots available), patrollers often look like literal machines and are difficult to figure out today.

Good example of the early-edit trick I mentioned earlier: the now maybe-retired Boing! said Zebedee. If you look at an early talkpage post from September 2007, you find that his original username was "Oscroft". He was writing about Thailand at the time. Google "Oscroft" and "Zebedee" and you find a Motley Fool article about oil exploration, featuring a well called Zebedee. It's also the name of a closet organizing product popular in the UK. The article's author: Alan Oscroft of Liverpool.

Who also has a Flickr. Where we see he hates David Cameron (typical of UK Wikipedians), has been to Myanmar and Thailand and Sri Lanka, and likes to post photos of his damned ugly feet. A smart guy who didn't want to be "doxed" would have deleted that crap. Guess he doesn't care.

User avatar
ericbarbour
Sucks Admin
Posts: 4547
Joined: Sat Feb 25, 2017 1:56 am
Location: The ass-tral plane
Has thanked: 1099 times
Been thanked: 1797 times

Re: How to "dox" Wikipedia insiders/fanatics

Post by ericbarbour » Mon Aug 09, 2021 2:32 am

FOURTH:

Virtually every en-WP WikiAddict will create accounts on other WMF wiki. Whether they need them or not, whether they participate or not (and even if they can't understand the language on that project). Almost certainly they will have an account on Commons.

Examine the nerd's early contributions on Commons. Some of them posted images under their real names, or left other personal details that could be used to track down their real identities.

Example:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.p ... d=88030184

(This does not work with certain hardcore Commons freaks like Russavia, Stefan2, Saibo and Niabot. They usually self-destruct after pushing their "NOTCENSORED" crap too far. Quite a few of the worst ones left after the Beta M debacle. And Jimbo's attempt to remove certain pederastic images from Commons led to his "founder's flag" being removed. Yet Commons continues to be even crazier than the main English WP.)

Yes, the en-WP "Bad Images List" is still there. And so are the images. Why?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki:Bad_image_list

User avatar
Cla68
Sucks
Posts: 71
Joined: Mon Dec 28, 2020 7:18 pm
Has thanked: 101 times
Been thanked: 90 times

Re: How to "dox" Wikipedia insiders/fanatics

Post by Cla68 » Mon Aug 09, 2021 2:56 pm

Great stuff. Please keep it going.

User avatar
ericbarbour
Sucks Admin
Posts: 4547
Joined: Sat Feb 25, 2017 1:56 am
Location: The ass-tral plane
Has thanked: 1099 times
Been thanked: 1797 times

Re: How to "dox" Wikipedia insiders/fanatics

Post by ericbarbour » Tue Aug 24, 2021 5:06 am

FIFTH:

You would be surprised by some of the things you can find on archive.org.

Admittedly this approach requires that you have a URL to search for. Sometimes Wiki-Boogers will post links to things that are later deleted (sometimes by their own connivance, see Wizardman above). But if you have an old weblink, searching for it on Wayback Machine can occasionally reveal personal information about people who do not want to be revealed. Many of them owned Geocities, Tripod, or other personal sites, blogs, or other web properties which they later deleted to hide their identities. Wayback often has captures of these sites.

I can't count the number of times the Wayback helped me in figuring out what Wikipedians were up to before they showed up on Jimbo's Junk Drawer. It found stuff like this:
In 2000 he was prosecuted for breaking into ISP servers: "Brian Michael Jacobs, 23, of Mobile was arraigned by U.S. Magistrate Bert W. Milling Jr. last Wednesday on charges that on May 16, 1999, he "knowingly transmitted code and commands to the computer of an Internet Service Provider (ISP)" which resulted in more than $5,000 in damage. The combined charges carry up to five years in federal prison and $250,000 in fines. In the computer world, Jacobs assumed the code name Blaxthos, court documents state."
I should add a note. In 2007 Brion Vibber managed to have "nofollow" tags embedded in various en-WP pages by default. Before that it was wide open for scraping by search engines, bots, and archive.org. It is sometimes alleged he did this at Jimbo's direction, in order to cover up links between the nonprofit Wikipedia and the very-for-profit Wikia. For a few years there were no archives of WP mainspace being captured, anywhere. Especially not on Wikimedia servers--this was the period when people like SlimVirgin and David Gerard were routinely using oversight to perform cover-ups.

But in recent years I've noticed that nearly all WP mainspace and administrative pages are being captured by archive.org again. Since the Archive's founder and fearless leader Brewster Kahle is a big fan of Wikipedia and a regular donor to the WMF, the fact that these nofollow tags are no longer being published/used makes one wonder if Kahle was behind the change. They're even capturing AN/I routinely.

Let me quote Kelly Martin from WPO, 2015:
"Wikimedia Engineering is a laughingstock. Especially given the budget and degree of loose cash that they have. Even today they tend to run with far less redundancy than would be considered acceptable in a reputable organization."

User avatar
ericbarbour
Sucks Admin
Posts: 4547
Joined: Sat Feb 25, 2017 1:56 am
Location: The ass-tral plane
Has thanked: 1099 times
Been thanked: 1797 times

Re: How to "dox" Wikipedia insiders/fanatics

Post by ericbarbour » Wed Sep 22, 2021 11:46 pm

SIXTH:

Got a very sociable Wikipedian, especially one with a long career? Look thru the massive archives of the Meetup pages. That's where I found photos of Brad "The Cunctator" Johnson and numerous other early admins.

I think the oldest is the first London meetup, June 2004. The "first time Jimbo ever met more than one WIkipedian at a time" blah blah. The attendees are almost the who's-who of the later founders of Wikimedia UK. Worst picnic evar.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Meetup/London_1

For non-English WP meetups there is a Meta page.

User avatar
hyatt
Sucks
Posts: 41
Joined: Mon Feb 19, 2018 12:04 am
Been thanked: 25 times

Re: How to "dox" Wikipedia insiders/fanatics

Post by hyatt » Fri Jun 17, 2022 7:31 pm

usually-secretive-as-hell Wikipedia insiders
They hired a consultant for that: Former Director of the US CIA National Clandestine Service Michael Sulick named Senior Partner at Threat Pattern

He was working for...
Trevor Neilson, President of G2 Investment Group, Co-Founder of Threat Pattern.
Let's look at his profile as a Wikimedia Foundation board member
He formed DATA (Debt, AIDS, Trade, Africa) with Bill Gates, Bono and George Soros

He served in the Clinton White House, for the Office of Scheduling and Advance and the White House Travel Office. He then became the Director of Public Affairs and Director of Special Projects at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation...
Wasn't there a scandal in the Clinton White House Travel Office?
The firings provoked a storm of outrage in Washington, especially when subsequent disclosures indicated that the White House tried to justify its action by framing the employees on charges of em-bezzlement and mismanagement....
The Clintons, especially Hillary Rodham Clinton, wanted the travel office vacated for the oldest of political reasons: pork and patronage. "We need these people out. We need our people in," the first lady reportedly told Watkins. A Chicago alderman couldn't have said it more succinctly.

User avatar
ericbarbour
Sucks Admin
Posts: 4547
Joined: Sat Feb 25, 2017 1:56 am
Location: The ass-tral plane
Has thanked: 1099 times
Been thanked: 1797 times

Re: How to "dox" Wikipedia insiders/fanatics

Post by ericbarbour » Fri Jun 17, 2022 9:45 pm

hyatt wrote:
Fri Jun 17, 2022 7:31 pm
Trevor Neilson, President of G2 Investment Group, Co-Founder of Threat Pattern.
Let's look at his profile as a Wikimedia Foundation board member
You should also note that the "Advisory Board" disappeared "officially"(?) in 2017 after the WMF failed to renew the Advistory Board's operating license in 2015. All mention of the old Advisory Board then vanished from WMF websites, apart from the very old Meta pages. Except for this, which was never updated after that:
The following people were appointed as Advisory Board members for the period June 16, 2017 to June 30, 2018:

*Ting Chen
*Ward Cunningham (Developer of the first wiki)
*Florence Devouard (Former Chair, Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees; Consultant in Collaborative Media)
*Melissa Hagemann (Open access and open education advocate, Open Society Institute/Soros foundations)
*Mimi Ito
*Teemu Leinonen (Professor, Media Lab, Aalto University)
*Wayne Mackintosh (Director, Open Education Resource Foundation)
*Benjamin Mako Hill (Author, free software advocate)
*Nhlanhla Mbaso
*Trevor Neilson
*Craig Newmark (Founder, Craigslist.org)
*Barry Newstead
*Clay Shirky (Associate Teacher, Interactive Telecommunications Program, NYU)
*Kat Walsh
*Jessamyn West
*Ethan Zuckerman (Director, Center for Civic Media at the MIT Media Lab; founder, Global Voices Online)
Not a peep out of them since. Does the Board still exist, or not? And no one has EVER raised the question of what Neilson, a former Clintonite with intelligence-community ties, is doing on the Advisory Board. Wikimedia is a land of suck-uppery to some bad people.

You gotta look at an old Wikipediocracy thread to find out more....

Or try scraping thru the Board of Trustees noticeboard archives. I did, and as far as I can tell, it ceased to exist "officially" in 2016.

Also in 2016, an "Endowment Advisory Board" was created, separately (?), to assist with managing the WMF's gigantic and growing endowment funds. Right below the bios of the board members is a timeline showing how the fund exploded in size since 2014. It continues to be managed by the Tides Foundation. Wikimedia is so deeply embedded in the Bay Area techie scene, I doubt they could be extracted without major financial damage.

User avatar
hyatt
Sucks
Posts: 41
Joined: Mon Feb 19, 2018 12:04 am
Been thanked: 25 times

Re: How to "dox" Wikipedia insiders/fanatics

Post by hyatt » Sat Jun 18, 2022 2:40 am

Also in 2016, an "Endowment Advisory Board" was created
The Endowment Advisory Board includes:
Peter Baldwin

Peter Baldwin was appointed on 9 September 2016

Co-founded with his wife, Lisbet Rausing, Arcadia to focus on preserving cultural heritage, the environment, and supporting open access resources.
And let's look up Arcadia...
Nick Ferguson CBE
That's a Commander of the Order of the British Empire...
Don Randel
President of the Mellon Foundation and board member of Carnegie Corporation, which has two people on the board of Qatar Foundation International
Professor Dame Alison Richard DBE
That's a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire...
Lord Rothschild OM GBE
Not much more needs to be said.

User avatar
notalawyerxyz
Sucks Noob
Posts: 11
Joined: Sat Jul 30, 2022 2:45 pm
Been thanked: 11 times

Re: How to "dox" Wikipedia insiders/fanatics

Post by notalawyerxyz » Fri Aug 05, 2022 3:25 pm

Since the arbitration committee won't get back to me, I thought I might help the doxing board out.

1. In the United States, and likely elsewhere, all real estate transactions are stored in the county registrar of deeds. So the owner is recorded in their official books, and the property they purchase/sold/whater is either identified by either a specific address, or a lot number on a tax map. If the latter, tax maps can be pulled up through the municipal tax assessors office. Many times these records are free online. A word of caution, it is possible there are multiple people of the same name living in the same municipality.

2. If a person has ever been dragged to court as a party, it is [likely] recorded on a court docket. Again these dockets are online, sometimes access to the dockets and the full pleadings are free, and sometimes the online docketing system is state wide or county wide. Again, A word of caution, it is possible there are multiple people of the same name, even the same approximate age, living in the same municipality.

3. There are free genealogy services online, which allows users to inspect copies of the the original documents, for free. Among these are https://www.familysearch.org/en/ . A word of caution, it is usually common for people new at genealogical research to make mistakes, as they are easy to make. Don't trust sites like geni or wikitree; They might provide guidance, but you have to establish your own proofs by original documentation on sites like family search [or ancestry-the latter of which isn't free].

4. Quite a few of the previously doxxed wikipedias have made political donations. Many countries and states publish who donates what. In the US, https://www.opensecrets.org/ is a useful tool that published federal and state donations. The FEC's webpage, for federal elections, is https://www.fec.gov/data/receipts/indiv ... ributions/ . For Canada, https://www.elections.ca/wpapps/WPF/EN/ ... turntype=1 . The US publishes more details such as the donator's profession, whereas in canada it is still easy to get people mixed up.

4 example https://www.fec.gov/data/receipts/indiv ... iam+lesuer . In the case of previously doxxed, evergreenfir, he is a berniebro, but his potential grandfather donated to republicans. One is a gender studies loser propagandist, the other... https://honorsandawards.iu.edu/awards/honoree/2463.html made something of himself.

5. For those who have your own webservers, you might be able to trick an admin to loading a specific image on their computer that generally the rest of the public will not known about. Some images can be loaded by accessing say a cgi or php script that ultimately produces the image and mime type to their client, but also scripted to save the access information into a special log file. Once you have their ip address, use an online geolocator tool. Unless they are using a proxy/vpn, or tor, this should find their general location. Sometimes the old traceroute an reveal a lot of information too, including a street name-but don't count on it.

6. Many people, and admins are no exception, have a common username used all over the place. If it is worth your time, see what their interest are, then use social engineering and try to befriend them in online conversation and see if they start to reveal personal information.

6a. use a google site search, to see what all they are saying on a site. A site search will include in the search bar something like [site:cnn.com], only without the brackets.

7. Every once in a while, wikipedia host social events that no one really cares about-except for admins and employees. With these events there is usually some type of hashtag associated with it. Some events might be specific to a certain time by country, so it might be possible to refine a search by county to a certain start and end date.

7a. If in the United states, film all you can about the attendees to these events from the public sidewalks or other non-restricted public land. film license plates, film name badges, etc, etc. If you can infiltrate these groups by a ticket, and pretend to be one of them, even better. hmm, are these events on youtube? I can think of some other things by creating public wifi, but won't finish this thought.

8. Cellphone Geolocation data is sold, as we have learned through the movie 2000 miles. I have no idea of the cost. It might be possible for people with advanced database skills with the data to collect unique cellphone ids at and during their wiki events by constructing a geofence. Then also using geolocation data for each positive, maybe a week before or a week after, see where else these ids are showing up. It might reveal their homes [strike]or workplaces[/strike].

9. I am not an attorney and I am not giving legal advice, and this one is bound to be expensive. But It might be possible to sue a particular admin in their individual capacity in a jon doe [defendant] lawsuit, for acts done in bad faith. Relief might be through tort as defined by statutes, or through injunction. I am not sure how one would establish jurisdiction, if the jon doe doesn't pass the international shoe test, or the state the suit is filed in doesn't otherwise have sufficient long arm statutes. questions for $lawyers$. If you can get the admin to visit your special image mentioned in #5, it might be possible to send the subpoena right to their internet host provider and thus never put wikipedia on notice.

10. Some admins try to edit pages in their own area. Go to google maps, and keep adding a point on the map that they edit. Alternatively, record the longitude and latitude and try to get the averages. It will not be an exact,and it could be towns off, and the mean could be skewed based upon economic development or other factors. hmm, did they make political donations where we might be able to use example #4 in reverse to get a list of potential wiki admins in the area?

11. If they upload images anywhere, although it is likely wikimedia strips the meta data, by cell phone, try to see if you can access the metadata. Cellphones are known to record the users longitude and latitude of where the picture was taken. Even if wikimedia scraps this data, if they use the username in other places on the web and make uploads in these other sites, then the meta data might be retained.

12. It is unlikely wikipedia is the only place they are uploading images. Whether it is an image they uploaded, or even an image on their user page, do a reverse image search, such as tineye.com . Sure plenty of other places and people are likely using the image too, but it is possible the image could be on the admins own facebook, instagram, personal website [check whois if they have one], etc, etc.

13. Some admins have edits in other language version of wikipedia. Try to see if they are more open in their native tongue, especially those who just have scripts to correct dead links or do petty nbsp changes on the english site.

So for the wikipedia Admins who really really really hate what I done, go blame "tobefree" for his baseless block, and for 331dot, jpgordon, and yamla for their sloppiness. And their failure to articulate how I allegedly violated the rules.
Just be glad I don't feel like getting litigious for go full otaku mode in outing all of you that i can.

User avatar
ericbarbour
Sucks Admin
Posts: 4547
Joined: Sat Feb 25, 2017 1:56 am
Location: The ass-tral plane
Has thanked: 1099 times
Been thanked: 1797 times

Re: How to "dox" Wikipedia insiders/fanatics

Post by ericbarbour » Fri Aug 05, 2022 7:32 pm

Thanks for posting this, it's good general information. Although I might add a couple of notes.
Currently a broken link--need to try it again later.
7a. If in the United states, film all you can about the attendees to these events from the public sidewalks or other non-restricted public land. film license plates, film name badges, etc, etc. If you can infiltrate these groups by a ticket, and pretend to be one of them, even better. hmm, are these events on youtube?
More than 10 years ago, a few unofficial WP meetup videos were posted to YouTube. Usually they were short and not good quality anyway. Today all of them have vanished that I can see--replaced by "official Wikimedia video presentations", and snivelling propagandistic garbage posted by third parties. Like Wikipedia itself, YT contains useful and reliable information--good luck finding it. (This plays directly into Google's extremely friendly relations with the WMF. It would not surprise me if YT is removing Wikipedia criticism videos "on orders from top management".)
8. Cellphone Geolocation data is sold, as we have learned through the movie 2000 miles. I have no idea of the cost.
It is usually quite expensive, AND you have the added charming benefit of buying information from hackers who may be selling you complete garbage. Scams are quite commonplace here. If you are compelled to try it, get the TOR Browser and figure out which "black sites" are being used to sell stolen databases. It changes constantly, because the operators of black sites are constantly being busted for illegal activity. They generally won't talk to a random like you unless you prove you're not a "fed".
9. I am not an attorney and I am not giving legal advice, and this one is bound to be expensive. But It might be possible to sue a particular admin in their individual capacity in a jon doe [defendant] lawsuit, for acts done in bad faith.
That will be expensive indeed, and the few cases have generally resulted in failure. The WMF and its minions will just scream "WRONG VENUE" or "SECTION 230" and get it quashed.

Post Reply