So, Sashi's unblock appeal thread has got the good folks of Wikipediocracy discussing the issue of hidden motivations on the part of Wikipedia editors. Specifically, whether long time Sashi nemesis, Wikipedia Administrator Neutrality, could be a paid operative of the Democrats.
Pudeo pointed out the coincidence that Neutrality was the guy who put serious work into the Timothy Kaine bio before he was formally announced as HRC's running mate, which got media attention for exactly that perception of coincidence. When forum member iii pointed out this was more likely simply the normal obsessive Wikipedian behaviour in acting on the hints being dropped in the media that he was one of the frontrunners, Pudeo countered with the fact the HRC campaign blew $1 million in social media.
This was perceived as a diversionary tactic which did not impress iii, and a factoid which did not it impress Wikipeidocracy Administrator Jake, who believes the amount is small fry compared to the budget deployed by the Russians to get the orange one elected. It continued with a debate over the specifics of the effort put in by Nuetrality, and how it compares to what was done for Pence, and the culture of hysteria that surrounds the spectre of paid editting, and how this is somehow being used by the right to undermine Wikipedia.
Overall, Jake and iii are casting themselves as people who would be tolerant of Pudeo and Sashi if they were merely alleging the ironically named Neutrality is a Democrat to his core, and this was just an example of how Wikipedia is biased towards Democrats. In other words, he is not a paid operative, there is no conspiracy.
iii's opprobrium of Pudeo however is undercut by a couple of more important things that we need to factor in. He himself is a master manipulator of Wikipedia, an agent of the Guerrilla Skeptics movement, a cult within a cult. So while he can talk a good game regarding what looks more likely and what is a waste of people's time, alleging conspiracy versus obsession, it's also in his direct interest to argue that whenever you see what looks like underhand dealings in Wikipedia, you should assume it is merely the misguided efforts of Wikipedia addicts working alone, toward a common cause. That is, after all, how the Guerrilla Skeptics would describe themselves, albeit without "misguided".
Jake's counter-argument against Pudeo is also seriously undercut in many ways. He argues that it is 90% likely that Neutrality is merely manipulating Wikipedia off his own back as a trusted user, possibly by receiving text from persons unonown, and inserting it into Wikipedia, on the basis his status as an Administrator makes it more likely to stick. Well, for a start, how is that not conspiracy? It is corruption. And how is it any more believable than the obsessive explanation? Why would Neutrality risk his Administrator status this way, when it really is equally likely these edits are ones he has decided need doing all by himself?
And on what basis do we assume his status as an Administrator makes it more likely biased edits stick? Given the bias of the edits matched the overall bias of Wikipedia, I'd say it was irrelevant. If he has not used his Administrator powers to ensure it sticks, he will not be treated as an abusive Administrator in any theoretical challenge to the content by opponents (presumably right wingers in their minds, but arguably simply people looking out for neutrality, small N), even if they want it to be considered. This is Wikipedia 101, policy and common cultural practice, which is ironic, as Jake asks Pudeo and others to put more of their Wikipedia expertise into their observations, lest the right wingers be able to easily discredit them.
Jake is also undercut by the pretty obvious fact Wikipediocracy itself is riven by political bias. People who have the wrong political views are not given the same leeway as those who are on the side of freedom and democracy, regardless of whether this manifests in support of the orange one or not. They are mobbed and denigrated in ways not too dissimilar to what happens on Wikipedia, since they cannot conceive of a world where "Trump is the worst US President in history" is not objective fact. Ask Pudeo if he sees any real difference in treatment. For merely suggesting Neutrality could have been paid, he is cast as a conspiracy nut who is in fact empowering the Democrats by making their website look like a haven for lunatics.
Both Jake and iii's case is also undercut by their claim there is reason to doubt what Neutrality did is paid editing. Firstly, because what he did is obvious, and a paid operative would not be obvious in their intent. Really? In all the exposes of paid editing, has it really been the case that this usually involved a high degree of skill or deception? Or is it more the case that Wikipedia is so incapable of spotting it, particularly in a sea of biased editing by volunteers, that most paid editors have made little effort to hide it, even if they had the tradecraft to do so.
Neutrality would have the tradecraft to properly hide the fact he is being paid. Then again, he has all the knowledge and experience to know that takes the sort of time and effort he really doesn't need to expend. He knows all he has to do is not abuse his Administrator rights and not be stupendously biased in his edits, and he would likely easily meet any contract terms he was set by persons unknown. And even that would likely be unnecessarily cautious, given what serious critics have seen people get away with.
They kept mentioning Cirt, as if this is proof of anything. It is proof you can be massively biased, and nobody will spot it, as long as you are biased in the right direction. It was so remarkable how he lasted that long as an obvious sock, it is inconceivable some level of corruption wasn't involved, even if it just took the form of people whose job it is to investigate, choosing to give them more benefit of the doubt because their bias was in the correct direction. It was likely much worse, right up to the very worst kinds of betrayal of trust, as we know from previous scandals. Regardless, Cirt-Sagecandor was #Resistance all the way.
An obvious thing neither Jake or iii seem to want to consider, is that you can be an enthusiastic Democrat who wants to manipulate Wikipedia, and someone who gets paid to do so as well. Republicans, not even anti-Trump ones, certainly wouldn't take that gig. And you would be surprised if people with no strong feelings either way chose the hotly contested topic area of politics in which to be a paid editor. There are easier ways to make your money as a paid editor on Wikipedia.
Ultimately, the issue here is nobody can know for sure what motivates a Wikipedian, absent hard proof or a confession, which is almost always non-existent.
At the end of the day, the smart person, someone with great knowledge of Wikipedia, readily assumes everyone who doesn't meet the basic test for neutrality (can you tell what they think of an issue just from the totality of their article edits?) is potentially a paid operative of some group or organisation that would rather Wikipedia didn't have a theoretical commitment to neutrality. Wikipedia's systems of governance, and the lack of a threat posed by the so called critics at Wikipediocracy, mean the world is a long way from making it necessary for any paid operative to have to do the things you need to do to pass this basic test.
For any given suspect, you of course don't discount the possibility that they are not being paid, that they're just the common or garden variety of everyday biased Wikipedia obsessive. But there is little point in ruling it out merely on that basis, unless you don't want to be seen as a serious Wikipedia critic. They can't prove they aren't a paid operative, obviously, but they can do what is necessary to show they are an unbiased Wikipedia editor. When the allegation is you are corrupt, why would they not do that?
In truth, when cast against what it claims to be, the group of people who write Wikipedia is a very small community. It only has three of four thousand editors making more than one hundred edits per month, which is as any serious critic would tell you, is the bare minimum amount of effort you'd need to put in to gain the social status to be able to do anything, and is also the bare minimum effort required if you have even a relatively small stable of articles you are monitoring on your watchlist, whether as a paid operative or theoretical good Wikipedia editor.
Bear in mind, to support their case that there is no there there, Jake and iii dismissed Neutrality's effort of 75 edits over two days to a single Wikipedia article, apparently just because he felt like it, as not remotely unusual. Well, not unusual, no, but it shows how few people are putting in that level of commitment to Wikipedia to achieve whatever it is they want to achieve.
Those few thousands will have quite a few Star Trek nerds who you can obviously discount as not being paid operatives. You can remove others on grounds of mental illness, or bad cases of Wikipedia zeolotry (the True Believers of True Believers), the Manual of Style obsessives, the vandal hunters, the grammar police, and indeed all the paid editors who are not editing political articles. Lastly, you need to correct for the fact that number of accounts <> number of people editing.
There will be fewer actual humans, because of sock-puppetry, of which the recent Cirt-Sagecandor long overdue bust was but one example of thousands over Wikipedia's seventeen year history. Cirt was the latest in a line of cases that show that even those who get caught in the long run, can achieve a hell of a lot toward their cause or their contract terms, especially as nobody else in the cult ever seems to go back to undo or even review their edits, certainly not as a systematic programme of corrective action. They do more to correct historical cases of serial copyright abuse, and that is not much.
Once you've done all that maths, you are left with a pretty small group of editors (people) who are putting serious hours into Wikipedia just to make obviously biased edits to political articles. We know this to be true, because we serious critics see the same few names crop up in every US politics dispute, so much so we can name them off by heart.
Once you realise that, are we really going to look like conspiracy nuts to assume, especially given how easy it is to get away with, what the stakes are, and how much money is involved, that it isn't at least even money that any given editor doing that, is doing so because they are paid to, rather than just because they want to?
If so, count me in. I shall wear that tin foil hat with pride. The Guerilla Skeptics did the maths, they know its worth the time and effort to manipulate Wikipedia on a large and coordinated scale, with zero transparency of who is doing what and why, and therefore also a high likelihood of money changing hands to achieve it, or at least fairly compensate those who would otherwise be doing it for free if they could afford to.
There is relevance here of the Philip Cross affair. He was undoubtedly addicted to making biased edits to Wikipedia, on a scale it absolutely has to have impacted his ability to work. And yet he still wasn't banned merely for his edits, he was banned because he tried to beef with his targets over Twitter, an entirely different offence in the eyes of the wikilaw. Even then, he was not completely banned, only topic banned, appealable in six months. The controversy itself unfolded over several months, just to get there. A perfect example of what you can get away with on Wikipedia, how blatantly biased you can be, before the cult reacts, and how ineffective that reaction is.
Plenty of public figures made several allegations about Cross, broadly removing any possibility that he was merely acting on his own, a mere self-motivated editor of the wiki. What is the one reason he did not act on these slurs? He is anonymous, so who really cares if an anonymous account is accused? It carries no real world reputation to defend, no status that can be damaged in financially calculable ways (except, ironically, the interruption of ill-gotten gains if he is a paid editor).
To be anonymous is the right of every Wikipedia editor, a right that is fiercely protected by the cult. If you can't show he made a libellous or otherwise criminal edit, they're not giving him up to anyone, least of all one of the most respected criminal justice systems in the world, a jurisdiction where you face serious financial penalties for abusing a supposedly neutral publishing platform to advance a biased agenda. It's called press regulation and/or the legal obligation of a public utility, a concept alien to Wikipedians, who would have you believe Wikipedia is both merely a private website whose means of content management is none of your business, and a public utility open to all.
But what is the one thing that makes paid editing of Wikipedia so attractive? Anonymity. Someone being paid to edit Wikipedia, but wants to keep that information on the down lo so as to blend in with everyone else, of course would not choose to identify themselves, they're going to use a pseudonymous account name and details, which is what "Phlip Cross, London, UK" is. The only people who give their identifying details on Wikipedia, are those with a genuine belief they pass the neutrality test. And it is their belief, not necessarily the objective truth, because undoubtedly many do not pass the test but identify anyway, this is merely a symptom of how arrogant and shameless the True Believers of Wikipedia can be.
All you have in this world of anonymity, is a person's word (worthless) and their record. You can look at my record of Wikipedia criticism here. If you review it and still think I am a paid operative of Vladimir Putin, sent to destabilise and embarrass Wikipedia as part of his effort to undermine democracy and erode our freedoms, then I guess I can't change your mind. Unsurprisingly, and with the consent of Jake, allegations of that nature have been made against me by members of Wikipediocracy. So we must assume it formed a large part of the reason they banned me.
But what is more likely? They malign me because I am an agent of Putin, or because I speak the truth? Unlike the case of people abusing Wikipedia, there are good reasons to think it is the latter and not the former in my case. Of course I don't ask you to merely believe me, I just ask that you review my efforts and make a conclusion of what I most likely believe in. Truth, justice and a Wikipedia that doesn't harm either, or Soviet Union 2.0. By any objective measure, I pass this test, even if I say so myself. Many, if not most of the highly active editors in Wikipedia's US politics articles do not.
The question remains then, do I pass this test because that is what an agent of Putin would have to do to achieve what I need to achieve, namely the destruction of Wikipedia? Perhaps. But then again, if you agree that the only reason I want Wikipedia destroyed is because it is the right thing to do in the interests of truth and justice, who cares who is paying me?
I got five kids to feed man.
This has been a message of the Resistance. If you are reading it, you are a part of the Resistance.......
