"These are not secret societies by any stretch of the imagination," comments Ehrenfels. "Nor are they an open society with secrets. They are an open society of members with secret identities. And once they realized their activities in Usenet were not doing enough damage to the reputations of individuals who make the mistake of sharing their unconventional wisdom or venting their complaints in a news group, they cleverly hijacked resources on the World Wide Web." And now it would appear the kook hunters have a new weapon in their arsenal of what they call loser attitude readjustment tools (or LART).

Gangs of stalkers based in Usenet exploited the dubious resource Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia that invites anyone and everyone to create and edit units of information to our organized body of knowledge. "It's unclear whether this encyclopedia is a front for stalking and anti-personnel propoganda, or whether it is simply being abused by Usenet-based gangs for the purpose of creating defamatory entries about individuals on their kook list. I was amused when I received an e-mail from a gang victim complaining about a "web site that dignified [Usenet news group] alt.usenet.kooks and slandering [him]." Sure enough, on the fourth page of results of a Google search on this person's name, you find the link to a Wikipedia page titled alt.usenet.kooks, and the fellow is identified by name (as a kook) in the text of the page describing the kook-hunting mission of this news group.

I examined the Funny Farm page featured in the External Links section of the article (actually, one of many, many Web-based catalogues of kooks who have been immortalized in everything from card decks to chess sets). The list of kooks on this page features many ordinary citizens who are labeled as deceased (see below).

Talk about your inability to let go. I'm going to assume these persons died of natural causes. But all joking aside, while the effigies presented in alt.usenet.kooks tend to treat kooks as frivolous failures -- anything from unemployed pedophiles to friend-less hamburger flippers -- the messages in the local news group from which the kook was referred to alt.usenet.kooks tend to be considerably more aggravated and threatening. The kook nomination / award is used as one of the devices to solicit aggression or pressure against the alleged kook.

At first, the defamed associate thought the site was malfunctioning when he noticed the "Edit This Page" link and discovered he could actually edit the page (and wipe it clean). He contacted Wikipedia officials under the assumption this online encyclopedia had been victimized by hackers. "I was able to replace real dates with false ones and completely obliterate some entries." But after reviewing the home page and the description of an "open source encyclopedia," he was shocked to discover that this is the whole point of Wikipedia.

From the dates certain policies were created in Wikipedia, it is clear officials have been aware for some time that Wikipedia is being used as an application for hate speech and propaganda. The Contact section comprises pages upon pages of policies and procedures for resolving disputes. "We're not talking about disagreements over the dinosaur extinction event or the planetary status of Pluto," comments cyberstalking expert Tim Johnsey. "We're talking about biographies of ordinary citizens authored by other ordinary citizens." You can try if you like to have your name expunged from this straw encyclopedia, but you'll have a hell of a time finding an arbitrator or authority. Each page in the Contacts section leads to pages with even greater numbers of links. "Some ideas are born in the shower. But Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales must have conceived this Help Section in a hall of mirrors." Research into public opinion on Wikipedia turned up a critical mass of respondents who converge on the belief the Help Section is designed to frustrate and confuse, and to make the defamed individual feel that his complaint is most unwelcome. "Wikipedia flounder Jimmy Wales is fighting a war of attrition with complainants. The policies and procedures for arbitration are a test of wills, and Wales is banking on the fact you won’t jump though all these hoops, especially if you can’t see the light at the end of the tunnel."

Wikipedia has always been beleaguered by critics pointing out the obvious: the adverse effect of vandalism on information quality. A vandal is one who willfully or maliciously defaces a Wikipedia entry by removing or falsifying its content. And Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales enjoys pointing out that an entry administrator can with a single click of a radial button restore the information to a previous draft. While this does not exactly inspire faith in anything I read in Wikipedia, I’m sure you’ll agree that vandalism is the least of Wikipedia’s problems, especially when you consider instances in which the source of the questionable content is the administrators themselves and the so-called “vandals” are individuals maliciously misrepresented by the Wikipedia record. Now how do you feel about Jimmy Wales’s reassurances? Any better?

Not John Seigenthaler, retired journalist, founder of Vanderbilt University’s Freedom Forum First Amendment Center, and a former editorial page editor at USA TODAY ... and, according to an anonymous biographer in Wikipedia, a suspect in the assassination of the Kennedy brothers. Seigenthaler reported having no idea whose “sick mind conceived the false, malicious ‘biography’ that appeared under [his] name for 132 days on Wikipedia.” The biographer was anonymous and untraceable.

Within days of the dissemination of this defamation by responsible news sources, Wikipedia flounder Jimmy Wales was all over the news himself feigning shock over the (har har) "isolated incident" that somehow managed to slip past his army of volunteer editors. He announced he was tightening control over content by requiring content creators to register with Wikipedia. Is this more fulsome reassurance? Let’s just say that if someone provides false identity or contact information to an Internet resource, it wouldn't be the first time, as evidenced by a report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office. Many Web sites are registered and hosted under aliases. Greater than 3 of every 4 message board participants use aliases. And what of those unmoderated Usenet news groups, where greater than 9 of 10 messages is a malicious or defamatory flame? Greater than 9 of 10 participants in these news groups not only use aliases, but use some tool / method to conceal or falsify the address of their computer (i.e. their IP address). And the Web sites designed to create Web copies of messages in select news groups (so they become accessible to search engines) ... well, greater than 3 of every 4 of these specialized Web sites – known as news readers – rely on privacy services from GoDaddy.com’s Domains by Proxy. And the individuals trying to gain unauthorized access to my Web site are using open ports so that it appears the source of the “activity” is several different companies and universities in Asia. There can be no accountability in a fiercely anonymous world.

Wikipedia might have been able to salvage its reputation and snatch credibility from the jaws of scandal if the unauthorized biographers had been the only anonymous contributors to this enpsychopedia. Unfortunately, the vast majority of volunteers vested with the authority to maintain Wikipedia content ... the "administrators" who treat as vandals victims who just want out of the encyclopedia ... are also anonymous.

Wikipedia's Credibility: A Mad Dash to Raise the Titanic

In the wake of the Seigenthaler scandal, the media and star-struck open-source enthusiasts have bent over backwards trying to help Wikipedia rebound from its crisis of confidence. "Today alone, a report by the magazine Nature finding Wikipedia as accurate as Brittanica was picked up by Reuters and the Associated Press and made its way into the feature headlines of just about every news distributor. I don't find the pop trash encyclopedia particularly newsworthy, but this didn't stop CNN.com from billing the Nature report as a "Top Story". The timing and fast-tracking of this comparison seems suspicious. The "expert-led investigation" examined only 42 articles, all in the domain of science. Since these are likely to have been authored by experts, the fact Wikipedia and Brittanica were comparable not only fails to surprise me, but the more ingrained the subject matter selected for comparison, the more I would expect expert contributors in Wikipedia to outperform Brittanica. However, this face-saving report does nothing to address the real problem with Wikipedia, which is to say, it does not address all the articles Brittanica would never put in its encyclopedia ... articles like Alt.usenet.kooks. Not being an oncologist, I'm not going to attempt an article on the Gompertzian growth of malignant masses (not even when the malignant mass is Wikipedia [har har]), neither would Brittanica probe that deeply into cancer, but an oncologist can create just such an article in Wikipedia, and it is these articles to which the Nature examination is restricted. Anything cultural or ideological about which anyone can write, well, these entries are another matter entirely, and they were not compared. And then there are cultural articles like Alt.usenet.kooks -- articles sober Brittanica staffers would never touch. So it's the cultural stuff and the frivolous stuff we find in Wikipedia that we don't find in Brittanica, like the Seigenthaler article, that concerns people. I have to wonder whether the "expert-led investigation" and its dissemination was organized by a relationship between stakeholders of Wikipedia and Nature. I combed Wikipedia's list of donors for names that could be traced to Nature, but alas, most of the American donors are anonymous and the vast majority of the now-$122,000 bounty comes from Japan. The United States accounts for only $4,000 as of 12/29/05. Not too good for a world-wide online "encyclopedia" with King Kong caliber media hype.

Jimmy Wales's War of Attrition with Victims and Complainants

"This isn't about taking sides in a flame war," argued Johnsey, who anticipated complaints that his opposition to the article would cause more harm than good. "This is about standards of civic responsibility on the Internet. We follow these standards or we enforce these standards in the real world, but we let them slide all the time on the Internet, thinking no one takes the Internet seriously enough for anyone to be harmed by it." Johnsey challenges readers to ask themselves what they would do in the victim's situation. What would you do if you had an authorized and malicious biographer in Wikipedia? Well then you’d have to plod through Wikipedia’s mediation and arbitration procedures. Prohibitive procedures tilted in favor of the biographers and the punk administrators who guard their bodies of "work." The first stage of the process would require the complainant to personally confront his biographer, or in the case of the people identified as kooks in alt.usenet.kooks, personally confront “the gang.” This is comparable to court cases in which rapists acting as their own attorneys make their victims relive the trauma on the witness stand. The request itself becomes fodder for additional abuse in Wikipedia … and elsewhere. And Wikipedia has the smell of a kangaroo court, or at least a peer review system in which the complaint would be evaluated by a jury of the stalkers' own peers. Even if the complainant endured the hour-and-a-day of the process I described so far and receives a favorable judgment, the gang would expend all of five minutes maligning the victim in a new entry ... and the process begins again ... lather, rinse, repeat."

But let's examine what happened when I experimented with the official process for recommending the deletion of Alt.usenet.kooks. This was not a simple matter of clicking a link titled "Recommend Deletion" on the page of the entry and typing my objection into a field. The deletion policy page is buried in the Help section. The length of the deletion policy page is such that it requires its own Table of Contents. For the procedures you need to recommend a page for deletion, just scroll down 8 paragraphs and 2 tables to a section titled "How to list a page for deletion." There you will find a link that will take you to the middle of another page ... a section incomprehensibly titled AfD footer that will make you wonder whether you're in the right place. This section is itself stuffed with links, and if you'll just wade through this weed garden, you'll find the paragraphs you need. Oh, they won't look like the paragraphs you need. And that's how you'll know you're in the right place. The page's text and formatting suddenly begins to resemble instructions for defragmenting a hard drive inside the E-Ring of the Pentagon, with phrases that range in clarity from "Be sure to include "subst:", not just {{afd1}}" to "Create its AfD subpage." Remember, Wikipedia doesn't want you recommending deletions, so you'll just have to follow the scarecrows to find what you've come for.

If you've done this correctly (failing to interpret these instructions correctly can result in banning), a box titled "This article has been recommended for deletion" will appear on the top of the Wikipedia entry. The box contains a link to a page where encylopedestrians and page administrators can vote yeh or nay on your request. Naturally, page administrators will defend the page with extreme prejudice and naturally Wikipedia policy requires a unanimous list of nays (i.e. "Do Not Keep") before a page can be deleted. So you've wasted your time.

A Partnership between Libel Artists and Admins Lacking Journalistic Integrity

Having recommended the deletion of Alt.usenet.kooks, here is a sample of the responses from the mild sadists of alt.usenet.kook and Wikipedia's punk administrators. "Can't Sleep Clown Will Eat Me" writes: "Keep as this article documents a notable and highly visible Usenet newsgroup." Generally, most of the article's defenders took issue with my objection to the article on the grounds of libel, claiming as "Mark Sweep" did that "this article doesn't level accusations against anyone, merely reports on what a few old usenetters have said." By this logic, if I heard rumors that Mark Sweep is a pedophile, and then I decided to devote a Web site devoted to rumors of Mark Sweep's pedophilia, all I have to do to sidestep responsibility is claim, "I am just reporting a rumor." This explanation would never fly in a court of law, where I would be perceived as a secondary publisher or re-publisher of content under the Communications Decency Act. Now imagine my rumor-trafficking Web site ends up ranking highly in a Google search on the name "Mark Sweep" or on keyword "pedophilia." Incidentally, Mr. Sweep rebuked me in commenting that "AfD is not an appropriate venue for dealing with content issues," a comment for which I have yet to find an interpreter, but apparently I failed to comprehend or read deeply enough into the manual for defragmenting Pentagon hard drives. But my favorite objection comes from administrator Joost R. Meerten, a self-described "Lord High Assigner of Titles" who complains that Wikipedia gets nothing but bad press. He writes:

"Neutrality problems are not addressed by AfD. I challenge you to find anything in that article that is not worded in a neutral, factual way, and discuss it on the talk page. What alt.usenet.kooks itself does you may well find objectionable, but the article in no way, shape or form claims that the "kook" label is appropriate to the individuals listed—of which, I'm fairly safe to claim, you are probably one."

Yikes! If disagreeing with Joost R. Meerten is all it takes to be tried and convicted as a "kook," then I suppose I better watch my step lest my name finds its way on this page. What I love (and hate) about Mr. Meerten's statement is that it is perhaps the most compelling evidence that both the motivation and trustworthiness of this article is suspect if not downright, how should we say, kooky. Now on to scuttling the substance of his objection: the world-infamous Seigenthaler article was worded in a neutral, factual way. Need I say any more? No, but I will. What Misters Meerten and Sweep and many others are doing is participating in slander. In fact, they're building an encyclopedia from bricks provided by cyberstalkers, defamation artists, and other belligerents, ex-cons, and mentally ill individuals who'd be knocking over the local 7-Eleven if they couldn't kill time in Usenet. But make no mistake about it. What we have here is both libel and lack of journalistic integrity / objectivity. All we need to do to make the case for libel is consider jointly both the information concealed and the information disclosed. This scholarly work omits the names of the individuals contributing defamatory content to the alt.usenet.kooks news group. It omits the ideas and/or equal-time statements of the individuals who are named in this article as the source of bizarre and irrational behavior. I don't think it's in their best interests to hide these details. The details serve as more than just evidence (i.e. face validity for allegations of irrational ideas / behavior) ... without these details, readers are lost and bored ... lost in and bored by this list of said-to-be-kooky strangers. Even as gossip, it's just not interesting. Moreover, I can tell you with subject matter expertise as a PhD in Psychology that the criticisms of one of the individuals identified on this page are not only not irrational, but are in actuality recapitulations of conventional wisdom or empirical research. However, that being said, I will concede there are individuals in the world whose beliefs (or inability to articulate them) are somewhat amusing, and I think these beliefs are presented very well elsewhere (i.e. not in alt.usenet kooks and partner enterprises). Crank.net, for example, succeeds where alt.usenet.kooks products fails in that

• crank.net identifies irrational or incomprehensible texts rather than irrational or incomprehensible people, thereby cutting through, capturing, and crystallizing the essence of irrationality rather than all the static associated with its human incarnations
  
• crank.net presents the bizarre passages verbatim for the amusement or evaluation of readers. In the event I understand a passage designated "bizarre", I can make my own determination
  
• by working at the level of the message and not the messenger, crank.net avoids the temptation to hang effigies on anyone with a reasonable view that is not in the best interests of a community in which some kook hunter has a stake
  
• thus crank.net does not get in the business of harassing, defaming, or intimidating sources of one or more irrational statements. This is an intellectual or linguistic exercise only and not a socio-political one
  

But the Alt.usenet.kooks, like the news group, has it backward. It identifies individuals without presenting the words/ideas -- words without which readers are left both uninformed and unamused -- words without which we lack the evidence these same Wiki admins claim to require for purposes of verifiability. Worse than that, most individuals identified as kooks in Usenet are not identified on the basis of ideas. In fact, they're branded as kooks because they weighed in on the wrong side of a flame war. Worse yet, many of the volunteer administrators protecting this article omit their own names. The admins go out of their way to reveal ... above and beyond the call to preserve ... the identities of the individuals named as kooks, and yet they jealously guard their own reputation/identity. Not that I can blame them. I wouldn't want to be publicly associated with this either. But what we have here is unilateral disclosure / discovery.

Furthermore, when I created the official recommendation to delete Alt.usenet.kooks, I did not sign my name to it. The next day my rationale for deletion was followed by a caption: "The preceding unsigned statement was contributed by Wyatt Ehrenfels [my IP address]." I deleted this caption, but on roughly half my visits to this page, I find the caption restored, so there's at least one person in my midst who feels my identity should be public knowledge. Fine. So let's reveal the identities of the individuals defaming the alleged kooks in the alt.usenet.kooks news group and, if we can't penetrate the identities of these anonymous sources, then as journalists, Wikipedia administrators should treat these individuals the same way journalists treat unnamed sources. Carefully. Confirm the rumors before releasing the article. If you have to release the article, withhold the identities of the alleged kooks. If you're going to reveal the identities of the alleged kooks, throw in a number of disclaimers. It's the absence of these disclaimers that undermines the neutrality of the article.

Wikipedia is a message board that enjoys the amenities associated with a faux encyclopedia. It's well indexed, so the alt.usenet.kooks entry appears prominently in a search of your name in Google. More importantly, some new web browsers are offering direct links to Wikipedia from its home pages. A steroid-enhanced Ask.com, media-anointed search engine du jour, is also a carrier of the Wiki infection.

And Reference.com, a sibling of Dictionary.com, borrows heavily from entries in Wikipedia.

Oh, but Reference.com, sibling to Dictionary.com and Thesaurus.com is a credible, authoritative initiative. Surely, they'll be amenable to our request to expunge the defamatory pages from their archive. According to networksolutions.com WHOIS database, Reference.com is registered to Long Beach, California-based Lexico, LLC.

I'll just drop a note to Brian Kariger. Actually, it's more of a carefully crafted tribute to correspondence. I want to make sure I make the best possible case here. And I want to sound intelligible and organized and thus take some of the burden off the recipient, the distinguished Mr. Kariger. Conveniently, Mr. Kariger is listed as both the Administrative and Technical contact for reference.com, so I'm sure I've got the right guy. His e-mail address is bpk@NOTHING.COM. Sounds like a working e-mail address to me. bpk@NOTHING.COM. How about you? Oh, wait. What's this?! Uhh --!

What a surprise that was. What is a citizen of the world to do? Well, a citizen of the world might e-mail Wikipedia's administrative and technical contacts, which is exactly what this citizen of the world did. His contact information turned out to be legitimate. He just isn't answering. If I were one of these defamed kooks, I would surmise that Wikipedia (like Google) is just too big and important for little 'ol me. But then, if they don't need me enough to entertain one of my complaints, they surely don't need my name in their encyclopedia.

Being full of inbred and derivative drivel, the Web carries the Wikipedia / alt.usenet.kooks content like an infection. The Farlex free encyclopedia has a Wikipedia search field, and the amateur "enPsychlopedia" is a front for Wikipedia.

The page Alt.usenet.kooks is not a defamation delivery device in and of itself. After all, who but the alt.usenet.kook usenetter will know that this "encyclopedia" page exists? Real defamation does not occur until alt.usenet.kooks creators, or any anonymous supporter from the "newsgroup" alt.usenet.kooks, drops a link to the Alt.usenet.kooks page in other Wikipedia entries. Take for example entries on Crank and Crackpot . Currently, these are the only common usage entries in Wikipedia with a referral to Alt.usenet.kooks (though I doubt these pages see much traffic). Other entries with links to Alt.usenet.kooks include List of Newsgroups, Net Kook, and Sollog (the name of an individual branded as a kook). But a person can potentially embed links to Alt.usenet.kooks in the text of other entries, or in the "See Also" section, and drop a link to the alt.usenet.kooks news group in "External Links."

But look at how contested the entry is. This cross-linking and propogation of defamatory content has not escaped the notice of its victims. As you can see from the graphic above, this entry has been edited over 500 times. But the stalkers are equal to the challenge. A review of the edit history tab reveals that this Wikipedia entry is defensed by a large group of Wikipedia administrators (pranksters, really) who will revert the page to original form within no more than 10-15 minutes of alteration. One prankster, who uses the handle CSTAR, identified and corrected my alteration within 2 minutes. That's dedication. And to think I have trouble getting my financial advisor on the phone. I wonder if they're paged in the middle of the night when a "convicted" kook edits himself out of the document. When this happens, the stalkers have the nerve to call this "vandalism."

As a free resource, Wikipedia is providing content to information directories on many Web sites. As an illustration, I identified my work in a Wikipedia article about dreams. In scanning the results of a Google search on my name, I noticed this Wikipedia content duplicated as content on 15 Web sites and counting. Take a look.

And for the dedicated volunteers administrating Alt.usenet.kook who may have to use the men's room, there's Wikipedia for your cellphone.

That's right. When you need a falsehood in a flash, or you need to text message your ordnance into the edit wars. In the time required to exercise a bodily function, at least one of the individuals you identified as a kook might have edited his or her name out of your canon.

And fireflySun staffers uncovered yet more evidence linking Wikipedia to the abuse. The WHOIS search database identifies Go Daddy Software Inc. as the Wikipedia web site host. It's who you hire to host your web site when you don't want to be identified or entertain complaints. Scottsdale, Arizona-based Go Daddy Software's Domains by Proxy provides bullet-proof hosting to Internet abusers worldwide, advertising protection for web administrators who want to hide their identities and contact information from the general public. Domains by Proxy is the host of choice for secret societies of stalkers using, as a base of operations, unmoderated Usenet news groups such as alt.usenet.kooks and sci.psychology.psychotherapy. "By using the fugitive-from-ICANN Domains by Proxy, these web admins place an unfair burden on the complainant seeking relief from libel. Domains by Proxy expects complainants to hire an attorney to mail official letters to Go Daddy Software -- just to get the mediation / arbitration proceedings off the ground. Everyone knows these Usenet news groups are a sewer, and so a red flag is immediately raised when you see a web site referring to sci.psychology.psychotherapy as a mental health 'resource' and archiving all its flaming and threatening messages to the Internet to get them in the search engines. Lo and behold, when you perform a WHOIS search of the web site, Domains by Proxy is the host, stonewalling any victim seeking some control over the way his or her image is being mismanaged on the Internet. Incidentally, in my wide correspondence, I have never encountered a Web-site-abused individual who ever received a reply from abuse@godaddy.com."

Anti-stalking advocate Tim Johnsey agreed. "No one, and I mean no one could ever mistake Wikipedia 'encyclopedia' for an authoritative source on anything. But I don't think that's what Wikipedia was really designed to be. It's quite possible that all that other stuff -- the encyclopedia entries from spiders to Vietnam -- is just a facade. The ulterior mission here is to leverage the Internet to harm and control other people."

And now there's evidence to support this.

You think Wikipedia is aware of the problem of defamation? We've always known they were aware of the vandalism. But the policy displayed in the above screen capture is not intended to address vandalism. I mean, no one's threatening to file suit over some disagreement about the atomic weight of plutonium or the birthdate of Satchel Page. The reason one would threaten to file suit is simply because one was presented in a false or derogatory light in what is masquerading as an organized body of facts (a quote-unquote encyclopedia)(har har). To dismiss such concerns as litigious and somehow inconsistent with the quality of the body of work is to turn reality on its head. Wikipedia realizes that this kind of malfeasance is rampant within its encyclopedia. Wikipedia realizes that an anti-personnel entry in its "encyclopedia" has become a popular way of winning a flame war. And Wikipedia realizes that it lacks the customer service and quality control to address this malfeasance. Why do you think its deletion request procedures are so inelegant and inefficient? Why do you think the arbitration policy is so prohibitive?

Web Itself Makes Wikipedia Superfluous

This policy betrays better than any other Wikipedia's juvee roots. In defense of Wikipedia, a high school psychology instructor writes the following: "The open-source concept is so democratic and so powerful that I'd hate to see us dismiss it." We already have a democratic open-source concept. It's called the Web. And powerful search engines (albeit developed by equally juvenile minds) allow us to navigate this open source in a way that makes it far more authoritative. You heard me ... more authoritative. When you search the Web, you can serially review independent sources of information for corroboration. In Wikipedia, one person simply overwrites another person's facts. Our high school teacher also dropped the following pearl of wisdom: "In addition, students can actually author/suggest edits on entries!" That's just what I need. Information from high school students. Maybe they can tell me how to open a condom. Or a Web-based business called "Wikipedia." Sheesh!

The following is a screen capture from a listserv in which one participant cautions the list after another participant referred an inquirer to an entry in Wikipedia.

There's a point at which the kookologists themselves become so shrill and so insidiously ubiquitous, as to become kooks themselves. "They not only meet the same standards of irrationality and officiousness they malign in their victims, but their spam advertising, zealous recruiting, and ideology conjure images of cults. The only difference between the people they capture as kooks for their card decks and chess sets, and the kookologists themselves, is that the alleged kooks act independently as individuals. This is what the kookologists really despise in them. In the view of kookologists, to submit one's idiosyncratic reflections or complaints to the web ... without permission, without backing, and without the expectation of public support ... what gaul ... what nerve ... oh the humanity! If you ask me, kookologists are everything the kook is, without the positive qualities that make them autonomous agents."

At least one focus group observer thinks the individual or individuals responsible for the alt.usenet.kooks Wikipedia entry made an egregious error by providing an expanded list of kooks to include celebrities. In her own words: "I'm no Democrat. I never pulled the lever for Bill Clinton. But there's no denying his popularity. He left office with one of the highest approval ratings and people trusted his intelligence. Putting him in the list of kooks is a bit kooky. Shows they don't know their own limits. And it makes you wonder whether every other person in the kook list isn't also an intelligent and popular person. And since many of these kookologists are obnoxious in-your-face pagans, are we to believe they would have also labeled Jesus Christ a kook?"

I was reviewing the information about the individuals responsible for creating this entry or preserving the entry as "administrators." Then it occurred to me. What's the one thing academics, professionals, and business persons do to build trust and instill faith in their products or services? They tie their real names to their products or services. If there's one thing I've learned ... you don't phone any one of the contacts named "Bruce" in the apartment listings bulletin board at NYU. And I don't buy any of the watches off the interior lining of some vagabond's trenchcoat. The same principle keeps me from buying any information off a hate-spreading web page edited by persons whose handles range from Ataru (which sounds like a Japanimation character) to SlimVirgin (which sounds like a cigarette). Don't even get me started on TacoDeposit.

In addition to his "gem" of a quote that's dressing the display window of this report, SlimVirgin opened the entry's discussion page with the following:

" ... Given the extreme (and frankly surprising) amount of discussion about [NAME OF "KOOK" OMITTED FROM THIS REPORT] , I hope the explicit mention of three more individuals virtually unanimously regarded as kooks won't meet with great opposition ... "

He knows he's doing wrong and he's feeling out his brethren for reassurance in the face of potential moral and legal challenges.

The strong link in this chain gang may just be telling the truth about himself. He calls himself Bryan Derksen, who defended the inclusion of the names of the kooks in his entry.

... "Which ones, by the by? [He's fishing for which of the alleged kooks may be threatening to file suit against Wikipedia over his entry] I don't buy the notion that one could successfully sue over this page, it's just reporting what's being said by other pages ... If reporting publically verifiable facts in an NPOV manner causes them trouble, I suspect they've got problems that suing Wikipedia isn't going to make go away."

Well, then just between us journalists, you won't mind if I reported a few publically verifiable facts about your libeling "encyclopedia" entry. After all, I'm just reporting what's being said in your little corner of Wikipedia's blog.

If you review his autobiographical statement, you'll be asphyxiated by the fumes of pride from a person eager to put his name and face to his persecution. This is just the kind of lovably madcap arrogance that gets drive-by messengers tarred, feathered, and burned at the stake in the Usenet news groups. But as for the news group devoted to stalking our fellow man, Bryan Derksen doesn't post to alt.usenet.kooks, at least not as Bryan Derksen. Given the 116 messages in alt.usenet.kooks that contain links to Wikipedia entries, I'd be surprised if he hadn't been involved at some point and in some capacity. How else would a Wikipedia "encyclopedia" "administrator" come to know alt.usenet.kooks and honor this defemation league with an entry?

Bryan does count among his Wikipedia colleagues a known kook hunter, with whom he exchanges some words that unwittingly betray their real feelings about the legitimacy of this article:

And for those of you who are wondering whether Mr. Ross will respond to his inclusion in this report by nominating me for a kook award, well, consider yourself prophets. Just a day after his Wikipedia correspondence with Bryan Derksen was captured for this report (i.e. the screen capture above), a personal stalker of mine and a Northern Illinois University graduate student using the alias Kali (seen here defending Mr. Ross in various flame wars) included me in a list of nominees for an impromptu holiday kook award.

Of the 14 ballots cast thus far, Mr. Ross was the only ballot cast for me.

Such is the profound scholarship that is kook diagnosis (and that Wikipedia administrators defend as "significant"). Granted, I won't win this award. I am largely unfamiliar to the patrons of these forums because two years have elapsed since I participated in the news groups. One of the other nominees, who will claim at least 90 percent of the votes, may not have shared any ideas or made any assertions that could possibly be judged irrational or bizarre, but he did get involved in a flame war against some kook hunters, and it's this exchange of profane zinging ... laced with references to dildos and pedophiles ... that will win him this award.

Alt.usenet.kooks, incidentally, spares no effort for recruitment and outreach. Like the Great Melting Pot that is the U.S. of A, just about every participant in this "news group" had emigrated from some other news group, and in maintaining "dual citizenship" so to speak, these "individuals" serve as liaisons, delivering kook-related news (including kook nominees, voting form, election results, and dossiers to and fro Usenet's federal bureau of kook instigation (alt.usenet.kooks). Usenet regulars are appointed to various offices in local news groups with some function related to kook hunting (e.g. Overseer of Kooks & Trolls in sci.psychology.psychotherapy), reminding others to nominate their fellow man for the monthly awards.

Mr. Derksen is an avid participant of the news groups, frequenting the groups listed below with the regularity of a rugby player patronizing the local pub. Since 1995, under his given name, he submitted at least 2,000 messages across no less than 35 news groups:

sci.astro.seti; soc.history.what-if; rec.arts.sf.science; k.media.tv.sf.drwho; rec.arts.sf.fandom; sci.astro; rec.arts.movies.current-films; rec.games.frp.dnd; alt.books.larry-niven; alt.atheism; alt.fan.tolkien; alt.religion.christian.roman-catholic; sci.physics; rec.arts.startrek.current; rec.games.frp.gurps; alt.language.artificial; comp.infosystems.www.authoring.html; sci.space.policy; sci.bio.entomology.misc; rec.arts.horror.written; rec.arts.sf.tv.babylon5; alt.tv.sliders; alt.abortion; alt.tv.star-trek.ds9; sci.skeptic; alt.tv.star-trek.voyager; alt.horror.werewolves; rec.games.computer.quake.editing; sci.misc; edm.forsale; rec.games.computer.quake.misc; alt.tv.the-tick; alt.tv.reboot; sci.astro; rec.woodworking; sci.space.shuttle

If all this hasn't earned Misters Ross and Derksen Usenet's crested dinner jackets, nothing will. So, is Mr. Derksen really just a "journalist" with no standing in alt.usenet.kook's inner circle? Is there such a creature? I don't take my outlook on life from the dual Star Wars trilogies, but if I did, I would surely cite as historical precedent the appointment to the Jedi Council absent the rank of Master. It's apparently the recipe for Darth Vader. An awkward and barely well-placed metaphor, I know. But how else am I going to digress into a discussion of this fellow's participation in sci-fi television news groups? ... the half dozen or so encompassing the many faces of Star Trek?

Anyway, Mr. Derksen's only real crime appears to be one of thinking alt.usenet.kooks fulfills some vital social function. Just think ... without that Wikipedia entry, hundreds if not thousands of netizens might have fallen under the spell of an irrational idea ... an idea with the gravitational pull of a black hole. I guess I owe my sanity to Mr. Derksen. Truth be told, it's not clear whether Mr. Derksen would have us believe we need more people like him to help us determine which ideas fall short of rationality. I mean, if you review the entry, it sounds as if he would have us believe that we all hold these kooks to be self-evident, that is, those of us who have crossed the kook's path. So, if what Derksen would have us believe is true, that to have read these individuals he's named is to know them for kooks, the only benefit of the entry -- that is, besides harassing these people -- is to take them public -- make sure that of the multitudes who have not yet heard of these kooks, as many as possible learn their names ... and learn that they are widely regarded as kooks. But wait just a Hollywood moment! What are we to make of all the attention lavished on the kooks by kookhunters if kookhunters whine about all the attention sought by kooks? Simple. Kooks attempt to draw attention to their ideas. Kookhunters retaliate by separating the kook's name from his ideas, omitting the ideas completely from an attack on the kook's person and other periphera. So the kookhunter is not really giving kooks a center-stage microphone, but more like a Salem Witch Trial and center-scaffold guillotine. Or a city street corner and a mandatory sentence to wear a sandwich board that reads "I am kook." What a public service this is.

All fire, ice, and darkness iconography aside, I am told that the most essential conception of Hell is the complete absence of God. Similarly, what makes alt.usenet.kooks the news group and Wikipedia article abusive is the utter absence of journalistic integrity and objectivity. Where's the summary of the alleged kook's ideas? You know? The ideas that have been characterized as "irrational" and "bizarre"? A respectable journalist would take it one step further and include a statement of self-description from the alleged kook, giving him equal time and an opportunity to represent his own ideas. Nowhere on this alt.usenet.kooks Wikipedia page do I see the ostensibly bizarre ideas of the three plus individuals named as kooks. The only thing I can take away from this article as a reader is that the individuals named in this article are bizarre. Not even controversial. Alt.usenet.kooks goes to great lengths to deny the kooks the moniker of controversy. Controversy implies importance, and the defamation leagues in Usenet are always telling us that the kooks aren't even worth the attention -- that any impetus on the part of a kook toward credit has been pre-declined. In a process that amounts to dismissal-without-refutation, the defamation leagues in Usenet are always using the word dismissed to refer to ideas they attempt to characterize as self-evidently frivolous and irrational. But if the ideas of the alleged kooks are so clearly without merit as to bring a chortling pfft to the lips of their readers, then how is this Wikipedia entry performing a public service? Why is it necessary? Why do Wikipedia "encyclopedia" "administrators" make like sentries and take shifts to defense their entry in the wee hours of the morning? Forgive me if this self-styled kookology strikes me as a tad karaoke or kooky itself.

One Wikipedia administrator in his own words: "Alt.usenet.kooks has been around for more than 20 years, and has always been a significant group within the alt hierarchy." Significant? How in the name of John Hinckley is alt.usenet.kooks significant?! I admit, it is significant in terms of its effects on the individuals named kooks. On the individuals given the "Busted Urinal Award," "Order of the Holey Sockpuppet," or the grandaddy of them all ... "Kook of the Month/Year/Decade/Millenium/Paleogeographic Period." But the article does not address this. And any effort to work such a sidebar into the article would be rebuffed with extreme prejudice, its author escorted by the sheriff of the Countervandalism Unit into Wikipedia town jail.

More from the distinguished Mr. Derksen:

" ... If someone who's won a kook of the year award wants to sue someone over it, they should try suing the people who awarded it to them rather than someone completely unrelated who merely reports the fact ..."

I don't know. Could they sue him twice? Once as an "administrator" of a defamatory dossier in an "encyclopedia" and once as a stalker in Usenet? From the way he's behaving, he's not just preserving the content for the creators. Doesn't he sound as though he's rushed the alt.usenet.kooks fraternity, been initiated, and put a down payment on his skull ring? I guess no fact is too frivolous for Encyclopedia Hysterica. I'm waiting for the American Textbook Council to incorporate kookhunting factoids into the grade school Social Studies curricula, which has already canonized references to such group stupidity as the Salem Witch Trials, Nazi bookburning, the Inquisition, and McCarthyism. This article is more open sore than open source.

I'm not a professional sports handicapper, but I'm willing to wager Mr. Derksen is well aware that Wikipedia is buoyed by cosmetic pretenses to legitimacy, strategic partnerships with other beatnik resources from the East Village of the Web, and flirtacious curiosity from grungy urban periodicals like Wired, Salon, and Slate. Mr. Derksen is well aware that a victim's prospective employer, mother, or old high school flame is much more likely to find the original (defamatory) messages in Usenet if reciprocal links between alt.usenet.kooks in Usenet and Wikipedia elevates the messages in the search engine rankings. And of course, the Wikipedia alt.usenet.kooks web page itself presents one more, and fairly high ranking, result to the Web Search archive.

But trust me when I say no one has to clue Mr. Derksen into the consequences of his profound scholarship. The distinguished Mr. Derksen is already well aware of this. He's heard enough of it in Usenet, where the kooks pleaded with their stalkers to expunge Wikipedia effigies, and the antagonism of it all drives him to the kind of casual speculation that strangely resembles a threat:

" ... If reporting publically verifiable facts in an NPOV manner causes them trouble, I suspect they've got problems that suing Wikipedia isn't going to make go away. Would likely make it worse since a lawsuit might be notable enough to mention in the Wikipedia article as part of this encyclopedia's history, possibly making the rounds of the blogs and whatnot and generally just increasing exposure ... "

Yes, very professional. And this statement pretty much dispels any remaining doubt that Mr. Derksen is keenly aware of the effectiveness of his Wikipedia entry as a defamation delivery device. And how about this threat?

" ... Well, I still don't find this remotely plausible, and you're providing no references to support your proposition so I don't see any reason to change anything about the article as a result. You may also want to read Wikipedia:No legal threats [see screen capture above] , I don't think making vague threats against Wikipedia as a whole technically violates it but it still seems against the spirit of it. If your mystery award-winners think they've got valid cases against Wikipedia as a whole, take it up with the board ... "

I just love being strongarmed. I just love being manhandled, roughed up, and shown the door like I'm being bounced out of a biker bar. "Award-winners?" This guy's gots the Usenet dialect. I would wager he's one of alt.usenet.kook's card carrying stalwarts. 10 plus years of recruitment and dissemination across what Google describes as the largest and most decentralized user network in the world (i.e. Usenet news groups) and alt.usenet.kooks cannot inspire more than 20-30 people to vote in their monthly kook awards. Unfortunately, while alt.usenet.kooks will never be more than a garage organization (or more like a carport), it only takes a handful of hobby-hungry hatemongerers -- with a little help from the Internet -- to make someone's life miserable.

Anything But An Open Source: Punks Abuse Their Administrative Authority

Wikipedia policies claim to exercise tolerance for users with alternative points of view. Not even vandals, individuals who maliciously remove whole entries or falsify indisputably factual material, are banned on first offense. So where was the three strikes law for me? A Wikipedia administrator who calls himself "Maru Dubshinki" banned me for a reason that was not entirely clear. I contacted him at his MaruDubshinki gmail address for an explanation. Apparently, it was not entirely clear to him either. Just hours after the banning, he couldn't remember me, as evidenced by his response.

We exchanged a couple civilized -- perhaps even congenial -- e-mails. In an attempt to jog his memory, I suggested that I may have been banned for cross-posting my multi-paragraph package of analytical material about gang activity in Usenet to multiple entries (e.g. Cyberbullying, Stalking, Gang Stalking). I even struck a note of contrition in suggesting that in hindsight, I probably should have used the "See Also" section to develop pathways between these related topics rather than duplicate my content. Still, I tapped Mr. Dubshinki for an explanation as to why "vandalism" was the reason cited for my banning. After all, my direct observations and social psychological analysis enhanced the scholarship of these entries, as suggested by the fact the administrators or creators responsible for many of the entries in which I dropped my text did not feel compelled to remove it, edit it, or even qualify it in the Discussion page.

He refers to "heavily point-of-viewed" statements. Yes, okay. The point of view of a social psychologist and a stalking victim writing up a paragraph for Wikipedia entries on Stalking, Gang Stalking, a couple other related topics. Every cultural entry in Wikipedia expresses a point of view. Wikipedia is more than just the Pythagorean Theorem and the weight of a newborn cocker spaniel. In fact, Wikipedia is by and large a fund of cultural information. That being said, what he calls "heavily point-of-viewed" is a series of observations. Not that it matters. Wikipedia has procedures for dealing with "heavily point-of-viewed" material, and it does not involve banning the contributor and, I might add, banning the contributor without warning and without an unsolicited explanation.

But I suspect it's clear to you, the reader, from Mr. Dubshinki's response that he is exercising his role as administrator under biases of his own. He refers to himself as a "heavy Usenet user" and even invokes the term "kookishness" to label my commentary on blatant gang stalking in Usenet. Without evidence, I cannot report that Mr. Dubshinki is a card-carrying member alt.usenet.kooks or that he participates in the practice of "kook hunting" in Usenet. But it is clear that he identifies with Usenet as a regular patron and feels the need to defend Usenet and its kook hunting gangs from my "assertions." Assertions, huh. Not only do the members of these stalking gangs make no efforts to conceal what they're doing (no more than the North Koreans to deny their nuclear program), they seem to relish public attention. Hell, they refer to themselves as the "cabal." If that isn't enough, I have even fairly reported what the stalkers describe as a benign-to-altruistic rationale for their activities. How "kookish" would I have been if I composed a Wikipedia entry on North Korean brinkmanship following statements from the North Korean leadership? Remember? We were planning to invade Iraq, and the North Korean government is screaming "Over here! The bombs are over here! And we plan to use them."

I'm pleased Mr. Dubshinki at least gave serious thought to "forgiving" "kookish" me. If we ever exchange e-mails again, I'll have to ask Mr. Dubshinki what field his PhD is in (har har). And if "kookishness" isn't enough, he even hit me over the head with the terms "screeds" and "spamming." Very professional is this footsoldier in General Wales's Army of volunteer authorities. I mean, this borders on hate speech. As for my "mini-essays," well, this is verifiably factual material that belongs in the text of the articles and not in the margins (i.e. the Discussion pages), as he demands. I even did use some statistics, as when I identified sci.psychology.psychotherapy as a "flame community" based on the fact over 90 percent of the messages in this "news group" have nothing whatsoever to do with science or psychotherapy but are designed to defame or incite anger in another individual. I mean, go into sci.psychology.psychotherapy and do a count yourself. You can examine the messages over the course of the past week. Or, if you want to be more rigorous, the past month. The past year. The past seven years. 90 percent!

Ah, but Mr. Dubshinki did refer to my "Original Research." What, there's no place for original research in a straw encyclopedia? I'm helping you. Wikipedia has serious credibilitity issues and can use all the research and educated analysis it could find. I apologize for the originality. Now proceed to the "volunteer administrators" dedicated to defending Alt.usenet.kooks from people who do not care to be named as "kooks." Yeah, yeah, I know. You're going to say that Alt.usenet.kooks is not "heavily point-of-viewed" because quite a number of people think of these individuals as "kooks." Yeah, real scientific. The recruiters in the artfully-franchised alt.usenet.kooks "news groups" managed to comb the world's largest and oldest user network to unearth 30 or so like-minded or generic defamation hobbyists willing to agree with their assessment. If this is evidence of anything at all, it's not evidence the named individuals are universally regarded as "kooks." Nearly 600 individuals accepted invitations to participate in my Yahoo discussion group devoted to my criticisms of Psychology, but that doesn't mean that my views on Psychology are universally accepted.

Ah, but Mr. Dubshinki has read my "anti-Wikipedia polemic" (AKA the report you are reading now before references to Mr. Dubshinki). And to add insult to injury, he vaguely insinuates that I may have stolen my material from some other guy. Well, it wouldn't surprise me if educated minds sound off alike about Wikipedia. Remember, this isn't "kookishness" or "screed" ... to observe, describe, and protest adverse impact from wrongdoing pranksters and administrators in Wikipedia is not exactly castle-building in the sky. Please stop me here if you take me for some kind of theologian, economist, or illusionist.

Mr. Dubshinki takes a big risk here. In characterizing as "kookish" the educated observations and analysis of a social psychologist of a subject on which he is qualified to comment, Mr. Dubshinki comes off as more than a tad "karaoke." I wouldn't be too liberal with the "kookish" label if I were him. I've been to his Wikipedia user page, where he writes "I am also "His Eminence Bishop" of the Inquisitorius of the Catholic Church of Wikipedia. I followed the link to the Catholic Church of Wikipedia (as if the statement alone wasn't enough) and read every word of it, including the Wiki Credo and, let me tell you, if irrationality and meddling officiousness are the hallmarks of kookishness, you don't need to kick the matter of this fellow's kookishness upstairs to the replay booth for review. I can't believe this guy's calling me kookish and rubbing out my thoughtful contributions, when Wikipedia counts among its faux encyclopedia a record like the Catholic Church of Wikipedia. Sheesh! Now he's distressed that I captured his e-mails without his permission. This is another characteristic he shares with many Usenetters: this belief that what they write to you is somehow their property and their property alone. It's written to me. It's written about me. And it explains why he denied me a contribution to a public record. Now he wants to control what I put on my own web site. That's so Usenet.

Portrait of a Wikipedia Addict

A growing body of evidence recently sparked the hypothesis that two individuals harassing Wyatt Ehrenfels, "Charles Grahm of Japan" in Amazon.com and "Calton" in Wikipedia, are one and the same person, Calton [LAST NAME OMITTED]. I discovered this entirely by accident. A rather meddling Wikipedia administrator who refers to himself only as "Calton" had been tracking my activity in Wikipedia, deleting my improvements to a handful of articles about which I claim some expertise as a PhD in Social Psychology (i.e. dreaming & cyberstalking). I was hard pressed to explain why my contributions seemed to aggravate him. There was something familiar about this fellow. Then I reviewed his Wikipedia user page, where I noticed in the section titled "International Travels" that he spent some time in Japan. Suddenly, I remembered a spurious negative review of my book in Amazon.com authored by someone who admitted to not having read the book and then, posing as a friend of himself in a live journal entry, admitted to having made a habit of sprinkling spurious reviews among his many genuine submissions to Amazon.com. When I searched on keywords "Calton" and "Japan" in Google, I was struck by the sheer number of front-loaded results about one "Calton [LAST NAME OMITTED]," who took up residence in Japan and fashions himself a Western expert on all things Japanese. So I visited his Web site, where I noticed the prominent Amazon.com logo beside this statement: "Also, since I already link book titles I mention here to Amazon.com, I've decided to make the links official and have become an Amazon Associate. Hence, the official logo on the left.". Is the Calton [LAST NAME OMITTED], the rabid reviewer of Amazon.com's book content, the same meddling Calton who wrote this in his user page in Wikipedia?: "I first became aware of Wikipedia when I began using it to look up some technical terms, my being an English literature major screwing around with computers, not vice versa. Being of a copy editor bent, I noticed typos, misspellings, and generally screwy language occasionally, and after a while I realized that I could in fact edit them myself. So I did. Soon, I was hitting the random page button, just for my own amusement, and I got sucked in ... Now, this has turned into a relaxing break from my required copy editing: I get to exercise my pedantic tendencies, without the responsibility of deadlines or deliverables. I've occasionally gotten a little deeper into things, and have written a few articles from scratch ... This whole project is infectious: hitting the random page button, I encounter whole swatches of text and knowledge areas requiring work, and I suddenly feel compelled to try to do something about it, even if I didn't have any particular interest in the subject to begin with. For example, I did a massive edit (for style, organization, and a general readability) for the submarine USS Trout (SS-202). I have no particular interest in the military, especially not the Navy, yet I found myself sucked into doing this. Same with entries on community colleges and Booker Prize winners." However, beyond the matter of his technical expertise in English composition (he is graduate of the English Literature program at University California Berkeley), his edits and critiques appear designed to cut down persons whose attitudes or opinions he does not like. Amazon. Wikipedia. There is no place this person will not insinuate himself. He can found opining on the message boards of many political magazines (e.g. Washington Monthly). And he is not shy about leveraging his affiliation with all things official and worldly; in fact, these things appear to fuel his officiousness: (1) his international travel history and expertise in a culture enigmatic to Westerners; (2) he idenitifies himself as a "former ticketholder at the California Shakespeare Festival and the Berkeley Repertory Theater; (3) his home page also features two links to Web sites laying out his political opinions (i.e. "Political Opinions 1" and "Political Opinions 2"); and (4) he edited a number of essays about a Berkeley historical landmark for the University Students' Cooperative Association. Even I cannot help but be impressed and intrigued by his background, as he writes that he was born on a U.S. Air Force base in Japan and then proceeds to list all the air force bases on which he was raised. He put his Japanese private and mobile cell phone number on his Web page (just in case you want to reach him).

As an American who never made it East of Bermuda, I can't imagine what it would be like to call Japan "home." I expect that I'd be lonely and no matter how well I learned the language and lay of the land, I'd still need a way to reconnect with my roots. This is a man who gives much of himself to edit the world's works, and as a resident of the world from birth forward, one has to wonder what kind of challenges this nomadic lifestyle posed to social and personality development. There is a homelessness about this well-traveled man Calton, now employed as a copy editor for a large Japanese electronics company. Amazon.com and Wikipedia provide not only an international stage with which to seek intercourse with the world, but as a one-man "Spectre-like" editing conglomerate, he sprays the world like a male feline marking his territory. It's not like I'm not sympathetic. A man of his intelligence cannot limit his mode of self-expression to tedious technical edits of other persons' copy. At some point, someone in his position finds his client's split infinitives and dangling modifiers infuriating, and his superiority and aggravation both rear their heads in the extracurricular reviewing he performs in his spare time.

Apparently, I was not the first author to suspect Calton [LAST NAME OMITTED] is behind a phony book review in Amazon.com, as [LAST NAME OMITTED] himself writes on one of his blogs: "I'll get into the details later, but some nutter calling himself "Steve Van Natter" took offense at my making fun of his incoherent rantings ipassed off as Amazon.com reviews. Steve apparently noticed, so back in April he responded by changing the name on the reviews to "Calton [LAST NAME OMITTED]"-- which I found out when I happened to run a Google search on my name and they turned up for me. I complained to Amazon, and Amazon responded by deleting the phony reviews." In a live journal entry (see Weapons of Mass Defamation: Amazon.com), he reported that he withdrew his spurious review of my book himself. A few days after finding the live journal entry in a Google search of my book title, I wrote about the incident on my Web site, making sure my readers were aware that it was Amazon.com, and not Charles Grahm of Japan, who removed the review. A few days after that, the whole live journal entry disappeared (thank God for screen capturing).

More Wikipedia Abuse

One Wikipedia administrator recently abused his authority and circumvented policy to delete a factually verifiable and well-researched article about a socially significant phenomenon for which much has been written on the Web: "gang stalking."

The administrators opposing gang stalking were technically defeated. The policy allows for deletion only in instances of a "rough consensus" to delete. Wikipedia had a problem. Not only did a consensus not exist, but votes to keep outnumbered votes to delete. So one Wikipedia administrator developed a creative stratagem for resolving this insoluble problem. He charged supporters with something called "astroturfing" and provided a link to the Wikipedia article on astroturfing, which in my opinion, is just as frivolous and political as the reality it describes.

Basically, the administrator is accusing supporters of canvassing networks of known or likely supporters to vote "keep." But how would this administrator know of such activity? How could he feign fly-on-the-wall knowledge of this secret network of strategic partnerships among supporters? He doesn't know. However, even if he had known ... even if the article creator researched and lobbied for support of the article ... this does not reduce the supporters to some multi-headed hydra. The independent votes would still reflect indepedent points of view, and the article co-creator, may have simply mobilized sources of knowledge he originally consulted as part of the empirical process of researching the phenomenon. In other words, what we have here is evidence for the verifiability that Wiki admins require.

This is dirty pool. A lot of effort by multiple contributors went into creating this article and into defending this article ... into elaborating and justifying the article a group of Wiki admins and stakeholders preordained for elimination. In fact, the relationships among the Wiki admins betrays an even greater expression of the reality they used as the final nail in the gang stalking article coffin (i.e. astroturfing). And it is astroturfing that is the cornerstone without which alt.usenet.kooks would not exist. Alt.usenet.kooks is essentially predicated on cooperative networking (i.e. recruitment & dissemination) among representatives of news groups Usenet-wide. And it is these representatives that infiltrated the ranks of users and admins who repeatedly mobilized one another to defend the Alt.usenet.kooks Wikipedia article from a series of challenges to its neutrality and fitness.

As Relates to Encyclopedias, Is Shabby Chic?

Individuals who have been adversely affected by a Wikipedia article converge with considerable glee on reports of Wikipedia founder's acquiescence to criticisms of quality raised by author Nicholas Carr, who reviled incoherent garbage in randomly selected entries about Bill Gates and Jane Fonda. Carr argued that a reference work should be judged by the quality of its worst entry. Well, don't look now Mr. Carr, but an analysis of messages in alt.usenet.kooks alone revealed that gang members were trading links to Wikipedia creations that include defamatory entries about Edmond Wollmann, Barbara Schwartz, Scott Keith and, in retaliation for his development of Wikipedia Watch, Daniel Brandt. And let's not include vulgar entries like Cunt and entries dedicated to obscure Usenet jargon (e.g. Formosa's Law, Clueless Newbie, alt.hierarchy, Newsgroup, Usenet Cabal, Flaming, Flamebait, Crossposting, Godwin's_law, "There Is No Cabal!", TINC, X-No-Archive, LART, Internet troll, and Sock puppet, and other Usenet-enhanced entries designed to control others or put others in their place (e.g. Vexatious_litigation and Netiquette).

Is this Wikipedia’s stupidest entry? Snuh. It’s not a real word. It’s not even jargon, well, unless you consider fans of the annually declining animated television series The Simpsons a noteworthy subculture. But perhaps the most noteworthy aspect of this Wikipedia entry is its section qualifying the meaning of the word snuh for the Usenet sub-subculture within this television subculture.

I notice settlers of this continent of the Web (Usenet) have their own words for lots of things, and they seem to think consumers of Wikipedia want to learn their language. They even have their own dialect (i.e. mebbe means maybe, figgers for figures, arse for ass). I don’t know of anyone save John Seigenthaler who has a lower opinion of Wikipedia’s faithful than me, but I will concede that Wikipedia does work as the right hand of Usenet. This is a marriage eHarmony.com can certify.

What do you think of Wikipedia now?