Update on the Bagley Wikipedia controversy
A contribution by Zbigniew Lukasiak:
“The wikipedia governance drama unfolds with new facts: I don’t know how should I treat The Register – is it a trustworthy source? The connection to the current financial crisis looks rather sensationalistic – but the alleged facts are interesting.
Especially this:
Though Bagley went to extreme lengths trying to expose Weiss, the Mantanmoreland account received heavy protection from the site’s inner circle, including Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy “Jimbo” Wales and an uber-administrator known only as SlimVirgin.
It’s unclear why. Some argue that Wikipedia circled the wagons simply because Judd Bagley was so persistent in questioning the site’s integrity. “I’d say to a point that the reason why Mantanmoreland got such protection was the extreme measures [Bagley] took to ‘out’ Mantanmoreland as Weiss,” says David Yellope, a longtime admin who was instrumental in eventually banning the account.
“Now, admittedly, we – being Wikipedia as a whole – should have listened to Judd in the first place, but there was a long time where Judd’s behavior was counter-productive.”
Definitively I can see how a person pushing too much is perceived as and attacker and activates the defence mechanisms. It is certainly natural human reaction that we tend to distrust strangers and once this first distrust reaction is activated it is reinforced with even more power after each attempt by the stranger to break it. The social organism defends it’s status quo. And wikipedia for sure has some very vitrious attackers so it must have strong defense mechanisms as well. How can we overcome this problem is one of the most interesting questions of P2P.”
November 3rd, 2008 at 3:00 pm
But even after his original point was proved right, Bagley remains banned and demonized on Wikipedia. At the time the fight over Mantanmoreland was raging, people even tried to get a “BADSITES” policy in effect to ban linking to Bagley’s site and other critics’ sites (such as Wikipedia Review); this was never actually enacted as a policy, but some overzealous admins still enforced it and imposed blocks on people for the horrible crime of linking to an “attack site”.