User talk:Becksguy/Information Flow on Campus: A Closer Look at Wikipedia

Barrett Brown's account of his experiences editing Wikipedia articles rings true. A lot of us can probably give one example of an experience similar to his.

Still, I wanted to see the edits for myself. He says he edited the following articles: For the article on Joseph Smith, Jr., it's perhaps too much of a haystack to find Barrett's edits. For Philip J. Corso, there's a ton of edits by Nima Baghaei and Captainbarrett, but I'm having trouble verifying his claim that before he got to it, the article was excessively focused on his UFOlogy. Cromulent Kwyjibo (talk) 18:11, 13 May 2008 (UTC)
 * Joseph Smith, Jr.
 * Joseph Smith, Sr.
 * Knights Templar
 * Sovereign Military Order of Malta
 * Philip J. Corso

If User:Captainbarrett is the only username he edited under, then all his edits are between 10 February 2007 and 8 March 2007, about one month. I confirmed that the author is almost certainly Captainbarret by a crosscheck of his article and his contributions, and they match with a very high level of confidence. And there was another WP article mentioned in 2600, Ebony Anpu, which was deleted per AfD, Articles for deletion/Ebony Anpu, on 25 February 2007. The problem with his article in 2600 is that it's based on one person's experience, so you can't draw any general conclusions from it, naturally. And it was a rather restricted experience at that, with only one month and several articles. To me, it's a poor basis to write an article on Wikipedia, even if true for him. — Becksguy (talk) 13:09, 14 May 2008 (UTC)


 * Thanks. I went to his user contributions page, clicked over to the earliest contributions, and then to one edit prior to his first edit of the article on Corso. The way I read what he wrote in 2600, I thought our article on Corso back then said next to nothing about his military service. And yet, the intro back then said "He was a member of President Eisenhower's National Security Council for four years, and was Chief of the Pentagon's Foreign Technology desk in Army Research and Development in 1961." Still, I believe Barrett when he talks about the kinds of experiences he had when editing articles about religious figures, and I get a chill from his suggestion on how the CIA or al-Qaeda could penetrate Wikipedia's adminship. Cromulent Kwyjibo (talk) 18:15, 14 May 2008 (UTC)

Question
Why is this here on a user page? Why hasn't this user done any other editing besides talk about this article? Does this 2600 article deserve it's own page? 67.115.155.131 (talk) 19:56, 12 November 2008 (UTC)