Wikipedia:Requests for arbitration/Mantanmoreland/Evidence

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Summary of checkuser findings

 * 1) For the period of time encompassed by the available checkuser logs, has edited exclusively from open proxies used by proxify.com.
 * 2) According to user agent information recorded in the checkuser logs, and SamiHarris use very different computer setups.  The value of this observation as evidence of anything is limited by the fact that user agents can be spoofed, and that proxify.com offers paid subscribers the option of substituting their own user agent with a different valid user agent.
 * 3) The checkusers have investigated a suspicion that the SamiHarris account was set up by Wordbomb to falsely implicate Mantanmoreland in additional (post-Lastexit) sockpuppetry. The basis for this suspicion is that Wordbomb has also occasionally used proxify.com proxies  .  Due to the nature of proxy editing, it is unlikely that this suspicion can ever be proved or disproved.

I have personally seen no persuasive evidence
Because there has been unseemly and false speculation in some quarters that I know this (or related claims) to be true, and that I have admitted as such in private forums, it is important for me to state what I know and what I don't know.

Claims about Mantanmoreland being author Gary Weiss have been floating around for a long time. Various claims of "proof" have been made, none of which I have found convincing. At times I have believed one way, at times I have believed another way. I have investigated the claims to the best of my ability and I have been unable to find proof one way or the other.

An email I sent to Mantanmoreland and others has been widely quoted as evidence that I supposedly "know" this claim to be true. Such interpretations are malarky, and most of the people making the claims appear to me to be acting in bad faith. What I said, at a point in time, was that I believed it to be true that Mantanmoreland == Gary Weiss. This was specifically in the context of a conversation in which I was trying to get more evidence... a proof, one way or the other. Me believing at a point in time in an investigation that something was true, is not the same thing as an assertion that it is true, nor of an "admission" or anything else.

Mantanmoreland steadfastly denies being Gary Weiss. Ask him yourself if you want to know.

Related allegations that I am protecting a "friend" are nonsense. Mantanmoreland and I do not get along well at all.

Related allegations that I have some vested interest in the underlying content dispute are even worse nonsense. I have no opinion about "naked short selling". I have never sold a stock short in my life. I have no financial interests of any kind in this case. If you read anything otherwise, or hints to that effect, on the overstock.com blog or elsewhere, well, I don't know was else to say but: nonsense. I think such allegations tell more about the people who are making them than anything else.

Regarding the specific claim at issue here, whether Sami Harris and Mantanmoreland are the same user, I can say quite firmly that I do not believe it to be true. I have interacted (argued!) with both users over an extended period of time by private email, and I have not seen any reason to think it true. The offsite "evidence" relating to this comes from a highly questionable source, and furthermore strikes me as completely unpersuasive. For all we know, these are faked screenshots from someone who has engaged in a campaign of harassment and bad behavior (on-wiki and off-wiki) that has been really astounding to witness.

I have reviewed my email archives to look for similarities between the users. I have examined email headers. I have looked for textual similarities, time patterns, etc. I see nothing to lead me to a conclusion that Sami Harris and Mantanmoreland are the same user.

For these reasons, I do not believe it to be true that Mantanmoreland == Samiharris. --Jimbo Wales (talk) 02:19, 15 February 2008 (UTC)

Sockpuppetry patterns
This is a slight update to evidence presented at the RfC.

It's important to remember that Mantanmoreland has abusively used at least two sockpuppet accounts in the past: Lastexit and Tomstoner. He never admitted to this, nor did he apologize, but the accounts fell into disuse after User:Fred Bauder warned him. With that in mind, consider these facts:
 * Samiharris always used a proxy.
 * Mantanmoreland and Samiharris shared a POV, and were especially prolific on articles related to Naked short selling, Overstock.com, and Gary Weiss.
 * They edited dozens of the same articles at similar times and to similar ends, and !voted on several issues together.
 * Mantanmoreland and Samiharris edit at precisely the same times of day. (see chart, details)
 * These accounts have better correlation coefficients with each other's editing patterns than any pair of 21 other accounts studied.
 * In spite of this fact, they have only interleaved edits within 30 minutes of each other five times over the last year (details), which is much much less overlap than with two randomly-selected accounts that made a comparable number of edits.
 * The closest edit was within 3 minutes. MM SH copying text (MM wrote this text the previous hour)
 * If their edits were randomly distributed over the year, there would be less than 1.5% chance that not one pair of edits would occur during the same minute. Considering the non-uniform and similar time distribution for both accounts, the true chance that this would occur randomly is much less.
 * Their contributions dovetail. That is: there are long strings of one user editing, followed by another editing, with no intersection.
 * Both accounts have used uncommon expressions such as "asked and answered many times," and "lipstick on a pig"&mdash;in fact it appears the latter expression has only occurred 20 times by 14 users in talk space, and two of those instances were from Mantanmoreland and Samiharris.
 * A lengthy catalog has been compiled of editing traits which these two accounts share. Of particular note are edit summaries using the strings " -- ", "rply", "duplicative", "Talk" (capitalized referring to talk page), and "as per" (instead of simply "per"). These traits are seen in several edit summaries by both of these accounts. Mantanmoreland's previous socks also shared many of these traits. However, these traits are uncommon among editors at large, based on a sample of Wikipedia editors.
 * " -- " (space, hyphen, hyphen, space) is particularly notable because it was also often used by both of Mantanmoraland's previous socks, and because there are many viable alternatives, and it seems less likely that the style would be "learned" like "rply" or "lipstick on a pig." A comparison with 14 other established editors showed that few other accounts ever used it in their edit summary, and out of all 18, the four most prolific users of this precise string were Samiharris, Mantanmoreland, and his two socks (see summary table).

Given Mantanmoreland's history of abuse, and given that these accounts shared interests, ideologies, "phraseologies," editing traits, and hours of operation, this is an easy case.

These are sockpuppets.

Some users complain that there's no statistical analysis, but that's never been required in a duck test as far as I'm aware. The comparisons I've made to other user are only to increase confidence that the traits and patterns highlighted really are uncommon, and that their simultaneous reincarnation in a single user is unlikely given (1) the user's history of sockpuppet abuse, (2) both account's shared POV, and (3) Mantanmoreland's motive to shunt edits with the "appearance of COI" off to another account.

I'm willing to do anything to provide more analysis, and I've continued to elaborate on my findings. It seems, however, that no amount of circumstantial evidence will convince some users. If that's this Committee's opinion, then I'll quit wasting my time.

If, however, someone could be persuaded by a test of their choosing, I'll do anything within my means to conduct that test.

Lastly, Jimbo and others claim that the users are stylistically quite different. They refer to prolific email conversations with both users. I think the evidence in this case should be confined to the site and its official appendages, but if Jimbo or others could articulate any specific stylistic differences at all, I'll look into it with all my might, as I've already offered. Cool Hand Luke 05:17, 15 February 2008 (UTC)

Conflict of interests
Mantanmoreland appears to be a certain financial writer that I will call "W" for convenience. It has been pointed out that Mantanmoreland edited a fairly obscure place called Varkala in India. Four months later, the writer W announced his vacation and marriage there. Whitstable suggested comparing edits in this vacation period for evidence of decline over the period W was in India. There's a slight decline, but what's really remarkable is a shift in editing patterns. Neither Samiharris nor Mantanmoreland has edited between 8:00 and 10:00 (3 AM EST, to 5 AM EMT) over the last year, but for slightly over a month, Mantanmoreland's time zones radically shifted. This causes me to conclude that user was in fact editing from the other side of the world at the precisely the same time W was visiting.

In conjunction with Mantanmoreland's interest in Varkala, I think it's safe to assume that the user is W. That said, has there been COI abuse? Yes.


 * Edits to mainspace Gary Weiss
 * Mantanmoreland, 26 (before May 15, 2007, when Mantanmoreland quit editing this article)
 * Samiharris, 18 (beginning May 14, 2007, when Samiharris started editing the article)
 * Lastexit, 7
 * Edits to mainspace Judd Bagley, who W has an adversarial relationship with
 * Samiharris  (revert warring with User:Phil Sandifer)
 * Mantanmoreland   (continuing revert war in apparent violation of 3RR by using sockpuppets)
 * See also the Judd Bagley deletion debate, where accounts appear to have double-voted.
 * Edit to Julian Robertson, where W is the rival in a real-world legal struggle. Here W appears to add his own source in the mix as Lastexit.
 * Other diffs where Mantanmoreland or his old socks used Weiss (often Weiss' Overstock.com-focused blog) as a source in the mainspace: Pump and dump Pump and dump II Arthur Levitt Hedge fund Julian Robertson (also a potential personal life COI) Naked short selling I Naked short selling II CUNY Richard Grasso Incidentally, one of Samiharris first edits argued for retaining the naked short sources added by Mantanmoreland.
 * See also Relata Refero's conclusions of long-term tendentious editing below.

Respectfully submitted. Cool Hand Luke 18:30, 15 February 2008 (UTC)

Reply to Smallbones
User:Smallbones complains that comparisons to other users are meaningless due to small sample size and particularly for unannounced methods. I hope to address this imagined shortcoming.

User:Alanyst has compiled the edit history of every user who made between 1000 and 2000 edits in 2007, constituting 3629 accounts. See Alanyst's section below. Building upon Alanyst, who did the hard work, I've begun to use this data to extend my previous comparisons. These are the same methods I've used, and I don't know how they'll compare to the whole group. This is also practically the largest sample size possible, so I think that decisively deals with Smallbone's objections.

Of these 3629 accounts, the editing patterns of Mantanmoreland and Samiharris are each other's 10th and 15th best match, respectively&mdash;out of 3629 active accounts, mind you. At this point, I believe we can say with some reasonable certainty that their editing patterns are a very good match. See details. (There's a caveat that it's unclear what good correlations actually mean. I posit that they mean that the underlying editor(s) have similar lifestyles and behavioral patterns that tends to make them edit at similar times of day. This is a therefore a proxy for offline lifestyle.)

Incidentally, all but 1 of 31 other accounts correlating best with these two users has at least one editing collision (that is, an edit which occurred with in the same minute). Recall that these two accounts only have a single edit within three minutes and only five examples of back-and-forth editing occurring within 30 minutes. As Alanyst details, 9.5-16.8% of all accounts with 1000-2000 edits don't have same-minute collisions with Mantanmoreland and Samiharris respectively, but accounts with superior correlation tend to have more collisions (which makes sense&mdash;accounts editing when Mantanmoreland is asleep have virtually no chance to collide). So once again, the non-overlap of these two accounts is curious.

''Note, I may extend my previous studies to these 3629 accounts to determine the number 30-minute interleaving edits, by the definition that I used for these two accounts here. Once again, this is now an established methodology, and I don't know what the results will be, so could not possibly use selection bias&mdash;consciously or unconsciously. If it takes comparing every user on the site to show that Smallbone's assumption of bad faith is misplaced on me, then I'll do it. Cool Hand Luke'' 07:35, 18 February 2008 (UTC)

Correlation coefficients examined
It's previously been shown that these two accounts have higher correlation coefficients (that is, their edit time graphs are better predictors for each other) than nearly all of 3629 accounts studied. Only one account with comparably high correlation had no editing collisions with either user ("editing collisions" are edits that occur in the same minute). Studied accounts include all users with 1000-2000 edits in 2007, as isolated by User:Alanyst.

In order to determine how unlikely it is that any two accounts' editing patterns would match as well as Mantanmoreland's and Samiharris', I compared 3627 users from Alanyst's data, yielding 6,575,751 comparisons. (3627 were used instead of 3629, because edits form "User:Cs" and "User:C S" were apparently mangled or mixed together in some strange way in my data.) Each editor had their edits put into half-hour buckets, as I've been doing, and each account was compared to every other account, and the resulting coefficients were recorded on a histogram sorting into 0.005 slices. The percentile of various points can therefore be determined. The correlation between Samiharris and Mantanmoreland over 2007 is 0.868, meaning they compare more similarly than about 99.93% of any randomly selected pair of accounts. In other words, if you picked 1430 pairs of accounts at random, you would only find one with editing patterns that match as well as these two. This has been dismissed as merely showing they edit from the same time zone, which we "already knew," but they are obviously more similar than belonging to the same time zone. In the first place, we did not know that they edit from the same time zone. Moreover, their daily patterns have many other similarities. These accounts edit chiefly in the day, with somewhat fewer edits in the evening, and absolutely no edits in the deep morning. Many accounts do not follow this pattern&mdash;even in Eastern Time. Students will sometimes edit very late, and many people have limited access during the day, so edit primarily in the evening. Still, editing timestamp information alone is just one consideration. Consider prior sockpuppet cases:

User:SevenOfDiamonds and User:NuclearUmpf had remarkably similar editing patterns, with 0.7758 correlation coefficient, which is a bit better than the 99th percentile. In this case, I think the editing traits added something to the case. Note that these accounts are also apparently on Eastern Time, but they have quite different patterns from Samiharris and Mantanmoreland. The User:Runcorn case is different. Runcorn made the bulk of all edits between 19:00 and 24:00, which was different from every other purported sock run by Runcorn. User:Brownlee and User:R613vlu had so few edits over this period, that their correlations are almost 0 with respect to Runcorn, even though they all appear to be on British time. The correlation coefficients are strong between User:Newport, User:Londoneye, User:Taxwoman, and to a lesser extent Brownlee, but User:Poetlister, R613vlu, and Runcorn have somewhat different patterns from these accounts and from each other. So what gives? One possibility is that these accounts edited from different computers at different locations through the day. For example, a work computer could have been used typically for the accounts that peak in the daytime, while a the Runcorn account might have been used from home, explaining why it peaks in the evening. Separate computers would also explain how these account could edit while continually evading checkuser evidence. (It's also possible that some of these accounts weren't sockpuppets, but that's not relevant here.)

So in conclusion, it's not clear what similar editing times mean. But if one asks how similar these user's editing times are, the answer is "very, very similar&mdash;less than 1 in a 1000 edit at such similar times." Cool Hand Luke 08:53, 24 February 2008 (UTC)

Non-overlapping is similar to prior proxy editing case
As in the Runcorn case, one of these accounts used open proxies. Runcorn was unlike many conventional socks because there were very few overlaps. Between seven major accounts totalling over 10,000 edits, I've found that Runcorn's socks had only 16 examples of interleaving on 14 days (Interleaving defined as A..B1...B2...BX..C, where A might =C and the distance between A and C < 30 minutes). These accounts, with about 3200 edits combined over the last year have only 5 interleaves. In both cases there are no examples of back-and-forth simultaneous editing.

Presumably this is because with proxy editing it takes longer to switch accounts than it does with more reckless styles of socking identified by CU. Cool Hand Luke 21:32, 24 February 2008 (UTC)

Replies to Mantanmoreland

 * 1) In response to a claim that Mantanmoreland was pushing a POV since his first edit, Mantanmoreland replies that he was merely reverting to a version that existed prior to his editing. In fact, this version was rewritten by an IP hours before his arrival, 70.23.85.112 (see MM-IP diff). 70.23.85.112 is a New York IP address, that was solely focused on Naked short selling and made its last edit precisely 60 minutes before Mantanmoreland set up an account. It is not unreasonable to conclude that Mantanmoreland was reverting to his own version of the article&mdash;in apparent violation of the 3RR.
 * 2) Mantanmoreland claims that he was fighting against "naked shorting conspiracy theories" with his edits. That's true, there were also some clear trolls on the article. I would like to clearly say that Mantanmoreland has done a lot of good work for the project, and that I still maintain that he should not be banned&mdash;if he comes clean and submits to editing restrictions. I thought "naked shorting conspiracy theories" sounded funny though&mdash;grammatically weird. As it turns out, the only person to have ever used this precise phrase ("naked shorting conspiracy theories") on the internet appears to be the financial writer W. Cool Hand Luke 22:49, 26 February 2008 (UTC)
 * 3) Below Mantanmoreland posts his stale spiel from SirFozzie's investigation almost verbatim. Therefore I suggest that users take a gander at G-Dett's excellent response there.
 * 4) Mantanmoreland claims that he doesn't use expressions like "it needs to be noted." I have no idea what expressions he means, but Mantanmoreland clearly uses the expression "this needs to be noted," which seems at least a little similar to me. Hat tip: User:Sxeptomaniac. Cool Hand Luke 23:36, 27 February 2008 (UTC)

Sockpuppetry and bad faith participation
To show that we're setting the bar for proof of sockpuppetry here much higher than we usually do, I was going to present some diffs from the Suspected Sock Puppet noticeboard. A quick look, however, showed that almost every single incident reported there was accepted and blocks were handed out with much less scrutiny and analysis than is going on here with Mantanmoreland and Samiharris. The question has to be asked, why does Mantanmoreland get such different treatment than others? The fact is, Mantanmoreland has received preferential and troubling treatment throughout the two years of this episode, including help in pushing POV in several articles and retaliating against editors who tried to resolve it.

Mailing list participation with certain, active admins
First, it appears from comments by Jimbo above and JzG (since removed) and Durova below and elsewhere that Mantamoreland and Samiharris were members of at least one of the private, invitation-only mailing lists to which several of our administrators and perhaps one or two sitting arbitrators belong to and. I believe that list is owned and operated by SlimVirgin. I suspect that here may be where SlimVirgin invited Samiharris to participate in the mailing list.

POV pushing with help at Gary Weiss
Mantanmoreland and Samiharris (and Mantanmoreland sock Lastexit in at least one instance) were very active in protecting the Gary Weiss article from containing any information, no matter how well cited from reliable sources, that might not reflect positively on the article's subject.
 * Mantanmoreland: Builds the Weiss article using his main account and his abusive sock account, Lastexit  (28 out of the first 34 edits to the article are by Mantanmoreland and Lastexit), then tried to protect if from NPOV editing.
 * Samiharris:    (this last is a paragraph that had been agreed to on the talk page) and argues that a NYTimes article can be listed but not actually linked to

They were helped in protecting the Weiss article by several administrators.
 * SlimVirgin: Protects the article    .  She also protects the talk page and, while protected, archives discussion  and then protects the archive  and admin deletes history from the talk page.
 * JzG: After I initiated a content RfC on the article, he shuts down the discussion and archives it .  Later, he removes cited text and then fully protects the article
 * Dmcdevit: Appears to admin delete previous versions of the article along with the edit history  .  These edits were subsequently oversighted.  Is this a violation of GFDL?
 * Unknown oversight admin: In this diff Mantanmoreland appears to be aware of talk and main page comments being deleted .  I request that the ArbCom check the oversighted material from the main page and post the name of the admin who oversighted them.
 * Jimbo: Admin deletes the Weiss AfD discussion Articles for deletion/Gary Weiss.  I don't think Jimbo is trying to help push POV in the Gary Weiss article with this deletion, but, I don't think that there's anything in the deletion discussion that should have been hidden.  But then, perhaps after being alerted via mailing list (IMO), Jimbo comes to the article talk page after I opened the content RfC which was shut down by JzG and states, "zero tolerance, shoot on sight"

I was going to also show POV pushing at Patrick M. Byrne, Naked short selling, and Overstock.com by Mantanmoreland and Samiharris but others have already presented that evidence below.

Other inappropriate admin actions

 * SlimVirgin indef blocks WordBomb about two hours after he filed a request for mediation concerning content in the Gary Weiss article for "libellous edits to an article; attempted to "out" another editor"  without any prior warning to stop the behavior  and protects his user talk page
 * David Gerard indef blocks Piperdown as a "sockpuppet/meatpuppet for overstock.com" . More discussion on the block here.
 * David Gerard blocks an entire IP range in Utah, falsely stating that it was an open proxy , apparently in an effort to keep Judd Bagley (WordBomb) from editing Wikipedia. When asked about it by a Utah newspaper reporter three months later, who confirmed that it wasn't an open proxy , he unblocked it

Anti-Bagley/Byrne/Overstock.com vitriol and personal attacks

 * Mantanmoreland edits a userbox on his userpage to say "This user has been stalked by Judd Bagley" . Bagley then alters the personal attack to a message advertising his blog .  SlimVirgin then reverts it back to the version with the personal attack on Bagley..
 * SlimVirgin states that Bagley conducted "some of the worst stalking that Wikipedia has seen".
 * JzG calls Bagley an "obsessive troll", a "net.kook", "absolutely not above forgery", a "vicious, agenda-driven troll" , "Bagley's lunacy" , "his (Bagley's) vile smear campaigns" , "harassment meme inventor" , "long history of abuse by Bagley" , "paranoid fantasies of banned abusers" , "targets of his harassment" , "Bagley uses disinformation and harassment against anyone who does not uncritically support his company" , "Bagley is a vicious hatemonger" , "Bagley's idiocy" , "People like Bagley. We've heard what he has to say, we've debated it, it's baseless - a tissue of lies from beginning to end" , "Posting links to Bagley's blog is simply wrong. Not because of BADSITES but because it is enabling a banned troll. We should not link to the ravings of a rebuffed POV-pusher" , "the delusional outpourings of sociopaths" , and "this malicious piece of shit-stirring by Bagley".
 * Phil Sandifer says, "Overstock is an unprofitable business run by a lunatic who rants about sith lords, with a sociopathic executive who infects his critics with spyware" and "run by the criminally insane", "Overstock is a money-losing company with a staggering record of despicable actions" , (on Wikien) "Bagley is so odious that everybody is unwilling to take him off the blacklist" , and "Bagley, or any other nutjob running an attack site"
 * Georgewilliamherbert on WordBomb (and Piperdown), "They're banned because they behave sociopathically and abusively towards editors here, tracking down real names, calling their homes, their employers, their friends, trying to get them fired, urging others to stalk them in real life, threatening violence, etc." and on the Wikien mailing list, "Bagley's claims are false, for reasons unrelated to him being a sociopathic, evil harrasser"
 * Morven referring to Bagley's revelation that SlimVirgin had abusively used a sockpuppet "Nor do I think it worthwhile to give stalkers, especially stalkers for pay, satisfaction"
 * JoshuaZ (on the Wikien message board), "Bagley is a complete ass", "We should confuse bad faith (i.e. Judd Bagley) with good faith editors" , "Bagley, Brandt, Amorrow and others have engaged in real life harassment that has ruined lives"
 * David Gerard tells Bagley on the Wikipedia Signpost news suggestion page to "Fuck off" and on the Wikien mailing list, "Bagley isn't your regular corporate spammer, he's actually notable in Reliable Sources™ for his odious stalking behaviour"

Retaliation and personal attacks

 * My RfA nomination was within three hours of closing when SlimVirgin requested that it be extended stating, "There was a serious concern a few months ago that Cla68 was either a sockpuppet of banned User:Wordbomb (a very abusive sockpuppet and stalker) or was helping him. My recollection is that there was no technical evidence that Cla was Wordbomb, but he definitely seemed to be helping him, and some of his edits indicate that they're based in the same area."
 * SlimVirgin then alleges in the RfA that I was a supporter, if not an outright sockpuppet or meatpuppet of WordBomb and that I posted conspiracy theories about the Gary Weiss article on Wikipedia Review . I've never had an account on Wikipedia Review.
 * After repeating the allegations in the RfA, SlimVirgin states, "Also, I forgot to say earlier that, judging by some of Cla's edits, he appears to be based in the same state as Wordbomb." . I have resided in Japan since September 2006 and before that I did not reside in Utah, which is apparently where Bagley resides (see Gerard IP range block above).
 * Mantanmoreland also gives a detailed oppose vote in the RfA accusing me of helping WordBomb and calls me a "classic troll".
 * A quick succession of oppose votes then follow, including FloNight, Crum375 , and Jayjg , among others.
 * During the RfA, discussion turned to Bagley's blog, and I was threatened with a block by Crum375 for even mentioning its name (AntiSocialMedia.net) even though no policy at that or the present time prohibited doing that.
 * At almost the same time that Crum375 threatened the block, SlimVirgin edited the blocking policy to support the threat
 * I subsequently opened an RfC on my involvement in the Weiss matter and the RfA discussion. I posted a notice of the RfC on the AN noticeboard .  SlimVirgin deleted the notice six minutes later .  When I asked her about that on her talk page, she immediately archived her talk page without responding (times, dates, and content of my post located here )
 * Crum375 likens unblocking Piperdown to "If a psychopath who violated your mother and your sister, say, wanted to live with you, would you let him, until he violated your wife too?"
 * JzG to another editor on the Gary Weiss talkpage, "You're sure doing a lot to give the impression that you prefer your friend Mr. Bagley to my friend Mr. Wales."
 * David Gerard states on the Wikien mailing list when discussing my involvement with the Gary Weiss article and a block I received after Jimbo's "shoot on sight" statement, "Precis: Cla68 has been a dick about this for quite some time, knew *precisely* how much of a dick he was being, and thoroughly deserved the block, and probably a longer one. He's not here to write an encyclopedia."
 * Mantanmoreland taunts me about my failed RfA and makes clear that he helped the RfA to fail because I opposed him on article content and that I'm a "WordBomb supporter"

Weiss AfD
Jimbo has denied a request to make the Gary Weiss AfD discussion (Articles for deletion/Gary Weiss) publicly available. Nevertheless, I encourage the arbitrators to review it as it contains comments by Mantanmoreland and others, including Fred Bauder which may help shed some light on issues in this case, such as questions of COI, sockpuppeting, POV-pushing, personal attacks on editors whether banned or otherwise, and attempts to link efforts to correct problems with the Weiss article to the agenda of a "notorious troll", aka WordBomb. I'll highlight some of the illuminating comments from that AfD below.


 * Several editors agree that the Gary Weiss article as built by Mantanmoreland and Lastexit has serious POV problems:
 * Delete. Yes, definitely self promotion. - jlao 04 08:13, 30 October 2006 (UTC)
 * Comment a possible Checkuser request might be needed. T Rex | talk 02:49, 6 November 2006 (UTC)
 * Weakest Keep. Clearly has serious conflict of interest issues and needs substantial weeding (the quotes section seems particularly extraneous); as it stands, the article verges on spam...Robertissimo 08:31, 30 October 2006 (UTC)
 * Keep Notable, although there is strong evidence that either Gary Weiss, or a devoted disciple, has been editing the page. Fred Bauder 13:41, 30 October 2006 (UTC)
 * Gary Weiss may have created the article and edited it, but he is notable, as is his work. Fred Bauder 15:34, 30 October 2006 (UTC)
 * Keep/Comment - If we can remove the bias then the article should be kept per the notability factor. I’m all for banning the primary editors as jlao suggests and giving the article a chance to come around. -bobby 14:20, 30 October 2006 (UTC)
 * Keep per Robertissimo and Fred Bauder. Conflicts o’ interest do not necessarily mean that the subject is not notable, but it does mean that close monitoring of the article is needed. Torinir ( Ding my phone My support calls E-Support Options ) 20:34, 30 October 2006 (UTC)
 * Keep, although I am sure the page will remain biased as long as the high level protection of this page remains. — Kim van der Linde at venus 12:52, 31 October 2006 (UTC)
 * Strong keep. Self-promoter? Okay, sure. Notable subject? Undoubtedly. Clean it up, monitor it closely. Problem solved. –badlydrawnjeff talk 14:25, 31 October 2006 (UTC)
 * Keep, but the sockpuppet issue needs to be investigated. Everyking 16:56, 31 October 2006 (UTC)
 * Abstain though dramatic clean-up certainly seems to be required. Given the notability, a delete may be inadvisable, but the current writing, especially the Barron’s plug (my, my, they actually like one of their own?) and the quotes section, make this article an abysmal example of information reporting. It looks more like a piece of resume puffery. The subject may be “notable” but the article does an extremely poor job of NPOV reporting on the subject...146.6.44.160 (talk • contribs).

"The claims of sockpuppetry by three unnamed editors (presumably myself and the two other editors who disagreed with Cla68 over the last 24 hrs.) are outrageous lies. So is the WP:VAIN assertion, which is rubbish, which is made in a link, now deleted, from a cockamamie anonymous website obviously maintained by banned editor and notorious troll User:WordBomb, who has been harassing myself and other editors via multiple sockpuppets as can be seen from his user page. I urge interested editors to view the actual edit history of this article, which is notable for its relative inactivity in recent weeks and for the utter lack of substance to Cla68’s claims. –Mantanmoreland 06:42, 31 October 2006 (UTC)"
 * Mantanmoreland then lies when he says that he had not used any sockpuppetry with the article, even though he had already been caught using Lastexit to edit it. He then tries to link the problems with the article to "notorious troll" WordBomb:

WordBomb and SlimVirgin
WordBomb and SlimVirgin recently and exhaustively discussed off-site the events surrounding WordBomb's original attempts to bring his concerns over Mantanmoreland's involvement with Wikipedia here at a discussion forum website called Wikback (their discussion begins later in the thread). I believe that this helps shed more light on the history and handling of this issue.

Naked Short Selling has seen long-term tendentious editing
As I stated here, i had not previously been involved in this issue, under this or any previous username, nor have I to my recollection ever been involved in discussion with either Mantanmoreland, Samiharris, or indeed anyone from this dispute. Nor do I have a view on the real-world dispute this reflects. Accordingly, I thought it would be helpful if I had a look at this article and the related talkpage.
 * My first impression was that the article had major problems, which I summarised in the linked diff, although there were no tags to indicate that. I did not at that time consider carefully what had happened on the talkpage, merely analysing the general approach.
 * I then considered, purely on the basis of the current version of the talkpage, what the mechanism was by which this unfortunate state was arrived at in a fairly high-traffic article. In each of the below cases I link to my summary of the talkpage section immediately above it.
 * Here I summarise a section of the talkpage in which User:Samiharris argues with an anonymous IP about the wording of a section on legal action by companies that believe themselves defrauded by manipulative short selling of their stock. He says "Not one has succeeded. I have added this information to the encyclopedia. Please do not remove." However, as the IP correctly points out, "not succeeding" is a mischaracterisation of the then status of those and related lawsuits. Either way, relevant legal studies were available; instead a DTCC press release was aggressively defended as the sole useful source of information.
 * This is damning as far as I'm concerned. A completely impartial observer from the good people at the Business and Economics Wikiproject drops by the page as part of their regular assessment patrol. He says the style is too journalistic and over-dependent on such quotes; that there is too much focus on the media controversy and on specific cases within that controversy; and there is absolutely no discussion of the economics behind it. User:Samiharris replies (hilarious, if these allegations are true) that "this article was written by committee" and that there is only a smattering of news articles to cite, as no independent reliable sources exist. As demonstrated at the end of the talkpage, and as anyone with ten seconds to spare can determine at SSRN and EconWeb, multiple surveys exist. Why then this emphasis on journalism, quotes and controversy, in the face of impartial external input, to the point of making what on WP we can call at most an inexplicable exaggeration?
 * User:Mantanmoreland and User:Samiharris agree with each other, with no other participants in the conversation, that an article on Regulation SHO, set up by the SEC to curb naked short selling, should be replaced with a redirect to Naked Short Selling. It is called a 'blatant POVfork' in spite of the fact that an article about regulation X set up to regulate Y might more than conceivably have considerably different scope and content than an article on Y. The examples I provide in the above diff are of the obvious parallel, insider trading and the various regulations adopted to deal with that issue. I see no discernible reason why this should be different, especially since the regulation itself was highly notable in terms of dedicated coverage.
 * Samiharris removes a tag placed by another uninvolved user. The tag's removal is completely uncalled-for and again involves some creative overlooking of fairly obvious sources.
 * Finally, on the matter of a particular financial journalist's views. These come up again and again on just that section of the talkpage I see. The particular theory he espouses has received little or no attention from reliable sources, and seems to be the province of a particular kind of online bulletin board, and a few opinion columns in the financial press. My summary of a survey relevant literature is in this diff; I end with the statement "I'd like to point out this appears to be a relatively fringe-y theory, or at best something that is considerably less important than a dozen points that are not in here, and any sort of frequent pushing of it should have set off some alarm bells."


 * To sum up, I have looked at a snapshot of one particular article among many involved in this dispute.
 * That article shows all the signs to me of long-term tendentious editing, something I am tragically familiar with identifying.
 * Judging by talkpage discussion, that recent tendentiousness seems to originate from User:Samiharris and User:Mantanmoreland.
 * That tendentiousness takes a particular side in what appears to be a real-world dispute over regulation policy.
 * This is not the first, nor the worst article in which real-world disputes and fringe POVs have spilled over into a Wikipedia article. This is, in my memory, however, the first where a long-term effort by the article's owners has succeeding in creating the impression of an article that is stable and non-disputed even though it appears to have received considerable attention. (This is particularly pernicious, in my opinion. When an article is problematic, that state should be telegraphed to the reader.)
 * Whether this is caused by false consensus, or by the fact that they received no opposition, or the possibility that all opposition was blocked as a presumed proxy for a particular editor who disagrees with this views in RL, is something on which I shall not express a view.


 * Given this, I additionally submit that all evidence or proposals that begin with the assumption that "nowhere has it been demonstrated these accounts have injured the encyclopaedia" or that there is no evidence of editing that in and of itself has violated policy is flawed to start off with, and should be viewed with concern.

Have a nice Arbitration,

Relata refero (talk) 14:07, 15 February 2008 (UTC)

To User:Smallbones
Smallbones below makes the claim that the "statistical" evidence is rubbish. I have some considerable experience with statistical and econometric methods, and I don't think its rubbish. The size of the dataset is extremely small; a model is unspecified; and there are sundry other problems. (As someone has pointed out somewhere, what does Pearson's coefficient strictly mean here? Does a correlation in the probability of either one of these accounts editing at a particular time - because that is what it means here - actually imply something real? What is the underlying distribution of probabilities that would permit us to test the likelihood of similarities? Yes, all that is inexact.)

However, there are some basic points that are well-taken. If we assume a uniform distribution, then there is a very, very small probability that edits from two such accounts would not overlap. If we assume that the two accounts are from the same timezone, that probability is even lower. Combined with the textual analysis - phrases limited on talkspace here to fourteen out of thousands of editors, and edit summary patterns - things are more interesting.

Further, as has also been pointed out, statistics is essentially a matter of good faith in some cases. We trust SF and CHL to, when analysing MM' edit summaries, to pick out every relevant tic and compare it to SH, and vice versa. We assume they weren't data mining.

If all that is true, then I submit that Smallbones' objections go away. (Otherwise, I invite him to prove that MM and I are sockpuppets.) Relata refero (talk) 23:17, 16 February 2008 (UTC)


 * Further response: I note that there is no response to my point that, if we assume a very simple model of independent times of editing, uniformly distributed, then someone calculated that the probability over a year that no such edit periods overlap is around a single percentage point; obviously, if the individuals are in the same timezone, that probability is even lower. The strength of this artefact of the data is strong enough that other concerns about the degrees of freedom etc. go away.
 * Also, I absolutely agree that there is a tendency to not report negative results - its particularly bad in economic data work. However, in this case, I believe someone can confirm that at least CHL and SF both have said that they particularly did not find any 'tics' in one account's editing that were not duplicated to a degree in the other account's editing. Relata refero (talk) 14:11, 17 February 2008 (UTC)
 * As I thought. Relata refero (talk) 07:57, 19 February 2008 (UTC)

To User:Mantanmoreland
I do not believe, on reflection, that User:Mantanmoreland has as yet raised any points that actually require a response. For the interested, here are the rejoinders that I had originally made, and have deleted as unnecessary. Relata refero (talk) 14:41, 17 February 2008 (UTC)

Linkholder to my original investigation
This is the state of my Investigation page at the beginning of this Arbitration. (the core is my work, additional evidence by many others (including Durova, Alanyst, and others is also present.) There is also a Sandbox page for everyone to work on that is linked off my investigation.

Evidence found compelling by the community
On the related Request For Comment Administrators' noticeboard/Mantanmoreland/RfC, the overwhelming view of the community was that the evidence provided linked the two accounts to each other. At the time I write this, the outside view of User:Cool Hand Luke which summarized the evidence he gathered, with the conclusion that these two accounts were related, had 34 endorses.

On WP:DUCK's, Geese, and other waterfowl
I regret that such an imperfect standard has to be the core test for this evidence. Most of us value certainty, the knowledge that something IS or IS NOT the case. Unfortunately, due to one user using open proxies, that certainty is not possible.

Instead, what I tried to do is look for reasons why they could be linked, as well as why they may not. What I found was a lot of the first, and not a lot of the second. I stand by my investigation, the investigation of other users, and my personal conclusion that these two accounts are linked.

I can understand why any action based off personal conclusions and not facts is problematic. That is why we're here in front of ArbCom after all. However, in previous ArbCom cases, the standard is clear:

'''It is rarely possible to determine with complete certainty whether several editors from the same geographic area are sockpuppets, meat puppets, or acquaintances who happen to edit Wikipedia. In such cases, remedies may be fashioned which are based on the behavior of the user rather than their identity. Editors who edit with the same agenda and make the same types of disruptive edits may be treated as a single editor.'''

(see:Requests_for_arbitration/Starwood)

Even if we cannot prove these two accounts are a certain-Real Life identity, that is secondary to my goal once the investigation started, and that's to determine if these accounts are linked.

On-Wikipedia vs Off-Wikipedia regarding evidence
One thing I note with concern, is that one "side"'s off-Wikipedia evidence is routinely dismissed and castigated, but now a lot of off-Wikipedia evidence is being offered by the other "side" in this discussion.

When this whole thing started, myself and Durova limited ourselves to on-Wikipedia evidence only specifically because of the contentiousness of some specific off-Wikipedia evidence, and the tactics used to gather said evidence. Durova said it best in an essay:

'''If something's wrong and it's not getting fixed, please be patient and keep working on fixing it the right way. If you let your own standards drop because you get frustrated, people will go ewwww and walk away. Then it'll take even longer to get your problem solved. That's not a happy place to be.'''

I have tried my hardest not to slip into off-Wikipedia evidence, to avoid that "eewwwwww". I went so far as to redact a comment that I had made that contradicted the way someone viewed this case, because that comment to me was based in a personal email that I was asked to keep confidential.

However, while I am perfectly cognizant of the private nature of the information being offered to ArbCom to support the viewpoint that these two accounts are not linked, I cannot help but be disappointed. We have attempted to be as open as possible, to get everything we know, and somethings we suspect on the table. In otherwords, we've been open and honest, and hope that Sunshine, indeed is the best disenfectant.

In poker terms, we've set our hand on the table, and we have two pair (not an unbeatable hand, but a pretty good one). Our opponent is refusing to tell us what he actually has, but is telling us his hand beats two pair.

(this is just my thoughts, I speak for no-one but myself on this)

Mantanmoreland, Lastexit, Tomstoner

 * 11 December 2005: Tomstoner's account created. logs
 * 28 January 2006: Mantanmoreland's account created. log Mantanmoreland's first edit, and 16 of his first 20, are to Naked short selling.
 * 8 February 2006: Tomstoner's contributions begin. The first seven edits are to articles about Indian cities or people.
 * 11 February 2006: Tomstoner's eighth and ninth edits are to Naked short selling. His tenth edit is to support Mantanmoreland on the talk page.
 * 19 February 2006: Tomstoner's eleventh edit is to nominate Patrick M. Byrne for AFD. The majority of the remaining edits are to pages related to the Weiss/Naked short selling/Bagley/Overstock.com dispute.
 * 13 March 2006: Mantanmoreland adds massively revises in the first person a post in which Tomstoner is explaining Tomstoner's actions.
 * 22 April 2006: Lastexit's account created. logs Lastexit's contributions begin.  Within 2 hours, contributing to Short (finance).  For the remainder of his editing history, the majority of edits are to pages related to the to the Weiss/Naked short selling/Bagley/Overstock.com dispute.
 * 13 May 2006: Lastexit makes an AFD nomination. Less than 3 hours later, Mantanmoreland votes delete in the same AFD.  Mantanmoreland had not edited (admin only) the article, participated in no other AFDs on the 13 May 2006 log, and had previously only participated in one AFD.
 * 7 July 2006: Diff of abusive use of Lastexit that Fred included in the warning on 23 July.
 * 22 July 2006: Tomstoner's last edit.
 * 23 July 2006: Fred Bauer's warning to Mantammoreland about the abuse of Lastexit.
 * 23 July 2006 1.5 hours later, Mantanmoreland archives all threads on his talk page, including Fred's warning. Subsequent edits to his talk page and talk archive make it clear that Mantanmoreland is aware of the warning. Conversation continues on Mantanmoreland's talk page; though it appears that part of the history has been oversighted due to claims about Mantanmoreland's real world identity that were included.  Fred reiterates the warning.  Fred has later said that this was checkuser confirmed sockpuppetry.
 * 24-25 July 2006: IP editor(s) and Lastexit edit war over using Lastexit's edit page to label as a sockpuppet of Mantanmoreland.
 * 29 July 2006: Last edit by Lastexit.
 * My review of the history of these three accounts indicates to me that they clearly meet the duck test; even absent Fred's warning.

Additional timestamp analysis
Above, CoolHandLuke presents a showing the timestamps of edits by Mantanmoreland and Samiharris, and remarks on a shift in editing patterns at a time that GW was in India, as known from GW's blog. Looking at the chart, there is a second significant event that also merits examination. From roughly mid-late October 2007 to the end of November, both Mantanmoreland and Samiharris show a dramatic drop in the frequency of their edits. (Neither has any deleted contributions then.) Does a comparison to GW's blog for this second time period support or deny the association?

I hoped to find a blog post indicating GW's location. I expected that if GW was known to be in India at this time, this would confirm our belief, and if GW was known to be in the states, it would tend to refute it. Instead, I found that in October-December 2007, GW was not posting about his personal life. I did find timestamps on the blog entries at the blog. I checked from mid-September to December 31, 2007. They show:
 * 1) In November 2007, GW posted 9 blog posts, or 0.300 per day. On November 2, he posted at 10:51 AM, on November 30 he posted at 11:09 AM.  All posts between those times were from 7:46 PM to 1:25 AM.
 * 2) In December 2007, GW posted 24 posts in 31 days, or 0.735 per day. In this period, he posted from 6:49 AM (a 1 line post, with 9:02 AM otherwise the earliest) to 8:55 PM, spread reasonably evenly throughout the day.
 * 3) From 16 September to 31 October he posted 32 times in 46 days, or 0.696 per day. One of the posts was at 12:52 AM, one was at 10:44 PM, the other 30 were from 7:54 AM to 6:30 PM, spread reasonably evenly throughout the day.

What I found was that, at the same time both Mantanmoreland and Samiharris had a major drop in their activity levels, GW also had a major drop in activity on his blog and a timeshift. At the very least, he was extremely busy with other events at this time, alternatively he was travelling.

When writing the above, I hadn't yet looked at GW's blog for September-November 2006, when Mantanmoreland showed the time shifting. I still haven't analyzed in detail, but a quick glance shows a massive drop in posting to that blog in October 2006, combined with some evidence of a timeshift. Someone could still go through and go a complete timestamp series for all of 2006-2008, but I don't see any point here. GRBerry, updated 16:01, 20 February 2008 (UTC)


 * Image:GW blogspot timestamps.pdf displays the raw data.
 * Wannabe Kate displays that November 2007 was the month in which Mantanmoreland had the lowest number of edits since the account began editing - 7.
 * Wannabe Kate displays that November 2007 was the month in which Samiharris had the lowest number of his active months (started late in 1/2007, left the building early in 2/2008.)

Impact on Wikipedia and NPOV
I see that Relata Refero addressed in detail the same issue I looked into about what abuse or damage has occurred. There are several other articles that I think should be considered, however, while I frankly find it hard to believe anyone who has read either Overstock.com or Patrick M. Byrne has not seen the problem. In any event, here are a few examples from those and elsewhere that should raise concerns. 

Note that in the first link, Samiharris adds Overstock as an example to Smear campaigns (the same was done in Astroturfing, a similar issue). The next link in particular seems to pursue disputes outside the scope of Wikipedia. Each of the others seems to suffer from the same types of problems. A fair hearing is certainly important here, as anywhere, but I think these should be considered along with the rest of the evidence.

Other implications
Finally, since people are just now beginning to discuss it, I think the community will need to reexamine the impact of the way WordBomb has been greeted on Wikipedia, first by Mantanmoreland and a now confirmed sock, Lastexit. To say the evidence here changes nothing, or that WordBomb was the only editor with an agenda, or that his actions were uniquely inappropriate, are all at this point unsupported, as are the more recent claims that allegedly serving a corporation somehow places WordBomb beyond the pale (with respect, it seems he’s alternatively obsessed or just doing his job). Clearly both sides are interested in an off-Wikipedia dispute, both sides have pursued their position on Wikipedia with questionable means, and really we shouldn't be surprised by either. For that matter, I have no problem with saying the editors are too involved to edit this portion of Wikipedia, or with applying blocks for specific reasons. However, I believe a reevaluation either here or in the near future of the hard positions that have formed on this larger issue is clearly necessary to restore some sensibility to the matter. Mackan79 (talk) 22:56, 15 February 2008 (UTC)

Background of WordBomb and Mantanmoreland's dispute on Wikipedia
Based on some of the current proposals implicating the larger context here (particularly as regard mitigation) I think it is necessary to inquire further into the background of WordBomb and Mantanmoreland’s dispute as evident on Wikipedia.

I believe we all know the long-standing conventional wisdom on this, that WordBomb arrived on Wikipedia with an agenda, attempted to damage a BLP and harass an editor, persisted in doing so upon warnings, and was then appropriately banned before proceeding to justify the ban in numerous other ways. Presumably this would be seen as mitigating evidence for Mantanmoreland.

However, a number of problems with this can now be noted. First, by the time WordBomb arrived in July of 2006, Mantanmoreland and Lastexit had been editing Gary Weiss, Lastexit and Tomstoner had been editing Patrick M. Byrne, Lastexit had been editing Overstock.com, and Mantanmoreland, Tomstoner and Lastexit had all been editing Naked short selling. The edits on Patrick Byrne and Overstock were decidedly negative, with the opposite true for Gary Weiss. This appears to be the issue that WordBomb intended to raise.

When he did so, WordBomb appears to have added the allegation to article space. He was immediately greeted by a vandalism warning from Mantanmoreland. A more appropriate response may have been to inform WordBomb of the proper way to raise his concerns, but clearly WordBomb’s approach was incorrect, so fair enough. Unfortunately, Lastexit then arrived to reinforce Mantanmoreland’s warning. Nevertheless, it appears that WordBomb agreed to hold his concerns as of 20:28 7 July 2006 for a proper forum.

One thing I do not fully understand is why SlimVirgin then arrived two hours later and blocked WordBomb’s account, “indefinitely.”  Of course one possibility is that she did not see WordBomb state that he intended to wait for a proper forum (although his edit summary did clearly state “concession”); even so, an “indefinite block” without discussion or warning does not seem to have been necessary. By SlimVirgin’s most recent explanation, I see she states it was following this warning and because WordBomb repeated his allegation that she then decided he was editing in bad faith and protected his talk page. This raises two concerns, however. First, SlimVirgin’s statement in originally blocking WordBomb indefinitely asked him if there “is an explanation for your edits.” I am not sure what this was expected to elicit, but I don’t think it is entirely surprising that WordBomb would then repeat his allegation. Second, I see that in then protecting his talk page, SlimVirgin specifically stated in her edit summary that his claims were incorrect.

We know then at this point that WordBomb was blocked, after being warned by what he recognized as two accounts of the same person, by a third who had specifically stated that his claim was incorrect. We know WordBomb believed, correctly, that there were other sockpuppets involved. Upon being asked to email his evidence on to SlimVirgin, then, we know he included an image, by his explanation, to determine whether the evidence was read. Incidentally, I don’t believe there is any evidence that WordBomb had a specific qualm at that point with SV or knew anything about her. Rather, after seeing a number of socks succeed in getting him blocked and silenced (rather than as he expected, the person who was socking), he used his own methods to figure out what was going on.

This is by no means the entire story. I believe this has been the source of a great number of other problems over the last two years, however. Moreover, to the extent WordBomb has been pilloried on Wikipedia over this time, while Mantanmoreland and Samiharris appear to have continued using multiple accounts to keep many of these related articles in a one-sided state (as well as often contributing to the pillorying), I think they are points that should be addressed here. Mackan79 (talk) 20:06, 16 February 2008 (UTC)

POV editing and socking are part of the same issue in this case
As people continue to ask about the tendentious editing, let me address this hopefully with a little more clarity. In sum, the problem with MM is not that this account has been used for absurd POV editing, but rather: 1. his contentious style in addressing other editors that suggests a COI, and 2. the consistent use of alternate accounts to support this approach and also for much more flagrant editing. The first point is seen in Gary Weiss and Naked short selling where MM has been most active, but the latter point is seen in the numerous peripheral articles including Patrick M. Byrne and Overstock.com. I've noted earlier some of the major edits where Mantan's socks created those articles as they currently exist, but let me address those edits in a little more detail.

In Patrick Byrne, Tomstoner first removed information about Byrne's charity work, calling it "promotional material," and replaced it with a statement, "Recently, however, he has received more critical treatment in the press, largely because of his adoption of a controversial stance concerning 'naked short-selling.'" Lastexit then turned the section on "Media attention" into the long standing section entitled "'Jihad' against naked shorting." This section was filled with various sensationalized statements and quotes, alleging "unstable" behavior by Byrne, etc. Without going into extensive detail, I am afraid one needs simply to read this material. The third edit is from Samiharris, changing a lead section that described Byrne's campaign and lawsuit relating to "stock market regulation and alleged hedge fund, media, and analyst improprieties," to a lead about Byrne's "allegation of a wide-ranging stock market conspiracy involving hedge funds, the media, and analysts, for which he has been widely criticized," followed by a vague statement that Byrne is under SEC investigation without stating for what. Mantanmoreland and other accounts then reverted that and other material a number of times. 

On Overstock.com, the three edits I listed from Lastexit can be seen creating the section on Byrne's naked shorting campaign, seen in full in the third edit here. The same type of material should be apparent: LE refers to a "Sith lord" out of any context, states that critics suggest he is simply trying to divert attention from a failure to make a profit, says Byrne and Overstock have been investigated, and then that Byrne says he celebrates the investigation but critics see it as an indication of "mounting troubles." No information is given to the nature of Byrne's claims; simply odd characterizations in scare quotes, followed by criticism. Many other edits on this page were equally questionable. (note in the last referencing the SEC investigation in multiple places in the same section).

These articles are not the whole picture; as I've shown, Samiharris was moving actively between other peripheral articles to add the same type of material. This included Smear campaign and Astroturfing where SH added Overstock as an example. It also included articles like John J. Byrne, created entirely by Samiharris with the very questionable section here. As noted earlier, SH's contributions to MM's contentious style can also be seen for example here and here.

These are not just the POV problems, but also specifically why the socking matters and should be addressed if not to invite others to do the same. Mackan79 (talk) 22:24, 4 March 2008 (UTC)

The evaluation of WordBomb's actions has been extremely stunted by a long campaign against him
I understand this is somewhat tangential; however, I submit that the following issues have been made relevant to several aspects of the case through comments of arbitrators and others. ArbCom can decide if it wishes whether the issues are relevant.

My concern here is that the evaluation of this dispute over two years has been extremely stunted by an inability to neutrally evaluate WordBomb's actions, for reasons that have remained poorly understood. This has itself damaged Wikipedia, to the extent it has resulted in a campaign that has called into question Wikipedia's neutrality. However, it has also poisoned much broader issues, as related disputes continue to begin by asking how much can be attributed to WordBomb. This began in this case as a minor comment that maybe Samiharris was manufactured by WB, then as a proposal on the workshop suggesting that Mantanmoreland's actions would be mitigated by WB, even though MM's socking preceded WB's arrival. It continues now with statements that it may actually be more likely that Samiharris – who has spent a year working extremely closely with MM without complaint – is WordBomb's sock rather than the person's he has been constantly supporting over this time (in particular since MM was made to agree not to edit the pages). There is no way to disprove this; it is simply an issue of how much one is willing to pin on WordBomb.

That said, the evidence I present is partly as to WB's actions, and partly to the nature of the accusations against him. I present my observations in part and in part my direct experience, with a view to presenting the unheard other perspective.

WordBomb's initial actions were within reason for a new user, and he should not have been blocked
As has been noted, it appears from current evidence that WordBomb's first act on Wikipedia was to allege on GW's bio that it was being edited by the author himself. It appears he did this at 7:57 on July 7, 2006, then replaced some version of that or other material at 15:39 and 16:46 when twice removed by MM. By 17:00, however, it is apparent in response to comments by MM and Lastexit that WordBomb had agreed to hold the issue for mediation.  At 19:17, WB opened a case, and at 20:28 he again noted his concession to wait as highlighted in his edit summary.  Based on these concessions, there was no apparent reason to indefinitely block WordBomb at 22:09.

WordBomb's actions clearly were not ideal; one wishes he'd started by asking someone what to do. However, I think there are many who arrive on Wikipedia to publicize a view before coming to appreciate the processes we have in place to promote quality and neutrality, and I don't see any indications that WordBomb would have been different.

SlimVirgin's block was provocative, and implicated her in MM's actions
SV's block was provocative in three ways. First she "indefinitely blocked" when it should have been clear from WB's talk page he'd already agreed not to post further. Second, if SV was extremely concerned about MM's privacy, it seems strange she'd specifically request "an explanation for your edits," which then became the basis for protecting his talk page. Third, SV specifically stated in protecting WordBomb's talk page that his claim about MM was wrong. Why she said this remains unknown, but considering WordBomb had already encountered two accounts of MM, and was then suddenly blocked under strange circumstances by an admin who somehow knew his claim was false, it shouldn't be surprising he questioned her neutral evaluation of the evidence.

WordBomb's response at that point became inappropriate, but should not be entirely surprising
Following his block, it appears WordBomb created another account to inquire about sockpuppeting protocol, and emailed another admin and arbitrator for assistance, informing both about the use of this new account. He did this before emailing SV, as it seems one contacted SV who then blocked the new account while clarifying that she hadn't received any email.  The fact WB had approached these others should clarify that he tried other methods, and that he had lost faith in SV's neutrality at that point. It was only then, following his inability to get help from two other admins, and apparently after their having forwarded his emails to SV, that WB began his email dialogue with SV.

At that point, in either his second or third email, it appears WB included a pixel to discern if his evidence was read, and potentially by whom. WB apparently found that an IP he recognized as GW's opened the email. At this point, it appears the discussions with SV continued but basically broke down. One of the emails that has been made public, apparently well into this, is probably the most troubling, in which WB appears to state that he had large amounts of evidence regarding her own sockpuppetry that he would share unless she was willing to discuss the situation. I would guess he had found certain critical websites at this point, as his email seems basically to be written in faux-spy language, with WordBomb saying among some typos that she was blocking something he wanted so he was going to "remove" her. The email smells to anyone who reads it; I don't believe this was any sort of physical threat considering it was an email about "difs" and exposing sockpuppetry, but of course anything that could be perceived as such is very poorly considered. Whether it is different from other poorly considered comments from good faith Wikipedians that get construed as threats may be the most helpful question which I will somewhat address below.

SlimVirgin has a history of making intimidating and damaging statements without adequate basis
The previous is based fully on events I've observed; the following is based as well on my own experience. I move also from the originating events to how they have been evaluated. Of course I am fully aware in this of the controversy surrounding SV, due to the feeling from many that she has been the persistent target of harassment from trolls who single her out for presumably petty reasons, as well as the feelings of others that somewhat differ. I'm certainly aware that a great deal of offensive commentary is leveled against her. However, as I will explain, I think Wikipedia's response to this has gone too far in this dispute, as signified by numerous actions and comments. I also don't know how to relate this other than with reference to two of my early encounters with SV, which incidentally may have been somewhat similar to WB's in not having previously heard anything about SV. These are out of date, but more recent than the basis for this dispute, and I think relevant.

The first of these began with SV posting a comment in a rather heated talk page discussion. SV stated, in response to G-Dett, that she had tried to find arguments in what G-Dett and others had said, but saw only empty rhetoric. I responded following another editor that it concerned me if she did not understand the other side of the debate, although I trusted that she could. (you could say I was ribbing). Following this, SV asked me an unrelated question, but also refactored the talkpage to separate my and another critical response from her earlier comment.  I answered her question, but also restored the talk page with an explanation that she had rendered it unreadable.  SV undid this without explanation, and the pattern was repeated. Finally, SV made her change a third time, solely with the edit summary "don't move my comments again." She then archived the talk page two minutes later.

Of course people might differ on how to interpret this, but as it happened, this was not the first time SV had acted to intimidate me. I won't recount the others (I can concede that both incidents are seen in my block log without much fear that she'll want to revisit them), but will note that I wrote two editors that evening asking whether to receive SV's comment as a threat. That could have been silly, and the editors I wrote suggested that I not take it seriously. All the same, the point is that the statement was taken as a threat, in part because of history and in part because it was entirely clear SV had no justification for her demand (as clearly exhibited by the fact that she then quickly archived the page).

The second incident came a month later, when I commented on a block issued by Jayjg. Following its expiration, I left a comment on the related article trying to resolve the issue, in fact agreeing with a position SV had taken. SV had a week earlier left a friendly-sounding comment that she thought I might have followed her to a page, to which I responded,  alluding to the fact that she had herself recently shown up on a policy page to revert me.  SV's response now was swift and harsh: large sections on both my talk page and the article talk page entitled "Mackan's stalking."  In fact, she knew this was baseless, as she specifically accused me of stalking "Jayjg and myself," and the comment here had only to do with Jayjg. This happened to also be my first interaction with User:Crum375, who arrived to delete an anon's comment questioning SV's actions. I asked Crum375 if the SV's comment and the header on the article page weren't also misplaced, but no, Crum375 said it had to stay since SV was a respected admin, and Crum375 was not willing to raise it with SV. The discussions on my talk page are seen here.

To be clear, it gives me no joy to raise these incidents, as I'm sure SV can present a different take. However, I think evaluating this situation requires some knowledge that SV is, with no better way to put it, very quick on the offensive, including with potentially very damaging accusations. Aside from WordBomb's actions, I think this has to call into question continuing claims against WB such as for "the worst stalking Wikipedia has seen," etc. Or if nothing else, people may then know why I have put some effort into defending him.

Conclusion
This speaks to one aspect of this case, arguably one that shouldn't be relevant. However, I don't think my views on this are isolated, and I know others have wanted to raise similar concerns. There's also certainly additional evidence that could be presented as to the full extent of the campaign that has been carried on against WB, but as to some of the originating issues, I present this for what it's worth. Mackan79 (talk) 03:39, 10 March 2008 (UTC)

Mantanmoreland has learned from previous sockpuppetry mistakes and is thus more difficult to detect
Mantanmoreland has previously engaged in the abusive use of alternative accounts, which is uncontestable having been warned for it. Per the evidence presented by SirFozzie and CoolHandLuke (here, here and here) there is the very real likelihood that Mantanmoreland has also abusively used other accounts, or which he received no warnings but which were quietly retired upon noting of suspicious behaviour. These previous instances of sockpuppeting are over two years old. I contend that having been caught out previously that anyone seeking to use the same method of supporting their point of view would have learned to be more circumspect if not to arouse further suspicion.

Also uncontestable is that Samiharris edited out of an untracable open proxy. Without the availability of two tracable ip addresses there has had to be a painstaking collecton and review of the contribution styles and mannerisms, dates and times, article interests and similarity of points of views of the two accounts. In those many thousands of edits there are relatively very few instances where it can be clearly demonstrated that there are aspects which the two accounts share and not by others. I contend that this would be expected from an individual who was both determined to evade the raising of suspicion, and who is experienced and sophisticated in the processes of Wikipedia.

While there is a good deal (subject to the above comments) of circumstantial evidence which may point toward abuse of alternative accounts there is no evidence of on Wiki action that effectively counters this material; there is nothing that a single editor may have concocted to support the illusion that two accounts were being operated by the one individual. If it is contested that there is no smoking gun to be found, I would strongly suggest that there has been found no White Hat either. LessHeard vanU (talk) 23:08, 15 February 2008 (UTC)

The reliance of off-Wiki emails to "prove" that the accounts were different individuals
In the current absence of permission to post (some) content of the emails sent by Mantanmoreland and Samiharris, as mentioned specifically by Jimbo and Guy, I have made a request that the timestamps for the email correspondence be presented so they may be checked against the same criteria as have the contributions of the two accounts. Again this would be looking for the instance of disparity (the White Hat) which would argue for the accounts being different people. I would however caution that emails are potentially very different from edits, as they are often literally composed and reviewed before sending. The likelihood of there being a smoking gun is considerably reduced, but also so is the White Hat scenario. Two posts may be created at different times but sent (and thus received) together. I therefore contend that evidence suggested by the interpretation of the content of emails is far less compelling than that offered by the review of edits made in "real (cyber) time". LessHeard vanU (talk) 23:08, 15 February 2008 (UTC)

Samiharris has left the building
Samiharris had previously been vocal in the condemnation of alleged socking by certain individuals or on the pages of certain articles, and has raised these allegations themselves. Upon notification that such an allegation against themselves was being investigated Samiharris posted a couple of messages commenting on off-site harassment and removed themselves from Wikipedia. There has been no indication of outrage or disbelief on what would be a slur against their good name, and there has been no indication of support to a fellow editor (with whom they had a good working relationship over a series of articles relating to a shared interest) who has been tarred by the same accusation. I find this very unfortunate, but also reminiscent of past accounts with the (strong) taint of sockpuppet. LessHeard vanU (talk) 23:08, 15 February 2008 (UTC)

Comments and response to Evidence by Mantanmoreland
Firstly, there is no hate campaign against Samiharris evident in the investigation of the allegations of sockpuppetry between the Mantanmoreland and Samiharris accounts. What campaigns there may be off-Wiki, and there is no specific evidence offered, are likely not of very recent instigation or either to have increased recently outside of these allegations. Insofar that those who are inclined toward accepting there is substance in the allegations the party receiving any indication of bad faith is Mantanmoreland, and there is very little of that outside of the serious accusation of violating a core Wikipedia policy. Mantanmoreland appears to me to be projecting any feelings of percieved ill-will toward him onto the personae of Samiharris.

Further, in his sub-section Response to Cla68 diffs Mantanmoreland appears to speak for Samiharris regarding a number of edits made by the latter, without supporting diffs or other evidence that this is exactly Samiharris' position. It is clearly Mantanmorelands point of view, but the points are made on behalf of Samiharris in a manner that indicates that Mantanmoreland is privy to their inner thoughts, and there is no dissimilarity between his and Samiharris' understanding.

This is of course opinion, but also evidence that there seems to be more than just an overlap in the perceptions of two accounts that have some common interests in editing a group of articles. It continues to point to the possibility that such commonality between the two accounts is not the product of coincidence or chance. LessHeard vanU (talk) 22:31, 17 February 2008 (UTC)


 * Further, to Mantanmoreland. Are you able to provide diffs of evidence of hate directed toward Samiharris in this process, or in the investigation that preceded it. Hate is a very strong word. Alleging violation of a core principle of Wikipedia is a serious matter, but not evidence pf hatred. Unless diffs can be provided, I think that that your statement should be modified. LessHeard vanU (talk) 22:42, 19 February 2008 (UTC)

Overstock.com appears to be a matter of some interest to Gary Weiss
Above, User:JzG states "It is clear that Weiss and the issue of naked short selling amount to an obsession for Bagley, but I've seen no suggestion from anyone worth listening to that the reciprocal is true." While I won't take it on myself to engage in amateur psychoanalysis to determine if "obsession" is the correct word to describe this circumstance, I did a little original research on Mr. Weiss' blog, and it appears that he does indeed spend a fair amount of time discussing the Overstock.com/naked short selling/Patrick Byrne/Judd Bagley issue. (Note: I don't know much about the underlying disputes here, although some brief perusal of Google News demonstrates that Mr. Weiss is certainly not the only financial journalist with a low opinion of Overstock.com). A brief analysis of the last two months follows - more can be presented if helpful, but I believe it is sufficient to demonstrate that Mr. Weiss is indeed a relatively frequent participant in this dispute.

I was considering providing some representative samples of each post, but much of it would likely violate our biographies of living persons policy, so I will instead simply link to them. Again, let me be clear that I am not taking sides in the underlying dispute (my knowledge of financial markets is mostly limited to my 401(k)!), and that Mr. Weiss may well be correct in all of his characterizations.

February 2008
Mr. Weiss has made eleven blog posts thus far in the month of February. Of these, five are directly related to Overstock.com, Patrick Byrne, or Judd Bagley:, , , , , and another discusses short selling in general with a brief mention of Byrne -. Thus far in February, Mr. Weiss has devoted 54.54% of his blog posts to this particular issue.

January 2008
In January, Mr. Weiss made twenty-eight blog posts. Of these, twelve are directly related to Overstock.com, Patrick Byrne, or Judd Bagley:, , , , , , , , , , , , and two discuss short selling in general with brief mentions of Byrne - ,. In January, Mr. Weiss devoted 50% of his blog posts to this particular issue.

The cyberstalking list
It's time to set the record straight about this list. Fortunately, Internet harassment is not a problem for the vast majority of Wikipedians. Some people do deal with it and the problems can be serious. The list came into existence because these are issues that really aren't feasible to discuss onsite. I am not at liberty to discuss other people's problems, but after careful consideration I've decided to disclose two of my own. The risk in doing this is that people who have a malicious intent could mine the information to intensify the harassment.

One early example I did address openly, and which was later mined for ammunition against me, was the community ban on Arkhamite. This was someone who posted a series of explicit sexual fantasies about me both onsite and offsite, and who had a self-disclosed arrest record and an inpatient psychiatric history. See Community_sanction_noticeboard/Archive6. His blog no longer contains the objectionable material and only Wikipedia sysops can read the deleted version of his user page, but the rest of the links I tested should still be good. This was a very straightforward ban that has never been contested. Nonetheless, a website known to the Wikipedia community selected that example and claimed that I had singled this editor out for no good reason at all, and driven him off the site because he had borrowed his username from Arkham Asylum of the Batman series. Actually my tastes run more toward Jane Austen than Marvel Comics and it was some time after the ban was implemented that I learned about this particular literary allusion. Other content at the same page left no doubt as to the malice with which this was chosen. And obviously I wasn't going to touch it.

For half a year, until quite recently, that same site hosted a photograph of my seventy-four-year-old uncle along with a not very subtle threat to harass him in real life if I don't stop editing Wikipedia. The caption correctly identified him as a World Trade Center survivor. Let there be no mistake: I've said this onsite before. He wasn't sipping cappuccino thirty blocks away--he was on the seventy-second floor of the north tower and watched his boss die before his eyes.

Those are two of the reasons I joined that cyberstalking list, along with other harassments I won't mention. A bunker mentality developed, in part because the people who called themselves critics of Wikipedia failed to uphold a fundamental baseline of ethics. Anyone could have removed that photograph from that website; it runs on wiki software. How much common sense does it take to see that going after someone's family is foul play?

Now I'm not going to voice an opinion on the merits of the circumstantial evidence here. I'm of two minds, frankly. On the one hand I want to believe the best and I have serious misgivings about my decisions that led the matter here. On the other hand, I think Mantanmoreland could have lied to me and played upon my trust in a place where I came to protect my elderly uncle, and that prospect makes me very very angry.

Per my presentation at SirFozzie's userspace, there is reason to accept this as a minimal baseline conclusion: Mantanmoreland and Samiharris have acted in concert to bypass normal consensus procedures at financial topic articles. Durova Charge! 10:24, 16 February 2008 (UTC)

Is Samiharris a sockpuppet of WordBomb?
One possible scenario suggested by SlimVirgin's evidence is that Samiharris might be a sockpuppet of the banned editor WordBomb, created for the purpose of framing Mantanmoreland as a sockpuppeteer. This idea prompted discussion on the talk page, where it received so little support that Mantanmoreland himself declared he was convinced that Samiharris was not WordBomb. So it came as a surprise to see arbitrators mention that scenario as a factor in their decision.

The first time I ever used time stamp analysis in a long term sock investigation was on 14 May 2007. Nearly three hours into a chat with another administrator who was researching the then-suspected (and later confirmed) Runcorn sockfarm, I posed the question:
 * 10:47 PM me: And do the edit time stamps for these various accounts overlap?

To the best of my knowledge, this was the first time this analytical method was used in a Wikipedia sock investigation. Runcorn was banned on 30 May 2007. As the Committee already knows, time stamp analysis was not the only factor in the Runcorn decision. Other administrators who did this kind of work with me agreed not to broadcast this method onsite because, although it isn't hard to apply once it becomes known, it also isn't very hard to defeat. This case is the first time it has been used publicly, and although I did not do the actual parsing it was me who suggested that this approach be tried here.

The Samiharris account made its first edit on 31 January 2007. As other evidence has already demonstrated, there is almost no overlap or interleave between Samiharris and Mantanmoreland. So the hypothesis that Samiharris is a deliberate frame-up depends on an assumption that WordBomb figured out time stamp analysis several months before it came into use at all and more than a year before it was done publicly. It is unlikely that someone would deliberately select an unknown method to frame an antagonist and keep it up for over a year without ever suggesting that someone look for it.

At the present time I am parsing the edit histories of Samiharris and Mantanmoreland to test this hypothesis in greater detail. The basic structure of this analysis is as follows:
 * Of the 156 days when Samiharris edited, study the portion where Mantanmoreland was also active.
 * If Samiharris is a frame-up, then avoiding interleave would have been WordBomb's principal concern. A hoaxster would be able to tell when Mantanmoreland begins an session but not when he ends one.  So if Samiharris is a hoax, then Samiharris edit sessions should tend to precede Mantanmoreland sessions.  The hoax scenario should be expected to turn up instances where Samiharris stopped editing abruptly when Mantanmoreland begins a session, but no instances where Mantanmoreland stopped editing abruptly when Samiharris begins a session.

A full chart is available at User:Durova/Samiharris and Mantanmoreland. Durova Charge! 05:36, 12 March 2008 (UTC)

Phase 1 analysis
The Samiharris account was active on 156 days during the period 31 January 2007 to 8 February 2008. On 70 of these days the Mantanmoreland account was also active. Due to other evidence and comments there appears to be a consensus that the two accounts are related in some way; the point at issue is whether the Samiharris is a sock/meatpuppet of Mantanmoreland or a sock of WordBomb. So I've set out to test three scenarios:


 * 1) Samiharris is a sock of Mantanmoreland.
 * 2) Samiharris is a meatpuppet of Mantanmoreland (who usually uses the same computer).
 * 3) Samiharris is a sock of Wordbomb.

The testable difference between scenario 3 and the first two scenarios is that WordBomb would have no way of knowing when Mantanmoreland has ended an edit session. WordBomb would be reluctant to begin an edit session after Mantanmoreland has edited, and would be especially reluctant to start a session shortly after any of Mantanmoreland's posts. In other words, each time WordBomb edits as Samiharris on the heels of a Mantanmoreland post he takes a risk that Mantanmoreland will continue posting--thus creating an interleave that would discredit the frame-up job he is attempting to construct.

The simplest way for WordBomb (as Samiharris) to avoid this problem would be to watch for Mantanmoreland activity and stop editing for the day whenever Mantanmoreland begins a session. For example, the following pattern would be the norm:


 * 19 May 2007
 * Samiharris
 * 15:25
 * 15:30
 * 15:32
 * 15:35
 * 15:46
 * 15:55
 * 16:05


 * Mantanmoreland
 * 16:23
 * 19:19

On 19 May, the Samiharris session ends abruptly when Mantanmoreland begins to post. Note that Mantanmoreland's two posts occur three hours apart. It isn't unusual for Mantanmoreland to resume a session later in the day. So the safest way for WordBomb to frame the Samiharris account as a sock would be to stop using it for the rest of the day after Mantanmoreland begins to edit. This might be too obvious, so a slightly riskier strategy would be to sometimes wait after Mantanmoreland has gone dormant and post a quick batch of edits for Samiharris. For example, the next day:


 * 20 May 2007
 * Samiharris
 * 22:53
 * 22:55


 * Mantanmoreland
 * 14:38
 * 14:45

If Samiharris is a sock/meat of Mantanmoreland then some occasions like these are to be expected. If Samiharris is a sock of WordBomb then days like these would predominate. Overall, a deliberate framing strategy ought to result in a greater proportion of days where the Samiharris account's first edit has an earlier time stamp than the Mantanmoreland account's first edit. According to my count, Samiharris's first post of the day happened earlier than Mantanmoreland's first post on 34 days: 49% the time.

Additionally, on 16 of the 34 days when Samiharris posted before Mantanmoreland, Samiharris also posted at least once after Mantanmoreland. So Samiharris posted after the Mantanmoreland account on 71% of the days when both accounts were active.

Phase 2 analysis: the one hour test
In order to refine this approach I paid specific attention to days on which Samiharris posts follow Mantanmoreland posts. If Mantanmoreland and Samiharris usually edit from the same computer, then the expected outcome would be that on some of the days Mantanmoreland would stop editing and trade off to Samiharris fairly quickly. As noted before, it would be highly unlikely that Samiharris sessions would follow on the heels of Mantanmoreland sessions if Samiharris were a sock of WordBomb. So I counted the days when Samiharris edited within 1 hour after a Mantanmoreland post.

If the one hour test was met on a very small number of days then it would support the SH = WB scenario; if it occurred on a large number of days then it would support the SH = MM scenario. It was met on 23 days; 33% of the time.

One could also hypothesize that under the SH = WB scenario, the proportion of days that satisfy the one hour test would decrease over time as WordBomb refined his frame-up strategy. This is not borne out by a monthly analysis. The breakdown looks like this:


 * January 2007
 * Total editing days shared: 1
 * Days that satisfy the one hour test: 0


 * February 2007
 * Total editing days shared: 6
 * Days that satisfy the one hour test: 1


 * March 2007
 * Total editing days shared: 6
 * Days that satisfy the one hour test: 1


 * April 2007
 * Total editing days shared: 3
 * Days that satisfy the one hour test: 1


 * May 2007
 * Total editing days shared: 7
 * Days that satisfy the one hour test: 3


 * June 2007
 * Total editing days shared: 13
 * Days that satisfy the one hour test: 4


 * July 2007
 * Total editing days shared: 11
 * Days that satisfy the one hour test: 4


 * August 2007
 * Total editing days shared: 2
 * Days that satisfy the one hour test: 0


 * September 2007
 * Total editing days shared: 9
 * Days that satisfy the one hour test: 4


 * October 2007
 * Total editing days shared: 2
 * Days that satisfy the one hour test: 1


 * November 2007
 * Total editing days shared: 0
 * Days that satisfy the one hour test: 0


 * December 2007
 * Total editing days shared: 6
 * Days that satisfy the one hour test: 1


 * January 2008
 * Total editing days shared: 3
 * Days that satisfy the one hour test: 2


 * February 2008
 * Total editing days shared: 1
 * Days that satisfy the one hour test: 1

Phase 3 analysis: WordBomb
The next challenge is to compare Samiharris account behavior against the known sockpuppets of WordBomb that were active during the Samiharris period. These sockpuppets include:


 * Palabrazo
 * Post Doctorate y-o-y
 * Spindleshank
 * PhotoMatthew
 * Fjse44
 * Great Ceasar's Ghost
 * Nonsense on Stilts
 * The So-Called Blogger
 * Jim Larry
 * WordBizzle
 * Two Toed Sloth
 * Monkey One Million

Parsing this set requires a different approach from the MM/SH analysis. If we assume that SH is not a sock of WB then we can anticipate time stamp overlap, but if we assume that SH is a sock of WB then we can also anticipate time stamp overlap because it is much easier to generate interleave on one's own sockpuppet than to frame another editor for the lack of it.

I will post the results of this research as soon as it is ready. Durova Charge! 07:17, 12 March 2008 (UTC)
 * Per decision by the arbitrators to close this case, this research is suspended. If community action is contemplated and members of the community request it, I will resume this work.  Durova  Charge! 17:06, 12 March 2008 (UTC)

Samiharris has edited controversial articles without any participation from Mantanmoreland
I have edited extensively with Samiharris on financial topics. He appears to be very knowledgable in finance. Controversial articles that we have edited together include George Soros, Martha Stewart, Unrestricted Warfare. I've also seen him at "technical analysis" and asked him (as a person knowledgeable in the technical aspects of finance) to do a Good Article review for Option (finance). A couple of times we seemed to be operating at cross-purposes (rather than really disagreeing), but mostly we've shared similar views. Soros, especially, has been a very controversial article. Mantanmoreland never once (as far as I can tell) poked his head into any of the controversies there. The recent Martha Stewart controvery was much shorter, but Mantanmoreland did not show up. In short, I'm very familiar with Samiharris's editing in certain controversial articles, and Mantanmoreland did not act as a sockpuppet for Samiharris in any of these articles.

Most of the "statistical analysis" above is essentially meaningless
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Since there is no ip evidence showing that Samiharris is a sockpuppet of Mantanmoreland, people have started presenting "statistical evidence." Anybody familar with proper statistical procedures will tell you that the "statistical" methods used are just horrendous. Given enough data and enough time, I could "prove" almost anything using those methods.
 * Response to Relata Refero -- RR disputes my interpretation of this analysis above, but says "The size of the dataset is extremely small; a model is unspecified; and there are sundry other problems." Actually, I think that says it all, particularly the unspecified model part.


 * She also states that the use of stats implies trust - that we have to trust the analysts not to do data mining (this is correct). So perhaps (my reading) I'm violating WP:AGF by not taking the analysis at face value.  I think that trust and AGF should also apply to Samiharris.


 * To be clear, I'm not accusing anybody of intentionally mining the data, but I think there is a tendancy - even among some professionals - to just keep on looking until they "find something," without reporting all the negative results (what else did they think of looking for and did not report not finding?) The idea that this interleaving pattern that was found a) means something, and b) was the only pattern they looked for I find incredible.  Smallbones (talk) 13:53, 17 February 2008 (UTC)


 * Further responses to CHL - I have not accused you of "bad faith" in your statistical analysis, but I think it's clear that you don't know how to methodically do an accurate analysis. As you suggest, Alanyst's analysis is much better (he still hasn't posted any results or details beyond what's on this page however).  His key result, on your "collision test" is that 16%+ of similar editors could be labelled sockpuppets.  It's a vaguely suggestive result, but I don't think you should try to convict anybody on it.  You'd have to convict the other 600 editors as well, wouldn't you?  As Alanyst states:
 * This seems to challenge somewhat the notion that a lack of simultaneous edits for editors with edit counts similar to those of MM and SH is indicative of a coordinated pattern. ("Simultaneous" here means "during the same minute".) There's a low but still reasonable chance that two independent editors will never produce near-simultaneous edits.
 * I suspect - that by reasonable means - he can cut the "false positives" in half. But do we really want to convict somebody on this type of evidence?
 * As an example of data mining in a different context (I'm not saying in bad faith, but he surely is getting carried away) is G-Dett's story about little Sam Harris in the Tombstone cemetary, showing a connection to W. I'm sorry, but there are almost 900,000 hits on googling "Sam Harris."  Showing that one website has a Sam Harris - that by a truly fantastic story can be connected to W - is really showing absolutely nothing about Sammiharris, and alot about G-Dett's desire to convict. Smallbones (talk) 23:42, 18 February 2008 (UTC)

Samiharris is not Gary Weiss
As I understand it, the claim is that Sami = Mantanmoreland = GW. I read GW's book on short selling (at the same time I was editing here with Sami). While I don't claim any extensive comparisons of text, time stamps, etc., it is obvious that they have completely different styles. GW is a journalist, Sami has a more academic style.

Smallbones (talk) 16:17, 16 February 2008 (UTC)

Further COI evidence, linking Gary Weiss to Lastexit and Tomstoner, hence to User:Mantanmoreland
It has been established that the Lastexit and Tomstoner accounts were operated by Mantanmoreland; Fred Bauder got CU confirmation on Lastexit, and everyone has seen the diff where Mantan extensively revises a Tomstoner post and even writes a fresh paragraph from scratch, replete with first-person references to Tomstoner's contribution history. And the Mantanmoreland account itself has been compellingly linked to Gary Weiss by the Varkala edit, preceding as it does the dramatic time-zone shift in Mantan's editing schedule when Weiss left for India, where he was married in Varkala.

I believe I have now found Weiss' fingerprints in the contribution histories of both the Lastexit and Tomstoner accounts; fingerprints which, together with the Varkala edit, make the case for Weiss' COI problem virtually bulletproof. Please bear with me if the presentation is a little novelistic. There are real toads in this imaginary garden.

Tomstoner set up shop on February 9, 2006. His first edit was to Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, and focussed on antisemitism in India. (His next six edits likewise focussed on India, with the emphasis now on tourism.) Weiss's interest in India is by now well-known, and he refers to it often enough on his blog; what is less known however is that he has written specifically on "India's Jews" in an article for Forbes magazine. The Forbes piece was published more than a year after Tomstoner's edit, so it isn't possible that Tomstoner read it first. As with the Varkala edit, the Wikipedian's expressed interest precedes the journalist's.

Tomstoner's choice of user name becomes more interesting when User:Lastexit arrives on the scene on April 22, sets himself up as a Southwesterner, and makes his first edit to Tombstone, Arizona, a ghostly homage to his predecessor and matching sock. Lastexit then makes edits to Josephine Earp, who made her last exit in Tombstone, and then to Earp Vendetta Ride, a three-week bloodbath set in motion by the assassination of a U.S. Deputy Marshall in Tombstone, Arizona.

Right about this time, April of 2006, Gary Weiss has the Southwest on his mind. Perhaps he travelled there that spring; at any rate three days before Lastexit makes his first entrance Weiss writes the following on his blog: If you're ever in Albuquerque, be sure to visit the Ernie Pyle home, now a municipal branch library. It's beautifully preserved, has a memorial to Ernie on the grounds, and contains a large amount of memorabilia.

Now turn to Lastexit's edits – three weeks or so later – to Albuquerque, where he "add(s) Ernie Pyle library to list of historic places", and to Ernie Pyle:,. He next creates an article stub for Ernie Pyle House/Library:.

Now hold those croaking toads while we stroll through what remains of this imaginary garden. Not mine but Weiss's, which if I'm correct lies west of Brooklyn, all the way over in the Arizona territories, where the aforementioned Earp federal posse avenged the killing of one of their own, Morgan Earp. Just about a hundred years later, Don Bolles, an investigative journalist for the Arizona Republic looking into connections between organized crime and stock fraud, was lured by a mafia "source" and killed by car bomb in downtown Phoenix. A "posse" of his fellow IRE journalists rallied and organized "The Arizona Project," which descended on Arizona for a massive investigation. They set out to find not Bolles' killer, but the sources of corruption so deep that a reporter could be killed in broad daylight in the middle of town. They were out to show organized crime leaders that killing a journalist would not stop reportage about them; it would increase it 100-fold. 

Weiss has written in Forbes about the Arizona project, and how it inspired his own "Project Klebnikov," founded in 2005 after some thirteen reporters – including the American journalist Paul Klebnikov – were killed in Moscow: The parallels between Klebnikov's slaying and the murder of Don Bolles, an Arizona journalist slain in 1976, are becoming increasingly apparent. Bolles was killed for probing the mobsters and land-fraud schemes that plagued the Southwest in the mid-1970s.

The Bolles murder resulted in the creation of the Arizona Project, a consortium of journalists that was created to continue Bolles' work. Scott Armstrong and I, along with Richard Behar and others, are members of Project Klebnikov, which has similar aims in continuing Paul's legacy."Murder in Russia," by Gary Weiss, Forbes magazine, January 30, 2007

A few hours after Lastexit debuts with his Tombstone and Earp vendetta ride edits, he turns to Gary Weiss, highlighting Project Klebnikov (previously added by Mantanmoreland) by giving it its own section. A week later Lastexit adds another section to the same article, this one focusing on how Weiss has been described as "an old-time gumshoe, with a soupçon of little-guy champion Jimmy Breslin and a dash of 1950s bad-boy comic Lenny Bruce," and how this courage and intrepidness "has provoked a vituperative response, including threats." These perils of being a straight-shooter are the imaginative link between Weiss and Paul Klebnikov and Don Bolles and Morgan Earp.

The two-year edit war now drawing to a close is Weiss's vendetta ride, this time not against shadowy killers targeting journalists abroad but rather against Overstock, Byrne, and other anti-naked-shorting activists allegedly polluting our domestic markets and financial discourse, "threatening" old-time gumshoes like Weiss, and – most recently – disseminating "Bagley memes"; a vendetta ride, as we've seen, with Mantan Moreland in the starring role, and Mantan's uncle – a proud resident of Albuquerque, New Mexico – and Tombstone Tomstoner riding side-saddle (at least until they're picked off towards the end of the first act). Mantan's sockpuppetry has always seemed so crude to me, but in its initial conception it was noble, comically baroque in a Pynchonian way, and even kind of beautiful. Tombstone is its luminous touchstone. Earp's posse rounded up in Tombstone in 1882 is the mythical precursor to the IRE posse rounded up for the "Arizona project" in 1976, which in turn is the precursor to Weiss's posse rounded up for "Project Klebnikov" in 2005; which in turn, finally, is the precursor for the posse of sockpuppets – each with its homage to Tombstone – that Mantanmoreland began to round up on the semi-lawless frontier of Wikipedia in the spring of 2006.--G-Dett (talk) 20:54, 16 February 2008 (UTC)

Postscript: A fellow Wikipedian has pointed out to me that Josephine Earp, Wyatt’s wife and the focus of User:Lastexit’s first edits after his Tombstone debut, was Jewish. As it happens, there was a significant Jewish population in the Tombstone of the 19th century; indeed the town's very name was given to it by a Jewish pioneer who opened its first general store. In light of the striking nexus of interests here – Jewish history, the Earp vendetta ride, historical/tourist sites in the Southwest, and the legends of Tom(b)stone(r) – I regarded this as an interesting lead. I understand that what I’ve found and am presenting is 'evidence' of a peculiar sort.

Something from Weiss's piece on the Jews of India – A short distance away is a Jewish cemetery, and again the distinction is in what you don't see--there's none of the overturned headstones and vandalism that have been sadly common in Jewish cemeteries in the U.S. – had put me in mind of Jewish tombstones, and with my thoughts turning now to Josephine Earp and the Jews of Tombstone, I began to wonder if they had a cemetery of their own, and if so, if it had suffered some of the desescrations described in Weiss's piece. It seems the answers are yes and yes.

Tombstone’s most famous tourist site is the Boothill Graveyard, where many of its legendary gunslingers and historical personalities are interred. Boothill has within it a Jewish section, which went unnoticed for over 100 years; a memorial was added in 1984. The small Jewish burial ground has no remaining headstones, and only one grave – that of a child. He died in 1889, when he was one year and four days old. There is still a small stone marker for the child in the burial ground today, next to the memorial. His name was Sam Harris.

I would love to be able to say that when User:Samiharris was born the Mantanmoreland account was one year and four days old. If only Samiharris had waited another forty-five minutes before making his first edit. As the time stamp would have it, however, Sami debuted a little before midnight on January 31, 2006 – one year, three days and some three hours after Mantanmoreland. There is a touch of the poet (as well as the gumshoe) in old Weiss. I am moved, almost to clemency, just reflecting on it.--G-Dett (talk) 01:05, 18 February 2008 (UTC)

Sockpuppeting
I can't respond to the statistical evidence that has been introduced because, as Smallbones correctly points out, it is "horrendous." In fact, all of the pages associated with this case are horrendous, not the least by personal attacks of every kind, including one left on my user page by an administrator. This case reads like some kind of appendix to Wikipedia Review or Overstock.com's antisocialmedia.net website. Most of the contents of this page have been on the ASM website for well over a year. If Judd Bagley, Overstock's spokesman and operator of ASM, were not coordinating this, I am sure he would have a case for copyright infringement.

The editors who know Sami and I best, and are not necessarily friends of either of us, believe quite firmly that we are different people based on writing style and the positions we took, and didn't take, in 600-odd emails.

The articles that seem to be most at issue here (Overstock.com, Gary Weiss, Patrick M. Byrne and naked short selling) are stable. They are not a "battleground." They have had very little activity except for periodic assaults by sockpuppets of WordBomb (that is, Bagley). No one is claiming that Sami and I edit collusively in those articles. Indeed, the main objective of all the "statistics" is to prove that we don't edit collusively. Despite all the hysterical calls for these articles to be deleted and salted and exorcised, the articles are in good shape.

In what I assure you was an unsolicited opinion on these articles generally (or possibly just naked short selling), Jimbo said:

"There is a fringe conspiracy theory here, one which is not reflected in reliable sources, and refusing to allow paid corporate POV pushers to control an article because they have a willingness to engage in 'dirty tricks' campaigns is always going to be the right thing to do. The article, when I have looked at it (not recently) seemed to be quite good to me, whereas the version proposed by the other side was not even remotely close to ok."

We don't behave like sockpuppets. A good example is when Samiharris became involved in a major content dispute in Gary Weiss in December. Here is the edit history for the relevant period.  I did not participate in that discussion. It was civil, it was confined to the talk page, and it ended amicably, despite provocations. Samiharris could have used help from another editor, but I did not want to get involved. Even though I promised SlimVirgin in November 2006 that I would avoid the Weiss article because of all the off-wiki harassment, I had not pledged to not participate in talk page discussions. A sockpuppet would have chimed right in because Sami was outnumbered.

Samiharris additionally became involved, without my participation, in enforcing policy in Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation. The article was being subjected to extensive POV edits, WEIGHT violations and gross misuse of sources. I did not become involved in that dispute and have never edited that article or commented on its talk page. An administrator intervened at Samiharris' request, because of the issues he raised, and put the article under protection.

Response to Noroton I think the effort to find "uncommon phrasing" in edit summaries has reached ridiculous proportions as an example of confirmation bias, and this is a good example of it. VERBing is used frequently on the pages of Wikipedia, particularly by the bots that crawl over Wiki articles. Here is one, with a 100% VERBing rate. Here is another. I am not a sockpuppet of VolkovBot or DumZiBoT or Alison

Response to LessHeard vanU Samiharris has left the building because of precisely the hate campaign that you see reflected in these pages and off-wiki. He said months ago on a private email list that he would leave if something like this happened. It did, and he has left.

Response to Cool Hand Luke By "W" you mean "Wales" I presume?
 * "There is a fringe conspiracy theory here, one which is not reflected in reliable sources. . .".

This arbitration is the product of an off-Wiki harassment campaign by executives of Overstock.com, including its CEO
The checkuser that prompted this case originated from User:Palabrazo, a confirmed sockpuppet of User:WordBomb. WordBomb is Judd Bagley, director of communications of Overstock.com, who operates a website called antisocialmedia.net, which attacks critics of Overstock CEO Patrick M. Byrne and engages in extensive harassment of Wikipedians..

Byrne was quoted in a Utah newspaper as saying the following:

"'The people who run Wikipedia are using Wikipedia to perpetuate a cover-up,' he said. '(Wales is) at the top of Wikipedia, and he's either hijacking these articles or has his stooges hijacking these articles.'"

Byrne has created a Wikipedia account for the sole purpose of continuing this campaign of harassment and stalking on-wiki, and posted "evidence" that consisted of a vicious personal attack on a journalist named Gary Weiss, who has been critical of Overstock. Byrne's participation, and the content of his "evidence," points up the deep-rooted malice of this corporate smear campaign. Byrne is apparently motivated in this hate campaign by an effort to divert attention to his being investigated by the Securities and Exchange Commission, as well as his company's longtime failure to make money.

Byrne's smear campaign against critics and bizarre accusations against various real and imaginary enemies has received widespread off-wiki publicity in the New York Times, New York Post, Bloomberg News and Fortune dating back to 2005. See, e.g., and.

The several dozen sockpuppets of WordBomb have repeatedly made POV pushing edits and disruptive edits to Naked short selling, Overstock.com, Patrick M. Byrne and Gary Weiss. IPs originating from Overstock have edited that company's article and related articles long before I became an editor. (diffs to come).

SlimVirgin's evidence below, in discussing a February 8 email from Judd Bagley should remove any doubts that this case is part of the Overstock.com smear campaign against its critics. Bagley, as director of communications of a public company, can be presumed to function in his corporate capacity in all of his actions concerning Wikipedia.

Bagley, posting as WordBomb, has posted extensively on Wikipedia Review on this arbitration. Wikipedia Review has devoted an entire section of its website to promoting Bagley's cause and in encouraging adverse action against myself. The section on this case has received many thousands of hits. If Arbcom requires it, a link can be emailed.

Writing style
Samiharris and I write in totally different writing styles.

Here is one example from March 2007, long before there were any accusations by WordBomb of sockpuppetry:

"I think Piperdown did a really nice job of summarizing the article last night and I think he deserves a round of applause for that. Good job! I still have a problem with the addition to the October 2006 Q&A at the SEC. Though now summarized, which is good, I still question its significance. Was there some kind of change in policy in October 2006 regarding Reg. SHO? I searched the SEC website and could find none. I then looked for articles mentioning this and could find none. So I would suggest to please provide some article sourcing meeting Wikipedia criteria. As written currently, it falls squarely under the category of 'original research' which is verboten under Wiki rules. Thanks for understanding and for your good work.--Samiharris 14:57, 20 March 2007 (UTC)"

Piperdown's response was to accuse him of being "patronizing."

The discussion then moved to Piperdown's talk page, here:

Samiharris wrote:

"Concerning your comments in naked short-selling: I was trying to be courteous and polite, and offered praise sincerely for what I considered to be an editing job well done. There was no intent to be 'patronizing' and I must ask you to tone down the heat level and avoid making comments attacking other editors. Please keep in mind the requirements of WP:CIVIL and WP:NPA. Thank you.--Samiharris 21:49, 20 March 2007 (UTC)" and:

You have not fairly stated the statements that I made in the talk page. Let's go back and review.

It is not true that my "Reason was for no long quotes. So instead of editing the section, you removed it." and that my next reason was simply "original research." You have entirely omitted my central reason for disagreeing with your edits.

My explanation for my first edit was as follows: "I also removed the lengthy quotation from Regulation SHO, which was unnecessary in my opinion and much too technical and jargon-y." That was and is true. The fact that it was "sourced" is beside the point.

After you insisted upon retaining the material, I said, "I strongly disagree with your adding that lengthy excerpt from Regulation SHO. It clogs up an article that is already top heavy with jargon, and it is unnecessary detail." That was and is correct.

You then summarized the same material, and I said that "Though now summarized, which is good, I still question its significance. Was there some kind of change in policy in October 2006 regarding Reg. SHO? I searched the SEC website and could find none. I then looked for articles mentioning this and could find none. So I would suggest to please provide some article sourcing meeting Wikipedia criteria. As written currently, it falls squarely under the category of "original research" which is verboten under Wiki rules."

Whether this is "original research" or not is a side issue. You have yet to address my central point, which is that this repetitious and unnecessary detail that gives the mistaken impression that something happened in October 2006. Nothing happened in October 2006, yet you add it under "recent developments."

Even if you put it somewhere else, the issue remains as I stated it. That is my opinion, and of course I could be wrong, but it is important to have a good-faith dialogue and correctly state what other people I object to your oversimplifying and distorting my position, as well as to your constant stream of insults and personal atttacking terms.--Samiharris 22:11, 22 March 2007 (UTC)

My responses:

Piperdown, your comments are not only wildly off-base, but they are off-base in the wrong place. The place to be off-base about naked short selling is in the talk page of naked short selling. If you're going to have a nervous breakdown concerning one paragraph of that article, please do it there so that other editors can read your comments.--Mantanmoreland 03:05, 23 March 2007 (UTC) and

"No problem. Your user ID evolved into a full-scale edit warrior after three days on Wikipedia, so it's pretty obvious this was anything but your first nervous breakdown.--Mantanmoreland 04:29, 23 March 2007 (UTC)" and

"Correction, your edit warring began one week after you began editing, when you began your blatant POV pushing in naked short selling and when you responded to a compliment from another editor with a personal attack.[1] I appreciate your frankness in acknowledging that you are edit warring, and that you view yourself as being on some kind of personal crusade. --Mantanmoreland 04:49, 23 March 2007 (UTC)"

I am much less polite than Samiharris: It needs to be noted that some funds are regulated by the CFTC if they trade futures in volume.--Samiharris 16:06, 1 February 2007 (UTC)

I don't use expressions like "It needs to be noted"

Similarly

"I have not looked at the original, but I believe there are references to it the episode in the authorized biography by Michael Kauffman. Certainly a tasteful and nonjudgmental reference to that sad episode belongs in this article.--Samiharris"

I went to the Kaufmann biography and there is a fair telling of the story, which caused a sensation a few years ago, including a 60 minutes episode, and probably should be included. I think a fair discussion of Mr. Soros' wartime experiences should be included, as it is important. --Samiharris

No offense taken, though I do not agree with removal. I see that there was an addition to the article, with the Overstock suit. I agree with Christofurio that lawsuits against brokerages are not per se notable, so will remove. Do you have an opinion on the Reg. SHO article?--Samiharris 14:34, 4 February 2007 (UTC)

I appreciate that. It is unfair to besmirch Mr. Soros for actions taken as a child, no matter what they were and certainly the greatest care needs to be taken.

On the issue of the "internal memorandum" regarding his vowing to fight insider trading charges in France, can't a source be cited on that? He has certainly generally denied culpability but I cannot recall any specific source or citation.--Samiharris 15:17, 4 February 2007 (UTC)[http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:George_Soros&diff=prev&oldid=105578831 ]

Commodity pools are part of the broader universe of managed futures, many of which are not pools per se. Should there not be an article on this separate and distinct investment vehicle?--Samiharris 15:27, 4 February 2007 (UTC)[http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Commodity_pool&diff=prev&oldid=105580374 ]

Responding in Talk:naked short selling: The edit that you made incorrectly implies there there have just been two recent lawsuits on this issue. There have been at least nine naked shorting suits against the Depository Trust and Clearing Corp. that were withdrawn or were unsuccessful, in addition to the recent suits. Not one has succeeded. I have added this information to the encyclopedia. Please do not remove.--Samiharris 15:26, 5 February 2007 (UTC)[http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Naked_short_selling&diff=prev&oldid=105809198 ]

Sorry for the error on Novastar. I will check out the Friedman settlement you mention. The sentence references the private lawsuits not being successful and therefore the sentence is correct as it now stands.--Samiharris 00:31, 5 February 2007 (UTC)[http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Naked_short_selling&diff=prev&oldid=105687988 ]

"The sentence references"? I don't write like that.

Here is another diff from more recently:

Look, you asked me if it should be in the article and I answered. We disagree on that, and in keeping with BLP practices I'm not going to put it back in. But I still think it is not a good thing to leave it out. More generally, I think the article would benefit from more on Byrne's political contributions, which appear to be significant.--Samiharris (talk) 05:50, 25 January 2008 (UTC)[http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Patrick_M._Byrne&diff=prev&oldid=186760821 ]

I would have fought the issue beyond this, and used far less mild language.

Here is another from recently: His edits on Wikipedia Review confirm that. I'm not suggesting they be used to justify the continued ban, as I don't think it is necessary. But it is worth observing that Piperdown is one of the most off the wall, paranoid contributors to Wiki Review, and it's always "Weiss this" and "Weiss that," and how "Weiss" is the source of all that ails Wikipedia. If there was any doubt that he was a WordBomb meatpuppet he allayed those doubts after he left here.--Samiharris (talk) 05:39, 25 January 2008 (UTC)[http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Administrators%27_noticeboard&diff=prev&oldid=186759498 ] "It is worth observing." "He allayed those doubts." I do not use that kind of wording. Note his style is consistent with seven months earlier.

Also recent: Luke, with all due respect I don't think it is your role to shield Byrne from what he says because you think it makes him look bad or "crazy." That is your OR analysis of what he says from a p.r. standpoint. That is not our role here. You're imposing, I think, an unreasonable standard here by saying that in order for his words to be quoted if they are "crazy" in your opinion, there must be an orgy of publicity as follows around Ann Coulter. Coulter is an entertainer while Byrne is a CEO and major political contributor. I'm still trying to figure out how what Byrne says can possibly raise BLP flags if accurately quoted, and I'd appreciate your addressing that. I don't see anything in BLP that relates to accurately quoting what the subject of an article says. I also don't see how you "attack" the subject of an article by quoting him.--Samiharris (talk) 05:29, 25 January 2008 (UTC) that one is [http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Patrick_M._Byrne&diff=prev&oldid=186758485 ] Here is me from more recently: The problem is not lack of citations. It is that text is copied verbatim from the Fordham website. It needs to be rewritten and then it can be placed back in the article. --Mantanmoreland (talk) 04:13, 7 February 2008 (UTC)[http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Fordham_University&diff=prev&oldid=189665476 ]

Editing of articles
My edits to articles have been entirely within policy, and the accusations made by other editors of "tendentious editing" by both myself and Sami are totally without foundation and unsupported by the diffs. I have never been warned for either tendentious editing or edit warning. Though I am shrilly accused of COI, based on the extensive Judd Bagley and Wikipedia Review campaign mentioned below, I have never edited in a way that has resulted in a case in the COI Noticeboard. That is because my edits have been in accordance with policy.

Because of the lack of any evidence of editing misconduct, G-Dett and others have waxed rhapsodic on the "Samiharris charts" and on alternate accounts that have not been used in fifteen months, but which were blocked by GRBerry in punitive fashion despite being dormant and unused, contrary to blocking policy. These blocks are typical of the hysteria, whipped up off-wiki, that has accompanied this Arbcom.

In most of what I describe below, perfectly innocent edits are described in ways that have no relationship to reality.

Specifically:

Relata Refero's claim of "long term tendentious editing" in naked short selling concerns edits that took place a year ago, were uncontroversial at the time and to which no one objected or were in accordance with consensus.


 * He calls this  "damning" that "sources were artificially ignored." But sources weren't ignored, "artificially" or otherwise. No one pointed out that there were "seven scholarly sources" until Relata Refero wandered by a year later. A section of the article cites three studies.


 * Not a single editor objected to redirection of the Regulation SHO article. Again, the fact that one editor, Relato Refero, comes along a year later to object to it does not make that redirect "tendentious editing."


 * Removal of a tag saying that the article lacks international aspects. . Again, no one objected to removal of the tag until this objection a year later.


 * Again, he weighs in a year after consensus was reached that use of that source was appropriate.

Cla68 is mainly upset with the way he is treated by administrators, but he does cite several diffs relating to my editing and Samiharris', all of which warrant response:

In this he wished to make an entire section out of a ten-year-old libel suit that was withdrawn. It was removed per WP:BLP and WP:WEIGHT. Cla68 himself conceded the latter point.

He objects to this edit by myself properly removing disruptive "fact" tags after every paragraph in the article, and clarifying that the sources were the websites noted.

He objects to this perfectly proper edit by Samiharris, cutting the length of an overlong paragraph on the antisocialmedia.net smear campaign, correcting an inaccuracy that attributed an allegation to the wrong source.

For some reason he objects to this edit by Samiharris that removed an allegation by Weiss that Patrick M. Byrne was "in the middle of a meltdown," turning that into the far less inflammatory "has made critical comments about him in articles and in media interviews." This edit protects Byrne, not Weiss. That same edit also removed a notable journalist's comment:

"'Bloomberg.com'' columnist Susan Antilla writes that the website attack on Weiss, 'Is but the latest example of the public relations path Overstock and Bagley have taken to wage their bizarre battle against naked shorts.'"

Removing a quote favorable to Weiss is not "POV pushing" on behalf of Weiss.

This Samiharris editsimply trimmed an overlong external links section, removing a New York Post article that does not mention Weiss, an article by Susan Antilla highly complimentary of Weiss, and a Times column that is uncomplimentary to Weiss and a critic. This is a routine cleanup and hardly POV pushing.

This Samiharris edit is misrepresented as "(this last is a paragraph that had been agreed to on the talk page)." In fact, as can be seen from the relevent portion of the talk page, Samiharris removed it in consultation with an administrator under WP:NPF. ("That point was clarified by an administrator uninvolved in the editing of this article.") The administrator's post on that point is here.

I have no idea what he is trying to prove with this Samiharris edit, which is a reasonable talk page post, as is this one.

The rest of his "evidence" relates to the raw deal he supposedly has gotten through much of his wiki-life, and has nothing to do with this arbitration.

Study of editing collision patterns in 2007
I have conducted some research that may be pertinent to the question of non-colliding edits by Mantanmoreland and Samiharris. The fundamental question I sought to answer is: How unusual is it for editors with edit counts at the level of MM and SH to avoid editing at the same time?

I will detail my methodology at User:Alanyst/Edit collision research. But here are the raw numbers so far (all numbers derived from the early January 2008 data dump):


 * I'm looking at 3629 editors (including anon IPs), all of whom had between 1000 and 2000 edits during 2007. MM and SH are included; MM had 1680 and SH had 1201 edits during that time.
 * There were 343 (roughly 9.5%) of those editors who never edited during the same minute as Mantanmoreland.
 * There were 610 (roughly 16.8%) of those editors who never edited during the same minute as Samiharris.

Caveats:
 * I have not analyzed how these editors' edits interleave with MM or SH's edits
 * I have not analyzed which of these editors' active times are inverted with respect to MM and SH's active times
 * My methodology has introduced certain biases that might have skewed the numbers slightly, though I believe they still give a pretty good picture
 * I have only looked at collisions with other editors for MM and SH; I have not yet examined collisions for other editors drawn from the same group
 * Some IPs represent multiple individuals editing at various times, which might have an impact on the overall pattern

Discussion:
 * This seems to challenge somewhat the notion that a lack of simultaneous edits for editors with edit counts similar to those of MM and SH is indicative of a coordinated pattern. ("Simultaneous" here means "during the same minute".)  There's a low but still reasonable chance that two independent editors will never produce near-simultaneous edits.
 * On the other hand, it may be that most of the non-colliding editors have substantially different times of activity than MM and SH, which would improve the odds of never colliding. This needs to be investigated further.
 * It's not clear what an appropriate definition of simultaneity would be, as far as edits are concerned.
 * Wikipedia is waaay too big to analyze easily, and I'm not good at cool graphs; sorry.

I wish this could be more solid, but perhaps it can aid the discussion. I will try to write up the methology but it will be at least a day before that happens. alanyst /talk/ 09:17, 17 February 2008 (UTC) I have documented my methodology for this analysis at the link mentioned above. alanyst /talk/ 04:21, 19 February 2008 (UTC)

Study of phraseology
Using all edit summaries from 2007 from all editors, and stripping out automatic section comments (everything between "/*" and "*/"), I have found the following: alanyst /talk/ 15:05, 18 February 2008 (UTC)
 * There were 77443453 total revisions made in 2007.
 * There were 778 uses of the word "duplicative" by 366 different editors.
 * There were 116726 uses of the " -- " (space, double hyphen, space) pattern by 26832 editors.
 * There were 85206 uses of the phrase "as per" by 18367 editors.
 * The intersection of these sets of users yields 61 different editors who have used all three mannerisms at least once.
 * Of those 61, ten users have edit counts between 1000 and 2000 for 2007: User:Emerman, User:Larry Dunn, User:Mangostar, User:Mantanmoreland, User:Neovu79, User:Nethgirb, User:OfficeGirl, User:Rhode Island Red, User:Samiharris, and User:Travisl.

New phraseology study
I ran another study, this time of all edit summaries during 2006 and 2007. I looked for the following words, which weigh heavily in the (corrected) Mantanmoreland-Samiharris VSM results: Results:
 * duplicative
 * rply
 * phraseology
 * There are 1230 distinct editors (including IPs) that use at least one of these terms. (There is no limit on edit count for this set of editors.)
 * 634 distinct editors have used "duplicative".
 * 254 distinct editors have used "rply".
 * 371 distinct editors have used "phraseology".
 * 8 distinct editors have used both "duplicative" and "rply".
 * 17 distinct editors have used both "duplicative" and "phraseology".
 * 6 distinct editors have used both "rply" and "phraseology".
 * 2 distinct editors have used all three terms. These are Mantanmoreland and Samiharris.

It is also notable that User:Lastexit used the terms "clarifying" and "as per" in seven edit summaries (out of 154 total summaries). These terms have been noted as characteristic of Mantanmoreland (49 uses of "clarifying", 12 uses of "as per") and Samiharris (11 uses of "clarifying", 6 uses of "as per"). User:Tomstoner uses "clarifying", "duplicative", and "as per" in eight edit summaries out of 252 total.

Further, Mantanmoreland starts 750 of 5126 edit summaries (15%) with a "verbing" style. Samiharris has the same style for 290 of 1201 summaries (24%). Tomstoner does this for 94 of 252 revisions (37%), and Lastexit for 59 of 154 (38%). (All edit summaries were first normalized to remove automatically created text.)

Are these shared terms the result of mimicry by Samiharris? The Samiharris account was created on 2007-01-31, and Tomstoner and Lastexit's last edits were at the end of July 2006, so we can assume that Samiharris did not mimic either of those accounts. That leaves Mantanmoreland. Is it likely that Samiharris picked up edit summary habits from Mantanmoreland?


 * Samiharris first used "rply", in five different edits, on 2007-07-11 at Talk:Patrick M. Byrne, User talk:Jayjg, and User talk:Samiharris . Mantanmoreland's only uses of "rply" to that point were on 2007-04-16 at Wikipedia talk:Requests for arbitration/MONGO  and 2007-07-01 at Talk:New antisemitism .  Samiharris never edited either of those pages.
 * Samiharris first used "duplicative" on 2007-02-06 at Regulation SHO . Mantanmoreland's four previous uses of "duplicative" were all in 2006, with the latest occurring on 2006-09-13 at Dominick Pezzulo .  The Samiharris account did not exist until four months after that edit summary, and Samiharris never edited the Pezzulo article.
 * Samiharris's use of "phraseology" was on 2007-12-11 in two edits: one at Glenn Greenwald and the other at Joe Klein . Mantanmoreland's only use of that term was back on 2007-02-06 at Mahmoud Ahmadinejad .  Samiharris never edited that article.
 * Samiharris's first use of "as per" was on 2007-05-12, and the last preceding use of the term by Mantanmoreland was on 2007-03-03 at Ernest Borgnine, which Samiharris has never edited.
 * Samiharris's first use of "expanding" was on 2007-02-04, and the last preceding use of the term by Mantanmoreland was on 2007-01-28 at Paul Burke (actor), which Samiharris has never edited.
 * Samiharris's first use of "clarifying" was on 2007-02-01 (his seventh edit ever), and the last preceding use of the term by Mantanmoreland was on 2007-01-19 at University Parish of St. Joseph in Greenwich Village, another article that Samiharris has never edited.

If Samiharris has unconsciously picked up Mantanmoreland's verbal tics from his edit summaries, then he must have studied Mantanmoreland's contribution history extensively to have been so strongly influenced. He also managed to echo Tomstoner and Lastexit's styles despite the 6-month gap of Wikipedia presence between himself and them. alanyst /talk/ 03:53, 29 February 2008 (UTC)

One more bit of evidence: Samiharris and Mantanmoreland have both misspelled "unnecessary" as "unecessary". Mantanmoreland spells it wrong 10 out of 15 times, and Samiharris spells it wrong 1 of 2 times. alanyst /talk/ 18:13, 29 February 2008 (UTC)

Study of edit summary similarity
As detailed at User:Alanyst/Vector space research, I have derived similarity rankings between User:Mantanmoreland, User:Samiharris, and all other 3627 editors who had edit counts between 1000 and 2000 during 2007. The results are charted below, showing the ten editors whose combined edit summaries are most similar, as computed by the vector space model (lower rankings precede higher rankings). I've also added the number of editing collisions each editor had, from the results in my previous study.

Work products available for independent verification
In response to Georgewilliamherbert's evidence section, and at the expense of some (hopefully) small amount of privacy and server bandwidth (not to mention openly shaming myself as a poor programmer), I am publicly making available my raw data files, work products, and scripts used in my analyses. I have shared this link with a few inquirers already, but if anyone wants to independently verify what I have done, I welcome it. My only request is that people be as judicious as possible in downloading any of the very large files, in order to spare bandwidth and the fragile feelings of my ISP.

Please forgive the anti-bot measures: the address is alanyst -dot com- ~slash~ mw. Incoming IP addresses will remain confidential. I will do my best to keep that link available until this arbitration is concluded.

Please note that there is no single script that does all the work. There are several scripts and intermediate files, and I have used various command-line statements to sort, compress, filter, and join results, so the road map from point A to B might not be obvious everywhere. I can answer specific questions about my methods, or which files are which, on my talk page or this page's talk. alanyst /talk/ 04:35, 22 February 2008 (UTC)

Use of "VERB-ing" as first word in edit summaries
It would be very hard for any single similarity in the editing styles of these four to conclusively prove that they're the same person. You need as many similarities as possible, and preferably each similarity would be very rare in Wikipedia. I doubt this particular similarity is extremely rare, but when I look for it in the edit summaries of other editors, I just don't find it. So I think it's worth adding to the pile.

The contributions pages for each of these four accounts have an unusually high number of edit summaries using the same kind of "VERB-ing" construction as the first word on the line.

Here's a sample of a cluster of them from Mantanmoreland, who uses them less than the other three accounts, but still more than anyone else I can find (I've put the initial verbs in boldface):


 * 13:25, April 18, 2007 (hist) (diff) Wikipedia talk:Attack sites‎ (→How Hanlon's Razor isn't going to help us: expanding comment)
 * 13:15, April 18, 2007 (hist) (diff) m Wikipedia talk:Attack sites‎ (→How Hanlon's Razor isn't going to help us: putting in correct timeorder)
 * 13:13, April 18, 2007 (hist) (diff) Wikipedia talk:Attack sites‎ (→How Hanlon's Razor isn't going to help us)
 * 13:04, April 18, 2007 (hist) (diff) Wikipedia talk:Attack sites‎ (→How Hanlon's Razor isn't going to help us)
 * 12:35, April 18, 2007 (hist) (diff) Wikipedia talk:Attack sites‎ (→How Hanlon's Razor isn't going to help us: clarifying)
 * 12:20, April 18, 2007 (hist) (diff) Wikipedia talk:Attack sites‎ (→How Hanlon's Razor isn't going to help us)
 * 12:15, April 18, 2007 (hist) (diff) Wikipedia talk:Attack sites‎ (→How Hanlon's Razor isn't going to help us: clarifying)
 * 12:14, April 18, 2007 (hist) (diff) m Wikipedia talk:Attack sites‎ (→How Hanlon's Razor isn't going to help us)
 * 12:13, April 18, 2007 (hist) (diff) m Wikipedia talk:Attack sites‎ (→How Hanlon's Razor isn't going to help us: fixing indent)

There was no particular reason to use the -ing form of the verbs. Many editors use either the past tense ("fixed") or present tense ("fix") if they use a verb in the edit summaries.

Look at the contributions pages for each of these four accounts and you'll find more:


 * -- uses them less than the rest,
 * -- especially the earliest page
 * -- especially the earliest page
 * -- especially the most recent page

This evidence would be stronger if it were compared to those of other editors, but I'm unsure about what set of editors to compare it to (perhaps editors who contribute to other finance-related pages; preferably not the ones that these accounts contributed to?), and I don't have the tools to give a count. The most striking way to look at it is simply to go look at it on the contributions pages.

It's been noted that inevitably, given a big enough sample, you'll find purely coincidental groupings of the same characteristic. And you'll find them even more if there are underlying similarities (editors from the same place, with the same interests). But each time you add a strand to the rope you make it less likely that we're dealing with coincidence. Consider this characterisic one more strand.

Use of space-hyphen-hyphen-space in edit summaries
Cool Hand Luke mentions the space-hyphen-hyphen-space construction (" -- ") as a distinctive feature of the edit summaries of Mantanmoreland, Samiharris, etc. To the extent that the construction is rare in edit summaries, Luke has a point. But that was a standard way to represent a dash in the Before Computers Era, so we can expect other editors to use it, possibly in edit summaries. The Associated Press Stylebook (1998 edition) states:


 * WITH SPACES: Put a space on both sides of a dash in all uses except the start of a paragraph and sports agate summaries.


 * LOCATION ON KEYBOARD: On most manual typewriters, the dash must be indicated by striking the hyphen key twice. On most video display terminals, however, there is a separate key that should be used to provide the unique dash symbol with one keystroke.


 * -- from the "Punctuation marks and how to use them" section under "dash"

Noroton (talk) 20:11, 17 February 2008 (UTC)

Response to Mantanmoreland
I did notice a bot that used "VERB-ing" as a first edit-summary word, and there seem to be more, meaning editors who create bots have put that in the program. What would be dispositive is to find a fair sample with a good number of human editors who do it. I'll continue to look. Noroton (talk) 21:12, 17 February 2008 (UTC)

On "confirmation bias": I've been waiting to learn more and see more of your defense before coming to a conclusion, and I don't need to confirm anything. I've shown that I'm not interested in overselling the case against you, which at this point seems strong. Noroton (talk) 22:24, 17 February 2008 (UTC)

This will be your finest hour
Hi. I am just checking in on this after a long day on the road. I have another tomorrow, but within a day or two will post something that I think most will find decisive. I fear it will be disappeared down the Orwellian memory hole, but at this point I think that would be noted. In any case, I will also post it on my blog DeepCapture.com so that cannot happen. For what it is worth, I know that this must be distressing to many good people of the Wikipedia community. I have an idea of where this is going to lead (short of a Battista-style counter-attack), but assure you, in retrospect it is going to stand as your finest hour. - Patrick PatrickByrne (talk) 01:40, 18 February 2008 (UTC)

A complex case like this has a complex back-story
There is a story, perhaps apocryphal, that in 1895 the Chairman of the Harvard Physics Department discouraged new graduate students from entering on the grounds that nearly all the questions in physics had been answered. There were just two issues remaining to be resolved: the problem of blackbody radiation, and the photo-electric effect. Neither could be explained within classical physics. Answers were finally achieved, but they shattered that classical paradigm.

I have received three private emails from Wikipedians trying to make sense of these facts about Gary Weiss and the actions of certain Wikipedelites. There are answers, but they cannot be grasped from within the classical understanding that Wikipedia has of itself. You must consider a new paradigm if you wish to understand. I have written a carefully-documented piece explaining that paradigm. Due to its length, and also, because (unfortunately) evidence for or even discussion of that paradigm has until recently been disallowed within Wikipedia, I have posted it on my blog, DeepCapture.com.

You can read it here: readding external link to BLP info, see talk page. Be forewarned that in it, you will discover that bad guys are good guys, and good guys, bad. You've always known it was possible. This is what it looks like. I mean it when I say, Respect, and I am sorry for the distress that it is clear many feel about these events. --PatrickByrne (talk) 01:26, 21 February 2008 (UTC)

Gary Weiss: The Secret History, by Patrick M. Byrne

 * [Material redacted, see below]

Respect, Patrick M. Byrne PatrickByrne (talk) 22:51, 24 February 2008 (UTC)


 * The issues in this arbitration case concern an allegation of sockpuppetry and how such alleged conduct and related matters may be affecting Wikipedia. The material previously posted in this section goes far beyond a statement or evidence that could be of assistance to the arbitrators in rendering an informed decision in the case and is not suitable for publication on Wikipedia. I and, I believe, the other arbitrators are familiar with the material posted, but if desired, a copy can be forwarded to the arbitrators' mailing list. However, this material should not be posted again in any location on Wikipedia. This comment does not express any view on any issue relating to the outcome of the case. Newyorkbrad (talk) 23:03, 24 February 2008 (UTC)

Mantanmoreland mis-states the case
MM's evidence--

Sockpuppeting

''...Most of the contents of this page have been on the ASM website for well over a year. If Judd Bagley, Overstock's spokesman and operator of ASM, were not coordinating this, I am sure he would have a case for copyright infringement...''(User:Mantanmoreland)

That is the same old argument, it is easily refuted. All known socks of WB are listed at Category:Wikipedia sockpuppets of WordBomb and none of them have posted to the arbcom. case, as far as i can see.

Mantanmoreland sets the agenda
MM's evidence--

(user:mantanmoreland)--The rest of his *Cla68's* "evidence" relates to the raw deal he supposedly has gotten through much of his wiki-life, and has nothing to do with this arbitration.

With respect Mantan, it is for the arbitrators to decide what is to do with this arbitration, not yourself.

Mantanmoreland appeals to the wrong peer group
MM's evidence--

The editors who know Sami and I best, and are not necessarily friends of either of us, believe quite firmly that we are different people based on writing style and the positions we took, and didn't take, in 600-odd emails. (User:Mantanmoreland)

Mantan, it is not a matter of the editors who know you best, but of all the WPeditors, most of whom have never met you; they are your peers.

Non-notability
Mr. Weiss, Mr. Bagley and Naked short selling are apparently notable, since there are reliable souces such as the New York Times. Where are the citations evident for Naked short selling or Bagley, or Weiss, in the Australian newspaper, the Sydney Morning Herald, The Age (Melbourne), or The Gaurdian newspaper? "Naked short selling" is no more notable, globally, than is Clothed tall buying.

It may well be the case that no-one, outside of Bagley and Weiss and the sock-puppets they have manufactured and the acolytes they have garnered, has any interest in this topic. There is no gain whatsoever for en.wikipedia to become embroiled in a petty stoush between two cantankerous and untrustworthy parties. en.Wikipedia ought not to be involved, we have better things to do. These are not matters for an encyclopedia. I do not believe sending articles to Afd is necessarily the expected outcome from an Arbcom. case. Nevertheless, if these articles were deleted, en.Wikipedia would well be the richer.

Respectfully submitted, Newbyguesses - Talk 12:51, 18 February 2008 (UTC)

Waste of time to examine 600 emails
The 600 emails (previously referred to in Mantanmoreland's evidence) do not constitute evidence that may be presented to this page, as is right and fair, because they are considered sacrosanct and private. It is my understanding that the Arbitrators, under certain circumstances are prepared to consider private, or priveleged evidence, but they then will not publicly release that information, via posting to this page, as is done with all other viable and vetted evidence. Only the findings of the arbitrators in relation to that private evidence is publicly released. It is my belief that, if the arbitrators are scrupulous in explaining their methodology and transparent and reasoned in thier advice and findings, that this will satisfy the community about the propreiety of their dealing with such private material should they choose to do so.

But do the emails need to be examined at all? If we accept hearsay evidence as to the mere existence of 600 private emails sent by MM and SH to User:Jimbo about this matter, that in itself is a very clear indication to me, along with all the other public evidence, that Mantanmoreland/Samihariss were pursuing a private agenda which they than also pursued on-wiki. Why on earth send 600, or even 300 emails OFF-WIKI, about a couple of crummy articles on an obscure topic, unless there is a clear and over-riding personal agenda being pursued? How many emails would it take to launch a space-shuttle?

It is my understanding that Wikipedia is an encyclopedia with a(n) NPOV, and the pursuit of private agenda(s), whether noble or base, ("Save the whales", "honour the war dead and return our homeland") is outside the scope of WP, and inimical to WP, (I could be wrong, and willing to be corrected here.) Pursuing a private agenda concerning such an un-noticed topic as Naked short selling, is just as wrong, in fact, since it is likelier to be successful in the absence of outside scrutiny, it's worse. The excuse that the private agenda being pursued was a noble one of protecting en.wikipedia from irreparable damage simply does not wash. Such legitimate concerns as MM/SH might have about article quality are meant to be addressed on-wiki, at the talk-page.

No dobt u:Jimbo, in common with the Pope and Prince Charles etc. recieves copious amounts of correspondence, a large proportion of this communication originates from true believers in fringe theories, conspiracy theorists and the mentally unhinged. We will not know without examining those emails whether there came a point where Jimbo advised his correspondents not to pursue the matter further in private, and to take it up to correct channels, but, if the arbitrators decide that the emails do not constitute evidence, that also is irrelevant. Newbyguesses - Talk 23:34, 19 February 2008 (UTC)

To date, there appears to be no response to this petition, (15 days have elapsed). Is it just me, or does the Arbcom intend to keep everyone in the dark about these informal, and no doubt unreliable emails? Why?

Note: Second, the committee does have some evidence which cannot be made public, which tends to support the view that MM and SH are different people.UninvitedCompany WikBack Administrator #3603 - 03/03/08 09:53 PM

Is it 600emails? Yes/No. Newbyguesses - Talk 01:01, 6 March 2008 (UTC)

Response to Requests for arbitration/Mantanmoreland/Evidence
Editors/admins here have been "drawn offsides" by WB before.

In this section of evidence, GWH refers to "the antisocialmedia.net page that started that The Skinny on SlimVirgin's Sockpuppetry. General conclusion ". This off-wiki matter is out of the jurisdiction of the Board, the arbitrators, and the community to the present case which currently is concerned with isues of sock-puppetry by Mantanmoreland.

These tedious OFF-WIKI battles do not have any impact on this case, so why don't we drop any reference to such sites, and the supposed crimes committed there? Newbyguesses - Talk 11:32, 22 February 2008 (UTC)

Diffs from User talk:WordBomb
Mantanmoreland's threat

and the very next edit is by Mantanmoreland's sock

Let's see what wordbomb had to say.

from talk:Wordbomb
These edits appear on the talk page.

Wordbomb blocked
7 July 2006 - User:Wordbomb made his first edit to Gary Weiss --

Mantanmoreland and Lastexit soon posted to User talk:Wordbomb.

wordbomb requests mediation
User:Wordbomb who was ostensibly a newby, offered to stop editing, and requested mediation at 20:28, 7 July 2006 (UTC).

''I will indeed refrain from further edits until the process can begin. Say...you know an awful lot about Gary Weiss. How exactly is that? Do you know him?'' Let the truth be told. 20:28, 7 July 2006 (UTC) DIFF.

blocked by SlimVirgin
SlimVirgin blocked wordbomb at ) 22:09, 7 July 2006 (UTC), and there appears to have been no attempt to comply with User:Wordbomb's request for mediation.

''Hi WordBomb, I've blocked this account indefinitely because you appear to be trying to insert defamatory material into an article, and you also appeared to try to out another Wikipedian (or so you believed). Please note that for the purposes of our harassment policy, it makes no difference whether you're right or not: if you post personal details about another editor, it something that we take very seriously, and it's a blockable offense. If there's an explanation for your edits, and if you can offer an assurance that it won't happen again, I'll be happy to discuss lifting your block. You can either reply here, or e-mail me using the link on my user page. Cheers,'' SlimVirgin (talk) 22:09, 7 July 2006 (UTC)

DIFF

Not once in this block message is the name of the article mentioned. The harrassment policy is mentioned, but no links are provided to any pages which might explain policy, and the dispute resolution process is not even mentioned. No DIFFS are provided as evidence of these assertions by user:SlimVirgin.

No acknowledgement is made by Slimvirgin of Wordbomb's offer to refrain from further editing.

Response to Evidence presented by ChipotlePickle
Thankyou for your analysis. In response, note -

A) That MM=GW does not need to be so, for the Remedies to apply.

B) That the "concrete" evidence you have analysed is supplementary to a whole slew of other evidence, of POV by MM/SH, of sock-puppeting by MM/LE/TS, double-voting etc.

C) That the Arbs. have chosen, to date, to "narrow" the focus, or scope of their findings, which render this material helpful, muchly, but perhaps more likely to be availed of at the Mantanmoreland Rfc at this late stage of the proceedings.

All in all, your points seem well made and may prove helpful still at this late date.

External stalking
It is reasonably well known that Overstock.com staff including Patrick M. Byrne (aka User:PatrickByrne commenting here) and Judd Bagley (formerly User:Wordbomb among others) have believed for some time that MM is the financial columnist the current RFAR case is focused on, and that SH and MM are the same individual. An early convenient example to call upon is this entry at antisocialmedia.net written by Judd Bagley on October 21st, 2006 at 10:50 pm according to its side notes, with a more current one being Gary Weiss, Psychopath & Scaramouche written February 19th, 2008 by Patrick Byrne. There is much in between, on those sites and others such as Wikipedia Review, to establish that such activity was widespread and ongoing.

The claims in this case have been made before
The bulk of the claims against MM are identical to those made by Byrne and Bagley offsite over the last two years. If there's any dispute on this we can source a few hundred links for it, but it's probably needless and redundant.

Editors/admins here have been "drawn offsides" by WB before
See for example Cyde's falling for Bagley's attacks on Slim Virgin from last summer and the antisocialmedia.net page that started that The Skinny on SlimVirgin's Sockpuppetry. General conclusion was that significant effort had been made to combine some true data with other false data and present ultimately unsupportable conclusions of abuse. Numerous arbcom members felt that Cyde should be sanctioned, though that ultimately did not happen.

We do not have full chain of custody and evidence in hand
It is not beyond the credible that evidence has been falsified in some way in this case here - the raw data used for significant statistical work is not being examined by others, and numerous works of opinion and conclusion are being presented without full evidence as to the source of individual data points.

Statistical analysis performed by User:Alanyst
Most significantly in terms of quality of evidence, a significant portion of the statistical evidence being used to argue this case originates in work done by Alanyst, whose data processing has been moderately open but not independently audited. I don't know that anyone has seen the actual code or intermediate data sets used to generate the final statistical conclusions. Nothing implausible or improper has been suggested (Alanyst is being remarkably proper about asking people not to stretch conclusions) but we essentially only have his word as to the state of the data that generates the final numbers he's reporting.
 * Addendum - I am informed that Alanyst provided the code being used to Arbcom and Cool Hand Luke - It would be useful to put it into the "public record" to eliminate this concern, but that's up to Alanyst. Georgewilliamherbert (talk) 04:47, 22 February 2008 (UTC)

Reason to be cautious in final conclusions
It is not impossible that the evidence in this case has at least to some extent been prepared or manipulated by persons who have done that on and off Wikipedia before, who have had a well known, self-admitted, well documented feud on and off Wikipedia with the accounts in question.. We are considering statistical types of evidence that have largely not been used before, and whose intermediate data steps are opaque.

Caution is called for, even in the face of a preponderance of evidence.

Georgewilliamherbert (talk) 03:57, 22 February 2008 (UTC)

Summary
I'm adding below details of my dealings with WordBomb and the admin action I took, as well as a description of the apparently faked screenshot of Samiharris's user interface that was e-mailed, because some editors have requested the details. If the ArbCom would like copies of any e-mails referred to that haven't already been forwarded, please ask.

My block of WordBomb
The (WB) account was created and began editing on July 7, 2006. 

On July 7, I responded to a post on AN/I from Mantanmoreland (MM), who asked for help with WB's edits to Gary Weiss. Over several edits on that day (at 07:57, 15:39, 16:46, 16:49, 19:18, 19:51, and 21:49), WB had added to the article that Weiss was editing Wikipedia as MM, and that an anti-naked short selling group had "launched a campaign" against Weiss to show that he was posting to certain message boards. WB had restored the edits when reverted. These were violations of BLP and HARASS, so I deleted the edits and blocked the WB account. I left a note on his talk page explaining that posting another user's personal details, accurate or not, was a blockable offense, and that I'd unblock if he gave an assurance that he wouldn't repost them. He responded by reposting them on his talk page, so I deleted the edit, protected the page, and let the block stand.

On July 16, using the name IPFrehley, WB told another admin that he had added what he called "unflattering" information to Gary Weiss in order to "probe [MM's] defenses." He said in the e-mail that he knew MM "outside Wikipedia."

FloydBarbour, IPFrehley, and WikiRicardo
Between July 8 and July 23, WB posted material about MM and Weiss as, , and , the first two blocked by me, the third by FloNight. Other accounts turned up too, though it became unclear who was WB and who was mimicking him. WB told FloNight that he had asked other people to create accounts to continue the dispute.  Some of the accounts are listed here and here.

On July 18, IPFrehley posted an image showing alleged links between Doright, Lastexit and MM. I deleted it, and posted another offer to unblock IPFrehley if the harassment stopped. I told him there were ways of dealing with legitimate sockpuppet concerns, and I asked him to e-mail me. 

E-mails from Becky Beckett
From July 19 onwards, I received several e-mails from WB, who pretended to be a woman called Becky Beckett. The first e-mail came with attachments &mdash; called Weiss2 and GW2 &mdash; that he said contained spreadsheets showing evidence of wrongdoing by MM. I learned later that the attachments contained some kind of spyware intended to obtain my IP address. It's important to stress that this happened from his very first e-mail onwards; at no point was there any straightforward or good-faith approach.

I requested diffs from Wikipedia showing wrongdoing by MM, rather than attachments or external links about Weiss. He replied by sending another attachment called the "Weiss files" hosted at filelodge.com. It was obvious that he was bringing an off-wiki feud onto Wikipedia, so I e-mailed him on July 20 and asked:

He responded on July 20 that he had previously used an account with a colleague to edit evolution theory and population genetics, and he linked to what looked like "en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Flashgrotto." There is no User:Flashgrotto. When you looked at the original of the e-mail, you could see that he had embedded a link that would take anyone clicking on the Flashgrotto link to http://www.charlesdarwinblog.com/wikpedia/Flashgrotto. I assume this was another attempt to obtain my IP address. Several months later, I e-mailed the blog owner to ask how his blog might be connected to this, and he told me he had contracted with someone to write the blog posts for ad revenue. He gave me the person's name and I learned later that it was a former colleague of WB's.

Wordbomb says I forwarded his first e-mail
WB has subsequently said that he inserted some form of spyware into the first attachment he sent me, and that this was subsequently opened, not by me, but by Gary Weiss.

It is true that I didn't open any of his attachments. I forwarded his e-mails to a number of people, including other admins and members of the ArbCom, warning them that he was trying to out someone and that he might be harvesting IP addresses. Gary Weiss was not among the people I sent this to. Whether MM was, I don't know. I have no memory of forwarding it to him, and nothing in my archives indicates that I did, but it's possible that I did. I don't regard attempts to spy on people as something I should keep confidential; on the contrary, it's important to warn others that it's happening.

Lastexit's last exit
In another e-mail on July 20, WB responded to my request for WP diffs by sending two diffs showing MM correcting a post by Lastexit. 

I was thoroughly fed up with WB by this point because of the IP harvesting antics, and wanted nothing more to do with him. But I was concerned about the diffs showing MM apparently sockpuppeting, so I asked FloNight if she would take over the case as a fresh pair of eyes. I forwarded her my correspondence with WB, warned her about his spyware and embedded links, and wrote: "Although it does look as though there may be a link between Mantanmoreland and Lastexit, there is no link between him/them and Doright. Doright's writing style is distinctive and completely different, as are his interests." FloNight responded by agreeing to look at the situation.

On July 21, I wrote to WB to ask him to deal with FloNight from now on, and they began to correspond. In one e-mail, he told FloNight something about intending to contact the media about her too.

On July 23, WB wrote to Fred Bauder as WikiRicardo, alleging that FloNight and I were protecting MM, and telling Fred that MM was sockpuppeting. Fred checkusered MM, which returned positive, and he left a warning on MM's talk page about sockpuppetry. Lastexit stopped editing a few days later.

My involvement after July 21, 2006
The only admin action I took regarding this case after July 21 that I recall was to semi-protect Gary Weiss and the talk page twice each,  after various accounts or IPs posted that he was MM. I have never taken admin action on any of the other articles involved in this, or edited any of them.

An apparent threat
WB continued to e-mail me as Becky Beckett, though I didn't respond. On August 28, 2006, he e-mailed me to say that I was sockpuppeting as John513 and Szero, and as anon IPs from London, Edinburgh, and New York. He said it was "very unlikely that you'll make it through this one." He said "our plan" was to present the information "in a rather high profile venue." He wrote:

WB also posted on my talk page on August 28 as "Before moving ahead, I want to be certain you received my email this morning,"  (to which Fred Bauder replied: "Horsefeathers, Grampa!")

At this point, WB had not identified himself, and I had no idea who he was, what he wanted, or what he was threatening to do.

On September 24, I received an e-mail from WB's boss, though I didn't know that's who it was until several months later. He wrote that he had been talking about me to a blogger, and that material was about to be published about me. He asked me to "respond soon if you wish to stop this exposure." I didn't respond.

A day or so later, WB posted on his blog &mdash; still anonymously &mdash; what he said was a description of me from 20 years ago.

On October 1, WB's boss e-mailed me again to ask me to telephone or meet him, to which I also didn't respond.

Topic ban
On November 1, 2006, I received information that persuaded me MM ought to stop editing Gary Weiss, Patrick Byrne, and any other BLPs related to Weiss's work. I e-mailed MM that day to ask him to agree to a topic ban:

I copied the e-mail to a number of admins and ArbCom members. MM agreed to the proposal, saying he was fed up with the trouble editing those articles was causing him.

WordBomb's identity
Until January 2007, WB operated anonymously, using a variety of names to e-mail people, and operating his blog without a name. I had no idea who he was or what his connection to any of this was. On January 2, 2007, the New York Post revealed which company seemed to be connected to his blog, and on January 20, WB was named by The New York Times. 

Ongoing claims
Throughout 2007, WB sent e-mails and posted on various websites that he was going to expose me in the media. He made various claims about me, some very personal and insulting, some that I'm involved in a complex conspiracy connected to naked short selling. He studied old database dumps of Wikipedia in order to obtain IP addresses of mine and other admins, or any information he could find about other accounts or what he thought were personally significant edits. In August 2007, he complained about me to the ArbCom asking that they "investigate" me. He repeatedly posted what he thinks are my personal details and location, and that of other admins.

Apparently faked screenshot of Samiharris's user interface
I don't know how this fits into things, but it's obviously connected in some way.

On December 29, 2007, another admin received an e-mail with the name Gary Weiss in the from: line, and the e-mail address garyweiss.mail at gmail dot com. This is similar to Gary Weiss's e-mail address. The e-mail said: "Any chance I was the only one to catch these?" It contained a link to an image from a news site. Attached to the e-mail was what purported to be a screenshot of Samiharris's Wikipedia user interface, showing the most recent contribs of the admin the e-mail was addressed to.

The original of the e-mail showed that there was an activemeter link embedded in it, for the purpose of harvesting IP addresses. The code was  >  alt="screen1">Any chance I was the only one to catch these? dir="ltr"> src="http://a.abcnews.com/images/GMA/apg_wikipedia_02_070820_ms.jpg" > alt="screen2"> >

Samiharris and WordBomb found to have used the same IPs
In February 2008, MM and Samiharris were checkusered. Samiharris was found to have been using the same open proxies from proxify.com, which were subsequently blocked. A number of these had been used in November 2006 to make attacks on MM, including posting a sockpuppet tag to his user page, and posting on AN/I to ask that he be investigated for sockpuppetry. It's therefore assumed that these IPs were used by WordBomb or a supporter.

I've asked two admins familiar with the situation, who are knowledgable about open proxies, how likely it is that Samiharris and WordBomb would end up using the same open proxies, 15 months apart, entirely cooincidentally. One said it could be explained by the anonymizer having a very small pool of stable IP addresses, so that any Wikipedian using it would likely be assigned the same addresses. The other admin said that the two being assigned the same IP addresses so far apart was so unlikely as to be almost unbelievable. I don't have the technical knowledge to judge whether this is a cooincidence or not.

WB says he will remove posts if Weiss is banned
WB wrote to me on February 8, 2008 (using his real name) to say that, if MM and Samiharris are found to be sockpuppets of Weiss, and if Weiss is banned, he will remove his blog posts about Wikipedia, including those about me. He added that he wasn't asking me to do anything, but just wanted to let me know.

Points arising from WikBack thread
I attempted to keep the discussion  between WordBomb and SlimVirgin on the 'WikBack' forum civil, to try to reconcile their differing beliefs about events to find out what "the whole story" is, and to put my own questions to both users to this end.

WordBomb, in the course of that discussion, made the following statements that would appear to contradict, in minor ways, SlimVirgin's account of these events:
 * That there was another e-mail, which he sent from the IPFrehley account to SlimVirgin via Wikipedia e-mail, which SlimVirgin has never acknowledged receiving. There are any number of possible reasons why it has not been received, and I do not doubt SV's account of not having received it. It was, however, posted on-wiki.
 * That he did not "pretend to be a woman" - he offered an alternative explanation for the name "Becky Beckett" on the e-mail address, and none of the e-mail content I have seen goes further than that name in representing himself as someone of either gender.
 * The only additional evidence that he presented himself as a woman that was given when I asked SlimVirgin to clarify this, was that he had sent other e-mails (to two other users, at least one of whom had evidently forwarded them to SV - no explanation why has been forthcoming) from the same address with a different name, "IPFrehley", on them, implying that the name was a deliberate choice specifically for that exchange. However, if he sent them via two different interfaces (say, webmail on the one hand vs wikipedia e-mail on the other hand), this need not actually have been a conscious decision. He states that the e-mail to the other users was via wikipedia e-mail.
 * WordBomb also claims that ActiveMeter was only included in subsequent e-mails, and not in the first one that he sent, and that his original intention in including it was merely to ascertain if it had been read, rather than to find out her IP address. I am inclined to disbelieve this, since my understanding of the timeline is that he had already at this point made attempts to capture Mantanmoreland's IP address.

Also, SlimVirgin admitted outright that she had no basis for believing that the e-mails contained any kind of spyware at the time that she forwarded them to other users. The only explanation she has offered to supposedly justify her decision to forward them was that he was "creepy" because he was supposedly pretending to be a woman.

—Random832 22:08, 27 February 2008 (UTC)

Activemeter
Gary Weiss's blog contains an activemeter tracking single-pixel image. I bring this up to point out that he is no stranger to these sorts of tracking devices. So far as I know, we have no-one's word but his to establish that he does not own both garyweiss.email and garyweiss.mail at gmail.com. —Random832 21:03, 5 March 2008 (UTC)

Note that Kelly Martin's blog does not contain an activemeter tracking pixel (though it does contain sitemeter and google analytics) - I mention this to show that activemeter is not something that is always present on blogspot blogs. The others may well be, since Weiss's blog contains all three. —Random832 21:09, 5 March 2008 (UTC)

Evidence of abusive, COI socking on Talk:Gary Weiss
''The following was originally placed on the discussion page for the "Proposed Decision." It was added there in response to a request from User:Georgewilliamherbert to provide more evidence that the socks were used in an abusive fashion and in a way that goes against our COI policies. This evidence assumes the sock allegations are true (though it adds a small piece of circumstantial evidence, depending on how one reads it, to that with the "three editors" comment) and that Mantanmoreland's real world identity is that of a certain financial reporter. It is meant to counter the argument that even if SH is a sock of MM there was not enough abusive editing happening to warrant serious sanctions.''

See (this diff) which is an old version of the Gary Weiss talk page. On the Proposed Decision talk page Georgewilliamherbert asks the following: assuming SH is a sock of MM, and assuming MM is a certain journalist in the real-world, where is the sockpuppet abuse? Well for one example scroll down to the sections "RfC" and "Replies to RfC" in the diff above and read through that.

You'll note that Cla68 opens an RfC about including some material which references criticism of Weiss by Judd Bagley, including the notion that Weiss had engaged in "unethical or bad faith behavior." Now remember we are assuming that SH is a sock of MM and MM is that one guy for the purposes of this evidence. The first reply, in a "replies" section, comes from MM who says "This material is clearly not relevant to Weiss' notability." Less than 24 hours later (in a different section, the original "RFC" section above that), SH chimes in with "In the past, three editors -- myself, Mantanmoreland, JzG and Jayjg -- have opposed adding the material" and then goes on to explain why. (I would point out that, though it could actually be an honest and routine counting error, Samiharris's reference to "three editors -- myself, Mantanmoreland, JzG and Jayjg" is mildly hilarious given...well you know). Before JzG archived that and other talk page discussion, both SH and MM had weighed in twice (each in different sections) arguing that information critical of Weiss should not be added to the article.

Maybe they were even right about that, but that's hardly the point. This example clearly shows abusive sockpuppetry (assuming SH is a sock of MM) undertaken to advance a clear conflict of interest (assuming MM is a certain financial journalist). The evidence here is meant to supplement evidence of abuse already provided by Cla68 and Relata refero and is only useful inasmuch as the ArbCom - or the community - determines that the basic sockpuppetry accusations are true.--Bigtimepeace | talk | contribs 18:04, 4 March 2008 (UTC)

SlimVirgin is Failing to Disclose Her Massive Conflict of Interest Here
What SlimVirgin is failing to disclose is that she and I have had a personal relationship in the distant past: I leave it to her to characterize that relationship. If I am telling the truth, then I am in the right to bring it up. If I am not, SlimVirgin should deny it here, for the record. If true, all of her involvement in this arbitration or l'affaire de Weiss must be viewed through that prism (or she should be honorable enough to recuse herself from it).

SlimVirgin's explanation for how it is that files Judd sent her were opened minutes later by Mantanmoreland amounts to the "I am not in cahoots with Mantanmoreland but I may have sent them to people who may have sent them on to Mantanmoreland" defense, over and over. Did I miss anything, Slim?

Also, I should mention that SlimVirgin's characterizations of her communications with Judd/WB are, as is typical for her, quarter-truths. Months ago both SlimVirgin and Jimbo contacted Judd, and SlimVirgin contacted me. Extensive email communications have ensued. Jimbo and and SlimVirgin requested that Judd not publish their emails, and SlimVirgin requested that I not publish hers to me. Both Judd and I gave our word on that score. Now I see that SlimVirgin is here telling quarter-truths about what Judd said in an email, knowing he is duty-bound by his promise not to reply. Let that stand for the general level of integrity of this gang.

Mantanmoreland's Articles on Naked Short Selling Are Hopelessly Biased
To give you a sense of how deeply Wikipedia has been manipulated by Mantanmoreland, check out these articles from yesterday and today.

SEC proposes new crackdown on short-sale abuses (Associated Press)- http://www.cnbc.com/id/23469171/for/cnbc

SEC proposes tougher "naked" short selling rules (Reuters) - http://www.reuters.com/article/etfNews/idUSN0446331920080304

SEC Proposes Tougher Naked Short-Selling Rules (Portfolio Media) - http://securities.law360.com/secure/printview.aspx?id=48999

Again, to make sense of it all: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:PatrickByrne/Whitewash_essay PatrickByrne (talk) 16:21, 5 March 2008 (UTC)

Evidence presented by User:Anticipation of a New Lover's Arrival, The
I've produced a comprehensive edit-by-edit analysis of naked short selling and Patrick M. Byrne, up to the latest edits by either Samiharris or Mantanmoreland.

These of course omit any deleted or oversighted revisions.


 * User:Anticipation of a New Lover's Arrival, The/Sandbox/Analysis/Naked short selling
 * User:Anticipation of a New Lover's Arrival, The/Sandbox/Analysis/Patrick M. Byrne

As advertised on teh interwebs.

It's a mistake to read to much into the time of day analysis.
It would take a lot of effort to demonstrate that time of day similarities are good indicators of sockpuppetry. Cool Hand Luke said it best with "it's not clear what similar editing times mean".

If someone really wanted to work on the time of day, which I don't recommend, then R^2 is not the best measure of similarity of the time of day patterns. Better to compute the empirical cumulative distribution functions for the time of day and use a Kolmogorov-Smirnov test.

The collisions analysis should be built out
Some work would need to be done to get an expected distribution of the number of collisions or the expected distribution of the time between posts. So far that's not been done. But this seems much more likely to lead to a conclusion.

The text analysis could use some work.
There are some somewhat standard measures that are made of text, even in simple tools like GNU style. It would be good to see more established tests applied rather than ad hoc ones.

If you give the first few paragraphs of Mantanmoreland's presentation here, everything up to "response to Norton", to GNU style, you get a SMOG-Grading of 12.1. It's hard to find Gary Weiss text that obtuse. --ChipotlePickle (talk) 05:56, 7 March 2008 (UTC)

Evidence presented by {your user name}
before using the last evidence template, please make a copy for the next person

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