Talk:Ronn Torossian

What's going on now?

I know we're supposed to assume good faith on the part of editors, but this article has in itself seen too much slanted editing, both aggrandising with "Conflict of Interest" and libelous. So, here it is. User:Dweller usually edits articles on British sports (particularly Norwich FC and cricket), sometimes British music. Also the odd page of this and that, but nothing long or persistent in time. Yes, I actually went through several pages of User:Dweller's contributions since 2006! I also went to his edit count page and saw these most edited pages ( 416 - Norwich_City_F.C., 350 - Donald_Bradman, 244 - History_of_Norwich_City_F.C., 217 - Bryan_Gunn, 197 - Norwich_City_F.C._Player_of_the_Year, 177 - John_Wark, 168 - Keith_Miller, 168 - Carrow_Road, 167 - Ipswich_Town_F.C., 157 - West_Indian_cricket_team_in_England_in_1988) All this is very well and this is a completely legitimate editor. But the fact that the editor is so obviously legitimate, makes "this" even more suspect. An editor with an interest in British sports, all of a sudden is busy in real life, but makes roughly 20 edits in this article about an American PR enterpreneur, adding an incredibly significant amount of content, citing references such as Bloomberg. And the content is rather flattering as well. Right about in the middle User:Judae1 (an associate of Torossian) makes an edit with a correction (no, Dweller is not infallible on matters regarding this article). Let's not forget that we're talking about PR people, who also have attempted and tried several times to "photoshop" the article. Finding a legitimate account and then have this account make these edit is not beyond them.

Please note, that the first time I was involved in the article I removed negative content (actually most of it was frightening slander). I have no war to wage against Torossian. --Atavi (talk) 20:49, 7 April 2011 (UTC)

So what are you saying? Our merry copyright-infringing edit-warring long-term sockpuppeting COI editor got community banned and he thinks "right, that's it, no way I'll be able to sockpuppet now!" so he picks a random established editor from England, sends him $100 and asks him to "improve" the article a particular way?

No, that's downright silly. If you look a bit deeper at User:Dweller's contributions, you'll see he regularly posts at the BLP noticeboard and about BLP policy in general, occasionally at AfDs, and also commented neutrally at the SPI for Babalisachai. Since our COI editor (whoever it is) has been making a lot of noise all over such places, it's entirely understandable that User:Dweller would have seen some of it and decided to put a little time into improving the article. There are ongoing concerns that the bad behaviour of the various socks has caused the pendulum of balance to swing too far the other way, and that's something we don't want on a BLP.

I have no concerns about Dweller's motives at all. --Demiurge1000 (talk) 21:07, 7 April 2011 (UTC)

Except for the "bribe" (this has happened before elsewhere in WP, right?), another possibility I was also thinking is account hijacking.

I actually noticed edits to BLP discussions, etc, but I only found very recent ones (I didn't go through the pages one by one).

Yes, the article has swung too far on the negative side several times, but if there was indeed any of the problems I was thinking of, I don't think we could disregard it, just in order to make the article have balance.

Adjusting BLP articles is very easy to do, all you need is a team of uninvolved editors (as you say User:Dweller might be one of them)

--Atavi (talk) 21:33, 7 April 2011 (UTC)

This is not the Twilight Zone. Account hijacking? You're suggesting that someone-with-a-COI has access to Dweller's account and is making COI edits from it without Dweller knowing about it, while Dweller goes on editing material about football, all unawares? Huh? I am saying Dweller might be one of whom? --Demiurge1000 (talk) 21:40, 7 April 2011 (UTC)

I don't want to go on arguing about increasingly absurd scenarios, but it is not inconceivable that the hijacker can continue the editing habits of the actual user. Anyway, if you are ruling out the possibility of foul play, I'm not going to say there is.---Atavi (talk) 21:49, 7 April 2011 (UTC)

Erm, at what stage were you going to bother to ask me what's going on? --Dweller (talk) 23:07, 7 April 2011 (UTC)

Well, I'm pretty sure you would be watching the talk page of the article you had been editing. I actually should have left a message on your talk page as well anyway.

--Atavi (talk)21:19, 8 April 2011 (UTC)

This is the silliest thing since yesterday when a checkuser had to checkuser themselves. I'm sure if the sockfarmer had access to an administrator and bureaucrat account, he wouldn't be having all these problems with getting blocked :) --Demiurge1000 (talk) 23:46, 7 April 2011 (UTC)

Well then, I didn't visit the link you provide, but it sounds like a process must be broken for a user to be able to "checkuser" themselves.

And wasn't Essjay a beaureaucrat, since you bring that up? Mind you, I'm not saying that Dweller actually did something wrong, but that "silly" and "wild imagination" unfortunately has been proven to not apply in even wilder cases.

--Atavi (talk) 21:19, 8 April 2011 (UTC)

Atavi, relax. Dweller is doing a fine job. Though I would like to see Rabbi Bachman's "unethical" quote restored. But that's another matter, for a separate thread on this talk page. --Ravpapa (talk) 06:24, 8 April 2011 (UTC)

Yes, one or the other specific sentence are not at issue here. --Atavi (talk)21:19, 8 April 2011 (UTC)

This is seriously the funniest thing I've ever seen on Wikipedia. The imagination involved here is incredible and I'd recommend pursuing a career in fictional writing. For what it's worth, I can assure you that Dweller's account has not been hijacked and, yes, sometimes real life means he is busy. And if I'm wrong, I'll fork out the $$$$ myself. The Rambling Man (talk) 06:37, 8 April 2011 (UTC)

You see, I only mentioned "hijacking" as another possibility, when "bribing" was explicitly was brought up; one of the reasons I did this was to not be outright uncivil towards Dweller, who myself saw to be have been a serious minded editor. I actually thought then that the latter (bribing) was more probable and unfortunately nothing anyone has written so far seems to address in any serious tone this possibility. It has either been joked about or entirely ignored.

I'm sure you're having a great time with this funny story, but is any of you actually considering giving any thought towards this?

Dweller, yourself you wondered why I didn't ask you, but you haven't answered either.

I'm not saying you are doing anything wrong, only that none of you is earnestly addressing what could be a potentially serious issue, just the way I put it forth in the first place: An editor, who did not appear until recently to be interested in biographies of PR businesspeople or PR as a subject, heavily editing such an article and (although I have not read every single word of these edits) it seems that they are in fact quite favorable towards to subject of the article. Once again, I remind to you all, that this article has been multiple times the target of people either seeking to tarnish Torossian or aggrandising him (and that's been the consensus of every single relevant discussion, not my vivid imagination. Editors writing libels have been banned; on the other hand, on the side of COI, User:Judae1 has been cautioned (way back, he hasn't done anything wrong in a long time).

That's about it....

--Atavi (talk) 21:19, 8 April 2011 (UTC)

FWIW, Dweller is a 'crat and an admin, myself also, and we know each (to an extent) off-wiki. Subsequent to the "concerns" raised here (which, frankly, border on hysteria) I "spoke" to my learned colleague who confirmed that he was prepared to send me either an ear or the tip of his nose to prove his natural existence. I asked for a finger, apparently that's old school. Atavi, your concerns have been noted, but hopefully you get the fact that Dweller is editing in good faith (after many 10s of thousands of edits, as an editor, admin and 'crat), your diligence in potentially unearthing a major account hijack, "paid-to-edit" conspiracy etc is admirable, but in this case, misplaced. And actually, for what it's worth, you never asked Dweller directly anything, so to become indignant that he never responded is a little unfair. If you'd like to pursue this further, feel free to contact me directly, or on-wiki, whichever direction gives you more confidence that we're not conspiring against you. The Rambling Man (talk) 21:28, 8 April 2011 (UTC)

Again, you chose the path of ridicule. I am sure that none of you is conspiring not against me, nor towards world domination.

I asked only for serious consideration instead of cracking jokes, not for a criminal trial; not even for any of the investigation routes in wikipedia procedure (regarding the Dweller; I did ask for admin "intervention" on the article...).

I did not ask Dweller anything specifically, but Dweller decided to comment on the fact that I did not ask him.

He did not choose to comment on the point at hand, which had little to do with me personally.

What you care to characterize hysteria seems to be "misplaced", but there's little I can do to change your mind...

I don't wish to pursue this in any direction and since this discussion is already steered miles away from its intended purpose, this will be the last post I place here.

Our personal discussion pages will have to do if need be, but I don't feel inclined to discover the need, if you'll pardon the pun.

--Atavi (talk) 22:01, 8 April 2011 (UTC)

Quick example from history. In the classical era of Athenian democracy, many public officials were selected by lot (randomly) from the general populace and served for very short terms, and the law courts (which formed a key part of the political process) often used juries (also selected by lot) containing several hundred members or even more.

Why was this done, when the huge juries were vastly costly, and the randomly selected public officials were likely to be considerably more incompetent than elected or appointed ones?

Mainly because bribery is almost totally impractical once the number of people that need to be bribed is beyond a reasonable number.

Let's say someone gets bribed to re-write the article in a manner unduly favourable to Torossian. Remember that someone is one out of several thousand active Wikipedia editors. All it would take would be for two people (say, me and Ravpapa) to decide the re-write is non-neutral, and then that bribery has become pointless. So the briber would need to approach and bribe two more people. And then maybe three more in addition to the two more, if subsequently some more non-bribed editors decide they don't like the re-write either.

And all the while, the person doing the bribing has to make absolutely sure that not even a single one of the people he approaches, tells anyone about it. Now, if offering $100 to a random editor, that's maybe a 50/50 bet. If it's an established editor with a vested interest in Wikipedia, the odds aren't so good. So you need more money per editor. $1000 each? $5000 each? And even at those higher rates, approaching half a dozen editors still gives you a fair chance that one of them will give you away, even if you're offering enough cash to make that chance 10% per editor. (Some people simply can't be bought.)

So some guy involved with a PR firm, could, theoretically, pay $30,000 to a bunch of otherwise diligent Wikipedia volunteers, and all he or she achieves by this is making the article about the PR firm boss not mention some things that, as far as we know, the boss himself actually quite happily says in public. And six months down the line, some pesky editor could change the whole thing back, and then the bribed editors are going to want another $30,000 (between them) to go through the whole thing again. Do you see how pointless this would be? Do you see why I'm really not very worried about the possibility?

It's like the moronic company that was offering $500 (or something like that) to any Wikipedia admin that would delete an article. Sure, you can certainly buy a deletion for that, but you're not going to get a refund when the article gets restored a few hours or days later :)

Sorry to have responded to your original comments with some level of derision, but I really struggled to know how else to address them, without the sort of TL;DR that I just have. In addition, I was struggling to understand what exactly you were suggesting, so I had to put forward some scenarios just to follow it. At the end of the day, if there is no scenario that is plausible, then it does not need worrying about. --Demiurge1000 (talk) 22:53, 8 April 2011 (UTC)

I'm an oversighter. When I declined a request for Oversight at this article, I decided to address some of the many problems I did see in the article. Hopefully, it's better for my input. Now, I'll happily head back to football and cricket. --Dweller (talk) 20:46, 9 April 2011 (UTC)

Where the action is much more interesting. Hope you are an Indian fan. --Ravpapa (talk) 07:00, 11 April 2011 (UTC)

"D"

Ronn D? Has anyone seen a reliable source stating what the D stands for? --Dweller (talk) 09:47, 8 April 2011 (UTC)

D = David

--Juda S. Engelmayer (talk) 14:23, 8 April 2011 (UTC)

As this is presumably totally uncontentious, I would say we can include it without needing to demand an independent WP:RS for it? What do people think? --Demiurge1000 (talk) 21:41, 8 April 2011 (UTC)

[Sourced] Dru of Id (talk) 01:59, 9 April 2011 (UTC)

Book

Torossian has a book being released which should be added to his page. Frank Luntz, Keith Ablow and Roger Stone are noteable book interviews and case studies are noteable. Consent to add to page ? http://search.barnesandnoble.com/For-Immediate-Release/Ronn-Torossian/e/9781936661169?r=1&cm_mmc=Google%20Product%20Search-_-Q000000630-_-Its%20All%20Personal-_-9781936661169 Williamchoi (talk) 16:28, 4 June 2011 (UTC)

I think that since Torossian is notable, and Torossian is having a book published, then a sentence on the book in this article would be entirely reasonable and appropriate. Although, what you've linked to is a bookseller; so we'll need to dig out a proper source, like a book review.

Also I've opened a sockpuppet investigation request into User:Williamchoi. The person who ran the Babasalichai account and its many sockpuppets is permanently banned from Wikipedia by community concensus, so should not be editing article talk pages or any other pages. Whether Williamchoi is that person, we will find out in due course. --Demiurge1000 (talk) 16:52, 4 June 2011 (UTC)

The book is being released in October. When it is released, someone might review it, and then we can add it to the article. For the time being, this book exists only in theory. --Ravpapa (talk) 17:43, 4 June 2011 (UTC)

OK. I've also struck the above comment which turned out to be a sockpuppet of banned user User:Babasalichai --Demiurge1000 (talk) 03:57, 5 June 2011 (UTC)

The book was published and covered in a review which is the source. 68.173.123.172 (talk) 00:56, 24 September 2011 (UTC)

That isn't the sort of review we're looking for. The Interior (Talk) 01:02, 24 September 2011 (UTC)

Ronn or friend or whoever you are, please wait until the book is actually published (October), then discuss it here. There are good arguments that the book should be included in October. There are no good arguments right now. --Demiurge1000 (talk) 01:04, 24 September 2011 (UTC)

I realize that my edit has been reverted a couple of times, but, (a) we should avoid using an Amazon product page as a source, and (b) both Gawker and the Atlantic Monthly are perfectly fine sources for what we're trying to verify. Plus, Gawker is probably the only third party source actually talking about the book. All other links I've found are press releases published by 5W/Torossian.--Mosmof (talk) 01:54, 10 December 2011 (UTC)

The Reliable Sources Noticeboard says that the Gawker should not be used as a source for BLPs. I have substituted a more neutral citation. --Dianna (talk) 05:30, 11 December 2011 (UTC)

Rabbi Pinto extortion case

I'm really not comfortable with including the Rabbi Pinto extortion case here. Right now, all the reporting is based on a single NY Times article, and the FBI hasn't commented on it on the record. All the on-record allegations have come from the rabbi's supporters, not neutral third parties. Given the seriousness of the accusations, I don't think this meets WP:BLP. Can we at least wait until the Feds charge Torossian with something, or even just acknowledge that he's a suspect? Mosmof (talk) 20:18, 23 December 2011 (UTC)

I'd be fine with waiting for charges/statement from FBI. I notice that the Times article also misquotes User:Dweller. (final paragraph) The Interior (Talk) 20:37, 23 December 2011 (UTC)

May someone point me to the specifics of the misquotes ? The entire article seemed factually inaccurate and odd.68.174.122.159 (talk) 23:14, 23 December 2011 (UTC)

Article: "“Even if they’re not all the same person,” a Wikipedia editor known as Dweller wrote on April 5, 2011, “they are all employees of Torossian.” Actual: "it's possible that even if they're not all the same person they are all employees of Torossian" Omitting "it's possible" really changes the meaning. No idea about the rest. The Interior (Talk) 02:53, 24 December 2011 (UTC)

Aside from the NYT's fairly blatant misquoting, I think it's worth noting that both Torossian and the other guy were given a chance to respond in the NYT article, and did so. Briefly or otherwise. I'm happy to delay mention in this article until there's a few more sources, but I see no reason to delay it indefinitely.

I should mention that my involvement in dealing with the User:Babasalichai sockpuppetry case that was mentioned in the NYT article, and some reading around the subject, have left me in no doubt as to who "Babasalichai" was, so I am not entirely neutral here. --Demiurge1000 (talk) 03:12, 24 December 2011 (UTC)

For what it's worth, the Times has a solid policy on confidential sources, so I don't doubt the veracity of the article. My issue though, is that the article doesn't explicitly say what Torossian is investigated for - all the details come from Pinto's supporters. So we're left with the impression that Torossian and the other guy will potentially be charged with all the crimes mentioned even though the article doesn't actually say so. Anyway, I'm okay if we eventually end up adding information from the Times article, but thank you for considering my reservations. --Mosmof (talk) 03:46, 24 December 2011 (UTC)

Another NY Times article cited that RT is being investigated by the FBI. How is this not being included in this whitewashed article? Beobjectiveplease (talk) 16:22, 31 January 2012 (UTC)

Hi, Beobjectiveplease. Could you please provide us with a link to the new story in the Times? I am not seeing it when I check Google news. Thanks. --Ninja Dianna (Talk) 18:04, 31 January 2012 (UTC)

I see no problem with waiting on the extortion stuff until something a bit more solid rises out of the slime. --Ravpapa (talk) 06:24, 1 February 2012 (UTC)