User:Durova/Mantanmoreland statement
One of the allegations that has floated around Wikipedia:Requests for arbitration/Mantanmoreland is that this editor's sockpuppetry was an open secret among well-placed Wikipedians. I can see how people would suspect that. So this is a summary of my observations.
Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain[edit]
Just as at arbitration, Mantanmoreland always denied any policy violations. He would point to the conduct of the other side and take offense at questions. Under the circumstances that was effective for quite a while. It wouldn't have held up nearly so long if his critics had been moderate and reasonable.
In private conversations among other Wikipedians who interacted with Mantanmoreland and Samiharris, I observed quiet suspicions and occasional open challenges. It didn't sit easily that these two accounts might be meatpuppets or sockpuppets. Our default policy is to assume good faith, so I did. And as far as I could see, that's what everyone in the "cabal" was doing also.
Dramatic and ethically dubious tactics played right into Mantanmoreland's hand. He characterized his opponents as crazed conspiracy theorists. The closer their actions fit that description, the more plausible his response seemed. Not every one of his critics acted that way, but the ones who had more clout didn't use it to rein in the problem. That gives the appearance of condoning bad behavior. It even raised quiet doubts about what could motivate hardworking editors to throw away a good reputation over something ridiculous.
A cabal of geeks[edit]
Wikipedia isn't run by the Illuminati. Its quirks can be explained from the working assumption that the people who rack up five digit edit counts are well-meaning geeks. At least most of them are (I'm one). Geeks are prone to the following:
- Blue sky idealism.
- Social gaffes.
- Intricate understanding of stuff that's mysterious to everybody else.
- Innocent blindness to stuff that's obvious to everybody else.
- Unending fascination with the humor of Douglas Adams and Monty Python.
What changed my mind[edit]
I wasn't keen on doing anything that might legitimize some of the tactics that had been used against Mantanmoreland and Samiharris. One of the reasons why I didn't prioritize a closer look at those two accounts went something along the lines of Suppose they turn out to be linked? Which is worse, that or a culture where Slashdot and IP harvesting become routine ways of resolving disagreements?
When I saw the new checkuser that identified one of those accounts as always editing through an open proxy, and learned that Fred Bauder had previously given Mantanmoreland a warning for confirmed sockpuppeting on the Lastexit account, that created a dilemma. I had blocked an editor while I had been going with the working assumption that those two accounts were separate people who had no conflict of interest. That obligated me to step forward and say this raised enough doubts to dig further. It wasn't an easy call, and I respect the people who raised the unclean hands argument. The offsite publication of Jimbo's e-mail strengthened that perspective.
The brilliant farmer?[edit]
At the beginning of a planting season farmers guess what the weather and market might be. By harvest time one looks like a genius and the other like an idiot. If a butterfly at the other end of the world had flapped its wings differently, the genius and the idiot would have changed places. When SirFozzie and some other people started digging into the edit histories it wasn't clear what would turn up there.
So for the record, I don't believe there were any secret backroom deals regarding this situation. Nobody offered me a junket to a hidden eighteenth century crypt beneath Wall Street where billionaires shared Cohibas with the WikiMedia Foundation board. My black velvet cabal robe got lost at the dry cleaner's, so maybe I'm just out of the loop, but somehow I don't think so.