Submitted by Heywood_Floyd in Tech
Below is a record of an IRC chat session between "natbrown", "Funfood", "Nickname1" and Wikipedia administrator Snowolf (Maurizio Lussetti). Lussetti is a "domain name broker" in Trieste, Italy, aka a domain-name squatter with over 200 domains. He has been on both English and Italian Wikipedias since 2004, though he claims he didn't start editing/patrolling until 2007. I have no idea who the rest of these people are, and there is a 'bot in the thread as well. The month this happened can also be filed under "allegedly." The clumsy grammar and bad spelling has been preserved.
belisarius9 wrote (edited )
This blog is fun, because I can't tell from this or the other posts if the author supports removing masturbation related images/video from wikimedia or not. Honestly, as far as I can tell the only thing the blog consistently stands for is that everything Wikipedia does is wrong, so I assume it's pro-religious right wingers removing files. The fact that information about pokemon and about history and about modern anything is all on Wikipedia is a problem, the fact that they don't have information on random obscure bank robbers is a problem, the fact that the dumpster diving article is longer than the dumpster article is a problem, apparently. I assume the various other nearly 15 year old IRC logs they've released are bad, but there's no commentary, no formatting, nothing at all to suggest what I should even look for. As far as I can tell, the biggest problem is that they are mostly casual conversations, and people don't take the conversations seriously enough? I feel like the audience for unedited, unformatted IRC logs that are 10-15 years old is approaching 0, but respect for collating them I suppose?
The off topic content is interesting too. Twitter is far too censorious and has been for a decade. Reddit isn't censorious enough, and did you know they used sockpuppet accounts in the early days, truly we should burn it all down near 20 years later for such a heinous crime. Apparently Azov have been neo-Nazis since 1991? How they could be I don't know, when the group was only formed in 2014, but I will say the only people I can imagine who are worse than Nazis are time traveling Nazis, so they must a decent target for the author. There's an article on the Holodomor, which would almost be a neutral take on the issue if not for the sneering tone reserved for anyone who suggests Soviet policy may have exacerbated the famine in Ukraine. At the very least, we do get a sneering overview of the Buffalo shooter's manifesto, and I can't imagine a more deserving target, so kudos there.
I think the most disappointing aspect of this is the discovery that the corkboard covered in yarn so vital to the conspiracy minded and the weirdos of yore has been displaced by the blog. An idiosyncratic organization that none but the author could decipher is probably the one thing that would make the blog more interesting.