The edit war on the Wikipedia article on John Lott has continued. Lott has now tried changing the page to his preferred version almost 50 times. The trouble he has encountered is that since his changes are so unreasonable at least half a dozen people have been undoing them. So, if you were Lott and it looked like you were outnumbered, what would you do? Yes that's right, create an army of sock puppets: Timewarp, Alt37, Purtilo, Sniper1, Serinity, Henry1776, Stotts and Gordinier.
These accounts have just been created and pretty well all they have done there is change the page into Lott's favoured version.
You really have to wander how Lott keeps so many fake identities straight.
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[Update: June 6th: Chase-Me has definitely been a very naughty boy indeed. The only question is whether he'll hang on to his sysop bit.]
By popular request. And I've not seen anyone else wiki-literate discussing this, so I will (update: Wikipedia sockpuppetry is a problem, but baseless accusations…
This is an annotated list of John Lott's on line reviews at Amazon
and at Barnes and Noble.
Most of his reviews were posted anonymously or under a false name, and he used this anonymity to post many five-star reviews of his own books and to pan rival books.
When you post a review at…
My previous post refers. There are lots more things to say; this post doesn't really say any of them but veers off at a tangent. Let me know if you get bored.
The tangent to start with is "no-one from outside understand how wikipedia works". An obvious example of this is Lawrence Solomon (my…
Hard on the heels of Wegman's farcical attempt to sue Mashey comes Watts's incompetent attempt to meat-puppet wiki. If you want to see my comments at WUWT that didn't survive moderation, you'll need to read stoat spam or just imagine them; I said nothing that wasn't obvious. My favourite, I think…
Characteristic to all is the goal common to all of these of reverting the entire article to a single, whitewashing version from a month or two back without discussion of individual disagreements; plus of course, the blanket squeal of how nobody else wants to discuss the individual edits. I say this having wasted the better part of an evening itemizing my disagreements with several of the proposed changes one by one in hops of engendering some sort of discussion, only to receive the blanket and mystifying response that "Lambert is a proven liar".
I'm not sure Lott does keep these things straight. If you look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Gordinier you see a response by 24.107.50.131. Does that number fit into your IP tracking?
24.107.50.131 tracks to Missouri, so Gordinier might not be him. Or Lott takes care to make edits whenever he is out of town to try to muddy the waters.
Can we call it a sock drawer now?