FLOP: Why Wikipedia Criticism Will Always Be A Waste Of Time
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The Infamous "Not Censored" IRC chat, January 2012
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9/22/15
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Addendum: Who the Major Players of the LaRouche Edit War Were
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9/17/15
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The Lyndon LaRouche Edit War, 2003-2007
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The Greasy World of Howard Keith Henson
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A List of Administrators Who Blocked Themselves, 2010
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Wikipedia Lost 300 Million Views This Year and Nobody's Talking About It....
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The Battle Over Scientology: Part III
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Jimbo and Larry Lessig "Start" the Presidential Campaign Trail - on Reddit
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Guest Post: Why Wikipedia Will Fail
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The Battle Over Scientology: Part II
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Stuff That Has Nothing to Do with Wikipedia: "Communism Kills" of Tumblr
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The Battle Over Scientology: Part I
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The Cults That Screwed Up Wikipedia; Future Tumblr Nonsense
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Reddit: Probably Screwed Anyway
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A Fluffernutter-Ironholds IRC Fragment, 2011
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Wikiscuttlebutt: SlimVirgin and Others
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Stuff that has Nothing to Do With Wikipedia: "You just got logic'd" of Tumblr
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Vaoverland and Vegaswikian: Dead Administrators Self-Promote while Living Ones Promote Las Vegas
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Is Vigilant of Wikipedia/Wikipediocracy actually Alan P. Petrofsky?
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Wikipediocracy's Messageboard Reduced to Flaming Lake of Shit
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Wiki-Douchebaggery: Beyond My Ken as an Example
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A Short, Open Post to the Administration of Wikipediocracy's Messageboard
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The Beyond My Ken Video, embedded
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Paid Editing as a Hobby: the Beyond My Ken story
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The Weakest Link of a Badly-Rusted Chain: the BLP
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The Paid Editing Clusterfuck of Wifione
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Despite Appearences.....
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January Grab-Bag
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Some last-minute sucker punches.....Averted!
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Wikipedia Tags and Eastern European Politics
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Before Wikipedia: Search Bastard and 3Apes
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Roshuk asks: "Was Wikipedia Ever Meant to be Transparent?"
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As above, so below....
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"Operation Swill" and TGI Friday's - or: Don't Go To New Jersey, And Don't Look It Up On Wikipedia
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A Guest Post on Jimmy Wales
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Addendum to the last post...
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The Things Wikipedists and Wikipediocratists Don't Seem to Understand.....
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Why This Blog?
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Saturday, September 26, 2015
List of "Wikipedia Sucks! (And So Do Its Critics.)" Posts
Wednesday, September 2, 2015
List of San Diego Scientology Missions, Churches (Orgs), Schools, Front Groups 1970-2015
San Diego is an interesting case in Scientology because it is less than 200 miles from Los Angeles, the West Coast hub of the religion, and yet today that religion is barely existent in San Diego county, which is larger than Delaware and Rhode Island put together.
Missions
A Scientology Mission is a storefront to sell Hubbard books, along with being a low-level auditing and training center (people usually go from "life repair" to preclear before moving on to the local Org.) Usually Missions are the first Scientology outlets in an area, and San Diego followed that pattern.
As far as we can tell the first Scientology Mission in San Diego was at 1052 10th Avenue, in a single-story building that has since been demolished (it's now a parking lot.) This Mission was part of a series of Missions run by a man named Carl Barney in Los Angeles; the four LA Missions were allegedly incorporated as the "Church of Scientology of Los Angeles" and all five were called Scientology Coordinated Services. In order to keep ordinary people coming in (prices were rising in the 1970s), Barney ran this odd usury scam involving a front corporation called the Nationwide Acceptance Company, which would defray costs through loans to the public members. Barney was found out by the "mother church" in 1979 and was forced to sign over his Missions and declared a Suppressive Person (an antisocial person wrecking Scientology), and kicked out. It is unknown if Carl Barney founded the San Diego Mission or bought it out, and we do not know when it was founded. A former staff member, Howard Dickman wrote about his involvement in Scientology, which lasted from 1972 to 1977; according to him, Scientology grew so fast in San Diego that by 1973 they had moved around the corner to 926 C Street (property has also since been demolished.) It should be noted that the area in question is in downtown San Diego, which has been going through radical changes in development since the early 1980s. In any case, 926 C Street was the first true San Diego Church of Scientology.
The next organization was the Mission of La Jolla. La Jolla is a beach community slightly north of downtown San Diego and part of the county. We do no know where the Mission was, but we know incorporation papers were drawn up in April of 1971 by Robert H. Fell II and Janet and Gary Lawrence; the papers were filed on April 13, 1971. The Mission lasted until 1973 when it was merged with the San Diego Mission. The State of California records claim that the Mission of South Lake Tahoe (now defunct) was the agent for the La Jolla Mission, but that may have been after Carl Barney was thrown out.
Around 1973 two Missions formed: the Mission of Encinitas and the Mission of Adams Avenue. As with the La Jolla Mission, the address of the place in Encinitas is unknown to us. We do know it did not survive the 1970s, because it is not on this 1979 list of organizations (taken from the appendix of What is Scientology?, a Church-published reference book.) Encinitas itself is a beach city north of La Jolla and next to the Camp Pendleton Marine Corps base. The Mission of Adams Avenue was far more important because it boasted such excellent auditors as Enid Vien (d. 2012), and was still raved about by former Scientologists years later as an excellent Mission. The place began at 3201 Adams Avenue (now the "El Zarape" restaurant), then moved to 6911 El Cajon Boulevard (at the time an abandoned supermarket in a strip mall - now a "Papa John's" pizzeria in the same strip mall.) According to this I have it backwards, that the Adams Avenue Mission ended in March of 1989 and became the Mission of Encinitas the same month, so the Mission moved east and then went north. Either way, both are defunct.
Chula Vista had two Missions, separated by thirty years of time. The first time they were at 192 Landis Avenue at least during 1978-79; then they were at 311 F Street, suite 103 from January, 2008 to October, 2010. They had a website for the 2008 version, but I can't find it now; that small storefront (today a computer repair place) was the last Mission the Church ran. None of the same people were involved as far as I know.
Escondido also had a Mission from July of 1987 to July of 1994, and like the Encinitas location I know nothing about it. This claims they changed names in 1994 to the "Church of Scientology Mission of Coast Mission", but that is a typo or wishful thinking because I can't find that place. Escondido itself is a few mile east of Encinitas, yet another inland Southern Californian town.
Churches (aka Orgs)
A church is not where Scientologists go every Sunday; it's where they go for auditing (psychology while holding E-meter cans), and training to Clear and the "Operating Theatan" (OT) levels, which run from OT I to OT VIII. There are also side levels and self-auditing, so you can spend the rest of your adult life doing Scientology courses. As with the Missions, they also sell the Hubbard books, CDs (formerly open-reel and cassette tapes), DVDs, along with E-meters and other paraphernalia. The term "Org" is short for "organization", which is what they called these places before Hubbard went all religious in the 1960s-1970s to dodge taxes (at one point "ministers"*, including the President of Scientology International Heber Jentzsch, wore Catholic-style clerical collars.) As with most places, San Diego had far fewer Churches than Missions.
We wrote about the first San Diego Scientology Church above; that organization lasted until around 1980 in that large two-story building.....but it gets slightly complicated. According to the State's records, in December of 1975, a "Greater San Diego Scientology Church" was incorporated. The mailing address for this Church was 3956 Texas Street, Room 9, San Diego, which may have been the address of the agent (that seemed to be the case for some of the Missions.) If it was a re-name of an existing Org, it only lasted five years because they changed.....
Into the same name but a different address: 2559 C Street, San Diego. The agent was Linda Schive. What I have heard from ex-Scientologists is that in the '70s people preferred to get auditing at the Adams Avenue Mission rather than deal with the Church of Scientology San Diego, "Greater" or not. They were at that address from 1980 to 1994. The building at 2559 C Street was demolished and the lot rebuilt into yet another obnoxious condo complex.
The last and present Church of Scientology, San Diego was incorporated in December of 1994 by its current (the last we have heard) President David A. Meyer. 1330 4th Avenue has been the address since it was incorporated. For a period they were trying to sell the building, then rent it out while working on their failed Ideal Org project on Parkway Drive in La Mesa (more discussion on that later.) At the present time, the Church on 4th Avenue is the only outlet for adult Scientologists in San Diego County.
Scientology Schools
Scientology was one of the first to copy the Rudolf Steiner "Waldorf Schools" and push for a private education system built on Scientology ideas. San Diego has seen secular private schools, Fundamentalist Christian private schools, Waldorf Schools, military schools, and also the Scientology schools.
Apple School: this was the first Scientology school in San Diego County. Based on a school run by Bonnie Bishop in the mid-1970s when she took over the Los Feliz "Midtown School" and turned it into the "Apple School", this school was run out of storefront at 4616 Avocado Boulevard in La Mesa near the El Cajon city line, and was open to non-Scientologists. The school ran from Kindergarten to 6th grade in two long separate rooms and most of the instruction was self-directed. I've heard rumors that the school originally started in a former Catholic nunnery in Chula Vista, one person online** claimed they had been part of a prototype version of the school somewhere in El Cajon or Del Mar which was just a large house with a trailer in a backyard. Apple School La Mesa lasted about a year, or a year and a half, from 1982 to 1983 or early 1984. Afterwards the location cycled through a number of businesses and is a gym (Crossfit La Mesa) today.
Delphi Academy: Based on the Scientology education ("Study Tech") at the Delphian School in Oregon, the one in San Diego was in La Jolla at 7527 Cuvier Street, and it was dead by 2011. There was also the Delphi Academy of San Marcos (134 Woodland Parkway) which was run on the same site as the Old Richland Schoolhouse which was used for wedding receptions. The owner of the school was Jonathan ben Gerson, and his back rent problems sunk the school and caused the venue to shut down for a period.
Applied Scholastics: The main difference between this and Delphi is.....not much. The Applied Scholastics Academy of San Diego was just the Delphi Academy in La Jolla (7527 Cuvier Street) working out of the same building rented from a Methodist church, and the school is now defunct. Ben Gerson's San Marcos Delphi Academy also became an Applied Scholastics school. Speaking of which, he also ran a tiny AS school in a mall in La Mesa. The school was at 5911 Severin Drive, though the school itself overlooked Amaya Drive. The La Mesa school died with the San Marcos one, in 2011....coincidentally, the school was near a 7-11 convenience store, mirroring how Apple School was next door to a 7-11. Finally, the one school that still exists is Applied Scholastics Academy North County (800 West Mission Road, San Marcos.) As with the La Jolla school they are renting space from a Methodist church. So out of five schools in thirty years, only one is operating. [2018 update: Applied Scholastics Academy North County has been dead since 2016.]
Front Groups
Before there was Narconon or WISE (World Institute of Scientology Enterprises), there were a number of national front groups Scientology created in the 1960s-70s and San Diego had a number of them.
National Commission on Law Enforcement and Social Justice: Group founded in 1974 claiming to be about human-rights promotion and government record-keeping has allegedly been used to attack Interpol (or so says Arnaldo Lerma's Lermanet website.) In 1979 their HQ was at....926 C Street, the San Diego Church of Scientology.
Committee On Public Health and Safety: Also credited as Committee on Health and Public Safety. This was the way Hubbard got back at the American Medical Association for the heavy interference they gave him in the early 1950s, and also how they forced the Church to put stickers on the E-meters claiming that it wasn't a medical or scientific device. COPHS heavily promoted alternative therapies, pointed out how expensive American medicine was/is. In 1979 their address was at 321 20th Street, San Diego.
Citizens Council on Human Rights: This is the one most people know, thanks to their LA anti-psychiatric,"house of horrors" museum on Sunset Boulevard. Founded in 1969, this is the anti-psychiatry wing of Scientology front groups. When R.D. Laing and Thomas Szasz were popular, these guys promoted them (and Szasz co-founded CCHR.) In 1979 their address was.....321 20th Street, San Diego.
Committee to Re-Involve Ex-Offenders: An ex-convict's group allegedly designed to get former prisoners into Scientology. As with the other two, the 1979 location was 321 20th Street.
All of the 20th Street organizations shared the same telephone number, a good indication they all worked out of one room. The building on the location looks too new for the time period. None of these groups seem to be operating in San Diego today.
The failed Ideal Org
This is a long, complicated story involving Jonathan ben Gerson, David Meyer, Gerri Fischman (the actual head of the CofS-SD), and David Miscavige's demand that all Orgs become "Ideal Orgs" (a Hubbard term for an Org that is running well, but twisted by Miscavige to mean "a nice-looking, big building full of expensive Scientology-made furnishings, which the Church owns outright.") It also involved Proposition 8, a failed attempt to get La Mesa to approve an anti-hate-speech ordinance, the SD Church begging its members for cash, the purchase of the abandoned Coleman College campus (formerly a bowling alley at 7380 Parkway Drive in La Mesa) right when the commercial market went south in 2008, their failure to make enough money to please Miscavige and start construction on a new building, and the final selling off to a developer so that the property could be converted to ugly shitbox townhomes is a story that deserves a book chapter unto itself. Supposedly the San Diego Church has only 20 full-time "publics" left, because all the begging went nowhere and infuriated the rest.
The TL;DR Section
After decades of existence, Scientology only has one working Org and one working Applied Scholastics school. Seven Missions, two Churches, five Schools, come and gone. San Diego is less than two-hundred miles from Los Angeles, the hub of West Coast Scientology, and this is as good as it got.
_____________
* Ministers are hard to define inside Scientology; today there are "Volunteer Ministers", but those are just staff members in yellow jackets sent to natural disasters. In the past people would appear for the press cameras dressed like this (another Lermanet photo, unfortunately; Heber Jentzsch is on the right.) Or this (Yvonne Gillham Jentzsch, Heber's first wife, possibly a file photograph.)
** From a former version of the ExScientologyKids.com messageboard, when it was locked and the only messages allowed were on a test forum. I also heard from a former parent user of the Apple School itself; she told me that the school had closed with no warning. Possibly the members were accused of "squirrling" the "Tech", of doing things without Hubbard's sanction; or the money behind Apple School was a Missionholder hit in the 1983 Missionholder's Conference, where the people who owned high-performing Missions were forced to sign them back to the Church. Either way Apple School died harder that some of the San Diego private schools I've heard of, such as St. Albans (collapsed in 1985 after a "parent strike" over allegedly poor teaching); or Fairhaven's Christian (imploded dramatically in 2000-2001 after the pastor of the mother church admitted an affair, let other people run the organization for six months, then tried to commit a coup. Rather than deal with a crazy man, the church and school shut down, and sold the site to another church. That pastor is still out there, and somehow still at a pulpit. His name is Preston Bunnell.)
Missions
A Scientology Mission is a storefront to sell Hubbard books, along with being a low-level auditing and training center (people usually go from "life repair" to preclear before moving on to the local Org.) Usually Missions are the first Scientology outlets in an area, and San Diego followed that pattern.
As far as we can tell the first Scientology Mission in San Diego was at 1052 10th Avenue, in a single-story building that has since been demolished (it's now a parking lot.) This Mission was part of a series of Missions run by a man named Carl Barney in Los Angeles; the four LA Missions were allegedly incorporated as the "Church of Scientology of Los Angeles" and all five were called Scientology Coordinated Services. In order to keep ordinary people coming in (prices were rising in the 1970s), Barney ran this odd usury scam involving a front corporation called the Nationwide Acceptance Company, which would defray costs through loans to the public members. Barney was found out by the "mother church" in 1979 and was forced to sign over his Missions and declared a Suppressive Person (an antisocial person wrecking Scientology), and kicked out. It is unknown if Carl Barney founded the San Diego Mission or bought it out, and we do not know when it was founded. A former staff member, Howard Dickman wrote about his involvement in Scientology, which lasted from 1972 to 1977; according to him, Scientology grew so fast in San Diego that by 1973 they had moved around the corner to 926 C Street (property has also since been demolished.) It should be noted that the area in question is in downtown San Diego, which has been going through radical changes in development since the early 1980s. In any case, 926 C Street was the first true San Diego Church of Scientology.
The next organization was the Mission of La Jolla. La Jolla is a beach community slightly north of downtown San Diego and part of the county. We do no know where the Mission was, but we know incorporation papers were drawn up in April of 1971 by Robert H. Fell II and Janet and Gary Lawrence; the papers were filed on April 13, 1971. The Mission lasted until 1973 when it was merged with the San Diego Mission. The State of California records claim that the Mission of South Lake Tahoe (now defunct) was the agent for the La Jolla Mission, but that may have been after Carl Barney was thrown out.
Around 1973 two Missions formed: the Mission of Encinitas and the Mission of Adams Avenue. As with the La Jolla Mission, the address of the place in Encinitas is unknown to us. We do know it did not survive the 1970s, because it is not on this 1979 list of organizations (taken from the appendix of What is Scientology?, a Church-published reference book.) Encinitas itself is a beach city north of La Jolla and next to the Camp Pendleton Marine Corps base. The Mission of Adams Avenue was far more important because it boasted such excellent auditors as Enid Vien (d. 2012), and was still raved about by former Scientologists years later as an excellent Mission. The place began at 3201 Adams Avenue (now the "El Zarape" restaurant), then moved to 6911 El Cajon Boulevard (at the time an abandoned supermarket in a strip mall - now a "Papa John's" pizzeria in the same strip mall.) According to this I have it backwards, that the Adams Avenue Mission ended in March of 1989 and became the Mission of Encinitas the same month, so the Mission moved east and then went north. Either way, both are defunct.
Chula Vista had two Missions, separated by thirty years of time. The first time they were at 192 Landis Avenue at least during 1978-79; then they were at 311 F Street, suite 103 from January, 2008 to October, 2010. They had a website for the 2008 version, but I can't find it now; that small storefront (today a computer repair place) was the last Mission the Church ran. None of the same people were involved as far as I know.
Escondido also had a Mission from July of 1987 to July of 1994, and like the Encinitas location I know nothing about it. This claims they changed names in 1994 to the "Church of Scientology Mission of Coast Mission", but that is a typo or wishful thinking because I can't find that place. Escondido itself is a few mile east of Encinitas, yet another inland Southern Californian town.
Churches (aka Orgs)
A church is not where Scientologists go every Sunday; it's where they go for auditing (psychology while holding E-meter cans), and training to Clear and the "Operating Theatan" (OT) levels, which run from OT I to OT VIII. There are also side levels and self-auditing, so you can spend the rest of your adult life doing Scientology courses. As with the Missions, they also sell the Hubbard books, CDs (formerly open-reel and cassette tapes), DVDs, along with E-meters and other paraphernalia. The term "Org" is short for "organization", which is what they called these places before Hubbard went all religious in the 1960s-1970s to dodge taxes (at one point "ministers"*, including the President of Scientology International Heber Jentzsch, wore Catholic-style clerical collars.) As with most places, San Diego had far fewer Churches than Missions.
We wrote about the first San Diego Scientology Church above; that organization lasted until around 1980 in that large two-story building.....but it gets slightly complicated. According to the State's records, in December of 1975, a "Greater San Diego Scientology Church" was incorporated. The mailing address for this Church was 3956 Texas Street, Room 9, San Diego, which may have been the address of the agent (that seemed to be the case for some of the Missions.) If it was a re-name of an existing Org, it only lasted five years because they changed.....
Into the same name but a different address: 2559 C Street, San Diego. The agent was Linda Schive. What I have heard from ex-Scientologists is that in the '70s people preferred to get auditing at the Adams Avenue Mission rather than deal with the Church of Scientology San Diego, "Greater" or not. They were at that address from 1980 to 1994. The building at 2559 C Street was demolished and the lot rebuilt into yet another obnoxious condo complex.
The last and present Church of Scientology, San Diego was incorporated in December of 1994 by its current (the last we have heard) President David A. Meyer. 1330 4th Avenue has been the address since it was incorporated. For a period they were trying to sell the building, then rent it out while working on their failed Ideal Org project on Parkway Drive in La Mesa (more discussion on that later.) At the present time, the Church on 4th Avenue is the only outlet for adult Scientologists in San Diego County.
Scientology Schools
Scientology was one of the first to copy the Rudolf Steiner "Waldorf Schools" and push for a private education system built on Scientology ideas. San Diego has seen secular private schools, Fundamentalist Christian private schools, Waldorf Schools, military schools, and also the Scientology schools.
Apple School: this was the first Scientology school in San Diego County. Based on a school run by Bonnie Bishop in the mid-1970s when she took over the Los Feliz "Midtown School" and turned it into the "Apple School", this school was run out of storefront at 4616 Avocado Boulevard in La Mesa near the El Cajon city line, and was open to non-Scientologists. The school ran from Kindergarten to 6th grade in two long separate rooms and most of the instruction was self-directed. I've heard rumors that the school originally started in a former Catholic nunnery in Chula Vista, one person online** claimed they had been part of a prototype version of the school somewhere in El Cajon or Del Mar which was just a large house with a trailer in a backyard. Apple School La Mesa lasted about a year, or a year and a half, from 1982 to 1983 or early 1984. Afterwards the location cycled through a number of businesses and is a gym (Crossfit La Mesa) today.
Delphi Academy: Based on the Scientology education ("Study Tech") at the Delphian School in Oregon, the one in San Diego was in La Jolla at 7527 Cuvier Street, and it was dead by 2011. There was also the Delphi Academy of San Marcos (134 Woodland Parkway) which was run on the same site as the Old Richland Schoolhouse which was used for wedding receptions. The owner of the school was Jonathan ben Gerson, and his back rent problems sunk the school and caused the venue to shut down for a period.
Applied Scholastics: The main difference between this and Delphi is.....not much. The Applied Scholastics Academy of San Diego was just the Delphi Academy in La Jolla (7527 Cuvier Street) working out of the same building rented from a Methodist church, and the school is now defunct. Ben Gerson's San Marcos Delphi Academy also became an Applied Scholastics school. Speaking of which, he also ran a tiny AS school in a mall in La Mesa. The school was at 5911 Severin Drive, though the school itself overlooked Amaya Drive. The La Mesa school died with the San Marcos one, in 2011....coincidentally, the school was near a 7-11 convenience store, mirroring how Apple School was next door to a 7-11. Finally, the one school that still exists is Applied Scholastics Academy North County (800 West Mission Road, San Marcos.) As with the La Jolla school they are renting space from a Methodist church. So out of five schools in thirty years, only one is operating. [2018 update: Applied Scholastics Academy North County has been dead since 2016.]
Front Groups
Before there was Narconon or WISE (World Institute of Scientology Enterprises), there were a number of national front groups Scientology created in the 1960s-70s and San Diego had a number of them.
National Commission on Law Enforcement and Social Justice: Group founded in 1974 claiming to be about human-rights promotion and government record-keeping has allegedly been used to attack Interpol (or so says Arnaldo Lerma's Lermanet website.) In 1979 their HQ was at....926 C Street, the San Diego Church of Scientology.
Committee On Public Health and Safety: Also credited as Committee on Health and Public Safety. This was the way Hubbard got back at the American Medical Association for the heavy interference they gave him in the early 1950s, and also how they forced the Church to put stickers on the E-meters claiming that it wasn't a medical or scientific device. COPHS heavily promoted alternative therapies, pointed out how expensive American medicine was/is. In 1979 their address was at 321 20th Street, San Diego.
Citizens Council on Human Rights: This is the one most people know, thanks to their LA anti-psychiatric,"house of horrors" museum on Sunset Boulevard. Founded in 1969, this is the anti-psychiatry wing of Scientology front groups. When R.D. Laing and Thomas Szasz were popular, these guys promoted them (and Szasz co-founded CCHR.) In 1979 their address was.....321 20th Street, San Diego.
Committee to Re-Involve Ex-Offenders: An ex-convict's group allegedly designed to get former prisoners into Scientology. As with the other two, the 1979 location was 321 20th Street.
All of the 20th Street organizations shared the same telephone number, a good indication they all worked out of one room. The building on the location looks too new for the time period. None of these groups seem to be operating in San Diego today.
The failed Ideal Org
This is a long, complicated story involving Jonathan ben Gerson, David Meyer, Gerri Fischman (the actual head of the CofS-SD), and David Miscavige's demand that all Orgs become "Ideal Orgs" (a Hubbard term for an Org that is running well, but twisted by Miscavige to mean "a nice-looking, big building full of expensive Scientology-made furnishings, which the Church owns outright.") It also involved Proposition 8, a failed attempt to get La Mesa to approve an anti-hate-speech ordinance, the SD Church begging its members for cash, the purchase of the abandoned Coleman College campus (formerly a bowling alley at 7380 Parkway Drive in La Mesa) right when the commercial market went south in 2008, their failure to make enough money to please Miscavige and start construction on a new building, and the final selling off to a developer so that the property could be converted to ugly shitbox townhomes is a story that deserves a book chapter unto itself. Supposedly the San Diego Church has only 20 full-time "publics" left, because all the begging went nowhere and infuriated the rest.
The TL;DR Section
After decades of existence, Scientology only has one working Org and
_____________
* Ministers are hard to define inside Scientology; today there are "Volunteer Ministers", but those are just staff members in yellow jackets sent to natural disasters. In the past people would appear for the press cameras dressed like this (another Lermanet photo, unfortunately; Heber Jentzsch is on the right.) Or this (Yvonne Gillham Jentzsch, Heber's first wife, possibly a file photograph.)
** From a former version of the ExScientologyKids.com messageboard, when it was locked and the only messages allowed were on a test forum. I also heard from a former parent user of the Apple School itself; she told me that the school had closed with no warning. Possibly the members were accused of "squirrling" the "Tech", of doing things without Hubbard's sanction; or the money behind Apple School was a Missionholder hit in the 1983 Missionholder's Conference, where the people who owned high-performing Missions were forced to sign them back to the Church. Either way Apple School died harder that some of the San Diego private schools I've heard of, such as St. Albans (collapsed in 1985 after a "parent strike" over allegedly poor teaching); or Fairhaven's Christian (imploded dramatically in 2000-2001 after the pastor of the mother church admitted an affair, let other people run the organization for six months, then tried to commit a coup. Rather than deal with a crazy man, the church and school shut down, and sold the site to another church. That pastor is still out there, and somehow still at a pulpit. His name is Preston Bunnell.)
Wednesday, August 26, 2015
Copy of "Why Wikipedia Will Fail"
Why Wikipedia Will Fail
by E. A. Barbour
For months, Mr. Strelnikov has begged me to write a fully honest essay on where Wikipedia is going. Having just spent FOUR YEARS studying and taking notes on the internal culture of Wikipedia, as well as its content, and having helped to produce a website containing more than two million words of notes, I daresay that most people would likely conclude that I can actually sit in judgement of the Wiki-world with some accuracy. In fact, the only hard conclusion I can reach is rather simple: that Wikipedia as an active community is dying, and no one can stop it. Because it is based on lies. The content? Hell with that. It was just the "honeypot" to build the community.
In 2011 and 2012 I performed statistical analyses of editing patterns, administration actions, article content biases, and a variety of other quantifiable patterns. One thing that stood out was a repeated pattern of percentages of good work vs. bad work; in general, roughly 15% of Wikipedia work is valuable, and the other 85% is either of dubious value or is complete garbage. This percentage appears in all kinds of unrelated analytic areas. And yet, the Internet-using public sees absolutely nothing wrong with it. Least of all its alleged "founder", the ever-dubious Jimmy "Jimbooboo" Wales.
Understand the worst thing about the perception of Wikipedia: it is not one thing, it is many many things. It is a scattered gigantic mess of hundreds of websites, with tens of thousands of people editing bits of it every day. The general public does not see the massive and lumbering bureaucracy behind the scenes, nor do they see the mind-blowingly stupid fights on hundreds of noticeboards, arbitration boards, mediation boards, or special areas like the ever-broken "Manual of Style". For fools, perception is truth, and these ugly places are not perceived because they are not easy to find. Not to mention the considerable amount of traffic on private Wikipedia IRC channels, which only insiders see. This is an archaic Internet protocol that very few people use anymore -- even IT professionals. It is "invisible" to average folks, therefore it does not exist.
Another part of WP's warped public perception is that average users automatically assume the administration is "reliable" and "trustworthy". Because of course, in their ignorance, the hoi polloi deludes themselves into thinking "as above, so below". And what they see (all they see) is "loads of interesting and probably-reliable info". When in fact, Wikipedia is the same 85% dubious/rotten, above AND below. Some of the administrators are good and honest people, some of them are average, and some are deeply arrogant and incompetent. Some are completely crazy and should be medicated forcibly. But they aren't controlled in any way. Again, this returns to Jimbooboo's incompetent oversight of the people he installed. And their subsequent evolution into a kind of obsessive, intolerant cult organization.
No one else but Wales can be blamed for the presence of "The Cunctator". Or of David Gerard, or of Tony Sidaway, or of Mark "Raul654" Pellegrini, or of "Essjay", or of Fred Bauder, or of a litany of other early administrators. Incompetent or not, they licked Jimmy's ballsack, so he put them in and insisted they have power, whereupon they caused total chaos. Some of them were placed on the early Arbitration Committee, simply because "Jimbo Sez So". The early history of Arbcom is full of dirty tricks and favoritism done by these fine people, to protect their friends and whatever biased Wikipedia content was involved. Arbcom eventually became a little more egalitarian yet still suffers from bloviation and uselessness. The rot set in back in 2005-2007 and all the chlorine bleach in the world won't remove it. Their "Mediation" system, which was supposed to prevent arbitrations and editor restrictions, was a massive failure.
And because Jimmy was a lazy and cowardly dictator, adminship was assumed to be "for life". Until recently, when administrators started to be removed for inactivity, the only way to get rid of one was for proven and outrageous acts of abuse for years. Even this was often not enough; several high-ranking Wikipedians who stuck their noses into the Israel/Palestine editwarring and other areas have yet to be punished for playing favorites. (Ironically I found that the administrators who were quitting or being pushed out for inactivity tended to be content contributors. The remaining sysops are mostly bot-operating drones, vandalism patrollers, and nut cases. Drug addicts, in other words. Wikipedia is their cult and their heroin. For some of them, Wikipedia is a source of income. Of course, no one wants to talk about this or admit it.) Wikipedia was set up in a broken way, we know exactly who was responsible, and yet it is clear it can never be repaired.
Back in 2012 when the now-failed criticism website Wikipediocracy was started, the sysops started a companion wiki for use by journalists and outsiders, to be a repository of hard information about WP internal operations that were difficult to find or verify. I wrote an article about Wikipedia's "death spiral" for it, liberally punctuated with charts from my previous analyses. It was completely disturbing information. And yet it was completely ignored. The Wikipedians ignored it, Wikipediocracy ignored it, and the journalists Wikipediocracy tried to attract ignored it. I've since realized why journalists rarely run critiques of Wikipedia: they use it routinely for background information, themselves, without further checking of facts. In short, they love it, have assumed that it is "accurate", and are fearful of damaging their favorite online general reference with bad publicity. I suspect this is why real criticism of WP, no matter how well justified, falls on deaf ears and is forgotten. Wikipediocracy's asinine sysops have deleted the "death spiral" article, along with considerable other content on their wiki. So an archive.org copy will have to do.
One of the "best" things Jimbooboo ever did for the Wikimedia Foundation was to put Sue Gardner in charge. And the only important thing she accomplished was to make the WMF into an effective fundraising organization. Mostly by begging directly to the general public, and by ass-kissing wealthy people in the Internet industry such as Google's management and Craig Newmark of Craigslist. Otherwise, she hired incompetent lunatics from the insider corps, lied about Wikipedia's quality and value, and otherwise played along with the "cult". She grew the organization from a few paid workers into hundreds, many chosen from the cultic insider ranks. Thanks to their cultic intolerance of criticism or outsider commentary, they refused to admit that Wikipedia's editing community was deeply flawed and declining. Not until Gardner admitted they had a problem in 2010, and was subsequently replaced in 2014 by Lila Tretikov, did any major changes occur at the WMF, as Tretikov started to push out some of the organization's incompetent dead weight (Erik Möller, former "Deputy Director", widely rumored to have had an affair with his boss Gardner) and liars (Steven Walling, Sarah Stierch and others). But she can't fix the community's male bias, paid editing issues, copyright-problem backlogs, and large quantities of crackpots, and she doesn't appear to be trying. Possibly she realizes how hopeless it is.
There are many other disturbing aspects to the handling of WP's decline. The all-important number of articles, or "content pages" is rapidly approaching the 5 million mark, despite a large number of these articles being generated by bots that scrape other websites, or by obsessive nutcases. Or sometimes by paid editors; especially in corporate areas and biographies. That 5 million number is bandied about as if it were magic. There is no talk, no measure of the QUALITY of these articles. Plus, this listing of statistical figures about English Wikipedia has numerous columns that stop in January 2010. No explanation. Are they so embarrassing? The "official page" about administrators lists 1,343 of them (whoops, it dropped to 1,342 while I was writing this paragraph), yet if you dig a little deeper , you learn that only 582 of them are currently "active". It hasn't been this low since 2005. As I said, those vanished administrators tended to be content writers and most of them appear to be quite disgusted with the way Wikipedia is operating today. New-article quantities per month are declining, new editor accounts are declining (they now have 26 million of them, even though most are unused sockpuppets and only a tiny fraction do something regularly), and many other indicia of the "health" of Wikipedia editing are either declining or static. You won't see anything about this on the front page, nor in any Wikimedia promotional materials.
Next time I'll comment on Wikipedia's tiny and pseudo-effective community of critics. They enjoy similar levels of competence/incompetence and outright lunacy, and are also declining as Wikipedia declines. And will deny it just as strenuously as Jimbo denies any problems with his "great creation" -- because most of them are either maniac Wikipedian fans who want to "save" it, or are secretly making money editing it. I've got some really negative things to say about Wikipediocracy, in fact.
by E. A. Barbour
For months, Mr. Strelnikov has begged me to write a fully honest essay on where Wikipedia is going. Having just spent FOUR YEARS studying and taking notes on the internal culture of Wikipedia, as well as its content, and having helped to produce a website containing more than two million words of notes, I daresay that most people would likely conclude that I can actually sit in judgement of the Wiki-world with some accuracy. In fact, the only hard conclusion I can reach is rather simple: that Wikipedia as an active community is dying, and no one can stop it. Because it is based on lies. The content? Hell with that. It was just the "honeypot" to build the community.
In 2011 and 2012 I performed statistical analyses of editing patterns, administration actions, article content biases, and a variety of other quantifiable patterns. One thing that stood out was a repeated pattern of percentages of good work vs. bad work; in general, roughly 15% of Wikipedia work is valuable, and the other 85% is either of dubious value or is complete garbage. This percentage appears in all kinds of unrelated analytic areas. And yet, the Internet-using public sees absolutely nothing wrong with it. Least of all its alleged "founder", the ever-dubious Jimmy "Jimbooboo" Wales.
Understand the worst thing about the perception of Wikipedia: it is not one thing, it is many many things. It is a scattered gigantic mess of hundreds of websites, with tens of thousands of people editing bits of it every day. The general public does not see the massive and lumbering bureaucracy behind the scenes, nor do they see the mind-blowingly stupid fights on hundreds of noticeboards, arbitration boards, mediation boards, or special areas like the ever-broken "Manual of Style". For fools, perception is truth, and these ugly places are not perceived because they are not easy to find. Not to mention the considerable amount of traffic on private Wikipedia IRC channels, which only insiders see. This is an archaic Internet protocol that very few people use anymore -- even IT professionals. It is "invisible" to average folks, therefore it does not exist.
Another part of WP's warped public perception is that average users automatically assume the administration is "reliable" and "trustworthy". Because of course, in their ignorance, the hoi polloi deludes themselves into thinking "as above, so below". And what they see (all they see) is "loads of interesting and probably-reliable info". When in fact, Wikipedia is the same 85% dubious/rotten, above AND below. Some of the administrators are good and honest people, some of them are average, and some are deeply arrogant and incompetent. Some are completely crazy and should be medicated forcibly. But they aren't controlled in any way. Again, this returns to Jimbooboo's incompetent oversight of the people he installed. And their subsequent evolution into a kind of obsessive, intolerant cult organization.
No one else but Wales can be blamed for the presence of "The Cunctator". Or of David Gerard, or of Tony Sidaway, or of Mark "Raul654" Pellegrini, or of "Essjay", or of Fred Bauder, or of a litany of other early administrators. Incompetent or not, they licked Jimmy's ballsack, so he put them in and insisted they have power, whereupon they caused total chaos. Some of them were placed on the early Arbitration Committee, simply because "Jimbo Sez So". The early history of Arbcom is full of dirty tricks and favoritism done by these fine people, to protect their friends and whatever biased Wikipedia content was involved. Arbcom eventually became a little more egalitarian yet still suffers from bloviation and uselessness. The rot set in back in 2005-2007 and all the chlorine bleach in the world won't remove it. Their "Mediation" system, which was supposed to prevent arbitrations and editor restrictions, was a massive failure.
And because Jimmy was a lazy and cowardly dictator, adminship was assumed to be "for life". Until recently, when administrators started to be removed for inactivity, the only way to get rid of one was for proven and outrageous acts of abuse for years. Even this was often not enough; several high-ranking Wikipedians who stuck their noses into the Israel/Palestine editwarring and other areas have yet to be punished for playing favorites. (Ironically I found that the administrators who were quitting or being pushed out for inactivity tended to be content contributors. The remaining sysops are mostly bot-operating drones, vandalism patrollers, and nut cases. Drug addicts, in other words. Wikipedia is their cult and their heroin. For some of them, Wikipedia is a source of income. Of course, no one wants to talk about this or admit it.) Wikipedia was set up in a broken way, we know exactly who was responsible, and yet it is clear it can never be repaired.
Back in 2012 when the now-failed criticism website Wikipediocracy was started, the sysops started a companion wiki for use by journalists and outsiders, to be a repository of hard information about WP internal operations that were difficult to find or verify. I wrote an article about Wikipedia's "death spiral" for it, liberally punctuated with charts from my previous analyses. It was completely disturbing information. And yet it was completely ignored. The Wikipedians ignored it, Wikipediocracy ignored it, and the journalists Wikipediocracy tried to attract ignored it. I've since realized why journalists rarely run critiques of Wikipedia: they use it routinely for background information, themselves, without further checking of facts. In short, they love it, have assumed that it is "accurate", and are fearful of damaging their favorite online general reference with bad publicity. I suspect this is why real criticism of WP, no matter how well justified, falls on deaf ears and is forgotten. Wikipediocracy's asinine sysops have deleted the "death spiral" article, along with considerable other content on their wiki. So an archive.org copy will have to do.
One of the "best" things Jimbooboo ever did for the Wikimedia Foundation was to put Sue Gardner in charge. And the only important thing she accomplished was to make the WMF into an effective fundraising organization. Mostly by begging directly to the general public, and by ass-kissing wealthy people in the Internet industry such as Google's management and Craig Newmark of Craigslist. Otherwise, she hired incompetent lunatics from the insider corps, lied about Wikipedia's quality and value, and otherwise played along with the "cult". She grew the organization from a few paid workers into hundreds, many chosen from the cultic insider ranks. Thanks to their cultic intolerance of criticism or outsider commentary, they refused to admit that Wikipedia's editing community was deeply flawed and declining. Not until Gardner admitted they had a problem in 2010, and was subsequently replaced in 2014 by Lila Tretikov, did any major changes occur at the WMF, as Tretikov started to push out some of the organization's incompetent dead weight (Erik Möller, former "Deputy Director", widely rumored to have had an affair with his boss Gardner) and liars (Steven Walling, Sarah Stierch and others). But she can't fix the community's male bias, paid editing issues, copyright-problem backlogs, and large quantities of crackpots, and she doesn't appear to be trying. Possibly she realizes how hopeless it is.
There are many other disturbing aspects to the handling of WP's decline. The all-important number of articles, or "content pages" is rapidly approaching the 5 million mark, despite a large number of these articles being generated by bots that scrape other websites, or by obsessive nutcases. Or sometimes by paid editors; especially in corporate areas and biographies. That 5 million number is bandied about as if it were magic. There is no talk, no measure of the QUALITY of these articles. Plus, this listing of statistical figures about English Wikipedia has numerous columns that stop in January 2010. No explanation. Are they so embarrassing? The "official page" about administrators lists 1,343 of them (whoops, it dropped to 1,342 while I was writing this paragraph), yet if you dig a little deeper , you learn that only 582 of them are currently "active". It hasn't been this low since 2005. As I said, those vanished administrators tended to be content writers and most of them appear to be quite disgusted with the way Wikipedia is operating today. New-article quantities per month are declining, new editor accounts are declining (they now have 26 million of them, even though most are unused sockpuppets and only a tiny fraction do something regularly), and many other indicia of the "health" of Wikipedia editing are either declining or static. You won't see anything about this on the front page, nor in any Wikimedia promotional materials.
Next time I'll comment on Wikipedia's tiny and pseudo-effective community of critics. They enjoy similar levels of competence/incompetence and outright lunacy, and are also declining as Wikipedia declines. And will deny it just as strenuously as Jimbo denies any problems with his "great creation" -- because most of them are either maniac Wikipedian fans who want to "save" it, or are secretly making money editing it. I've got some really negative things to say about Wikipediocracy, in fact.
Monday, August 17, 2015
Copy of "The Battle Over Scientology: Part I"
Right off the bat I want to say that we aren't going to be talking
about Xenu, body thetans, auditing, "sec checking", or L. Ron Hubbard's
rotten teeth. This is all about the article on Scientology in
en-Wikipedia, how it was biased from the beginning, fought over for
nearly a decade, and became a relic of the Internet-Scientology wars of
the 1990s-2000s while also being a guide for other New Age, "new
religious movement" groups on how to dodge the e-mobs while keeping a
presence on Wikipedia.
In the Beginning....
The first Scientology article was in October 10, 2001 by The Cunctator (Brad Johnson), and as you can see here it's a long, harsh stub with no section breaks, photos, or complicated layout of any kind. The next edit was in November 19, 2001 by an IP address (62.20.33.xxx) who stuck in all the "cult" references and then it was off to the races. The Cunctator only edited the article twice after creating it, with his last addition in September of 2002. When Larry Sanger resigned from Wikipedia on March 1, 2002 he told Johnson this: "I'm sure glad I don't have to deal with you anymore, Cunctator. You're a frigging piece of work."
Early editors of the article split into two camps very quickly; those who actually used their real names, and those who just used IP addresses, and the latter camp were thought to be Scientologists or PR flacks working for them. Lee Daniel Crocker (who called the article "the best carefully-polished, well-debated" one on Wikipedia in November of 2001), Dreamyshade (one of the first female Wikipedia editors), AxelBoldt, and Bryan Dirksen were some of the early "name" Wikipedians involved. By 2003 Modemac (Eric Walker) was watching over the page and the warring was in earnest. By that point the article had regulars. The anti-Scientologists were: Prioryman when he was ChrisO (Chris Owens, 2003); David Gerard joined in 2004; Tony Sidaway, Gerard's friend, that same year; Will Beback (William McWhinney), also in 2004, then banned in 2012; Antaeus_Feldspar (Joseph Crowley) also 2004, left Wikipedia in 2011; SchuminWeb (Ben Schumin) in 2005, he left in 2012: MartinPoulter in 2005; Cirt (name unknown) 2006, desysopped in 2012; and finally Wizardman (Daniel Tylicki) in 2006. The named pro-Scientologists were much smaller in numbers and they were: Misou (name unknown) 2006; COFS aka Shutterbug (same) in 2007; TaborG (same) also in 2007; Lyncs aka Justallofthem aka Justanother (also unknown name), joined in 2006 and survived blocking, still on Wikipedia today. Misou, COFS, and TaborG were all accused of being sockpuppets of each other and banned; Lyncs tried to be the voice of reason from the Scientology side and failed to make a dent. There were four "uncertains" whose "allegiance" and true names were unknown: Wikipediatrix, who joined in 2005; GoodDamon in 2006; Republitarian joined that same year, was later blocked as a "meatpuppet or sockpuppet" (?); and Highfructosecornsyrup, also in 2006. That last account was blocked as a sockpuppet of Wikipediatrix. Beyond all the names listed there were a large number of IP addresses and alleged sockpuppets, so much so that a number of half-baked "sockpuppet investigations" were carried out and large numbers of people were banned, most probably innocent. And thanks to all the submissions, deletions, reinsertions it remained a biased wreck that only began having photographs of Scientology buildings attached to it in the summer of 2005, and even then it was just a shot of the long vertical sign of the Los Angeles "Scientology Information Center" on Hollywood Boulevard.
Why Kick Scientology?
There are a number of reasons, all of them complicated. Since the 1970s, there have been a number of anti-cult movements fighting groups like the Unification Church ("Moonies") or the Hari Krishnas (ISKCON), but especially the cults which encouraged mainly young people to drop their previous lives and live in some sort of collective, and there have been a large number of those, copying the `60s "drop out" communes but sticking in their pet religious dogmas. I see a lot of this as a bourgeois revenge at the time on the commune culture which allowed the Symbionese Liberation Army (1973-75) to form, the fear that "something worse" would emerge. Instead they got Jonestown and David Berg's "The Family"; while "revolutionary suicide" and the idea of religious prostitution are deeply unpalatable, they aren't the urban guerillas of the SLA nor the bombers of the Weather Underground, and neither of those were cults.
Scientology was different; it was run like a corporation, most of the members did not live in communes (group living was for poorer staff members and members of the "Sea Org" priesthood), it aimed itself at the aspirational middle-class, it was wealthy enough to have television ad campaigns, famous people were members. There had been small bits of criticism like Paulette Cooper's 1971 book The Scandal of Scientology, but the Church liked lawsuits, so the media stayed away. What changed everything was the rise of Usenet, then the early Internet; Scientology tried to attack anti-Scientology Usenet groups in 1994 (possibly because they felt invincible after forcing the IRS to declare Scientology a religion in 1992); they were trounced. Scientology asked members to put a modified version of Netscape Navigator in their computers in 1998 which critics dubbed "Sciento Sitter"; it blocked out a number of anti-Scientology websites. When YouTube started in 2005, that became another battleground as protesters would record their protests and post them, or video editors cut up Hubbard lectures and other material into anti-Church collages, or posted copies of private Scientology videotapes like the 1986 death of L. Ron Hubbard "briefing" or the Jon Zegel audiotapes. The last two examples were posted to "stick it" to the Church of Scientology, to prove that their secrets were no longer so, also Zegel (who was involved in dissident Scientology, mainly David Mayo's Advanced Ability Center) was forced by Church lawyers to make a "recanting tape" after three others laying out where Hubbard had been from 1967 to 1983 and other secrets the Church was hiding from parishioners and the US government. As with everything else Internet and Scientology, videos were pulled for "copyright", but copied and reposted. Some of the videos linked to above are copies of copies.
So this is what the Wikipedia Scientology war was about, continuing the older Usenet fight on another website while also being a sideshow of the mid-2000s "Project Chanology" protests (which started when the Church yanked that Tom Cruise video that wound up being relentlessly parodied anyway.) It really had nothing to do with sticking to Wikipedia's "neutral point of view" in article writing, it was all about protesting an unpopular group the oddest way possible.
***
In the next post on this subject, we will run through the insane 2009 Arbitration case, look at how sloppy Wikipedia is when dealing with the large number of Scientology spinoff cults, and examine a number of odd articles related to Scientology within Wikipedia.
Below is an interview the Lisa McPherson Trust made with Mike McClaughry in 2000. McClaughry was a former member of Scientology's Guardian Office which was a small intelligence organization within Scientology. These were the people who broke into US government offices in the 1970s ("Operation Snow White"); they are now called the Office of Special Affairs and allegedly less crazy.
In the Beginning....
The first Scientology article was in October 10, 2001 by The Cunctator (Brad Johnson), and as you can see here it's a long, harsh stub with no section breaks, photos, or complicated layout of any kind. The next edit was in November 19, 2001 by an IP address (62.20.33.xxx) who stuck in all the "cult" references and then it was off to the races. The Cunctator only edited the article twice after creating it, with his last addition in September of 2002. When Larry Sanger resigned from Wikipedia on March 1, 2002 he told Johnson this: "I'm sure glad I don't have to deal with you anymore, Cunctator. You're a frigging piece of work."
Early editors of the article split into two camps very quickly; those who actually used their real names, and those who just used IP addresses, and the latter camp were thought to be Scientologists or PR flacks working for them. Lee Daniel Crocker (who called the article "the best carefully-polished, well-debated" one on Wikipedia in November of 2001), Dreamyshade (one of the first female Wikipedia editors), AxelBoldt, and Bryan Dirksen were some of the early "name" Wikipedians involved. By 2003 Modemac (Eric Walker) was watching over the page and the warring was in earnest. By that point the article had regulars. The anti-Scientologists were: Prioryman when he was ChrisO (Chris Owens, 2003); David Gerard joined in 2004; Tony Sidaway, Gerard's friend, that same year; Will Beback (William McWhinney), also in 2004, then banned in 2012; Antaeus_Feldspar (Joseph Crowley) also 2004, left Wikipedia in 2011; SchuminWeb (Ben Schumin) in 2005, he left in 2012: MartinPoulter in 2005; Cirt (name unknown) 2006, desysopped in 2012; and finally Wizardman (Daniel Tylicki) in 2006. The named pro-Scientologists were much smaller in numbers and they were: Misou (name unknown) 2006; COFS aka Shutterbug (same) in 2007; TaborG (same) also in 2007; Lyncs aka Justallofthem aka Justanother (also unknown name), joined in 2006 and survived blocking, still on Wikipedia today. Misou, COFS, and TaborG were all accused of being sockpuppets of each other and banned; Lyncs tried to be the voice of reason from the Scientology side and failed to make a dent. There were four "uncertains" whose "allegiance" and true names were unknown: Wikipediatrix, who joined in 2005; GoodDamon in 2006; Republitarian joined that same year, was later blocked as a "meatpuppet or sockpuppet" (?); and Highfructosecornsyrup, also in 2006. That last account was blocked as a sockpuppet of Wikipediatrix. Beyond all the names listed there were a large number of IP addresses and alleged sockpuppets, so much so that a number of half-baked "sockpuppet investigations" were carried out and large numbers of people were banned, most probably innocent. And thanks to all the submissions, deletions, reinsertions it remained a biased wreck that only began having photographs of Scientology buildings attached to it in the summer of 2005, and even then it was just a shot of the long vertical sign of the Los Angeles "Scientology Information Center" on Hollywood Boulevard.
Why Kick Scientology?
There are a number of reasons, all of them complicated. Since the 1970s, there have been a number of anti-cult movements fighting groups like the Unification Church ("Moonies") or the Hari Krishnas (ISKCON), but especially the cults which encouraged mainly young people to drop their previous lives and live in some sort of collective, and there have been a large number of those, copying the `60s "drop out" communes but sticking in their pet religious dogmas. I see a lot of this as a bourgeois revenge at the time on the commune culture which allowed the Symbionese Liberation Army (1973-75) to form, the fear that "something worse" would emerge. Instead they got Jonestown and David Berg's "The Family"; while "revolutionary suicide" and the idea of religious prostitution are deeply unpalatable, they aren't the urban guerillas of the SLA nor the bombers of the Weather Underground, and neither of those were cults.
Scientology was different; it was run like a corporation, most of the members did not live in communes (group living was for poorer staff members and members of the "Sea Org" priesthood), it aimed itself at the aspirational middle-class, it was wealthy enough to have television ad campaigns, famous people were members. There had been small bits of criticism like Paulette Cooper's 1971 book The Scandal of Scientology, but the Church liked lawsuits, so the media stayed away. What changed everything was the rise of Usenet, then the early Internet; Scientology tried to attack anti-Scientology Usenet groups in 1994 (possibly because they felt invincible after forcing the IRS to declare Scientology a religion in 1992); they were trounced. Scientology asked members to put a modified version of Netscape Navigator in their computers in 1998 which critics dubbed "Sciento Sitter"; it blocked out a number of anti-Scientology websites. When YouTube started in 2005, that became another battleground as protesters would record their protests and post them, or video editors cut up Hubbard lectures and other material into anti-Church collages, or posted copies of private Scientology videotapes like the 1986 death of L. Ron Hubbard "briefing" or the Jon Zegel audiotapes. The last two examples were posted to "stick it" to the Church of Scientology, to prove that their secrets were no longer so, also Zegel (who was involved in dissident Scientology, mainly David Mayo's Advanced Ability Center) was forced by Church lawyers to make a "recanting tape" after three others laying out where Hubbard had been from 1967 to 1983 and other secrets the Church was hiding from parishioners and the US government. As with everything else Internet and Scientology, videos were pulled for "copyright", but copied and reposted. Some of the videos linked to above are copies of copies.
So this is what the Wikipedia Scientology war was about, continuing the older Usenet fight on another website while also being a sideshow of the mid-2000s "Project Chanology" protests (which started when the Church yanked that Tom Cruise video that wound up being relentlessly parodied anyway.) It really had nothing to do with sticking to Wikipedia's "neutral point of view" in article writing, it was all about protesting an unpopular group the oddest way possible.
***
In the next post on this subject, we will run through the insane 2009 Arbitration case, look at how sloppy Wikipedia is when dealing with the large number of Scientology spinoff cults, and examine a number of odd articles related to Scientology within Wikipedia.
Below is an interview the Lisa McPherson Trust made with Mike McClaughry in 2000. McClaughry was a former member of Scientology's Guardian Office which was a small intelligence organization within Scientology. These were the people who broke into US government offices in the 1970s ("Operation Snow White"); they are now called the Office of Special Affairs and allegedly less crazy.
Friday, July 10, 2015
Copy of the article "The Paid Editing Clusterfuck of Wifione"
One of the biggest problems with Wikipedia since The Popularity began
has to be the paid editing of articles on corporations, private
colleges, the bios of any living person, and so on. As with most things
Wikipedia, paid editing breaks their rules on conflict of interest but
it happens so much, all the ever-shrinking army of editors do is ban the
most egregious cases.
One such case is Wifione. He/she/it/they was banned a month ago or so for being a sockpuppet army of paid editing, though knowing socks, Wifione will re-emerge with another lame pun for a handle and a slightly-different IP. So who were "they"? One of my sources thinks Wifione was possibly a former Wikipedia admin called "Nichalp" who was also "Zithan" and the Zithan account was a paid editor (which was banned in 2009, and Nichalp lost IP oversight privileges.) Whatever the username, the paid editor was allegedly a University of Mumbai electronic engineering graduate named Nicholas Alphonso who now lives in Australia. He started appearing online in 2002 at the age of 19, possibly using a college computer. But there are complications with that claim of ownership, because it turns out Wifione had more predecessors, all of them from India. But first, who were they allegedly working for?
The Indian Institute of Planning and Management is an MBA school based in New Delhi, with 18 campuses across India, that has been in operation since 1973. It's a father and son affair; the founder is Malayaenda Kisor Chaudhuri, the "honorary dean" is his son Arindam. The IIPM has been ruthless in censoring its online critics in India (Cory Doctorow called it a "diploma mill" in a 2013 BoingBoing post), though it and Arindam Chaudhuri were censured last September by the Delhi High Court for "misleading students" into thinking it had the power to issue Bachelors of Business Administration or Masters of Business Administration qualifications (i.e., they were unaccredited by Indian standards.) Worse yet, the IIPM was claiming it had been recognized by a Belgian "International Management Institute" that had been set up by the Chaudhuris, an "institute" that is not even legal in Belgium. As of this writing, the Wikipedia article on the IIPM has been locked for "new" or unregistered users so that "sockpuppets of blocked or banned users" can't edit the article.
So now we get to the repetitious part of the article, listing all the alleged former Wikipedia handles of Wifione. Thanks should go to Eric Barbour and some others for the legwork......
First there was "Drnoamchomsky" who came and went in 2005. Edited in a fake claim about IIPM using subscription-only Business Week as a source, was found out. This account identified itself as being a part of IIPM (".....Other institutes don't organize any lectures - we do.") The Wikipedia userpage has been scrubbed by somebody from the www.chomsky.info site for "impersonating" noted linguist and political commentator Noam Chomsky.
Next was the more open "Iipmstudent9", which as finally blocked in February 2007. There was no pretense of being unassociated with IIPM ("Yes, this id [sic] is used by multiple students from the New Delhi campus. We were not aware this was against Wiki policy, and have agreed to get new accounts for each of us.....we're looking to protect our institute's interests.....unsubstantiated allegations by bloggers on a Wiki page make our institute look bad!") Was kicked out for threatening Wikipedian "MakrandJoshi" with a visit from the Mumbai (Bombay) Police for allegedly revealing his identity. Also edited from IP address 61.16.233.196. On September 8, 2006, signed as "Mrinal", who later became true separate account.
During the same time but separate were "Iipmalum" and "Dipali Sakhare." Iipmalum used the same IP address as Iipmstudent9, Sakhare was an employee of Arindam Chaudhuri. She was involved with setting up the PR division of a company called Planman Consulting, whose webpage calls it "an IIPM initiative". Iipmalum was autoblocked in 2007.
"Mrinal Pandey" had "her" user page created on Christmas Day, 2006 by Iipmstudent9....whom she denied being (....."For the sake of clarity :-) I'm not iipmstudent9 or whomever the person is".....November 29, 2006.) She made the November statement from the IP address 203.76.132.74. That address was one of nine used by Mrinal; one of them (58.68.49.70) is the IP of a journalist named Mr. Onkareshwar Pandey, of The Sunday Indian. Which is "associated" with IIPM and Arindam Chaudhuri (i.e. Chaudhuri owns it.) Mrinal was indefinitely blocked in 2008 for using 43 accounts to edit IIPM related articles. No worries; Arbcom unblocked "her" a year later, she changed her name to "Empengent", and blanked her user page. "MakrandJoshi" and Tarantino of the Wikipediocracy board watched her online activities for years. Either O. Pandey is Mrinal, or Mrinal is somebody else (office assistant? girlfriend?) using that last name for editing ID purposes. In any case, they work directly or indirectly for the Chaudhuris.
More minor accounts were: "Dean.A.Sandeep" who appeared and disappeared on March 31, 2009; he wanted page protection. "Suraj845" was never blocked, worked with Wifione, still around in 2013. There's also "Carlisle Rodham" with a blanked user page.
"MakrandJoshi" stopped following Mrinal in 2010 despite threats to his property and life; I guess seeing people constantly get away with their schemes must have been too much to take.
List of Wifione Sockpuppets (no links, aforementioned in bold)
RAVIRAWAT
Deborah Fernandes
Kumarsingh
Newsexpress
Matthewlocker
Doublecover
Carlisle Rodham
Empengent
MfginIndia
Bigbangboom
Abhinaw01
Atul005
Ravindra Sing Rawat
Rawat2008
Addy kundu
Joshua Artgobain Benedict
Maheshbopara
lanchappell
Richapatell
Sumitpatel12
Solankikumar
PreetiSehgal
PramodMehta
NamithaSahu
Nancy1986
Mohit006
Sanjay Acer
PromilaGaur
Shilpanayar12
Highestheight
Whitepaperr
Editorrahul
Mrs.hidden
Missshivani
Arjunsingh11
Fastmovement
Articlesheet
Smartarticle
Amazingarticle
Articlerelease
Articlexpert
Newsexpert
Strongreader
Deverma
Radhika15
Puneet27
Manojkartik
Gangachauhan
Heenasrivastava
Aakritiverma
Bhadrikajain
Nainasrivastava
Dharakashyap
Kanishkachopra
Kristinakaif
Trishnaroy
Amaritarona
Mayankchopra
Anirudhodja
Karangupta
Jigneshmerhra
Parthaagarwal
Pratikshamehra
Prayushagarwal
Rakshitchopra
Notes:
Accounts Fastmovement through Articlexpert were all minted 11-27-08; all were blocked on 12-1-08.
Account Newsexpert began the next wave 12-18-08.
Account Deverma began editing IIPM article after protection ended 1-5-09.
Postscript
After this post was linked to the Wikipediocracy board, Tarantino wrote this: "Wifione isn't Nichalp. We know who both are." If you actually do, please tell, so that they can be shamed out of paid-editing of Wikipedia or anywhere else online and popular.
One such case is Wifione. He/she/it/they was banned a month ago or so for being a sockpuppet army of paid editing, though knowing socks, Wifione will re-emerge with another lame pun for a handle and a slightly-different IP. So who were "they"? One of my sources thinks Wifione was possibly a former Wikipedia admin called "Nichalp" who was also "Zithan" and the Zithan account was a paid editor (which was banned in 2009, and Nichalp lost IP oversight privileges.) Whatever the username, the paid editor was allegedly a University of Mumbai electronic engineering graduate named Nicholas Alphonso who now lives in Australia. He started appearing online in 2002 at the age of 19, possibly using a college computer. But there are complications with that claim of ownership, because it turns out Wifione had more predecessors, all of them from India. But first, who were they allegedly working for?
The Indian Institute of Planning and Management is an MBA school based in New Delhi, with 18 campuses across India, that has been in operation since 1973. It's a father and son affair; the founder is Malayaenda Kisor Chaudhuri, the "honorary dean" is his son Arindam. The IIPM has been ruthless in censoring its online critics in India (Cory Doctorow called it a "diploma mill" in a 2013 BoingBoing post), though it and Arindam Chaudhuri were censured last September by the Delhi High Court for "misleading students" into thinking it had the power to issue Bachelors of Business Administration or Masters of Business Administration qualifications (i.e., they were unaccredited by Indian standards.) Worse yet, the IIPM was claiming it had been recognized by a Belgian "International Management Institute" that had been set up by the Chaudhuris, an "institute" that is not even legal in Belgium. As of this writing, the Wikipedia article on the IIPM has been locked for "new" or unregistered users so that "sockpuppets of blocked or banned users" can't edit the article.
So now we get to the repetitious part of the article, listing all the alleged former Wikipedia handles of Wifione. Thanks should go to Eric Barbour and some others for the legwork......
First there was "Drnoamchomsky" who came and went in 2005. Edited in a fake claim about IIPM using subscription-only Business Week as a source, was found out. This account identified itself as being a part of IIPM (".....Other institutes don't organize any lectures - we do.") The Wikipedia userpage has been scrubbed by somebody from the www.chomsky.info site for "impersonating" noted linguist and political commentator Noam Chomsky.
Next was the more open "Iipmstudent9", which as finally blocked in February 2007. There was no pretense of being unassociated with IIPM ("Yes, this id [sic] is used by multiple students from the New Delhi campus. We were not aware this was against Wiki policy, and have agreed to get new accounts for each of us.....we're looking to protect our institute's interests.....unsubstantiated allegations by bloggers on a Wiki page make our institute look bad!") Was kicked out for threatening Wikipedian "MakrandJoshi" with a visit from the Mumbai (Bombay) Police for allegedly revealing his identity. Also edited from IP address 61.16.233.196. On September 8, 2006, signed as "Mrinal", who later became true separate account.
During the same time but separate were "Iipmalum" and "Dipali Sakhare." Iipmalum used the same IP address as Iipmstudent9, Sakhare was an employee of Arindam Chaudhuri. She was involved with setting up the PR division of a company called Planman Consulting, whose webpage calls it "an IIPM initiative". Iipmalum was autoblocked in 2007.
"Mrinal Pandey" had "her" user page created on Christmas Day, 2006 by Iipmstudent9....whom she denied being (....."For the sake of clarity :-) I'm not iipmstudent9 or whomever the person is".....November 29, 2006.) She made the November statement from the IP address 203.76.132.74. That address was one of nine used by Mrinal; one of them (58.68.49.70) is the IP of a journalist named Mr. Onkareshwar Pandey, of The Sunday Indian. Which is "associated" with IIPM and Arindam Chaudhuri (i.e. Chaudhuri owns it.) Mrinal was indefinitely blocked in 2008 for using 43 accounts to edit IIPM related articles. No worries; Arbcom unblocked "her" a year later, she changed her name to "Empengent", and blanked her user page. "MakrandJoshi" and Tarantino of the Wikipediocracy board watched her online activities for years. Either O. Pandey is Mrinal, or Mrinal is somebody else (office assistant? girlfriend?) using that last name for editing ID purposes. In any case, they work directly or indirectly for the Chaudhuris.
More minor accounts were: "Dean.A.Sandeep" who appeared and disappeared on March 31, 2009; he wanted page protection. "Suraj845" was never blocked, worked with Wifione, still around in 2013. There's also "Carlisle Rodham" with a blanked user page.
"MakrandJoshi" stopped following Mrinal in 2010 despite threats to his property and life; I guess seeing people constantly get away with their schemes must have been too much to take.
List of Wifione Sockpuppets (no links, aforementioned in bold)
RAVIRAWAT
Deborah Fernandes
Kumarsingh
Newsexpress
Matthewlocker
Doublecover
Carlisle Rodham
Empengent
MfginIndia
Bigbangboom
Abhinaw01
Atul005
Ravindra Sing Rawat
Rawat2008
Addy kundu
Joshua Artgobain Benedict
Maheshbopara
lanchappell
Richapatell
Sumitpatel12
Solankikumar
PreetiSehgal
PramodMehta
NamithaSahu
Nancy1986
Mohit006
Sanjay Acer
PromilaGaur
Shilpanayar12
Highestheight
Whitepaperr
Editorrahul
Mrs.hidden
Missshivani
Arjunsingh11
Fastmovement
Articlesheet
Smartarticle
Amazingarticle
Articlerelease
Articlexpert
Newsexpert
Strongreader
Deverma
Radhika15
Puneet27
Manojkartik
Gangachauhan
Heenasrivastava
Aakritiverma
Bhadrikajain
Nainasrivastava
Dharakashyap
Kanishkachopra
Kristinakaif
Trishnaroy
Amaritarona
Mayankchopra
Anirudhodja
Karangupta
Jigneshmerhra
Parthaagarwal
Pratikshamehra
Prayushagarwal
Rakshitchopra
Notes:
Accounts Fastmovement through Articlexpert were all minted 11-27-08; all were blocked on 12-1-08.
Account Newsexpert began the next wave 12-18-08.
Account Deverma began editing IIPM article after protection ended 1-5-09.
Postscript
After this post was linked to the Wikipediocracy board, Tarantino wrote this: "Wifione isn't Nichalp. We know who both are." If you actually do, please tell, so that they can be shamed out of paid-editing of Wikipedia or anywhere else online and popular.
Tuesday, April 21, 2015
The Kinks - Muswell Hillbillies
One of those albums people forget about when they talk about The Kinks. Pitchfork had this to say about it back in 2004:
"Muswell Hillbillies came out in 1971, and it was the Kinks' first release on RCA. This explains why you haven't been able to find the little bastard for years, but the good kids at Velvel know what's up; They've reissued this 1971 album (and are filling in the gaps for everything up until 1984). Muswell Hillbillies may very well be the best Kinks album you never heard, a scathing but witty take on urban renewal. No, it's not quite a concept album, more like an idea album-- a buncha songs that are a bit downbeat in theme but lively in execution.
What's a Muswell Hillbilly? Well, Muswell Hill was a community in England that the Davies family had to move to after their neighborhood in North London was razed and gentrified. You do the math, kiddo.
Muswell Hillbillies features Ray Davies at his whipcracking best, rolling out lyrics like "The milkman's a spy and the grocer keeps on following me/ And the woman next door's an undercover for the KGB." It's a pretty simple sound, and one that's more folk and country based than any album they'd ever done. A wonderful brass band turns up on two of the album's best tracks "Acute Schizophrenia Paranoia Blues" and "Alcohol" (oh, there's a good combination). "Here Comes the People In Gray" is a bluesy stomp about a man whose house is being torn down by the city. "Oklahoma USA" is a pretty ballad about living in a fantasy world "with Shirley Jones and Gordon McRae." But other than the insidiously catchy chorus of "Have A Cuppa Tea" (you may be driven to murder if you listen to it too long), I can't find much to complain about with these Hillbillies."
Thursday, March 26, 2015
Tom Scharpling's "Best Show" Back on the Air as a Podcast
One of the great cult classics of latter-day radio comedy, the Best Show on WFMU, gave us the inimitable pairing of Tom Scharpling (writer/producer for the comedy series Monk) with Jon Wurster (drummer of "Superchunk", writer on a number of Adult Swim comedy shows.) Their style was the "reverse prank call", with Wurster calling Scharpling on air at WFMU as a number of characters who become progressively unglued during their calls, sometimes conferenced with regular callers. Their inital shot across the bow was "Rock, Rot & Rule", done in 1997 before the Best Show existed:
After that, a mythos began emerging around the fictional town of Newbridge, New Jersey, with Scharpling "moving" the Jersey City-based WFMU to the town and Wurster voicing everybody who lives there, to the point where there is now a "Newbridgctionary" website listing them all.
Tom Scharpling would also have guests on, such as Paul F. Tompkins (member of the Mr. Show sketch troupe.) Above, Tompkins and Scharpling rip apart a radio ad for the 2009 "Gathering of the Juggalos" at Cave-In-Rock, Illinois.
The show lasted thirteen years, shutting down on New Years Eve, 2013. After an near-two year hiatus, the show returned as the podcast Best Show, and has been taking calls and letting Philly Boy Roy Ziegler do his thing every Tuesday from 9PM to Midnight, PST.
The original WFMU Best Show recordings.
The new website (episodes availible on iTunes.)
After that, a mythos began emerging around the fictional town of Newbridge, New Jersey, with Scharpling "moving" the Jersey City-based WFMU to the town and Wurster voicing everybody who lives there, to the point where there is now a "Newbridgctionary" website listing them all.
Tom Scharpling would also have guests on, such as Paul F. Tompkins (member of the Mr. Show sketch troupe.) Above, Tompkins and Scharpling rip apart a radio ad for the 2009 "Gathering of the Juggalos" at Cave-In-Rock, Illinois.
The show lasted thirteen years, shutting down on New Years Eve, 2013. After an near-two year hiatus, the show returned as the podcast Best Show, and has been taking calls and letting Philly Boy Roy Ziegler do his thing every Tuesday from 9PM to Midnight, PST.
The original WFMU Best Show recordings.
The new website (episodes availible on iTunes.)
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