IMPORTANT: See my statement found here regarding my own use of sock puppets.
Sorry friends, I have been trying to ignore Wikipedia as much as possible for my own sanity and so I have not been around much to comment. It doesn’t look like I have missed much. The Climate Change Arbitration seems to have moved into the proposed decision phase which is good, I guess, but I have been ignoring that like the plague. I can’t participate and I have chosen not to blog about it either just to let the elephants work things out for themselves.
Ever since the AGW extremists started running around tagging various accounts as alleged sockpuppets of me I periodically like to check back and see what I have been doing. 🙂
You can follow along by watching two primary locations:
There’s really nothing interesting that has changed on the SPI page but today I found a couple of interesting things on my category of suspects page.
First we have MastCell who has just tagged Absit invidia II (talk | contribs) as a suspected sockpuppet of mine. Looking through the edits of this user nothing remarkable to report. Mostly just chit chat on Lar’s talk page. Now I realize that I am known for my Latin skills (no, not really) so I can certainly understand how this account was mistaken for me. The fellow did point out the desperation that MastCell was showing by misrepresenting information to help make his case. For a science type editor this surprises me, although given the company he has been keeping perhaps it shouldn’t. Climategate. Enough said on that point. I guess MastCell is hoping to get under my skin with this but his attempt is truly misguided as I don’t much care.
Guys, you can suspect as many accounts as you like and you can tag them all. Get back to me when you can actually tag one as confirmed. That’s when things might get interesting. I know this won’t happen so I have no worries.
The more interesting thing today is that there is another user also getting caught up in the hysteria and the paranoia, one Ricky81682 (talk | contribs). If memory serves (but I’m not going to go back and confirm it) this user has previous been tagged as me. For some reason someone, somewhere seems to think this guy sounds like me or whatever.
What’s funny is that this is not a new user at all:
- Ricky81682 (administrator) (Created on 29 October 2004 at 05:22)
Created back in 2004 and an administrator to boot! Woo hoo! Now I ask you, if I had control of an administrative account would I ever in a million years be able to resist using it to block various AGW extremists for their shenanigans? (Hint: There is no way.) Still, there they are tagging the account as a puppet of mine (wait, wouldn’t I be a puppet of them since they are the older account?). This is all so confusing.
Note also that whomever tagged this person as a puppet of mine also seems to think that he is a puppet of Scibaby (talk | contribs) too. Is sockpuppetry transitive? If so then I guess we are all actually the same person: Scibaby, Ricky, and me. It would be sad if it weren’t so amusing. 🙂
On a more serious note, however, the accusations are being made by the following IP addresses and edits:
- (cur | prev) 04:14, 14 August 2010 68.171.231.17 (talk) (4,838 bytes) (→FYI: new section) (undo)
- (cur | prev) 06:39, 13 August 2010 68.171.231.19 (talk) (4,803 bytes) (→warning: new section) (undo)
- (cur | prev) 19:58, 26 July 2010 32.174.180.52 (talk) (2,717 bytes) (see User talk:Jimbo Wales) (undo)
The first two (68.171.231.17/19) track back to the Blackberry network, which we have run into previously. The last one (32.174.180.52) maps back to an old Cingular mobile account that was bought up by AT&T.
So, no major conclusions here other than to notice that the web being used to attempt to snare me is continuing to yield an ever growing number of spurious accusations. I truly wish I had enough time to really be all of these people AND Scibaby too. 🙂
Wikipedia Watch 
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