eppur si muove wrote: ↑Fri Jan 27, 2023 3:29 pm
I wonder whether anyone has thought to contact the people who obtained this court order (the lawyers and/or their client) that the sockpuppet documentation means that WIkimedia does have lots of details of the libeller.
I can only say that
we haven't done that, but at the risk of giving too much away here, it should have been possible for an internet-savvy private investigator with some competence in "forensic wiki auditing" to figure all this out, even down to the probable identity of the perpetrator. (And when I say "probable," my estimate would be to within an 80% likelihood or even higher.) IOW, we're fairly clever at this sort of thing, but it's not like we have a monopoly on it. So, was such a person ever hired? We don't know.
Frankly, it's a double-bind scenario. It seems possible (to me, anyway) that Mr. de Gourcuff may be deliberately "playing dumb," and behaving as though such an investigation couldn't possibly have succeeded without data from the WMF, because he realizes that merely getting an injunction against the perp is
completely insufficient. Any of the perp's friends could pick up right where he left off, at any time. So he has to sue the WMF, and win, in order to ensure the article is protected at a sufficiently higher level in the medium/long term. Except now, we see (unsurprisingly, at least to me and I should think most of us here) that the WMF
would rather pay thousands of Euros in donor money to de Gourcuff and the French courts than do the responsible thing for this one article and this one really obvious case. (It's true that they might never actually pay, but that's sort of a side issue.)
Alternatively, Mr. de Gourcuff and/or his lawyers might have already hired that competent P.I., who might have already done the investigation and already found out who the perp is, but maybe they believe they can't make a case against the perp in a French court without having first done their "due diligence" (of getting confirming data from the WMF, or at least trying). In other words, the lawyers are going down a list of all the possible objections a French judge could make in relation to their case, and covering them. That might indicate that the perp is actually a high-value target — perhaps a rich guy, or someone who's so widely disliked in French society that de Gourcuff would actually gain in stature by ultimately destroying him, even if he takes a nasty hit in the short term.
There are other possibilities too, of course, but this post is long enough already. Basically, this case could be a "slow burner" — maybe not so immediately interesting for those of us who aren't French, but it could go on for a while and have some interesting repercussions.
There is nothing I've seen in his contribution history suggesting he has anything against gender studies. And since you say you know who he is... 
