Washington DC shooter is a wiki editor active in multiple articles related to shootings

[WordsWordsWords]

My title is horrible, and I'm not sure if I'm posting on the right subforum but it turns out the recent shooter was a wiki editor with a pretty... weird wiki user page. Also, his profile has been revdeleted (not sure if that's standard practice) but some of it has been archived. Someone might want to check his edits to make sure he didn't mess with the shooting related articles too much.





https://web.archive.org/web/20220423015 ... nd_Spencer


Ps: mods If this is not appropriate or relevant feel free to delete it, and let me know if there's something to change!

[Midsize Jake]

On the contrary, it's highly appropriate and relevant... In fact, I think we'll move it into "General Discussion." And thanks for archiving the guy's user page just in the nick of time!

Here's a link to the Washington Post article...

I actually dated a woman once who lived about a block from where this shooting occurred. I mean, that was back in the 80s, but I don't think that part of the city has changed all that much since then (other than the fact that nobody ever took a shot at me while I was there). It's a fairly upscale neighborhood, close to the Metro. And of course, the guy would have to be from Fairfax.

[Vigilant]

I'm not sure one should have those two userboxes next to each other.

[AndyTheGrump]

...
Someone might want to check his edits to make sure he didn't mess with the shooting related articles too much.
...

Someone checked. See recent redactions to Talk:2022 New York City Subway attack (T-H-L), which were edits by Wikipedia's Raymond. It was fairly innocuous stuff though.

Wikipedia coverage of mass shootings etc is weird, to say the least. Obsessive about some things (number killed, kept like a scorecard in a series of 'list' articles), and cavalier about others (like waiting for trial before labelling someone a mass killer). And one bright spark thought it was clever to register an account under the name of 'Rampage Killer' to edit such content, though the evidence for that seems to have been largely purged: Wikipedia is censored when it wants to be. You'd have to know it was there to find proof. link

[Jim]

Wikipedia is censored when it wants to be.

Sure.

You can see the odd, no doubt partial, history of a page called User:Raymond Spencer if you look at this: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?ti ... on=history where the rather odd Pink Amperthing latest name bizarrely involves herself for no immediately clear reason.

But notice that while viewing that page the sidebar has none of it's usual "User Contributions" etc. links, and, indeed, if you try to look at https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?ti ... nd_Spencer you are informed that:

""Raymond Spencer" is not registered on this wiki. Please check CentralAuth to see if it is registered on other wikis."

You can still look at diffs such as https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?ti ... 1082424701, but there are no links to user contribs from there either, just the signature in the wikitext as any indication that this "user" ever existed...

[DanMurphy]

Wow. They instantly memory-holed the account, down to deleting the talk page. I don't know if there was anything juicy/interesting to find there. Neither did they. But they were determined to prevent people from finding out.

[AndyTheGrump]

The account only had about 20 edits. Signed up on April 12th.

[AndyTheGrump]

I have reason to suspect that the image at the top of this page may have been doctored. WordsWordsWords, can you tell us where you got it from?

[Beefsoup]

I have reason to suspect that the image at the top of this page may have been doctored. WordsWordsWords, can you tell us where you got it from?

Here's a twitter user who got a similar screengrab of his account: https://twitter.com/HGTomato/status/1517682443976908800

Why do you think it was doctored?

[AndyTheGrump]

I will answer that question as and when I think it appropriate.

[tarantino]

Here's an archive of the WaPo article.

https://archive.ph/GqkCv

Spencer had a picture of Yakub on his wall. Yakub was a black scentist who lived 6600 years ago and began creation of white people by selective breeding and killing dark babies.

[WordsWordsWords]

I got it on twitter! Is it doctored? Sorry for posting without proof, I just assumed no one would doctor.... wikiboxes!


Also, I agree that it is weird for a user with so few edits to have such a... personal? User page.



Edit:
And yeah, I think this will add to the debate around how should shootings/massacre articles be treated and dealt with. I guess it's a fine line to walk, and I personally think that most articles aren't problematic... but the quality seems to vary a lot. Some articles will go in details about a shooter's life & have a picture of them, while on some others any picture will be reversed and deleted and little details will be given on the shooter.


I'm not sure if the second approach is better, but it is interesting to see the difference.

[Vigilant]

I thought talk pages weren't allowed to be deleted...

Current user page history. No talk page.

[AndyTheGrump]

I got it on twitter! Is it doctored? Sorry for posting without proof, I just assumed no one would doctor.... wikiboxes!


Also, I agree that it is weird for a user with so few edits to have such a... personal? User page.

Yup. I have access to a copy of the original userpage, as edited by Spencer, downloaded directly from Wikipedia. The 'AR-15 aficionado' userbox isn't on it. Someone has been naughty.

*** EDIT See my later posts, this is incorrect ***

[WordsWordsWords]

Yup. I have access to a copy of the original userpage, as edited by Spencer, downloaded directly from Wikipedia. The 'AR-15 aficionado' userbox isn't on it. Someone has been naughty.

Is anything else edited? I honestly would've thought the "circumcised" userbox would've been the fake one. Looking into it, it seems like the tweet linked in this thread also has a "cheese pizza" userbox. That one is a bit too on the nose in my opinion, so I'd guess it's edited too?

Amazing that someone actually doctored a wikipage screenshot so quickly after the shooting. I think he was still alive/not caught when I got the screen capture.

[AndyTheGrump]

Since we agree it has been doctored, the image should probably be removed, since people seeing it aren't necessarily going to read the entire thread.

As for what else, if anything, has been altered, I'll keep shtum for now. I have a suspicion that the person responsible may be reading this thread...

*** EDIT See my later posts, this is incorrect ***

[Beeblebrox]

So, obviously what I can say here is pretty limited, but for what it's worth: Suppression is considered a "tool of first resort", as in, use it before discussing the matter so this is in line with accepted procedures.

It may take a moment for the dust to settle. Everyone who should be aware of it, is.

I would assume the FBI already has all the un-supresssed diffs and CU data, but that's way over my pay grade.

What's not confidential at all is that The Washington Post has picked up on the Wikipedia stuff and also reported on the AR-15 userbox link.

[AndyTheGrump]

The WaPo has picked up on the AR-15 userbox, certainly. But did they get that from the original userpage, or from Twitter? As I said, the userpage I have access to (saved as a file, not a screenshot) doesn't include the userbox, and from what I can figure out, it was most likely never there, unless there is more going on than just the suppression of files.

*** EDIT See my later post, this is incorrect ***

[Beeblebrox]

The WaPo has picked up on the AR-15 userbox, certainly. But did they get that from the original userpage, or from Twitter? As I said, the userpage I have access to (saved as a file, not a screenshot) doesn't include the userbox, and from what I can figure out, it was most likely never there, unless there is more going on than just the suppression of files.

I could look into that, but I couldn't tell you what I find.

[Vigilant]

Stop fucking with the posts.

Just stop.

[Beeblebrox]

Publicly viewable facts as of right now without any advanced permissions:

*The user box exists, having been on EN.WP since 2014: Template:User AR-15 (T-H-L)

* The revision history of User:Raymond Spencer (T-H-L) shows creation of the page by someone on April 21, at 253 bytes.

*On April 22 someone added a further 15 bytes of content

*About six hours later the page was blanked

[Bezdomni]

No contributions now on either commons or en.wp
commons
en.wp

The database hasn't updated yet at wikiscan, so it still shows contributions to both:
commons
en.wp

[AndyTheGrump]

Having looked into this further, it seems I was mistaken. The version of the user page I was looking at was the previous one, from when the page was created on the 21st. As Beeblebrox notes, another 15 bytes (presumably the userbox, which will be 15 bytes long, allowing for a newline) were added on the 22nd. And although Beeblebrox doesn't say so, it can be seen from the archived copy of Spencer's contribution history (linked in the first post, and confirmed by a copy I've seen elsewhere) the edit came from Spencer's account, and were posted very shortly before the edits to the Edmund Burke School article.

Apologies to all for getting this wrong. I'm not entirely sure how I cocked up, but I clearly did.

[Moneytrees]

I thought talk pages weren't allowed to be deleted...

To be clear, the talk page wasn't deleted (as far as I can tell), it just hadn't been created, which is very common for new users.