Qworty

[Tippi Hadron]

Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/The Death of the Death of the Novel (T-H-L)

Nominated by Alf.laylah.wa.laylah (T-C-L), who seems like a very nice and erudite person.

[Vigilant]

Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/The Death of the Death of the Novel (T-H-L)

Burn the witch!!!

[Vigilant]

Get bent, Wnt.
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?tit ... =556612834

It is not clear to me why some people seem proud of the outcome that some minor writer was publicly disgraced for making some short-lived and pretty minor changes in spin to the article about a rival. We need to fix things like this, not make spectacles out of them. [[User:Wnt|Wnt]] 17:52, 24 May 2013 (UTC)

Did you actually read the Salon article?

[NaymanNoland]

Just wanted to post some fanboy recognition of the current blog entry. I don't know if "Murphy" is your real name, but if not, your Murphy writer-persona-sock-person is a rockstar.

(Lose the hyphen in "postmodern".)

[DanMurphy]

Just wanted to post some fanboy recognition of the current blog entry. I don't know if "Murphy" is your real name, but if not, your Murphy writer-persona-sock-person is a rockstar.

(Lose the hyphen in "postmodern".)

Thanks for the kind-words. I'm a typo-machine and the copy-editors here don't get paid enough to save-me-from-myself.

About 20% of the time I think I'm 80% interested in writing something substantial about this stuff, but mostly I let off a squib occasionally.

[NaymanNoland]

That's more than a squib. That's a stick of dynamite worthy of Wile E. Coyote.

In fact, Wikipediocracy's coverage of this in general has been at least the equal of anything in the mainstream press. You're in danger of becoming a publication.

[NaymanNoland]

And, surprise surprise, there's a misguided effort to erase most of the Qworty controversy from Robert Clark Young's entry, on the grounds that it somehow violates BLP. Only one source, you see. (Wikipediocracy not being a source or anything. And Salon being an oh-so-minor one.)

This is why I intend to stay focused on this: I know that with the efforts of TDA and others, it's going to be very difficult to keep Wikipedia from sweeping the Qworty disgrace under the carpet.

Do we really have to rely on the MSM to continually disinter the truth here? My sense is that the media will be fully obliging in this respect, but is that what it takes?

[NaymanNoland]

(Oh, and I apologize for apologizing to The Devil's Advocate. What he's now doing at Wikipedia to derail the truth about Qworty is just fucking unbelievable. I don't care whether he has a coherent agenda, or whether he just likes doing annoying stuff because it annoys people - it's sure not aiding the creation of an actual encyclopedia.)

[NaymanNoland]

<snip allusion to moved post - Zoloft>

I've set up the Qworty Cleanup Project - and I've probably done it wrong. Can you have a look, and tell me if there's anything that needs doing? I don't, for instance, really want my username in the page title - it's hardly MY page:

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?tit ... =580503890

[Vigilant]

Dear lord, that's a long page.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia: ... y_clean-up

You should add this thread to the list of "useful threads" on that page.

[Tippi Hadron]

It's interesting to see how different search engines are handling the Qworty affair.

Enter "Robert Clark Young" into Google, and our exposé on him currently comes up in sixth place, with Andrew Leonard's stories for Salon appearing third on page one.

It's different for Bing: neither Wikipediocracy nor Andrew Leonard show up on the first page of the search results. Leonard's current trifecta on Young shows up fourth on page two, followed by Dan's analysis of the Qworty fallout on our blog as the third hit on page three.

The resuscitated version of HotBot ranks Leonard's pieces ninth on page one, and ours in fourth place on page three.

Of course, Robert Clark Young's Wikipedia biography is the top hit on all three search engines.

[Vigilant]

As predicted, the Qworty cleanup fizzled.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia: ... -up/Qworty

Thousands and thousands of articles potentially corrupted by an admitted revenge editor.
Interest waned and the project died about a month ago.

Who's going to take responsibility for the rest of this mess?

[Randy from Boise]

As predicted, the Qworty cleanup fizzled.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia: ... -up/Qworty

Thousands and thousands of articles potentially corrupted by an admitted revenge editor.
Interest waned and the project died about a month ago.

Who's going to take responsibility for the rest of this mess?

The operative word is "potentially."

RfB

[Vigilant]

As predicted, the Qworty cleanup fizzled.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia: ... -up/Qworty

Thousands and thousands of articles potentially corrupted by an admitted revenge editor.
Interest waned and the project died about a month ago.

Who's going to take responsibility for the rest of this mess?

The operative word is "potentially."

RfB

How will anyone know unless they go look?
Go pick a random location in that mess of 2448 articles.
It's almost July 4th so let's choose 1776.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia: ... rough_1780
None of that block of twenty articles has been checked.

The WMF KNOWS, without doubt, that Robert Clark Young was a bad actor with a verified history of revenge editing.
They have a fiduciary duty to deal with this.

This situation makes me want to drive up to the city and leave a steaming coil on their doorstep with a Qworty flag in it every weekend until they clean this shit up.

[Moonage Daydream]

From The Espresso ("San Diego's Coffeeshouse and Cafe Newspaper"): Robert Clark Young: Writing the Book on Elder Care After Five Years’ Caring for Gravely Ill Parents

Robert Clark Young recalled the day his life changed. He was in the shower when the phone rang with a call from his father about his mother. Something was very wrong; she was confused, agitated, speaking jibberish and barely responsive. Robert’s 80-year old mother suffered a massive stroke and was entering a new world of aphasia and ever-decreasing mobility and function that eventually ended in her death. But on that day, Robert thought of how long he’d have to be gone from teaching in Sacramento and the trip back to his boyhood home in Imperial Beach. That was in July, 2008. Robert Young still hasn’t gone back; for him and his parents, a series of escalating health crises changed their lives permanently.

Yes, there is a comments section.

[EricBarbour]

From The Espresso ("San Diego's Coffeeshouse and Cafe Newspaper"): Robert Clark Young: Writing the Book on Elder Care After Five Years’ Caring for Gravely Ill Parents
Yes, there is a comments section.

I and others have tried to post comments. Nothing goes through.

[Zoloft]

Eh, we don't need to follow him around everywhere. We just need to watch for him on Wikipedia. Let him reinvent himself as an eldercare advocate.

[Vigilant]

Eh, we don't need to follow him around everywhere. We just need to watch for him on Wikipedia. Let him reinvent himself as an eldercare advocate.

You misspelled grifter.

[Randy from Boise]

Moderator's note: Several of the posts below were split from the August 2017 "Foundation News" thread. As you can see, the intervening time amounts to over four years. {MSJ}

Someone should pay me to do this work. If it's been sitting 7 or 8 years, that should be a pretty strong clue that this is work that volunteers don't want to do. This would be more valuable work than scanning old photos at a museum.

That's without looking at stuff that they know is wrong, that they were complicit in allowing, but refuse to fix.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia ... -up/Qworty

Just for you, Viggie, I spent some time on our friend Qworty this morning.

I learned enough from my small sampling to deduce that his editing to non-writer-related topics should be removed from the list and his editing of material relating to American writers and publishers closely scrutinized. Of course, random sampling and attacking problematic areas identified by sampling is alien to The Wikipedia Way™, which is to create the biggest logjam imaginable so that nothing is ever resolved, but protecting the project from the criticism that it wasn't at least trying to be sufficiently thorough. Wikipedia's Contributor Copyright Investigations party crew LOVES making cases out of the universal set of contributions by a problem editor but barely has the staff and the energy to whack off the tip of the iceberg. Their eyes are bigger than their bellies... (Love them mixed metaphors!)

Qworty took malicious glee in deletion. I found one he did that was a good one (removing a massive CV) and one he did that was a very bad one.

RfB

[Vigilant]

Someone should pay me to do this work. If it's been sitting 7 or 8 years, that should be a pretty strong clue that this is work that volunteers don't want to do. This would be more valuable work than scanning old photos at a museum.

That's without looking at stuff that they know is wrong, that they were complicit in allowing, but refuse to fix.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia ... -up/Qworty

Just for you, Viggie, I spent some time on our friend Qworty this morning.

I learned enough from my small sampling to deduce that his editing to non-writer-related topics should be removed from the list and his editing of material relating to American writers and publishers closely scrutinized. Of course, random sampling and attacking problematic areas identified by sampling is alien to The Wikipedia Way™, which is to create the biggest logjam imaginable so that nothing is ever resolved, but protecting the project from the criticism that it wasn't at least trying to be sufficiently thorough. Wikipedia's Contributor Copyright Investigations party crew LOVES making cases out of the universal set of contributions by a problem editor but barely has the staff and the energy to whack off the tip of the iceberg. Their eyes are bigger than their bellies... (Love them mixed metaphors!)

Qworty took malicious glee in deletion. I found one he did that was a good one (removing a massive CV) and one he did that was a very bad one.

RfB

So, how long until Project Qworty is finished?

[Randy from Boise]

Someone should pay me to do this work. If it's been sitting 7 or 8 years, that should be a pretty strong clue that this is work that volunteers don't want to do. This would be more valuable work than scanning old photos at a museum.

That's without looking at stuff that they know is wrong, that they were complicit in allowing, but refuse to fix.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia ... -up/Qworty

Just for you, Viggie, I spent some time on our friend Qworty this morning.

I learned enough from my small sampling to deduce that his editing to non-writer-related topics should be removed from the list and his editing of material relating to American writers and publishers closely scrutinized. Of course, random sampling and attacking problematic areas identified by sampling is alien to The Wikipedia Way™, which is to create the biggest logjam imaginable so that nothing is ever resolved, but protecting the project from the criticism that it wasn't at least trying to be sufficiently thorough. Wikipedia's Contributor Copyright Investigations party crew LOVES making cases out of the universal set of contributions by a problem editor but barely has the staff and the energy to whack off the tip of the iceberg. Their eyes are bigger than their bellies... (Love them mixed metaphors!)

Qworty took malicious glee in deletion. I found one he did that was a good one (removing a massive CV) and one he did that was a very bad one.

RfB

So, how long until Project Qworty is finished?

At the current pace, about 27 years from now. What's that, 2044???

RfB

P.S. Because of your post above, Vig, I took a look at this. I assess the damage done to WP as follows:

Articles he edited not dealing with the publishing industry or contemporary writers — that is, stuff about politicians and so forth — I find to be unproblematic, period, full stop. He edited with a liberal orientation and is not always NPOV, but I would rank him among the milder political warriors playing games with each other In the field of Modern American Politics.

Articles he edited dealing with writers and publishers should be approached differently. These are potentially problematic. Qworty was sort of like a really rotten internet book rater, coming from a background in the field of literature. The writers he did not like, perhaps individuals he met personally, he typically edited viciously against. His typical Method of Operations was to remove, remove, remove, remove content in a series of edits, frequently citing "unsourced" as a rationale for bold deletion — which is really sketchy behavior for content which appeared obviously to be true.

He also hated pay-to-publish publishers (a fact of life in the modern world), going out of his way — to edit war, even — to call them "vanity publishers." While technically correct, this is a loaded term, to be avoided.

He did, however, make at least one very aggressive cut that was a big net benefit to WP, wiping out a ton of self-promotion in a few strokes.

So he was a mixed bag and not necessarily every deletion he made was in bad faith.

I would call him warriorlike in his editing behavior and am glad that he is gone from the project.

Due to the CCI-like structure of the Qworty Cleanup Project, it will never be fully resolved due to the inability of that model to scale. That's a whole 'nother discussion.

P.P.S. From what I saw, I don't think WP subjects have probably been harmed in real life. Their B-minus Wikipedia pages have been slashed to become D-plus Wikipedia pages by a bad actor back half a decade ago, but have subsequently regenerated — in most cases, I am hoping.

P.P.P.S. I think that the reason that Qworty Cleanup was abandoned so fast is because it wasn't an enormous festering boil of slander and innuendo. It is more like vandalism cleanup, following around an ortherwise decent Wikipedian who was making good faith edits at a ratio of about 10-to-1. If Qworty was a big libel problem or something, the cleanup would have been massive and fast. But checking the veracity of some unsourced claims he made on an edit listing the CSA's Andersonville prison camp as "the first concentration camp," etc. etc. etc. — that's just not what the troops signed up for. They wanna go after the bad guys. Qworty was both already banned and boring.

[Randy from Boise]

Mods, feel free to split the Qworty stuff to the appropriate thread.

viewtopic.php?f=8&t=2162&p=39621&hilit=qworty#p39621

Oh, I see Vig is the one who started the original Qworty thread.

WPO:Barnstar (T-H-L) to you, you grumpy mf, barnstar to you.....

t

[Vigilant]

Mods, feel free to split the Qworty stuff to the appropriate thread.

viewtopic.php?f=8&t=2162&p=39621&hilit=qworty#p39621

Oh, I see Vig is the one who started the original Qworty thread.

WPO:Barnstar (T-H-L) to you, you grumpy mf, barnstar to you.....

t

My only barnstar, likely ever.

*sniff*

Wait, wait!
What about Little Green Rosetta... and Oliver Keyes... and ScottyWong... and and and

[Poetlister]

My only barnstar, likely ever.

*sniff*

Wait, wait!
What about Little Green Rosetta... and Oliver Keyes... and ScottyWong... and and and

If you suddenly got a flood of barnstars, it's possible that some officious idiot would delete and lock the page.

[Vigilant]

My only barnstar, likely ever.

*sniff*

Wait, wait!
What about Little Green Rosetta... and Oliver Keyes... and ScottyWong... and and and

If you suddenly got a flood of barnstars, it's possible that some officious idiot would delete and lock the page.

More grist for the mill.