The Frank Lovece Files

[Woden.Ragnarok]

Frank Lovece (T-H-L)
I raised this on the "Politicians editing their own bios" thread but Frank's Bio has been getting some more editing so it's worth looking at separately. Yesterday we got the addition of a link to Habitat (magazine) (T-H-L)

The Habitat article was created by Skippu (T-C-L) whose editing history shows the same unique tells as the editor who uploaded the photograph of Lovece (JimCorrigan (T-C-L)).

So we can assume these both to be the same editor. From then on the history of the article (other than bot edits) is a succession of I.Ps and a single edit by Tom Soter the Editorial Director of Habitat. The I.P.s can be googled and regularly lead back to Habitat's offices and a selection of habitat writers (including F. Lovece).

What's even funnier is that in messaging one of the I.Ps 207.237.230.157 (T-C-L), Tim Canens outs him because his actual name is identifiable from that IP http://disc.yourwebapps.com/discussion. ... icle=11794 The account Tim outs also has the same tells as Skippu and JimCorrigan

[EricBarbour]

Okay, all this checks out. I can add it to our (already massive) collection of "autobios".
Now, what's so special about Lovece?

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/w ... -page.html

[Woden.Ragnarok]

User Skippu is worth looking at on his own

Firstly this account is the primary writer of Maitland McDonagh (T-H-L), Frank Lovece's Wife
http://toolserver.org/~daniel/WikiSense ... d_McDonagh
The next most frequent editor on that article is another of the IP's from the Habitat article.
There are a few other articles with connections like that, for instance the article on the George Carlin showhttp://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?tit ... =190930321 not surprisingly the claim for this originated in a Frank Lovece newspaper article http://community.seattletimes.nwsource. ... ug=1894887

Secondly take a look at this RfC Wikipedia:WikiProject_Comics/Requests_for_comment/Articles/Vertigo_(DC_Comics) (T-H-L) and the interaction between the account Tim outed and Skippu with excellent quotes like:

One more thing -- ******* can be highfalutin but ntnon is acting like a little snot. I don't know if he's really a professional journalist or not, who knows here, but ntnon is not a professional writer, so maybe he should listen more.

This is a technique I've seen him take in at least one other RfC - use an IP/sock to make a minor attack on himself, then a Major attack on his debating opponent. In that same RfC Outed Account requests a cool down week the Skippu appears attacking opponent then outed account returns claiming to have had a week long break and adds to Skippu's attack.

It's this socking in relation to articles not autobiographical I see as particularly problematic. Try reading Lovece's newspaper article on say Demi Moore in 1992 http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=6i ... +oui&hl=en where he accuses he of lying about her early life - then read the talkpage of Talk:Demi_Moore (T-H-L) (and archives) and note the behaviour of the lovece accounts as they try to spin the article into a negative light on Moore, accuse her of lying about her early life, and provide undue coverage of her early career.

[Woden.Ragnarok]

In addition Lovece has filed something like 80 Drama board reports, 14 Sockpuppet reports, and 2 Conflict of Interest reports for editors breaking policies that he himself is engaged in breaking.

[Woden.Ragnarok]

It was recently raised at the Film WikiProject that Wikipedia had too many Roger Ebert film reviews, but I don't think anyone is keeping track of how many Frank Lovece ones are being self cited.

Looks like we're not in Kansas anymore but I am the Law
so lets Kick Ass!

Granted there's a number of cites to X-Files topics that he doesn't appear to have introduced (but he gets cited because he wrote a book on the subject) but there's currently 256 articles that mention him and I'm guessing that most can be traced back to himself. There's also talkpages and project pages not included in that count where Lovece sources are used to justify content though not cited in the final version.

The best I've found so far is this comic related doozy. Where he cites a copyvio of a fanzine he wrote an article for in 1977 (long before he became a journalist, either a high school or college student). That would be self cite, by a non expert author(at time of writing), in an unreliable source, that violates copyright and shouldn't be linked per WP external linking policy.