Nihonjoe Has Been Naughty

By Eddy Landwehr

Bureaucrats are the most trusted users on Wikipedia. There are only 19 bureaucrats for the entire English-language Wikipedia. Bureaucrats have the ability to grant or revoke administrator privileges, so it is important that the Wikipedia community chooses bureaucrats they can trust. Nihonjoe, Wikipedia bureaucrat, is not trustworthy and never has been.

Nihonjoe started editing Wikipedia in 2005. In 2006, they became an admin. They became a bureaucrat in 2009, after 3 unsuccessful attempts. When they first applied to become a bureaucrat in 2007, they stated “I think it’s very important to avoid even the appearance of a conflict of interest”. Those are fine words, but Nihonjoe did not follow them.

Who is Nihonjoe?

To understand Nihonjoe’s conflicts of interest, it is necessary to know who he is outside of Wikipedia. There is an account on Deviant Art that is also named Nihonjoe. That account has posted several times about an art show that is part of a convention called CONduit. The contact for the CONduit art show was Joe Monson of Orem, Utah. Deviant Art’s Nihonjoe’s profile states that they live in “Utahppia”.

In one of their posts, they also mention that “my wife was one of the winners” and included a Heather Monson in that list. Joe Monson of Orem, Utah is married to a Heather Monson. I suppose if one took the time, one could probably find images on the Deviant Art account that were also uploaded to Commons by Nihonjoe. Like this and this.

Joe Monson’s LinkedIn page tells us that he is an “Information Technology Administrator, Inventory Manager at Aquaveo | Managing Editor, Art Director, Project Manager at Hemelein Publications”. Note that his LinkedIn page includes his Wikipedia activities, but does not name the account. He is also a writer and has a website.

Conflicting interests

Nihonjoe had conflicts of interest almost from his very first edits. In 2005, he created an article for something called the Utah Speculative Fiction Council. Somehow it went largely unnoticed until 2013, when it was deleted. Both Joe and Heather Monson were involved in running that group at various times. Joe Monson was on the board as early as 2005.

If you go through his employers listed on LinkedIn, he has edits for almost all of them that have Wikipedia articles. He created the article for CONduit in 2006. He created the article for Nausica.net in 2007. He created the article for Life, the Universe & Everything in 2010. He also created the article for Hemelein, but it’s a disambiguation page and doesn’t include his publishing company, although here he adds one of their books to an article.

Joe Monson currently works for a company called Aquaveo. Of course, that hasn’t stopped Nihonjoe from editing it, including getting it on the front page of Wikipedia with a DYK. Nihojoe’s history with various articles related to his former employer Ancestry.com is full of questionable activity. I think even the most forgiving Wikipedia editor would probably say that if you are the editor of a book and your publishing company published it, you should not be adding it to the author’s page as Nihonjoe did in 2022.

Here we have a Wikipedia bureaucrat with several undeclared conflicts of interest over the years, but also making edits in which they have a direct financial and professional interest. What could be worse than that? Well, it looks like there is probably some sockpuppetry. too.

Matching socks?

Remember that Joe Monson works for a company called Aquaveo? Nihonjoe didn’t create that article – another user named 42of8 did. 42of8’s very first edit was to add a new section to Brandon Sanderson. That edit included a bunch of formatting that no ordinary user would know. Their next edits were all to articles about software made by Aquaveo, then on their seventh-ever edit, they created a new article with an infobox and everything. 42of8 only ever makes 171 edits total. Most of their activity is in the Spring/Summer of 2013. They returned in 2015 for a few edits to Aquaveo software articles and to add a category to the article of Larry Correia, a Utah-based author. On Fandom, there is a “Larry Correia Wiki”. A user named Saijojoe is an admin and bureaucrat on that wiki. Saijojoe is a username that Joe Monson has used in the past.

The Nihonjoe at Deviant Art lists Brandon Sanderson as his favorite author. Joe Monson knows Sanderson through the CONduit and LtUE conferences. Nihonjoe uploaded a 2007 photo of Sanderson he had taken at CONduit. In the brief time that 42of8 edited, they managed to overlap with Nihonjoe on 7 articles and 3 talk pages. The intersection of Joe Monson’s employer and the authors he knows suggests that this is no coincidence.

Another account, Edit42 shows up in 2015. Their interests are Aquaveo software, Brandon Sanderson, and a fantasy novel. Fans of Douglas Adams will have noticed the connections between the account names and the name of the Life, the Universe and Everything conference.

Missing socks?

Some Wikipedia editors may have difficulty believing that an admin and bureaucrat would use sockpuppets. Well, over on Goodreads, there’s an account for author Joe Monson and an account for Nihonjoe. I found 5 instances where “Nihonjoe” is rating books edited or including stories by Joe Monson: A Universe of Stories, Down The Arches of the Years, Thin Air, Dragon Soup For the Soul, and All The Monoliths In The Universe.

On Amazon, a user named Fumitaka Joe rates a book by R. F. Barlow a 4 out of 5. Fumitaka Joe tells people to “read my full review over on MySF reviews”. If you look on Joe Monson’s my-sf.com website, you can find his review of the book. Neither the Amazon comment nor the full review mentions that Heather Monson edited the book. Another book edited by his wife is given a 5-star rating.

In 1978, at the end of what would turn out to be the Sex Pistols’ final performance, singer Johnny Rotten posed a question to the audience as the band left the stage – ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?