Barry Kort  00:00
My story begins, basically about four years ago, and it was the month of August. And in 2007, August is a slow month, everybody's on vacation, nothing's happening. You go online, and there's just nothing. So I'm looking for, what I can use to productively use my time? So I thought, you know, I'm gonna, I'm affiliated with the Affective Computing Research Group at the MIT Media Lab. I'm a visiting scientist here, and I'm doing some research. And I wonder if there's an article about Affective Computing on Wikipedia, I've never bothered to look. And is there an article is it up to date, maybe I can do some work on it. So sure enough, I go to Wikipedia, and there's an article on Affective Computing, and it's not too bad, it's reasonably up to date recently, correct. Not a whole lot of need to do any editing on it. But I noticed as I'm reading the article, that the names of some of the people who are involved in the field are in blue, which means that there's a biography. And in particular, the founder of the group that I'm affiliated with the epic computing research group, Rosalind Picard is a professor at the Media Lab at MIT, her name's in blue. So there's a biography of Rosalind Picard, it never occurred to me, there'd be a biography, I should take a look at that and see how that looks. So I click on her name, up comes a biography. And I'm startled because there's practically nothing about her that I recognize, there's almost maybe one or two sentences that says she's a professor at MIT in the Affective Computing Group. And then there's this whole long story about something called Intelligent Design. And I go, What the devil is that doing in there, I've known Roz Picard since the early 1980s. Seams almost, what, 30 years now. And I've never known her to be involved in anything involved in Intelligent Design. So I look at this, this is just you know, this is baloney. So now, I had been on Wikipedia before. And I knew a little bit about editing on Wikipedia, but I hadn't mostly it only done like, you read an article and you see a typo. And so you edit it and your fix your typo, no big deal. But this time, I was going to basically take out a bunch of stuff, and put in a real biography, I was gonna go to the, to the MIT Media Lab website, pull up her biography, and essentially replicate her biography, on on the spot on this Wikipedia biography. So I bring up the editor, and I'm logged in as my avatar named Moulton — Moulton is a name that I had adopted as an avatar name, back in the late 80s. And I used it to work in Wikipedia too. So I do all this editing. And I'm, you know, I got all the time in the world so I'm very carefully doing a preview of the page and you edit it, and you preview the edit. Finally, when you're happy with it, there's the the final save where you save the page for real. So I hit the Save button. And it displays I think that's great. And I thought, you know, I could just make sure I should reload the page afresh, just to make sure that I did it right, that I didn't miss some details. In that sense, I reload the page. And lo and behold, it's back exactly the way it was before. With, you know, I go, I must have done something wrong. So I try it again, I bring up the editor again, and I go through the whole rigmarole again, and I this time, I want to make sure that when I save it, I do the save correctly. And I don't miss something, I save it again. It looks fine. Reload the page, it's back again. And I'm I'm surprised at what's going on here.  So then I remember that there's a feature on Wikipedia, where you can look at the history of the edits of the page. So I click on the History tab. And as soon as I had made my edits, somebody else had reverted. And I look at the the identity and it's somebody whose name is unpronounceable, it's HRAFN42, Hrafn42 a total stranger. So I go, Who is this Hrafn42 who is reverting my edits? So then I remember there are talk pages associated with with an article page. So I go to the talk page. And I begin to put in you know, comments like what's going on here. And this fella Hrafn and another fellow who goes by Filll F-I-L-L-L, they start telling me that I can't do this edit that I have all these reasons why it's wrong. And, and why, you know, they're controlling what's on the page. So over the next about two weeks, I have this long conversation with these, basically four people Hrafn42. Filll, who turns out to be a guy in Maryland, Hrafn and turns out to be a young fellow in Dunnedin New Zealand of all places. And two more of their colleagues who all turn out to be members of this editing clique, they call them cabals which is the wiki project on Intelligent Design. So there's this group of about a dozen people who are controlling a whole bunch of articles on the subject of Intelligent Design, including several biographies and several Main articles and others.  Now I've heard of Intelligent Design, and it's not like, you know, you've never heard of it, but I hadn't really paid much attention to it. And here's this whole group. And and they're basically telling their version of the Intelligent Design story on something like two or three dozen articles, including including this one, Rosalind Picard. So I'm arguing with them, I should explain why her name comes up. You have to, you have to go all the way back to 2001. In 2001, Public Television, PBS, did a new series on evolution. And it was a terrific series on evolution. But at the time that they that they did the series, the, I guess, the religious right, you'd have to say, who are sort of in this creation thing. Were pushing against teaching evolution, both in public schools and public television, they were trying to, to tell the other side of the story. And they had published a couple of display ads in the mainstream press, the New York Times and maybe one or two other mainstream press. And they were arguing that well, there are scientists who are skeptical of evolution, and it turned out back in 2001, there was circulated an email, a two sentence statement about being skeptical of various scientific theories, including theories of evolution. And, you know, having an open mind about doing the science in a systematic way, and not just presenting scientific results as sort of established fact. So about 100, scientists and academics back in 2001 signed the statement said, Yeah, we agree that, you know, if you're gonna do the scientific method, you should do it. You should have healthy skepticism. And, you know, take your theories and look for and you should you should support them with with good evidence. And part of the criticism is that, well, some of the evidence is trotted out to support theories is really not not probative. Except that the evidence is wrong, it just doesn't. It's like if you were to write a theorem in mathematics on the blackboard, and student says, What's the proof and you write an incorrect proof, you don't want to do that. It's not that the theorem is incorrect, it's that the proof is sloppy, or incorrect. And so the, the academics are saying, demonstrate scientific theories in accordance with the scientific method and do probative evidence and don't just, you know, toss it out with some kind of, you know, kind of a whitewash technique that's not doing a good service to science. So it turns out that among the people who signed this two sentence statement back in 2001, was Rosalind Picard, which I didn't know about.  And there was a group called the Discovery Institute, which was one of these lobbying groups for what became Intelligent Design. And they took this two sentence statement that about 100 Scientists had signed in 2001. And they added a headline to it, that headline was not part of the the original statement. And his headline was something to the effect of, of scientists are skeptical of Darwin's theory. I can't remember the exact phrasing. And they published this this display ad, and they had this big headline, which was not part of the statement, and they had in small print the statement, and then underneath that the names of the scientists, and this whole thing was essentially against this PBS series. So these two, these two or three display ads came out 2001, and everybody forgot about it. So here now we're talking about 2007. Right? Well, it turns out that around 2006, the Discovery Institute, who had done those two display ads back in 2001, they launched a new website. And the new website was to get to promote intelligent design. And among other things, they were featuring the statement which they had now, since they had added this, this interpretation, we call it reframing. If you take up a perfectly innocuous statement, and you add a headline to it, you can change the interpretation. It's called reframing. And they had basically reframed the statement to make it sound like it was saying something other than what was really intended by the original people who looked at it. So the New York Times in 2006, wrote a story about the launch of this new Discovery Institute website there was promoting intelligence and intelligent design. And the author of The New York Times story, tried to get some quotes from two or three of the names who are on the list of signers back in 2001. So he got a couple of quotes. One guy said, they're both full of baloney, a pox on both their houses, meaning the scientists and the ID people. And there was another professor down in Texas who was working on nanotechnology. And he was skeptical of a lot of stuff. But but he was not a proponent of intelligen Design and he said so. And the author of the article had tried to contact Roz Picard, because she was one of the better known names who was on the list. And she was on sabbatical that year at Boston College, and he never reached her. But he nonetheless, mentioned her names is one of the original signers. So this group on Wikipedia, this Intelligent Design Cabal, take this New York Times article, which has this headline, which is sort of the headline basically, is is the interpretation of the Discovery Institute. And they from that they draw the conclusion that these 100 Scientists in 2001 are supporters of Intelligent Design, just obviously baloney. But nonetheless, they put in on the biographies. You know, these people like James Tour, and Rosalind Picard and others are all proponents of Intelligent Design. And that's the whole biography is this stuff. And I argue with him, I say, you can't draw that conclusion. It's bogus. And but it's in the New York Times, that's a reliable source, you know, and they're using this, this whole argument that, you know, if it's, if you can find a reliable source, you know, that's good enough for Wikipedia. So I worked with him for about two, two weeks, on the talk pages. So I argue with these guys for good two weeks on just on the talk page, and you can actually read the entire archive with the talk pages still on the archives of the Wikipedia. And after about two weeks, this guy, Filll F-I triple L says, Enough is enough.  And then they launched into something that I had no inkling was coming, but turns out to be a standard practice on Wikipedia. They started something that they call an RFC, which is Requests for Comments, and which I call a Spamish Inquisition. And what this is, is they start a little inquiry about whether or not my conduct is in accordance with Wikipedia's guidelines for editor behavior or not. Now, the only people who show up to this request for comments are people in the Intelligent Design clique, which is about a dozen of them. And nobody else even knows about it. So and it's a little bit funny, because Filll and his colleague who goes by Confucius Ornis, and I eventually looked that up, it turns out that Confucius Ornis is actually the name of a bird species. So this guy was probably a biologist or bird biologist. And I never found out who he really was because he vanished from Wikipedia, not long after this episode, but he and Filll started this, this RFC, and they initially drafted it in their own personal talk page, sub-pages and on Wikipedia, you can put things in the public area, and you also have a little personal area and they began to write it there. So I being naive, I didn't realize that there were these two different spaces this this personal space and so when I learned that they were drafting this RFC, I began to respond on the on the personal pages of the the guys who are writing it rather than in the public area. So Confucius Ornis, he realizes that I'm kind of naive on this. And he he he copies my rehearsal material to the public area. And he signs my name to it. And I go, excuse me, I get to edit what I write and I get to sign my name to what I write you don't get to submit the portion. You know, that is reserved for me and you don't get to sign my name. They shrug that off so anyway, this this Spamish Inquisition goes on, again for I think about two weeks or so. And finally in comes some sort of the heavyweights of the of the Intelligent Design Cabal. There, there are three people as a result, there's only about 14 people in the Intelligent Design Project. Three of them are administrators. Administrators have technical power, administrative power, which the regular editors don't have. And there were three of them. One was named Dave Souza, who's pretty decent chap, and I suppose that's his real name. I never found any actual person that I identified as him, there was a character who called himself Felonious Monk with an F. And he turned out to be a person who worked at the IT center at Macy's. San Francisco his real name was Paul Mitchell was a content management guy, but he was sort of a high powered administrator. And these guys were among those who were, you know, conducting this Spamish Inquisition. And then there was a third administrator, a woman who went by the name of Killer Chihuahua. And her real name turned ou to be Tracy Walker, which I found out later. And she was an amateur horticulturist. But, and was down in Florida, but she comes in at the end, and says, she, she basically acts as the judge and jury and executioner on this thing. And she, she declares that, that I've violated some vague principle or guideline on Wikipedia, and she decides to ban me. And now in those days, this is 2007. If you wanted to ban somebody in Wikipedia, you had to go to a community noticeboard and publish it there and get feedback. And she says, I'm not even going to bother with the community noticeboard, I'm just going to use my own power. And ban, this guy forever. So she executes users her adminstrator power to do a permanent ban of my login, which is Moulton. That's my login name, at which point I cannot edit anything on Wikipedia, except my own personal talk page.  So now I retreat to my talk page. And I begin dialoguing there primarily with one person who is a bit of an old timer. I never learned his real name. I think he lives in northern New Jersey somewhere around  New York. And for years, he never even had an account, he just edited with an IP address without logging in. And he eventually decided to register. And he chose the name that was his old IP address. So he was something like 14.275 dot, whatever. And that was they chose that his name Was14.275. So his name was really was his old IP address anyway, so but he was a knowledgeable chap a week dialogued about lots of stuff about and he was the one who said, You got mugged. You've got mugged by a bunch of thugs. And so he and I have this really long, wonderful really conversation that goes on for a period of time. In the meantime, I went on to my own personal blog on Blogger, and I wrote a little memoir of this episode, a little account of it. And I published that on my personal blog. And at the same time, a colleague of mine, who is a professor of journalism out of Utah State, she teaches online journalism, Public Affairs reporting, and ethics and journalism. And I collaborate with her mainly because when she was doing online journalism, and things like that, I was helping them set up all of their Internet based forums and blogs and things like that, because I'm sort of with them, sort of the geeky guy, and they didn't really have enough technical staff to do that. And they also had an online newspaper in the Department of Journalism School Journalism Department called the Hard News Cafe. Now remember, this is we're now into September. Well, by the way, I should tell you, the date that I was banned was September 11. So so it was kind of a 2007. So that was the day that was banned by Killer Chihuahua. So So my colleague, again, who who has this teaches ethics in journalism, online journalism, and I've learned a lot about ethics and journalism just from hanging around them. They had a, she had set up a blog for her course, on mass media ethics. And because it was September, the blog was essentially idle, because it was the previous time she taught it. And so I also write an essay on the mass media ethics blog from Utah State University. So my friend Nancy, who is the professor, she says, I'm going to show this to our department, and she says, nice essay. So she shows it to Mike Sweeney, who's the department head and Mike says, That's a great essay, I'd like to run it as an op ed piece. In the hard news cafe, the online newspaper while it's September, school is just started. The students are not up to speed yet and the students generally write the content for the paper but there's almost no content yet because it's only September. So I say to Mike sure be my guest. And he doesn't change a word except he picks, I had written a very bland headline. And he picked a soundbite in the middle of the article and made that the headline. So I have these two publications, a personal blog and this op-ed piece at the Hard News Cafe. So the guys from the Wiki project, the, the ID Cabal, they get wind of this. And the first thing they do is they come over to my personal blog, which I called Moulton Lava. And I hardly ever get any traffic on my personal blog. And you know, it's, it's almost like a memo you write to yourself, it's like a diary, practically, it's almost no traffic. But this little essay, this little memoir that I write, you know, generates a lot of negative feedback from these people who were very familiar with, you know, the the case, on Wikipedia. And, and the first comments are very crude. And they come from somebody I've never heard of who uses the blogger named fuckinbroke somebody in Cleveland. Dunno, never find out who he was. And then I get comments from another character who uses the Blogger named Skip. Now, this is before Blogger had that feature where they would tell you how much traffic and where it's coming from. And all the stats, this is before they had that stats feature. But as it happened, you know, usually on the blog, or you have a little thumbnail photograph, or of your avatar or your picture. So it turned out that, that when I went to put a little postage stamp picture of myself, I had a, I had a nice shot of myself that somebody's taken with a digital camera that was on my own web server. And so rather than upload it, which was a bit of a technical pain, I simply went into my Blogger template, and I fetch the image right off of my own server. And what that meant was that anybody who visited my blog, even though the blog is run by Google Blogger, when they loaded that little picture, it fetched it off of my own server, which left a record that left a time and date log record in my own server that somebody had fetched it. And so I could tell how essentially how much traffic by looking at the logs on my server. Now, as I said, almost nobody, this is my blog. So finding a time concordance between somebody posting a comment, and fetching my picture is, you know, there's no confusion at all. Okay, so, so these two guys who are posting these rather intemperate remarks, I say to the one who's goes by Skip, I said, Can I quote you on that? And attribute it to the person who's posting from the Macy's, San Francisco IT Center, because he had, in fact posted from his work, because, you know, so he's incensed. And he says, that's an invasion of privacy. You know, take that down. The next comment, by the way, these are all still, you can you can find them on the on the comments. So right back, I said, Well, it's too late. Because since that was posted, it's already in Google cache. You know, Google put something up. There's also a cache so that even if the original goes away, you can click on Google cache and get the same thing anyway. And also, there was another system I didn't even know about at the time, the Library of Congress had an archiving system called Minerva. As it happened, Minerva had, had crawled my blog and I said to them, I said, look, it's already in the Nerva on the Library of Congress is already too late to take it down. So so I've really annoyed these guys now I found out later, so I saw I knew that that this blogger, Skip worked at Macy's IT center. I felt like they didn't know who it was. Much later, I found out that it was Felonious Monk. That he was the he was the person who worked at Paul Mitchell. He was the one who worked at Macy's IT center. And it turned out that there were there was another person in the ID cabal who also was posting from the Macy's IT center. Now Felonious Monk, when when you leave a record in a in an Apache Web log, it not only it gives you the IP address, it gives you the kind of operating system and the kind of browser so this he was on Windows, and he was using, I think Internet Explorer, but there was somebody else from the same IP address at Macys who was on a Macintosh running Safari. I thought he's got a subordinate and he's got a colleague who's working with them this guy goes by Odd Nature. And for the longest time I thought that Odd Nature and Felonious Monk were two different people turned out they weren't. The reason he had two different machines was that he was working on content management. And he had to view the Macy's web pages in all platforms and all browsers to make sure they rendered correctly. And so he had two machines sitting in his office. And on Wikipedia, he would log into one as Felonious Monk and the other he'd log in as Odd Nature. And so he had a sock puppet, he had two identities. And so here was this guy, doubling his presence. One is administrator, one is as a non-administrator. And at the same time, when I posted things on the University of Utah State University website, again, they got an irate letter. And this irate letter came from somebody who had the Google address, Center of Attention. And he wanted them to take something down that I put up. And he signed his name, Jamie F, no last name, just initial. And that turned out to be the same guy. So then, later, he called up the MIT Media Lab on the phone and tried to lodge a complaint. So this one guy, Paul Mitchell, was the administrator who was really working hardest on Blogger and Utah State University and MIT trying to really, you know, gag me and shut it all down. So pick up the story. So we're on, we're on my talk page now. And so if you're, if you have an account of Wikipedia, you not only have a talk page, you have a user page and user page, you usually put up something about yourself. It's a little bit like a billboard, I had put up basically a biography of myself with my bonafides. I said, Well, here's, here's my academic background, here's my interests. Here's, you know, everything about me. And I'm, even though my login name is Moulton, which is not my real name, if you click on any of these links, back to my bona fides, so my identity is not a secret. So Felonious Monk, goes to my user page. And he deletes my biography and he replaces it. He locks the page and replaces it with stuff that's that's, that tends to damage my reputation, which really annoys a few other people, they think this is just over the top. In the meantime, on my own talk page, I'm beginning to collect evidence for this corruption, this unethical behavior, I'm beginning to collect little, little by little, you know, evidence. And of course, the people on an ID don't like the fact that I'm collecting all this evidence. But I'm not the only one. Because actually, my case is really below radar. And if you didn't know about it, you wouldn't know where to find it. But it turns out that this bully group, this ID Cabal, which is kind of a bully group, I wasn't the only person that they were jerking around, including some people who had real presence on Wikipedia. So finally, there was not everybody on Wikipedia is unethical. There's a few people who've got a reasonable sense of ethics. And among them was a chap who I believe he's stationed, I think in the Pacific, maybe somewhere around Japan or Hong Kong or someplace like that, and his name, his real name is Charles Ainsworth. But he goes by CLA, which is his initial CLA-68. Probably his birth year, I suppose. I don't know. But everybody knows him online as CLA68. So he's also aware that there's all this bullying going on with this ID Cabal, and he launches a case against Felonious Monk, and one other person who's not involved with me, but is involved with other stuff — a person named Slim Virgin, there's quite a story all by yourself. That's a whole nother movie. And so this CLA 68 launches this this case on the Arbitration Committee, which is like the Supreme Court of Wikipedia. And I'm watching this thing, you know, silent because I have no power to log in or participate, even though I had compiled evidence just for my part of the case. In the meantime, there's this criticism site called Wikipedia Review. It's a bulletin board site, where people who are disgruntled or distressed or just critics have a common discussion forum about, you know, the nonsense that goes on Wikipedia. So I am, I joined, I had registered on Wikipedia Review, and I began to tell my story, little by little on Wikipedia Review. And one of the people who was a long-time editor of Wikipedia and also who tracked Wikipedia Review but didn't participate very much most occasionally posted mostly read, read some of my account and and she thought this this isn't right and she went to the Roz Picard biographies. She wrote first people went to the Roz Picard biography and said, This is what we call a coat rack. This is taking an article with one title and hanging some stuff on it that doesn't really belong there. And so she began to correct it. Well Felonious Monk came down hard on her. And so she was one of the very first people to submit a complaint against the Felonious Monk in his ArbCom case. This ArbCom case, dragged on for, I think, more than six months. It was one of the very high profile cases, he was a very high profile guy. He was a close friend of Jimmy Wlales. Eventually ArbCom came to a decision. And they found Felonious Monk guilty of abuse of power in his position with administrative power, and get the exact phrase here leveling unfounded accusations against people, something to that effect. And it was unanimous. And they stripped him of his administrative power. And he basically slunk away basically disappeared a few days after that, and also so did Odd Nature. Naturally, because they were one of the same.  So in the meantime, his cronies on Wikipedia didn't want me compiling all my evidence on my topic. So they said, You can't use your talk page, like a blog. That's, you know, I made a claim that that was a rule. So the person I was mainly dialoguing with said, Well, you know, Wikipedia is not the only project of the Wikimedia Foundation, they have these other sites besides the English Wikipedia. He said, there's sort of an overall management site called Meta.wikimedia.org, where they kind of do kind of high level management of what projects and this and then the other thing, and he said, Why don't we migrate over there, you can read register as Moulton, on Meta.Wikimedia, and we can resume our conversation. So we do that. And this goes on for maybe a month or two, and then they, you know, our adversaries migrate over to Meta, and again, they say, you can't use your talk page in this way, you know. So about this time, we learned that there's yet a third project, a very small project called wikiversity. Wikiversity is a project has been around for a few years. And unlike Wikipedia, which is a dict, which is an encyclopedia, there was like, wikiquote, which is, for quotes, or was there was Wiktionary, which was a dictionary, there was wikibooks, and was wikiversity, and a few others. So wikiversity was where you could basically put together instructional course material, on any subject you like. And unlike Wikipedia, where you had encyclopedia articles, you could work on academic content that you had your that was your own research, Wikipedia, if you were doing academic research on a field that that was how you earned your living, if you were writing books, or journal articles. You were disallowed from editing on those subjects, because that was a conflict of interest. So people could quote your work if it's in the mainstream, but you couldn't edit anything that was in your own field. But on wikiversity. You could, and you could own not only that, but you could report your own original research on wikiversity, which you cannot do, there's no, Nobody's allowed to publish their own original research on Wikipedia. So we go over to wikiversity. So again, we've you know, this is like refugees were migrating. So this is our second refugee movement, where we arrived at wikiversity. It's a very small project is a few dozen people, half a dozen administrators who call themselves custodians. And I make the acquaintence of the two or three dominant administrators on this little project. One of them is a goat farmer in Pennsylvania. Another one is an academic who teaches cell biology to pre med students down in Phoenix and another one is a chap somewhere in Asia, who speaks lots of languages and is very genteel chap with the you know, academic demeanor. And they say, why don't you make a course in wikiversity on the subject of Wikipedia Ethics, because this whole thing was about corruption and abuse of power and lack of ethics in journalism and mass media because I keep saying, you know, there's this whole thing about ethics and journalism, you're, you're violating all the precepts of ethics. And I know something about ethics, because I've been working with this professor who teaches mass media ethics. And I've been sort of, I won't say, auditing her course. But you know, helping out with this, I'm basically picking up all the material over a period of almost a decade now.  So we say, okay, so I begin to work with several other people. And we begin to put together this this abstract academic course, on ethics in journalism and mass media ethics as it applies to Wikipedia. So initially, the project is called Wikipedia Ethics. Eventually, we brought it to Wikimedia Ethics. And I'm pretty much putting together the the basic academic material, the material that comes from John Rawls the late John Rawls of Harvard, Lawrence Kohlberg's work, Caroline Gilligan's work, if you studied ethics, you may recognize some of these names. This is material that I basically have gleaned from my relationship with the professor who teaches mass media ethics at Utah State. For putting together this whole story, Greg Kohs is in it, a few other people who were critics of Wikipedia are joining the project. And we're encouraged by the three custodians, who are sort of the dominant players wikiversity. So we get up to a point and then one of one of the people who's helping write the course, fellow who lives in Australia, he goes by private musings, that was his avatar name, he starts to put together some case studies, but the case studies are not actual case studies. They're sort of synthetic. So he makes up the these, these synthetic case studies that are inspired by real situations, but they're there. Don't use any real names. And he kind of changes them around just to give case studies. So this this one administrator who is from from Asia, who goes by Hillgentleman, he says, Oh, he says, don't use made up case studies use real case studies from real Wikipedia. I said, you really want us to use it. Absolutely. So you know, fill this thing out with real case studies, and then use those as examples to apply the theory. So how would you apply the theory of ethics to these actual cases? So we began to write the actual cases, in my case, the one involving the Intelligent Design Cabal, and the other people who were in it on some way to put together their comparable stories? Well, no sooner did we start to put this together. Oh, and by the way, the, the the administrator, who, who teaches cell biology in Phoenix, who uses his real name, John Schmidt, who uses his real name, doesn't use an avatar name. And he's working very closely with me to pull together the story because he's one of the founders of wikiversity. And he knows the ins and outs, and he knows how to dig into the history. And he's digging up parts of the story that I didn't know about because I you know, wasn't it wasn't anything that wasn't a direct witness to, he would go back and pore through tediously pore through the history, pulling up stuff that I would have known how to find, you know, how to research if my life depended on it. So he's filling in the rest of the backstory, and making it as objective as possible. So we have this, my version of it, and then his objective research version of it. And of course, we're naming names. So along come the two or three dominant bully characters from the ID Cabal, they show up in wikiversity. And first, they show up only as IP addresses, and they start deleting stuff. Well, but they're only IP addresses, you put it back, right. So then they come in. So Killer Cihuahua comes in with her avatar named Killer Chihuahua. So we know that same person, the one who was Felonious Monk, and Odd Nature comes in first as an IP address. Then he comes in his Center of Attention, which was the same name he used, you know, when he sent that, that complaint to Utah State. And, and a few other people come in either with IP addresses or alternate avatar names, or in some cases, their Wikipedia avatar names. And it's pretty obvious that this is the same clique. And, again, when they use the IP address, you can use the same IP address for Macy's, for example, or one by a guy named Guy Chapman. He's, he actually has his own wiki and his own website, and the IP address resolves to his name so you know who it is. So we know who these people are. And we said look, this is a thing on ethics, and you're entitled to tell your side of the story. So I presented my side of the story, and now you are invited, and welcome to tell your version of the story beside it. No, they want to delete our side, they want to edit ourselves and no, I said, in academia, you cannot edit the work of other scholars, you can submit your own scholarly work, and subject it to peer review. And my scholarly work is subject to peer review, you can criticize it all you want. And you can ask all the questions, and I'll answer them the best of my ability, but you cannot edit my testimony, you cannot change what I wrote under over my signature, I will have none of it, they just simply want it, delete it, they don't want it, they don't want to have a give and take with two sides of the story. So eventually, they call in Jimmy Wales, but they call him in kind of behind the scenes, because he said before Jimmy Wales comes in his assistant, Cary Bass comes in and he goes by Bastique. By the way, Cary Bass has since left the project. And he's a theology student. So you can see where he's got that kind of thing on ethics, you know, he's got this, this, this tension between what he's learning in, you know, as a theology student, and what he's being pressured to do, you know, by this. So, behind the scenes, and at the time, unbeknownst to me, Jimmy Wales tells these administrators, not just the three, but about half a dozen, shut down this course on ethics, or we'll shut down wikiversity. To threat. And so the, it's a small project, and these guys are scared. And so they gradually comply. And they basically withdraw support and, and, you know, we tried to either change the rules or, or shut it down. And poor Cary Bass, he's caught in the middle, because he's been told to do something he doesn't really want to do, because he's got his own sense of ethics. And he's sort of walking a tightrope. And finally, Jimmy Wales has to come in and, and do the deed himself. So Jimmy Wales comes in, and he declares this workshop on ethics to be quotes, beyond the scope of the project. That's the quote, he says, this whole presentation on the academic subject of mass media, ethics, ethics in journalism, and ethics as it applies to Wikimedia projects, he declared, he personally declares it beyond the scope, and directs it to be shut down, or else anyone else will be shut down. Wiki versity. So they shut down the course. Okay, and, and they also have to shut me down. So they can they have a little micro Spamish Inquisition. And try to find some excuse to silence me. So. So wikiversity, which is the English wikiversity also has other languages universally, just as Wikipedia does. And they also have a kind of a Nexus site for all of wikiversity called beta.wikiversity, which is just sort of coordinating all the wikiversity stuff. So John Schmidt, and I retreat to beta.wikiversity. Where again, I can, you know, can participate, and we begin to, to document mainly in my own talkspace There, personally begin to save the stuff that they're trying to delete. We, we we backup copies to beta and also backup copies to my personal hard drive and to other web servers. And so there's there's a, there's uneasy detente between beta and English wikiversity. And John Schmidt is basically siding with me. So he's now on the outs with respect to these administrators who are being coerced. So after Jimmy Wales came in to wikiversity, the English wikiversity and said shut down Moulton and shut down this ethics project. John Schmidt and I also they basically had to shut down John Schmidt because he was basically siding with me. So they marginalize him too. And took away his administrative bit and reason it took away his administrative bit is because if he had the administrative bit, he would have been on the inside to know what was going on behind the scenes with this, you know, coercion stuff, and they didn't want him to know what was really going on, below radar. So he and I basically retreat to beta wikiversity where he's a custodian, and, again, document stuff and kind of lick our wounds and regroup. And he starts writing a blog, where he's documenting this whole story in a very detailed technical accounting, but not doing it on Wikimedia servers, because of this whole history of it being deleted. So he begins to tell me to document the story on his own WordPress blog called Collaborative Learning. And just to show that this was not a one off event, after I'm basically out of the picture on English wikiversity, other people, after six months to a year, begin to regroup where we had left off, and once again, Jimmy Wales comes in and tells him to knock it off, and this time they stand up to him. And the main custodian, English wikiversity, who's the Pennsylvania goat farmer stands up and reverses Jimmy Wales, Jimmy Wales takes away this chap's bit administrative bit. And then he resigns from the project and starts a new site called netknowledge.org, which is essentially a clone of wikiversity on his own rented web server. And we bet we copy a lot of material over to this new site, which is outside of the domain of Jimmy Wales. So there was the sun, the basically the bottom line is that they basically sundered wikiversity, it just split. And, and you had sort of those who siding with the corrupt establishment and those who were against it. And it kind of went into this limbo state. So essentially, they marginalize me and John Schmidt, and sunder the community and the others who were my allies kind of fade a little bit and regroup. And so things kind of go quiet for a time until people start to recover from this, this trauma, essentially, and figure out well, what can we do that's along lines, what we want to do, but we're not going to have all this drama with the shutdown stuff. So I'm not I'm working really from the sidelines, and chatting a little bit with John Schmidt. I'm mainly in IRC. I mean, a lot of the action now goes off of Wikipedia off of wikiversity. And we're just chatting an IRC chat room that anybody can join, but it's just basically John Schmidt, me and me become a lot of people. And he's gradually narrating, you know, the slow soap opera is evolving. In meantime, after this custodian who was the powerful custodian who was the goat farmer left, now there's a power vacuum. So now, other people are coming in to fill the power vacuum on wikiversity. And a little drama starts to resume. And there's a new character, like he's not a new character but he's character who becomes interesting. There is a graduate student down at Catholic University, which is down in the suburbs of Washington, DC. And he's not only a grad student at Catholic University, he writes a column on ethics with a local paper. And he's a very controversial character in wiki culture. And he sort of becomes the dominant administrator on wikiversity, but also very controversial. And so he's also making enemies partly because of his exercise of power. And so he's, people have a gun sights on him. And one of his last moves is he decides to rehabilitate me and unblock me, which is a complicated deal, because Because Wales had arranged to globally lock the Moulton account across all projects, this is a very obscure thing that you can do, which is to lock a user name from appearing on any Wikimedia site. It's a global lock at the server level. And that means you can't use that name, anywhere. And also they can put in filters that block you from even using the name as text in a page. And not only that, but if you do a search, anytime that name had appeared, it won't come up in an internal search. Whereas if you did a Google search from the outside, if it's there, Google will say, oh, there's a page with Moulton's name, but inside you put in a search for anything that Moulton's name appears, search comes up empty. So they were using this, this global lock, and he and they've used it not only against me, they use it against Greg Kohs, and I think maybe one or two other people. And we had discovered a way to break this global lock, a technical hack, and we figured it out first on beta. And then they did the same thing on the English version, it broke the global lock against Greg Kohs. And also against the Moulton account. Because this, this, this fellow from Catholic University, decided that he was going to turn things around and unblock me. So I'm kind of there. And I'm kind of not there, because I'm still on this, this controversial Limbo character. And I also have, as an educator, I'm impressed by the use of puppet characters. I mean, I grew up in the days of Howdy Doody and Kukla, Fran and Ollie. And more recently, you know, the Muppets and, and so educators use puppet characters as characters like Bert and Ernie. And these these characters is educational. And I had my animal, little characters and Montana mouse and Barsoom Tork, and Gastrin Bombesin, even Caprice, the Fantastic Flyng Scapegoat for Azazel, I had all these characters that I would use to have different voices. And these were not actual, real sock puppet, he actually writes for a real account. But I wasn't doing that I was simply using them as signatures. Beneath, either beneath my real name, if I was logged in, or if I wasn't logged in, I would simply edit with an IP address, which is not logged in, and then I would manually sign either Moulton, or manually sign one of these avatar characters that spoke in a slightly different voice all basically, it's an educational trope. So people were kind of disgruntled or disturbed by this fact that I wasn't logging in, I was just signing my name. And linking the name to my talk page where you can get the biography. So So I was generating this whole thing where it's as if I were logged in, but it's really an IP address. So then they begin, so the ones who are opposed to me begin to block my IP address. Now, here I am in Greater Boston, and I have service from Verizon. And it's it's DSL Digital Subscriber Line, which means that my IP address is not fixed. And in fact, I can power cycle my DSL modem in such a way that I get a fresh address up in about one or two minutes. So I would, if I would show up and sign my name on wikiversity, let's say, or meta.Wikimedia or any of these sites, they would block that IP. And then if I would change my IP, they would end up blocking the whole range, the whole the whole block. So now it turns out that Eastern Massachusetts, this area that served has about half a million IP addresses in the entire block. Or maybe quarter billion, but you know, so they ended up blocking, essentially all of the Verizon addresses in eastern Massachusetts just to keep me out. And then I would also then log in by virtual private network to MIT. So they blocked all of MIT. So then I would log in, on the on the Utah State University, you know, just routed through there, and they would block that. So they basically, were blocking half a million IP addresses in three states, from the East Coast to the West Coast, just to keep me out. And I was saying, you know, this is actually a good thing. And the good thing is that I'm really concerned because its culture is so toxic. This is I mean, look what happened to me. I mean, here I am, you know, semi retired academic. And this is how they're treating me. And it's, you know, it's a very disturbing toxic culture, I it really is not safe culture for children. And maybe I should encourage them to block IP addresses to keep the keep children out of Wikipedia, so they won't have to go through the same trauma. So now, I'm trying to promote this this system by blocking Now, besides the IP addresses, you know, there's this new ipv6, this new, larger address space, and mostly it's outside of the US because it's outside us where they don't have enough addresses. So I go on to ipv6, which isn't technically not very hard to do. And you go into the sites from an ipv6 which go actually goes through these gateways. it because Wikipedia doesn't actually have an ipv6 address of their own yet. And so you're funneled into a few gateways in Canada and Europe and wherever and then they go. So they block these gateways. Which means that everybody who's on an ipv6 network is now blocked from Wikipedia and, and related sites, which is, you know, what isn't, you know, it's billions of addresses worldwide. So I'm kind of having a good time, a lot sort of laughing over the fact that they're basically locking the world out. Just to keep me from putting an academic educational content into this education site.  Now, you have to keep in mind, the Wikimedia Foundation is a 501(c)3 nonprofit and their charter, do you actually look up the documents are easy to find their charter is an educational nonprofit, which means that they don't pay federal taxes, and that they solicit donations from the public and from donor organizations, for this educational purpose. And they've actually got a little statement on the Wikimedia Foundation site that says, you know, this is our mission. This is our charter. These are our organizational values. And we're, we want to provide an educational resources to children around the world. All right. And so I look at this and I say, are you really living up to I'm What are you teaching the children around the world? I said, Are you teaching them how to be bullies, you've got these adolescents coming in, you give them power, and you inculcate them in this bully culture where they use their power. And, you know, and and engage in histrionic and narcissistic and sociopathic ways? And this is, what are you really teaching children? You're inculcating them into this bully culture. That's not, you know, that's not consistent with charter. And what would the IRS think about taking donor money, ostensibly for education, tax free, and then using it to create this bully culture is really what you've got is a site that ostensibly it's educational, but you're really running a kind of a version of Mafia Wars to get you know, the game on Facebook, the real the most popular games on sites like Facebook, are games like Mafia Wars, where you get to pretend to be a thug. And you basically get lols thrills, by kiboshing the other guy. And of course, it's just a game, you know, on Facebook, when you're when you're playing mafia character and getting revenge and all this stuff. It's just a silly game. But here on Wikipedia, people are behaving as if they're playing Mafia Wars, they're getting power, and then they're using their power to, to knock down the rivals. And this is all done, ostensibly, under the name of global education, nonprofit, tax free. And I say, you, you've, you've become a clone, of course. It's not really just an encyclopedia. It's it's an encyclopedia game. Exactly. So in fact, if you recall, the, the editor of Encyclopedia Britannica, way back, around 2005, or so did an interview when he called it the encyclopedia game, that's actual a quote, probably easy enough to look it up after the Chap's name, but he was the editor of Britannica called it a game. And in fact, if you look at how does it become a game? Well, it's very simple. Wikipedia has a lot of rules. And it's a it's a hodgepodge of rules. They're not constructed in any systematic, comprehensive way, they just sort of grew up organically. Now, if you think about any system that's driven by rules, the simplest ones are board games, chess, checkers go. Most board games have, you could write the rules on a half sheet of paper, or they're easy enough to memorize, they're not complicated enough to follow. And in most games, people don't cheat. They play by the rules, you play a game of chess, or checkers, or gold or whatever, and play by the rules. And if you think about games, you have no idea how the game is going to turn out. As long as the players are roughly equally matched in in skill, they will, on every move of a game, you get to pick which rule, you're going to apply on that move. It's not like every move every rule fires. No, you get to pick which rule you're going to say I'm going to use this rule on this move because it's to my advantage and to your disadvantage.  So rules define games. And in generally defined dramas, I mean, if you think about these really big contests, you know, the chess matches, or the poker matches or whatever, they're full of drama. So a generalized game. If you think about a simple game, the goals are equal and opposite that what I win, you lose, okay. But a generalized game is a drama where I have an objective. And you have an objective which is opposed to my but not exactly equal and opposite. They simply interfere with each other. So a drama is a generalized game. And rule driven systems generate games and dramas, which is pretty obvious he stopped to think about anyone know this since a kid. And yet most people, when they say, why do we live under the rule of law, Western civilization, civilization general lived on the rule of law for about 4000 years. And it's because people have long believed that rule driven systems rule governed systems, if you have a good set of rules, is orderly, stable, predictable, peaceable and not chaotic. And that's just, you know, everybody says, well, we all know that it's common knowledge. If you go back about 100 years, and you ask mathematician starting 100 years ago, is it a theorem, that rule driven systems in general, are orderly, stable, predictable, and not chaotic? You find and astonishing discovery that really comes from a mathematician named Poincaré.  Henri Poincaré a little over 100 years ago, he was neither the first nor the last, but he was sort of the one who most importantly, revealed this rule driven systems are mathematically chaotic. And about 50 years ago, an MIT meteorologist named Edward Lorenz took that the next step took the work of Poincaré the next step, this is a wonderful story, which I think is not tell here but because you can look it up independently. But he basically developed the beginnings of what today is called Chaos Theory in mathematics. So if you go back about 100 years, Henri Poincaré, French mathematician, Henri Poincaré comes up with the first important discovery that leads eventually to chaos theory. And it's that he calls it exquisite sensitivity to initial conditions a small perturbation can make a huge difference in the way things turn out, which is what drama is, and eventually this this evolves into modern chaos theory. So chaos theory really emerges in the second half of the 20th century, based on the work of Edward Lorenz, the meteorologist at MIT who comes up with the the Lorenz butterfly. And that gives rise also to fractals, which is another application of the same mathematics. And then James Gleick writes the definitive book for the public. James Gleick was a New York Times journalist who wrote a terrific book on chaos theory. So that now so now the public at least has heard of chaos theory. And if you take for example, one of the most popular drama series on television is the NBC Law and Order series that involved with all those spin offs. And all the reruns are syndicated on a TNT cable channel. And if you look it up, the TNT cable channels advertising slogan is we know drama. So the title is law and order. Rule based systems give you order. well they don't they give you drama, and, and high drama. So the culture is full of evidence, both mathematical evidence and cultural evidence that rule driven systems are not the foundation of order and stability and peacefulness. They're the foundation of chaos in general and drama in games in particular. So I looked at Wikipedia, I said, Well, no wonder you've got all this drama. And all this game, you know, gaming the system, because you've got a system that's basically people have written all these rules, this this organic hodgepodge of rules, this mishmash of rules. And you've defined a really complicated game, where on every move, whoever's, you know, exercising power is gonna say, I'm going to pick that rule and use it as a club to kibosh you. So the rules are basically it's not the rule it's the it's the punishment the sanction the club end of the rule is that if I can figure out what rule you're you're violating and assert it, then I get to kibosh. And so you basically in a Mafia Wars thing where the rule is just, you know, some excuse to kibosh the other guy. So I looked at this I said, Well, so Wikipedia is really a drama engine. And I thought, you know, it's interesting because in in, in education theory, we use games and simulations as a powerful technique. And a lot of children learn by playing games and simulations. But most games the simulations are single user against the system. And what you really want is more drama. In these games, people constantly want games to have characters in them, where you have a dramatic encounter with characters. And so I was thinking about this whole theory of, of developing character driven dramas, where games of the 21st century evolve to scenarios where you encounter synthetic characters that are driven by the software of the game and you encounter a character interaction with them. And the interaction isn't just scripted. That is, the character reacts in a way that's consistent with the character, but not pre scripted, no, not programmed in advance. And now the challenge is, well, suppose that you're imagining a character, that you're going to design a character for drama. And you want to give it a real test a real trial. So what can you throw at this character and see if it you know, it can hit it can handle it. So what you need, you need a workshop? Well, you got one. Wikipedia emerges as the premier drama engine on the internet. So any character you can envision as an author, you basically put on the mask, you waltz into Wikipedia acting in character as that character and guaranteed, within seconds, up will come the worst adversary you can possibly imagine to oppose you. So it's a wonderful laboratory for working out the design of an arbitrary storybook character because your adversary will materialize, almost like magic is like a postmodern Schadenfreude theater of the absurd. And that's what I had discovered is that no matter what role I was playing with, I was simply playing a perfectly pedestrian academic educator, or whether I was playing any other role, no matter what role I was playing, or anybody else is playing up comes your adversary. And you have these little micro dramas. So if I were Jimmy Wales, I would say you nevermind, you know, the, the encyclopedia, I've got something better than Mafia Wars, I've got a drama engine, and people today crave drama. And let them you know, we should do basically set aside a site under Wikimedia as a postmodern theater of the absurd schadenfreude drama theater. Of course, he I'm sure you won't take that up, because now he's clearly running, you know, like World Warcraft, he's now clearly running a gaming culture. And there goes his 501(c)3, nonprofit educational, front. But But I think that's one of the important observations is that rule driven systems, defined drama. Today, I mean, here we got, just this week, last week, you have this anonymous, this hacktivist group Anonymous, and they put on a mask, and they go out and they do guerrilla theater in the streets, and they engage the authorities, like yesterday was BART, the Bay Area rapid transit, whoever, you know, WikiLeaks, is this whole drama thing and they're doing street theater and grill theater. And the mask is essentially is the story. In kabuki theater, you put on a mask or you play a character, and you're trying to evoke an emotional response from your adversary. And we're moving into the age of dramaturgy. Now, there was a wonderful talk I saw on on the web the other day, Jeremy Rifkin gave a great talk. And he says, culture has evolved from the Age of Mythology, to the age of theology, to the age of ideology, to the age of psychology, and he says, Now we're entering the age of dramaturgy. And I absolutely I said dramaturgy is the next big frontier in the evolution of the Zeitgeist. People who are having the most impact and most effect are exploiting the dramaturgical characteristic of our culture and exploiting it and I know I ran into it I'm looking at it was wasn't intention so I call it Jimbo's Unintended Drama Engine. Jimbo's Unintended Drama Engine is J-U-D-E. So I wrote a song parody called Hey Jude, based on that and it basically takes the song Hey Jude, and it adapts the the lyrics to emphasize this, this drama engine aspect of it.


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