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Comment by kurthr | Hacker News Reader

This isn't about content provided by some editor (Phillip Cross) being neutral, it is about being abusive, threatening, and vindictive, as well as particularly politically focused with an regular activity level that indicates either group activity or a profoundly unhealthy mental state. This took place over a period of years without any response by Wikipedia.

It is about Wales/Wikipedia demanding diffs to substantiate "outrageous" claims and ignoring the very diffs that are presented multiple times by multiple people. Then it is about punishing those who provided the diffs. It's about sickness not neutrality

:edit perhaps you are referring not to Wikipedia, but to the lack of a need for any curated "neutral" documentation available on the web.

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> as particularly politically focused with an regular activity level that indicates either group activity or a profoundly unhealthy mental state

Why would an organized group use one account to make thousands of edits in their own favour? That would make it really obvious it's coming from one source and make themselves far easier to spot.

The fact he's a conservative poster, with people on both sides showing highly-politicized tendencies (including his favourite targets for abuse who themselves are known for highly polarizing politics) my default response here it to be highly skeptical of claims that it is some organized grand scheme by some party, intel agency, or group of rich people to manipulate the world for the worse.

That secret "cabal" behind everything bit is a cliche pattern in political conspiracy theories.

There have been plenty of individual Wikipedia editors with an inhuman-amount of work they contributed. You find prolific contributors like that in open-source projects all the time too.

The statement you quoted and challenged is well-supported by facts. Have you seen the graph of contributions of "Philip Cross"? Very evenly paced across very long and predictable working hours. Nearly impossible that it is one person.

"Cabal" is a strawman. Think "PR office with outsourced help" for one much more mundane hypothesis that fits the available facts.

> That secret "cabal" behind everything bit is a cliche pattern in political conspiracy theories.

Except in Wikipedia's case, it's been shown, on numerous occasions, that such a thing _does_ exist. Backdoor channels, IRC, mailing lists, where a small in-crowd of Administrators regularly ask for "backup" when they're about to do something, shall we say "contentious", and make clear that certain topics are only to be discussed there, where there are no logs, rather on other moderated forums.

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