Church of Scientology banned from Wikipedia

[charlie]

This is too funny. You've got to be a special kind of pain in the ass to get banned wholesale from Wikipedia. Miscavige's space monkeys will just have to work from home now, or from cover sites with names like Crabshaw's Bituminous Coal Snacks. I'm sure they're already massing for Total War, this is the sort of thing that gives the CoS a chubber.

In an unprecedented effort to crack down on self-serving edits, the Wikipedia supreme court has banned contributions from all IP addresses owned or operated by the Church of Scientology and its associates.

Closing out the longest-running court case in Wikiland history, the site’s Arbitration Committee voted 10 to 0 (with one abstention) in favor of the move, which takes effect immediately.

...

According to evidence turned up by admins in this long-running Wikiland court case, multiple editors have been "openly editing (Scientology-related articles) from Church of Scientology equipment and apparently coordinating their activities." Leaning on the famed WikiScanner, countless news stories have discussed the editing of Scientology articles from Scientology IPs, and some site admins are concerned this is "damaging Wikipedia's reputation for neutrality."

One admin tells The Reg that policing edits from Scientology machines has been particularly difficult because myriad editors sit behind a small number of IPs and, for some reason, the address of each editor is constantly changing. This prevents admins from determining whether a single editor is using multiple Wikipedia accounts to game the system. In Wikiland, such sockpuppeting is not allowed.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/05/29/wikipedia_bans_scientology

[Lasher]

1. Busted!

I won't be surprised if I see more of this type action from Wiki. And good for them.

[onager]

2. It's deja Xenu all over again!

We can expect something like the following to happen with Wiki, I bet:

Return with me now to a simpler time long ago--1996. The lawyer for Co$, Helena Korbin, issued an "rm group" to try and remove the whole Usenet group alt.religion.scientology.

This accomplished exactly nothing. Well, it got Korbin cruelly and justly mocked on some of them new-fangled Web page thingies that were starting up.

When the rm group trick failed, some very strange things started happening. In the a.r.s. group, ISP owners started posting about folks who would show up with cash and buy multiple accounts. About the same time--and this will shock you--the a.r.s. group started getting flooded with spam on a daily basis, from multiple accounts.

And legions of sock-puppets started showing up in every religious Usenet group.

Yes, even alt.atheism, where a lot of posts suddenly sounded just alike. They started by commisserating with atheists about our treatment as a "religious minority." (That phrase broke every Bullshit Meter in alt.atheism, but fortunately we hot-wired some E-meters and carried on.) "Now let me tell you about another religious minority currently being persecuted on the internet..."

You can imagine how well that tactic worked.

[charlie]

3. Heh. No doubt, it's coming

First, the swarm of "helpful" noobs wearing Groucho glasses, then the lawsuits. Wikipedia's troubles are just starting. When France boots their dumb asses out of the country, they're gonna be enturbulated like ants on fire.

[moggie]

5. Yeah, good times

It was so cute that they thought an rmgroup would achieve anything in alt. It was roughly equivalent to trying to deal with a hornet nest by poking it with a stick.

[Strong Atheist]

4. Good! nt.