Difference between revisions of "En-WP: Act III -- The Sagecandor Incident"

Revision as of 17:42, 14 June 2017

Background

I am fascinated by the morality play actor by the name of Sagecandor and as such have dug up his participation at AE.  In the process, I think it's worth noting that the prosecutor's name is never mentioned in the archived cases at AE...

Neutrality v. Anonywiki 17-27 Nov 2016, 1-year GMO topic ban (Ed Johnston), statements by Neutrality & Tryptofish

During this dubious trial, a new account was created (Sagecandor), and the new user's talk page was created by mimicking Neutrality's (diff).

(weirdly the user mirrored their user page from meta after having their en.wikipedia user page deleted twice)

Sagecandor on AE

Sagecandor v. Solntsa90, 7-9 Dec 2016, 3 month block (Ed Johnston), involved: Neutrality, Drmies, Peacemaker67, Ed Johnston

Sagecandor v. Ag97, 9-12 Dec 2016, topic banned at ANI, involved: JzG, Beyond my Ken, John Carter, Ian.thomson, MrX, Eggishorn, Acroterion, Exemplo347, MjolnirPants, A Quest for Knowledge, Timothyjosephwood, Neutrality, NorthbySouthBaranof

Sagecandor v. Tlroche, 15-16 Dec 2016, Tlroche banned indefinitely, SashiRolls banned from commenting at AE, involved: Mr. X, SashiRolls, Volunteer Marek, Neutrality, Timothyhjosephwood, T. Canens (closer)

Sagecandor v. SashiRolls, 19-20 Dec 2016, SashiRolls blocked 6 months, involved: Snooganssnoogans, Tryptofish, My very best wishes, Timothyjosephwood, LaserBrain, Dennis Brown, T. Canens, Peacemaker67

Other cases on which Sagecandor commented during his one-month editorship:

EtienneDolet v. Abbatai, 10-19 Nov 2016

TheTimesAreAChanging v. SPECIFICO, 15 Dec 2016

MikeV v. The Rambling Man, 16 Dec 2016

Volunteer Marek v. SaintAviator, 21-24 Dec 2016

Volunteer Marek v. Doc9871, 23 Nov-12 Dec 2016

Sagecandor on ANI

[Crossswords v. Sagecandor]: mostly concerned the NPOV noticeboard where Sagecandor claimed Crossswords & SashiRolls were Russian propaganda Accounts

Edits

TP Warnings to other editors

• Implied Threat of Imminent Smackdown by Serioux Adminz here
• Specifico (All caps)
• The Times Are a Changing
• Snooganssnoogans?
• à completer

GA

Sagecandor

• declines The Fountainhead for GA...[1].
• idem for Jack of Fables... [2]
• nominates his rewrite of "And you are lynching Negroes?". (Anonywiki had previously edited Whataboutism.)

Articles for Deletion

Mr. X, Sagecandor, Neutrality, jytdog, Volunteer Marek-MVBW, they're all at this party. What's funniest about this is that by creating the category "Foreign influence on national elections", and adding it to this article on the 2009 Honduran elections, I ended up creating a fun situation when this page was deleted, since another Wikipediant was quick to add "Russian intervention (yes at one point it was 'intervention') in the 2016 US election" to the category. As it stands now, the US 2016 election appears to be the only election that been influenced from abroad and has a whole, entire, page about it. NB: Since that time, BlueSalix has added a new page to the category based on a Politico article about Ukrainians shilling for Hillary... ^^

Denouement

In the two days after SashiRolls was banned, Sagecandor (whose passage on wikipedia was noted by the folks at WikiInAction) continued editing pages like Asshole, Douchebag, Butthead and Dick before disappearing on the 22nd of December.

Anonywiki reappears on the 29th of December with an edit concerning a murder. (ar) User:Coffee reappeared on the 23rd of December, the day after Sagecandor disappeared.

Discretionary Sanctions / User:Coffee

A discussion for Talk:Jimbo Wales reproduced here, based on the share-alike CC-BY-SA creative commons licence. The original is in Archive 215.

• Alright, now we have a problem!!! Apparently, according to something just posted on that talk page, the Arbcom has just imposed a censorship regime on all "highly visible" American politics articles. The way it works is that anyone who wants to patrol the article can revert one edit a day, and nothing is allowed to go back in until there is consensus. As anyone who has read a thing or two about American politics in the past decade and a half knows, there is not, and can never be, consensus. So over time any highly visible article is going to lose its facts and we're not going to be allowed to put any of them back in. Someone needs to stop Arbcom, or Wikipedia's coverage of American politics is going to become dominated by patrolling Wikilawyers. Wnt (talk) 21:07, 13 December 2016 (UTC)
  • Template:Reply to Neither endorsing nor condemning the Arbcom decision, your statement implies that rampant falsification on the page prior to Arbcom's decision - declaring Russia's intervention in the U.S. to be a known fact - was not a problem. If that's your conclusion you are neither appraised of what reliable sources have reported regarding these allegations, nor editing in a manner consistent with them. -Darouet (talk) 21:25, 13 December 2016 (UTC)
    • @Wnt: Arbcom just made placing page restrictions possible. user:Coffee actually came up with the restriction. See my comment here.- MrX 21:39, 13 December 2016 (UTC)
      • User:Coffee's last visit was on September 9th. Quite a parting gift. (1RR, plus any challenged material must remain out of the article until consensus is achieved on the battlepage talk page). The requesting admin wants to "slow down the battling" after this article was shaped out of nothing by named users (no IPs obviously need apply on the page in question) with the usual intensive editing sprees. Cyroxymandias: "Look on my words, ye doubters, and despair..." SashiRolls (talk) 22:57, 13 December 2016 (UTC)
        • My comment shouldn't be viewed a s criticism of Coffee's action. It's done much more good than harm, and it's better than doing nothing at all.- MrX 23:03, 13 December 2016 (UTC)
          • A maximum number of edits per week (or per hour) per editor (talk + article space) would probably work better for developing consensus, and for getting people like me to use the preview button to make sure their word salads are properly dressed. And I've used mine up here, so... :)SashiRolls (talk) 23:24, 13 December 2016 (UTC)

Note my concern is not just about this page. See the text at top: "The article 2016 United States election interference by Russia, along with other highly visible articles relating to post-1932 politics of the United States and closely related people" -- that's the difference between an infection and an epidemic! Wnt (talk) 00:08, 14 December 2016 (UTC)

• Yeah, I'm not exactly a suspicious person - and I'm not usually active on U.S. politics articles other than New Mexico state politics to a limited extent - but everywhere I turn lately there is a group of freshly minted accounts doing things one normally doesn't see freshly minted accounts doing, like !voting in AfDs (all the same way), voting in RfCs (all the same way), etc. I literally can't take two steps forward without tripping over a dozen new accounts trying to purge some articles, massage others, and change the titles of others to reflect high-probability Google search terms rather than encyclopedia article titles; like this latest one - 5 !delete votes, three of which are from accounts less than 10 months old (one a month old, and another a freshly minted two weeks). That one isn't even U.S. politics related other than it apparently shows the U.S. in a negative like so gots to go! Maybe I'm being overly suspicious and there just happen to be a lot of new people signing-up to WP this month, which of course would be great. BlueSalix (talk) 00:14, 14 December 2016 (UTC)
  • Template:Reply to User:SMcCandlish was interested in this problem. You might consider contacting him about it. -Darouet (talk) 05:00, 14 December 2016 (UTC)

Drama

Because of the above, and because of User:Coffee's sudden reappearence (through a $wikitubePeriscope into $this.BloodyPanopticon), I learned not only a bit about his past but of his immediate present in ways I had certainly not counted upon.

After conflict with some folks in the FA cabal, and over a discussion at ANI, Coffee was blocked by Bishonen on 14 April 2017. This led to great drama, both on Coffee's talk page (now revdelled) and at Arbcom (The Rambling Man decided to take up his cause. Curiously, once Coffee left the projects, Sagecandor again became very active. This is almost certainly no more than a very strange correlation.

Return of Sagecandor (Feb. 2017 / May 2017)

AE

As Prosecutor

• Sagecandor v. JGabbard (27-31 May 2017)
• Sagecandor v. DHeyward (4 Jun 2017): Sage's first loss at AE; there was even some limited talk of a boomerang, though such a sensible course of action, of course, was not taken.

As "Expert" Witness

• TParis v. Snooganssnoogans (20-24 May 2017)
• Politrukki v. ArchwayH (2 Jun 2017)
• Debresser v. El C (13 Jun 2017)

Non-notable book Reviews

Malcom Nance

• The Plot to Hack America: AfD initiated by DHeyward. Notable keep votes from friendly cabalistas (Moboshgu, MrX, myverybestwishes), and from JeffFive (an account created 6 days after Sagecandor's account was created).
• Defeating ISIS: Another Malcom Nance book. AfD intiated by DHeyward failed. This 25K review was produced in 7 minutes (See SC's contribution history (dates listed here), which suggests the possibility that SC is a role account).

• New York Journal of Books -- not to be confused with the NY Review of Books. Sagecandor rewrote the Wikipedia entry (post rewrite), quintupling its size (original) because it was the only entity that had reviewed The Plot to Hack America. The result is hilarious: the same information is presented over and over in slightly varying form. After pushback from E. M. Gregory which made it fairly obvious what was going on, Sagecandor wrote NYJoB an email asking, "Do you just let book reviewers post live whatever they want, or do all book reviews go through an editor first ?" and mailed their response to WP:Contact. (lol)
• Malcolm Nance's BLP page was also significantly "cleaned up", deleting RS (NY Times, Politico, WaPo) noting some of his sillier claims as a Fox News "expert". (This led to Sagecandor being taken to ANI by an old-time Wikipedian; Black Kite (a powerful admin) ended that call for attention to Sage's snotty behavior towards power~enwiki just as he had previously ended the call for attention be paid to Sagecandor's libellous claim that his "opponents" were Russian propagandists.)

Note on arbitration

• SBHB's pocket guide to Arbitration (2012)