From Dizzy Thinks:
David Boothroyd has had to resign from the “Wikipedia Supreme Court”. David Boothroyd is a Labour councillor in Westminster who comments on a number of right wing blogs including this one. He has an anally retentive insistent on this blog of referring to me by my full name for some reason.
I mentioned this simply because he’s had to resign after admitting to have multiple identities on Wikipedia and spending most of his time editing David Cameron’s page. He also used his multiple identities to get himself elected to the Wikipedia Arbitration Committee it seems.
With more detail in The Register:
A Labour councillor for London’s City of Westminster resigned from Wikipedia’s supreme court at the weekend, after admitting he gained election to the site’s ruling body using a false name.
David Boothroyd – councillor for Westminster’s Westbourne ward – was elected to Wikipedia’s Arbitration Committee in December 2007 under the name Sam Blacketer and has edited the overly-egalitarian online encyclopedia under at least three other names…
Elected by the Wikipedia community at large, the Arbitration Committee resolves site disputes and serves as the final word on site policy. In the wake of Boothroyd’s resignation, the community is discussing whether it should review the 18 months of Wikicourtcases in which Boothroyd cast a vote.
Looking at the details on Wikipedia, it’s clear that controversy has surrounded some of these aliases for several years, with one being stripped of its powers for “extensive abuse of admin tools”.
11 Comments
I’ve always been amazed that DB has enough time to post all he does in various places under his real names. The fact that he was also posting even more under hidden names is amazing! LOL…
I first came across David Boothroyd on the Usenet newsgroup uk.polics.electoral in 1995. He had the absurd belief that the concept of swing could only apply to vote changes between Conservative and Labour candidates.
Ah yes Nigel, I remember him.
Nothing wrong with being a stats nerd, but he did get over excited when anyone mentioned a swing to/from the lib dems.
Also, nothing wrong in having a giggle at trivia in amongst weightier stories.
Actually this isnt just trivia. I dont expect he was officially sanctioned by the Labour Party, but if political activists are working themselves into admin positions in organisations like Wikipedia, in order to support their party by deceptive methods, then this is much more than trivia…
Ah, uk.politics.electoral, I also “fondly” remember DB from there. I know schadenfreude is wrong but…
I am not gloating at all. Dear me, no.
May I be the first to congratulate David in his new role as the Oxford Professor of Poetry?
Sorry Mark W, I wasn’t downgrading the story, I was pre-empting the usual nuts who write the whiny “haven’t you got anything better to do” messages.
Now the wikipediots over at Wikipedia HQ are fighting over whether DB is notable enough to have an article about him http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Deletion_review&oldid=290421679
One editor has already been blocked as the drama ensues.
While the Wikipedia drones have swarmed in to “protect their own” and have deleted David Boothroyd’s encyclopedia article, they seem to forget that it was released to the public under the terms of the GFDL open license. Therefore, the article is bound to show up somewhere else on the Internet.
Indeed, it already has:
http://www.mywikibiz.com/Directory:David_Boothroyd