I was looking in on Jimbo's Twitter feed yesterday and noticed this conversation, in which a fellow calling himself "@turnoffthenews" drew Jimbo's attention to a 42-page thread on a sort-of general purpose forum, Hipinion.com, entitled "This is the story of an abolitionist as told by her stalker." (The thread has since been moved to a members-only forum, but I was able to "get in before the lock," as they say.) Jimbo's response was typically fuzzy and equivocal, so I'll just skip that.

Essentially, some of the forum's members took issue with a Canadian WP administrator, User:Neelix (T-C-L), who had written an unusually long and obsessively detailed BLP article on Tara Teng (T-H-L), a Canadian beauty pageant winner who is highly active and outspoken in the effort to stop human trafficking and sexual exploitation. (Not just in Canada, I might add.) She prefers to be referred to as an "abolitionist," so I apologize for referring to her as a beauty pageant winner, but that's a bit more germane to the issue at hand I'm afraid.

The argument being made by the Hipinion.com folks is that Mr. Neelix, who identifies himself as "David Purdy" on his user page, is engaging in a form of "stalking" with the BLP in question - and that his status as an administrator has allowed him to do this with impunity for almost two years. (The article was started about two years after his successful RFA in Feb.-March 2011.)

Usually when we see lengthy puff-piece BLPs, they're either paid PR or a WP:AUTO violation, but this clearly isn't either of those things. Frankly, the article is much longer and far more detailed than what any woman in her right mind would post about herself (and very few men), particularly given the area of activism she's involved in.

At the same time, other articles written by Mr. Neelix do indicate a strong tendency to produce spectacularly large amounts of verbiage on practically all subjects, presumably with the intent of having every article he writes featured on Wikipedia's main page at some point. Still, it's one thing to do this with an article on an episode of the TV series Bewitched; another thing entirely to do it with a BLP, especially for someone like Ms. Teng. But it's also possible that Mr. Neelix, an extremely active Wikipedian by any definition, simply lacks the real-world social awareness required for him to realize how inappropriate this is.

I'm forced to conclude that the Hipinion.com people have a valid point - this just doesn't look good. Anyone not aware of Mr. Neelix's editorial excesses would see it as very creepy and obsessive, and despite the fact that the article is almost entirely positive, it does appear to be an abuse of admin powers by Mr. Neelix. Who, I should note, has just announced that he'll be taking a "long wikibreak" due to "a high level of trolling" - which in turn is presumably a reference to various efforts by Hipinion.com members to draw attention to the situation, some of which were probably inappropriate in themselves.

Am I right in thinking this is a highly unusual situation? Maybe I'm going senile or something, but as long as I've been observing WP (10 years!), I don't recall seeing anything quite like this involving just one admin (and one BLP subject) before.

The word is out. His wikibreak message has been vandalized, and nobody has yet bothered to correct it. He also wrote the Wikipedia article on Ron Wear (T-H-L), now (improperly) tagged for deletion, and this bit of vandalism was reverted on January 1:

It's certainly unusual, but not unprecedented. See Katydidit and Miss Indiana, for example.

I'm not seeing anything particularly concerning about the bio in question.

Certainly it's a ton of detail and certainly work has been lavished on the page since this is a beauty queen-political activist rather than a truck driver-political activist. But it appears to be a good-normal Wikipedia article at a glance.

I recall mainstream press coverage of the WP editor "Neelix" at some point in the last few years. I will see if I can find that.

RfB

Here it is, from a WPO thread started by Andreas: link

Neelix seems like he doesn't get much sunlight. Must be from all that time spent in the basement, building the slave dungeon he has planned for Teng.

It's a ... SHRINE, thank you very much!
Hmph!

David Purdy (Wikipedia alias: "Neelix") has been noticed before as obsessive, a little creepy, and probably a paid editor/promoter of his pet causes.

The Wikipedia rank and file loves him. Here's a David Purdy classic: "Leslie Ludy (pictured) writes that it is important to listen intently and regularly to God's voice when seeking discernment about romantic relationships, and Jason Evert commends her on this assertion." Followed by:


(That "abolition" nonsense in the Teng article, pushed by her and her fans, is also laughable; these ignorant sorts do a great deal of harm to the capable people fighting sex trafficking. But I digress).

Yeah, David Purdy (AKA Neelix (T-C-L))is an obsessive evangelical propagandist, pushing his views in Wikipedia's voice. What else is new?

Mr. Purdy is currently pushing a dropping of his for "Featured Article." It is about She Has a Name (T-H-L), an extremely minor play by an extremely minor evangelical "abolitionist" from Canada. How minor? Mr. Purdy and Wikipedia have helpfully provided for the little girl in Africa the article "2012 tour of She Has a Name (T-H-L)." Mr. Purdy has also written a series of articles about the extremely minor actors who appeared in this extremely minor play.

The article on the tour is 52,000 bytes long and the article on the play is 84,000 bytes long. Both articles dwarf Wikipedia's treatment of plays ranging from Long Day's Journey into Night (T-H-L) (30,000 bytes), Death of a Salesmen (T-H-L) (25,000) Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (T-H-L) (21,000), The Mousetrap (T-H-L) (31,000) and Anything Goes (T-H-L) (49,000). These are highly influential and culturally relevant English-language plays that have had an impact on academia and the broader culture that reverberate, each for their own reasons, to this day.

Well, at least Hamlet (T-H-L) and Macbeth (T-H-L) are deemed more important topics by Mr. Purdy and Wikipedia than this bit of fluff. But, sorry Will, Coriolanus (T-H-L), Julius Caesar (T-H-L), and King Lear (T-H-L) are not.

(Oh, for Chrissakes: Mr. Purdy has also written a 50,000 byte article called Critical response to She Has a Name (T-H-L). The level of bias and elevation of the trivial to epic lengths in a promotional effort is so great as to make Purdy's "encyclopedia writing" indistinguishable from bad PR work. Would it shock you to learn that the critics have uniformly been moved to raptures by this play, according to Mr. Purdy? Second sentence, particularly delicious since this is supposed to be about a work of art: "She Has a Name, written by Andrew Kooman, has since become tremendously successful, garnering a number of strong endorsements from Canadian abolitionists." Another: "Those who listened to readings of the script at the Scripts At Work workshop are said to have been stunned into silence."

He is of course a powerful and valued insider among Jimmy Wales' loving and thoughtful community).

Just an observation: the extremely detailed bio of the anti-sex trafficking activist and the extremely detailed history of the anti-sex trafficking play indicates a probable close concern with the subject matter rather than the fit of a tight swimming suit on the former.

RfB

Before Mr. Purdy's obsession with Ms. Teng was discovered by other Wikipedia editors (or more likely: Unhappy friends and family members), he had (remember Purdy is one of Wikipedia's most senior editors - an administrator) the article up to 101,000 bytes. That's 33 percent longer than the Wikipedia article that Purdy, Wales, and the thoughtful Wikipedia funky bunch have written on Florence Nightingale (T-H-L). Or, slightly more on point, 11 percent longer than the Wikipedia article on Frederick Douglas (T-H-L), nearly triple the length of the one on William Lloyd Garrison (T-H-L), and quadruple the length of their article on Harriet Beecher Stowe (T-H-L). (It is now slightly shorter than the Nightingale article, much shorter than the Douglas article, and still much longer than the ones on Garrison and Stowe).

Purdy is a gift! (Is this a members-only forum? Stupid if so).

Well, to be clear, despite the article's absurdly excessive length, most people probably wouldn't be too bothered by it if it hadn't all been written by one guy.

There may also have been an anti-nerd (or at least anti-Wikipedia-nerd) undercurrent going on among the Hipinion.com members - they may suspect (at least subconsciously) that Mr. Neelix is doing this to get attention from girls who are way, way out of his league, and they don't want him to succeed no matter how much work he's put into it. It's that "this is not how the game is played" attitude that you often see when someone finds a loophole in the rulebook and exploits it - no matter how hard it was to find the loophole and use it, others will still see it as cheating. All of us are taught that to get favorable attention from beauty queens, you have to be rich, successful, tall, athletic, well-dressed, well-groomed, articulate, sophisticated... and this guy is clearly none of those things.

I also hadn't considered Mr. Murphy's point above about how people who are highly visible, but largely ignorant of what really goes on, are harming the cause of people who are fighting sex trafficking (or at least are capable of harming it). I didn't want to make that judgement directly because I myself am almost totally ignorant of what really goes on, and I know this could risk accusations of blaming the victim... nevertheless, I have to wonder if the large amount of personal detail Ms. Teng provides on her own website about her home-birthing experience and what-not may not have contributed to this situation - and may also detract from what others are doing in relation to the human-trafficking issue, in some way or other. As a well-established international journalist, Mr. Murphy has considerable expertise in this area, and I'm very glad to see him participating in this thread.

I don't believe so!

It isn't, but I for one would hope that we don't get too personal (or prurient) in this thread to the point that it has to be "trimmed." The Hipinion.com moderator(s) didn't provide an explicit reason for hiding their thread, but I got the impression they were worried that over 50 pages of "STALKER!" accusations and other speculations about Mr. Neelix's motives might have set off some very loud alarm bells not only for Ms. Teng and her husband, but also for Mr. Neelix's own family and friends. I personally do not believe Mr. Neelix is some sort of total weirdo, other than the usual weirdness of his participation in Wikipedia. All I'm saying is that someone without a firm grounding in how die-hard Wikipedians think and behave would probably think otherwise upon seeing this situation.

It can't be stressed enough what a menace lots of people dealing with human traficking think these kinds of groups are. Even if you don't agree with the position of the pros, accept it from me as fact that this is a highly controversial topic with the majority, establishment view seeing these evangelical "sex slavery" hucksters as doing harm. The presence of this view in Mr. Purdy's walled-garden/shrine? Zero.

This is just from clicking on obscure links about people and things I've never heard of within the Teng article, all written by David Purdy (AKA: Neelix), all within a month of each other last year. All with very poor sourcing, uncritical, and boosterish. All either about evangelical Christianity (many of the articles conceal these links, which is typical for proselytizing groups seeking do-gooder street cred as cover), connected to Teng in some way, or both (some of the below seem solely designed for SEOing Tara Teng's Wikipedia article, i.e. "Riverside Park (Kamloops) (T-H-L):

Let Me Be a Woman (T-H-L)
Darren Storsley (T-H-L)
Mitch Merrett (T-H-L)
25 Transformational Canadians (T-H-L)
Women of Distinction Awards (T-H-L)
Servants Anonymous Society (T-H-L)
Ron Wear (T-H-L)
Sunny Fong (T-H-L)
David Batstone (T-H-L)
Nicole Dunsdon (T-H-L)
Riverside Park (Kamloops) (T-H-L)
Tania Fiolleau (T-H-L)
Freedom Week (T-H-L)
Buying Sex is Not a Sport (T-H-L)
An Act to amend the Criminal Code (minimum sentence for offences involving trafficking of persons under the age of eighteen years) (T-H-L)
Bangkok Girl (T-H-L)
Natasha Falle (T-H-L)
Ignite the Road to Justice (T-H-L)
And... I give up. There look to be about 15 more.

That guy needs a mail order bride.

He has been mostly under the radar because he hasn't annoyed any of WP's active cabals or their admin enablers. Although most of WP's active cabals are anti-religion, he hasn't crossed them because his topics don't touch on Intelligent Design, theistic science, alternative medicine, immunizations, global warming, etc. Human trafficking is a safe topic as long as it appears that you're generally against it, even if you're coming at it from the evangelical angle.

There's been a book-wiki article about Purdy since November 2013.

Evidently I need to post this.

http://www.macleans.ca/education/uniand ... -articles/
viewtopic.php?f=6&t=1319

(Yes, the "130,000 articles" bit is a lie.)

And this.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/nova-scot ... -1.1176614
viewtopic.php?f=6&t=1406

And this.

http://www.trurodaily.com/Opinion/Colum ... our-life/1

Plus a WR thread.
http://wikipediareview.com/index.php?showtopic=33842

Do you think he's now "notable"?

There was a photo of him on Commons, but it was deleted for "out of scope".

Dear lord,

He's one skinning knife away from making himself a suit.

With not too much looking you begin to find clearly "involved" ("involved" is a Wikipedia term for administrators acting with a clear conflict of interest to silence editing opponents) blocks by Mr. Purdy. (This is supposed to be against the rules for their administrators but is generally ignored at leisure).

For instance Xxxxxf (T-C-L), blocked for fairly innocuous edits to Purdy's Tara Teng article and to what I can only hope is a Wikipedia article surreptitiously created for paying clients, Men Are Like Waffles — Women Are Like Spaghetti (T-H-L) (it appears to be built around the idea that women struggle to present information in an orderly and concise fashion. Not making this up).

He also blocked Dicklickerish (T-C-L) yesterday for the reason that the username was inappropriate (yes) and that it was vandalizing (a lie). Its only edit was to fiddle with some some language on one of Purdy's possessions.

ADDING:

Mr. Purdy ends his Waffles/Spaghetti opus with this line:

Heh, I love the nominator's statement as the reason for deletion; "Author claimed is in photo." Apparently, some commons users have never heard of timers on cameras... which is impressive. So, why are standard selfies outside the scope of Commons, yet penis selfies are valid?

And now, the hipinion.com forum has disappeared, replaced by a placeholder from hover.com.

This is great. Before I had regarded him as just another robotic gnome who produced little or no actual content. After all this, I've got almost enough to drag him off to AR for violating the "bright line" and WP:INVOLVED. Nutsack, vise.

...or media controversies, especially given Wikipedia's focus on pop culture (and some of the more popular media (especially those popular with frat boys) can tick off some evangelicals).

Actually, that's my bad - in the initial post, I just linked to "hipinion.com," when I should have given the full URL to their forum (which apparently isn't their default subdomain):

http://forums2.hipinion.com/index.php

Of course, they really should have a default subdomain, but who knows, that might be intentional. I assume if you register, you could probably read the thread in question. I thought about registering myself, but... naaah. Maybe if they do some more anti-WP kinda stuff though.

What the hell is this, some kind of hidden hangout for Wikipedia trolls?

No, it was deleted because Commons is populated by a bunch of anal retentive assholes...

(Hmmm, that's an interesting juxtaposition of epithets... I wonder how it translates into Ukrainian...)

Commons:Deletion requests/File:David Purdy 2013.JPG


RfB

I was also told about this: there's a Canadian politician named David Purdy.

Back in 2008 an article (a terrible one) was created about this Purdy. Later deleted and merged into a list of "New Democrack-tic" politicians. It mentions "His step-son, who was born in 1994". Could this be our little friend Neelix? Doubtful albeit, as he would have been 14 when this article was created.

Originally created by PsychoSamuraiX (T-C-L), a sock which did nothing else. Bet there's an untold story there.

If he's in the photo, and as you say some commons users have never heard of timers on cameras, they reckon it was taken by someone else so it's a violation of that person's copyright and moral rights to attribute it to the subject.

And now, a video of young Mr. Purdy giving a public speech -- about editing Wikipedia.

Looks like there's enough here for a blog post.

Another recent use of the word vandalism by David Mark Purdy to describe edits to one of his articles that he doesn't like. Mr. Purdy then accused his opponent of being a sockpuppet without providing evidence beyond "disagrees with Mr. Purdy, too."

The article in question? Sci-Fi Dine-In Theater Restaurant (T-H-L). It is, in Purdy's version, five times longer than the Wikipedia article on Lutèce (T-H-L), 5x longer than the article on Les Deux Magots (T-H-L) and twice as long as ElBulli (T-H-L) (I just picked these three out of my own knowledge of reasonably "important" restaurants). Jimmy Wales, David Mark Purdy, and friends, refuse to recognize how much damage they are doing to "knowledge" with a popular reference work that routinely gets every ounce of emphasis wrong.

So it goes.

All he needed to do was explain that a monkey took the photo and it would have been just fine.

I chipped at Neelix for steamrollering what appears to be a good faith newbie with a bad user name and he promptly retired. I presume Neelix is lurking here and hope he will note that this was not my intention at all, nor is such an action proportionate to the seemingly minor party fouls that have been committed.

Just don't bite newbies, particularly those who stray into your treasured articles — that's all.

RfB

Wikipedia is nothing if not uneven. How is a nice article on Subject A somehow diminished because there are worse pieces on Subjects B, C, and D? Progress comes in fits and starts depending on volunteer interest and energy, as you are well aware. If writing were centrally directed, then there would be cause for complaint.

RfB

Like last weeks blog showed: you can end up with results which in no way represents reality. I think this is a good example of a major fault in the WP-model of "crowd-sourcing". One thing is when people write "fan"-articles, but we have also seen the opposite: if you hate a people/race/sex, you write an article about every nasty person of that people/race/sex. And then you can make comments like these, pretending that your Wikipedia- "make-believe" world actually reflects reality.

As so many have noted before: An encyclopaedia anyone can edit may be a good way to start, but a hopeless way to finish.

In some other news; the Tara Teng (T-H-L) article has decreased from 70 K to 50 K in the last 24 hours (since this tread was started) (by several editors)
(It reminds me of the bra-blog, which made the corresponding article decrease from 130 K to 90 K in a day.)


And Neelix (T-C-L) say he has retired from Wikipedia.

Wow, you aren't kidding. This retirement is fairly newsworthy, is it not? I would say that it's no coincidence that attention from Wikipediocracy had to have been a major contributing factor, right?

(Maybe he's going into full dungeon-building mode and can't be sidetracked with Wikipedia.)

Either there's evidence of his being paid to promote various evangelical causes on Wikipedia that he knows is out there to be found, or he'll be back very shortly. (I remember a guy who made All-American as a junior in high school. Come senior year he announced he wasn't going to play "unless, like, the guys tell me they really, really want me back.")

Paid or not, I think it's clear Purdy has done great harm (not that Jimmy Wales and his cadre of administrators will ever see the problem), and no one should celebrate his contributions to what advertises itself as an encyclopedia, but has turned into a promotional arm for his causes.

I fully expect him to return in a few months, after all this is forgotten....

It is entirely possible that he already has. Notice that an image of Teng's water birth was ganked from her blog, uploaded to Wikipedia by Roman Dog Bird (T-C-L), added to water birth (T-H-L) by an IP, removed by another IP, and promptly restored by Millionmice (T-C-L). All this, despite the presence on Commons of two images that are more illustrative and with clearer copyright status.

I expect him to be back in 2 or 3 weeks, because I don't think he's really guilty of what he's been accused of, and if he's even moderately intelligent he'll realize that a diva-quit at this point makes him look more guilty. We've seen time and time again that the way to deal with this sort of thing - and I don't mean just on Wikipedia, either - is to work out a plausible story (preferably a true one if you can manage it), stick to it, gather a few allies, and minimize, minimize, minimize. It's fine if he wants to scale back on his WP activity, he should do that regardless, but disappearing altogether just makes him look like he's ashamed of something.

He has a perfectly good out here - the FA process has clearly gotten out of hand, to the point where they're practically insisting that articles on subjects of marginal importance have to be puffed up with absurdly excessive levels of detail. He got taken in by it; he's young, it happens. He should just own up to that, and if he were to do so I expect he'd be fine. And I don't think he's done much harm (yet) - at least not to Tara Teng herself, as her website shows that she's no shrinking violet when it comes to publicizing personal details.

And more to the point, does anybody really want articles on subjects of marginal importance to be puffed up with absurdly excessive levels of detail? That's stupid, it makes no sense at all. However, it does show one of the inherent limits of crowdsourcing, which is that given the choice, "the crowd" will nearly always choose qualitative measurements that involve the least amounts of expertise, scholarly effort, and self-restraint, and the greatest amounts of copypasta and self-indulgence.



It's possible the reverting IP's were him, but the people posting the images are probably people who read about the situation on Hipinion.com and just wanted to do a bit of point-making trollery. That's a different problem, of course, and one we're far more familiar with - more and more people have figured out that Wikipedia isn't actually "editable by anyone," especially if it's a topic area controlled by control freaks, and when it matters enough they'll resort to other methods to try to alleviate the damage it causes.

He may not be guilty of what he is accused of in the hipinion thread, but he is certainly guilty of doing what Dan Murphy has been documenting in this thread.

I can go along with that.

Still, we have to be careful about what we're really saying, at least in terms of word-choice. He does appear to be an evangelical-Christian propagandist, cleverly skirting around Wikipedia's various strictures on "POV-pushing" and using sheer volume of verbiage (and, to be fair, sources - such as they are) to get his favored POV onto the main page and therefore in front of more eyeballs. To that extent, and in that context, he could be fairly labeled "obsessive." But unfortunately when you start using the word "obsessive" in relation to a fairly well-known beauty queen, you risk giving people the wrong idea.

Clearly there are people here (and needless to say, on Hipinion.com) who suspect that his interest in Ms. Teng does go beyond merely using her story for propaganda purposes, but as inappropriate and creepy as the results are, the pattern of behavior that led to those results actually doesn't appear to match up with the kind of sex-driven psychopathic obsessiveness you see in, oh, roughly 80 percent of everything on TV and in movies these days.

Here's another wonderful "encyclopedic" creation of David Mark Purdy's from July 2013: Pimp stick (T-H-L).

I'll leave it to the gentle reader to divine which particular evangelical hero of Mr. Purdy's this article was created to SEO. (Though it's not as easy to figure out as it should be; Purdy gets a little sneaky about the affiliations and motives of the causes and people he uses Wikipedia to propagandize for).

One thing I'm noticing is all the links to abolitionism (T-H-L) (an article, I note, unlike Neelix's cultivation of pablum-filled "Good" and "FA-level" pieces, is floundering in "B-class"-level evaluation-dom in spite of it having not a small amount of better content and copyediting than most of his terrible nonsense, though suffering from the typical issues related to crowdsourcing content) as a description of these white Canadian evangelicals — an appropriation of the eighteenth and nineteenth century movement. Seems at the very least, unseemly, and at worst, outright racist to have such links without commentary as stand-ins for the advocacy of these Christian anti-prostitution activists.

To be fair: 19th Century abolitionism was also largely a religious movement — as was prohibitionism.

In the 20th Century, the same could be said about the Civil Rights movement in the United States.

There would seem to be nothing new or surprising in a revelation that modern anti-prostitution activism also has a religious basis.


RfB

Neelix is a Salvationist. The Salvation Army are quite active in combatting prostitution and human trafficking.

There ya go. That's on the money.

Note that this is quite different than a theory about an obsessive fan writing an insanely-detailed biography about a beauty queen in a twisted scheme to gain her affection.

RfB

Arguing that the Civil Rights Movement is the successor of the abolitionism movement is more than a defendable position.

Arguing that the Salvation Army's anti-prostitution campaigns are an outgrowth of the abolitionism movement is a much larger stretch. Don't get me wrong, I do not begrudge any human-trafficked victim their right to fight for an end to human trafficking in any way they see fit. But it's pretty clear to me, at least, that the Salvation Army, for one, has some problematic ulterior (some might even say misogynistic) motives in advocating for anti-prostitution along with its related moralistic stances.

The_Salvation_Army#Controversy (T-H-L) covers it adequately. I wonder if Mr. Purdy has been trying to "sanitize" this article, under a sock. The edit history is quite a disgusting mess. The editor who made the largest per-byte changes was Burntsauce (T-C-L), one of the "meatpuppets" in that pathetic Alkivar arbitration.

Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/2012 tour of She Has a Name (T-H-L) is causing a kerfuffle. Note how people are already coming out of the woodwork saying "Keep, it's an FA with lots of references" without once actually looking at the article properly. Then again, I'm not surprised.