Overlapping edits mean nothing

On Blogger, I can schedule blog posts for future publication. I can also back-date blog posts. Theoretically, if I had another Blogger account, I could have them making blog posts at the same time. But what would be the point of that? There could be some deceptive value to post back-dating: when the first incident of Wikipedia-related homicide occurs, I could write up some blog post with some sketchy approximation of what actually happened and back-date to say, a month prior. Then my blog post would seem prophetic.

On Wikipedia, as far as I know, there is no way to schedule edits nor back-date edits. At least I can say such tools are not available to the average Wikipedia user. But that doesn't mean that Wikipedia's most brutal warriors don't find ways to both schedule edits and back-date them. Scheduling is probably easy, as computers offer us plenty of ways to command them to do something at a specific time in the future. Back-dating edits would certainly be more work, in part because it requires access to the server itself. But Wikipedia's most vicious warriors definitely have such access.

Although those brutal bastards can have many sock accounts and give the appearance of independent users by having overlapping edits, that means nothing. They can just as easily declare a bunch of you to be operated by single sockmaster.

How long to the first Wikipedia-related homicide?

"Maybe you're like one of those nuts who forecast the end of the world," someone suggested to me recently. Maybe it's true that the first Wikipedia-related homicide won't happen for a long time. When forecasting death, you kind of wish you'll be proven wrong. But sadly, Wikipedia-related violence has already happened. We'll call him "Ted." Ted fits the stereotype of the typical nerd almost to a T, except he has a girlfriend. Let's say Ted knows a lot about "math."

He got into a disagreement with a little Wikipedia god-king who claims to have a Ph.D. in calculus, we'll say his screen name is "Wiki Authority 45." Even without the example of Essjay, you have to take claims of advanced degrees with a grain of salt. Well, Wiki Authority 45 hired a thug, drove who knows how many miles with the thug, tracked down Ted and had the thug beat Ted up, as Wiki Authority 45 yelled "I am the ultimate authority on Wikipedia. Don't you ever forget that." Ted won't press charges, and he won't let me tell you his story. I don't know if Ted still edits Wikipedia.

But at least Ted has learned one lesson: if you have a webcam on a motorized truck toy, don't let strangers on the Internet operate it! Nor should you ever put your real name on the same webpage as your Wikipedia username! Because otherwise Wiki Authority 45 can track you down and have a thug beat you up.

By the way, how does Wiki Authority 45 have the time to track down those who disagree with him to beat them up and still have time to make dozens of 'contributions' to Wikipedia each and every day? Ted's theory is that Wiki Authority 45 has an undeclared robot patrolling new articles and tagging suitable deletion candidates automatically based on "lopsided binary tree heuristics" or some other technobabble along those lines. Sure it takes skill to program the robot. But to actually write deletion nomination babble takes so little skill that even a robot can do it.

Can't give the specifics of the first Wikipedia-related murder

When the first Wikipedia-related murder happens, the police better not look to me for clues. I only deal in what is publically visible from the website. Given that most of Wikipedia's logs are falsified on a daily basis, I could easily be wrong when I say such and such user is a sockpuppet of another. Indeed, most CheckUser requests yield laughably wrong information. But what is the real information? That is lost due to so much falsification. So when the first Wikipedia-related murder happens, I won't know anything more about it than can be seen on the user pages of the involved users.

Wikipedia-related murder still on the horizon

Someday, a brutal warrior will find out the true location of one of his enemies and show up in person to kill him. The brutal warriors take Wikipedia that seriously. The only reason it hasn't happened yet is actually a positive side effect of the ridiculously idiotic sockpuppet witch-hunt: Warrior A wants to kill warrior B. However, warrior C has falsified the IP address and edit time stamps of warrior B in order to have warrior B declared a sockpuppet of one of warrior C's sockpuppets, so now warrior A doesn't have reliable information from which to figure out the location of warrior B. Hopefully warrior A won't kill anyone if he arrives at the wrong location and fails to find warrior B. Either way, warrior B's life is saved because he's been declared a sockpuppet of warrior C's sockpuppet (which was created specifically for the purpose of being a sockmaster of real users).