The Popcorn Thread

Or, doctoring Debito Arudou.

First, I actually do think that the current Wikipedia article is pretty awful, but converting it to his CV, as the not-at-all sock puppets are trying to do, is not the way to go and is certainly not going to fly. I’d kill most of the Early Life and Divorce sections, make the publications into a bullet list and trash the academic papers section – from what I understand, publishing three papers on almost identical topics within a short period (“Embedded Racism …fill in the blank… Critical Race Theory“) is frowned upon – and the criticism section could do with pruning. Indeed, for such a minor figure, I think the Simple English entry is enough.

So, let us go back in time to 2008, where the first attempt at editing his own article resulted in this:

 I’m just supposed to shut up and take it by people who won’t take any personal responsibility for what they say or reveal who they are, even when there is a potential conflict of interest with an editor and a source (in other words, the COI is perpetually placed on me, never you). The process here is neither fair nor professional. And I’ll have no part of it since it will have no part of me.

(My highlighting)

Fast forward to August of this year, when Sweetandloveable and Mister_Mtzplk appear and start favourably editing various pages relating to Dr Arudo – notably, despite having lots of detailed information about him at their fingertips, somehow both manage to spell his name without the final “u”, and despite both having lots to say about him, their editing trails never cross.

Now, things heat up on the 30th of September when Mr Googles adds a little about the then Mr Arudou getting fired instead of quitting so he could get unemployment insurance. After this entry, by some strange quirk of fate, Dr Arudou (or someone else with the keys to Debito.org) decides to edit the source of this text, and by an even more quirky quirk of fate, Mister_Mtzplk reports this change just five minutes after Eido says Firefox reports the last edit time as. I have also double-checked this with Chrome, one of the HTTP Response headers is “Last-Modified: Tue, 30 Sep 2014 02:08:13 GMT”.

Thus I am led to conclude that even if we assume that S&L and MM were previously operating independently of Dr Arudou, he must surely have been made aware of the Wikipedia edit war at this point in time, and I would expect him to recall issues of Conflict of Interest and be aware that S&L and MM were potentially breaking these guidelines.

Next, the page “gatekeeper” or whatever it is called in Wiki-world manages to rub S&L up the wrong way:

These wikipedia edit disputes really get on my nerves. I’m not used to them (I know, I’m new here, which Oddexit keeps pointing out) I’m trying to assume good faith in editors, but I’m having a lot of trouble.

I felt the appeals to “good faith” were a bit out of place, as S&L is not declaring their COI.

So, Eido decides to take things to the next level by calling for a sock-puppet investigation on MM, which seems a reasonable step to me – let’s wait and see how that turns out. This appears to annoy the good Doctor, as he calls in a retaliatory Request for Arbitration against Eido and Oddexit, reactivating his account after a six-year hiatus. However, a cursory reading of Wikipedia rules is that an RFA is a last resort after other resolution means fail, so not surprisingly a third party tells him to start from the beginning:

Maybe WP:DRN or WP:ANI should be tried first before arbitration.

Now, the interesting thing about Dr A’s RFA is that he somehow omits to mention S&L and MM’s roles (who co-incidentally have fallen silent) in the dispute or his awareness of a potential COI since, as I indicated above, it appears he made an edit to Debito.org in direct response to an edit on Wikipedia. I also await with bated breath his promised “Mr Googles is a big meanie”:

Will discuss Eido Inoue’s WP:COI based upon published personal animus towards BLP subject later.

UPDATE 16th October:

After going strangely quiet, and after a not-too-surprising rejection of Dr A’s arbitration request, he now posts this epic to the Biographies of Living Persons Noticeboard. The post includes mentions of both Japologism and Tepido, with the Tepido link being prefixed with:

the forums that [Eido] contributes to engage in cyberbullying and cyberstalking

The destination of the link, however, is an article where I unmask James Grey (now Jim Di Griz, one of Dr A’s favoured commenters) as a troll. Furthermore, there is a second link that leads to a dead page on a rather strange site.

There is also perhaps an unintentional revelation of motivations that further suggest Mister_Mtzplk is a sock-/meat-puppet:

Even after I removed the section in question from my website, in order to see how Wikipedia would enforce its own rules, Eido decided to use the Wayback machine as a source, which violates WP:SELFPUB. For if Wayback becomes the template for citing internet-archived self-published sources when current sources exist, issues will arise. This has been raised on the Talk page by Mister Mtzplk

Eido also suggested to me privately that perhaps Dr A is unaware of the sock-puppet investigation. We still haven’t got the bottom of the popcorn bucket, folks!

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303 Comments.

  1. He can edit his English page all he wants to make him look like the reincarnation of Gandhi it won’t help one jot.

    The Japanese language wiki entry for debito has ‘little yellow Jap’ among other debacles last I checked and potential employers aren’t just going to google his name in English.

    He’s proper fucked, too old for America, known as a racist in Japan. He’d be well advised to make up with his rich daddy or it could be a shit retirement singing ‘wheels on the bus’ in some smoggy Chinese eikaiwa…

    ReplyReply
  2. Ken on another phone

    @COYP: Good point, I’d forgotten how bad it was. It makes him look like a moaning racist, yet as far as I can see he has made no effort to get it changed, yet he expends lots of energy purging even the most minor negative view from the English page.

    If he was getting interviewed for any job related to the Japanese language, asking why he doesn’t lobby for change there would be a great question…

    ReplyReply
  3. And yet he is still editing the English version by proxy – who needs sockpuppets when you can just use the talk page to order other people to fix the grammar on your online CV?

    ReplyReply

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