Wikimathia exist?

At the end of May , the story was completed , which for many months did not give rest to the administrators and active editors of the English-language segment of Wikipedia. The currently banned Mantanmoreland user purposefully and persistently fought for the “purity” of an article about the cunning practice of New York brokers called “ uncovered short sale ”. His personality is already almost exactly connected with a reputable financial journalist, leading speakers on Forbes.com Gary Weiss (Gary Weiss). In the fight, he was confronted by the employees of a large trading company Overstock.com: her boss Patrick Byrne and his advisor Judd Bagley. In their dispute (the objects of which later became Wiki articles about them themselves), billions of dollars were, without exaggeration, put on the map.

But it would be just one of the most frequent conflict of interest histories on Wikipedia, if the administration of the encyclopedia did not come out on one of the parties, right up to Jimmy Wales.

Uncovered short selling is pure exchange speculation, aimed at making money by falling stock prices. In its most illegal and at the same time most profitable variant, a certain seller puts up for sale shares that he currently does not have. According to the rules of trading established in the USA in 1934, the delivery time of the purchased shares from the seller to the buyer is 3 days. If you put up for sale a sufficiently large amount of shares, their price in the market during this time will fall, and the seller will buy them from someone at a price lower than the price at which he has already sold them to the buyer. The difference is the profit - almost money from the air. Here actions are illegal, because of which the stock price starts to fall unnaturally.

Patrick Byrne, who had long followed this practice on Wall Street, eventually filed a lawsuit against a number of brokerage firms for a total of those billions of dollars. By developing a PR campaign in his support, he achieved history publications in the New York Times and other influential newspapers. The Wikipedia article was just one of the sites where Byrne and Baghli who joined him promoted their ideas. However, the free spirit of the online encyclopedia turned against them very soon when Weiss, who was hiding under a pseudonym, began methodically removing from her all traces of the Overstock point of view.
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Deciding to besiege the stubborn Mantanmoreland, Bagley decided to add to the laudatory article about Gary Weiss, which he himself wrote, a fly in the ointment — compromising, in fact. With this he wanted to cause a nervous opponent to the next duel, which was supposed to end with his ban. However, everything happened exactly the opposite. The administrator under the name SlimVirgin banned the account of Bagley himself, for a conflict of interest.

Not intending to give up, Judd wrote directly to SlimVirgin, supplying the letter with a mass of materials, allegedly proving his case and Weiss’s dishonest intentions. To which she replied in the spirit of "your evidence is worth nothing." Baghley, doubting that the administrator generally read the attachments to the letter, sent them again, this time adding a small script to the documents that was supposed to send a ping to his server when the document was opened. What was his surprise when in a few minutes the ping came, but it came from Weiss's IP address.

Realizing that serious forces were acting against him, Bagley turned to the Wikipedia community of editors for help. For a long year he managed to achieve his goal: a number of respected authors from the Top-10 defended the site of the company Overstock.com from being listed as “bad sites”. This, however, only strengthened the repression from the administration: articles about Weiss, Overstock.com and short sales were closed for editing except for employees of the Wikimedia Foundation, and more than a thousand IP owned by Overstock and residents of the whole area where Byrne and Baghley live , appeared in Wikipedia in the list of blocked. This decision of the administrators was officially confirmed by a spokesman for Wikimedia and Jimmy Wales himself.

This state of affairs lasted until May 28, when the FT2 junior administrator banned the users Mantanmoreland and Bassettcat (the second Weiss virtual), accusing them of using many users to circumvent the rules of the encyclopedia.

Thus, the participants in the dispute about speculation were, as it were, equalized in rights. The story of the dishonest game of stock giants at this certainly did not end and went on its way. But the "sediment remained" - a fair decision, made by the junior administrator against people who decided to use Wikipedia for their political purposes, was made only after the head of the encyclopedia itself actually stood on one of the contending parties, without hiding his personal dislike for the other. “Something rotten in the Danish kingdom.”