For some time now, the ongoing debates over failures to deliver and over naked short selling have played out in the cyberpages of Wikipedia.

I can’t really claim to have stayed on top of this, because the development I’m about to report is nearly a month old, but … it’s worthy of some mention. A longtime Wikipedia editor who most frequently used the name “Mantanmoreland” has been banned from making further contributions to that free online resource … indefinitely.

For purposes of clarity, I might best say here that I know of what I speak in part because I’ve participated in Wikipedia myself, always using the name Christofurio. I can’t really claim to have stayed au courant though.

But it is uncontroversial at the very least to observe that the cluster of Wikipedia articles, dealing directly or indirectly with hedge funds that are alleged to engage in naked shorting, and with the crusade against it, have collectively been the scene for at least two years now of an intense edits war.

Furthermore, it seems that MM’s name is often coupled with the name of a former editor who called himself WordBomb – coupled in the same way that the names of Athens and Sparta are often coupled. Or Rome and Carthage. I’ll follow wiki practice in this blog entry and engage in no speculation as to who is who in the real world. As they say, no ‘outing.’ I’ll just call them by the short form of their most common screen names, MM and WB. They have been paired in many minds as the opposite poles of a tiny but intense globe. MM believed that the anti-nakedness crusade is nonsense, and dangerous nonsense at that, a crusade that benefits chiefly incompetent managers and pump/dump fraudsters. WB, on the contrary, was himself enthusiastically committed to that crusade. He was its encyclopedic face. All this would have been well and good – they might be arguing in the Talk pages and cancelling out each others edits in the articles proper to this day – but for the wiki attitude toward ‘sock puppetry.’

Here’s where the plot thickens. Given the rules by which Wikipedia operates, there’s a premium on consensus. This premium means that editors who want to affect the structure or gist of an article try to show that other editors agree with them, and try to isolate those who disagree, in the ongoing debates on the Talk pages that accompany each article.

This is where the temptation to use a “sock puppet” arises. An editor might create a faux-consensus by opening ten different accounts, posing as ten different editors, who agree with each other on the matter in dispute. When that happens the oldest and most frequently used of the accounts is considered the real one, the Shari Lewis in this situation. The other nine are his/her sock puppets, like Lambchop.

Typically, one who uses sock puppets for that purpose may get blocked from editing for a definite period. If the person behind the multiple accounts is a real wiki addict, though, he/she might create further accounts to evade the block. Block-evading puppetry is treated more harshly than mere consensus-faking puppetry, and it can lead to an indefinite block.

This is precisely what happened with WB, the anti-nakedness crusader, two years ago. He was found to have used sock puppets “abusively,” blocked for a brief term, then found to have used them “evasively,” and blocked indefinitely.

This didn’t end, it didn’t even calm, the editing wars. On the one hand, spottings of alleged WB “socks” continued, and in September 2007 – acting on the theory that the real-world analogs to AB were editing from computers in the corporate offices of Overstock.com, Wikipedia banned editing from any Overstock IP address.

On the other hand, the blocking of WB seemed to give the anti-nakedness crusaders an ancillary cause (in the same way that sacking Constantinople became a cause for the original Crusaders simply because it was on the way to Jerusalem, presumably the real target). The crusaders became determined to secure a permanent ban on Mantanmoreland – whom they accused of sock puppetry in opposition to their crusade.

By February of 2007 there was an extensive page of back-and-forth debate over alleged a variety of stylistic similarities and timing coincidences, which supposedly proved that MM was the Shari Lewis behind a sock puppet known as SamiHarris.

On February 10, a fellow calling himself GDett wrote that the expression “lipstick on this pig” is very peculiar, and that he had found it in posts by both MM and SamiHarris. So they must be the same person! Obviously, that’s an invalid argument. Some form of the expression “you can put lipstick on a pig, but its still a pig,” is fairly common.

An example of ‘lipstick’ closer to home: in July 2006, HedgeWorld carried a review of a book by journalist Gary Weiss, Wall Street versus America. The review (written by yours truly) included some critical commentary, but was generally in accord with Mr. Weiss’ views on the efficient capital market hypothesis, and on why most investors should avoid stock picking, and should also avoid advisers who promise to pick stocks on their behalf. The review said nothing about the anti-nakedness crusade, although the book under review did contain one chapter on that subject.

The title of that review?: “Lipstick Brands Change, the Pig’s the Same.”

Eventually folks involved in the Wikipedia investigation picked up on this. One of them cited it as proof that the metaphor is pretty common, so it didn’t prove that MM and SamiHarris must be the same person.

Nonetheless, for other reasons Mantanmoreland was eventually found to have committed sock puppetry and he has now been blocked. All this means … what?

It means at least three things: first, that the debate over hedge funds’ alleged naked short selling is one in which some of the participants remain so naïve that they can imagine that a rather common metaphor constitutes an idiosyncrasy; second, that as promising as Wikipedia sounds (and it can be a helpful first step in research) it must still be treated with some caution; finally, that some debates have more value as entertainment than as enlightenment.

Frankly, I enjoyed some of MM’s work and regret his disappearance. One might consider this blog entry my effort to … well … apply some sort of cosmetic to the situation.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 23rd, 2008 at 10:06 am and is filed under Media Watch, Odd Stuff. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.