Pointman writes: I think we’ve all had that pleasant surprise when something totally unexpected just drops out of the sky and into your lap. That happened to me last weekend when a creature called William Connolley attempted to comment on a piece I’d written about the Bengtsson scandal. If you’re unfamiliar with him, he’s infamous for editing thousands of Wikipedia articles on climate and anyone significant in the area. You can find several articles on his activities over at WUWT.
His idea of truth is somewhat idiosyncratic to say the least, but let’s just say if you were any way sceptical, you weren’t going to get a glowing entry. When the skeptics tried to correct the foul calumnies for their entry, they were promptly changed back, a loop they went around until he banned them from being able to edit anything.
I’m actually quite knowledgeable about him, since I’ve been a fawning admirer and stroker of his ego for as far back as his days co-founding the joke site called Real Climate with Gavin Schmidt and others of a similar ilk. Needless to say, it’s under one of my dark side Eco-Annie personas. The site is pretty much moribund these days but it did get a sniffy mention in the climategate emails by Phil “hide the decline” Jones, as being there just to disseminate propaganda.
He was never particularly significant in the self-declared pantheon of climate demigods, more like their technical gopher despatched as required to cobble together various bits of HTML for them. In his Wikipedia heyday, he built up a small but dedicated following of fanboys but since Wiki banned him and nobody sane reads his blogging attempts, he’s of late been at a loose end, cruising around the skeptic blogosphere, trolling for all he’s worth and generally leaving a terrible stench behind him.
As it happens, I’ve a personal score to settle with him, and one I never thought I’d get the chance to do but this looked to be a heaven-sent opportunity, if I could just play it right. Picking an appropriate way would undoubtedly come down to making use on his own rather inflated idea of his importance in the general scheme of things climatic, but in just the right way. He’s used to swimming around in a little pond of mutual fishy admirers and as far as I’m aware has never had a good kicking, so I laced up my steel-toed boots and thought about an appropriate bait to fix on the hook.
Read the rest of this entertaining post here: The scorning of William Connolley.
LIsten, listen on this thread. Here it? That is not the sound of a great northern loon’s (Gavia immer) haunting call. It is William Connolley is trying to speak, but all his words all rhyme with synonyms of ‘unconvincible’.
John
Lenin is said to have had a succinct term for the discardable gophers of a cause:
“Useful idiots.”
@Mod can you put in “shameless hussy” instead?
Pointman
Well done Pointman. Well done. I got banned from Real Climate just for asking too many good questions , LOL
John Whitman says:
Your comment is awaiting moderation.
May 30, 2014 at 5:54 pm
= = = = =
Moderator,
yup, one to many ‘is’ and one to many ‘all’, and a here where it should be an hear. OOPS.
John
[Ya want it “as is” or do you want to “re-typo” it so we here can hear where you all are is as it should be if it were was what it was when it wasn’t here? 8<) .mod]
@William Howard Connolley
Do you endorse the censorship of sceptically minded people on anthropogenic global warming? regardless of their wide spectrum politics, views and opinions, do you believe they should be subjected to media bias, name calling and lies? Should people just roll over and submit to bulling and unjust pressure?
You are way out of your depth if you do… don’t you think?
And don’t play the victim, you certainly are not, you have had free range of expression until you abused it. I hate bullies! even wannabe ones.
All it takes is someone who is a fanatical gatekeeper like WC who refuses to give up when someone inserts something they don’t like.
=============
you are mistaken. Bots (computer programs) patrol wiki and revert the pages automatically pretending to be humans, while at the same time notifying the human control of the change. In this way a very small team of people can control thousands of pages of content.
there is no mistake in this. I’ve had WC roll back wiki changes in matters of seconds, as I jumped randomly from page to page editing. No human being can do this. It is completely impossible. It requires bots (programs) continually interrogating pages, hundreds if not thousands every minute to the limit of your bandwidth, looking for the slightest change.
technically this is not difficult to do. all that is required is a mania to devote the time and energy to making it happen. creating some simple bots and leave them running on a bank of low cost PC’s.
The Bots have a list of pages (URL’s) they are protecting. They scan them round robin looking for any change. If a change is found the bot first reverts the page using a standard list of excuses. Most people have already moved on and don’t detect the reversion. However, if the person attempting the change discovers the reversion, and tries to make the change a second time, the Bot passes the problem to the human control for more ingenious excuses to revert the URL.
This process continues day and night, over thousands of pages. Ensuring the Wikipedia is nothing but propaganda.
Wasn’t WC invented by Thomas Crapper?
Don’t become the bully you faced ……..
Just sayin folks,,,,,,,,,
Over the last year-plus, I have had oddly reasonable exchanges with both Connolley and Victor Venema concerning the surfacestations paper. We explored their three main objections and have addressed them. That was actually quite valuable, as it turns out.
I do understand that they are controversial figures, and many have crossed swords with them, but I have made out okay. They found out we are for real — which they needed to know. I found out what their criticisms are and where how they will be arguing against the paper, down the road — which I needed to know.
REPLY: he seems to have a different persona when not in public view. In my case here and at his own blog, he wears his contempt on his sleeve – Anthony
ossqss says:
May 30, 2014 at 7:43 pm
Don’t become the bully you faced …
A very fair and honest point, and I agree!
evanmjones says:
May 30, 2014 at 7:45 pm
Luke warmers ffs lol
William the weasel,
the mass propaganda prince:
misleading man and womankind for money.
LoL.
Wait till his wives, ex-wives, kids & grandkids get a load of what daddy was doin when all the books come out.
The execrable connolley says:
… especially since it’s a very cheap trick to drive up visits.
WUWT doesn’t need connolley.
Of all the real trolls out there, connolley is the most odious. NikFromNYC’s link demonstrates that well. Well worth the read. So is this.
evanmjones says:
May 30, 2014 at 7:45 pm
The planet earth is either warming due to a green house gas or it is not, there is no middle ground because the anthropogenic greenhouse, global warming, climate change, weather disruption theory has made it’s case… and it is horror most foul.
Connolley the grave digger…
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/10/09/death-by-stoat/#more-72186
> As is Pointman’s wont, he lays out both sides of conversation well
P provides his side of the conversation only. By contrast, I provide both sides of the conversation. This is a matter of obvious fact; how can you get that so badly wrong?
> he never went away just changed hats
Wrong. I still edit under the same account.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/William_M._Connolley
> notice I do not use Mr.
Thanks. Its the wrong title: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:William_M._Connolley/For_me/The_naming_of_cats
> Being banned from a blog
Its no great deal being banned from P’s. But what do you make of someone who bans you, but then wants you back (“Come on over to my gaff…”)?
> Why anyone would let him try to post anything on anything is beyond me
Some people like to hear both sides of the argument. Not P, obviously.
> If only the Wikipedia creators knew beforehand that William Connolley would take their brilliant idea and completely destroy it,
I know I’m, like, immensely powerful and all that, but don’t you think you’re being too generous to me there? One man, destroy wiki?
> Do you endorse the censorship of sceptically minded people on anthropogenic global warming?
Nope. But you provide no examples, so this is a matter of general principles.
> I hate bullies! even wannabe ones.
That’s nice. What do you think of the behaviour of someone who censors the other side of a conversation and then gloats about it?
And hence the reason why I – and virtually all teachers – refuse to accept any source from Wikipedia. You have destroyed the site, and are making sure it will not rise again.
Congratulations.
ossqss says:
May 30, 2014 at 7:43 pm
Don’t become the bully you faced ……..
Just sayin folks,,,,,,,,,
ossqss,
Facing a bully usually means you have to ‘put them on the pavement’ once or twice, in my experience. Some bullies are slow learners. Connelley seems to be a veryslow learner. He demonstrated a monomaniacal penchant for abuse of editorial power on Wikipedia and shows no indications of conscience or remorse for his abusive behavior that caused him to be banned from Wiki. He clearly has not learned the error of his ways yet.
I have absolutely no problem with Pointman knocking him down as many times as it takes for the poor fool to learn humility. Think of it as a remedial educational program …… or evolution in action.
Mac
Yes, William is pain in the butt. However, I don’t agree with what the Pointman has done, it is censorship. I don’t think that the skeptic community interests are well served by going down the slippery Stalinist slope of the warmist commissars. I think that ridicule is the best medicine for trolls. It doesn’t hurt to be exposed to alternate views provided that they are knowledgeable and not abusive because it combats group think which the warmist commissars indulge in on their sites.
A few years ago, if you did a wiki search on El Nino, the page back then described there was still a great deal of uncertainty with regards to the various possible mechanism that cause the trade winds to weaken and El Nino to form. The page today still conveys that same message of uncertainty.
One of the theories /mechanisms put forth on this ye ol’ El Nino page on wiki (perhaps it still exists somewhere lurking on the web..way back?) was a suggestion by climate skeptic Ian Plimer, that volcanoes, or more specifically, undersea volcanic/seismic shifts may be a significant cause of El Nino.
These days, the reference is gone. And good riddance to that. The claim was and still is the biggest load of pseudo science ever conceived, in my view. In fact, using typical Plimer-type language, one might describe it as “the greatest fraud of the 20th century”.
The lesson here folks is that just because “it’s skeptical” doesn’t make it a good argument.
Odds are, it’s extremely likely that Connolley removed Plimer’s garbage, and for that William, I thankyou.
Richo, there are plenty of contrary opinions welcome on Pointmans site, it is just whiney abusive trolls who are banned. No censorship problem at all.
I clicked the link here to Stoats site…. just so he knows that the only reason he gets any traffic is because he occasionally gets mentioned on this site.
Deeper he digs!
“What do you think of the behaviour of someone who censors the other side of a conversation and then gloats about it?”
We hate you for it corrupted Wikipedia William, all thirty thousand of us regular WUWT readers, or about twice that as of 2014 compared to 2013, and every one of the millions of Fox News viewers who are informed competently by skeptical arguments that we alert their guests about, despise you for it, by name, as you stand exposed as an enabler of potentially genocidal artificial energy rationing. You are one of the few people most privy to the damning information that climate “science” at its very core is a fraud and that makes you special indeed.
Here is the hockey stick you helped create, the WUWT site rating that just tripled in 2013:
http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/wattsupwiththat.com
-=NikFromNYC=-, Ph.D. in carbon chemistry (Columbia/Harvard)
@Pointman.
Who are you to call me a hussy? We’ve all heard about you and that Curry woman.
Eco-Annie
Wee Wiki Willee … doesn’t mind censoring famous scientists in his rewriting of history but can’t take it handed back to him. This is a person of little ethical or moral fortitude. Low life.
“This is the Essex stuff, isn’t it? No-one believes that. Just look at posts on this blog. Everyone is entirely happy to talk about average temperature.”
Well, which exactly shows his level of ‘logic’. Which is substituted on how many (bandwagon fallacy) he thinks (like what he thionks using his fallacies would have any relevance whatoever) ‘believes’. Belief trumping reality and physics.
Happiness to talk on a blog versus thermodynamics. That is very conclusive.