Talk:The Journey to the Merge

Deceptive attribution

User:Anaxis created this page with the following introduction:

On 23 January 2021, a set of screenshots were publicly released by Watchmen member Lainchu ...

As we know from this, this, and this, among others, Anaxis was Lainchu at that time. Had she* kept it to "conversations with Lainchu/the Lainchu RP account" or something like that, it might be a little less egregious, but here she's claiming that Lainchu was (a) an actual person and (b) not her. Now, not wanting to get your name involved with Chris content is totally understandable ... which is why she's using the name Anaxis and not her government.

(*I've actually heard it both ways, that Anaxis was a guy or a girl, but I think the latter, dunno.)

She's bullshitting around hard here, and combined with the efforts of User:Hurful Truth Level (who granted her jannie privileges on the Wiki in April 2021) to redact her identity from the Watchmen page, there's a very clear effort to scrub her involvement with that group and with fucking around with Chris in general. It is all suspect as hell. The various highly selective "Watchmen leaks" from their Discord were also a pet project of hers (although one imagines they could not have been done without the approval of, at the very least, Naught, at least given that Anaxis stayed around.) Anaxis left the Watchmen and went with Sean's splinter group (the Knights of CWC) from which she leaks nothing (or even acknowldge their existence) and then goes dark around the time of the merge.

This situation keeps expanding and really needs to be addressed on a large scale, sooner rather than later, for the sake of everybody's credibility. At this point I treat everything I read here relating to these people as suspect, and keep receipts (archive.li) of every edit I do because I have no confidence whatsoever that people are acting in good faith.

Highly relevant discussion is here on the Watchmen talk page.

For the record I have tried over time and repeatedly to get in touch with Anaxis and she ignored and eventually outright refused to speak with me. SpookyBones (talk) 23:51, 26 October 2021 (UTC)

Yikes. This looks pretty bad.

As someone who doesn't browse the Farms much and mainly just WikiGnomes here, I propose that as a starting measure, editors who have personal connections or a conflict of interest regarding a topic be categorically barred from editing articles on that topic, similar to how Wikipedia deals with this kind of thing. I don't see any reason why people suspected of being in the Watchmen are allowed to edit the Watchmen page.

I don't really know enough about the situation to say much more, so I'll leave that to other editors. More action definitely needs to happen, though.

By the way, SpookyBones: the links you're using as sources are dead links. I think you might have forgotten to put "File:" before the names of the images you're linking. You might want to fix that. --4CentUser (talk) 00:25, 27 October 2021 (UTC)

I'm pretty much the opposite as far as the first part goes, I know pretty much nothing about Wikis (thanks for pointing out the image links, should work now) but am very comfortable on the Farms and places like that. It's a different mindset for sure but in a perfect world we'd complement each other, after all, "CWCki forums" and all that.

You're definitely on the right track as far as restricting people from editing articles on subjects that concern them. The unfortunate thing about this is that I guess that would have to be a self-report thing unless people are outright exposed (as has been happening recently) because these groups by their nature skulk around in the shadows. They hardly publish membership lists. It would be a good start, though. An absolute minimum. And as far as the rest goes, concealing involvement should be grounds for a ban, no questions asked. There were far too many weird Discord gayops and general fuckery in the leadup to the Merge, including, I'm sure, a lot of stuff that we don't even know about. The fact that people are not only withholding this information but then going around and editing CWCki articles on the subject is, to say the least, problematic. Just the act of editing an article, IMO, if we're "assuming good faith" (heh) implies not actively concealing information on the subject. Sockpuppeting to do so is on another level especially if you are staff but what happened in this case is a big problem too even though User:Anaxis was not yet staff at the time.

Especially since this is not a Wiki open to random people from the general public there's an implied level of trust with people who are granted an account. It's been broken repeatedly and so far without consequences.

I would love to hear the input of others. SpookyBones (talk) 00:59, 27 October 2021 (UTC)