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Jimbo's birthday

From Wikitruth

(Redirected from The Case of the Disappearing Diff)

What day is it again?

Once upon a time, Jimbo was born.

Like Jesus, there's some amount of argument about when he exactly was born, and a number of conflicting sources have arisen claiming various different dates. Unlike Jesus, Jimbo is still around to stick his hand into the mix. This has good and bad consequences.

In the case of Jimbo's birthdate, his happy day is supposedly August 8th, 1966. This is what's written on his birth certificate in Huntsville, Alabama, and it's what has been listed in a lot of different places. This was not, traditionally, a controversial statistic, something to debate, or to make a big deal about. He was born on August 8th, hurrah hooray, back to the salt mines.

But then something happened, something which said that this universally accepted day was not the right one.

The thing that happened was Jimbo Wales himself.

On September 18, 2004, at 8:55pm, Jimbo Wales added a line to the discussion page of the Jimbo Wales article on Wikipedia. It said the following:

My actual birthday is August 7th, 1966. This is unverifiable information, I'm sorry to say, since my driver's license and passport say August 8. If we must revert on that basis, then I guess we must. *g*. Maybe I'll have to upload a signed note from my mom as documentary evidence; the only proof that I have is her sayso. :-)

— Jimbo Wales

15 seconds later, Wales added his signature to this line, obviously having forgotten to do the little squiggle-line thing that signs your name and the date. The signature was "Jimbo Wales 20:55, 18 Sep 2004 (UTC)".

Dutifully, people changed the date on the Jimbo Wales article to read August 7th, 1966. After all, Jimbo Himself said that it was the right date, and Jimbo Wales was about Truth, and the Real Story, and being Forthright and Honest.

This date stood for a very long time in the Wikipedia.

One day, however, something changed.

The thing that changed was Jimbo Wales himself.

Spontaneously, Wales decided that he was no longer born on August 7th, 1966, ^[1] ^[2] ^[3] but August 8th, 1966.

According to my birth certificate, this article is wrong. If anyone has a reliable source for that bit of information, please produce it. Otherwise, I recommend it be removed.

— Jimbo Wales

This declaration, made by Jimbo, was at 5:10pm, on January 11, 2007. It completely contradicts what he said a little more than two years previously. People knew this. People questioned Jimbo about his sudden reversal: ^[4]

A strange comment about the birth certificate. You have yourself previously stated what your birthday is, and that your birth certificate is one day off. If you don't want your birth date in the article, why don't you plainly say so, instead of trying to insinuate that there's some completely wrong date in the article now. And if your own statement is not a reliable source, then neither is your birth certificate, since this is not verifiable either. We don't have your birth certificate available as a source, we have your statement about your birth certificate and we have your statement about your actual birth date. Assuming that people are an acceptable source for their own birth dates (unless there's any particular reason to doubt them) then we should take the date you said is your actual birthday, and this is what's in the article now.

— Bramlet Abercrombie

A link was made back to the original statement to back up what was said. ^[5] Normal procedure, really, when you ask someone why they suddenly reversed their position.

But then it got weird.

Spontaneously, Jimbo Wales' edit from above, where he said his mother told him differently, was deleted, just like that, using the Oversight function. In other words, Wales disappeared his own statements and edited so that he would win the argument.

Please let this sink in. Please realize the consequences.

After doing so, Wales went on the offensive, attacking people discussing his birthday as being August 7th: ^[6]

It is original research, and in this particular case, I regard it as borderline stalking. People should be ashamed of themselves for doing it.

— Jimbo Wales

Suddenly, quoting Wales himself became "Stalking". Listening to the co-founder of the website after he posted, under his own account, a declaration, was something to be "ashamed of".

What makes this so weird is nobody cared which day his birthday was. Truly, nobody gave a shit either way, but Wales turned it into a fight, and turned it into a witchhunt-like accusation-fest at anyone who dared say "But you said this yourself." And at this point, Wales simply started stating this new reality as if it had never been any other way: ^[7]

I don't know of any reliable source for it. Right now all we have is nndb.com, which is a user generated content site. It clearly should be removed.

— Jimbo Wales

And it didn't take long for people to notice ^[8] that yes, the entire evidence of that edit had been deleted from Wikipedia:

Well it's impossible to use the talk page diff now as it seems to have been deleted by someone with at least oversight powers. That's the best way gain to consensus, isn't it?

— RockMFR

By this point, people started misreading the edits ^[9] thinking that the following editor, GeneralPatton, a longtime Wikipedia administrator, had somehow "forged" the original Wales editing. That's to be expected when someone haphazardly yanks edits out using the Oversight function; it confuses the n00bs.

A lot of people archive the talk pages of Jimbo Wales. A lot. And in those archives, going back two years, was Jimbo's insistent statement, edited by him, User ID #24, stating that his birthday was the 7th.

The question remains to Jimbo:

Why do this? Why do this this way? Why lie, Jimbo, about something so minor a point? Why use the Oversight function, an emergency-only function meant to protect the Wikimedia foundation and Wikipedia project from legal trouble, so you can win your petty little argument? How long before you Oversight the diffs we reference in this article to hide this whole discussion?

This is the legacy that Wales has created; a little fake world of "information" where he decides the facts, on his whim, when it suits him. How many other times has Wales Oversighted an article or edit or anything else to suit his private biases and whims?

We've been dismayed, we've been shocked, and we've been horrified.

Now we're just disgusted.

Happy Birthday, Jimbo.