It's worth noting that despite being hit with a month long block out of the blue, interrupting his usual activity of making double digit numbers of edits every day this month bar one, he has made only one substantive edit since, his appeal, and only three in total.
And his appeal is almost perfect in terms of the dos and don't, he doesn't get angry, he doesn't focus on irrelevant issues, and he tries to make the case he didn't do the think he was blocked for doing. And he is hampered in that effort, because he did do it. But he makes a good stab of it. Enough that the bureaucracy of Wikipedia has spent many days considering an appeal, all be it an appeal that was quite obviously never going to succeed.
It's telling what he didn't do. He didn't admit guilt or apologise. Understandable if he genuinely thinks he didn't do what he is not supposed to be doing, but at the time, and certainly now it is clear his appeal is not going his way, he could and should have simply said, OK, fair cop, I disagree with your interpretation but I can see how others would see it this way, and I'll be more careful.
This speaks of his general issue, as has been observed by sadly only one member of the Wikipedia Administrator corps. A perfect editor, when already banned from editing X, not only makes sure he steers well clear of X, he avoids W and Y too, just to be safe.
Cross has chosen a different path. It is perhaps unkind to call it blatant wikikawyering, but it is wikilawyering in spirit and intent. All be it, bizarrely, in just one edit.
So what does this all show?
He is either one of a very few things....
1. A particularly good POV pusher. And I have to stress, this is really good, given a tendency to emotion and lawyering goes hand in hand with POV pushing. So to see him shut it all down here, shows a capacity for cold calculation, his eyes clearly on the bigger prize. A situation where he takes advantage of the liberty to appeal, but if he fails, he has likely done nothing to affect the thing he knew straight away. That if he simply waits a month, he can get right back to it. Presumably being well pleased that nobody there seems remotely interested in the fact he has been making wholly unacceptable POV pushing edits outside of his already generously narrow topic ban (although it helps that Wikipedia Administrator Chillum buried the evidence).
2. A paid operative. It should scare Wikipedia, given their utter inability to spot much less stop undeclared pad editing, that it is perhaps a far more likely explanation for the exceptionally good performance above, that Cross is beign paid be this good. To be mindful of his objectives.
3. A role account. As has been speculated many times, paying five people to use the Philip Cross account means you can get way more done. And necessarily, that requires all edits that could reveal a personality or anything else that speaks to him on a human level, should be avoided.
I was pretty tickeld to see this garbage....
...the theories online about Philip Cross being a state actor, or a company paid to edit Wikipedia, are absurd, and if you believe them you are not thinking very hard. The conjecture tends to center on his high edit count as res ipsa loquitur proof of malfeasance. Really, it's not that big of a deal: he makes about a thousand edits a month and he's been doing so for several years. I am just some guy who edits Wikipedia for fun, and I made about two thousand edits in October of this year. Fixing typos and using scripts adds up quickly. Moreover, while there are shady characters trying to influence Wikipedia articles, they generally do not put up huge neon glow-in-the-dark signs by using one extremely visible account to do so in a dramatic fashion (cf. some of the entries here to see what it actually looks like).
For a atart, fuck off with this obvious bullshit. Every single one of Philip Cross's edits are manual. Every single one reflects his sole purpose for being on Wikipedia, namely to add, subtract, or otherwise changing the wording in articles in a non trivial manner. A gnome, he is not. A back office monkey, he is not.
Philip Cross is all about the content. One edit at a time.
Which is exactly what you would expect of a POV pusher.
Sometimes he marks his edits as simple copyediting, and sometimes that is what they are. Someone with his focus on content, is naturally going to want to copyedit as he goes. But of course, in true POV pusher fashion, sometimes those edits he claims are mere copyedits, are also times where he is making non trivial changes....
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?ti ... 1053717113
In that edit he changes the article to suggest Desmond ovesaw the publication of "hundreds" of defamatory articles in the Madeleine McCann case, away from the previous text which didn't give a number. Is that a faithful reflection of the sources already given (since he didn't add a new source in this edit)? Is he improving this article with more information from existing sources, or is he seeing a chance to distort it with misinformation?
One has to wonder.
And where did anyone get the idea Philip Cross himself is trying to put the spotlight on himself, or is doing anything dramatic? This appeal is typical of his entire existence on Wikipedia. He is deliberately avoiding drama. He deliberately doesn't draw attention to himself, much of it happens in some wierd parallel universe, where Cross is allowed to be absent. Not even an Arbitration Case against him, drew any great level of verbosity.
Nobody knows anything about Cross, he is a black hole of information regarding who he is and why he is on Wikipedia. Most bad actors don't do this, they do actually try to appear to be a typical Wikipedia editor, and naturally, they typically either dissappear the moment anyone has more than a suspicion that they might be up to no good, or they make a strenuous defence.
Cross has perhaps proved, given he has been able to make thousands of edits over several years in spite of tremendous loud protests against what is some pretty blatantly bad editing by a person wholly uninterested in being a model editor, that there is an even better way to be a bad actor intent on influencing Wikipedia content toward a particular POV.
A POV that does indeed suspiciously align extremely well with a certain sovereign state's world view. A state that is quite happy to violate its own Constitution to perform mass surveillance of its citizens, and so sure as shit wouldn't think twice about investing in a Wikipedia black ops programme.
Whoever invented Cross, has surely cracked the Wikipedia code. Wikipedia editors are obsessive wierdos, with difficulties in doing the things us normal humans find second nature. Expressing our personalities, working in teams, balancing emotion and logic, etc.
What better way to hide among a bunch of freaks, than be the most bland uninteresting variant of said freaks? He is obsessive. He is wierd. He's just not the most obsessive or the weirdest. There's always someone else stealing the limelight.
The steely eyed focus on his strategic goal, is the single biggest giveaway.
Wikipediots don't have that. Not even Guy Macon could stay the course. There's always some situation that sends them into a spiral.
"Philip Cross" is going nowhere. He can and probably will be skewing Wikipedia for as long as his paymasters wish it.
There are already people who are grumbling about his existing sanction, sensing the loss to Wikipedia of his POV pushes in this area, so a third party appeal where he simply has to say yes, I wish to appeal, to satisfy protocol (third party appeals are not allowed in absentia) will happen eventually.
Maybe they are real people, maybe they are plants. All I know is, the very last thing you do on Wikipedia, if you're trying to stay under the radar, is appeal your own topic ban if you have already been seen skirting the edges of it. That's noise. That's neon lights. That's drama.
You do what Cross does, and take what Wikipedia gives you, safe in the knowledge they're too stupid to see the full extent of his crimes, and too cowardly to effectively deal with what little they are forced to notice.
Wikipedia is wide open for abuse, as long as, of course, you're pushing it in a desirable direction.
It's at times like this I realise I could make a shit ton of money as an advisor to anyone looking to run a black op on Wikipedia.
And who knows, maybe I already do!
I am, after all, allegedly globally banned. Nobody knows why.
Vigilant can wave his dirty underpants in the air and shout and holler all he wants at Wikipediocracy, thanks to his own idiocy, not even the most expensive lawyer in the world will ever be able to compell the WMF to admit they have ever banned anyone because they were found to be a black ops consultant.
It's almost irrelevant that Cross isn't yet banned for his clear and obvious failure to be what a Wikipedia editor is meant to be (neutral, transparent, collaborative), if the reason is that he is a state actor. For if he is, well, as any black ops consultant would tell you, always have a replacement on alert 5, ready to go.
But if Wikipedia's owners and its most loyal followers have any due regard for its reputation, they really should ban Cross, if only to show that while we all know what they're doing in terms of their own broad goals as a movement, they at least draw the line at letting states do it better.
People aren't going to forget he exists, after all. Just like people won't forget what Snowden revealed. Sooner or later, and crucially, the longer you do nothing about it, well, all the more likely the solution becomes clearer and clearer...
HTD.