After being dumped by Jimmy Wales on his own website, Rachel Marsden put his clothes up for auction on eBay
Posted on 03/03/2008 6:37:42 AM PST by TigerLikesRooster
March 3, 2008
Jilted lover uses eBay to hit back at Wikipedia guru
After being dumped by Jimmy Wales on his own website, Rachel Marsden put his clothes up for auction on eBay |
Philippe Naughton
As of midday today, $102.50 could buy you a little piece of internet history: the T-shirt that Jimmy Wales was wearing when he met Rachel Marsden for what he insists was their one and only night of passion.
There's nothing special about the T-shirt, except for a couple of stubborn stains that even Tide extra-strength could not remove. But it's not every day that a guru of the worldwide web uses his own site to dump his girlfriend and she responds by putting his old clothes on eBay.
Mr Wales, universally known as "Jimbo", is the 41-year-old co-founder of Wikipedia, the online encyclopaedia written and edited by its users that now contains 9 million articles in 253 languages. Ms Marsden is a Canadian columnist and right-wing TV pundit for whom the word controversial could have been invented.
The two met, online at least, a couple of years ago when Ms Marsden contacted Mr Wales to complain about her Wikipedia biography, with which she disagreed. Mr Wales says that they have only met in the flesh one time, on February 9 this year, by which point they appeared to have developed something of a cyber-lust.
The precise details of their meeting are still unclear. A San Francisco weblog has published transcripts of instant messaging (IM) conversations in which the pair planned a romantic getaway at a hotel in Washington DC. Ms Ramsden, on the other hand, said that Mr Wales left his T-shirt at her flat in New York City.
Either way, they clearly hit it off. In one IM message after their meeting, Mr Wales reportedly tells her: "btw, i am recovered from 24 hours of marathon sex. lol."
In another exchange carried on the Valleywag blog the pair compare broadband services around the world and Mr Wales complains at the miserly download speed offered in America. "When you talk about megabits and broadband, you have no idea what that does to me," she replies provocatively.
For some reason, however, the relationship soured - possibly because Mr Wales realised that Ms Marsden was keeping a copy of all their "hot" instant messaging on her Google e-mail account.
Citing "friends" of the Wikipedia founder, Valleywag reported that Mr Wales had become fearful that Ms Marsden would use the transcripts to blackmail him and threatened to have her deported back to Canada.
The transcripts were duly leaked last week and on Saturday Mr Wales, ignoring the Wikipedia protocol he has so carefully developed, posted a personal statement on the site to insist that he had only met Rachel Marsden one time and was "no longer involved" with her.
Mr Wales also denied having intervened "inappropriately" to redraft her Wikipedia biography, a far more serious charge given the politics of Wikipedia. The IM transcripts suggest, however, that he did offer her advice and even quoted Bill Clinton's line from his dalliance with Monica Lewinsky that it "depends on what the meaning of 'is' is".
Ms Marsden first came to public attention in Canada in the late 1990s when, as a college swimming star, she accused her team coach of sexual harrassment. The coach, who was fired and reinstated, claimed that she had in fact harassed him.
In 2004, she was given a conditional discharge with one year's probation for criminally harassing a Vancouver radio host following their break-up. Last September she was again accused of harassment after she used her blog to accuse a Canadian counter-terrorism officer, with whom she had had a two-year affair, of passing her secret documents.
After Mr Wales posted his Wikipedia statement on Saturday, Ms Marsden was quick to take her revenge, taking the T-shirt and sweater out of the closet, washing them and posting them for sale on eBay - modelling them herself.
"It was such a classy move [by Mr Wales] that I was inspired to do something equally classy myself, so I'm selling a couple of items of clothing he left behind, here in my NYC apartment, on eBay," she explained to buyers.
"Jimbo was supposed to come visit me in a couple of weeks and pick up some of his stuff, but obviously that won't be happening now," she wrote.
"Both of these items have been washed, twice, with Tide extra-strength liquid detergent. Otherwise, they would not be in salable condition. I took them out of GitMo style isolation from a plastic bag in my closet (where they were placed to prevent the ongoing terrorism of my olfactory senses) and washed them out for the purposes of this auction.
"PS: Sorry that my hair is such a mess -- I'm in breakup mode right now and really couldn't be bothered."
I thought maybe he had posted a photo of her under his Wikipedia entry for Bunny Boiler.
I looked to see if he had. ;)
Ha...so that’s what happened. Let’s just say, she’s attractive enough that I’d be happy to go out with her - as long as I didn’t have to use my real name!
Of what? How it screws conservatives?
That is too bad. I have contributed to wikipedia on subjects I am familiar with, though I do not want to begin to get into a pissing match with someone on the site.
Perhaps some good, literate FREEPers can go there and adjust the content... :)
I am not so worried about what liberals say about FR, either. But I do think Wikipedia is fast becoming a resource of note for many: a poor man’s Encyclopedia Brittannica, if you will.
I hope responsible people can keep blatant lies out of the hands of those who use it for looking up information.
RD
So what can be done about this public menace?
One would think if the Senate can spend weeks and weeks talking about steroid use in baseball players, they could take on something like this where many people are being harassed, intimidated, and slandered at once and their personal private information being put out for all to see.
Over 12 thousand for the t shirt now. The sweater holding steady at 530
$12,000?...Maybe Jimbo’s buying it back himself because he left dna on it.
bookmark
FR - .... per official policy, expressed in 2004 by the owner as: "we feel no compelling need to allow [liberals] a platform to promote their repugnant and obnoxious propaganda from our forum. Free Republic is not a liberal debating society." The owner reserves the right to revoke posting privileges and exclude any individual without recourse.
DU - Its membership is restricted by policy to those who are generally supportive of progressive ideals and support Democratic candidates for political office.
Although there is nothing factually wrong with either of the above statements, and although both websites have pretty much the same policies regarding membership, there is a major difference in the slant applied to the essential facts about the membership policies. While FR "excludes" and "revokes" and gives "no recourse" to their victims, DU on the other hand is simply a "progressive" club with an innocuous "restricted membership".
Also note that while FR tosses people they don't like out the door, there is no mention of DU doing that, implying they must have figured out some way of never letting those kinds of people join in the first place.
Yeah, right.
Furthermore, the FR people use pejoratives against their victims like "repugnant" and "obnoxious," but DU's statements regarding membership restrictions must have never, ever, ever, ever contained any negative words about people who they won't allow to join. Or at least not in the time span going back to 2004, which is how far they went to find an FR quote.
Liberal bias & spin like this are so all-pervasive that we miss seeing it most of the time, sometimes even when we're LOOKING for it. The subtle stuff can be especially hard to spot, unless you can manage to do apple-to-apple comparisons of statements side-by-side like above.
A classic example of this:
Report on a political debate, version 1:
The Republican stated ......
His Democratic opponent answered with ....
The Republican answered that with ....
The Democrat answered that with ...
Report on the exact same political debate, version 2:
The Republican claimed that ......
But his Democratic opponent pointed out that ....
Then the Republican claimed that .....
But the Democrat refuted that with ....
membership privileges between the FR and DU articles on Wikipedia:
FR - .... per official policy, expressed in 2004 by the owner as: “we feel no compelling need to allow [liberals] a platform to promote their repugnant and obnoxious propaganda from our forum. Free Republic is not a liberal debating society.” The owner reserves the right to revoke posting privileges and exclude any individual without recourse.
DU - Its membership is restricted by policy to those who are generally supportive of progressive ideals and support Democratic candidates for political office.
So why doesn’t someone go on the web site and CHANGE it? :)
Wow. Google “wikipedia eschoir free republic” and find some wild stuff.
Before he was banned for life from Free Republic, and has a permanent federal injunction against him forbidding any further interference with FR, Eschoir was peeping in the windows of the homes of prominent lady Freepers in the DC area, going through mailboxes and garbage cans, posting whatever he could find, and adding lewd propositions and remarks. In the age of cyberstalking, this can be very unnerving.
He’s a creep. Now we can nail him for violating a federal injunction.
Holy mackeral. Just..holy mackeral.
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