The Spoonkymonkey Story
by John Doe Number One
Way back in 2013, Wikipediocracy members investigated the activities of a Wikipedia user known as “Qworty.” That led to a blog post here and two articles on Salon, and attracted quite a bit of attention on Wikipedia itself. To make a long story short, Robert Clark Young (aka Qworty and other sockpuppet accounts) was an author who was rather blatantly using Wikipedia to promote himself and attack his enemies. It was a high-profile case, one that Wikipedia might have been expected to learn something from.
As you will see, it didn’t.
Warren Kinsella vs. Mark Bourrie
Before I tell you about Spoonkymonkey, let me tell you about something that happened well over a decade ago. It isn’t very interesting, but it will be important later in our story. In 2006, two minor figures in the Canadian political media were having a spat. Political strategist Warren Kinsella sued Mark Bourrie, a journalist, author, and blogger, over something Bourrie had said about Kinsella during his time working for Canada’s Department of Public Services and Procurement. The whole thing blew over fairly quickly though, and never went to court.
Since Bourrie posted the lawsuit on his own website, we know that part of the lawsuit was related to Bourrie’s alleged editing of Kinsella’s biography on Wikipedia. The whole thing boiled over on Wikipedia in August of 2006 with an unrelated Wikipedia user starting a case with the Arbitration Committee about the editing of the Warren Kinsella article. It closed with Wikipedia user Arthur Ellis being restricted to a single account and banned “from Warren Kinsella and articles which relate to Canadian politics and its blogosphere”. During an Arbitration Committee case about Canadian political commentator Rachel Marsden, Arthur Ellis was found to have violated his ban; after being blocked for a week, the account was later blocked indefinitely at Arthur Ellis’s own request.
That block didn’t slow down Ellis’s editing, though. The account was formally banned by the Wikipedia community in February 2007 for repeated sockpuppet editing of Rachel Marsden’s article. The Kinsella case page lists years’ worth of blocks placed on Arthur Ellis sockpuppets, stretching into 2008. There is also a connection made to the Arthur Ellis account in a 2009 sockpuppet investigation regarding a group of sockpuppets which were focused almost exclusively on Canadian climate scientist David Suzuki.
(“Arthur Ellis,” by the way, was the pseudonym for Canada’s last hangman, Arthur B. English. The Crime Writers of Canada named their annual award after him – it’s a fairly prestigious award if you’re a Canadian who writes true-crime books, as Mark Bourrie has done on occasion.)
Enter Spoonkymonkey
In February of 2008, a new user account called Spoonkymonkey was created, whose first edits were to the David Suzuki talk page. By May of that year, Spoonkymonkey made his first edit to the Rachel Marsden article, and in June 2008, he wandered over to Warren Kinsella’s biography for the first time. For all intents and purposes, this “new” account seemed to have the same interests as Arthur Ellis. You’d think that after two Arbitration Committee cases, someone would be watching those pages closely. And after dealing with so many Arthur Ellis sockpuppets, shouldn’t administrators have protected those pages from editing by ordinary users?
Spoonkymonkey was a steady, but not prolific editor. He seemed to stop editing in the summer of 2014 but reappeared in the fall of 2018, and all told, he’s racked up about 3,000 edits over the years. His four most-edited articles are Warren Kinsella, Mark Bourrie, Mike Duffy, and Rachel Marsden. (We’ll discuss Duffy below). His sixth-most-edited article just happens to be the biography of Warren Kinsella’s father, which he tried to have deleted – twice.
It should be noted that the second-most-prolific editor on the Warren Kinsella article is none other than Arthur Ellis. Coming in at 20th place is Arthur Ellis sockpuppet Stompin’ Tom. On Mark Bourrie’s article, Spoonkymonkey is the top editor and Arthur Ellis is second.
Mark Bourrie’s Wikipedia history
Let’s talk a little bit about Mark Bourrie’s history with Wikipedia before we break out the pushpins and red string. The Mark Bourrie user account was created in January 2006; that account’s first edits were, of course, to the Warren Kinsella article. In one posting to Jimmy Wales’ talk page, he complains about the Rachel Marsden article and signs himself “Mark Bourrie M.J., PhD (cand), Dept of History, University of Ottawa, Canada.” By the end of February 2006, Mark Bourrie had already been blocked three times for edit warring and blanking Marsden’s article. In March, he asked that his username be changed to Ceraurus. (Ceraurus, by the way, is a type of trilobite.)
Mark Bourrie/Ceraurus nominated Rachel Marsden’s article for deletion on March 4, 2006, but the discussion was quickly closed. On March 7, an account called Isotelus renominated it. (Isotelus, by the way, is another type of trilobite.) That request was also quickly closed, but not before someone accused Isotelus of being the same person as Mark Bourrie/Ceraurus. A checkuser investigation confirmed that Isotelus was indeed Mark Bourrie/Ceraurus and all the accounts were indefinitely blocked. (Incidentally, a third deletion nomination of Marsden’s article was made in December 2006, by an account identified as a sockpuppet of Arthur Ellis.)
Although Arthur Ellis denied being Mark Bourrie/Ceraurus in the June 2006 checkuser case, by July the connection was deemed “likely” by a checkuser. In August, seven Wikipedia Arbitrators agreed that “there is substantial evidence” that the users (and numerous sockpuppets) were one and the same. If that’s true, Mark Bourrie is not just an indefinitely blocked user, he is also under Arbitration Committee sanctions and “community banned” (as Arthur Ellis).
The Mike Duffy connection
Mike Duffy is a Canadian senator and former television journalist. In 2015, Duffy was on trial over misuse of government money, and during the trial it was revealed that Duffy had (through an intermediary) paid Mark Bourrie $500. In 2009, Duffy had asked Bourrie to, in Bourrie’s words, “do some research work on how to deal with troll posts on the Internet.” According to media reports of the trial, Bourrie helped Duffy get insulting comments removed from various websites, including Wikipedia.
Duffy was ultimately acquitted of the charges, but there was some fallout for Bourrie. Even before his testimony, a Canadian news blog, Canadaland, published the revelation that Bourrie (a political journalist) had been paid by Duffy (a politician). Bourrie published a rebuttal on Canadaland, challenging the claims of its author, David Akin.
It isn’t clear how Mark Bourrie approached his task of getting things changed on Mike Duffy’s Wikipedia article, or if he was successful. In fact, apart from some anonymous IP vandalism in the early part of 2009, there really wasn’t much editing of either the article or the article’s talk page. If Bourrie approached Wikipedia by email or otherwise, no result is apparent from the article’s history. In May of 2009, however, Spoonkymonkey removed three paragraphs critical of Duffy. One of those paragraphs was about a ruling by the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council that Duffy violated Canadian broadcasting codes and ethics. Although it had multiple sources, Spoonkymonkey returned to remove it again and again. And again. It does not appear in the current version of the article.
Just days after the Canadaland pieces were published, someone editing under just an IP address tried to have David Akin’s Wikipedia article summarily deleted. When that didn’t work, they attempted to start a deletion discussion. The very first edit from that same IP, which geolocates to Ottawa, Canada, is worth examining. The IP editor posted to the discussion page of Warren Kinsella’s article, claiming to be Mark Bourrie. Recall that by then, Bourrie was indefinitely blocked on Wikipedia and should not have been editing at all, even as an IP. Recall also that the Arbitration Committee had connected the Arthur Ellis account to Bourrie and it was not only banned from Kinsella’s article specifically – and Canadian politics generally – but also banned from editing by the Wikipedia community. The IP continued editing though, including 33 edits to Bourrie’s own article, and… one edit to the Spoonkymonkey’s user page. Oops.
More recently, in January 2019, Spoonkymonkey gutted Jesse Brown’s biography. This comes soon after an attempted hatchet job by an account named Midlandino. Both Spoonkymonkey and Midlandino made similar changes to the Canadaland article.
Someone appears to be holding a grudge.
Mark Bourrie is a great guy!
Mark Bourrie is a very accomplished man; he’s a journalist, professor, lawyer, and author. He has written for the Midland Free Press (Wikipedia article created by Spoonkymonkey). He helped launch Blacklock’s Reporter (Wikipedia article also created by Spoonkymonkey), and he wrote a book about prospector Viola MacMillan (again, Spoonkymonkey). And as mentioned above, Bourrie is a trilobite enthusiast – just like Hit Parader magazine editor Andy Secher (yep, Spoonkymonkey).
Bourrie began working for the Chinese news agency Xinhua beginning in late 2009 or early 2010. Spoonkymonkey removed sections critical of Xinhua from their Wikipedia article in July of 2010 and again in September of that year. (In 2012, Bourrie resigned because he felt that he was being asked to gather intelligence for the Chinese government.)
Along with all his other accomplishments, Bourrie also appears several times on Rachel Marsden’s podcasts as an expert in both censorship and propaganda. Just recently, Spoonkymonkey removed quite a lot of sourced material from Marsden’s Wikipedia entry. If you thought that issue had been settled a decade ago with the Marsden Arbitration Committee case, you were wrong. And if you thought the Arbitration Committee would take the obvious steps to prevent the dispute from continuing like this, you were wrong again. As Warren Kinsella said, Bourrie’s “unusual Wikipedia preoccupation with Rachel Marsden… could be the subject of an important psychological study.”
Around the time of Bourrie’s testimony at the Duffy trial, political reporter Kady O’Malley was asked what Bourrie’s Wikipedia user name was. She replied, “I have a vague recollection someone suggested it was Spoonkymonkey.”
It’s clear that whoever Spoonkymonkey is, he shares a lot of the same interests with Mark Bourrie, and the same enemies. (We should also point out that nothing Spoonkymonkey has been doing on Wikipedia is illegal, despite what some Wikipedians might have us believe.) And by the way, here’s a really odd thing – Spoonkymonkey and Bourrie also have very similar taste in tables. Here’s a photograph of a trilobite uploaded to Wikimedia Commons by Spoonkymonkey. And here’s a photograph of a trilobite from Bourrie’s trilobite site. Weird coincidence, eh?
What happens now?
If history is any guide, Wikipedia editors will read this report, someone will poke a checkuser, and a few blocks will be handed out. A few articles may get protected temporarily. Nothing will be done to prevent the same thing from happening again to these very same articles, let alone a different set of articles.
What should be done? The same thing that should have been done when Qworty was exposed. First, acknowledge that there are people who use Wikipedia to attack other people, sometimes for years. Second, acknowledge that every biography is a potential target for this. Third, protect every single biography of a living person with the existing pending revisions system. Fourth, ensure that every new biography gets protected this way by an admin-bot. Fifth, fully and permanently protect articles that are obvious problems (like Rachel Marsden’s).
All of these actions could be done right now, with only a modicum of effort. And while none of them directly address the sockpuppetry issues, they would go a long way to cut down on cases like this going forward.
