Tuesday, March 24, 2020

Blind Item #1

There is an ongoing struggle between this B+ list singer with her people and the general population. The singer, who shares the name of a French painter likes to pretend she is four or five years younger than her actual age. A person changes the birthday to the actual date in Wikipedia and her people go in and make her younger. 

23 comments:

J said...

Some old hag.

MyDogSmiles said...

Janelle Monáe?

Do Tell said...

Yes, I thought of Monae too.

Do Tell said...

I don't see what the big deal is, though. These days, as long as you look good, people don't really care how old you are.

Trapped said...

Monae

Freed Weave said...

She's not making JoJo Siwa cringe music... unless she's also a yachter?

hunter said...

Do Tell is correct. Especially being dark-skinned she can surf that wave longer.

I do hate her day-glo teeth.

AListDiva said...

I know Tamar Braxtin is two years older, but I dont believe she shares her name with a painter or is B+ list.

longtimereader said...

Saw her live she is incredibly talented.

Flashy Vic said...

Not the subject of the blind, but back in the late 80s early 90s Liz Hurley was two years older than me. Now she is - at last count - three years younger.

But she looks 15 years younger. God, 60 or not, she is hot though . I'd buck her till I spunked blood.

IndieRaga said...

I read this comment somewhere else too....did you post it anywhere other than here?
What's your age....to calculate hers I meant!

Joe said...

Believe it or not, age does matter in the entertainment industry. Singers over 30 won't get added to pop radio. Older writers won't get hired by TV shows. It is real, so hiding or lying about it is an unfortunately necessity.

notthisagain said...

Monae (Monet)

lol Beyonce is a year older than Gabby Union....and yet her fans go crazy if its even implied (theyre all idiots tho, sooo)

Flashy Vic said...

@Indie Raga, I've posted it on here before, I think more than once, maybe that's where you saw it. Possibly on reddit once years ago? I'm not sure I did though and I gave up reddit eons ago.
I remember when she first came to prominence in the UK she was 25 year old Elizabeth Hurley. I was 23 then. Now I'm 57, she's 54, according to wiki.

But I've always had the hots for her, still do.

Moose said...

Is Monae only a B+ singer though? She’s acted in a number of celebrated movies (Moonlight, Hidden Figures)...

Angela said...

This is a fake blind item, and, once again, I can prove it.

All revisions to a Wikipedia entry can be consulted.

For instance, the newest 100 revisions to the Janelle Monáe entry can be found here.

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Janelle_Monáe&offset=&limit=100&action=history

This covers almost all of 2020. There hasn't been any debate about her date of birth then.

If I go deeper into the past revisions, I've actually found ONE occurrence of someone changing her year of birth from 1985 to 1982, with the reference provided being a result found on Family Search (a LDS website that requires registration).

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Janelle_Monáe&type=revision&diff=929978818&oldid=929953850

It happened on December 9, 2019. A Swiss user, "Aloist" (real name: Alois Treindl) made the change on the page at 8:33am (on my time zone). On 12:58pm, user "Ghmyrtle", who is Welsh and named in real life Guy Hamilton, undid the change with this comment (also found on the revision history page) "Please continue the discussion. As most sources give a different date, the most we should do is a footnote." It's standard operating procedure at Wikipedia. Intel must be corroborated.

"Ghmyrtle" isn't a sock puppet account from Monáe's people with an elaborate fake biography. He's been for 14 years a power user (and probably moderator) at Wikipedia who contributes to and revises numerous entries, totally unrelated to her.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/Ghmyrtle

That was the only change in the last year to her Wikipedia entry.

Now, there's a secondary page for most entries, it's the talk page. That's where discussions happen about the content of a particular page happen (duh...).

Currently, the only issue at hand is about the pronoun to use. Should it be she or they? Yeah, hardly riveting stuff.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Janelle_Monáe

However, this talk page also has a revision history, and that's where the shivering truth comes to light...

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Janelle_Monáe&action=history

Between December 8 and 9, there was a lot of conversation there, where Aloist, identified through his account or his IP addresses, repeatedly tried (27 times in two days...) to push for 1982 as year of birth. Aloist was some kind of a pedant bragging about his credentials as the guy who's written the code to the calculation used in most of astrology software. That's also why he was that vindicative, because at some point Monae posted on Instagram that when she was born, she had Moon in Gemini, which apparently couldn't happen in 1985, only in 1982, that kind of thing.

On the other hand, the moderators were hmmm.... moderate. They let the guy vent out, then explained to him that they would stick with 1985, the most commonly accepted year of birth, based on what they do for the biography of any living person.

Angela said...

(Second and final part)
Here's actually the whole conversation on the talk page (from the December 20 revision), it was then deleted from the talk page on January 25.

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Janelle_Monáe&oldid=931735194#year_of_birth

Someone actually stated in 2012 that she was born in 1982. Then, the conversation went dormant until Aloist suddenly revived it and went all Teutonic about that issue. He even, at one point, started to harass Ghmyrtle by posting comments on his personal page.

So, let's go back to the blind item.

"There is an ongoing struggle" FAKE. All of it took place during two days in December, and it's over.
"between this B+ list singer with her people and the general population" FAKE. It was just ONE SWISS GUY.
"The singer, who shares the name of a French painter likes to pretend she is four or five years younger than her actual age." INCORRECT. It would be three years (1982 vs 1985), and she's definitely not the only person who would have done this.
"A person changes the birthday to the actual date in Wikipedia and her people go in and make her younger." FAKE. Moderators refused the edit (they also reversed a 2018 edit that had her born in 1988), and it happens on a lot of entries for living people. That was not a special favor to her, it's the common rule.

Anyway, before some moron states that I spend too much time here, that I'm a bore, etc., I'll try to spice things up. I give you my word that if you find actual elements that prove me wrong, I'll state my real name and leave this place for good. And you can fucking quote me on this.
And for the record, I'm not a moderator at Wikipedia, nor a Monáe fan. However, I've identified and outed a few people with Wikipedia entries who would try to edit their own page to their own benefit. So, I have some idea of how these things work, and I know that I'm not taking any risk here. And I found it funny to compare the Enty "version" with the definitely boring reality...

Morgan said...

All these incorrect guesses and debate just prove that a lot of this comment section is a bit out of touch with stars of today. This blind is clearly about R&B singer Victoria Monét (i.e., ACTUALLY shares her name with a French painter). She's a frequent co-writer on Ariana Grande's songs, collaborated on multiple songs with her last year, and is continuously trying to break into the mainstream with her single releases (hence: she's B+ list by association with Ariana despite not being noteworthy for her solo career). In addition, her Wikipedia edit log actually shows MULTIPLE instances of "possible DOB change" within the last month alone, and that's without me having to scroll back. Sorry Angela but you were wrong about this being a fake blind :(

Kiki said...

Exactly!

Anonymous said...

If this is Janelle Monae then I really don't understand what She is hoping to get out by doing this.

Because let's be honest here She is not your typical Pop Star and definitely doesn't have a young fanbase so that right there doesn't make sense for Her to do this.

And yes She is starting to Act more & more now but I wouldn't say She is a Huge in Demand Actress.

She's certainly a Working Actress but not a High in Demand one.

So yeah if this Her I'm not sure why She would feel the need to do this.

Simon Jenkin said...

i love how the commenters will pick a name, even though it doesn't really fit, and just run with it or twist it so it does fit. and then that just fuels the skeptical people (of which i am frequently one! so much "insider info" on this site is utter horseshit!) to say "see! this is all fake!" but i still find the site entertaining, so who cares? (angela. angela cares)

IndieRaga said...

Reddit.....After I read about her nephew thingie here! So she's 60 huh?! Much much hotter than any 30yr old Reality'Star'today !
Iam with you on that!

Angela said...

@Morgan

Victoria Monet makes indeed more sense, even if B+ is quite a generous ranking for someone who's never charted so far outside of a single featuring Grande.

There have been a few attempts to change her birth year, and they weren't exactly "consistent".

First one was from an unregistered contributor on March 8. The account changed one of the dates of birth from 1993 to 1989, but only for the box on the right, not for the main entry. The change was reversed an hour by user Binksternet, who is a frequent Wikipedia editor and moderator. There's nothing strange about it. That's what moderators are supposed to do.

Second one was from another registered contributor (no alias, just the IP address), the day after. This time, the year of birth in the box was changed to 1990 while the main text wasn't even edited accordingly. Once again, no evidence provided, no prior contributions from the account that made the change, etc. It was naturally reversed, except that it came from another unregistered contributor 17 hours later. Could be from Monet's side, could be a random visitor who noticed the discrepancy.
Then, an overeager, but fallible, moderator spotted the rollback and reversed it, which, once again, left two different years of birth in two different sections.

After that, there were three or four ongoing adjustments for these two DOBs, from various accounts or unregistered contributors over the next two weeks (that's hardly an edit war). These were sloppy rewrites, that often left out one of the two. And these came for both sides from different contributors that a) weren't registered and didn't have an account (with a proper ID) b) don't have much of a history of contributions c) didn't provide any evidence for the change

It took time, because it's probably a page with little traffic so far, which means that egregious mistakes (the different years of birth inches from each other) weren't necessarily spotted.
In the (provisional) end, the page is back to 1993 for the year. So, kids, if you want to expose Ms. Monét for being an old hag, follow those steps...

a) Register on Wikipedia, and make dozens of valuable contributions to other pages that need work. That will give you some credentials for substantial changes.
b) Find some commonly accessible information that shows it's indeed 1989. Or 1990. (It's also better to make one's mind about it)
c) Change the date of birth at the same time on the two fucking sections (the box at the right and the main text), while also putting as a footnote your reference for the DOB.
d) Expect other people, not necessary paid by Monét, to come with conflicting sources (bio released by the record company, other articles) that support 1993. Fight them if you want.
e) Consider that you've pathetically wasted days of your life for a minor issue few people actually care for (except for step a, as there are many typos on Wikipedia and contributions are much welcomed there).

And the lesson from the Janelle Monáe still applies. Conflicts about a date of birth are frequent and happen to almost every entry for a living person on Wikipedia. Moderators ultimately always rely on documented sources rather than some word of mouth.
Also, when they're still nobodies and get the possibility to shove a few years of age on their official bio, almost everybody will take the opportunity to appear younger (and taller, and slimmer). There are worse crimes in the world, and it's not as if Monét had tricked anybody by having sex with them while she was not legal. Just don't edit your own entry with an old account named VMonet89 for instance.

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