Wikipedia

There's a brief article on a fellow called Judd Bagley in wikipedia, and there's an "Articles for Deletion" page on Bagley as well.

I find myself in an odd position here, because something I wrote has apparently been cited as one of the reasons why Judd is notable enough to warrant an encyclopedia article of his own.

Editor Phil Sandifer wrote, "Bagley is involved in a financial scandal with coverage in the New York Post, New York Times, Bloomberg, and the HedgeWorld Daily."

Well, I wrote the last of those. In fact, Bagley is mentioned exactly three times in the pages of HedgeWorld, and each of those three times the byline is mine. Here's one of them.

But I don't think he warrants a wikipedia entry of his own. He's worth the sporadic mention he gets because of his position as "director of social media" at Overstock, a company I've mentioned more than one here I think.

I might as well mention, though, that Susan Antilla, a finance journalist, wrote a column for Bloomberg in February of this year on what she called the "bizaare battle against naked shorts" being waged by Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne and Mr. Bagley. The gist of the column was that although Mr. Byrne is "pro at creating havoc [he] isn't so good at creating profits," as indicated by Overstock's history.

This Antilla column generated an odd response from Mr. Bagley on the InvestorVillage message board. He referred to Dennis H. Leibowitz, founder of the New York hedge fund firm Act II Capital LLC, as Ms. Antilla's husband. He also said that this provides "a wee bit of context" on her column -- he left, and I think he meant to leave, the implication that the Leibowitz/Antilla marriage is itself a microcosm of a broader hedge fund/financial media conspiracy.

On March 14, on his AntiSocialMedia web site (which Mr. Bagley appears to maintain of his own initiative, outside the scope of his employment at Overstock), Mr. Bagley acknowledged that he had read on another web site or blog that Ms. Antilla and Mr. Leibowitz are divorced. He responded, "I went on to spend about 10,000 moments online searching for evidence of that divorce, yet found no record of the dissolution of the Antilla-Leibowitz union. In fact, I'm on the verge of advising Ms. Antilla to ask her divorce lawyer for her money back."

The divorce lawyer in question can keep his fee, though. The records of the Family Division of the Superior Court for the State of Connecticut in Stamford clearly show that Ms. Antilla filed for divorce on Feb. 2, 2005. The marriage was formally dissolved Oct. 31, 2006, months in advance of the Bloomberg column that drew Mr. Bagley's effort at that "wee bit" of contextualizing.

The nature of social media is such that Mr. Bagley was soon directed to this document, and backed down from an impossible position, acknowledging the divorce.

People outside Mr. Bagley's own limited social circle seem to mention him chiefly in conexts like that -- contexts in which he made demonstrably false assertions. Hardly a sufficient reason to give him a wikipedia entry of his own, IMHO.

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P.S. Subsequent to my composition of the above, the Bagley article was in fact deleted from wikipedia, pursuant to its Afd procedure.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Judd_Bagley_%282nd_nomination%29