The Original Barnstar
		For your work on the Sarah Palin, I, Brewcrewer, hereby award you with the Original barnstar brewcrewer (yada, yada) 19:37, 29 August 2008 (UTC)

• Every single one of my edits complied with Wikipedia policies regarding reliability, verifiability, and neutral point of view. Indeed, my edits won a Wikipedia award for improving the quality of the article. There was nothing wrong with my edits. There have been over 2000 edits to the article since my last edit, more than half of the text and cites I added remain in the article, showing that hundreds of Wikipedia editors found my edits legitimate.
• There's been a lot of misinformation on NPR and Daily Kos and in this thread. I did not "minimize" the trooper allegations. It's not true that "all of my edits made Palin look better." If someone actually looks at my edits instead of just reading the Daily Kos lies, I expanded the discussion of the trooper allegations, adding many cites including a link to the "smoking gun" Frank Bailey tape. (One of my edits removed a paragraph added about the Monegan firing that was redundant with an identical paragraph earlier in the article. That improved the article. Is it "minimizing" to say the same paragraph should be in the article once instead of twice?) I also expanded the discussion of the paegant competition, adding cites. NPR is simply wrong.
• I am not Sarah Palin. I think it is obvious that I am not the five-month old Trig Paxson Van Palin. I am not a member of Sarah Palin's family, or even Michael Palin's family. To my knowledge, I have never even been in the same room as a member of the Palin family.
• I did not "edit for five hours." I edited for a couple of hours over a five-hour span while I was reading the Internet. The timing was coincidental. I finished reading the Palin biography that day, went to her page, and saw a lot of "cite needed" places and thought I should improve the article and created an account to do so. There is a huge problem with Wikipedia in that editors are rely exclusively on Google and leave out stuff that can be found in books. Is it so strange that a biographical encyclopedia article should include cites to the only book written about the subject?
• Ninety percent of the "whitewash" allegations made in the Daily Kos thread were edits made by other editors. The others are legitimate edits. No one has identified a single edit made by me that violates Wikipedia rules or was inaccurate.
• I was not the person who added the claim that Palin was the vice presidential nominee. A vandal or Palin fan did that, perhaps based on Internet rumors that were going around at the time. The same thing happened on the Pawlenty page, the only difference was that the people editing the Palin page happened to be editing a page that ended up getting a lot of attention the next day.
• No one instructed me to make these edits. No one knew that I made these edits. I did this on my own becuz I like improving Wikipedia articles. I create SPAs precisely for the sort of reason this to-do came up: crazy people making up conspiracy theories wanting to blame the editor for their own problems, and then huge games of telephone where people who don't understand Wikipedia blame one person for every edit that happened to an article. Have you seen some of the threats in the Daily Kos comments? One of my accounts is for editing hockey articles; another for articles about history; another for evolution; and so on. (Unlike Sarah Palin, I believe in evolution.) Forgive me that I want to remain anonymous rather than have my family exposed to one of those crazies or have Daily Kos auditing every edit I've ever made about the Whiskey Rebellion. (I have not actually edited Whiskey Rebellion, that was a hypothetical example. Don't waste time crawling through the contirbutors there.) Correction, this comment made me curious, and I just edited Whiskey Rebellion. Sorry.
• I did not know Palin was the nominee when I made my edits. (According to the Wall Street Journal, McCain didn't make up his mind until Thursday, hours after most of my edits.) If there's a politician out there hoping for appointments who want to hire me to edit their articles, maybe they will have the same luck, but I doubt it. (That's a joke. Again, no one hired or asked me to edit this article.)
• I will acknowledge that I volunteer for the McCain campaign, one of thousands of people nationwide who are working to elect the best candidate for the job. Palin was not the nominee when I made my edits, though I am certainly excited about the selection. I don't believe I have a conflict of interest problem. Even now, Obama supporters and Daily Kos members are editing the article adding a lot of untrue slanders, and no one is tagging their webpages. The article would be one-sided if only Palin haters edited it. Even if I did have a retroactive conflict of interest, the policy just requires that editors comply with Wikipedia policies if they have a conflict of interest, and I did that, as I do with all my edits. But becuz I come to Wikipedia to improve Wikipedia articles and am not in it for the drama, I will retire this account and no longer edit the Sarah Palin page, just as I avoid editing the John McCain page. Thanks to those who defended me against the silliness, and thanks for the barnstar. I will continue to read books and create SPAs to add cites to those books where they can improve articles, and recommend that more people read books to improve articles. Young_Trigg (talk) 07:58, 31 August 2008 (UTC)

I show no remorse because I have not done anything wrong. I did not engage in "bad hand" editing. No one has identified a single edit I made that was substantively or procedurally wrong (I did misspell a cite or two that I corrected). I have not edited Barack Obama's page. I edit pages where cites are needed, where I have read books, and where there are not hundreds of other Wiki editors looking to solve the problem. I don't have any interest getting into arguments over edits, so I don't edit pages where such arguments occur.

Cohen acts like it was suspicious that I started editing the section about Palin's early life and then edited the section about her political biography, but that just simply reflects that I started at the top and continued to the bottom. Cohen also falsely states that my edits were all "flattering," when I cited to multiple edits of mine that were not.

There have been thousands of edits in the last three days, but at least twenty of the cites I added are still on the page, which shows the value I added. (One reason there more aren't there is because my expansion of the trooper section has been moved to another page. The current version on the page is dreadfully unfair to Palin by selectively omitting facts favorable to Palin, like the fact that Monegan denies that Palin ever asked him to fire Wooten. But this is typical for Wikipedia, where Democratic political operatives take over pages and harass any editor that tries to use neutral language, and suffer no consequences or publicity for doing so.)

Fascinatingly, every single cite to Fred Barnes has been scrubbed from the page by left-wing editors, even though Barnes wrote the first comprehensive national article about Governor Palin's political career and term as governor. No one is complaining about that, but it's the real scandal here.

-- Young_Trigg (talk) 13:18, 1 September 2008 (UTC)