I am catherine yronwode, also known as cat yronwode. I am editing in the folklore, magic (paranormal), magic (illusion), occult, jug band, and blues music sections at the present time, and dipping into any page where i think i can help. I live in Sonoma County, CA with my Beloved.There is a page about me at Wikipedia (which i did not create!) due to my work as a writer and editor in comic books, gardening, folklore, and other fields. More information on me can be found at my home page
I regularly copy-edit random pages and sometimes contribute to articles and their discussion pages under an IP address. I sometimes take wiki-breaks due to having other requirements on my time or because editing for Wikipedia ceases to be fun for a while.
My husband has his own Wikipedia account and edits from the same IP address that i do, for obvious reasons.
Our IP addresses have varied over the years as we have changed ISPs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/67.180.143.131 ("Old 67" - from 2006 -2013)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/70.36.137.19 ("Seventy" - from 2013 - 2013)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/75.101.104.17 ("Seventy-Five" - from 2013 to present)
If you wish to contact me and do not get a quick response via my talk page, you may email or telephone me at my work site, the Lucky Mojo Curio Co., which can be found on the world wide web.
I joined Wikipedia on February 22, 2006.
 |
What is Wikipedia?
editI see a cascading series of failures of human decency here: The horrific Poetlister / Slim Virgin debacle and especially the clearly worded attempts to shush it up for the sake of Wikipedia's reputation (and the clearly worded instructions to allow the culprit to "slink off" rather than to expose him, so similar to the mentality that lay behind the Catholic pederast priest scandal); my brief time spent reading Wiki Review, Encyclopaedia Dramatica, WikiTruth, et al; and my reading of the pages on previous MEDCABs, ANIs, RfCs, and so forth, pointed out to me by helpful readers -- all of these make clear the multiple failed attempts by editors to put a stop to the incivility and ownership and cabalism of people who are trying to negatively impact important portions of Wikipedia. I am now convinced that MEDCAB, ANI, and RfC pages are utter time-wasters. I hold out little hope for ArbCom, either.
My thinking turns to the view that, contrary to the slogan "Wikipedia is not a Battleground," Wikipedia IS a Battleground, and that it was designed that way and is being played that way by a bunch of gamers. It's a MUD or a Dungeon where the premise is "Let's build an Encyclopedia." It is structured upon the storyline that "editors" are needed, and it sucks in a lot of high-minded writers who tend to be a little lonely and would love to have occasional text exchanges with others interested in whatever obscure topics interest them ("Hi, Danny! Wow! I couldn't help but notice that you took your nym from a book by the poet Kenneth Patchen! Cool!") -- but we, the writers, are just cannon fodder or _targeted Red Shirts, while the REAL players at Wikipedia are those who know that it provides a shoot-em-up free-fire zone where people can take on anonymous personae and tear apart our writing (called "editing" by the gamers) on any class of thought or belief with which they don't agree.
We set the words up; they take them down. They award themselves points. They promote one another to high offices. That's the game.
To this end, complaints from hard-working writers that they are being treated with incivility are ignored, while the writers themselves are given the run-around. ("You need to develop a thicker skin." "Go ahead, just take a Wiki-Break." "Have you tried Wikiquette alerts?" "Why don't you try MEDCAB?" "This isn't a MEDCAB issue; try Dispute Resolution." "This is unlikely to be resolved; take it to ANI." "This is too long for ANI; take it to RfC." "This isn't an RfC matter; take it to ArbCom"). Meanwhile, the uncomplaining writers who leave in sorrow, confusion, fear, or disgust are said to have "retired." Nothing must interfere with the Battle.
I could say more, but i think you understand my point. No, i take that back. I have no idea if you understand my point or oppose it or are snickering with laughter right now. You are just another anonymous nobody here, and the fact is that you and your Wikipedian comrades are either writers who have thanklessly provided thousands of hours of good writing for _target-practice or you are one of the real patrons, the shooter-boys, just hoping to find a handy _target.
If i "retire" now, another writer-geek will take my place, and the Battle can go on . . . and on . . . and on.
catherine yronwode Catherineyronwode (talk) 03:23, 12 September 2008 (UTC)
Child Pornography is to Wikipedia as Child Sex Abuse is to the Catholic Church
editAnd I am sick of both of them.
catherine yronwode Catherineyronwode (talk) 06:12, 18 May 2010 (UTC)
Qworty
editLook up Qworty in the archives of google news for May 2013. The man made 13,000 edits at Wikipedia from 2006 (or earlier) to 2013 under a vast swath of fake user-names, many of them aimed at removing the bios of living authors.
Robert Clark Young -- Qworty -- was on a mission of revenge and effacement of information, His corruption of the encyclopedia fell into two major fields that i know of -- revenge-edits against those who had been his colleagues and were now his perceived enemies in the "writers workshop" community, and deletions of the bio of any author whose topics included metaphysical, magical, occult, divinatory, or Neo-Pagan subject-matter.
In carrying out his intention to remove information from the Wikipedia database, he diminished the biography articles about his victims either by attrition and effacement (removing relevant biographical details from the biographies) or by calls for complete deletion of the biographies on the basis of the subjects' non-notability. Deletions at Wikipedia require discussion, and during the ensuing discussions, he himself, under dozens of pseudonyms, voted to "delete."
His deletions, he claims, never broke any of Wikipedia's rules, except, of course, the rule against sock-puppeting, which he easily evaded, and which Wikipedia has never actually been able to enforce in a systematic way. After admitting his multi-year career of destruction of data, he justified it by calling it a piece of "performance art."
Wikipedia administrators claim that they have undone Robert Clark Young's spurious diminishments and deletions of hundreds of biographical articles. They claim he is permanently banned. I believe this is untrue on both counts. I think they are trying to whitewash the situation. Unless he confesses, they will have no way of knowing how many user-names he fabricated here, so they can never undo or "fix" all of the effacements and deletions he perpetrated. Additionally, it is known that he used multiple IP addresses, so unless Wikipedia's administration looks at and revisits the deletions of all "workshop" writers, all popular novelists, all occult and metaphysicial writers, and all Neo-Pagan writers from 2006 to the present, they will never be able to undo the damage that Robert Clark Young did to the encyclopedia. Furthermore, he is still here -- several of his spurious accounts are still active and can be used whenever he has access to those IP addresses. And even if all of his accounts were deleted and banned by IP address -- every single one of them -- he can come back at any time from a new IP address with a new user-name and continue his destruction of information.
Robert Clark Young has destroyed thousands of helpful, well-intentioned edits made by sincere writers, which means that all their time in Wikipedia was wasted and held hostage to his whims. His nasty and uncivil expressions of contempt against other editors -- and against the subjects of the biographies he was deleting by sock-puppet committee -- are well known to the administrators here, and examples have been widely published in the press. He did not attempt to conceal his hostility to the writers whose biographies he was diminishing or deleting.
The fact that for at least seven years Robert Clark Young was not censured or banned for his uncivil language (or for the fact that he made uncivil comments under so many pseudonyms, creating a spurious "community" of anti-occult and anti-Pagan incivility at Wikipedia) has led editors like myself to abandon Wikipedia on the basis that it is too biased against certain topics to be a meaningful project. In short, to those whose work on biographies has been continually tagged as relating to "non-notable" writers, Wikipedia seems not to be an encyclopedia of knowledge but an agenda-driven source of ideologically-vetted information, in which certain topics and certain writers are considered "non-notable" due to their content, regardless of their actual standing in the wider media and publishing world. The fact that ONE MAN might be responsible for most of this appearance at Wikipedia is alarming. The reason for it is obvious: anonymity.
I think it's time for Wikipedia to face the serious problem of sock-puppetry -- not just reactively, by having administrators deal with IP checks (which are very, very difficult to request, by the way, and which obviously failed to work at all in the case of Robert Clark Young) -- but by requiring an external source of verification of unique identity. Paypal, for instance, does this fairly effectively, by requiring a separate linked bank account number for each named account. Facebook does it with less success by requiring a separate phone number for each new account. Wikipedia requires NO IDENTITY CHECKS. I can edit from any IP address i want and i can make as many accounts as i want from as many IP addresses as i can visit.
For instance, i could go to a friend's house and ask to "check my email" on her computer, then create a "sleeper" Wikipedia account from her IP address and use it to insert libelous, spurious, deletionist, promotional, pornographic, or otherwise non-useful information into the Wikipedia database every time i visited her.
I could do the same from a series of internet cafes (as happened in the Slim Virgin scandal of harassment cited above).
I could do it while visiting family, while on vacation, or while attending professional conferences (as i suspect Robert Clark Young did).
I could open email accounts with dozens of competing isps, and each one would assign me a different IP address.
None of this is difficult to do. It simply requires intelligence, patience, and planning.
Intelligent, patient, and well-planned sock-puppetry is undetectable by Wikipedia despite administrative claims that there are special "checkusers" who have access to the special "checkuser tool" that can identify sock puppets. Claims of powerfulness aside, all those tools do is check IP addresses and time-stamps, which is the same technique employed by every phbBB forum admin when looking up trolls on a home-made forum site.
Outwitting a checkuser probe (or a phpBB forum user probe) is easy and simple. All it takes is a good memory for persona-creation and time of posting (or a personal log, if one's memory is insufficient) and a long-term plan of attack.
If sock puppetry is so easy, simple, and undetectable, why don't many more people use it, either for personal gain or as part of a program of disruption?
Well, actually, the only two reasons NOT to do it are ethical-moral social self-regulation and a lack of motive.
Robert Clark Young seems to have had no ethical-moral social self-regulation and he obviously felt he did had a motive for corrupting the Wikipedia database and destroying the work of his fellow-editors.
How many more like him will it take before the Wikimedia Foundation wakes up and realizes that this extremely popular site is built on sand and not on a firm foundation?
Please, editors, speak up for the integration of some form of identity verification system at Wikipedia. Anonymity leads to abuse, and systematic abuse is destroying public and private faith in the value of this project.