Etcetc

Goodbye Wikipedia!

For the first time in five years of editing I found myself blocked, if only for a day. Both the blocking admin and the one who declined to remove my block refused to provide me with links to policy that justified the block in the first place. They insisted that my reference to another user who has been suspected of sockpuppetry multiple times by multiple people constituted incivility, despite no such indications been revealed in policy. They insisted that this "incivility" further constituted a personal attack of the disruptive nature, despite the fact that wiki policy specifically distinguishes between disruptive and non-disruptive personal attacks, and no indication has ever been given as to why my statements would be considered one or the other. One of the admins even censored my comments on a talk page and claimed that their action was supported by policy, even though the very same policy page they referred to stated that such censorship is highly controversial. But all of this is just a matter of a couple petty admins who are, for whatever reason, unwilling to fully inform themselves of the issues and instead substitute the time and effort required to inform oneself of a situation in order to solve the problems with uninformed and brute adherence to policy. And then they profess faith that such blind conformity to vague and general policies will solve the problems for them. Gotta love bureaucrats. =)

The deeper problem is that wiki procedures to deal with those knowledgeable enough to game the system are very weak. The anarchism pages have been under near constant attack by the same petty individual who uses multiple proxies to change identity for years. When one of his identities is found he creates a dozen more. Unfortunately, there is a general feeling amongst wikipedia users that this individual is easy to spot, because all of the banned sockpuppets he uses have the exact same editing style and disregard for the rules. However, like racial profiling, these banned sockpuppets only serve to reinforce faith in a flawed method. That a sockpuppet is easy to catch by their behavior does not indicate that the individual behind the sockpuppets is unable to change their behavior on a some accounts, even while continuing to push through the exact same edits on both "amiable" and "hostile" accounts. That this exact tactic was revealed more than a year ago by the individual in question makes it fairly obvious it is being employed.

Multiple checkusers, sponsored by multiple people on separate occasions, have failed. Most admins simply move on after banning a new slew of sockpuppets every few months. Those editors who have taken painstaking efforts to gather the evidence required to demonstrate the undeniable link between the "amiable" sockpuppets and the "hostile" sockpuppets have repeatedly found ourselves ignored by admins either too overworked, too apathetic, or too lazy to even bother reviewing it properly. That I cannot even reveal the identity of the individual in question without being threatened with a ban by these admins just serves to demonstrate how impossible it will be to deal with this problem given current attitudes, policies, and procedures.

That I would be banned for daring to point out what is already obvious to everyone involved, that the "amiable" user is in fact a meatpuppet and in all likelihood a sockpuppet, and then have my ban confirmed by yet another admin, is one straw too many for a back long since grown weary from the constant edit wars that have destroyed the topics I've worked so hard to improve. I can only hope the admins who've been unwilling to do their job in protecting these articles from vandals don't someday find their own work destroyed for years by a single, persistent, semi-knowledeable, individual.

So good luck wikipedia, I hope the best for you and no hard feelings. =) Etcetc 22:58, 8 June 2007 (UTC)

Do I look familiar?

If I remind you of Revkat or Kevehs thats cause I am. Feel free to peruse their edit history as my own. (ack, I forgot about blahblahblahblahblahblah, that was me too) I didn't change accounts to be sneaky, but rather cause I lost my password twice and was being stalked once.