The following fifty accounts have been banned from the Wikipediocracy message board as of December 2014:
wllm (abandoned the site a while ago, but ban him all the same, right?)
Willbeheard (possibly William McWhinney, Wikipedia big wheel.)
TZ9876543210
Tyrenius
tryinghard
Triptych (thrown out, brought back, then thrown out again!)
Tippi Hadron (wife of HRIP7, was fighting with Greg Kohs on messageboard.)
themelinda
The Wife (another old-timer bites the dust.)
Tarc (ditto.)
Stierlitz (even though he has been locked out of his account for four months.)
Sidereal (alleged Wikipedia troll.)
russavia (aka "the Russian airplane guy" on Wikipedia.)
Retrospect
rd232 [addendum: Robin de la Motte of Wikipedia Commons.]
Rathel
Pen
Off2delhiDan [addendum: AKA "Youreallycan" and "Off2riorob", noticeboard pest.]
my two pence
Montoya
mike
MathSci [addendum: banned Wikipedia insider, a nasty person.]
LiquidWater
lightnight
Langston
Kumioko (Wikipedia old-timer; tossed for "personal agenda", whatever the fuck that is.)
Kiefer.Wolfowitz (SWEET JEEBUS, they shitcanned him for "relentless assholery"!!)
kemanan
Kauffner
JohnJ
In the Gulag
Hydrangea
HRA1924
honeypot21
Freddy
Faye Kane girl brain (a real ranter; has Venus symbol in middle of name)
Elissa
Duke Olav III (why?)
Deltahedron
deci
DebbieG
Daniel Brandt (they threw out the GodKing over a "personal agenda.")
Chris
Charmlet [addendum: a teenaged brown-noser.]
bryansee
Bonkers the Clown [addendum: Singaporean kid with an imagination.]
badmachine (Wikipedian; doesn't know why he was booted.)
Analytician
Abd (even though he's been AWOL for months.)
3 to 20 characters
***
Certainly some of these people were crazy, or wankers, or tools. Certainly as a board admin you have to ban people from time to time. But having a secret list, like you are Richard Nixon in 1971, is the sort of chickenshit you can expect from a man who is attempting to run for Wikipedia's Arbitration Committee (aka Jimbo's Kangaroo Supreme Court.)
If the criticism website is as bad as the thing it criticizes, is it even worthwhile to keep it running?
[My sources claim that some of the people listed are sockpuppets of each other, so the journey to Wikipedia behavior is complete.]
Hey sweetie,
ReplyDeleteWould you mind removing my doxx from that list, for my husbeast's sake? I'm pretty sure some of the folks on WP would have him for breakfast if this got out, and, unfortunately, he still cares about the place and thinks it can be improved. Also, could you please delete this post once you've read it? GK may be a flaming misogynist in addition to being many other interesting things, but there are a number of good folks left on WO, and, as for now, it's the only game in town.
Tippi
No.
ReplyDeleteYou haven't been reading this website, have you? We are not playing by Wikipedia's "delete all the child porn before the Feds arrive!" rules....we don't have "nonpersons" or "nonarticles"; unless a comment is spambot gibberish, it stays.
Actually, I have been reading this website. Your post about TGIF was excellent. The rest, not so much, but then again, I'm a rather demanding editor. So, by all means, keep my doxx, if you can live with that decision. My time over there was up anyway, and The Management made a couple of poor choices in the run-up to all this.
ReplyDeleteStill, I wrote some posts on there that made an impact. To find my name on a list that contains some of the worst pests in WO and WP history hurts like hell. I could give you deets on some of the names on that list, but you don't seem all that friendly, and I do have a day job.
For me, participating on WO was never about sides, but about people. WP has no right to hurt its BLP subjects the way it does, as far as I'm concerned. But then, as I found out at my expense, WO isn't that much better. It sure got its share of officious former WP bigwigs who couldn't write their way out of a wet paper bag. But lord it over us writers they did. Oh well. All in the past.
You take care, and good luck with whatever it is you're trying to achieve
Tippi
You misconstrue; I have nothing against you, or your husband. But I am playing by the rules of journalism, and one of the key points in journalism is you do not delete things. You do notify the readers of errors in the next issue or as a tag below the article. Are you asking me to say that the list was wrong, and that you are still a part of the Wikipediocracy messageboard?
DeleteYou have to understand that Wikipedia has been lying about its past from at least 2004, and that Wikipediocracy is following suit. I'm not gunning for you; it's Zoloft I want out. I've never seen a guy run a messageboard like him, outside of that hellscape at Something Awful forums; he is narrow-minded, controlling, and manipulative. He will sink the Wikipediocracy project in the long run, just as Mistress Selina Kyle sank Wikipedia Review.
Just to answer a few of the issues raised above, you're right that some of these suspensions were questionable and a few were unwarranted, but when Wikipediocracy was set up, a conscious decision was made to exclude people on the basis of "near-constant distraction" alone - even though this is similar to what Wikipedia does (they call it "disruption") and therefore difficult to swallow, at least in a philosophical sense. But the underlying idea is that all interpersonal disputes are considered petty and distracting unless they somehow serve to illustrate a larger Wikipedia-specific problem.
ReplyDeleteAs for specifics, Abd is still active on Quora, which clearly is far-better suited for him. Badmachine (aka "Hipcrime" on ED) was a "pre-emptive" suspension, as he'd apparently been active in GNAA, but that one was still dubious. Daniel Brandt's status is the trickiest of all - at the time, he was so relentless in his pursuit of Tarc's identity (and that of one or two others) that we felt he was hurting our credibility and scaring off other members, but still, he was probably justified in that pursuit. Anyway, when Tarc was suspended, we felt it was only fair to suspend Daniel as well - Daniel even agreed with us at the time, believe it or not.
"Duke Olav III" was an alternate account of a perfectly likable member who, after we asked politely, agreed to stick to his "main" account, so that one's OK, I think (and yes, about half the accounts on the list were suspended for that same reason). Kiefer is back, and agreed to lose the avatar/sig that we all felt was needlessly provocative politically, but he's definitely confrontational (though in a mostly-likable way). Kumioko should not have been suspended, but you can't deny that he was a one-note member; WR would have given him a daily posting limit, but Wikipediocracy just doesn't do that.
"The Wife" and Tippi were suspended for essentially the same reason(s); they weren't good reasons, but once you're in the "insider" group the rules change, and not always in a good way. That's true of most forums, I'm afraid. (Hopefully Tippi's situation can be revisited someday soon and corrected.) Finally, Triptych just got on everyone's nerves as he was completely uncompromising, but he could certainly return to the fold once bad blood on all sides has cooled down a bit.
So, all in all, I'd say about 10 percent of these suspensions are unwarranted, but I could see how some might think it was closer to 20 percent, all told. A lot depends on things like ideology, history of interpersonal disputes, and resistance to personal insult in general. I don't expect the situation to change much, but we'll try to reconcile with some of the people on this list, sooner or later.
Good to hear from one of the Masters.....
DeleteSomey, my beef is with the shit way Zoloft dealt with Stierlitz; Stierlitz was willing to walk away for two weeks when things got hot and heavy over the Michael Shermer nonsense AND ZOLOFT THREW HIM OUT ANYWAY WHEN HE RETURNED and at 2am TO BOOT! Stierlitz took screenshots and sent them to me; I've never seen a board operator act so petty, outside of the aforementioned SomethingAwful forums. The guy was thrown out for talking about non-Wikipedia material in the OFF TOPICS forums, which is pure insanity. I think he was curbstomped because he WASN'T a member of Wikipedia, so Stanistani didn't have to fear being screwed with in Jimboland.
I wouldn't be so quick to blame Mr. Zoloft specifically; he's running the board because he's more willing than most (even myself) to implement the wishes of the group, and if he seems inconsistent, capricious, or petty, it's because the group is only as unified as a barely-cohesive bunch of die-hards who don't know each other in person can be, which is "not very." I don't agree with everything he does, and he's definitely quicker on the trigger than I ever was at WR, but again, that's essentially what the group wants.
DeleteAs for Mr. Stierlitz, he was actually a special case, and I myself was as responsible for that as anyone, maybe more than anyone. I'd say your opinion of the matter is actually justified, but anti-atheist content on Wikipediocracy is a hot-button issue for me and (IMO) a clear majority of the insider group, especially when atheism is conflated with pro-science skepticism - fairly or unfairly. We've usually been sort-of willing to grin & bear it when it's strictly Wikipedia-related, but as soon as it strays out of the wikisphere, it quickly starts to piss many of us off.
So, assuming he's reading this, I do apologize for my (and our) lack of forbearance... but even in purely practical terms, we really don't like to make it easy for Wikipedians to pigeonhole us as "pseudoscience advocates" or anything else that smacks of an overarching agenda. I understand that it's technically a form of (non-official) censorship, but anti-atheists also should try to remember that religious people are the vast majority, and they have plenty of other places they can say that stuff. Atheists, OTOH, have relatively few places, even online, where they can feel relatively free from it. (And all that said, the situation is far from irreparable.)
Last but not least, I should state somewhere that my memory of some of these events is by no means perfect, nor am I speaking for the group. I also shouldn't have mentioned Tippi and "The Wife" in the same sentence, above - while the reasons were similar, the situations were completely different, and the loss of Tippi is huge in many important ways... whereas suspending "The Wife" was hardly a loss at all (other than that she added to our advocacy-credibility on the child-protection issue).
You know, I could tell you a few things about the "rules of journalism," but that would likely be entirely pointless. You seem consumed by your dislike for one of WO's admins, and that does not make for good journalism. You have that in common with another WP critic who shall remain nameless, but whose writing seems mostly motivated by his antipathy for one of the founders of WP. I did call that person out on a few things, and was subsequently ousted. The site still profits from the connections I've established, but they now have one less writer. Oh, and I am the writer who put them on the map with the Qworty story. So, please, do talk to me about journalism. Not.
ReplyDeleteAnd Somey, I have the greatest respect for you, but please do not lump me in with "The Wife." That account was run by a troll. I believe I did a little bit more for you people. On the positive side, you still have plenty of officious WP admin-style types to pick up the slack.
Peace out
Tippi
My sometime contributor Doctor Why (who is not Stierlitz) has this to say:
ReplyDelete"Oh look, once again Wikipedia's furious typing is spreading elsewhere
on the web. Accomplishes very little and looks very silly. Why is it
that a serious open discussion of Wikipedia's problems usually becomes
this "Secret Squirrel" crap? None of you are James Bond and I am not
impressed."
If you want to go down that route, please, from now on, address me as Pussy. Pussy Galore, the original fly girl. ;)
ReplyDeleteFor what it's worth, I thoroughly enjoyed Stierlitz's contributions to WO, and banning him was all kinds of stupid, imo. However, I am not sure how much of that was Bill Zoloft's doing. He may have been following orders from on high. Wouldn't have been the first time. Bill may not be perfect (who is?), but he is not the ogre you make him out to be. And that's me speaking as someone who was banned by him.
There are people on WO who have turned petty and bureaucratic into a fine art, people who couldn't see the big picture if it went and took them for a drive in a mint green Corvair at the break of dawn, but Bill is not one of them (and neither is Somey).
I am reasonably sure that if Stierlitz asked Bill to be let back in, Bill would be more than happy to oblige. He's quirky that way, and he's anything but narrow-minded. But would Stierlitz want that, given the way he was treated over there? Then again, grudges. What's the point? Life is short.
Be well,
Tippi
Everything in quotations in my last was from that person, not me; he's having issues signing in.
DeleteI am glad somebody recognizes that throwing out Stierlitz was an awful idea.....what Somey doesn't recognize is that throwing people out of a website opens the possibility that they (or their friends) will start criticism websites. And Wikipedia/Wikipediocracy are a huge conjoined target; only Reddit would be bigger.
It wasn't an "awful idea," it was a necessary evil. Religion (or the lack thereof) is just not our target area, unless for some reason it is. And I do recognize that banning people leads to new websites of a critical (or worse) nature - we all recognize that. But when you've already got the 800-lb. gorilla doing it to you pretty much all the time, you grow a thicker skin after a few years, I guess. It's the nature of the business.
DeleteI've met Stierlitz; he is not religious. He is interested in bizarro stuff, and he hates guys like James Randi because he thinks they are fundamentalists of a very narrow-minded materialism. Because you admitted that you threw him out and not Billy "Monty" Burns, you are now on his shitlist....which is a very bad place to be.
DeleteI dunno, "shitlist" - that sounds like a potential fatwa to me...? I'd say he's quite religious indeed. Maybe I could be the first Wikipediocracy martyr and get it on with dozens of virgin babes in the afterlife. Woo hoo! I can't wait! :)
DeleteSomey, he will track you down and expose you. That's the shitlist.
Delete"Monty" Burns has behaved capriciously at times. If this is due to Wikipediocracy trustees' orders, that should be publicly clarified, and the trustees should reveal their behind-the-scenes roles in questionable decisions. Wikipediocracy's governance system is not sustainable.
DeleteFormer government employee James Somers appears to have been exposed as the Wikipediocracy trustee "Somey." "[G]et it on with dozens of virgin babes in the afterlife. Woo hoo! I can't wait! :)" Clearly, Mr. Somers is a classy fellow.
Finally, someone not afraid to tell it like it is. If there's anything we've learned from the Wikimedia Foundation, the fish rots from the head down. Wikipediocracy replicated Wikipedia's recipe for combining secrecy and power.
ReplyDeleteAs the official Wikipediocracy spokesman, Somey is protecting the brand. I look forward to Stierlitz exposing him. It's well past time.
You have a few details wrong. More importantly, you are essentially correct.
Someone mentioned an essay I wrote on gender categories, so I posted a copy for reference. I was then immediately banned from Wikipediocracy. It's a perfectly innocuous essay. You can see it here: http://www.conservapedia.com/User:PeterKa/Filipacchi. Apparently, the long arm of Hachette Filipacchi Media tracked me down.
ReplyDeleteThis comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteI've been poking through this blog, and answering a few questions. I won't address the list of banned people, except to note that the phpBB software has a list in the banning function, so I don't need to keep track.
ReplyDeleteI do think it's petty to doxx banned people here when you're objecting to another board's behavior. That's collateral damage, not journalism.
As far as why I ban anyone, very few are my sole decision. Any member banned who wasn't a raging asshole (posting child porn, gore, threatening members, etc.) could conceivably return.
I am the predominant advocate for banned people being 'unbanned.' We don't put them through the 'grovel and confess' ordeal that Wikipedia does. Usually we just ask them to stay on topic, and try to be polite.