The Cop and the Spaceman Call it Quits

We had a choice after the last post: either continue detailing awful Wikipedians [a reference to Ekman, this post is that old], or write about Commons pedophiles. It's summer and Strelnikov would rather write about  these gawdawful people than discuss the brotherhood of Marc Dutroux. What is interesting in both of the following cases is that they both quietly quit in the recent past.

The Long Dorky Arm of the Law

Tiptoety is almost too well-known to write about; he has a page on Encyclopaedia Dramatica (though it isn't up to date). Tyler Van Wormer is his true name; during his seven and a half years on Wikipedia he posed as an adult police officer even though he was in high school when he started being a Wikipedian in May 2007. The truth was that after 2008 he was a cadet officer at the Multnomah County Sheriff's Office, which meant he was wandering the outskirts of Portland, Oregon as a sub-trainee. All of Tiptoety's actual additions to Wikipedia were either about Oregon law enforcement or the Sheriff's Office he "worked" out of. What made him useful to the regulars during the post-Essjay collapse/reshuffling of the deck was that he was the ultimate catspaw; he did anything the powerful people asked him to do. Such as this 2008 blocking of four accounts as sockpuppets of Anti-Gorgias, who "turned out" to be Herschelkrustofsky (Daniel Platt). If it was or if it wasn't, Platt was banned before, thanks to the edit war over Lyndon LaRouche (notice that Will Beback was involved in the blocking). Here he is "indefinitely blocking" Jennavecia (now Indubitably) in 2009, which was overturned. He also liked undoing good edits done by banned users, just because he could. He became an unlisted clerk in Sockpuppet Investigations sometime in 2008; there is no record as to why he was allowed to be an unlisted clerk nor why they needed an unlisted clerk. It seems they "let the cop be a cop" even though he wasn't a cop.  He went through the Request for adminship process three times (first, second, third) before he made it in early March of 2008. He could get away with this because he would block all access by a user in dispute before the user could post a formal complaint, so there are few actual complaints about his doings in AN/I, 3RR, or SPI. His style of action is common among the worst patroller types and Wikipoliticians. You can see this in his block of Boodlesthecat, which was part of the Polish antisemitism battle that was raging at the time. (We need to write about that.)

Once he was in as part of the Admin crew, Tiptoety went further and became an Arbcom clerk in April of 2009, ran for checkuser power in 2009 and 2010, making it in May, 2010, even though he only had a positive vote of 64 percent. Five years pass and in September, 2015 Van Wormer is sent a reminder to sign a confidentiality agreement on "non-public information." He ignores it. Gets another notice in October, "please sign this by the 15th of December." Out of nowhere on November 4th, 2015, Tiptoety just up and quits, resigning his adminship and advanced permissions, leaving this note: All is well (not planning on leaving forever, not disgruntled). I simply don't have the time I once did for Wikipedia and don't want my idle account to sit around with so many advanced permissions on so many projects. Thanks for the kind words, User:Tiptoety 10:48, 4 November 2015 (UTC). Why?

Thanks to the anonymous poster below the "secret" is out that Tyler Van Wormer is a campus cop in Oregon. I'm not going to link to the place, anyone can now do a simple search; we've had issues with people showing up to "doxx" Wiki-admins over at the Wikipedia Sucks! board, and I'm not going down that road. But back to Van Wormer - all I can think is that he got his campus cop job sometime after 2012, didn't want to answer questions from co-workers who found the Dramatica article, so he quit Wikipedia, rev-deleted the stuff on his userpage (which itself has vanished) and began forgetting. This post won't let him.

Douglas Adams Would be Ashamed

We don't know his real name, but Beeblebrox (possibly of Homer, Alaska) was a definite nominee for "Asshole King of Wikipedia"; that clown blocked more than 2400 users from 2009 to around 2013. Little to nothing is known about the actual person behind the handle Beeblebrox, which is the name of the erstwhile President of the Galaxy and starship-stealing two-headed alien Zaphod Beeblebrox from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series of satirical novels. All we can say about the Wikipedia "Beeb" was that he was about 40 years old, possibly worked some sort of customer service job, and may have been a videogamer.

Beeblebrox showed up five months after the Essjay scandal in 2007, doing minor gnoming of random articles in August of that year, mostly removing things he disliked. He liked copying articles he worked on to edit them offline, then pasted or retyped the "improved" versions back into Wikipedia. That "technique"  increased his statistics immensely, though the clod was a heavy misspeller. Did I say that he likes to write the word "fuck" in edit summaries? Well, he does. He tried a Request for adminship in May of 2009 through self-nomination and it utterly failed. According to here, it fell apart over a nasty thing he did to the now-banned Bambifan101: "He put a "suspected sockpuppet" template for Bambifan101 on an IP editor's talk page with the edit summary "you little shit, stay off my talk page"." So claimed Scott Martin (Hex aka Scott) on the Wikipediocracy messageboard, March 20, 2013. We can't find the evidence now, of course - things like that seem to continually vanish. He would do incredibly stupid crap like claim that Gavia immer, one of the good editors and well-known to boot, was a vandal. As a very poor joke, he did the same to Drmies (Michael Aaij) a few years later in February, 2013: "You have been blocked from editing for a period of forever and ever for being an evil vandal who fooled us all for years, before finally revealing your bad intentions today. Bad Drmies. Go to your time out corner." He did another RfA in August, 2009 and was successful. In that Request he wrote the following: As the owner of a small business, I have personal information regarding my coworkers (I've never liked to think of myself as the boss, we work as a team) including their criminal and driving records. I am also privy to sensitive information regarding our clients, up to and including their home addresses, medical and mental health conditions, medications they take, when they come and go and who they are with when they do so, and sometimes other details that I don't need or want to know. I have to keep all this information to myself, and make sure my coworkers do the same, and have been pretty successful at doing so for the past nine years. In 2000, I also worked for the United States Census Bureau as an enumerator, a person who goes door-to-door finding people who did not fill out a census form and convincing them to fill one out right there on the spot with me. Obviously, this entailed a lot of sensitive information about my neighbors, which I had to listen to, record for posterity, and then forget all about it and never mention it anyone lest I be fined thousands of dollars and thrown in jail. So I'm pretty darn comfortable with keeping other people's personal information to myself." If the above is true, then this is all we truly know about that man from his own admission.

The notes I have on Beeblebrox are twice as long as the ones on Tiptoety and are heavy on quotations because the Alaskan liked sticking his foot in his mouth a lot. He is so infamous, he was discussed on Wikipedia Review, the aformentioned WO-MB thread, this "electric universe" forum, and a page I had to pull up through the Wayback Machine. There was even a now-defunct Facebook page dedicated to following the antics of MuZeMike, AussieLegend, and Beeblebrox. What I have decided to do is publish all of these quotations, fights, and other nonsense as a separate post, the first for September 2016.

His user talk page claims he is taking a long "wikibreak", but he resigned his checkuser and oversight powers on May 7, 2016 and has not been seen since. If he returns we will change this post to reflect that.

                                               A fitting song for the subjects of this post.