Rome Viharo re-emerges....

 For the uninitiated, Rome Viharo was/is Wikipedia's Abused Stepson, the guy who tried to balance the BLP ("biography of a living person" to spell out the Wikipediaese) of Rupert Sheldrake which was being loaded to near-libel by the Guerrilla Skeptics, was kicked out of en.Wikipedia, then "earned" a very stupid article on RationalWiki, to which Viharo ran a blog trying to explain the mess titled Wikipedia, We Have a Problem (2013-2019). Viharo unfortunately let a renewal slip and the URL was taken by the Wiki/RationalWiki psychos. He is now on Medium discussing what happened.

Related to all this is something that Dyskslyver posted to the WikipediaSucks messageboard:

WWHP wrote: ↑

Thu Dec 23, 2021 11:33 pm

Well I did have a straight confrontation with Wikipediocracy.

Unfortunately, despite receiving a notification on WPO, this thread only just now came to my attention because I don't use the internet enough these days to receive timely updates. The WPO thread is currently locked, nevertheless I would like to respond to what you directed at me specifically in your WPO post dated Dec 21, 2021.

WWHP wrote:You're a rationalwiki editor right? You are aware of Oliver, right? Well because you are a rationalwiki editor, and you know Oliver, and I know you know who I am, I am holding YOU personally responsible for that article about me on that platform.

You know that is wrong, why don't you change the article? Why dont you ask for it to be removed?

Do you support rationalwiki conducting harassment and misinformation campaign against personal targets?

Apparently, you do

There are several questions here. Firstly to "You're a rationalwiki editor right?" I can confirm that I was a RationalWiki Editor prior to April 2021 with the usernames D and Judge Dredd. However, I am no longer involved with that project.

Secondly, to "You are aware of Oliver, right?" I can confirm that I most certainly am, since I was the one who banned him from RationalWiki in the first place, I have furthermore suffered substantial interactions with him on multiple boards where I have commented on his antics extensively.

You wrote; "You know that is wrong, why don't you change the article? Why dont you ask for it to be removed?" and to that I will simply say this, your article was a low priority, hidden among the countless other hit pieces written by the same author. When I failed to gain the upper hand on the author, the articles survived unscathed.

To give some context. When I was elected to the RationalWiki Board of Trustees in 2020 I quickly discovered that nobody actually runs the website, the owner, Trent Toulouse, logs on twice a year to collect donations and pay the hosting service. Every so often David Gerard organises someone to update the website software on an ad-hoc basis without board involvement. The main email contact for the foundation is generally not read, and there is no internal communication regarding any mails received, most of which are binned, assuming the email address you are using even receives mail at all, which they normally don't due to being broken. The foundation website was last maintained by a now banned user. The board has forgotten to file critical legal documents so many times that there is a backlog reaching back to 2013 and it's questionable if the board will ever catch up given that they meet twice a year for an hour and all board matters are conducted in that time.

A short time after I joined the RationalWiki Board of Trustees, I became involved in a high level dispute with the community regarding my decision to unilaterally exploit a configuration error in the edit filter, to check the IP addresses for all suspected sockpuppets of Oliver D. Smith, Michael Coombs, and Abd ul-Rahman Lomax. This exercise was inspired by Abd giving me a large amount of behavioural analysis on Smith, asserting that Smith was operating a "good hand, bad hand" approach where the bad hand was an impersonation of one of his enemies. I found through technical analysis that this appeared to be true, the majority of blocked accounts attributed to Abd, Mike, and Smith were infact all operated by the same person. Smith had also impersonated several other people he'd written about on the site, resulting in them getting banned, thus pre-emptively closing a means of complaining about his articles.

The majority of the board was not amused by this exercise, and unanimously voted to remove me from the board at the beginning of their next meeting, citing misuse of technical access to user data. I was also forced to give up the 'tech' role and thus lost sysadmin access to the site, resulting in Smith resuming activity. I thereupon became involved in an action to ban formally Smith and Abd from RationalWiki, this succeeded, but it gave Smith a forum to air opinions and he was successfully able to influence other editors to informally ban me shortly after. Smith himself is still actively maintaining his articles with an army of new sockpuppets. In the meantime I stopped bothering, it doesn't affect me personally and I have better things to do than try to regain standing on that project.

Short of taking legal action against Trent Toulouse, your article will persist on RatonalWiki as long as the site remains on the internet. The web of manipulation and lies runs far too deep for any editor to be able to delete it even if they were so inclined, the mob would ensure that such an action was quickly reversed. There is no oversight of the editors, they do as they please in a form of direct democratic consensus, so complaints to the board will remain fruitless. In short you are fucked.

****

It is absolutely insane that RationalWiki is that poorly run. But then, Wikipedia suffered a memory wipe in 2006 or 2007 and everything had to be pieced together out of salvaged stuff over a VERY long weekend, so that's where David Gerard learned his rickety "online skillz" from. Click and read those links above and see the horror for yourselves.....