I wouldn't be surprised if there were an element of this. There was a pretty big brouhaha about GG a few months ago, and I'm sure there are latent grudges there. That's another big thing on Wikipedia that you don't hear about much: a lot of people are carrying huge grudges against other established editors. An apologist might argue that it provides an element of content vetting, but it still really fucks up the atmosphere for newbies.
It's actually also bad for established people. Think about what happens on Tumblr when you misgender someone on accident. You can spend years living down a mistake. Even good people will show less confidence in you. It can and has driven established people to leave the project.
Some of the current thinking, especially among the more progressive in the project, has been that having established people leave the project isn't necessarily a bad thing. They argue, with some effect, that the thorny nature of some of Wikipedia's people has driven away untold scores of possible experts in the name of keeping out quacks and advertisers.
Jimbo Wales and Eric Corbett is one of the bigger ones recently. Corbett actually sparked off a firestorm by using the word "cunt" in a discussion once (he didn't actually call someone a cunt directly, which would probably have gotten him blocked, but the way he used it was still pretty shitty). This one woman, Carol Moore, who has since been banned, flipped her shit for a variety of reasons (there was a slightly smaller freakout between her and someone called Sitush, with both of them being published authors carrying their offline grudge into Wikipedia).
Anyway, Corbett (formerly known as Malleus Fatuorum) is an amazing content creator. And I mean amazing. Lots of people seek his input when they want to get an article featured. Wales, for those not in the know, is the founder of Wikipedia (or co-founder, depending on who you believe). He apparently called out Corbett when giving a keynote last year, though not by name, when announcing that Wikipedia has to move away from being so oppressive to outsiders.
I seem to recall that Corbett had actually been told not to comment on Wales' user talk page (which has over the years been something like a complaint board, though Wales rarely comments) after some incident. Corbett at one point had taken to talking shit about Wales, which rubs a lot of people the wrong way.
One of the big issues has been the question of whether Corbett is too big to fall. He has a lot of supporters, and a lot of people who hate his guts. He's been a nonstop drama magnet for years. Some argue that he represents the "old guard" system, where people who create content are by and large exempt from rules concerning civility, while inexperienced users get indefinitely blocked for being similarly insulting. They claim that his continued presence on the project is evidence that it's becoming a private club, where only the qualified may edit, etc.
Corbett's position seems, in essence, to be that while he's rude at times, he does genuinely produce good content. His supporters argue that his removal from Wikipedia would be a massive loss, and that while he's made some mistakes, it's more often than not people with grudges against him who stir him up and push him to losing his temper.
From what I've seen of Wikipedia, I think Corbett's supporters are closer to the truth than his detractors, but I also agree that the project as it is does a lot to drive away experts who aren't used to online rudeness. The problem with Wikipedia is that it's trying to go from just being a website to being a legitimate information source, and the people who would need to contribute are used to the simpering flattery that goes on in academia when publishers and editors court them for their contributions.
I was telling chat about this e-mail I got a couple of other days out of the blue. Keep in mind I haven't edited Wikipedia in months, and I don't even remember editing the article in question:
Jan 23 at 11:24 AM
I see.
Well, I no longer edit Wikipedia and I don't recall being particularly involved in the Perverted Justice article when I did. My advice would be to make your suggestion on the talk page and start a dialogue to move consensus toward the change that you believe is most accurate, backed up by secondary and tertiary sources.
Best of luck!
Best,
Holdek
Sent: Friday, January 23, 2015 9:36 AM Subject: Re: Wikipedia email
It was a suggestion on how to change the Perverted Justice article, I would change calling the groups Perverted Justice targets pedophile advocate groups to allegedly that.
On Jan 23, 2015, at 6:32 AM, [REDACTED] wrote:
Who are you and why did you e-mail me this?
--Holdek
Sent: Tuesday, January 20, 2015 7:49 PM Subject: Wikipedia email
Since Perverted Justice has a broader definition of pedophilia than is customary, I do not know if we should take its word for it that the groups it agitates against advocate pedophilia. Perverted Justice on its website defines pedophilia as sex with anyone younger than 18, they stopped at 15 because the age of consent in some states in the USA is 16, while 15 is at least a misdemeanor in all states. A 14-15 year old would be outside the age range a true pedophile would be interested in. I don't want to change it myself though, because an abrasive editor got angry at me for trying to.
Oh wow. Here's another fun one that I didn't know had come to a head. I mentioned somewhere around here that the Wikimedia Foundation had started doing terms of service-level bans of editors (i.e., kicking them off all Wikimedia projects without any community input or oversight). One of these bans had been leveled at someone who was an alleged pedophile. Well apparently another went through recently.
The case of Russavia is interesting. He was banned from English Wikipedia by the community quite some time ago, like over a year. The interesting thing is that Russavia was an administrator on Wikimedia Commons, and continued to actively participate there, as well as campaign for his unbanning on Wikipedia. The campaigning by and large failed, so Russavia started evading his Wikipedia ban and kept doing it. They'd block him, he'd change IPs, and continue. He was contributing good stuff, but he was still evading his ban, and it pissed people off.
The problem is that the admins on Wikipedia can't do anything on Commons, and the admins on Commons aren't going to enforce Wikipedia sanctions on Commons. Rules-wise, they're considered separate communities. So Russavia kept participating at Commons and evading on Wikipedia.
Well, it looks like the Foundation finally dropped the hammer on Russavia by "globally locking" his account. This is just fancy Wikipedia talk for a ban from the Foundation. It's usually really hard to get one levied: it usually requires cross-wiki vandalism that can't be addressed effectively by local admins. Russavia, like many long-term users who get banned, had a lot of supporters. And they've been flipping out over it.
I went to this page once specifically because I wanted to see what kinds of autism people had spewed onto it, and I found a gold mine. I'm going to check the furry one too. But holy shit, let me show you some magnificent classic sperging from the good old days: Administrator brenneman vs. a fanatical autistic diaperfag named DaveyBlue who just won't give up.
Now, Wikipedia is known for some high-level autism. This is par for the course. What you are about to see is no different from its usual faggotry, but is in fact quite a bit funnier because it involves diapers and persecution complexes, which are both inherently hilarious.
First, let's examine the obvious: the content from the discussion page for the now defunct ABDL (Adult Baby/Diaper Lover) article. Apparently, it was a big shit heap to begin with, and people like brenneman (who was actually a pretty okay admin some of the time) said it was total crap written by autistic fetishists. Some people took it as a kind of persecutory behavior that the article on their lifestyle was being downsized, but fortunately most of them had the sense not to get diaper rash over it.
But one brave man had something to say about the repression, and his name was Davy Blue!
As you read through the lines after lines and slowly process them, you gradually begin to realize that Davy Blue has combined his wikipedophilia with a sense of persecution and an intense fascination with dirty soiled diapers. Moreover, he is not just proud of his fixation on diapers; he feels himself to be a martyr for the great cause of giving grown men the freedom to wear dirty filthy diapers in public places, and sees brenneman as the dastardly Nazi foe trying to oppress his diaperkin into concentration camps forever.
(Also, go here to see what they talk about in between the above two pictures, because it's pretty funny in its own right)
At this point, a white knight fellow diaper masturbator appears. And he is very angry.
Then OrbitOne, in his anger, makes this immediately after brenneman's reply:
And then immediately after that section, this densely packed field of autism is created:
We can now gather that brenneman edits infantilism articles too much to be innocent of being a diaperfag, but we will forgive him somewhat because he is the only remotely relateable character in this retarded tale.
OrbitOne vanishes into the tubes, but meanwhile, brenneman has been hard at work crafting a masterpiece of spergwin on Davy Blue's talk page.
Davy, however, does not take it so well.
Can you feel the sexual tension? They're probably dying to get into each others' diapers by this point.
And now Dave removes his veneer of civility and accuses brenneman of being the kind of person who burns niggers alive for fun. I think that it is his way of denying his obvious sexual feelings for brenneman. I wish this was a soap opera.
brenneman is what makes this whole thing work so well. It wouldn't be nearly as funny if it was just two hysterical spergs having a catfight. But no, it's this idiot repeatedly threatening and insulting what amounts to an emotionless, overly rational brick wall that spams him with rules every time he posts.
Oh yeah, I forgot, Davy has some past history with brenneman too. He's obsessed with remaking that ABDL article, which I think gives his character a lot of depth and mystique that it otherwise wouldn't have had. For example, he tried to remake it under different names, and brenneman just redirected them to the infantilism article every time. Example:
And let's not forget the revelation of Davy's traumatic beginnings with the deletion of the ABDL article all the way back in July, when he compared its deletion to ethnic repression.
But now it's all coming to a close. The loose ends are being tied up! The series finale is drawing near! Davy is so mad at brenneman that he starts spamming the arbitration request page with demands for them to delete brenneman, who, just to remind you, is one of the wikipedia brass, whereas Davy has made like 30 edits total at that point and most of them have been autistic as fuck. To make it even better, he doesn't even make his own title for it, he just co-opts someone else's discussion and inserts his own demand:
No.
But like all good things, the lulz must end eventually.
And I guess he got banned or something because there are no more posts after August 12th.
The official response is completely unilluminating: it was for good reason, and that for equally good reason they cannot tell us why.
Some speculation says that it has to do with harassment. I've poked around Wikipediocracy (which is a pretty big off-site Wikipedia criticism forum, though the guy who runs it is no less autistic than the Wikipedia community himself, the big difference being he tried and failed to make money off Wikipedia) and found a lot of speculation.
One of the claims is that Russavia was the guy responsible for the Pricasso painting of Jimbo Wales, and that this is a bit of retribution that has been a long time coming. (Pricasso, for those not in the know, is a guy who paints with his penis. He did a portrait of Jimbo Wales a few years back. Wales was not amused.)
The general consensus over there, though, is that it's probably related to something that's been a long time coming, and that it's just now that the Foundation is getting around to cleaning house because they got someone competent enough to get all their ducks in a row to make it effective.
Is he the one that invented a fake Siberian language and went full-blown autistic trying to get added to wikipedia? I think I remember reading about him.
There was the whole mess about bronies trying to give Fallout Equestria its own Wikipedia page and to include it alongside the My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic page. I'm really stupid with how Wikipedia works so I don't know if discussion is saved or archived somewhere. Bronies tried to defend it for multiple reasons including FO:E being 'quality' literature, FO:E being popular on the internet so it has enough recognition to get its own page and a lot of other reasons. Wikipedia put its foot down and decided it should not have its own page. Now it's just mentioned within one sentence of the fandom page.
The most hosed up thing about it was that it attempts to be an explicit retelling of Fallout with ponies. The fanfic is full of excessive gore and even rape. If you wanted to showcase your fandom, you want to show THAT crap to a general audience?
Okay, I'm getting a grasp on who's involved but not the concept itself. Is it just the tenets of Marxism with all the economic principles stripped out? If so, why do tumblristas care? Identity politics doesn't sound like "forced equality" to me. Is it solely a pejorative term for stuff the right-wing doesn't like or are there self-identifying cultural Marxists? Is the "gamergate involvement" just an overlap in the same shitty people from both sides screaming at each other? And what do the actual Marxists think of this? Have they picked a side or do they even not care?
Actually, this might all be derailing. I'm inclined to believe blackie toy, that it's just generic wikipedian autism more than anything to do with the actual topic and the types of people who care about it. But I could be wrong.
It's just using the loaded term "Marxism" to denigrate an unrelated idea. Well, the two ideas are related insomuch as they both exist on the left side of the political spectrum. That's it.
It's like the Nazi term "Jewish Bolshevism." In order to scare people into hating Jews even more than they already did, they added in the communist element.
There was the whole mess about bronies trying to give Fallout Equestria its own Wikipedia page and to include it alongside the My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic page. I'm really stupid with how Wikipedia works so I don't know if discussion is saved or archived somewhere. Bronies tried to defend it for multiple reasons including FO:E being 'quality' literature, FO:E being popular on the internet so it has enough recognition to get its own page and a lot of other reasons. Wikipedia put its foot down and decided it should not have its own page. Now it's just mentioned within one sentence of the fandom page.
The most hosed up thing about it was that it attempts to be an explicit retelling of Fallout with ponies. The fanfic is full of excessive gore and even rape. If you wanted to showcase your fandom, you want to show THAT crap to a general audience?
Fallout Equestria fans are pretty much an entire thread in themselves due to the sheer amount of stupidity emanating from that entire pile of filth which grew limbs and tried to stab the pile of filth that it spawned from.
Is he the one that invented a fake Siberian language and went full-blown autistic trying to get added to wikipedia? I think I remember reading about him.
I don't think so. My understanding, actually, is that the Pricasso thing was what ultimately got Russavia kicked off Wikipedia. He had been a long-established and pretty decently respected editor before that; trying to add fake stuff like an invented language really isn't something I can see an established user doing, at least not without it spelling the end of their involvement on the project.
The problem with Wikipedia is that it's trying to go from just being a website to being a legitimate information source, and the people who would need to contribute are used to the simpering flattery that goes on in academia when publishers and editors court them for their contributions.
They don't need "simpering flattery," they just need to have the fact that they are experts respected by people like Randy in Boise. Wikipedia is asking experts to contribute content, for free, that is only made possible by the sweat equity that goes into acquiring expertise. This is already going to turn off 90% of experts, primarily because they don't see Wikipedia as a serious project when any 12-year-old with an Internet connection can come by and reverse/otherwise fuck up their contributions.
There was the whole mess about bronies trying to give Fallout Equestria its own Wikipedia page and to include it alongside the My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic page. I'm really stupid with how Wikipedia works so I don't know if discussion is saved or archived somewhere. Bronies tried to defend it for multiple reasons including FO:E being 'quality' literature, FO:E being popular on the internet so it has enough recognition to get its own page and a lot of other reasons. Wikipedia put its foot down and decided it should not have its own page. Now it's just mentioned within one sentence of the fandom page.
The most hosed up thing about it was that it attempts to be an explicit retelling of Fallout with ponies. The fanfic is full of excessive gore and even rape. If you wanted to showcase your fandom, you want to show THAT crap to a general audience?
Heh, I remember hearing some reference to a Sailor Moon character, and knowing nothing about Sailor Moon, looked it up on Wikipedia. This character had her own article consisting of pages and pages of content, about her powers, what color she was in different worlds, along with caveats, and all sorts of autism I've since forgotten.
I was appalled.
So I deleted about 75% of the article (which was unsourced anyway). Someone probably got butthurt and reverted it though.
They don't need "simpering flattery," they just need to have the fact that they are experts respected by people like Randy in Boise. Wikipedia is asking experts to contribute content, for free, that is only made possible by the sweat equity that goes into acquiring expertise. This is already going to turn off 90% of experts, primarily because they don't see Wikipedia as a serious project when any 12-year-old with an Internet connection can come by and reverse/otherwise fuck up their contributions.
I would respectfully suggest that this is hardly the place to discuss issues with the Wikipedia project generally, much as threads about Chris and mace are hardly the right place to discuss whether imprisoning criminals is a good idea. The people on Wikipedia themselves devote more than enough autistic argumentation to how to address the expert retention problem, and how to balance it out with retaining people who are expert editors. People who are experts in a subject are rarely themselves expert in writing encyclopedia articles. Both are needed to write quality articles. We aren't going to cover any new ground here.
I was telling chat about this e-mail I got a couple of other days out of the blue. Keep in mind I haven't edited Wikipedia in months, and I don't even remember editing the article in question:
Jan 23 at 11:24 AM
I see.
Well, I no longer edit Wikipedia and I don't recall being particularly involved in the Perverted Justice article when I did. My advice would be to make your suggestion on the talk page and start a dialogue to move consensus toward the change that you believe is most accurate, backed up by secondary and tertiary sources.
Best of luck!
Best,
Holdek
Sent: Friday, January 23, 2015 9:36 AM Subject: Re: Wikipedia email
It was a suggestion on how to change the Perverted Justice article, I would change calling the groups Perverted Justice targets pedophile advocate groups to allegedly that.
On Jan 23, 2015, at 6:32 AM, [REDACTED] wrote:
Who are you and why did you e-mail me this?
--Holdek
Sent: Tuesday, January 20, 2015 7:49 PM Subject: Wikipedia email
Since Perverted Justice has a broader definition of pedophilia than is customary, I do not know if we should take its word for it that the groups it agitates against advocate pedophilia. Perverted Justice on its website defines pedophilia as sex with anyone younger than 18, they stopped at 15 because the age of consent in some states in the USA is 16, while 15 is at least a misdemeanor in all states. A 14-15 year old would be outside the age range a true pedophile would be interested in. I don't want to change it myself though, because an abrasive editor got angry at me for trying to.
Guy might be socking. There's at least a suspicion of it voiced by Flyer22. I forget where I ran into Flyer before, but I don't recall the interaction being pleasant. I suspect if that editor stays around much longer he'll wind up at SPI or ANI.
The e-mail is odd but not crazy. Crazy is the e-mail I got from a guy I encountered at ANI some months ago, whose harassment of inexperienced users earned him the reinstatement of an indefinite block. Not only did he feel the compulsion to get in the last word, but also felt compelled to quote a line from fucking Starcraft: Brood War to sound hard. I never laughed so hard in my life.
