Warrior of the week: Cobaltbluetony

Cobaltbluetony is yet another wikiwarrior whose user page says he's on break or vacation. To be fair, it was yesterday that he put on that message, and he hasn't edited today. Let's see how long that lasts. Cobaltbluetony may one day give Teapotgeorge a run for his money on the title of "Butcher of Speedy Deletion."

The thievery of Wikipedia

Supposedly Wikipedia is on a mission to make knowledge free. But thanks to its dishonesty and thievery, Wikipedia is actually causing the cost of knowledge to rise ever higher. According to BBC News, Derrick Coetzee stole more than three thousand digital reproductions of artwork curated at the National Portrait Gallery in England and uploaded them all to Wikipedia. (The article gave his name rather than his screen name).

So what's the big deal? Think about it: when was the last time you had to scan images into your computer? Even with today's scanners, it still takes time and money just to scan in a few snapshots. Consider what it takes to digitize a large art collection. In order to pay for the labor and equipment, the Gallery licensed its high-quality images for reasonable fees. But now that Wikipedia has stolen three thousand of those images, who will pay the Gallery's fees when they can just get them for free from Wikipedia? How will the Gallery be able to afford its digitization project now? Will the Gallery allow even its low-quality images on the Web now? In exchange for three thousand high-quality images, Wikipedia has cost us access to millions of images at any resolution. No museum will want to share its digital files anymore.

Wikipedia's long rap sheet already had libel on it, and now larceny is added. Murder seems less farfetched with each coming day.

How long to the first Wikipedia-related homicide?

"Maybe you're like one of those nuts who forecast the end of the world," someone suggested to me recently. Maybe it's true that the first Wikipedia-related homicide won't happen for a long time. When forecasting death, you kind of wish you'll be proven wrong. But sadly, Wikipedia-related violence has already happened. We'll call him "Ted." Ted fits the stereotype of the typical nerd almost to a T, except he has a girlfriend. Let's say Ted knows a lot about "math."

He got into a disagreement with a little Wikipedia god-king who claims to have a Ph.D. in calculus, we'll say his screen name is "Wiki Authority 45." Even without the example of Essjay, you have to take claims of advanced degrees with a grain of salt. Well, Wiki Authority 45 hired a thug, drove who knows how many miles with the thug, tracked down Ted and had the thug beat Ted up, as Wiki Authority 45 yelled "I am the ultimate authority on Wikipedia. Don't you ever forget that." Ted won't press charges, and he won't let me tell you his story. I don't know if Ted still edits Wikipedia.

But at least Ted has learned one lesson: if you have a webcam on a motorized truck toy, don't let strangers on the Internet operate it! Nor should you ever put your real name on the same webpage as your Wikipedia username! Because otherwise Wiki Authority 45 can track you down and have a thug beat you up.

By the way, how does Wiki Authority 45 have the time to track down those who disagree with him to beat them up and still have time to make dozens of 'contributions' to Wikipedia each and every day? Ted's theory is that Wiki Authority 45 has an undeclared robot patrolling new articles and tagging suitable deletion candidates automatically based on "lopsided binary tree heuristics" or some other technobabble along those lines. Sure it takes skill to program the robot. But to actually write deletion nomination babble takes so little skill that even a robot can do it.

Eusebeus and David R. Floristan, sockpuppets of the same hand

Eusebeus and DavidRF must be sockpuppets of the same sockmaster. About a couple of weeks ago, "DavidRF" declared he was going to go on vacation "from mid August until late August." That account made no edits to Wikipedia between the 14th and 19th. Meanwhile, "Eusebeus" declared no vacation but was similarly silent from the 13th to the 19th. Both accounts pretend to be experts on the subject of classical music, yet I know more about it than either of them even though I only go to classical concerts when the wife drags me along. I learned an interesting tidbit when I tried to sneak out of the concert hall to go to the football stadium: Robert Schumann, the German composer who went crazy when a single G-flat wouldn't stop playing in his head, had in the 19th century what Wikipedia's most vicious idiots would call "sockpuppets:" he called them Eusebius and Florestan. Eusebius represented the cheerful side of his personality, while Floristan represented the brooding, melancholy part. At least Robert Schumann wrote some halfway passable music, and he wrote no ballet music. (Ballet is absolutely the most boring thing ever.) Will the sockmaster of Eusebeus and David R. Floristan
leave anything any man's wife will care to drag her husband along to in a hundred years? Not bloody likely.

By the way to William: I still think Eusebeus is a puppet and not a master. The 'vacation' certainly points to something fishy, but it doesn't rule out that Eusebeus could be a sockpuppet. So either send me more convincing evidence or drop it.

Brutal warrior of the week: Dpbsmith

Dpbsmith hasn't nominated anything for deletion since November 19, 2008. At least that's what he wants you to think. But can you really be sure that a bastard who still so proudly displays a "flower" of Wiki-thanks from 2005 "For making me laugh when reading VFD [Votes For Deletion, what Articles For Deletion used to be called]" would not continue to be energetically involved in Wikipedia's sacred deletion process? No, he must still be strongly and energetically pushing for deleting Wikipedia content. Just not in any way that can be publicly seen.

Least subtle warrior award goes to Toddst1

Recently, Wikipedia user Willi Gers07 was brought to my attention. Toddst1 had tried to tell Willi Gers07 that Wikipedia is not a battlefield. Willi Gers07 dared warrior Toddst1 to "defeat" him right then and there so Toddst1 could concentrate on more important enemies. Toddst1 did exactly that! He deleted Willi Gers07's userpage and blocked him permanently. He then went on to attack more important enemies. Way to prove him wrong by doing exactly as Willi suggested, Todd!

Brutal warrior of the week: Maurreen

A woman can be a brutal wikiwarrior? I strongly doubt it. Maurreen is almost certainly a man. You see, pretending to be a woman can be a little bit like hiding a cannon in an ambulance. It can be a highly effective tactic for disorienting your enemies. And his creation of Wikipedia's "Wikiquette alerts" marks him as one of the foremost brutal warriors. Supposedly, the Wikiquette alerts board is to mediate "impolite, uncivil or other difficult communications with editors." But in reality, Wikiquette alerts are to notify when people disrespect tenured wikiwarriors. The slightest disrespect is subject to tremendous reprisal, and initiating a reprisal through an Orwellianly named Wikiquette alert is just brilliant. Here's a toast to Maurreen: not an amazon, but indeed a relentlessly tough, brutal, vicious warrior of the keyboard.

Brutal warrior of the month: Mastcell

Still supposedly on sabbatical, the viciously ferocious MastCell continues to toil away at Wikipedia. Who wants to bet his sockpuppets are just as active? What a brutal warrior that MastCell is.

Googlepedia

Wikitruth suggested that Wikipedia's massive stupidity might be fixed once it gets bought out by Yahoo, and at the time that idea made sense. But realistically, Google is now a much likelier prospect for taking Wikipedia over and turning it into a respectable reference rather than a battleground for ignorant idiots to fight each other over the color of a template. So: don't donate money to Wikipedia. Allow it to get to such a point that it can't refuse a Google take over. When Google takes it over, it would be nice if it would rename it "Googlepedia," to usher in a new era of actual reference-building, and put all the idiotic fighting in its past.

Warrior of the week: TTN

Some of Wikipedia's most ferociously brutal warriors have the battle scars to prove the vindictive ferociousness of their campaigns. TTN is one such warrior. To date he has been blocked three times: the first for violating the sacred 3-revert rule in an article about a fictional character, the second and third time for the scary-sounding "arbitration enforcement." But don't be fooled, these are all just for show. The second block was just for a week and it was simply allowed to expire. But the third block, for two weeks, was reversed by the blocking admin barely four days after the sentence. This way, Wikipedia's ruling idiots have it both way: they can claim to uphold the supposedly lofty principles of Wikipedia while letting off the true violators with slaps on the wrist, practically love taps.