Brutal wikiwarrior of the week: Gwen Gale

An excellent example of Wikipedia's hostility of experts is exemplified by the way Arthur Rubin was treated in 2008. The renowned mathematician was blocked eight times in about as many months. Two admins blocked him twice, one of those being Gwen Gale. You look at Gwen Gale's user page, and, surprise, surprise, it's protected! Who protected it? The last one was Gwen Gale himself. (I seriously doubt Gwen Gale is female, but I could be wrong). The blog "Gwen Gale Revealed" identifies her as female; regardless I must agree with that blogger's characterization of Gwen Gale as one of the worst administrators. Gwen Gale is also a notorious sockpuppeteer, surely, and I surely wouldn't be surprised if Gwen Gale reported as sockpuppets users who actually only use one account. Also, any Wikipedia users who displays as many barnstars (Wikipedia's idiotic equivalent to military medals) as Gwen Gale does must have surely earned them through diligent wikiwarring. Which makes it all the more ironic that Arthur Rubin was once blocked by Gwen Gale for edit warring.

Warrior of the week: Dravecky

Dravecky has a very healthy proportion of article edits, well over 80% compared to talk page edits, user page, project pages, etc. Still, I can't escape the feeling that Dravecky has sockpuppet admins and sysops to do his dirty work.

Warrior of the week: Epbr123

Epbr123 is a sysop whose main obsession is dealing with vandalism from users who are not logged in. However, it's quite telling that the top link on his user page is "Category:Candidates for speedy deletion." The next two links are pages of recent edits by new users and recent edits from IPs. He has a healthy proportion of edits to articles, but his constant monitoring of requests for adminship is surely the mark of one of Wikipedia's most viciously brutal warriors.

Better sources of information than Wikipedia? Try the library!

Supposedly Wikipedia is dedicated to the ideal that "information should be free." Now, we know that that really isn't Wikipedia's purpose, but I'll expound on that in other posts.

Even if Wikipedia really was dedicated to that stated ideal, the fact is that information just isn't free. You always have to pay something for information, and it's not always necessarily money. In the cases that you do pay money, it might not be money that you pay directly to the information provider (as would be the case if you have a subscription to Encyclopedia Britannica's website).

You pay money to your local public library in the form of taxes. It's time that you started taking advantage of it. Any general knowledge question you might have can be answered by a trip to your local public library. To not use your library would be like shelling out money for information and then not using the information you're given.

Besides, consider what is the true price of using information from Wikipedia: your credibility. If you have credibility, that's too valuable a thing to pay just for the illusion of convenience Wikipedia provides.

Warrior of the Month: CRGreathouse

The great martyr CRGreathouse is still martyrizing himself! 'Nuff said.

Vicious warrior of the week: Antandrus

The block log for Antandrus is very fascinating reading, so I will quote it verbatim here:

• 02:59, 2 December 2008 Antandrus (talk | contribs) unblocked "Antandrus (talk | contribs)" ‎ (whoops)
• 02:59, 2 December 2008 Antandrus (talk | contribs) blocked Antandrus (talk | contribs) (account creation blocked) with an expiry time of 24 hours ‎ (vandalism)
• 16:16, 20 December 2005 Antandrus (talk | contribs) unblocked "Antandrus (talk | contribs)" ‎ (oops, need coffee :-()
• 16:15, 20 December 2005 Antandrus (talk | contribs) blocked Antandrus (talk | contribs) with an expiry time of 3 hours ‎ (vandalism, warned)
• 06:02, 1 December 2005 Antandrus (talk | contribs) blocked Antandrus (talk | contribs) with an expiry time of 1 minute ‎ (want to see what the block page says and read the instructions; also see how much text this reason box allows; for instance, does this entire long line make it in?)

So, he's blocked himself thrice and unblocked himself as many times. What could possibly be the reason for such a game? Simple: to educate himself for the purpose of operating his admin sockpuppets more efficiently! But at this point I can only say for sure that Antandrus has sockpuppets with admin privileges, but I have no idea what the user names are. I am far more willing to wager that the non-admins DavidRF and Eusebeus are sockpuppets of Antandrus.