Tuesday, March 30, 2010

Vicious warrior of the week: Phil Sandifer

Phil Sandifer is a textbook wikiwarrior. His pie on WikiChecker is about three quarters devoted to the Project, Help, MediaWiki and Portal namespaces, while the slice for articles is barely an eighth, if that.

It is also worthwhile to note that Phil Sandifer became a sysop in April 2004, and it was in August 2004 that he launched a dastardly attack on User:Orthogonal which led Orthogonal to get tired of Wikipedia's crap and leave the project. The "request for comments" regarding Orthogonal's alleged lack of good faith and failure to resolve a dispute started out in high melodramatic fashion, with Phil Sandifer the poor martyr accusing Orthogonal of trying to come up with a new Wikipedia policy specifically as an attack on him. Soon after Phil Sandifer's sock attack poodle certified the dispute.

I could go on, but this particular litany of melodrama is getting very tiresome. Still, it is important to be aware of such things, because that's how things are decided on Wikipedia, whether it's a matter of personnel or of determining the factual validity of something.

1 comment:

  1. Really? Dastardly? I'm almost honored.

    Although really, I still qualify? I made 16 edits in the six months before you posted this. If I was the most brutal warrior of the week, it must have been a week of extreme pacifism.

    Also, I suspect that Fennec, a former arbitrator, would be surprised to find out that he's a sockpuppet of mine.

    In any case, thanks for providing some amusement when I Googled myself. It'd been a while since doing that made me laugh this hard.

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