Wikipedia's Most Brutal Warriors

Dastardly warrior of the week: CactusWriter

2010-08-24T14:42:00.000-07:00

Most vicious Wikipedia warriors have much more edits to user talk pages and deletion vote pages than they do to articles. CactusWriter is an excpetion to this, but that's because he does most of his vicious work through his many sockpuppets.

Relentless warrior of the week: Daniel Olsen

2010-08-17T14:39:00.000-07:00

This week's brutal warrior plagiarizes the work of more skilled photographers and passes it off on Wikipedia as his own. For shame, for shame!

Vicious warrior of the week: Crazysane

2010-08-10T14:33:00.000-07:00

Crazysane may be a little of the latter, but certainly a lot of the former. Supposedly he was or is an Information Assurance Security Officer in the United States Army. I bet he's also won the Medal of Honor. Lucky for him, the Stolen Valor Act has been declared unconstitutional. All free speech is protected, even lies and drivel. He may not really be a warrior in real life, but he's certainly a warrior on Wikipedia.

Dastardly warrior of the month: ChristTheDude

2010-08-04T14:45:00.000-07:00

For the vicious warrior of the month this month I had to go with the guy with the Christ complex. Pure and simple.

Brutal warrior of the week: Bibliomaniac15

2010-08-03T14:26:00.000-07:00

He's hoping that by his username you'll be fooled into thinking that he actually cares about and does something about holding Wikipedia to a high academic standard of bibliographic sourcing. In reality, what Bibliomaniac15 is really a maniac about is his various deletion battles, and his eagerly enthusiastic blocking of new users for silly reasons.

Crybaby of the Week: Ten Thousand Argonauts

2010-07-28T09:10:00.000-07:00

Wah! Wah! Yahoo! Answers Nihilsock Ten Thousand Argonauts is crying us a river. In response to a college professor desperately trying to get his students to stop using Wikipedia, the man thought he might get some hints on how to that. Instead, he gets accused by a sock of being a sock of someone who disagrees with that sock.

So, the most productive way is CLEARLY to create ever more dozens of sockpuppets on Yahoo! Answers to ask questions about how Wikipedia is evil, COMPLETELY 100% FACT-FREE, and going to hypnotize you before it slurps up your brain through a straw. Oh, and be sure to always give another one of your accounts "Best Answer" so that they all dominate the "Top Answerers" list.

But wait, you're doing that already, aren't you?

This satire is too thinly concealed to be particularly DELICIOUS.

Yes, folks, this guys a BIG FAT PHONY. Take my advice before he uses all his other accounts to thumb this down into oblivion.

The Nihilsock's satire is also too thinly concealed. But it is delicious.

Wait a minute, though: it is the Nihilsocks who actually dominate the Top Answerers list in the Wikipedia category: Nihiltres with almost 400 last I checked, and Nihilsock Wikipedia Answers a distant second with almost 200. It's taken Eddie (a Wikipedia Review sock according to various Nihilsocks) years to reach third place now just short of 150. "Wikipedia Review socks" My Wiki Business, Bill and Moses are on the board but still well short of even a hundred.

And another thing: Wikipedia is not "completely 100% fact-free" nor do the "Wikipedia Review socks" claim that it is. Part of the reason Wikipedia is so dangerous is that it does get a few facts right, mixed in with lots of lies, and people just assume it's 100% correct.

Dastardly warrior of the week: Anthony Appleyard

2010-07-27T14:14:00.000-07:00

He may have a "Random Acts of Kindness Barnstar," but make no mistake, Anthony Appleyard is one of the rudest, most vicious Wikipedia warriors. An unearned metal medal costs very little, and an unearned virtual medal costs nothing at all.

Vicious warrior of the week: ChrisTheDude

2010-07-20T14:11:00.000-07:00

It's not uncommon for Wikipedia sysops to have a Christ complex. One of the most well-developed such complexes belongs to User:ChrisTheDude. But dude, for a Christ he sure is stuck in the Old Testament: eye for an eye, consequences be damned! His brutality, viciousness and cutthroat savegery knows no bounds.

Brutal warrior of the week: Ranjithsutari

2010-07-13T14:05:00.000-07:00

Supposedly Ranjithsutari is an Indian user of Wikipedia. Don't fall for it. He's really as white as they come. This relentlessly brutal warrior can't be bothered to welcome new users in a friendly manner, but still wants the appearance boost of doing so, so he uses an automated tool to get this chore out of the way. Just because you get a seemingly warm welcome message to Wikipedia from him don't fool yourself into thinking he would hesitate to stab you in the back if it suited his battle strategy.

Vicious warrior of the month: AlexiusHoratius

2010-07-07T14:03:00.000-07:00

This highly decorated, vicious attack dog is the winner hands down of this month's vicious warrior award. If you are naive enough to think you can make a difference on Wikipedia for the better, let's pray you never come across this brutal bastard.

Dastardly warrior of the week: Department of Redundancy Department

2010-07-06T14:08:00.000-07:00

TravisTX supposedly became disillusioned with Wikipedia politics a year ago, and melodramatically abandoned his Wikipedia account. Seems it had something to do with the "article rescue squadron." (Yeah right). Barely half a year passed, he was having such trouble dealing with Wikipedia withdrawal that he created a new account.

User:Department of Redundancy Department. I'll admit I chuckled the first time I read that. But Travis's newfound viciousness and dastardliness are hardly a laughing matter. In any case, it's more fun to laugh at the fact that he blocked himself on January 30 for a full minute.

Vicious warrior of the week: AlexiusHoratius

2010-06-29T13:58:00.000-07:00

Wikipedia's bravest warriors don't get any combat pay, but boy, do they get compensated in fake virtual medals. AlexiusHoratius, for example, is a "Veteran Editor IV," which apparently entitles him to display a picture of a crappy Medal of Honor knockoff on his user page. That is an honor which does not come by easily. How much keyboard war did he wage in order to earn that medal? A lot.

Brutal warrior of the week: David Fuchs

2010-06-22T11:41:00.000-07:00

So David Fuchs mostly busies himself "writing and reviewing articles over at Featured Article Candidates, but" he also does "a smattering of Good article nominations and peer reviews." Sounds admirable, doesn't it? On WikiChecker, a good half of his Recent 500 Edits pie goes to article edits, and a much smaller proportion to User talk edits. However, it is quite telling that he prefers to respond to messages posted on his talk page on the other user's talk page. That frees up his user talk page to mostly only show messages by robots, like the WP:FILMS newsletter announcement. Quite clever, huh?

Myths about Wikipedia: It is more accurate than Britannica

2010-06-21T11:54:00.000-07:00

Did you hear that a study in the scholarly journal Nature declared that Wikipedia is more accurate than Britannica? Take that, you British dullards!

Well, there are several problems with that declaration. For starters, the study was not really a study, it was a piece of journalism that did not go through the same rigors of peer review as other articles published in Nature.

But much more importantly, the "study" was RIGGED!!! In the sample of 50 scientific topics covered by both Britannica and Wikipedia, Jim Giles, the author of the "study" found that experts counted 162 errors in Wikipedia and 123 in Britannica. Now, I'm no mathematician, but I have the feeling that 162 is greater than 123. So how do you derive that Wikipedia "is more accurate" from those numbers? Easy, you downplay, explain away, or completely dismiss some of Wikipedia's errors so that you don't have to count them. That's exactly what the author of the "study" did.

By the same token, you exaggerate mistakes in Britannica. In the articles on the Acheulean industry, the expert consulted by Giles found ONLY ONE mistake in the Britannica article and SEVEN mistakes in the Wikipedia article. So if you count Britannica's one mistake as twenty mistakes, and discard six of Wikipedia's mistakes, then yeah, Wikipedia, while still not perfect, is more accurate than Britannica. That's a result that can be arrived at only by very careful manipulation of the data!

For much more details, go to Nicholas Carr's blog: http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2006/02/community_and_h.php

Vicious warrior of the week: Aaron Brenneman

2010-06-15T11:28:00.000-07:00

The vast majority of brutal Wikipedia warriors make a very detailed and careful study of the politics of Votes for Deletion. However, I have so far only encountered one warrior willing to show some of the results of his research so openly: User:Aaron Brenneman, whose user subpage "Am I in a cabal?" is, contrary to what one would expect, a systematic study of the votes for deletion process when it comes to Wikipedia's coverage of middle schools and high schools. That's not the only one of his user subpages that demonstrates his careful study of the sacred deletion process. He could write a book on the subject if he wanted to.

Dastardly warrior of the week: Butseriouslyfolks

2010-06-08T16:11:00.000-07:00

But seriously, folks, this is delicious: User:Butseriouslyfolks blocked himself in 2007 for copyright violations. The guy is supposedly a copyright patroler, then unblocked himself. How can we take Wikipedia's alleged commitment to respecting copyrights if those charged with upholding that are clowning around, like a bunch of cops playing around with their guns? This is another case where it's better to laugh than to cry.

Brutal warrior of the week: Deacon of Pndapetzim

2010-06-01T16:02:00.000-07:00

He might as well call himself Mxyzptlk. Gah, we're supposed to be impressed by your unpronounceable user name.

Take a look at his block log: It's always funny when admins do admin action war, such as when Stemonitis blocked Pndapetzim for edit warring, then Angusmcclellan comes along and unblocks Pndapetzim. Of course Stemonitis is an obvious Pndapetzim sock.

Vicious warrior of the week: Cburnett

2010-05-25T15:41:00.000-07:00

Supposedly Cburnett adheres to the following "wikiphilosophy":

With each and every edit ask yourself this: does the edit make Wikipedia better? Edit warring is an automatic no. Bad Faith editing is an automatic no. Edits that suit your personal/political agenda is an automatic no. Edits that suit a business's agenda (advertising) is an automatic no.

And yes, Cburnett does adhere to that philosophy. At least his main account does. Open the sock drawer and a much different story emerges. As Lincoln said, you can fool some of the people all of the time...

Warrior of the Week: Commander Keane

2010-05-18T11:36:00.000-07:00

For some reason it doesn't quite annoy me as much when Wikipedia users claim to have military rank they don't actually have, like Commander Keane does. Despite his lack of real life military experience, don't be fooled: User:Commander Keane is a consummate wikiwarrior.

One of User:Commander Keane's many sockpuppets is User:After Midnight, who on May 18, 2007 promptly unblocked Keane after Keane blocked himself "by accident." Right.

It's not enough for Wikipedia to give wrong information in its articles, it also has to give wrong info in user pages: for example, in Keane's user page, he claims that "if you use Firefox you can go to any Wikipedia article by typing "wp Article name" into the address bar." I tried that in Firefox 3.6.2 for Mac OS X: no cigar.

Brutal warrior of the week: Darthgriz98

2010-05-11T09:13:00.000-07:00

So the pretentious Darthgriz98 is no longer active on Wikipedia. Hmm. Or is he perhaps more like Darth Sidious, manipulating things behind the scenes, not drawing attention to himself, getting ready to strike when no one expects it? The main account has been inactive since August 2009, but the alternate accounts have been very busy, moving all the weapons into position.

Vicious warrior of the year: Ctjf83

2010-05-06T09:06:00.000-07:00

I still find it so thoroughly disgusting that Ctjf83 continues to pretend to be gay as part of his dastardly strategy to mow down his enemies on Wikipedia. Think of all the gay people who have died because of hate crimes, while that bastard Ctjf83 pretends to be gay online while being straight offline. Horrendous. Appallingl.

Brutal warrior of the month: Eluchil404

2010-05-05T09:04:00.000-07:00

It was a close one this month, but the honor certainly goes to Eluchil404. His brutality and viciousness are quite unparalleled.

Dastardly warrior of the week: Davidcannon

2010-05-04T08:31:00.000-07:00

Have you ever thought of hiring a halfway good looking Asian woman and a little kid to pose with you in a picture to put on social networking sites like Wikipedia, such as User:Davidcannon has done with his family? Okay, that's low and tacky of me, but that could have been prevented from happening in the first place by not putting pictures of them on social networking sites like Wikipedia.

The picture of the family is necessary to support the idea that Davidcannon has a very busy life. His list of contributions would seem to support that idea. In his latest 50 contributions, you can still see contributions from February 2009. But what of his many alternate accounts? You don't get to be a sysop on Wikipedia without engaging political cloak-and-dagger. Look in particular at all those who supported his Request for Adminship, and also quite a few of the ones who opposed it.

Myths about Wikipedia: Mistakes are reverted quickly

2010-04-29T14:50:00.001-07:00

A frequent response to examples of mistakes in Wikipedia is that "mistakes get reverted quickly." If I were to write "Barack Obama is a Klingon from the Classic Trek era born in the year 2288 and sent back in time to fight the machines" in the Obama article, that would get reverted within the minute, if not sooner.

But that's a blatantly obvious error and no one would take it seriously even if it wasn't reverted immediately. What if instead I put in a mistake about someone "notable" enough to merit their own Wikipedia entry but not famous enough to have more than 30 'watchers'? (Watchers are Wikipedia users who put the article on their watchlists to be alerted of changes in real time).

Gregory Kohs at Akahele posted a carefully-researched account of how the Mike Ilitch article was wrong for almost three years! (See http://akahele.org/2009/07/where-in-the-world-was-mike-ilitch/). Randomly pick a date within the past six years the article has been up, and the chance of Ilitch's place of birth being correctly stated is about the same as is that of a tossed coin landing on heads—50/50.

Don't even get me started on the Seigenthaler scandal, the false Wikipedia biography that stood for months. If his son hadn't noticed it, who knows how much longer it would've gone unchallenged?

To my knowledge, the most recent example of an inexcusable Wikipedia mistake is the Sarah Palin death rumor I mentioned some posts ago. I had already mentioned that although that stood for just little over half an hour, it is still inexcusable because the article has almost seven hundred watchers. Sarah Palin was unknown five years ago and will hopefully sink back to obscurity in another five years, but at this point in time, how do you explain that none of the almost seven hundred watchers were awake and logged on at the very moment the false death announcement was made?

Maybe you think you're helping Wikipedia out when you correct a mistake you detect in it. Next time you do that, after your edit, look in the edit history (by clicking the "history" tab) and try to determine how long ago the mistake you just fixed was inserted. The results will be quite enlightening.

Vicious warrior of the week: Deathphoenix

2010-04-27T13:49:00.000-07:00

So Deathphoenix is the famous inventor of the "!vote." Are you bored yet?

If you are, that's how he wants you to be. That way, you won't pay any attention to his dastardly warrior moves behind the scenes.

Gregory Kohs loses Yahoo! Answers account... again

2010-04-21T19:39:00.000-07:00

I don't know why the guy keeps coming back to Yahoo! Answers. Gregory Kohs has lost his account thrice already that I'm aware of.

What is his big sin, anyway? I don't know the official reason he's been kicked off each time, but the thing the pro-Wikipedia duckspeakers have against him is that he asks "push" questions—questions he already knows the answer to but with which he hopes to provoke other people to the realization that Wikipedia is completely worthless as a source of information on anything and completely unworthy of donations.

But given that thousands if not millions of people continue to trust Wikipedia as being "good enough," it is important for people like Gregory Kohs to continue trying to do everything they can think of to educate people about Wikipedia. If, in researching the answer to a question Greg posts, someone gets it across his thick skull that Wikipedia can be trusted with neither intellectual property nor money, it will have been worth it. Besides, a question is a question, regardless of whether or not the asker knows the answer.

I suppose Greg might comment on this post and disclose his new username on Yahoo! Answers. It doesn't matter if he does, the Wikipediots on Yahoo! Answers have already figured out what it is. In one of his latest "push" questions, the user calling himself "Death Panelist" (previously "GrimJack") wrote "And try not to lose your Yahoo! account this time, OK?" Which quite likely means that it was him who reported Greg for a violation. That's the kind of thing Wikipedia apologists expend their limited intelligence on: figuring out the identities of Wikipedia critics.

Dastardly warrior of the week: Eluchil404

2010-04-20T19:22:00.000-07:00

Of all the numbers to put in your username, 404 has to be the worst. If you choose 666, at least you can say you're being cute or facetious. But 404, the File Not Found error code. Something's off.

Eluchil404 aspires to be a "wikignome" (barf) but his frequent participation in deletion discussions clearly indicates he does not take his aspiration seriously. And hell knows why he feels it necessary to express an opinion about inclusion criteria in Latin. Dorkus maximus.

Vicious warrior of the week: Ahoerstemeier

2010-04-13T04:18:00.000-07:00

Given that he's a self-confessed "Wikipediholic," it is kind of hard to believe that Ahoerstemeier really has a degree in physics and a job using the Delphi programming language. When would such a person find all that time to edit Wikipedia?

So proud is Ahoerstmeier of editing Wikipedia that he claims to have been specifically mentioned in the New York Times. Sure, whatever you say.

Brutal warrior of the month: Drilnoth

2010-04-07T14:50:00.000-07:00

As brutal and vicious as the warriors selected last month were, you have to agree that Drilnoth outdoes them all in ruthlessness and drive. I have little to add to what I said earlier other than that now he has added a rather annoying bar to his user page, a bar that follows the bottom edge as one scrolls. Ugh.

Brutal Warrior of the Week: Anonymous Dissident

2010-04-06T16:10:00.000-07:00

Oh, poor Anonymous Dissident! About a month ago, the poor guy declared that because of mounting real world pressures, he's "no longer able to sustain interwiki activity," so he's resigned administrative positions on all wikis except en.wikipedia. Cry me a river! And yes, his activity on en. is somewhat scaled back. But his sockpuppet activity is off the charts. Soon many of his socks will also reach admin status. It's only a matter of time now.

Vicious warrior of the week: Phil Sandifer

2010-03-30T14:26:00.000-07:00

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.

Myths about Wikipedia: The paid fact-checkers

2010-03-24T14:59:00.000-07:00

In this awful economy, people are quickly realizing how thoroughly uneffective the want ads in the paper are for getting a job. They would have more fun flushing their resume down the toilet. So they realize that they must "think outside the box" in their job search, and try to figure out where the jobs could possibly be at. There's a restaurant near my house, and they don't seem to have enough waiters, or I heard in the news that there is a shortage of truck drivers, etc.

So then they think: "Wikipedia is a pretty good reference, but it has the occasional bit of false info, therefore, they need more paid fact-checkers." Such a line of thought is wrong on so many levels, but first consider why Wikipedia can't pay fact-checkers: it can't pay anyone to work on the content.

When Wikipedia started to become famous, the more puritannical elements of our society were first and foremost concerned that Wikipedia would become a source of free porn for bored teenagers. In order to escape persecution as pornographers, the Wikimedia Foundation hides behind Section 230 of the Telecommunications Act: Wikipedia doesn't provide content; it provides a service for users to post content.

Mike Godwin, Wikipedia's general counsel, is aware of this and he likes to edit Wikipedia. Therefore, his user page has the following disclaimer: "Unless it is otherwise stated, any edit or contribution to Wikimedia projects by Mike Godwin is an act of a regular member of the community, not a legal or official action of the General Counsel or the Legal Department of the Wikimedia Foundation."

Theoretically, this means that if Mike Godwin chose to upload a picture of himself going down on himself, the responsibility for that action would be solely his, and not the Wikimedia Foundation's.

A side effect of this is that then the Wikimedia Foundation is protected against claims of libel. If Mike Godwin were to edit Wikipedia to say that John McCain likes to go down on himself, again, the responsibility for such a statement would fall on Mike Godwin, and not the Foundation. However, in that scenario, we know who Mike Godwin is, whereas in real life we often have little clue as to who an IP address or a cryptic user name represents.

That sweet deal would be invalidated if Wikipedia paid anyone to check facts. The next time John McCain gets slandered on Wikipedia, people would ask if the paid fact-checkers were asleep at the wheel. So it's much easier to not pay fact-checkers at all.

If you want a job at Wikipedia, you have to be a close friend of Jimbo's. Otherwise, the only kind of job you can get in Wikipedia is the kind that doesn't pay anything, monetarily or otherwise.

Brutal warrior of the week: Amberrock

2010-03-23T14:20:00.000-07:00

Amberrock contributes using Microsoft Windows Vista. Oh please. You're so full of yourself. His attack poodle is Ansett, which whom he frequently confabulates both on Wikipedia and through IRC.

Vicious warrior of the week: Coffee

2010-03-16T19:38:00.000-07:00

I had almost forgotten about Coffee, who, at least on Yahoo! Answers, may be a Nihilsock; I was reminded when I saw his user name come up yet again on WikiChecker's recent queries. I'm inclined to think that on Wikipedia, User:Coffee is a main account rather than a sock account, and for Yahoo! Answers Coffee has given permission to Nihiltres to have an account in his name, also signed off with saying "I'm an administrator on Wikipedia."

At the top of Coffee's user page on Wikipedia, there is a banner that says "Coffee has a real life, therefore Wikipedia isn't his main concern. He will take his time getting to queries." The banner has the Air Force logo. Notice how he doesn't say "I'm in the Air Force." You're supposed to jump to that conclusion. Frankly, I think it's disgusting to pretend to be in the military, especially these days when the National Defense ribbon is too often earned together with a Purple Heart.

And if Coffee is really so busy in real life with the Air Force, where does he find the time to create the most sophisticated Wikipedia user page I have ever seen? Maybe you don't find that convincing enough, since he hasn't edited his user page in months—oops, I mean days. Then consider this: As I write this blog entry, Coffee's logs page (which you can get to by clicking the "Logs" link on his user page 'toolbox') has at least 50 deletion actions performed today (or maybe last night, I get confused by Wikipedia's use of zulu time sometimes). And if you look at his user contributions, you still see a great deal of contributions for today.

You know, if I was as "busy in real life" as Coffee is, I would be able to write daily posts for this blog.

Myths about Wikipedia: Every article must have sources

2010-03-15T11:09:00.000-07:00

One of the most prevalent myths about Wikipedia is that articles must have sources or else they're deleted. It is true that a lot of articles get deleted on Wikipedia, but lack of sources is rarely the real reason, though it may often be given as the official reason. Click "Random article" just a few times and you will encounter:

Articles with no sources whatsoever, but the article is not tagged with one of those infamous orange "This article does not cite any references or sources" tags. For example, Fairfax District (Kansas City, Kansas) as of today.
Articles that do cite one source in the preferred inline format yet are tagged as unreferenced just the same. For example, Ryers, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania as of today.
Articles with one external link, which happens to be broken. For example, Oil Heritage Route as of today.
Articles cited with a website in a foreign language (which would be just fine if we all spoke all other languages). For example, Asmane Gnegne as of today.
Articles incorporating information from another language Wikipedia, where the other Wikipedia has no citations whatsoever, and the English Wikipedia has two or three footnotes all from the same place. For example, as of today, National Mint of Bolivia is pretty much trimmed down from the Spanish article though with the addition of three citations from Euromint.net.

And who knows, maybe someone will do something about the specific articles (listed in bold above) mentioned here. (And for some reason "Random article" turns up a lot of geography stubs). But for each of these example there are dozens of Wikipedia articles in similar states of uncitedness.

Searching without Wikipedia

2010-03-10T15:11:00.000-08:00

It's so damn annoying how Wikipedia is the very first result in most of my Wikipedia searches. Sure I can suffix all my searches with "-site:wikipedia.org," but it gets rather tiresome.

To address this need, the folks at Distilled came up with a plug-in for Firefox that removes Wikipedia search results from Wikipedia. Read more about it: http://www.distilled.co.uk/blog/seo/search-google-without-wikipedia-a-firefox-search-plugin/

Brutal warrior of the week: Jake Wartenberg

2010-03-09T15:01:00.000-08:00

Jake Wartenberg blocked SonGoku786 "as a sockpuppet of LOTRrules." The funny thing is, that if you look past the smoke and mirrors, SonGoku786 and LOTRrules are actually both sockpuppets of Jake Wartenberg. Very well played by Jake. Most other people will be fooled.

Oh, and by the way, Jake Wartenberg is part of "WikiVoices," a project that has a cat as executive producer. This stuff is just too hilarious to invent.

Vicious warrior of the month: Bradeos Graphon

2010-03-03T18:15:00.000-08:00

So supposedly Bradeos Graphon got married last year and that's why he hasn't edited Wikipedia in months. But we're on to him, and we're not fooled by his incredible self-control in not using his main account (which has administrator privileges). Or does it still count as self-control if some of his sockpuppets also have admin 'privileges'?

Attack of the Nihilsocks

2010-03-03T06:22:00.000-08:00

Can you get straight answers about Wikipedia on Yahoo! Answers? Sometimes, depending on whether or not Nihiltres and his thirty or so Nihilsocks are standing by to thumb them down, or to vote for the pro-Wikipedia duckspeaking answer. Inevitably a lot of the Nihilsocks have attained Level 2 by accumulating 250 points each, meaning that they can thumb answers up or down. If an answer gets enough thumbs down, it will be hidden from view. You can vote at any level, and so you often see Nihiltres winning Best Answer with 40 or 50 votes, which is funny when you consider that most questions in the Wikipedia category get less than 20 votes total.

But this is not to say that Nihiltres is the only person who believes in the glory of Wikipedia. The existence of Nihilsocks does not negate the fact that thousands of people have fundamental misconceptions about Wikipedia, and remain oblivious to its gross inaccuracy.

Brutal warrior of the week: Drilnoth

2010-03-02T17:35:00.000-08:00

As if editing Wikipedia wasn't fast and loose enough, Drilnoth had to go on and create a new user script to outdo "TWINKLE, Friendly, FurMe, and AssessorTags, among others." Less than 25% of Drilnoth's edits are in "article space" (according to WikiChecker.com), but surprisingly that proportion is larger than that of his edits to the "WP:" namespace. The majority of his edits are in the Image, Category and Template namespaces. Still, this is a less positive indication than someone who makes more edits in the article space than other spaces.

Vicious warrior of the week: Dave souza

2010-02-23T15:29:00.000-08:00

Why would anyone be proud of being a "wiki sloth"? Slightly worthier of being proud of, he's a "rouge admin." What the hell does that mean? Apparently it's "Wikipedia humor." What, not even a chuckle? Not surprising. The so-called humor disguises the extreme brutality of the rouge admins, of which Dave souza is an excellent example.

Wikipedia kills Sarah Palin

2010-02-17T23:32:00.000-08:00

Did you hear that Sarah Palin died in her home earlier today? Supposedly,

Sarah Palin died in the early mourning [sic] of February 17, 2010, estimated 4:37 AM due to an increased blood pressure in the brain while she slept. Stress brought on by the criticism she has received since running for presidency is believed to have caused this. Sarah Palin's children and husband were asleep at the time leaving them unable to rush Sarah to the hospital. Paramedics arrived on scene not until two hours later, when Sarah Palin's husband woke up, and tried to revive her but by that time she was dead.

No, you haven't heard that? That's because you get your news from a reputable source, like CNN.com, or even Saturday Night Live's Weekend Update. Not from Wikipedia. At 01:00 Greenwich time (already February 18 over there), HeliAce added that paragraph quoted above to the Wikipedia entry on Sarah Palin. It wasn't until 01:36 that it was reverted.

Now, half hour and change is not bad compared to how long it took for the slander against John Seigenthaler to be removed from Wikipedia. But when you take into account that Sarah Palin is these days far better known than John Seigenthaler, a half hour to revert false information about her on Wikipedia is way too long. Supposedly the article is on the watchlists of almost seven hundred Wikipedia users.

Brutal warrior of the week: Bradeos Graphon

2010-02-16T15:27:00.000-08:00

Supposedly Bradeos Graphon got married, which explains why he hasn't edited Wikipedia since July of last year. At least his main account hasn't, since July of last year. Even if the wife really does exist, a wiki-warrior as vicious and brutal as Bradeos Graphon would most likely not go into hibernation. It is interesting to note that after he edited his user pages to announce his marriage, he made one edit to an article on tai chi chuan. Hmm...

Reviewing Wikipedia's accuracy: Tulsa Port of Catoosa

2010-02-12T12:49:00.000-08:00

Next in my review of Wikipedia's accuracy is the article about the Tulsa Port of Catoosa. The short article hasn't been edited since November of last year. The first thing I looked at was the coordinates given for the place, I plugged them into Google Maps and they seem to be correct.

I think the administrators of the port would be happy with this article. Most of its content seems to be lifeted straight off http://www.tulsaport.com/profile.html with only the PR hyperbole removed. In fact, the last edit to the article last year removed the company's claim that it is the "most inland river-port" in the United States.

However, the claim that the Tulsa Port of Catoosa "is located 15 miles from the Tulsa International Airport" merits further scrutiny. I asked Google Maps to give me driving directions from Tulsa International Airport to the Catoosa port, and it said 15.3 miles. Well, it would be petty of me to make a big deal over 0.3 miles. However, the port's website says it's just 7 miles from the airport, and remember that I gave Google the coordinates I got off Wikipedia. Neither Wikipedia nor tulsaport.com give the criteria for their distance measurements. I'm guessing the port people are measuring from the outermost gate of the port to the outermost gate of the airport, and I won't venture to guess how Wikipedia is measuring.

Applying Wikipedia's rules to Yahoo! Answers

2010-02-10T16:17:00.001-08:00

One of the great unwritten rules of Wikipedia is that you don't criticize Wikipedia on Wikipedia. Sure, there is an article called "criticism of Wikipedia," but outside of that article, you're not allowed to criticize Wikipedia in any way. Doing so on your user page is one of the surest ways to get your user page deleted.

Recently, Eddie on Yahoo! Answers asked "Why do some Wikipedia admins insist that the rules of Wikipedia be applied all throughout the Internet?" GrimJack, a notorious Wikipedia apologist on Answers, answered the question with another question: "Do you have any specific examples of this?"

Well, I have a specific example for you: Nihiltres and Coffee seem to think that since Gregory Kohs was banned from Wikipedia, that means he also needs to be banned from Yahoo! Answers. The bastards have gotten him kicked off as both "MyWikiBiz" and "Try MyWikiBiz," the latter within days of the account being signed up. Supposedly Gregory Kohs uses multiple accounts on Answers, but no doubt the hypocritical Nihiltres and Coffee do so too, and on Wikipedia as well (in fact, they might be the same person).

Much more importantly, Gregory Kohs violated the unwritten rule of Wikipedia: You shouldn't criticize Wikipedia, which Nihiltres and Coffee and their various apologist sockpuppets on Answers wish to have extended to Yahoo! Answers. The reason this is important is that so many people turn to Answers to ask whether Wikipedia is reliable or not. There needs to be someone there to tell them that no, Wikipedia is not one bit reliable, and point them to the websites that tell the truth about Wikipedia, like Wikitruth (obviously), Wikipedia Review, Wikipedia Watch, MyWikiBiz, this blog, and even respectable newspapers of record like the New York Times and USA Today.

Vicious warrior of the week: Carlossuarez46

2010-02-09T07:25:00.000-08:00

Carlossuarez46 boasts to being a native speaker of both English and Spanish. But something interesting happens when you go to his user page in the Spanish Wikipedia. There he says he wants to be contacted in his user page in the English Wikipedia! Apparently, the Wikipedia wars in the nearly two dozen other language Wikipedias he has user pages in aren't heated enough to his liking. Only the fighting at en.wikipedia.org gives him the adrenaline rush he needs, en.wikipedia is the only platform suitable for him to exert his vicious aggressions. So there you have it: Carlossuarez, warrior and liar.

Reviewing Wikipedia's accuracy: Regimental Sergeant Major

2010-02-05T14:48:00.000-08:00

Next in my review of Wikipedia's accuracy is, quite appropriately for a blog about Wikipedia warriors, the article on Regimental Sergeant Major. It could be the case that the article is factually accurate, but they do a lousy job of explaining the concept. From the very first line any reader with a passing familiarity with American military ranks will be confused. A Regimental Sergeant Major is a Warrant Officer in the Royal Army? What? I know they do things differently in the United Kingdom, but that sounds like a huge difference.

You see, back in high school, I was in Army ROTC. I seriously thought about joining the Army, but I have not inhaled, if you catch my drift. Still, I remember what I was taught about the difference between officers and enlisted personnel. A Sergeant Major is a senior enlisted rank. And while no Sergeant Major would mind terribly being addressed as "Sir," I doubt a Warrant Officer would much like being addressed as "Sergeant Major." There has been a lot of discussion on this particular point in the article's talk page, but it looks like a very confused argument between weaklings who would be turned away by even the most overzealous recruiters.

The article mentions that the equivalent in the U. S. Army is Command Sergeant Major, which is an E-9 rank. But the article says nothing about why it's WO-1 in the various military branches of the Commonwealth but not the American military.

Now, I realize that I set out to gauge accuracy, not clarity of presentation. So I will have to table this part of the review until I can consult with someone more knowledgeable on the British military.

Vicious warrior of the month: Encephalon

2010-02-03T12:24:00.000-08:00

Among the warriors chosen last month, Encephalon stands out as an example of the warrior spirit, of viciousness and brutality. That's why he's warrior of the month this month.

Brutal warrior of the week: BorgHunter

2010-02-02T15:20:00.000-08:00

A Star Trek geek at heart, BorgHunter proudly displays the "Starfleet barnstar" on his user page, an award which was supposedly bestowed on him by the fictional Federation Council. If you've ever wondered why Wikipedia is so disconnected from reality, this gives you a hint why.

Reviewing Wikipedia's accuracy: Sculptural Ensemble of Constantin Brâncuşi in Târgu Jiu

2010-01-29T18:25:00.000-08:00

First in my review of Wikipedia's accuracy is the article on the Sculptural Ensemble of Constantin Brâncuşi in Târgu Jiu. Already I'm biting my tongue on my promise not to criticize the grammar and spelling in the articles.

The Sculptural Ensemble of Constantin Brâncuşi in Târgu Jiu consists of a set of sculptures by the artist Constantin Brâncuşi which are in the Romanian city of Târgu Jiu. The Wikipedia article has no references in the usual sense demanded by its rules on "reliable sources," making my review of this article so much easier. The whole article seems to be little more than a trimmed down regurgitation of this page: http://www.ici.ro/romania/en/cultura/mz_asbrancusi.html from the ICI in Bucharest. I'm going to have to get a book about Constantin Brâncuşi before commenting further on this.

Vicious warrior of the week: ClockworkSoul

2010-01-26T16:43:00.000-08:00

We see that ClockworkSoul is "just writing his thesis proposal." Sure, whatever you say, you Essjay wannabe. Supposedly this will take him a couple of months, at which time "he'll be coming back to life." So what is ClockworkSoul's definition of "life"? Arguing with other idiots on the Internet? What else can you expect from a self-described clockwork soul?

My own review of Wikipedia's accuracy

2010-01-21T18:52:00.000-08:00

The study in the journal Nature proclaiming Wikipedia's accuracy has been a favorite tool of Wikipedia apologists. Many have pointed out that the study was from the start handicapped in Wikipedia's favor. Since the question of Wikipedia accuracy, or rather, lack thereof, remains an unsettled question in the minds of many, it is necessary to do more studies.

That is why I have decided to do my own study of Wikipedia's accuracy. I hope that by publishing which articles I intend to use for the purpose of my study and clearly stating my methodology, others can see for themselves whether my conclusions are supported by the data or if I have just shaped the data to fit my conclusion.

My first instinct was to use random articles with the "Random article" link provided on all Wikipedia pages. The problem with that is that perhaps the selection of articles would not be as representative as I would like. My next idea was to use "ancient" pages, but the Ancient Pages report has not been refreshed in a long time.

So what I'm going to do is this: on the Main Page, there are eight "portals" listed: Arts, Biography, Geography, History, Mathematics, Science, Society, Technology, and also a link to a list of all the portals. A Wikipedia portal looks much like the Main Page, but all its content is dedicated to a given topic. I don't know if the eight portals I've just listed are the portals that are always listed, but they're the portals listed as of today. From each portal, I'm going to choose either an article that has has barely been edited in a year, or in the case of the "Did you know..." and "On this day..." boxes, articles which have had very few edits for a year prior to being chosen for those features, or I'm going to choose an article that has been nominated for one of those features which has similarly laid unedited for a long time.

It could be argued that this is biased against Wikipedia from the start, since it would enable me to blow mistakes out of proportion saying that they stood uncorrected for months. Maybe so. To compensate, I will completely ignore spelling and grammar errors if they have no impact on the factual accuracy of the article. For example, "Martin Luther King, Jr. was asasssinated in 1968" would be acceptable since anyone reading that would understand what is meant regardless of whether or not they notice the misspelled word. By contrast, "The researcher was injured when a stalagmite that had hung from the ceiling of the cave for centuries fell down" would not be acceptable because by misspelling "stalactite" a factual error has been introduced into the text. (I'm sure stalagmites can fall down, too, but it would be a very different danger).

This is the list of articles I will use for this review:

1. From the Arts Portal: Sculptural Ensemble of Constantin Brâncuşi in Târgu Jiu (two edits in 2009, one of them by a robot).
2. From the Biography Portal: Regimental Sergeant Major (five edits in 2009, none so far this year to date).
3. From the Geography Portal: Tulsa Port of Catoosa (four edits in 2009, none so far this year to date).
4. From the History Portal: Jus exclusivae (five edits in 2009, none so far this year).
5. From the Mathematics Portal: Permutohedron (only one edit in 2009! Could it possibly be any good?)
6. From the Science Portal: Jon Lomberg (five edits in 2009, two so far this year).
7. From the Society Portal: Benjamin Franklin Burch (article created March 5 of last year, edited five more times over the next two months and not again since).
8. From the Technology Portal: GWR 1076 Class (three edits in 2009, two of which were by robots!)

These are all articles I am fairly certain I had never read prior to embarking on this review. I plan to read one of these each week, and examine its factual accuracy while abstaining from commenting on its quality as literature. For each of this I will use the version of the article as it was on the date of this post. It would be just fine if people decided to improve these articles before I got to them in my review. However, it might be possible to defeat my study by falsifying the edit histories for these articles, by dating major improvements prior to the date of this post).

Brutal warrior of the week: Angusmcclellan

2010-01-19T16:42:00.000-08:00

So a lot of Angusmclellan's 50 most recent contributions have "(top)" next to them (meaning that they're the last edit to the page). It becomes scary when you realize that a lot of his edits are to user talk pages. Is anyone listening to what that blowhard is saying? Just anyone who wants to emulate him on being a brutal Wikipedia warrior.

Warrior of the week: Encephalon

2010-01-12T16:41:00.000-08:00

So Encephalon has a committed SHA-512 identity. So what. Not only is Encephalon a tremendous Wikipedia warrior, he's also a pretentious blowhard. His logo is "Vivitur ingenio, caetera mortis erunt." Sweet hell, he sure has a high opinion of himself. It is suspicious that he hasn't edited Wikipedia as Encephalon since September of last year. But rest assured that his socks have been busy. The Encephalon account lies at the ready.

Not ready to name Warrior of the Year

2010-01-07T17:32:00.000-08:00

Since it's January, it's perfectly understandable that some of you might expect me to name the Warrior of the Year this month. However, this blog has only been around since May of last year. So that means that there aren't yet enough brutal warriors named Warrior of the Month from which to select a vicious Warrior of the Year. That'll have to wait until May. Wikipedia is still so full of raging soldiers that I could even have Warrior of the Day and I'd still not get to everyone.

Warrior of the month: Michael Snow

2010-01-06T16:40:00.000-08:00

Michael Snow supposedly has bachelor's degrees in history and political science. But given the relentlessness and viciousness of his wikiwarring, someone needs to award him an honorary doctorate in wikiwar, honoris causa!

Brutal warrior of the week: Adam Bishop

2010-01-05T13:26:00.000-08:00

Adam Bishop is such a warrior. Near the top of his user page has a user box (those annoying little boxes that report inane, sometimes false, tidbits about the user in question) claiming that Adam Bishop is "is addicted to semicolons; he or she uses them frequently." Topmost on his user page (on the user-customizable part) is the canned message that "This is a Wikipedia user page," blah, blah, blah. The various awards (barn stars and even the ridiculous Plutonium Editor Star) which Adam Bishop has earned for his brave warring, are at the bottom of his user page. What's up with the false modesty? Adam, you're a remarkable wikiwarrior, be proud of it!

If placement near the top is any indication of pride, then one of the things Adam Bishop is proudest of is having reverted the change of Pope Lando's old picture to a picture of Billy Dee Williams as Lando Calrissian on Empire Strikes Back (or Return of the Jedi, one of those). Yes, there really was a Catholic supreme pontiff by that name, I checked in the Old Catholic Encyclopedia just in case it was a Wikipedia hoax. Adam says he cracks up every time he reverts the picture of Han Solo's token black buddy back to the old drawing of the bishop from Sabina. Please.

Kind of wrong about Nihiltres

2010-01-04T16:40:00.000-08:00

So I made a mistake in my last post of 2009. When Nihiltres said that MyWikiBiz had privately admitted to him to having sockpuppets on Yahoo! Answers, I immediately jumped to the conclusion that Nihiltres had invented the confession. "Privately admitted?" How convenient, I thought.

Now it seems that MyWikiBiz did "privately admit" to having multiple accounts on Yahoo! Answers to Nihiltres, and followed that with a public admission at http://akahele.org/2009/04/searching-for-answers/. So, unlike Wikipedia's powers that be, I must admit to my mistake.

But does my mistake really change anything? The fact remains that despite an increasingly larger chorus of condemnation for Wikipedia, way too many people still have way too many misconceptions about Wikipedia (that it's a charity, that it's accurate, for starters).

Dastardly vicious attack by Nihiltres (aka "Alex") on Yahoo! Answers

2009-12-30T19:19:00.001-08:00

Almost as often as people ask in the Men's Health category of Yahoo! Answers whether their member is big enough, in the Wikipedia category people keep asking if Wikipedia is reliable or accurate. Each time that question comes up, Nihiltres is ready with his multiple Yahoo! accounts to respond that yes, Wikipedia is 99% reliable. Several different people have been trying to educate those who read Yahoo! Answers that in fact Wikipedia is 0% reliable. What's the reaction of Nihiltres?

Waaah! Waaah! Not fair! How dare they! Waaaaaah! Waaaaaaaaaaaaaah!

Here's me playing the world's smallest violin.

So, as "Alex," he posted the question "Why is the wikipedia section on Yahoo answers only answered by people who hate wikipedia?" yesterday. Then, today, as Nihiltres (we're getting to the dastardly part now), posted an answer saying that there are three reasons people contribute to Yahoo! Answers; the first is altruistic, the second is balancing, and the third is to push a point of view. And that the third reason is the reason why the "Wikipedia haters" keep answering questions in the Wikipedia category, according to Nihiltres. (It couldn't possibly be altruistic to want to keep other people from feeding themselves false information from Wikipedia.)

Here's the dastardly part: Nihiltres says that "Gregory Kohs earlier admitted privately to me that he had used multiple accounts to cheat on Yahoo! Answers, and there's nothing stopping this from happening again, assuming it isn't already." Oooh, what a bastard!

The feint is hardly original. Robert, an answerer who spoke up two hours after the dastardly attack, pointed it out: "Of course Gregory Kohs admitted that to you privately, and not publicly, where others can scrutinize for themselves the exact wording of the admission. That's a play straight out of the Wikipedia secret manual. I bet you also have server logs to prove Greg's misdeeds, but out of privacy concerns, you can't show them to us."

Meanwhile, Nihiltres logged out his main account, got back in his car, drove to another WiFi hotspot, and logged in Alex, who then promptly chose the answer from Nihiltres as Best Answer. Supposedly because "it was ballenced [sic] and well reasoned." Please! Even Gregory's answer was more balanced, and Greg is the guy who still can't let it go that Wikipedia rejected his article about Arch Coal.

In the big picture of things, it doesn't really matter if I'm wrong about Alex being a sockpuppet of Nihiltres on Yahoo! Answers. The fact remains that thousands of people are still blissfully ignorant of Wikipedia's awfulness, and all the efforts of college professors, late-night comedians and "haters" on the blogosphere are still failing to wake the ignorant up to the truth: Wikipedia sucks; it's not worthy of use for any purpose whatsoever.

Dastardly as the actions of Nihiltres were today, since they took place outside of Wikipedia, they don't qualify him as a brutal Wikipedia warrior of the week.

Warrior of the week: Arcadian

2009-12-29T18:24:00.000-08:00

In November 2007, Picaroon blocked Arcadian, then reversed that decision the next minute. The block was supposedly for vandalism, the unblock for "so sorry." But neither Arcadian nor Picaroon is sorry. The reason is that Picaroon is really a sockpuppet of Arcadian. Picaroon, supposedly disappointed with the state of Wikipedia (though there really are people very disappointed in Wikipedia), hasn't edited since March 2008. But Arcadian continues his relentless war, with Picaroon remaining a secret weapon ready and waiting for the most opportune deployment.

Veropedia: still watching

2009-12-28T07:57:00.000-08:00

Just for the sake of the blip on the radar screen: I'm still watching the Veropedia website. It still says "The original version of Veropedia has been taken down for now while we work on a new Veropedia. This new Veropedia will have a superior method of handling articles and introduces an improved interface."

For what it's worth (not much), Wikipedia says that in the original version of Veropedia, "Veropedia editors chose Wikipedia articles that met the site's reliability standards; information was then scraped, or chosen by an automatic process, and thereafter a stable version of the article was posted on Veropedia." If that's true, Veropedia editors must've soon realized that very little information was actually coming through the process.

The reason for the failure of the original version of Veropedia is that Wikipedia is worthless. The only thing worth taking from Wikipedia is its stated ideal. Nothing else.

Brutal warrior of the week: Michael Snow

2009-12-22T18:13:00.000-08:00

Michael Snow double majored in history and political science at college. Well, at least that's what his user page says. The whole Essjay scandal showed that you can't trust claims of having degrees made by Wikipedia users. Oh, and by the way, Michael Snow was involved in the whole Essjay business.

The myth of Wikipedia's paid fact-checkers

2009-12-21T14:27:00.000-08:00

For some reason, people believe that the Wikimedia Foundation pays people to fact-check Wikipedia's articles. Nothing could be further from the truth! No one gets paid to review Wikipedia's articles for factual accuracy. The WP:CITEWIKI page says "you should ... independently verify the accuracy of Wikipedia information." This means that the responsibility for checking facts on Wikipedia rests solely with you! The following sentence from the can-clinking appeal for donations from Jimbo Wales is quite telling: Wikipedia is "a community creation, entirely written and funded by people like you." There is no money whatsoever alloted to experts to write articles, nor is there money alloted to pay fact-checkers. As long as Wikipedia gets a lot more money in donations than it really needs to keep running, factual accuracy will never be a concern for them.

Vicious warrior of the week: FCYTravis

2009-12-15T17:20:00.000-08:00

It seems extremely well-fitting that a Wikipedia administrator should be a diaper fetishist. FCYTravis maintained extensive online journals and forums devoted to his diaper fetish, and apparently still lives with his parents. Supposedly he's on "wikibreak and will be back on Wikipedia when the community wises up." You might say that he hasn't edited Wikipedia since July. That's true, at least for the FCYTravis account.

Isn't it interesting that FCYTravis was blocked by User:Nandesuka, then unblocked by Redwolf24, and then again by Nandesuka? Wikipediot admins and their block wars!

Now Wikipedia lies even in its pledge drive

2009-12-10T17:03:00.000-08:00

These days there's something else at the top of Wikipedia articles for lazy college students to ignore: quotes of letters from recent donors hoping to encourage others to donate to Wikipedia. A lot of those messages are predictably hagiographic but can't really be faulted as lies.

But today I saw one that is just way too much of a whopper to swallow. Supposedly William Knecht donated $50 to Wikipedia, saying that "As a professional scientist, Wikipedia is my go-to source for ideas and concepts new to me. Donate for this? You bet!"

A scientist for whom Wikipedia is a go-to source? Given the high regard professional scientists have for scientific journals with their peer review rigmarole, I seriously doubt any professional scientist would be willing to admit to making Wikipedia their "go-to source," much less donating money to it. Come up with more believable lies, Wikipedia.

Warrior of the week: Mike Godwin

2009-12-08T16:54:00.000-08:00

This week's featured wiki-warrior is one of the Wikimedia Foundation's legal eagles. His sharp legal mind has battled the idea that the lead of the Wikipedia article on Roman Polanski should say anything about accusations of child molestation against him. But I suppose anyone who believes in "innocent until proven guilty" would come to the same conclusion.

What should be troubling about Mike Godwin is the way he defends Wikipedia's lawlessness. Look him up on Wikitruth. Truly horrifying stuff.

Wiki-warrior of the Month: David Gerard

2009-12-02T16:52:00.000-08:00

Need I say anything more?

Warrior of the week: ClockworkLunch

2009-12-01T16:41:00.000-08:00

For a self-declared ex-editor, User:ClockworkLunch stills edits Wikipedia quite often. Granted that his most recent edit is from October of this year, but the last edit to his talk page, the one where he declares himself an "ex-editor," is from July of this year. So forgive me if I have a little difficulty believing he's really an ex-editor. If he makes no further edits by April 2010 I'll believe him then.

Warrior of the week: David Gerard

2009-11-24T16:35:00.000-08:00

There's not much for me to say about David Gerard. Wikitruth has said a lot about him, and not much more needs to be added.

Brutal warrior of the week: Commander Keane

2009-11-17T16:05:00.000-08:00

It's not enough for this brutal warrior to be a savagely vicious rank, he also has need of a high rank. Commander. Please.

Often I name potential sockpuppets for these warriors, but with Commander Keane I'm very certain of at least one: "After Midnight." You see, on May 18, 2007, Commander Keane "accidentally" blocked himself for vandalism at 03:19. After Midnight was ready and standing by to unblock Commander Keane the next minute.

Warrior of the week: Cprompt

2009-11-10T15:46:00.000-08:00

What is a C prompt anyway? Those of you old enough to remember MS-DOS might remember those black and green computer screens with the mysterious "C:\Windows>" prompt at which one had to type strange short commands. That's what the Wikipedia user Cprompt named himself after.

Now, unlike most warriors, Cprompt has a list of articles he'd "like to showcase." But what is so suspicious about Cprompt is the fact that having been made a "bureaucrat" (an insult in the real world, but quite a badge of honor on Wikipedia), he has never taken advantage of his bureaucrat privileges. This almost certainly means that he has at least one sockpuppet which also has bureaucrat rights, and is intending to keep Cprompt unsullied by any controversy. Quite the sneaky warrior this one.

Warrior of the month: Gwen Gale

2009-11-04T16:24:00.000-08:00

This month I just had to choose the most notorious of the bunch. Good old Gwen Gale. Purported novelist, all-around vicious warrior.

Warrior of the week: WikiLaurent

2009-11-03T16:12:00.000-08:00

Any Wikipedia user with "wiki" in their user name is up to no good. WikiLaurent is a rollbacker, hasn't been blocked, who likes waging war on users without a log-in. Supposedly French, WikiLaurent uses all the idiotic WP abbreviations of en.wikipedia with fluent aplomb. Quite the dastardly warrior.

Brutal wikiwarrior of the week: Gwen Gale

2009-10-27T18:04:00.000-07:00

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

2009-10-20T10:20:00.000-07:00

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

2009-10-13T13:03:00.000-07:00

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!

2009-10-08T14:12:00.000-07:00

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

2009-10-07T13:50:00.000-07:00

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

Vicious warrior of the week: Antandrus

2009-10-06T13:44:00.000-07:00

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.

This week's brutal warrior: Rascal the Peaceful

2009-09-29T13:17:00.000-07:00

With a username like that, he couldn't possibly be a brutal warrior, right? Well, you have to be suspicious when the vast majority of his edits are to User and User talk pages. Of his past 300 edits, only 22 have been to articles. And he uses "Friendly" to welcome new users. Yeah, this one really throws you off the scent of wikiwarriors. But the notifications of speedy deletions are what convinces me that what we have here is a bona fide brutal warrior.

Brutal warrior of the week: CRGreathouse

2009-09-22T15:37:00.000-07:00

Nothing pisses me off more than brutal warriors who self-martyrize. The great CRGreathouse so selflessly releases all the content he creates on Wikipedia (asterisk) into public domain for all to use in whatever way they see fit! Oh, how noble! Oh, how selfless! Puh-lease. Give me a break.

Debating Wikipedia's accuracy

2009-09-17T15:51:00.000-07:00

A lot of people ask on Yahoo Answers whether or not Wikipedia is reliable or accurate. A recently reran Saturday Night Live skit from last season really puts that question into perspective: A straight man (Jason Sudeikis) pretends to be gay so he can be the roommate of a beautiful woman (yes, I think Casey Wilson is beautiful). To explain an erection that she felt, the man creates a Wikipedia article on "boner-plasia." When he's finally forced to admit that not only is he a straight man, he also created the Wikipedia article on "boner-plasia."

Brutal warrior of the week: Warrior4321

2009-09-15T15:34:00.000-07:00

Sometimes this blogging gig is just way too easy. Warrior4321. His username says it all. And, surprise surprise, he's a rollbacker. He does edit articles a little bit more often than your typical wikiwarrior, but still, he's a warrior. And a damn crafty one at that.

Wikipedia Warrior of the Week: Cimon Avaro

2009-09-09T09:00:00.000-07:00

This white dude could've chosen to give himself the identity of a Latina girl. But he knew better, and just left it at Latino. And in an extreme stroke of arrogance, Cimon Avaro has declared himself a "Grognard Extraordinary," which to the common man means... exactly nothing. Just another brutal butcher.

Overlapping edits mean nothing

2009-09-09T08:18:00.000-07:00

On Blogger, I can schedule blog posts for future publication. I can also back-date blog posts. Theoretically, if I had another Blogger account, I could have them making blog posts at the same time. But what would be the point of that? There could be some deceptive value to post back-dating: when the first incident of Wikipedia-related homicide occurs, I could write up some blog post with some sketchy approximation of what actually happened and back-date to say, a month prior. Then my blog post would seem prophetic.

On Wikipedia, as far as I know, there is no way to schedule edits nor back-date edits. At least I can say such tools are not available to the average Wikipedia user. But that doesn't mean that Wikipedia's most brutal warriors don't find ways to both schedule edits and back-date them. Scheduling is probably easy, as computers offer us plenty of ways to command them to do something at a specific time in the future. Back-dating edits would certainly be more work, in part because it requires access to the server itself. But Wikipedia's most vicious warriors definitely have such access.

Although those brutal bastards can have many sock accounts and give the appearance of independent users by having overlapping edits, that means nothing. They can just as easily declare a bunch of you to be operated by single sockmaster.

Brutal warrior of the month: Dpbsmith

2009-09-02T21:37:00.000-07:00

If there is a brutal warrior who's best learnt the lessons of Emperor Palpatine and Machiavelli's Prince, my money would be on Dpbsmith. Enough said.

Using Wikipedia's most vicious bastards for your own personal amusement

2009-09-02T09:42:00.000-07:00

Thanks to Wikipedia's most vicious bastards, those brutal idiots concerned only with their own aggrandizement, Wikipedia's stated goal of presenting the sum of human knowledge without any monetary barriers will never be realized, and Wikipedia's potential will never get even halfway close to its theoretical maximum.

But it's not all doom and gloom when it comes to Wikipedia's most vicious bastards. Some of them can be manipulated for your personal amusement, according to "Dakota." She went to a cybercafe, got a new Wikipedia account, then chose three brutal warriors to target. She opened three tabs on the Web browser, each pointed to the User contributions page of each of her targeted bastards. Then, she randomly chose an article the bastard had edited recently, and made some random edit to it, something which "any normal person would realize doesn't change the essential meaning of the article at all." In some cases, Dakota made one paragraph slightly more verbose. In others, she made the wording more concise. Most amusing of all, she changed double spaces after periods to single spaces in some articles and viceversa, doing nothing else whatsoever: so, the article's byte count goes up or down a little, but it displays the same!

A normal person who patrols recent changes (do they exist?) would say to themselves, "That isn't bad, but it isn't good either. I might as well leave it alone." But not so with the brutal warriors Dakota targeted. They flew into a frenzy of angry reverting. "You have to do a lot of these quickly, and in a short period of time," Dakota explained, "because unlike you and me, brutal wikiwarriors are logged on to Wikipedia almost 24/7. If you just make one change like this, you're not going to get the full entertainment value of watching those morons act as if they're being martyrized."

Along the way, if you happen to spot any information that is wrong and you can correct without having to spend too much time doing it, go for it. It will only up the entertainment value when the idiotic warriors revert the correction.

A few more words of advice: "Don't edit the same article twice, or they can immediately block you for 3RR." (Actually, they can block you for 3RR even if you don't revert anything, which is why speed is of the essence here). "Don't blank any sections and don't create any new articles. Don't respond to anything on your talk page." And don't keep at it for longer than ten minutes or so. After that, log out, go to your user contributions page and just watch as the moron warriors fall over themselves to revert every single thing you did as quickly as possible.

This week's brutal warrior: Aarktica

2009-09-01T16:01:00.000-07:00

Have you ever wondered why it is that almost anyone can edit your user page? I didn't wonder that until recently because the few times I edited Wikipedia, I didn't get a user name. I guess I assumed that if I got a user name, only I would be able to edit my user page; those who wanted to communicate with me would be able to utilize my user talk page for that purpose. But, as was recently pointed out to me, anyone can edit your user page.

That is, of course, unless you are a powerful brutal warrior on Wikipedia. Then you can 'protect' your own user page. And in fact, Aarktica, this week's brutal warrior, has done precisely that, and he even had the boldness to use his main account to do that instead of one of his sock admins. Aarktica protected the User:Aarktica page on December 11, 2007. There haven't been any further edits to that page since then.

As you probably know, Jimbo Wales has his own Wikipedia user page. Anyone can edit it! In fact, it was edited at least fifty times in the past month, and Jimbo Wales hasn't edited it himself since April 19! The page has been protected from time to time, but always with expiry times: most recently, Jehochman protected the page on Sunday with an expiration of September 6. If you have an established Wikipedia user name (that is, more than a month old), try this today: not logged in, go to Jimbo Wales' user page. You can't edit it. Log in. You can edit his page! Come September 7, you can edit his page without logging in.

So why does Aarktica merit eternal protection for his user page but not the founder of Wikipedia? Because Aarktica is a brutal warrior, and more than that, one with a very brittle ego. Say what you will about Jimbo Wales. He's not afraid of people saying bad things about him. But with Aarktica, it sets him crying like a little girl. And it angers him to new heights of destructiveness.

Warrior of the week: Cobaltbluetony

2009-08-26T11:57:00.000-07:00

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

2009-08-21T09:52:00.000-07:00

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?

2009-08-20T21:29:00.000-07:00

"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

2009-08-19T08:41:00.000-07:00

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

2009-08-18T08:31:00.000-07:00

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

2009-08-14T14:46:00.000-07:00

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

2009-08-11T15:51:00.000-07:00

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

2009-08-05T14:11:00.000-07:00

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

2009-08-05T14:07:00.000-07:00

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

2009-08-04T14:00:00.000-07:00

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.

Brutal warrior of the week: Mastcell

2009-07-28T14:53:00.000-07:00

Something seems to be wrong with his WikiStress Meter, which is broken at the "became insane" level. That's what MastCell wants you to believe. Though his master account may be on sabbatical, his many sockpuppets are busy doing his will. Actually, when you look at his contributions page, you see that his master account has never really been on sabbatical! What a vicious, ferocious, brutal warrior MastCell is.

One possible reason your college professor hates Wikipedia so much

2009-07-27T12:09:00.000-07:00

A lot of college students are wondering why their professors are so damn uptight about Wikipedia. Those professors are being "pesky" or "uncool."

Those of you still in college, try this experiment: go up to your professor and say something along the lines of: "Professor, I was wondering what kinds of lies and misconceptions are out there about [topic you teach], so I went to Wikipedia." Watch him or her launch on a speech about how Wikipedia is unreliable, how it has no peer review, how no one is accountable for its content, how some schools (including perhaps yours) give failing grades to students who cite Wikipedia, etc. In fact that speech is the very same one they'd give if you had said you believed something you read on Wikipedia.

What is it about Wikipedia that sets professors off on such a paroxysm of hatred? When I was in college (don't ask how long ago, suffice it to say Wikipedia didn't even exist back then) I don't remember any professor getting in such an angry mood at the mere mention of Encyclopedia Britannica. "Don't use it as your only source," is the most strongly-worded advice on the matter I can remember.

The publically-stated principle of Wikipedia sounds very good on paper: instead of the encyclopedia seeking out experts (like a traditional encyclopedia does), Wikipedia lets the experts find the encyclopedia. Idealistically, this has the advantage of bringing up experts the traditional encyclopedia would have overlooked. In fact it's possible your college professor bought into this four or five years ago and enthusiastically started contributing to Wikipedia.

But soon he or she would have found out the reality of Wikipedia is very different from its purported ideals. His or her contributions were probably reverted immediately, despite his or her best efforts to comply with Wikipedia's shifting-sand standards. Professor can't cite himself in Wikipedia? Fine, he or she knows plenty other scholars to cite. If he or she was not discouraged at that first difficulty, he or she would eventually have been more thoroughly attacked, his credentials ridiculed and his views mocked. He or she was probably called every name in the Wikipedia book: vandal, sock, troll, pedant, wikiholic, inclusionist, deletionist, etc.

Your professor soon realized that the true purpose of Wikipedia is to provide an arena for self-important ignorant idiots to battle each other for the amusement of Jimbo Wales. Your professor realized that fighting ignorant idiots on Wikipedia is a waste of his time. At the same time, he or she saw, with increasing distress, how his students turn to Wikipedia for information on almost everything. But he or she's too proud to admit that his hatred of Wikipedia stems from the lousy treatment he received at the hands of Wikipedia's ruling idiots. An encyclopedia ruled by idiots is certain to have many other flaws, some of which the professor can use in his anti-Wikipedia speech without any personal embarrassment.

But I'm not letting professors off the hook completely. I say to them: Before launching into your anti-Wikipedia speech, take a second to assess whether you're really telling a misguided student something he or she hasn't heard before or you're actually preaching to the choir.