Dastardly warrior of the week: CactusWriter

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.