Overlapping edits mean nothing

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

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

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

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

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

The thievery of Wikipedia

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

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

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

How long to the first Wikipedia-related homicide?

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

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

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

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