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So the pretentious Darthgriz98 is no longer active on Wikipedia.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.

Vicious warrior of the year: Ctjf83

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

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

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

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.