| − | ==Wikipedia: The encyclopedia anyone can edit -- unless you make fun of a feminist novelist, or if a liberal user wants to make trouble for you==
| + | Ever wondered how Wikipedia gets rid of conservative editors? They have it down to a science. Liberal editors will harass the victim until he reacts. Then they use his reaction as the basis for a complaint to "ANI" (Administrator's Noticeboard/Incidents). Established liberal editors don't get sanctioned for harassing a conservative, the situation has to be resolved somehow, so the result is often a "topic ban" for the conservative. Finally, they accuse the victim of violating the topic ban so he can be banned from Wikipedia altogether. |
| − | If you are interested in the specific issues that led to my ban, you can read about them in [[User:PeterKa/Arbcom | my Arbcom appeal]]. But I will present some of the larger lessons I learned from the experience here. In a series of cases I am familiar with, Wikipedia has resolved persistent conflict between liberal and conservative editors by banning the conservative. Judging from my case, this policy may apply even when the conflict can be attributed to malicious and unreasonable edits by the liberal editor, and the conservative editor is a top contributor. I was banned over an article I wrote about [https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Han-Nom&oldid=563875554 Sino-Vietnamese characters]. So retreating to an apolitical topic was not enough to appease Team Harassment.
| + | I can't say what exactly I did to tick off Team Harassment. I participated extensively in a forum called "requested moves," so many editors were aware of my opinions on a variety of subjects. My views on diacritics, climate change, gender issues, and the use of disambiguation all provoked emotional responses. I was well-established editor with tens of thousands of edits, and I was able to outargue Team Harassment in several ANI discussions. So it took a year-long campaign to get me banned. Every time I logged in there were new posts denouncing or harassing me. |
| − | "Consensus" is supposed to be Wikipedia's basic organizing principle. The banning of someone with any significant amount of editing experience is normally done only after public discussion at ANI or Arbcom. It is unlikely that so many high-ranking admins took an interest in my activities at the same time on their own separate initiative. After all, I had been editing for eight years at that point. Somehow, the consensus-building process was short circuited. Perhaps a star chamber worked out its strategy off Wikipedia. There is a clique of feminist trollocrats, including User:Ponyo, who have been granted extraordinary powers to resolve Wikipedia's supposed "woman problem." I was targeted as the epitome of this problem, apparently on account of [[User:PeterKa/Filipacchi | a few jokes I put on my user page]]. (I'm not that funny, really!) Several comments I made in my own defense were oversighted, so I wasn't even allowed to explain myself.
| + | Finally, my case went to an admin named Ponyo. She is apparently high enough in the Wikipedia hierarchy so that she doesn't issue warnings before blocking or follow the other procedural safeguards that lesser mortals on Wikipedia do. She found a flimsy excuse to impose a a two-week block on me. Her note explaining the block referenced various incidents going back months, so she had obviously been recruited. After that, an ANI discussion could be held without my participation. There is of course a rule this tactic. To keep bringing up the same complaint again and again is called "forum shopping." In fact, [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Administrators%27_noticeboard/Archive252#Ban_proposal:_Kauffner the discussion which resulted in my being banned] consists almost entirely of references to previous discussions. That is to say, discussions in which it was decided not to sanction me were the primary evidence against me. Later, I noticed that several of the posts I made these earlier discussions were "oversighted" -- disappeared from the point of view of ordinary users. Apparently, I had defended myself too effectively for the posts to be left in the archive. If you are interested in the play-by-play of what happened to me, check out [[User:PeterKa/Arbcom | my Arbcom appeal]]. |