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==My time at Wikipedia==

==My time at Wikipedia==

Back in 2012, I was a senior editor on Wikipedia and could boast tens of thousands of edits as well as a clean eight-year track record. I was especially active in a forum called “requested moves.” After an editor named GoodDay was topic banned over [[diacritics]], the people who had been involved in the campaign against him began targeting me. GoodDay wrote about hockey and I wrote about Vietnam, so is not that he and I had a great deal in common. Team Harassment had fun with him and wanted to keep that going with someone else. An editor I will refer to as “IIO” began picking fights with me. The original discussion between IIO and MSGJ on MSGJ's talk page that kicked off the harassment campaign is now oversighted and hidden from public view. But if I recall correctly, it was basically two guys chortling over the joys of bullying. Day after day, IIO complained about me in one forum after another. He put an astonishing amount of time and energy into harassing and stalking me, apparently jealous of my unofficial status as "RM expert." The campaign against me went on for a full year. For a time, a sympathetic admin protected me. When he took a break from editing, yet another proposal to ban me was made on a board called ANI.

Back in 2012, I was a senior editor on Wikipedia and could boast tens of thousands of edits as well as a clean eight-year track record. I was banned in 2013 following  [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Administrators%27_noticeboard/Archive252#Ban_proposal:_Kauffner a discussion that was obviously rigged]. It was full of people I'd never heard of up to that point. Although no compelling arguments were presented, everyone voted to ban me. If some reporter digs into this, I suspect they will find that the French embassy has paid off various Wikipedia admins to promote the use of the French language on English-language Wikipedia. Perhaps my sin was to lead an effort to move an African country from it's French name (''Côte d'Ivoire'') to it's English name (Ivory Coast).  

 

The [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Administrators%27_noticeboard/Archive252#Ban_proposal:_Kauffner discussion that followed] was obviously rigged. It was full of people I'd never heard of up to that point, as well as other people IIO had recruited. Although no compelling arguments were presented, everyone voted to ban me. So they must have been canvassed together somehow. One editor accused me of multiple voting. No actual case was mentioned. This was apparently a drive-by editor, someone making a wild guess as to what the fuss was all about. The other votes were even less specific. Several votes tossed around ANI clichés like "disruptive" and "Hasn't he been banned already?" without making any substantive point at all. Not a single diff was presented -- a diff being Wikipedia's version of evidence. Despite the fuss that arose over diacritics earlier, this issue was not mentioned in the banning discussion.

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