PeterKa
My time at Wikipedia
Back in 2012, I estimate that I ranked somewhere around No. 5 as an active non-administrative editor at Wikipedia. I could boast tens of thousands of edits on as well as a clean eight-year track record. So what does it take for a senior editor to get banned? You can write an essay mocking a feminist friend of the executive director. Climate change warrior User:William Connolley, perhaps Wikipedia's most notorious editor, played a supporting role in my banning. (Hey, Connolley even has a nickname for me.) Sue Gardner, executive director at that time, left Wikipedia in May 2014. For a brief moment, it seemed like things might change for the better. It's not like anyone else cares about the essay. As near as I can tell, the people who are keeping me banned these days have zero interest in the articles I write and the forums that I comment in. They are just having some fun being vindictive.
My latest appeal got sixteen angry replies in the space of eight hours, an extraordinary response for an ANI post. According to the guidelines, the admin is always right and the sanctioned user must apologize. So there is a basis to reject my appeal. But not one response made a constructive suggestion of any kind. No one discussed how the appeal could be improved or what trust-building activity might be appropriate. Instead, the commenters attacked on my "mentality" and even described the appeal itself as "practically trolling." (Huh?) Each discussion of my case has featured a different "real reason" as to why I was banned. The comments are always in synch with the current party line, and no one is confused as to which reason is the "real" one this time around. During my time on Wikipedia, I count five separate occasions when angry mobs came out of nowhere to dominate otherwise sleepy forums. In short, the system is rigged with editors who know what they are supposed to do notified in some way.
Few of the editors who condemn me in the latest discussion have even one tenth the level of experience that I have. Several have less than one twentieth. Yet each and every one of them is confident that they understand Wikipedia better than I do. Notice the comment by User:Heimstern near the end. As Arbcom enforcer, he speaks for Wikipedia's top brass.
Related pages
- Read my parody of Wikipedia's gender categories affair. Behold the masterpiece that Wikipedia censored and banned me for.
- Watch me blow the lid off the Ivory Coast RM scam. I expose the shenanigans of corrupt admin User:Billinghurst.
- My Arbcom appeal has a blow-by-blow account of what happened during my time on Wikipedia.
- Diacritic â This is a zippy overview of one of the most controversial aspects of my editing.
- Diacritics proposal â You can find a detailed set of arguments here.