QUOTE(One @ Fri 5th March 2010, 11:23pm)
Contrary to EricBarbour's claims, he's not a pedophilia POV-pusher. Years ago he stated that they are "very welcome" to edit, but it appears his own editing was not that of an advocate; he seems to have focused his own editing on removing subtle pedophile POV. This was not a well-researched block. Shot from the hip, no attempt to aim was made until it was challenged.
I've looked over his contribs a bit more thoroughly, and I guess I'm forced to agree with you. I still don't think he should have admin rights, but of course I'm going to say that about most WP admins... Nevertheless, if Viridae erred at all in this case, it was on the side of caution, and he shouldn't be blamed for that.
I sometimes find myself morbidly fascinated by the mentality and motivations of people like Mr. Herostratus - what drives a person to deliberately insert himself into an issue like pedophilia, on a website like Wikipedia, for the purpose of (ostensibly) playing peacemaker and compromiser between pedophiles - a thoroughly disreputable bunch if there ever was one - and (potentially) the rest of the world? Is it just "someone has to do it, so it might as well be me"? Does he gets some sort of supreme self-satisfaction
(hey, alliteration!) from it, i.e., "I'm probably the only one capable of dealing with this, and I want everyone to know that and be impressed," even if he never actually identifies himself?
I'd also agree that we tend to assume, perhaps wrongly, that someone who deals almost exclusively (OK, about 80 percent) with one topic area must, almost by necessity, have some sort of underlying advocacy agenda. I'd also hasten to point out that this isn't because we're bad people who constantly jump to conclusions; it's because in large numbers of cases (perhaps even the vast majority), this ends up being exactly what's going on.
One interesting incident that I found with Herostratus involved
this unsuccessful AfD on something called the
René Guyon Society (T-H-L-K-D) - supposedly a pro-pedo organization, but actually a hoax perpetrated by one person. He begins by stating: "As near as I can determine, the René Guyon Society is an urban legend that never actually existed." He's challenged on this point by anti-humanity zealot
JoshuaZÂ
(T-C-L-K-R-D)
, who essentially says that if Herostratus (or whoever) can't come up with a "reliable source" to prove that the organization didn't exist,
it must therefore be worthy of inclusion. At the time (Feb. 19, 2008), of course, JoshuaZ had lost his own admin rights just two weeks earlier due to his use of multiple accounts to influence deletion discussions, and this was just five days after evidence of this
appeared here on WR. But as a result of his intervention, the article was kept, and still exists to this day.
Meanwhile, Herostratus voted to
delete the Adult-child sex article, and while he was "on the fence" WRT the (successful)
deletion of the Boychat article (he actually voted "Hmmmmm"), he did make some valid points in favor of deleting it. The actual WP pedophiles were quite adamant about keeping both of those, apparently.
Anyway, it's an interesting problem, distasteful though it all may be. The main point is that it wouldn't take an anti-WP fire-breather like Mr. Barbour or even myself to mistake Herostratus for a "notorious Pedophilia editor" -
most people would have done that, and it takes a fair amount of reading through some extremely unpleasant content to finally conclude that he actually believed Wikipedia could, and should, try to be "neutral" on the subject without actually advancing the pro-pedophile agenda. That's not something that most sane people would really want to bother doing, even if they're WP admins like Mr. Viridae.