Hi, I found your site while Googling for anti-Wikipedia stuff to read, as you can obviously understand. I was unjustly banned. Indefinitely. For being a "sock puppet."

This will be long, boring and convoluted, but I'll outline the events for you. I hope you'll read because my blood is still boiling and I need a hug. :-)

Full disclosure of account history: I made my account "CreepyCrawly" in November 2006. I used it once, to make a babbling comment on a talk page, then didn't log in again until yesterday. I did edit in the interim, as whatever IP I happened to have, mostly just random little fixes here and there, to whatever article I happened to be reading. I remember none of them, but it is irrelevant. I'm not a "Wikipedian," in other words. But the other day, March 9th, I did make another account, "Razor6." I was listening to "Metal Health" by Quiet Riot while reading an article, and when I heard the lyric "I'm like a laser, six-string razor," I thought Razor6 would be a cool username so I figured I'd snag it, just in case I ever did decide to become a Wikipedian (not bloody likely now). I made a couple edits and logged out. (I don't ever remember registering at Wikipedia before CreepyCrawly, but I have been using the site and making sporadic edits for several years. This is why I'm reasonably familiar with the policies, which apparently qualifies as "evidence" that I am some malicious multi-personality.)

So, yesterday I wanted to edit Global Warming, but it is semi-protected. When I tried to log in with Razor6, I realized I must have mistyped my intended password when I signed up, and I hadn't entered an email. Oh well, cool username lost, whatever. So I log in with CreepyCrawly and commence. I tried rewording something that was rather subjective and weaselly, but it didn't show up when I was done, so I reverted myself because I was afraid I'd broken something. (I later realized that I had deleted it from the citation rather than the body.) As I looked at the history, I noticed a user named "Spamsham" had made a weasel word edit, and that it had been reverted because "the intro is a carefully balanced (and highly discussed) item. Please take to talk before changing." I became incensed at this; editors are NOT required to beg for permission in talk pages before making good-faith edits that they believe will improve an article. I feel this was the case with Spamsham's edit. Yet here was this other person waltzing in and declaring otherwise. So I went to bat for Spamsham and reverted it back. I can now see that this is where my trouble started, because Raul654 later opened a discussion on his talk page (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Raul654#Halbut_returb), which has since been deleted or archived or otherwise hidden (big surprise), trying to figure out if I WAS Spamsham, as well as some other names. Let me state for the record here that I am not ANY of those other people. Although, "Raymond arritt" did call me "Obedium" as well, on my user page, so maybe they were thinking I was Obedium first, for whatever reason, and chatting about me behind the scenes somewhere, like a coffee clutch gossiping about the new single guy down the street. Anyway, I made a couple more changes, which were all instantly reverted by the article "ownership," along with discussion in the talk page and on user pages. Feel free to peruse them if you're bored; I am admittedly bold in asserting my equal editing privileges in the face of Wikibullys, but I'm not a troublemaker/flamer/vandal/etc. You'll find none of that from me. Note that user "Nonexistant User" in Global Warming history was named "Veritas" when he went to bat for me there. I'm not sure what the deal is with his name change; I visited his userpage a couple times and it kept changing, then he seems to have vanished. Very strange. Anyway, I do not know who Veritas is or was, other than a seemingly objective editor. He was later reverted as well, by another pompous asshat who explained himself by simply stating, "this is better." So at the end of it all, they kept "their" article "balanced" (i.e., stagnant and under iron-fisted lockdown).

At any rate, they seem to believe they're wrapped up their "case," and here I am permabanned. I am now accused of being a cabal of sock puppets, when I've never used a sock puppet in my life because I've never even been a regularly logged in editor! Raul654 even admits on his talk page, "There's no IP evidence linking them," but since he believes that "Scibaby" is a proxy user, and since his amazing gut feeling tells him that I am apparently this Scibaby as well as all his other phantom tormentors, the banhammer was dropped! I even went to Spamsham's page and asked him to tell them I am not him, which he quickly did (they didn't seem to notice or care that we were apparently logged in at the same time, which would seem to me to be an obvious mark against their "case"). From Scibaby's page, I checked the guy who banned him and he appears obsessed with Global Warming. I get the feeling this really is all about keeping the hooks into that article by quickly "determining" that any member of the proletariat who dare touch it is clearly a sock puppet of some past insurrectionist whom they've squashed.

I've read plenty of talk page squabbles over the years, but never got involved. I just laughed at how petty it all seemed. But I never thought I'd get caught up in it. Now I understand why emotions flare so easily at that place, because of jackasses like Raul654 who indefinitely ban people based on random "hunches," and who have no problem inflicting collateral damage in their inane witch hunts. Or, worse, who intentionally couch a banning under the guise of collateral damage, when their real motivation is that some "newbie" had the temerity to edit a page that he and his cronies "own." I don't know if my case comes down to administrative collusion or just idiocy, or both, but the end result is the same: I've been wronged. I've appealed my ban on my talk page and emailed Raul654, and even Jimmy Wales (hey, you never know!) and unblock-en-l@lists.wikimedia.org (twice), but I get the feeling that they just want people like me, who are bold and will not tolerate bullying, to go away. And I'm sure they refresh sites like this all day, so I'll probably never get unbanned now that I've offended the gods by daring to speak with devils. Heh. What's funny is that all they've accomplished by banning me is to make me want to circumvent it and actually start causing trouble. I won't bother though; the encyclopedic quality is fairly atrocious so I'd just as soon stop visiting it altogether.

Anyway, thanks for indulging me. :-)