I've been doing some more research on the blocking and banning of a number of users who were combating pseudoscience in Wikipedia. FT2 was behind the bans (he is an adherent of the NLP cult, and a large number of the people who supported him at the election are either NLP, or other cults, or members of, er, certain fringe sexuality groups).

The facts are hard to track down, but there do seem to be a number of editors, not just a set of sockpuppets. Some of them were banned because they were members of the same science club at Hong Kong university.

Question: is this allowed? For example, if several members of the Royal Society had the same concern about pseudoscience or whatever, and acted to correct misinformation in Wikipedia, would there be grounds for a ban like this? Or what about members of the same philosophy department?

I've emailed Helen to get her side of the matter. [Update - the email address is no longer valid, and there is still a question of whether she is a sockpuppet of Headley - on the other hand, the offense she was blocked for was being a 'meatpuppet', and that seems fundamentally wrong. I've also followed up a lot of the Headley down edits, and, regardless of whether he was guilty of the sockpuppet issue, they were pretty much all sound, and many of the attacks on him were flagrant abuse of policy, and bullying. But more of that later. End of edit]



This post has been edited by Peter Damian: