Even hinting that admin abuse exists is against the rules now....

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=....80.A2_moves.29


Sceptre begins a complaint about admin abuse with, "I'll probably get blocked for blocked for this, but..."

And it's so true. Often complaints about admins end up getting reverted and the complainer banned for life.

So one of the first comments he gets is:

Can you picture me rolling my eyes?

It's very true though, that's generally what happens.

If you say "I'll probably get blocked for this" it is considered to be goading.

Normal Wikipedia practise is that if you dare to say that you hope that you don't get attacked, then it is "asking for it" and is the same thing as saying that you want someone to attack you.

Of course, most everywhere else, they'd reassure you that you wouldn't be attacked, ask why you think that you are going to be attacked, and so forth.

But Wikipedia isn't a nice, happy, friendly place to be. Wikipedia is nasty, full of pricks, and power trippers, who love to newbie bash and to bash anyone who is less powerful than they are.

Amusingly, most of the discussion in that thread is more about whether he should have said "I should have been blocked for this", and then secondly whether he had any right to criticise an admin, rather than the actual complaint itself.

HOW DARE YOU criticise an admin!

Indeed. Scrolll down that same page and you'll see people bending over backwards to make excuses for the fact that SlimVirgin used a sock puppet to stack votes. It's ok for her to do that, since she's an admin, and a high cabalist, at that.

Al

Yeah I read that. I loved ElinorD's statement the most. Paraphrasing:

"Yes, SlimVirgin is guilty of using a sock puppet, but it was 2 years ago. And so what if she voted twice in a Featured Article thing, its not a big deal. No, she hasn't explained anything, but she's been under a lot of stress - outed in the media and all, with her corruption exposed. Yes, there is verifiable information, but it comes from Wikipedia Review, so regardless of the quality of it, you need to ignore it. And don't ban SlimVirgin straight away without a talk - I mean SlimVirgin's sock puppet - I mean no that's not her sock puppet at all. If you must ban it, why couldn't you ban it and pretend that it's being banned for something other than being SlimVirgin's sock puppet? We don't want to give these people, like the evil Wikipedia Review, any more ammunition, or any feeling like they might be right. Please respect people in the cabal. They are more powerful than you."

Of course, this is being discussed in another thread.

"First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, then you win."
-- Mahatma Gandhi






Game, set... match? Getting closer.

It's being a cabalist that makes it OK, not an admin. The charge against Runcorn was his alleged sockpuppetry.

A case in which, even if the sock puppetry claims were true, didn't justify a ban, because they weren't abusive. They weren't ban evading, and they weren't using it to change history.

The absolute worst claim that they could make is that they used it to vote for the deletion of an article, or against the deletion of an article.

Something so minor as to be laughable. Does it really matter if a marginal article is kept or deleted? Seriously, that's so minor that it's not worth even thinking about.

You look at what SlimVirgin is proven to have done, and they are passing that off as nothing. Compare that to the claims that they made about Poetlister, and later Runcorn etc. There is no comparison to what SlimVirgin was proven to have done and what Runcorn and Poetlister are accused of doing.

One group were good users, the other one is one of the most abusive users in the history of Wikipedia (if not the number 1).

That's one thing that they should be asking before they look at any claims of sock puppetry: does it even matter? If it doesn't matter, then who cares?

They deleted all of the photographs, but let me tell you there was no doubt that they were real people (not models, not magazine shots, not copied off the internet, not belonging to anyone else), and they were different people.

Now maybe you can say that Runcorn, Brownlee and Newport were sock puppets of one of the others, because you don't have that photographic evidence. But there's no way that Poetlister, Taxwoman, Londoneye and Rachel Brown are the same person. 4 unique, independent identities, both in terms of editing style, photographs, and real people set up throughout the internet.

If Taxwoman, the bondage queen, and Poetlister the innocent girl, are the same person, then something seriously weird is going on. They are like opposites of each other.

Runcorn?

In fact, it's perfectly fine even if you're not an admin, just so long as you're part of a sufficiently powerful cabal. Look at Proabivoac, who gets away with stalking and sock puppetry on a daily basis.

Al

I think my own case takes the cake for bizarre abuse of sock puppet rules.

First, they ban me for a year on BS charges. Of course, a year isn't long enough, so they decide that some edits by a variety of unrelated IP's are evidence of my sock puppetry. No need to run checkuser, bring it up in AN/I or otherwise pretend to anything like due process. Hell, don't even bother fucking asking me if any of these are me. Instead, Centrx the admindroid decides to bump me up to an indef "community" ban, all by himself.

Now, the whole permaban thing is ridiculous because I made it very clear in my last edit that I wasn't coming back unless I was appointed to ArbCom so I could protect myself. Centrx' actions amounted to spitting on my corpse, a pointless insult added to injury.

Of course, with my account being outlawed forever, it became a fine tool for ridding WP of inconvenient users who offend the wrong cabals. Some newbie comes in and offends Teams Rand, Jesus and America all at once, so he's accused of being me. Note that they didn't have anything on him; no warnings or blocks for edit warring or even incivility.

To be clear, they didn't have a CU to prove he was anyone, and in fact aborted their own RFCU, though not before adding a few other users to fish for. All they had, and all they needed in this lynching climate, was Proabivouac's "professional" opinion, which we now know is worthless. The end result is that they found a way to drag a user all the way from a clean slate to an early grave without stopping at Go. Brilliant!

Al