Not entirely sure what has gone on:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Maj...a_banned_editor

But Majorly has been indef blocked.

Majorly proxying for Amorrow!?!

I'm confused.

Apparently, someone went through and reverted all edits Amorrow has ever made. Majorly didn't much like this, and reverted them. Then he was yelled at for proxying, started being disruptive, and got blocked.

i do feel a bit for the kid. He has just been in a traffic accident which resulted in him being knocked off his bike, and suddenly his childish sarcasm is appearing to be more serious than he intends.

Note these pointy questions at RFA:

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=...oldid=199245498



The kid doesn't seem too well.

Alison has unblocked, incidentally.

I get the sense (from an edit comment) that the WP:POINT that Majorly was trying to make is that good edits should be kept no matter who made them.

No wonder he got indefinitely banned.

You can't put the "encyclopedia anyone can edit" ahead of personal grudges! What nonsense!

He's being pretty emo. I hope he's alright.

Incidentally, the whole "delete every contribution" standard seems wasteful. I see Alison doing that. If it's really worthwhile to revisit every edit, can't one at least retain the positive contributions?

Actually, why are bananas yellow?

Remember, they start out green, so why can't they just turn purple or a nice shade of pink?

Anyway, it looks like Majorly is trying to get himself re-blocked, and of course they aren't having it. Too much Wikipedia Review reading, no doubt - he's figured out the whole reverse-psychology angle. You had to figure some of them would twig to it eventually.

This performance by Alison and Sir Fozzie is ridiculous and surely constitutes "vandalism" by WPs own tenets. Deliberately sabotaging content due to some issue with a banned user is inexcusable.

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=...oldid=199218482

The irony of the censorship and demonization taking place on an Orwellian article takes the biscuit.

It is certainly a sad day when the "good guys" start fighting among themselves instead of going after Sir Shagalot and Mr Rent-a-Hack!

I certainly wouldn't think Alison and SirFozzie would engage in this kind of behavior, this is JzG-fringe territory here.

Hopefully they will come by and comment about this.

Tell me about it …

I'm still waiting for them to figure out the double-reverse-with-a-sleight-hesitation march hare krishna 3-step, however …

Jonny

Well, Alison said that it had to do with Amarrow's real life behavior, East718 says stalking female admins (actual stalking, not wiki-"stalking"). But User:GoldFlower felt the need to humiliate Majorly by replacing his page with a banned user template.

If it is to do with an editor stalking female admins, surely all female admins have a COI and can't get involved?

I can't wait for Mantanmoreland's RFA...

Hmm. I've been summoned.

Look guys, a lot of you know what Amorrow has done in the past, or at least what he's been accused of. Why he got banned from WP. Why he got banned from here, for god's sake.

He is not welcome period. I'm a rules wonk, I'll freely admit it. That's why I do things that don't make me popular with certain other folks, good or bad, but A) We don't have the time, the energy or the patience to have to go through every open-proxy wielding vandal, and B ) Considering his history, and the ramifications that have come from it, Amorrow is spectacularly unwelcome on Wikipedia.

The sooner that he gets the idea that his edits, be they good, bad, indifferent will not stick, and that he's wasting his time and leaves.. not only the better off will the encyclopedia will be, but considering his history, the safer the people who edit and admin Wikipedia will be.

Here's the discussion about him being banned from here (WR):

http://wikipediareview.com/index.php?showtopic=1563

I'd be curious to at least know how recent the latest complaint of female-admin "stalking" is against User:Amorrow, or if they're still operating on the basis of his (admittedly quite nasty) writings from two years ago about Slimmy, Katefan0, Phaedriel, and MusicalLinguist.

IOW, is Amorrow back to his old tricks? If so, then maybe User:JzG shouldn't have baited him by claiming that he spent time "in jail" without mentioning precisely what for, because it turned out to be for something related to a child-custody dispute that had nothing to do with "cyberstalking" whatsoever...?

Anyway, they seem to be under the impression that IP 69.108.26.26 is him, and it does geolocate to Silicon Valley, which is where Amorrow lives. But y'know, a lot of IP's are based in Silicon Valley!

WP:LITVIASW —

Living In The Valley In A Silicon Way

Jonny

As much as that I agree with a concept of a good edit is a good edit no matter where it comes from, I can also understand where the "revert all Amorrow edits and maybe he will go away" concept comes into play.

Ah SirFozzie thanks for coming by.

I have to say though, I doubt you will ever be able to influence Amorrow's behavior. I would think someone like Amorrow would never "take the hint." And, provided that's true, removing worthwhile edits only hurts Wikipedia.

Amorrow was disinvited from WP years ago. If he still hasn't given up, what makes anyone think he'll stop? It's technically impossible to keep people off an open-editing project like WP. They always find a way in.





True.

Beats WP:LIVIAVW

Living In a Venerial World
(Venerial!)

Oh, they do.

I'm Gunna Bwast You Wiki Wabbit!!!

Jonny

Very nice. Yes, the only point is that the plant make the fruit turn ANYTHING other than green, when it's done. Yellow is popular because it's easy, being the xanthophyllic color of stuff before chlorophyll gets made, and after it's gone.

Nature's first green is gold
Her hardest hue to hold
Her early leaf's a flower
But only so an hour
Then leave subsides to leaf
So Eden sank to grief
So dawn goes down to day
Nothing gold can stay
Unless it's a banana

(Robert "Ernie" Frost)


The red of carotenoids also gets seen in some early foliage (which is higher in sugar and other nutrients), and may be why primates and birds, alone among animals, developed the color vision to see red (most color vision is red-green colorblind).

And thus the pink bananas, which are clearly meant for primates. They certainly aren't that size and colored to attract birds! And nothing but birds and monkeys can see red and pink as something different from green or yellow. Elephants and giraffes and sloths and such, wouldn't even notice.

Jonny "Day-O" Cache

As the original author of "Come Mr. Taliban", I say "give that man a hand."

<de-lurk>

Hi all. Urgh - what a mess. I'm just really going to post one reply to all this here, and I'll try to say as much as I can without going into too much detail. I feel I owe some explanations.

I've been quietly reverting/blocking/moving-on a lot of Amorrow's edits and have been doing so for some time now. Someone here pointed that out only last week that there's much less "headless-chicken" behaviour on ANI these days as a result.

You all know me well enough by now - I don't do the mindless, blind "revert-banned-editor" thing on WP as a rule, I don't do the "proxying for a banned editor block" thing and I certainly don't generally answer to some clique or other. This stuff is so out of character for me, but I do have my reasons.

There's one exception to all this, and Amorrow is it. Without going into too much detail, I am loathe to allow his edits to stand without there being very good reason. It's not down to encyclopedic integrity either, and that was where Majorly was coming from on this. I don't mind people going through stuff and taking ownership and responsibility for stuff, as User:Lucretius did last week but wholesale reverting? Nope, sorry.

This involves off-wiki stuff, indeed RL stuff and I cannot go into details. Most everyone on here is intelligent and I know you guys can prolly figure out why, and what exactly is going on here without it having to be spelled out. As regards East718, he should not have blocked Majorly without warning, as he did, and nor should he have made comments about stalking and harassment. Same with those "jail" comments that were made by someone else on ANI last week. I'm not going to speculate wildly on a public forum about any of that, so please don't ask me to. BTW - in case anyone didn't guess, yes - he's on here, too. Did anyone really expect otherwise?

I'm really sorry about what happened to Majorly. He's one of the long-term WP folks and I really like him a lot. I've known the guy for years now and didn't want this to happen. He's already had the week-from-hell from what I can see.

-- Allie

PS: Sorry, Vintagekits, about earlier. I'll email you in the morning

I'm not sure I am smart enough to piece it all together, Alison. Why don't you dumb it down for me? >:-(

This had better be a campaign to remove Amorrow's current edits and not PAST edits, as some are implying. To go through and remove still-standing edits made when he was not banned is the height of the sort of stupidity that fuels BADSITES, self-appointed "troll-fighters" and the insincere label "meatpuppet". Any Harry Potter fans will likely remember Harry's words in the second book about how Dumbledore would never be truly gone from Hogwarts as long as those there were loyal to him. I opine that Amorrow will never truly be gone from Wikipedia until those there are no longer afraid of him.

You're doing him a service here, more than you know. If he's a troll he'll lap up the attention, and if he's a psycho he'll get off on being able to generate such fear and chaotic results.

Correct. Only new edits.



Yup again. Hence the quiet approach ...

... at least until NOW, that is Ugh!

s/you/they

Disturbing. I thought the issue was that someone had reverted good edits by this person. Are we saying that there are certain things, facts, possibly well-sourced facts cannot be stated on the encycopedia any more? What if an Amorrow proxy edits the Medieval Philosophy article and inserts biographical details of St Peter Damian, say? Do they have to be removed because, while true and sourced, the cause of them getting there is 'wrong'. That is Orwellian.

Alison, could you explain to me how someone can legitimately reinstate a perfectly good Amorrow edit? Let's say he adds something that is indisputably valuable information--surely you agree that it would be irrational to say that this information should be excluded from WP just because Morrow happened to be the one to add it. What is the difference between restoring it legitimately and doing what Majorly did? You're saying he was "wholescale reverting"--you don't think he was adequately reviewing the edits before reinstating them?

The point, I believe, is to stop any of Amorrows new edits lasting in the form he added them. That doesn't stop others adding the exact same information in their own words. (indeed writing it in his words without indicating the source would be a GDFL vio)

So others are expected to reword any of Morrow's positive contributions before restoring them. This merely burdens those doing the restoring for no constructive or meaningful purpose, doesn't it? (Of course, it isn't a GDFL violation to simply revert to somebody else's version, so I'm not sure what you mean by that.) Is it agreed upon that if Morrow makes a good edit, and someone reviews it, decides it is good, and restores it without altering it, that person should be blocked?

On the subject of GDFL - i meant reverting wholsesale without indication it is a revert, thus claiming that it was your work not the actual authors.

ON 99% of cases i agree with you, that it is the content that matters not the contributor - in fact i post something in general chatter about 2 days ago on that very subject. The point here is that the real world implications of amorrow's editing and potentially stalking (IRL not on WP) female editors again, and offence he reportedly went to prison for has an impact greater than reverting his contributions when they are discovered. Ultimately it comes back to the mantra of "its just a website" if IRL harm can be stopped using this tactic thats a good thing. So ultimately, just because he added it doesnt mean facts etc are forever blacklisted from that article, instead the edits he made cannot remain intact, but must be removed and can be re-added by someone who sees fit to do so in their own words - no wholesale reverts allowed.

That said, while i understand where arbcom is coming from with this policy (not in the usual WP policy sense), I'm not sure that it is going to have any effect.

This is the fundamental problem behind how Wikipedia deals with its exiles, and I'm disappointed that Fozzie, whom I respect, buys into it.

Banned users aren't just "disinvited" from editing and that's that. It's generally the goal of the Wikipedia community to make sure that they FEEL banned. That the person "GETS THE IDEA" that you are NOT WELCOME HERE ANYMORE YOUNG MAN. Indeed, this caused a lot of frustration among some supporters of my ban; many editors complained at length about my remarks on this forum, which rather than being sorrowful and apologetic consisted of a gleefully resounding "loldongs" coupled with a pride at the controversy I had unwittingly caused.

Any sort of "campaign" against Amorrow is more likely to egg him on than get him to "get the idea". He's been banned for like two and a half years? He's not just going to up and quit after all that time. And this isn't just theorizing on my part: I love wikis because they're easy to throw into chaos. I've targetted wikis with varying degrees of participation and sysop experience, and the ones I get sick of the quickest aren't the ones that MAKE IT CLEAR that my presence will not be tolerated. If I go to an inactive wiki and do a few pagemoves with absolutely no consequences, it gets boring and I leave within 20 minutes. But other wikis, like Citizendium, who go BONKERS from a little trolling, would enjoy my company for weeks. Seriously, these guys got so paranoid they started blocking ALL new accounts indefinitely during times that I was particularly insistent.

Obviously the situations aren't totally parallel, since Amorrow is far more mean-spirited than I am and Alison and Co. lack the technical incompetence of the early Citizendium sysops. But the point stands: you can't win philosophical battles with trolls. You can't force them to admit defeat; they'll only ever give up from boredom. The smart thing to do is to watch these accounts and quit making fools of yourselves reverting helpful contributions. And if he strays out of mainspace for even one edit, block him with a {{checkuserblock}} and be done with it. Don't gossip about it on IRC or on mailing lists, and if anyone inquires just be like "that's priveleged, sorry"; Amorrow's name should never even have to come up, and his baiting game will lose some appeal (though truthfully, I doubt he'll ever drop it entirely - I'll still be terrorizing Citizendium if they hadn't disabled account creation). Yeah, this may suck because "Amorrow is still getting edits in" - but you know what? He is right now, and that's just something you'll have to live with.

It is simply beyond me to understand how forcing good faith contributors to reword Morrow's stuff will help prevent real life harm. I think this is the kind of reasoning that develops in a "bubble" where there's no critical voice or skepticism.

I have myself seen people reverted because they were suspected of being sockpuppets of banned users, the sole grounds for that suspicion being that they were making the sort of edits that said users would have made. In at least one case, they were reverting bad-faith trolling and an admin restored the bad edit!

The point being that if he sees he work get obliterated at every turn he might go away - I doubt that personally but that is, I believe, the thinking. I think if they could they would ban any of amorrows work entering articles in any form, including reworded stuff, (thus more effectively have his work obliterated) however that is a completely unfeasible stae of affairs and also stops the issue being quietly dealt with.

Well we've just seen a case of this.



The edits were a series of additions to the Medieval Philosophy article on the influence of St Augustine and Boethius on the early medieval period. Obviously anyone who edits on this topic is clearly a dangerous stalker and harasser of Zoophilists & a threat to the continued existence of the project and must be blocked instantly.

This will of course put off any of the 100 people existing in the world with enough knowledge to edit that article, from going anywhere it. Thus, the high medieval period remains blank, and will do for the foreseeable future.

Thanks btw to those who offered to proxy-edit the article. I declined for precisely this reason.



Likewise and by parity of reasoning, I will turn away from my attempts at editing the Medieval philosophy article if I see the work I do being obliterated at every turn.

Btw, why haven't my edits to that article last Sunday been obliterated? Surely they should?

It is an indication of how powerful the group think is that rational people can get sucked into it.

The acid test should only be "Is it a valid edit?" No consideration of the who at all. As soon as the who comes into it, simply by examining the edits, then the game is up.

That is a different test to spotting a vandal and working through the list as a repair exercise.

If you think it through, the simple fact that he can come back and see that he has had the attention of his edits being reverted will prove that he is getting the attention he seeks. So if they are vandal edits, let the normal processes apply, if they are normal edits, trust to the normal processes of Wikipedia. (Yes, wearing a Wikipedian hat of assumption of competence, but you see the principle).

It is a bit like dog training: you come home to your dog and pay it attention, it assumes it is top dog. You have to ignore it to prove you are so important that you do not need to worry about the dog. Then after a bit, the dog gets the idea and does not jump up and seek to dominate you. Ignoring is a very powerful technique. In fact it is one that Slim (oops! Mack's Law) uses very effectively - and it drives people mad in the short term. The more you can ignore, the better. It is called not rising to the bait. It is also why the likes of Guy are so ineffective: he does not see that he generates more vandalism and trolling than he cures by his provocative ways. If someone does something that cannot be ignored, deal with it in the way that gives the minimum attention to the transgressor.

The other thing that comes very apparent, is that Wikipedia is something of a magnet for the unbalanced (not just a social networking site, but a strange, amoral one where people with some very odd views on appropriate behaviour can thrive and gain positive feedback for their odd behaviour). Wikipedia is in denial about this, but they really ought to spend some WMF money on understanding the issue and seeing if there are any measures that could be taken to reduce the harm that the Wikipedia environment does. It's not like that problem is not acknowledged to exist.

Jonny

My generation won't be fooled again. Tommy, can you hear me? I'm free. Who are you?

Peter amorrow socks are not found using the duck test. Noone should be afraid to edit those articles.

It's actually easier to remove them all - when an admin looks at someone's contributions list, each one (at least, the ones that haven't been edited later on) has a link on it that says "rollback", which reverts it without ever showing it to the admin.



I don't think it can, and I don't think we should be trying. This should be something for law enforcement to handle.

Was he, officially? I remember reading at one point that the WMF (who are the ones with the authority to say "You are not welcome on our property, if you come back you are trespassing") had declined to do so. Has something changed?

It's threads like this that remind me why Wikipediot Kulture is the very Paragon of Mass Mis-Education.

The deliberate destruction and distortion of records for the purpose of disguising plagiarism amounts to a conscious, concerted, collective effort to conceal the facts of who is using whose work. Condoning plagiarism and counseling people to commit further offenses only compounds the original offense, and the fact that Wikipediot Administrators lack the common sense and the grade-school education to know this right off is proof positive of their abject lack of ethical standards.

Jonny

A lot of people share your perception that rules are important, and without them, things are likely to descend into chaos.

The irony of that view remained clouded until Poincare and Lorentz astounded the world of mathematics by discovering that rule-driven systems are mathematically chaotic.

If you want order and stability, you have to bite the mathematical bullet and advance to function-based regulation, rather than rule-based methods.

This, of course, is exceedingly unlikely to ever happen, since most member of the species, Homo Schleppian, lack a math co-processor.

And worse yet, the few who do (like JoshuaZ), lack the Empathy Function anyway.

Random: Considering the visibility, the ArbCom directive, and the discussion that happened last night, I think that the situation is that the WMF has made it clear that this person is not welcome. But I can see what I can do to get that clarified if I can.

as for the other part, I can understand why folks are disappointed. As things stand, I'm disappointed with this as well.. this is someone who just about everyone agrees needs to be kept away from Wikipedia, for other people's sake. But we're reduced to playing whack-a-mole. It's not something I do for fun, trust me.

If I were to point out that user Soother62 made two edits to Public_Information_Research within a mere two months in a manner similar to edits that evil banned user Daniel_Brandt might make, then by your own logic, SirFozzie, you should request a checkuser on Soother62. I'm sure Alison will get right on the case. If Soother62 is anywhere near San Antonio, where anti-Wikipedia demons surely abound, then thou shalt smite Soother62 and revert that repulsive meatsock's unsightly edits.

You're already on hivemind, but there's plenty of room to add Alison also.

Where the fuck are you coming from Daniel? And oh, btw, Fuck you. Threatening my friends is a new fucking low, even for you. These are checkuser proven socks of a fucking stalker, period. Someone who was banned from HERE for stalking WP admins. End of fucking story. Never mind trying the old "Posting in a similar way" bullshit.