I'd put on some Tchaikovsky and leave a consolation note for his damaged soul ... but I cannot be bothered re-booting the router in order to be able to edit.

Classy? When I hear "classy," I expect "Breakfast at Tiffany's" -- this is "Lunch at Burger King." Phooey!

Hey, someone get Lara back in here -- winter is coming and we need her to heat up the space!



I assume that, not unlike Twain, reports of Ottava death are also greatly exaggerated.




Put on some Spike Jones music -- more appropriate for the Wikipedia mood music.

Twain is still alive? Nevermind, it seems she is.

Ah, horsey, there's nothing actually classy about the "dry hussle." In the end you realize that lunch at Burger King with the happy ending is better than "look, can't touch." That window at Tiffany's is a METAPHOR, you know.

Well, I can dream, can't I?

Moooooooooooooooooooon riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiver, wider than a mile, I'm crossing you in style some day...

Okay, Huckleberry friend. You and Jimbo.

Hey, can any of our Huckleberry friends go over to the Moon River article on WP and clean it up? Down in the References section, there is a misplaced sentence relating to the song's use in the film "Born on the Fourth of July."

And speaking of our Huckleberry friend:

Horrible casting as the lead actor was only born on the third of july (and is a scientologist, but I digress).

Ottava into Risker into Audrey Hepburn into Huckleberry Hound into Tom Cruise. Okay, where does conversation go now?

I'm not through with the dry hustle a popular bar hustle in the 1950's when Capote wrote his novellete. It's not mentioned as such in the Wiki on either the film OR the story, so don't bother to look there. But it's how Holly makes her living in NYC. There's some connection to the diamonds in the bank-glass window display, AND to Wikipedia's flagged revisions and the people who keep promising them for their own gain....

Could we get Jay Walsh a REALLY long cigarette holder, as a prop? And Jimbo, too, if he's that much into Rand.

They've been able to blow smoke up our asses even without such paraphernalia.

At this point I'm just glad it's not menthol.

Oww!! Ooooh!!! Eeee!! Ahhhh!!

Are you SURE they're not using menthol??

As indeed was the author of the song from which the title comes.

George M. Cohan (T-H-L-K-D)

Alas, James Cagney was 17 July. Missed it by a whole 13 days.

If the analogy holds, we've still got two more sequels to sit through. "Ottava 4: The Revenge" promises to be the worst of them all.

The return of the living dead 5

The return of the living dead 6

These presumably will be Ottava's last contributions under this username for a while, because the ArbCom case will be closed fairly soon.

Somehow Ottava seems to have been born in the wrong period. He would have had so much more fun working with Torquemada.

Apparently, the ArbCom has been infiltrated by the cabal. Now it all makes sense!

Good fucking grief. Even Durova in her prime would have thought "both users' IPs resolve to the United States" was insufficient evidence for a sockpuppetry case, but Hans Adler (T-C-L-K-R-D) apparently doesn't.

He's just using their own ad-hominem tactics against them......

Stephen Bain added some last minute votes; remarkably, after everything that's happened, he's against banning Ottava: "I see no reason not to at least try rehabilitative remedies." Have they not been tried already? Has Stephen even read the case? It's a little disturbing that by this point there'd be anyone at all (except Malleus, of course) opposed to a ban.

Certainly looks like he hasn't read the case. Isn't that one of the arbs we are getting rid of this time?

Oh and argumentative to the end: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=...ademic_sourcing

But.. but that's what Dispute Resolution is for! You try everything to get a person to change their behavior and, failing that, you go to Arbitration.

So isn't it too late to look for "rehabilitative remedies?" Ottava wants to play the martyr and accuse everyone of being against him. Regardless of his good content, his behavior has made him too many powerful enemies. It is just not going to work out.

At some point, whether the individual is right or wrong, you have to realize that his/her behavior is not conducive to a collaborative environment. Eventually, as strange as it may sound, you're going to have to say "I'm sorry, you're a good content editor... and you have to leave."

Giano and his most ardent supporters may be facing that day soon.

This applies more to situations like Kurt than to Ottava, but I like to analogize it to the real world example of an Elk's Club. If every week a person came to the group meeting and motioned to disband the organization, people would probably laugh the first couple of weeks. But if they kept doing it every meeting, yelling at the top of their lungs for the disbandment of the organization, at some point the other people in the organization would probably say "it doesn't matter that he supports the aims of the Elk, he is unable and unwilling to work with us" and then show him the door.

And I know many people will say that the unfair part is that Wikipedia is the only game in town on the internet and that there are usually many recreational groups in a town, but that is really a creative construction, since someone could move to any of the 50 other major user-created content places like blogger, digg, flickr, etc, if they find WP so inhospitable.

Stephen Bain has been a lazy arbitrator: he didn't read the case pages of Abd&WMC properly and he hasn't taken into account the interaction of NYB, SandyGeorgia and Jpgordon with Ottava. I doubt he would have been elected had he stood for re-election.

I do feel a little sorry for Ottava (but only a very little). Perhaps adding a little sugar and spice could reduce his toxicity, if that's the right WP term. Certainly going out with a bang rather than a whimper in his flame war with Risker will not exactly endear him to ArbCom if and when he decides to come back officially in 6 months time,

That sort of reminded me of when he jumped on IRC a few dramas ago and said something like "I suppose you're going to accuse me of being paranoid now"... he more or less just proved everyone else's point.

Just curious though: what's this "petition" stuff about? Has ArbCom ever been over-ridden by petition?

Petition?

Moved - the verb is moved. A motion is that which is moved, not the action itself.

Goddammit.

What petition? And no. Though it is technically possible if enough of the community disagrees, to simply ignore an arbcom decision, I really doubt that would happen here.

It's on the decision talkpage somewhere, iirc. I was just curious if that sort of thing happens. It's just somehow hard to believe that this drama has actually come to an end.

Yes, at the end of this thread.

Time for the Christmas Panto. Who'll play Widow Twankie and when's the puppet show?

It's nothing personal, I'm opposed to any editor being banned as things stand. Specifically, I'm opposed to the inherent dishonesty in the way that editors are banned, and the hopelessly pedantic distinction between blocks and bans, neither of which can be enforced anyway, so what's the point?

Sometimes I wish I were banned so I could carrying on editing anyway, just to show how pointless bans are.

Given that there's no practical difference between a block and a ban, no matter what the wikifaithful parrot at RfA, Horsey has already proved how pointless they are, in spades.

Thanks to Greg, the WP:BAN policy reads (bold is my emphasis):



So Ottava can continue editing his talk page as long as he doesn't do anything disruptive like continuing his fights there.

With a site like Wikipedia, you can never really ban someone. They can technically come back anytime they wish and, as long as they do not draw negative attention to themselves, they can usually go along editing merrily.

Been there, done that...got the t-shirt made from child labor, too!




Well, don't forget Law/The Undertow -- he actually got a bunch of admins (including at least three members of Arbcom) to play along with the charade of his post-banned sock!

I've occasionally been tempted as well to prove to the fools who think otherwise how easy it would be to take over a dormant administrator account (not any old dormant account, but some), but I haven't as yet. Hardly any point either, as even dying doesn't lose you the bit.

Well, arbitrator Anne "Risker" Clin openly stated that she approves certain sock accounts. Plus, CHL/One claims that Mantanmoreland is still editing -- no block on that sock. So who is f**king whom?




It ain't worth the bother, Malley. Trust me, adminship is just like Gertrude Stein's opinion of the city of Oakland, California: when you get there, there is no there there. That is why people (mostly kids) with no brains thrive in admiship while anyone with half-a-life gets bored and leaves.

I'm quite sure you're right. I could probably count on the fingers of one hand (using binary notation) the number of times I found there was something I wanted to do that I couldn't, and almost all of them were to do with moving pages or deleting sandbox pages.

You'd think the developers could give you those tools as an editor in good standing. It's not like admins work with a full set of tools anyway.

If adminship were something automatic you gained gradually over time while "in good standing," maybe there would be less drama in going through RFA and less privilege in being one.

Then again, my idea of how adminship should be gained would mean that Giano, Malleus, Ottava, and Kurt would be admins by now. Hmmm... maybe that's not such a bad idea!

Returning to Ottava, I like radicals like him and Giano, but I don't think it would work out between us if we crossed paths on Wikipedia in content or policy areas. I can be as stubborn as both of them. It's easy for me as an outsider to root for them, but if I were more deeply involved in WP's processes and community, I couldn't stand the tension they bring.

It would benefit the project to have intelligent adults who are genuinely concerned about content to be admins, rather than the OCD cases and clueless kids. It is a shame that one of the current RfA candidates, a highly intelligent content creator with the handle of Polargeo, is getting such a rough treatment from the usual suspects -- none of whom contribute one word of genuine scholastic input to the site's contents. It is also amusing (in a sick way) to see someone like Tan sneer at Polargeo for perceived incivility -- getting a lecture from Tan on incivility is like getting a lecture from Tiger Woods on marital fidelity.

That may have been true during the 13 years when Stein lived there from 1878-91, leaving at age 17. At that time Oakland was just the "wrong side of the tracks" of San Francisco (or wrong side of the bay if you will), and there really was no "there" there. No large buildings...

The ghetto-fication and urbanization (complete with skyscrapers) we know as Oakland today, is all post WW II. I still remember (having been in Oakland not long before) my shock at hearing Sinatra sing in 1965 (in my favorite of his albums), an even older song by Alec Wilder & William Engvick:

That year in Oakland High
when I was seventeen
The grass from there to San Jose was high and cool and green
I see it now

Too brash and young was I to know what time could mean
The old Acacia, long cut
down, was felt but never seen
I see it now

That world I knew is lost to me
Loves have come and gone

The years go racing by, I live as best I can
And all at once I know
it means the making of a man
I see it now

The lyrics are by Californian Engvick, who was born in 1914 and would have been age 17 in Oakland high school about 1931, a time when you could be nostalgic about high school in Oakland (no more!).

I was sometime before I realized just why an Acacia tree could be "felt" but never seen. . Obviously some transcribers of the lyrics of this song don't get it, either, because they transcribe it "the old Acacia lawn [sic] cut down". No clue.

There, have I derailed the thread enough? Pre WW II California fascinates me. Most of the things that make it suck now, weren't there, then.

Ottava has now been blocked from sending WP email. I'm not sure whether he can still edit his talk page.

He still has talk page access.



Indeed, and as long as they aren't drawing attention to themselves, they aren't causing problems so who cares if they are there.

Of course he can edit it -- only the OR account has been disabled. If he can shed that skin and take on a new persona, the Wiki is all his!

I expect he has created a new account already.

I rather doubt it. It's always a mistake to judge others by one's own standards.

Here are 30 people who somehow avoided Ottava's wrath and never got to see what a lunatic he really is. I suppose if he never came at you hurling insane accusations from out of nowhere, it would be easy enough to imagine that he was just a poor, maligned content creator.

You've apparently not been keeping up. I've fallen out with Ottava several times, and he with me. I just don't get my knickers in a twist about it like so many others do.