http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User%3ACan%27...own_will_eat_me

Always assumed there must be a story behind this user.

Ridiculous amount of vandal fighting, passed RFA, then went a bit odd and disappeared.

Seem to recall user edited for long, long stretches at a time.

There was talk the user was quite senior over at ED, or that the account was an ED jointly-operated deep sleeper.

Given it has been more than a year since they last edited, any ideas?

See here.

Gist is he was a classic, power-hungry (probably teenage) vandal fighting admin who went "too far" got desysopped and quit.

Hâ‚€ (Null Hypothesis) Nothing happened.

H₁: He got eaten by a clown.

Hâ‚‚: He fell into a deep sleep.

Severe burnout and disillusion

How rude of him to depart without singing a dithyramb.

Back in the mid-1970s, Frank Sinatra recorded a version of the song “Send in the Clowns” and music critics were confused by his somewhat enigmatic interpretation of the Stephen Sondheim lyrics. A writer asked him what he thought the song was about, and Sinatra angrily replied: “What the hell do you think it’s about? It’s about a f**kin’ circus!”

I think that Sinatra’s answer can be applied to any questions relating to Wikipedia and its various larger-than-life characters. Really, what the hell do you think Wikipedia is about – it’s a f**kin’ circus!

This was and remains a weird one. The guy stopped editing and adding content April 1, 2008, but just kept blocking people for 3 and a half more months after that and not answering his email or talk pages when people complained (some of the blocks were inappropriate). Block people WAS ALL HE DID. He hadn't died, got physically ill, or committed suicide. After this went on for an unbelievable time, they finally desysopped him, as this was all they could think of to stop him. He was blocking people for vandalism, right up to the day they pulled his bit, in mid July 2008:

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

And then-- they never heard from him again, so far as I can tell. Not a peep. Even after hinting heavily that he could get the bit back if he communicated at all. Nothing. But he was still jamming the block button on vandals, so once again his reading abilities and account and fingers were working.



As gonzo a case of burnout as I've seen so far.

Hmm, I wonder if he's now using a sock......


(PS: previous threads about him here and here.)

Shaldowjams and Clown are certainly similarly nutso. They share a massive 3244 articles co-edited, and some of them are very, very odd ones.

http://toolserver.org/~mzmcbride/cgi-bin/w...&user9=&user10=

So is this a case of simply two Twinkle, Huggle, or rollbackers who happened on the same articles? I'll have to look at some individual articles here to see if they only have a few editors. But yeah, it's a reasonable working hypothesis.

Perhaps its reasonable, but wikistalk only reveals part of the picture. I share about the same number of articles as Shadowjams, Iridescent shares almost three times as much, and J.delanoy shares almost four times as many.

If CSCWEM maintained a list of articles he edited (as opposed to reverted vandalism on), such analysis would be far easier.

Hmmm...this is the third time that you are trying to throw water on the little Shadowjams fire that we're building. For somebody who is so gung-ho about stomping out sockpuppets, you seem a little too eager to dismiss talk about Shadowjams.

Oh no, you caught me. Shadowjams is my best friend and he lives right next door.

If the amount of time you spend on WP is any indication, I would wager you are lacking in real-life friends.

It is amusing, though, that someone who is plainly obsessed with "sockpuppet" investigations abruptly loses interest in the subject when one of the supposed valued contributors on WP is tagged for sockpuppetry. Oh well, the one consistent thing about WP is inconsistency.

It is amusing how you misunderstand the meaning of sockpuppets.

Damn right. Horsey's got no experience there.

Sarcasm? Anyway, my point stands, experience or not. Horsey brought up the idea on another thread, yet provided no evidence of sockpuppetry, nor did he name any account Shadowjams is socking with. Just a vague, evidence-less accusation.

Well, we could figure it out from his most-edited articles, but current Dashboard tool is stuck at the last 500 edits and for some reason won't go beyond that. For an editor who does almost nothing but reverts, dashboard doesn't reveal much. Clown has edited one article 6 times and that's the most you can get from his recent edits. And no, no other editors for that article have anything close to Clown's sleep scedule, with the possible exception of Steelerfan-94 (T-C-L-K-R-D) who is a user in Arkansas who gives his RL identity on his userpage, and quite obviously is not Clown.

Enjoy. You have to wait for the script to finish, then scroll down to the end and click on "Frequently edited pages".

Let me guess. He frequently drops into your place or vice versa and you use each other's computers. Indeed, sometimes you sit side by side and edit an article together. Cosy.

The other kind of best friend.

You and ulsterman should roam around performing unskilled labor and saving up for a rabbit farm.

Whew. Shadowjams always told me that I was her best friend.

It would have been awkward if you hadn't pointed out your sarcastic meaning to me and ulsterman--who I'm sure was thoroughly confused by your apparently false statement.

Thanks. It took a while to figure out that you need to input the number of edits for lookback manually if you want more than 500, and it doesn't like commas. Duh, I get the lame-brain award for the last bit.

Clown really hasn't done much on any specific articles, in his last 30 K edits out of a total of 100 k (30,000 per recommendation of the tool is all I looked at). He did 30 edits on "pizza" and 20 or so on Cassidy (rapper), J. Holiday, Hulk Hogan. He's a pop culture kind of guy. None of the other editors on any of the articles where clown had been very active have the "right" history to be a Clown sock (they registered long before, or they have the wrong edit patern).

Clown edited 7 days a week and had a very specific sleep time of 1100 to 1500 hours GMT. He needs 6 hours of sleep, and edited all the time when awake (either having no job or else editing from work with little variation). All suggesting he was a US East West Coaster. None of my other suspects looked anything like that. He certainly isn't Shadowjams, who sleeps from 1100 to 1600 (probably is also an West Coaster in the US), but who has a job, starts editing early on Fridays for some reason, and almost never edits in the AM.

No, I think it probable that Clown is gone. Just as well, as his last 3.5 months of edits showed that his thinking-range and communications-ability had been badly affected by the Delta Rays emitted by WMF, and his output was rather monotonic.



I hope he found another group of Talosians to give him a better illusion than WP did.

The only point is on your head. My earlier discussion of Shadowjams clearly showed this individual is a "sock," as evidenced from his/her/its first day of editing. People have been "blocked" for much, much less. And as I've stated earlier, the conspicuous absence of admin/arbitrator/checkuser comments on the discussion of the Shadowjams account could easily suggest that this is one of the "socks" that is approved to participate -- itself a violation of policy that has already been shredded into confetti.