Hello, nice to meet all of you horrible evil people.

I need to report a couple administrators for meat puppeting/canvassing with a lesser charge/observation of a 3r violation (ignored by the other admins of course).

What would be the best board to do this on? Do I go to Arbcom, the ANI board or what?

Oh, and on a completely unrelated note, considering his long-term abuse and media coverage, how is it that William Connolley doesn't have his own subsection in the editors forum?

Some would probably recommend an ordinary 2x4, but I tend to prefer something with more heft, like a 2x6 or even a 4x4 fencepost. You can smash most laptops to smithereens with a 2x4, but if you've got something like a Panasonic Toughbook or one of those older desktops with the heavy-duty metal cases, you're going to need more torque on the downswing to really crack those circuit boards, not to mention put a sufficient dent in the hard drive casing. Of course, if you have a sawed-off shotgun and don't mind a little collateral damage to the furniture, the explosion effect is more emotionally satisfying.


He didn't ask?

Anyway, welcome to WR, Mr. Locust!

That editors who edit primarily in the field of global warming, such as Connolley and Petersen, would both show up on the talk page of a global-warming related article where you're engaged in attempts to debunk global warming, is hardly evidence of canvassing or meat-puppetry. Do you have anything more persuasive?

ANI would be the logical place. Once there, you will likely be told the same thing as I said above.

They're generally awarded on the basis of WR threads about the editor; I presume, though I haven't counted, that Connolley doesn't have enough about him to justify a separate folder. Or he does, and nobody's gotten around to creating one.

Hahaha. Somey, ilu.

Yes.



Thanks for the pointer - I was thinking ArbCom since it was evidence of a rather systemic problem (but didn't really want to go there considering the involvement of some of them).



Ah okay, I thought I saw a request about someone requesting one.

Again, thanks for the shove in the ANI direction.

Arb Comm tends to require evidence of lower-level attempts at dispute resolution before it will accept a case, except in cases that involve abuse of admin tools, and there don't seem to have been any admin tools used here at all.

I'm going over the ANI posting now, though I'm confused as to why you decided to assign Guetterda and R. Baley pseudonyms other than the ones they use; it's somewhat confusing.

In any event, I probably won't comment on the ANI thread one way or another since, to the extremely limited extent to which I have anything that might be described as a "wikifriend", R. Baley's probably one. Good luck at a satisfactory resolution, in any event.

Okay, like I said I didn't really want to get involved with ArbCom anyway, but Connolley's abuse has gone on for years and even though I'll probably get banned I think putting the information out there is the right thing to do.



Mainly because I wanted people to avoid preconceptions over the players - Connolley and his friends have been such a thorn in wikipedia's side that most people won't touch him with a 10 foot pole.



R. Baley is kind of an aside - his behavior was definitely suspcious, but the lack of obvious facebookedness saves him somewhat. I could've posted about 10 other admins from Connolley's facebook page (with "interesting" reputations here I might add) and evidence of them colluding on things, but I didn't want to muddle it up too much.

If someone really cares about their massive gaming of the system then they can do something about it.

Well, good luck. It's my experience that editors who report admins at ANI usually end up with a 24 hour block. I hope it doesn't play out like that.

Yes, I expect I'll be blocked - probably permanently. I'm kind of curious how many of the admins on Connolley's facebook page will attack me (just the ones with pseudonyms I presume).

Well, you've got the reigning Wikipedia Review champion of straight shooting participating in the thread, so perhaps things will turnout okay (though he is accusing you of unclean hands; I guess that's not so much a good thing. Tell him you're looking for a legal remedy rather than an equitable one).

Well, even the simplest of things can be complicated on wikipedia. I do like your response about a legal remedy. The "unclean hands" thing seems like a logical fallacy though - if someone gets raped while robbing a house then does the rapist get off? Maybe I'm not understanding the principle properly.

Even if I was totally in the wrong, which I don't believe I was, it is pretty disgusting that these admins have gotten together on facebook so they can call in for backup whenever they want to hammer someone down.

First of all, what you're describing isn't a logical fallacy. Just wanted to get that out of the way.

The clean hands doctrine basically states that if you want to benefit in a civil suit from equitable, as opposed to legal, relief (injunctions being probably the most well-known kind of equitable relief), you have to have behaved ethically in relation to the matter on which you're seeking equitable relief.

Dude, you didn't get raped. Have some sense of perspective.

So, you were being a dick, and someone gave you a talking-to. You didn't even get blocked. If you want people to go out on a limb for you and invest their personal time and energy investigating a case for presentation as an admin conduct RFC or an Arbcom case, you need to give them something more to work with than, "I got a talking-to for being a prat" and "Something similar happened 3 years ago."

Be nice. Edit responsibly. Refer to editors by their preferred nicknames, without being snide. If you can show that a bunch of editors who are facebook friends just happen to show up at the exact time and place needed to maintain control over content, when you have followed the rules scrupulously, I (and others) might be interested. If all you have is that a bunch of editors who are facebook friends happened to show up at the right time to call you a prat when you were being a prat, well, yawn.





That might work with Brad, but not me. I learned about "unclean hands" from Judge Wapner.

I was going to whine about how I was being left out on the (presumably) clever references made by all you American legal scholars, and then I looked up who Judge Wapner was.

Does that apply in this situation? I'm not seeking any "relief" - not in any legal sense. I'm trying to do the right thing here. I know I can be a bit harsh at times and I've always found Connolly's, Schulz's, and Dabelstein's obvious "teamwork" to be distasteful, but when I actually had to deal with that dick, and found out that he not only had a list of admins he could privately email to "fix" things (and actually has used it) then that really pissed me off.

There has to be a joke in there somewhere.

You want the editors engaged in "teamwork" (as you allege) to stop, or to be made to stop. That is "seeking relief." You want to persuade one or more admins to help you (else why post to ANI?). To put this in the simplest possible terms, you have to look like you deserve help.

Well, I didn't want to mention it on wikipedia, but yes, I did indeed get raped. Connolly and his pals, dressed up for Oktoberfest strapped me down, pried my eyes open like in a Clockwork Orange and made me watch an Inconvenient Truth for 5 days straight.

I was mentally raped.



Well, you are welcome to your opinion. I layed it out as best (perhaps imperfectly) as I could and I thought their behavior was so oddly specific as to cause question. Even if this ANI report doesn't go anywhere (not that I had too much hope) it'll let others know to watch out for these users.

Of course, I didn't point out the examples of the other facebook admins helping each other out, but that seemed beyond the scope of things and unnecessary.



Perhaps he could simply asked nicely? Did he ever ask or did he simply delete my entire comment in order to exert content control and to piss me off?



Again, that's your opinion - the other users who showed up, admin included, saw their fault as well (and they weren't even aware of their off-wiki collusion).




Are you joking? As I "allege?" You can't go to any article with Connoly without Schulz or Dabelstein showing up.

Wikipedia is a joke because of people like them. The guy uses his faked/fluffed credentials to bash his opinion into articles instead of trying to maintain a NPOV.

Hell, did you even see the ridiculous little sentence that he HAD to have in that article?

Well, not literally, because you're arguing before ANI, which is not a court that grants equitable relief. I believe that Thatcher's argument is that applies by analogy, because (according to him) you were not acting ethically in connection with the matter on which you're now seeking action. My suggestion that you claim that you're seeking legal relief (which is different from equitable relief and to which the clean hands doctrine does not apply) was me attempting to make a joke by taking the analogy to an unreasonable level of specificity.

I'm sorry; I'll stop trying to make jokes.

Yes I'm a bit confused at to what my crimes were and I'm not sure how my actions have any relation to Connly's crimes.



Ah, sorry for not getting your joke. Are you a lawyer?

…or, as they're called in the real world, "talking to each other" and "agreeing on stuff". Shocking behaviour, report them at once.

Never mind the fancruft, feel the wikihelpdeskcruft.

Dude, consider yourself lucky -- you could've had Newyorkbrad dressed up like Las Vegas showgirl tying you up and forcing you to watch that video with Shappy talking about ageism.




Wikipedia is a joke because of people like...uh, should we go alphabetically, by age, or by height?