[WikiEN-l] I'm mad as hell, and I'm not gonna take it any more

Mon Feb 23 00:46:30 UTC 2004

Wikipedia's methods to deal with trolls are broken. I'll refer to 2 
cases, one I'm not involved in, the other I am.

The former is Irismeister, who, as well as engaging in a prolonged 
edit war on [[Iridology]], has now threatened legal action against 
not one but two other users. Is this acceptable behaviour now? He 
remains unbanned.

The latter is User:Plautus_satire, who has engaged in edit wars on:

[[Quasar]], [[Laser star hypothesis]], [[Albert Einstein]], [[Black 
hole]], [[September 11, 2001 attacks]], [[Space Shuttle Columbia 
disaster]] and others.

A look at the full (ie 500 edit) history of [[Black hole]] shows that 
on that one page he's been reverted by me, SheikYerBooty, Cyp, 
Jwrosenzweig, Isomorphic, Modemac, Morwen, Curps, and an anonymous 
IP.

He has had similar wars on other pages. Even after 8 days, and 
certainly after having had NPOV pointed out to him, he continued the 
insertion of opinion as fact, for example, on [[Laser star 
hypothesis]], stating categorically that Hubble is a spy satelite.

According to a a poster at Apollo-moon-hoax groups, who commented at 
[[Wikipedia:Requests for comment/Plautus satire]], he has been banned 
from two such groups. Said poster gave a link:

http://www.clavius.org/plautus.zip

At the above is an archive of Plautus's messages to the Yahoo Apollo 
group, in which he sends literally hundreds of messages, often 
abusive, in the space of a single week. This suggests to me his 
motives are simply stirring up arguments, rather than any genuine 
desire to contribute.

[[User:Silsor/fanmail]] contains several extremely abuse emails from 
him when he was temporarily banned. As has been noted on this list, 
he also spammed just about every sysop in connection with that event.

Now, I freely admit I have not always acted well when faced with 
Plautus - I have occasionally adopted a sarcastic and condescending 
tone, for example. As a result of feeling I was in too deep, I 
decided to try to take a break from Wikipedia for a while. Yet even 
after this was pointed out to him, he repeatedly trolled my talk page 
with absurd complaints about me removing comments from it.

Lest anyone should think it's just me who has a problem with this 
guy, there is a vote at 
[[Wikipedia:Requests_for_comment/Plautus_satire]] where, at the time 
of writing, 14 people are in favour of him being banned, with 5 
opposed.

Yet he remains unbanned.

Supposedly, instead of banning him, we now have to mediate with him. 
This is quite literally insane.

-- 
Allan Crossman - http://dogma.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk
PGP keys - 0x06C4BCCA (new) || 0xCEC9FAE1 (compatible)