[WikiEN-l] Clearing my Conscience

Mon Oct 31 14:41:47 UTC 2005

Why don't you set yourself up an account (a procedure you're familiar with) 
and actually improve an article? Possibly you ow it to the people who's time 
you wasted.

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Willy on Wheels" <willyonwheels at hotmail.com>
To: <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
Sent: Sunday, October 30, 2005 4:06 AM
Subject: [WikiEN-l] Clearing my Conscience

> Yes, I am Willy on Wheels.
>
>
> Specifically, I am one of six people who have chronically trolled numerous 
> wikis, notably the English version of Wikipedia. Recently, Wikipedia saved 
> me from failing a research project horribly, and thus, I have decided to 
> repent for my past colourful actions.
>
> This whole mess started as a prank in an IRC channel. One of our members 
> loaded Wikipedia pages in Firefox tabs, and performed a mass-move 
> vandalism. Normally, this wouldn't be funny, but we had just returned from 
> the pub and were thorougly sloshed by then.
>
> After we saw the reactions that people made, the vandalism became a bad 
> habit. We would vandalize, or attempt to vandalize pages just to get a 
> frantic reaction from Wikipedians. Eventually, one of our group developed 
> a tool written in PERL script to automate the creation of usernames and 
> page vandalism. Eventually, we started hunting for proxies to continue the 
> vandalism.
>
> I'm done for good, and will never again vandalize Wikipedia. After it 
> proved so useful to me, I realized what our vandalism was taking away from 
> others. If someone had vandalized the pages I needed, I would have likely 
> failed out of university. I hope to eventually contribute to this shared 
> knowledge for the benefit of more than just my warped humour.
>
> I don't expect most of you to believe me, but at least I can rest easy 
> knowing that I've moved beyond this childish behavior.
>
> --Alec
>
>
> For the sake of non-repudiation:
> 126f060696ce9f41757052316647c3c7
>
> _________________________________________________________________
> De todo para la Mujer Latina http://latino.msn.com/mujer/
>
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