[WikiEN-l] Indefinite Bans with No Oversight

Wed Sep 14 00:31:52 UTC 2005

Dear Sirs,

It is not usually my nature to bring others into my problems, but I think this has gone too far.  People are effectively being banned indefinitely without any oversight, in order to associate their misdeeds with me.  I don't have anything to do with these people, and I can't figure out, from their edit history, what they have done wrong.  Yet, I am blamed for being them and blocked for periods of up to 48 hours for each instance.

1) I am not these people.
2) Nobody has presented any evidence on the Administrator Board that I am in any way associated with these people.
3) According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Blocking_policy#When_blocks_may_be_used, there is nothing in the edit history of these people that warranted a block.
4) I'm being blocked based on unfounded accusations that I'm associated with these people who have done nothing wrong.  I'm being accused of something, with no evidence, that's not even on the "exhaustive list of the situations that warrant blocking."

The two administrators involved, User:Jayjg and User:SlimVirgin, apparently think they can make up whatever rules they want and enforce them with no oversight.  In trying to hurt me, they have blocked at least twelve other people, some of them permanently, for doing nothing that could remotely be considered against the rules of Wikipedia.  They are all accused of being my sockpuppets, even though most of them have IP addresses from other nations or states.

EXAMPLES

   User:Go_Cowboys was blocked indefinitely on the accusation that he is me.  Looking through his list of contributions (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/Go_Cowboys), it appears that the worst thing he did was catch Jayjg's friend Smyth misquoting the OED (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Terrorism#I_draft_a_proposal:).
   User:Felice_L%27Angleterre was blocked indefinitely before posting a single change to an article.  Apparently, Jayjg's buddies User:Jpgordon and User:Calton didn't like her refusal to give up personal information on her User_talk page. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Felice_L%27Angleterre).  I received another 48 hours block for being accused of being her.  I didn't even know who SlimVirgin was talking about, until someone emailed me, because she misspelled her name "Felix" on my discussion page and only referred to her as a sockpuppet on my block description.
HISTORY

After resolving the long-standing NPOV dispute for the article on al Qaeda, I thought I would try to do the same for the article on Terrorism.  It took over a month, but after many compromises with all other editors involved, I successfully posted a proposal on the talk page that nobody expressed disagreement with for three days.  At that point, I updated the article with the introductory text that I had proposed, along with an editing request that all intro changes first be proposed in discussion.  Even though he had not been involved with the discussion for months, Jayjg immediately gutted the article and demanded that I replace the obvious holes he had made with something that he liked better.  I suggested that he was the best person to know what he would like better, but he said he didn't have time for that.  He made a few vague demands and then disappeared.  Of course, I reverted the article to what I had written, with a reminder to everyone involved with editing the intro to
 first make their suggestions in Talk.

SlimVirgin, someone who had not been involved with the article at all but is often accused of working with Jayjg as a team, threatened to revert the article to an older definition unless I did as Jayjg said.  When I refused, she wiped out all of the changes we had made over the past month and called in her friends to support the revert.  A revert-war started between the people who wanted to keep the new article and those who were loyal to Jayjg/SlimVirgin.  When it became obvious that more people wanted to keep the new article, Jayjg and SlimVirgin started blocking everyone who voted for it or expressed any support for it.  Despite the blocks, people kept reverting SlimVirgin's punitive efforts anonymously (without logging in).

Pretty soon, the discussion of terrorism had more administrators than I've ever seen at one article.  Virtually none of them had ever expressed the slightest interest in terrorism before.  Even after arriving, none of them seemed interested in making any proposals for a better article.  Everyone merely wanted to express their support for Jayjg and for the old article.  It didn't seem to matter that the old article was not definitive: it didn't convey information.

Ever since reading a spread in Wired Magazine and joining Wikipedia, I had been in heaven.  This promised to be the fulfillment of a dream introduced by Ray Kurzweil over a dozen years ago: a large society of true equals, enabled for the first time through global communication.  However, at that point, my blinders came off.  The best articles were not automatically rising to the top.  Bad articles were being used as punishment to get editors to do administrator bidding.  Terms like "original research" were being thrown around as excuses to delete factual information until sources were sighted, at which point relevance was questioned.  When relevance was shown, "original research" was questioned again.  The cat & mouse game continued until the administrator got bored and threatened to block the editor for being a trouble maker.  (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:State_terrorism).

One of the most humorous examples I've seen of this was when User:Pmanderson accused User:Go_Cowboys of creating "original research" with his assertion that John Locke's "Two Treatise of Government" preceded the United States "Declaration of Independence."  It may be true that no scholar has ever specifically said that 1689 came before 1776, and using the same logic, Jayjg's arguments with Zain in Talk:State_terrorism might make a certain kind of sense, but is deleting information on these grounds going to make Wikipedia "the sum of all human knowledge?"

I'm not one to sit around and let corruption destroy something I admire.  I spoke up in the discussion of terrorism.  I defended myself against attacks and I said exactly why I thought the article for terrorism was not definitive: that a few administrators were so wrapped up in securing power, and subverting information failing to show their group in a positive light, that they were willing to make articles worse and accuse innocent people to accomplish their aims.

This made people mad enough to propose that I be banned for life.  The proposal was rejected and cited as a definitional dispute because it related to one article and involved personal comments from both sides.  SlimVirgin apparently took it upon herself to override consensus and keep me blocked for things that have no link to me whatsoever.  It doesn't seem to matter to her that, in doing so, she is effectively banning other editors who have broken no rules and sometimes have made considerable contributions.

CONCLUSION

I'm sure that SlimVirgin and Jayjg are nice people, but some folks can't handle administrative power without it getting mixed up in their personal life.  Jayjg and SlimVirgin use their administrative tools to artificially increase their influence on articles.  When people call them on it, they use their administrative tools to cover up the truth of their actions.  I think it's fair to say that Wikipedia cannot accomplish its goal of NPOV articles when administrator power is used to bias the content of articles.  I ask that you remove administrative privileges from SlimVirgin and Jayjg so that everyone can contribute equally to the articles.

Thank you for your consideration,
Zephram Stark (zephramstark at yahoo.com)
(432) 224-6991

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