[WikiEN-l] Clearing my Conscience

Mon Oct 31 17:08:04 UTC 2005

Well Willy, it is good to see that you have some balls.

What? I mean not everyone would have the balls to apologise.

----- 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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