If the quotes only available on wiki and the mirrors, remove it. Challenge
him for a source (be aware though, that offline sources are perfectly
acceptable. If its in a book, get all that information and ISBN number and
look in the print. The reason no one did anything is you failed to provide
specifics. You still have yet to provide a name. We cant look at the edits
you tell us supposedly exist because we have yet to see them. Either show
us
something we can actually comment on, or this is nothing more the trolling
and I'll kindly tell you to go do something productive.
On 4/21/07, K P <kpbotany(a)gmail.com> wrote:
I posted about a user, and no one seemed to care, that the user appears
to
not have the background they quote themselves as
having (namely someone
who
is a phd in physics who does not understand the difference between
strike-slip deformation and uplift). This user also uploads images
without
permission to use them, and when challenged for the copyright, simply
said
they were unable to get hold of the copyright
holder again, so the image
could be deleted. This user also quotes himself in numerous articles
and
reports, and the reports he quotes can be found
nowhere else on the web
besides Wikipedia and its mirrors, uses botanical terminology
incorrectly,
yet writes botany articles and fights to the
death challenges to his
wording, quotes material from the Jepson Manual that isn't in there,
improperly references geological material that he obviously hasn't read
or
used.
To me, one of the reasons that people like the supposed phd professor
get
away with claiming they are someone else, is that
there is no way on
Wikipedia to deal with users like this. No one cared about the woman
who
wholesale copied another's user page, and
claimed to be on staff at a
non-existant university, and there is no way for the average editor to
deal
with issues like this, no exposure method. It surprises me, considering
all
the talk about whether or not we should institute a credentials
verification
method, that there is no place that an editor can go to say, look, this
person is doing tons of work on Wikipedia, but there are some big
problems
with his work, he uploads images that are clearly
copyrighted by others,
saying he has permission, then can't find it, he does lots of botany
articles, but can't read in botany, and fights when challenged, his
quotes
from geological sources are flat-out wrong, maybe
in the thousands of
edits
he so gleefully announces on his user page, he claims to have written
hundreds of technical articles but has difficulty handling technical
language, his paragraphs are often obvious cuts and pastes from diverse
unrelated sources that appear to be unrelated, he rambles all over the
place, repeats himself, translates things like yellow-green leaves in
one
sentence to yellow-green flowers in the next, but
then goes on to
correctly
describe the flowers as oranges and reds, and maybe there are a lot more
problems that aren't in areas where I've overlapped with him.
Maybe, instead of debating the credentials issue, we could debate, how
these
users, the Essjay's (or whatever his name was), should be handled in the
future. What editors should do when they encounter problems at this
level,
or potential problems. How this can be
discouraged on Wikipedia. I
think
awards like high edit count awards should be
warnings, not bragging
rights--and keeping a list of people with high edit counts encourages
behaviour like this. My little pet of the day editor, for example,
edits
an
article 10-20 times for one or two sentences, thereby boosting his edit
count. If this editor has as many "Did you knows" as his user page
indicates, shame on us for posting his articles on the front page with
this
level of inaccuracy. This is a LOT of crap uploaded to Wikipedia by one
highly visible person--there should be a special place in Wikipedia for
these dishonrable mentions. And, if this stuff was riegned in early on,
it
might lead to productive editors, rather than edit-countitis.
KP
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-Brock
Oh, good grief, trolling. The question is really what to do about this all
the time, not about this particular instance. I am challenging him, I'm
reading his history, I'm finding tons of additional stuff, I'm working on
it.
The point is that all these methods that exist, RFC, are hard-core user
methods. There is no other way to go about this, it seems than making a
thorough investigation and spending eons writing up a RFC. I've seen how
RFCs go, they usually arise long after a problem has been identified and
failed to be taken care of.
I would like to know what all I can do that brings this person to the
attention of the Wikipedia community, not this list, as this is not the only
problem user I've come across of this nature, although the couple others
took care of themselves more quickly. But I don't have limitless time, and
when I see something like this, I would like to know how to get someone with
more time and more knowledge about how Wikipedia works to pay attention to
the situation.
This is a discussion list. As I said before, if I want to discuss the
specifics of a Wikipedia editor and their edits, I'll do that on Wikipedia
talk pages, that's what they're designed for. This list is for general
discussion about Wikipedia, don't tell me that if I don't use the list as
something it's not, instead of using Wikipedia as it was designed, that I'm
trolling as that's not true.
Both RFC and RFAR are demanding processes. The one time I commented on an
arb it took me a week to read the instructions and figure out where to post
my comment, and I posted it incorrectly because it said to use a template
that didn't do what it said it did, and came without instructions for how to
use it correctly.
KP