[WikiEN-l] Psychosis and Wikipedia

[Fred Bauder]

Most people with serious mental disorders are unable to keep it together enough to edit, or are disorganized but harmless. A small group is focused and disruptive. They generally can't work, so have idle time and often an ax to grind (after all, they may actually wear aluminum foil hats to prevent the CIA from reading their thoughts.) Our share of this sort of trouble is consistent with its incidence in society. It is important to be courteous, but to avoid entanglement. A tiny minority is actually dangerous and law enforcement assistance should be sought. You might think about editing anonymously, if this sort of trouble is unacceptable.

Not a psychologist, I just have some experience.

Fred

>-----Original Message-----
>From: Bogdan Giusca [mailto:liste at dapyx.com]
>Sent: Sunday, May 13, 2007 02:58 PM
>To: 'English Wikipedia'
>Subject: [WikiEN-l] Psychosis and Wikipedia
>
>I did not edit much Wikipedia lately because of lack of time, but
>I noticed a worrying trend:
>
>A couple of days ago I got another harassing phone call from an
>apparently delusional person (complete with threats of lawsuit and
>vague threats of physical violence) over some older AfD and today,
>on another AfD I started, someone posted stuff like this:
>
>http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia%3AArticles_for_deletion%2FWipipedia_%28third_nomination%29&diff=130579646&oldid=130579376
>
>Is there any psychologist here which can explain why such people are
>attracted to wikipedia?
>
>Or perhaps, are there really that many people like that in the
>general population?
>
>
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