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