On 2/9/07, Daniel R. Tobias dan@tobias.name wrote:
Comic book artist and web forum owner John Byrne has declared his forum to be a "Wikipedia-Free Zone" and banned all links to Wikipedia regardless of content or context:
http://www.byrnerobotics.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=16456&PN=1&to... osts=105
It seems his grievance against Wikipedia is that he was unable to bully it into suppressing all mention of controversies and criticisms of him in his article, and rebuffed his Daniel-Brandt-ish demand that the John Byrne article be either deleted or permanently locked.
When Byrne complained to Jimbo a year or two ago, Jimbo, in a proto-wp:office action, blanked the article and requested it be rewritten with scrupulous attention to sources. So it was rewritten, the bulk of it by me initially, and it was stripped of anything resembling rumor and innuendo and sourced almost entirely with published interviews of Byrne himself. And he's still angry. Both before and after Byrne has refused to answer, despite repeated requests from myself, Jimbo, and members of his own forum, exactly what problems he had with the article. My best guess is that he thought there shouldn't be an article at all or that it was a stubborn point of honor for him to not identify the problems, as we should have caught them ourselves. At least Brandt came up with specific, though ludicrous and impossible, demands from time to time. You do the best you can, but some people won't be happy unless they are provided with veto power over whatever anyone says about them. Case in point is Byrne's message board, a place where thoughtcrime is rigorously controlled, manned by sycophants and widely mocked in the comic book community.