On 4/21/07, Brock Weller brock.weller@gmail.com wrote:
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@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 _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
-- -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