I recently sent a message to the wikien-l mailing list which was a long account of what
happened to get me banned from Wikipedia, and also my opinions on the matter. I was very
pleased with the response, because my thread actually received legitimate responses
instead of the ubiquitous "you're a troll, anything you say is trolling, and now
I will ban you from the channel/wiki/mailing list".
And because a lot of people were wondering about the details of the story, which I did not
realize were so vague. I will include several links and a timeline (or rough approximation
of a timeline) in this message to give a clearer view of events.
Timeline below. I don't have dates for these things, so it will be constructed from
memory.
I join Wikipedia as "Flameviper12".
Not being very good at the whole civility thing and not used to Wikipedia/etc, I do a lot
of stupid stuff and get some 24-hour blocks, warnings. Petty things.
I get indef-blocked after vandalizing my own userpage by moving it to various places
within my userspace.
Some time passes, and I create an account named Son of a Peach, which is totally unrelated
to Flameviper12.
Unfortunately, SoaP gets into trouble much the same as Flameviper12. I wasn't really
trying to be civil with the account, and was making an ass of myself by acting like I was
on my main account and everything was fine.
Eventually, Son of a Peach becomes indefinitely blocked for some reason (I believe it was
3RR).
I don't know if this was before or after the userpage vandalism/SoaP saga (I think it
was before but I'm not certain), but at one point I was relieved of an indefinite
block by Samuel Blanning. I was later re-banned.
About a month passes after SoaP is blocked.
I go back on and create another account, "Flameviper in Exile". After a short
discussion, the administrator Netsnipe and I make a deal that if FiE can get 200 (or maybe
100, I can't remember) edits, than Flameviper12 (my name as of then) would be
unblocked.
I edit, revert vandalism, and do various things as Flameviper in Exile. Joy.
I go to Netsnipe and he unblocks the account Flameviper12. At this point, I have the
account's name changed to "Flameviper" without the "12". (NOTE:
Many people get confused by this for some reason and assume that Flameviper12 was my
sockpuppet. This is incorrect. It's the same account.)
I edit some with Flameviper, and submit an RfA, one of several. It is brutally killed with
fire. Even though everyone essentially hates me, I still edit and accomplish some things.
NOTE: This message is not complete because the size limit for this list is 10KB and the
full message is 16KB. I am sending both halves of the message at the same time.
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