Well Willy, it is good to see that you have some balls.
What? I mean not everyone would have the balls to apologise.
----- Original Message ----- From: "Willy on Wheels" willyonwheels@hotmail.com To: wikien-l@Wikipedia.org Sent: Sunday, October 30, 2005 4:06 AM Subject: [WikiEN-l] Clearing my Conscience
Yes, I am Willy on Wheels.
Specifically, I am one of six people who have chronically trolled numerous wikis, notably the English version of Wikipedia. Recently, Wikipedia saved me from failing a research project horribly, and thus, I have decided to repent for my past colourful actions.
This whole mess started as a prank in an IRC channel. One of our members loaded Wikipedia pages in Firefox tabs, and performed a mass-move vandalism. Normally, this wouldn't be funny, but we had just returned from the pub and were thorougly sloshed by then.
After we saw the reactions that people made, the vandalism became a bad habit. We would vandalize, or attempt to vandalize pages just to get a frantic reaction from Wikipedians. Eventually, one of our group developed a tool written in PERL script to automate the creation of usernames and page vandalism. Eventually, we started hunting for proxies to continue the vandalism.
I'm done for good, and will never again vandalize Wikipedia. After it proved so useful to me, I realized what our vandalism was taking away from others. If someone had vandalized the pages I needed, I would have likely failed out of university. I hope to eventually contribute to this shared knowledge for the benefit of more than just my warped humour.
I don't expect most of you to believe me, but at least I can rest easy knowing that I've moved beyond this childish behavior.
--Alec
For the sake of non-repudiation: 126f060696ce9f41757052316647c3c7
De todo para la Mujer Latina http://latino.msn.com/mujer/
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