folks hi,
i am a long-time wikipedia user and long-time and low-volume editor, and a significant contributor to the strategic roadmap of wikipedia which occurred a few years ago. i returned to edit a page and found that the IP address of the HTTP proxy that i use had been blocked. i was reminded of an extreme intimidation incident which clearly violated the spirit of trusting people to contribute to wikipedia, so thought it best to alert you of this.
the editing last year was carried out - accidentally - anonymously and using my usual style of making several incremental edits in rapid succession so as not to lose track of the information being added. i was unpleasantly surprised to find that in the middle of the editing the *entire* set of edits had been reverted. i had encountered the user who carried out the blanket reversion before (when logged in) and he's what one might call a "wiki nazi": very experienced at "the rules", and uses them to bullying effect rather than works *with* a less-experienced contributor, usually by doing total-revert in a highly disruptive manner.
things escalated and a number of idiots piled in, citing the anonymity as a means to "attack" wikipedia, whereas in fact it was purely accidental, but the bullying and the lack of trust shown was the reason why i chose to *remain* anonymous.
the article in question i refuse to name publicly because it will identify me instantly to the bullies from whom i still wish to remain anonymous.
it was a corner-case technical article full of technically inaccurate technically unsubstantiated and speculative "wishful thinking" on the part of former editors. i.e. former editors *wish* that the technology would be successful, but are unfortunately dreadfully misinformed on basic maths and physics. the problem is: the lack of success of anyone to create a commercially successful version of this technology in over 100 years makes it very difficult to provide any kind of "wikipedia-acceptable" citations as to why there are no commercially successful versions of this technology.
the article therefore continues to mis-inform people rather badly. a quick check shows that the page has since been updated, but the core concerns remain as the page is completely lacking basic math and physics references, as well as having since been marked as requiring citations.
so there are several things that need to be resolved - bear in mind that i am *not* prepared to help publicly resolve this unless the people who carried out the intimidation are taken to task first:
1) the people who carried out the intimidation and accusations need to be reminded of the spirit of wikipedia to *trust* contributors rather than automatically assume that they have malicious intent
2) the IP address of my HTTP proxy is to be removed. it's utterly pointless to block IP addresses based on an *individual's* assessment, when there are things such as "Tor" and other truly anonymous proxies. anyone wishing to truly vandalise wikipedia could do so with extreme prejudice in an automated fashion, and they would certainly not use an HTTP proxy where a simple reverse-DNS lookup would quickly identify them.
once these things have been done then i am prepared to assist further in resolving the subtly misleading parts of the article. i am happy to provide the details *privately* to more senior individuals within the wikipedia foundation such that an investigation can be made.
my efforts to improve wikipedia's accuracy are genuine and sincere, but as a very low-traffic part-time editor of highly-technical corner-case articles i simply don't have time to go learning all the "rules": i'm just not interested, to be absolutely frank. i'm happy to work with people who are sincere and accommodating who truly welcome technical input.
l.