Maybe I didn't notice it before but since my Skyring 'experience' a number of other users have approached me to say they have having the same experience.
Among the things happening are a NUMBER of users are eperiencing:
* PERSONALLY targeted attacks on individual members by another individual (a different individual in each case), who follows the user around adding abuse to talk pages. (Another user has just emailed me and said that has been happening to them too. Someone else said they had experienced it a few weeks ago.)
* users who standby and the moment an individual is criticised, jump in to add in venomous attacks of their own that are unconnected to the current dispute.
* users spamming other users with smears about someone on Wikipedia.
* off-Wikipedia public attacks, some of them libellous, many of them offensive and distressing, on Wikipedians.
* One abuser, Skyring, even accused another Wikipedian of physically stalking his house!!! (She obviously didn't, but was shocked at the claim, which was in a longer personal attack he launched on her.)
Two people in the last 24 hours, having witnessed Skyring's antics against me, have emailed me to say that they too are being targeted others. Both said that they are on the brink of quitting WP altogether because of the unending cycle of abuse they are getting from an individual (a different individual in each case).
I can't help wondering if Skyring's antics (which are proving difficult to stop - he has now started again creating phoney sockpuppet 'users' to sneak back in attacks under the guise of innocent edit summaries) has inspired others to act in a similar way.
Simply deleting attacks doesn't solve the problem if merely the fact of editing an article opens one up to the attack to start off with. The offence will have been caused by the time the attack is deleted. And with some users spreading attacks like confetti, not every attack is spotted if it is in the talk page of a little read page. Offensive attacks also remain in the archives for anyone to read.
This problem could destroy Wikipedia, by driving away genuine users and having WP swamped by abusive trolls stalking individuals throughout the database. The danger is that genuine users who may themselves not be a victim of this problem may see such stalked attacks appearing all over the place and decide 'I don't want that to happen to me' and so leave. One already left two months ago, having emailed me to ask "what is happening here? It is disgusting."
What strategy do we have for dealing with what seems like a growing problem?
Thom
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