Hi all,
I am afraid I spoke to soon. Mr Natural-Health was initially cowered by RK's agressive edits and hostile comments. His first response was several anonymous personal attacks against RK on the Talk pages. Then he hit upon the idea of listing him (also anonymously) on VfA to be de-sysoped -- only to be told that RK wasn't a sysop to begin with. Upon learning this, he triumphantly posted this on [[Talk:Criticisms of modern medicine]] (again anonymously, I don't know if this is accidental or intentional):
RK had me going believing that he was an Admin.
All this could have been avoided if YOU guys would clearly point who is an Admin, here. It is extremely confusing.
Now, that I know that RK is a nobody just like moi, I will continue to improve Wikipedia with selective editing. Alternative medicine clearly has been improved with my editing.
Yes, I will hang in here for the long haul, revising articles as I see fit every couple of hours, days, weeks, months, years, decades.--12.77.35.139 22:57, 6 Dec 2003 (UTC)
He then proceeded to get into an edit war over one of his articles, [[Heroic medicine]]. Upon it being protected, he tried to skirt the injunction by creating a new article, [[Age of heroic medicine]], which the new sysop Pakaran later protected as well. In the meantime, he 's got a few more titles going:
[[Natural therapy]] [[Natural philosophy]]
and added his loopy New Age stuff to:
[[Biopsychosocial model]] [[Eastern]] [[Interventionism]]
I would like to emphasize that it isn't his ideas which are the problem -- WP needs to improves its coverage in this area -- so much as his erratic, willful behaviour. Not only does he insist on blanking his personal Talk page, but he deletes comments from the article Talk pages. Just now I restored a series of deletions (of his own messages) he made to [[Talk:Criticisms of modern medicine]].
One final comment:
On 12/05/03 at 02:51 PM, Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net said:
Ah-ha! The proletarian mob raises the flag of victory from the yardarm!
That was too close for comfort. There was a serious risk that if Ed had gotten to him first he might have become a useful contributor. :-(
From this and several other comments you've made, I gather you are
sympathetic to Mr NH's point of view. Very good, but I don't see you getting involved in editing these articles to defend them from dogmatism. By the look of your contributions page, it appears you devote more time to this mailing list than to the encyclopedia itself. Fine, not everyone has the same number of hours to devote to WP. But the longer I spend on Wikipedia, the less respect I have for people who simply chant NPOV mantras from the sidelines and, correspondingly, the more my respect grows for people who roll up their sleeves and get their hands dirty in the difficult, at times deeply frustrating task of editing articles on polemical subjects with (other) strong-willed contributors. I have been hard at times on Ed Poor here -- I've disagreed with his methods -- but I freely acknowledge that he puts more energy into trying to resolve problems in contentious articles than anyone else in this list. And in the final tally, that's what counts.
V.