On Sat, 10 Nov 2007 06:30:21 -0500, "Alec Conroy" alecmconroy@gmail.com wrote:
Point being-- in your response to Dan T, you didn't address his points, you just harped on his affiliations, and (presumably falsely) claimed he was affiliated with Awbry. Ya shouldn't have, and more importantly, you shouldn't in the future, end of story.
No, what happened was:
* A self-admitted sockpuppet posted an essay on a subject Awbrey obsessed about as part of his POV-pushing campaign, and on which several tenacious POV-pushers have also spoken, because after all if we'd only recognise their "expertise" instead of those pesky reliable sources, the world would be put to rights.
* I posted a light-hearted "oh noes" comment and went off to investigate.
* Dan reckons that this is evidence that Wikipedia is fundamentally flawed.
* I don't.
I think it's about as simple as that. Dan has said many times that he thinks people on WR make valid points - and they might, in the way a stopped clock is right twice a day - but I have spent a lot of time tracking down the ban-evading sockpuppets of these people, trying to undo the effects of their harassment and abuse, and generally cleaning up the sewage they leave behind.
I think users that stand with one foot in the sewer will, as a result, leave shitty footmarks on Wikipedia. They should get their foot out of the sewer, at least until the next rainstorm cleans it out.
In the case of Awbrey, the reason he was banned was because whatever he said, no matter how superficially reasonable, came down to "and this is why you should accept my original research rather than what the sources say". He was given months and months to reform or learn to play nice, and he obdurately refused to do so. After he was banned he carried on posting here in the same style until he was banned from here as well.
So in this case, as with Jonathan Barber (JB196), if it genuinely is Awbrey then long experience shows that the banhammer is the right approach. Revert, block, ignore.
This is probably not, as it turns out, Awbrey. It is some other sockmaster. I await developments. But I do have a suggestion for whoever it is: they should stand up and be counted. It is very very hard to take at face value the special pleading of someone whose past history we cannot evaluate. The increasing use of single-purpose sockpuppet accounts to stir controversy is something that really needs to stop.
I think that's probably more than enough on this subject.
Guy (JzG)