David Gerard wrote:
This may be a stupid question, but can someone point me towards the history behind this Wik chap? There's a lot of references now, but it seems to just predate me...
Wik ([[User:Wik]]) was a Wikipedian dedicated to the point of obsession. He mostly made very good edits, but was somewhat brittle and abrasive. Eventually he got pissed off with another user doing things to his talk page and wanted it *stopped*, and eventually wrote a nasty vandalbot to do just that ([[User:Vandalbot]]). He returned as [[User:Gzornenplatz]], but continued to be abrasive in the same way, and ended up at the AC. It turned out he was definitely Wik. He came back again as [[User:NoPuzzleStranger]], editing from open proxies; and continued okay for a while, but then was abrasive again in exactly the same way; then Lucky 6.9 noticed that "NoPuzzleStranger" was an anagram of "User Gzornenplatz".
[Snip]
(Any details above incorrect, please correct!)
Slight expansion: we (the Arbitration Committee) banned him for a week for a few personal attacks; during this time, several highly immature editors kept vandalising Wik's page (certainly, as he saw it), taunting him for being banned. Understandably, Wik got rather upset (I do not in any way condone his subsequent actions, though). It wasn't just that they were "doing things" to his talk page, it was that they were doing it and he couldn't respond.
Anyway, enough of this. We've current work to do. There's no use just reminiscing about the good old days when I could actually recognise more than 20% of the sysops as such.
Yours sincerely,