"Wikipedians should generally refrain from witch hunts of users who may be reincarnations of banned users."

However, grave concerns have been raised, and I have reason to think, based on what's been going on the past few days, that ChuckM, Joe Canuck, DW/Black Widow, and perhaps some others may (or may not) be the same person, posting repeatedly on the same sorts of topics and in the same sorts of obnoxious ways.

So, after a bit of research by one of the sysops, who will remain nameless unless he wants to take public credit, we've determined that there is a relatively small block of ip numbers where this user is coming from. At least through the weekend, we're going to block all of those completely.

Next Monday morning, we'll assess whether it worked, and discuss when to unblock that range of addresses. It seems unfortunate in case people in a certain ip block in Canada happen to want to edit this weekend, but odds are, they won't.

Additionally, any and all of those names can be banned by names, and I authorize a witch hunt (but please, practice WikiLove) on new instances. :-) Just for the weekend.

My concern is that this might spiral out of control into a full-fledged attack, and I'd just as soon prevent that and deal with it next week.

--Jimbo

Is there any program that can be written to keep track of any new users coming from those IPs and perhaps highlight them to a handful of senior figures on wiki? That way, subtle watch could be kept to see if similar patterns are appearing. Given that David Baltzer (if that is his real name, and not yet another phoney name) has seemingly used such an astonishing array of identities on wiki it seems exceedingly likely that he will not try to come on again. (Triton and Tritonian are just the latest two to come to light since my original messsage pointing out the astonishing similarities between DW, Black Widow, Ron Davis, Olga Bityerkokoff, Jacques Delson, Joe Canuck, ChuckM et al - I'm kicking myself for not coping on immediately who Triton was; the topic, the 'I'm just a poor foreigner whose poor english . . . ' malarkey, the person he ganged up on, the tone adopted, etc was all classic DW, he having used it all before a couple of times, but it was only by spending hours wading through past 'visitatons' that the pattern could truly be spotted and conclusions drawn.)

Ensuring a subtle private eye can be kept to spot a user with classic DWism from those IPs would help avoid recent situations where people in the dark had to spot similarities, the new 'DW' in the process having caused a lot of damage, bad feeling and probably as DW has managed to do in the past driven people away, as well as in the process having uploaded many images with serious copyright problems. (There are still images from past DWs that have yet to be examined. Those I have checked at random uniformly lacked any information whatsoever on source, though I strongly suspect they all came from one sourcebook or source, because all are almost identical in composition, size, colour, shape, etc.)

But that private eye program should not be generally available. All users should be treated with the presumption of innocence. But a quiet track of users from those IPs (maybe only for a couple of weeks) might help wiki spot the new DW within days and react, rather than the current weeks or longer it has taken, during which time a lot of damage has already been done by him.

One final point - even by DW's standards, his 'Sue Joe Canuck' antics hit a new low. To pretend to be a paedophile, editing pages on sexual matters and leaving summaries asking could he ''keep'' a copy of an image of 'Pan' copulating with an goat and especially asking could he copy a picture of a child from one page, was horrifying.

18:33 27 Jun 2003 Incest (a linky) 18:30 27 Jun 2003 Talk:Child (can I copy this photo too?) 18:29 27 Jun 2003 Child pornography (one teeny weenie linky!) 18:21 27 Jun 2003 North American Man-Boy Love Association (another linky pooh by Sue-Sue!)

God knows what visitors to wiki thought when they saw someone all this. We can say what he want about Adam [name omitted for privacy reasons] and Michael, but they have never stooped to such a level of vandalism. If DW is willing to stoop to such levels, what else will he try when he comes back. This is one user that wiki needs to be ready and able to clamp down on as soon as possible.

JT

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