-----Original Message----- From: K P [mailto:kpbotany@gmail.com] Sent: Saturday, April 21, 2007 02:16 PM To: 'English Wikipedia' Subject: [WikiEN-l] Counting coup

I posted about a user, and no one seemed to care, that the user appears to not have the background they quote themselves as having (namely someone who is a phd in physics who does not understand the difference between strike-slip deformation and uplift). This user also uploads images without permission to use them, and when challenged for the copyright, simply said they were unable to get hold of the copyright holder again, so the image could be deleted. This user also quotes himself in numerous articles and reports, and the reports he quotes can be found nowhere else on the web besides Wikipedia and its mirrors, uses botanical terminology incorrectly, yet writes botany articles and fights to the death challenges to his wording, quotes material from the Jepson Manual that isn't in there, improperly references geological material that he obviously hasn't read or used.

To me, one of the reasons that people like the supposed phd professor get away with claiming they are someone else, is that there is no way on Wikipedia to deal with users like this. No one cared about the woman who wholesale copied another's user page, and claimed to be on staff at a non-existant university, and there is no way for the average editor to deal with issues like this, no exposure method. It surprises me, considering all the talk about whether or not we should institute a credentials verification method, that there is no place that an editor can go to say, look, this person is doing tons of work on Wikipedia, but there are some big problems with his work, he uploads images that are clearly copyrighted by others, saying he has permission, then can't find it, he does lots of botany articles, but can't read in botany, and fights when challenged, his quotes from geological sources are flat-out wrong, maybe in the thousands of edits he so gleefully announces on his user page, he claims to have written hundreds of technical articles but has difficulty handling technical language, his paragraphs are often obvious cuts and pastes from diverse unrelated sources that appear to be unrelated, he rambles all over the place, repeats himself, translates things like yellow-green leaves in one sentence to yellow-green flowers in the next, but then goes on to correctly describe the flowers as oranges and reds, and maybe there are a lot more problems that aren't in areas where I've overlapped with him.

Maybe, instead of debating the credentials issue, we could debate, how these users, the Essjay's (or whatever his name was), should be handled in the future. What editors should do when they encounter problems at this level, or potential problems. How this can be discouraged on Wikipedia. I think awards like high edit count awards should be warnings, not bragging rights--and keeping a list of people with high edit counts encourages behaviour like this. My little pet of the day editor, for example, edits an article 10-20 times for one or two sentences, thereby boosting his edit count. If this editor has as many "Did you knows" as his user page indicates, shame on us for posting his articles on the front page with this level of inaccuracy. This is a LOT of crap uploaded to Wikipedia by one highly visible person--there should be a special place in Wikipedia for these dishonrable mentions. And, if this stuff was riegned in early on, it might lead to productive editors, rather than edit-countitis.

KP

A request for arbitration might be successful in this case.

Fred