Jonathan Walther (Clutch?) wrote:

You are running hot under the collar based on false information. Please cool down. What Clutch was doing isn't vandalism, but I doubt anyone here has the time to look at every single edit that was done to Lirs pages and see all the tiny changes that were made; the fact that Lirs page is long makes the job much harder than it otherwise would be.

It's easy to look at every single edit. I did it. (Yes, Erik, Lir put in the link to good taste first, after Clutch had put it on her user talk page.) There's no doubt in my mind that vandalism was at work. This is not name-calling; I do not say this gratuitously. These sorts of changes to a user page are unprecedented, and they were done repeatedly, despite admonition from several other Wikipedians. Normally bannable. However, we made an exception, because we hate Lir.

-- Toby

PS: Who are you on Wikipedia?

Jonathan Walther wrote:

I doubt anyone here has the time to look at every single edit that was done to Lirs pages and see all the tiny changes that were made; the fact that Lirs page is long makes the job much harder than it otherwise would be.

And I said that it was easy to do.

But Jon's right -- it can be very tricky.

In fact, *Clutch* was the first to link the article on good taste, not Lir:

http://www.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=User:Lir&diff=437516&old...

If Lir linked it anytime before then, then she'd taken it out.

However, Lir *did* choose to let it stay in, although she changed the format of the link.

I think that it's necessary that ordinary administrators be given the power to block signed in users for vandalism. I'm not arguing for further *authority*, such as to ban people like Helga and Lir that weren't engaged in vandalism as such but eventually proved impossible to work with -- only Jimbo has the authority to ban such people. I mean that logged in users should be bannable for the *same* acts of vandalism that anonymous users can be banned for. All that this requires on the technical end is that administrators be able to see the IP numbers of signed in users.

And, yes, we need to clarify what rights users have to their user page. Until the episode with Lir, users were given quite a free rein, up to the point that advertising was explicitly allowed. While I've said that Clutch's edits to [[User:Lir]] were vandalism, I do think that this needs to be clarified.

-- Toby

I just posted a non-page to the page, a request that we all just drop it. Please let's drop it.

I have no problem with that.

Regards,

Erik