[WikiEN-l] Counting coup

[Fred Bauder]

>-----Original Message-----
>From: K P [mailto:kpbotany at 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