[WikiEN-l] Administrator "Wafulz" instigating retroactive edit deletions on dubious pretext

[Bryan Derksen]

Cole DeShawn wrote:
> My only edit to [[Talk:Something Awful]]
> (http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Something_Awful&oldid=167299083)
> was a paragraph explaining some of the above. Shortly afterward,
> [[User:Wafulz]] edited the page to deny what I had said, and anonymous
> [[User:70.112.72.54]] then denied [[User:Wafulz]]'s denial. So far,
> fair play.

I haven't dug into the edit history surrounding this edit, but solely
from the contents of your comment I can imagine two competing interests
at play here:
*Revelation of potential COI
*"Outing" an editor's identity as part of a debate

The latter is a particularly contentious issue right now.

> However, I noticed later that completely unrelated prior edits to my
> user page, and 50+ other unrelated edits I've made on Wikipedia from
> March 2005 onwards, have mysteriously vanished. (My edit count was
> formerly well into the triple digits, and is now 44.)

There may be some misremembering going on here. I've just checked
<http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special%3ADeletedContributions&target=Rolloffle&namespace=>
and there are only 23 edits belonging to User:Rolloffle that have been
deleted, as part of the following pages:

[[Autopackage]] (last deleted by [[User:Pending deletion script]] on 12
May 2005)

[[Klerck]] (last deleted by [[User:Bobo192]] on 15 September 2006)

[[Talk:Gay Nigger Association of America/Archive1]] (last deleted by
[[User:Tawker]] on 28 November 2006)

[[Talk:Gay Nigger Association of America/Archive4]] (last deleted by
[[User:Coredesat]] on 29 November 2006)

[[Image:Linuxbeak.ogg]] (last deleted by [[User:Linuxbeak]] on 13
December 2006)

[[Gay Nigger Association of America]] (last deleted by
[[User:Cowman109]] on 4 February 2007)

[[Wikipedia:10 GNAA AfD nominations pool]] (last deleted by
[[User:Radiant!]] on 6 June 2007)

[[Talk:Klerck]] (last deleted by [[User:John Reaves]] on 26 October 2007)

[[User:Rolloffle]] (last deleted by [[User:John Reaves]] on 27 October 2007)

So that's only a total of nine deleted pages, only three of which were
in article space and only two of which were by John Reaves. Most of
these deletions appeared to be fairly routine - either due to AfD/VfD
results, or as speedied talk pages belonging to deleted articles. So no,
he doesn't seem to have been involved in a significant amount of
deletion of your work.

> As near as I can tell, this has been done because I've supposedly used
> sockpuppets to argue about the file forums on [[Talk:Something
> Awful]].

According to your user page you're a self-declared member of GNAA and
are a Tor user. Both of these may also have contributed.

I haven't done any further digging, though, I'm mainly just tossing out
the deletion information since it takes an admin to easily gather the list.

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