Hi. I hope it is ok to raise this issue on this mailing list.
From my recent observations, the current situation on
Wikipedia often seems
to be that as soon a user expresses any concern over an indef
block, they
are immediately accused of being a meatpuppet (on AN/I or similar) and in
many cases, blocked themselves. After a recent incident, I have been told
about a number of similar cases. Had it not been for the fact that I've been
a wikipedia editor for over four years, I suspect I too would have been
blocked on the assumption of being a meatpuppet.
I saw some recent posts on this mailing list where the question was asked
"do meatpuppets exist"? I'm pretty much of the opinion that the term itself
ought to be avoided, as it seems all too easily be used to refer to a group
of editors who share a view.
There are various policies on Wikipedia that deal with sockpuppets, but
these seem to have changed over time to include meatpuppets, and it seems to
have become largely ignored as to what the policy said at the point that it
became policy.
The same seems to apply to WP:DUCK. This was originally brought in as
WP:SPADE to allow people to call a spade a spade, i.e. to say that something
is what it is. It was at this point it became policy. Then it somehow got
linked (hijacked?) to become WP:DUCK, which seems to now be used to state
that something must be a duck if it shares a few attributes with a duck.
WP:DUCK and WP:SPADE seem to me to be hugely different arguments. WP:SPADE
is about stating facts, whereas WP:DUCK seems to be about making often wild
accusations based on correlations.
In case an example is needed to back up my above observations, below is a
link of where I was concerned that WP:DUCK and accusations of meatpuppetry
were getting out of hand, and that supervision instead of blocking may have
been more appropriate:-
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Administrators'_not…
Regards,
R E Broadley