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Meet the editors: Meco

By Delicious carbuncle

Another in a in a series of blog posts highlighting lesser-known Wikipedia editors.

So far, I’ve introduced you to Wikipedia editors For An Angel (AKA Ospinad) and Crakkerjakk without revealing their real-life identities. This time I will be introducing you to Meco, who tells us on his Wikipedia user page that he is 48 year-old “Halvor aka Halvor Raknes aka Halvor Raknes Johansen aka Halvor R. Johansen” from Oslo, Norway.

Some background

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You probably won’t remember this, but in 2010 it was revealed that Amazon.com had been selling an ebook entitled The Pedophile’s Guide to Love and Pleasure. It made a great topic for discussion on the news networks. Faced with the predictable outrage, Amazon quickly pulled the book and everyone moved on. Of course, someone wrote an article about the book and its author in Wikipedia. As I recall, it was an excuse to air the author’s somewhat unusual views on relationships between children and adults. This article and the deletion discussion I started for it were where I first took notice of Meco.

Meco is an old-timer. He has been editing Wikipedia since 2006 and has over 50,000 edits on the English-language WP. As Meco’s user page notes, he was banned from the Norwegian-language Wikipedia in 2007. Of course, just because you have been banned on one Wikimedia Foundation project doesn’t mean you aren’t welcome on a different one.

In June 2009, Meco created the article for Sons, a film about “the conflict between a pederastic man and the boys with whom he has had intimate relationships”. In July 2012, Meco created an article on WP about a documentary called Are All Men Pedophiles?. This article had already been created and deleted twice before. Meco

…continue reading Meet the editors: Meco

Jimbo does Vegas

By H. Krustofsky

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On March 14, Jimmy Wales took his travelling god-king act to the annual convention of the Independent Community Bankers of America at the palatial Wynn Las Vegas Resort. As the final performer on the bill, Jimmy played to a half-filled hall of die-hard community bankers who had managed to resist the siren song of the nearby casino. Many of them seemed impressed by what Jimmy had to say.

Jimmy was there to present Wikipedia as it wishes to be perceived, a magical place where NPOV (Neutral Point of View — a policy intended to prevent biased articles) is embraced by all, where there are no vendettas, malicious bannings, defamation, or plagiarism, where every policy means just what it says and no one is gaming the system.

Much of the presentation followed the format of “What Wikipedia Is Not” (WP:NOT, one of Wikipedia’s most widely ignored core policies.) Jimmy got ’em chuckling when he said that, for example, there are no “funny pet videos” on Wikipedia, because that wouldn’t be appropriate. The question of whether it is appropriate to have roughly 1,000 images of penises on Wikimedia (think twice before clicking this link) was not addressed in his presentation.

 

 

For a moment, it looked as if things might get interesting when Jimbo said,

…it is important to know who the Wikipedia editors are.

 

It stands to reason, for example, that if you were the target of a defamatory Wikipedia article, or you happened upon a propagandistic and misleading article on a controversial topic, you would want to know just who was responsible for putting this material at the top

…continue reading Jimbo does Vegas

Wikipedia intervenes to hide identity of Russavia

By Gregory Kohs

 

A masquerade mask uploaded by Russavia

Wikipedia was in a bit of chaos last week, as some of its administrators and its Arbitration Committee sought to wipe away any mention of the real name of a user who goes by the nickname “Russavia”. One popular and prolific editor of military history articles has been indefinitely blocked for “outing” Russavia. And an administrator with nearly five years under his belt who sought to unblock the history buff was defrocked of his admin toolkit in the early hours of March 5th. Alas, the people who built Wikipedia have developed an accompanying set of rules that are so extreme, heavy-handed, and (not surprisingly) unevenly enforced, it’s not hard to believe that fewer and fewer people have the courage to edit the wiki encyclopedia any more.

What is especially perplexing is the fact that “Russavia” has identified himself as Australian web merchant Scott Bibby in numerous places across the internet, but because he has never sought to identify himself on Wikipedia, no other Wikipedia editor is ever allowed to identify him by his real name. Furthermore, Russavia’s account on Wikipedia has been blocked since April 2012, so this entire kerfuffle has been fought over the identity of someone who was already kicked off of the site.

The puzzling affair began with a blog post on Wikipediocracy. The post explained in clear detail how Russavia is one of the most prolific and intractable contributors of photos to Wikimedia Commons (the photo album cousin of Wikipedia), how he so offends opponents that he got blocked for a year from Wikipedia, and how his name is without a doubt Scott Bibby. The post also described a moment on Wikipedia when a female editor complained

…continue reading Wikipedia intervenes to hide identity of Russavia