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How to Ban a POV You Dislike, in 9 Easy Steps

by Dtobias

Editor’s note: this essay appeared originally at Wikipedia, where it is accompanied by an elaborate disclaimer which assures the reader that the essay is intended to be humorous and that “It is not, has never been, nor will ever be, a Wikipedia policy or guidelineRather, it illustrates standards or conduct that are generally not accepted by the Wikipedia community.” Me, I’m not so sure.

Also, by way of explanation, a “POV” in WikiJargon means a “point of view,” or what for ordinary folks would be called a “bias” or “prejudice.”

 

This page in a nutshell: If you play your cards right, you can make your POV on an issue the only one legal to express here!

  1. Do your best to bait, prod, and aggravate somebody on the opposing side of an ideological war from yourself into acting uncivil out of frustration with you. If you have friends, get together with them to gang up on your opponents and get them angry and desperate.
  2. When the opponent finally does something that can be construed as a violation of policy, get a friendly admin to block him/her.
  3. When the blocked editor uses the means still available to him/her, such as his/her talk page and the e-mail feature, to complain about the unfairness of the block, get your admin friend to bind and gag the editor by removing talk page posting and e-mailing privileges for “trolling” and “harassment”.
  4. With the editor forcibly silenced and thus unable to speak in his/her defense, hold a lynch mob ban discussion on WP:AN/I, with your friends once again ganging up. This works best when the blocked user lacks friends to gang up on his/her behalf; if that happens, you’d really have drama, but if there aren’t any, you’ll just get an open-and-shut case where you and your friends say “Burn the witch!” “Ban him/her already!”, and a handful of people who like to see a good lynching banning and hang out on that forum for that purpose weigh in too.
  5. Now that an editor representing the POV you oppose is banned, make the banned editor into a bogeyman responsible for all that is wrong with Wikipedia, claiming that everything that editor believes in is a “fringe belief” or a “harassment meme”, and that no tactic is too extreme to counter this grave threat. They should block all IP addresses in Upper Slobbovia if that’s where they think the banned editor is editing from!
  6. If anybody else shows up with similar opinions on any subject to the banned editor, try to accuse him/her of being a sockpuppet. If that won’t stick, call him/her a meatpuppet and claim that he/she is proxying for the banned editor, and that everything they edit needs to be reverted on sight.
  7. If they call this treatment unfair, block or ban them too.
  8. The larger the body count from the serial banning of advocates of this particular POV gets, the easier it will be to summarily ban anybody new who shows up; just cite the “serial harassment” allegedly committed by people allegedly associated with the new editor.
  9. Award barnstars to everyone who jumped on the dogpile!!!

 

 

 

Image credit — Flickr/mullica,  licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic

6 comments to How to Ban a POV You Dislike, in 9 Easy Steps

  • […] How to Ban a POV You Dislike, in 9 Easy Steps (Wikipediocracy: Examining the Corruption in Wikipedia) […]

  • eunwoo

    Sadly accurate. Sometimes I contemplate editing WP, but then I look at the administrative processes and its innumerable pages of drama, appeal to emotion, moral outrage, tag-teaming, and it just doesn’t seem worth it.

  • Investigative researcher

    Funny, I just found this link because I have been investigating a rather clear and cut and dry case of this happening on Wikipedia and wanted to see if there were similar stories.

    This case is recent – caused quite a stir among the admins and is being discussed a bit. Here is a story on a blog about it. Tumbleman, Rupert Sheldrake BLP

    http://weilerpsiblog.wordpress.com/2013/10/18/wikipedia-the-trial-of-tumbleman/

  • […] In my last post I talked about the banning of Tumbleman.  While I couldn’t quite put my finger on it, I knew that the skeptics were systematically working a plan.  Fortunately, there is a Wikipedia article on how to ban a point of view you don’t like.  Wikipediocracy acknowledged the article with this comment: […]

  • […] banning of Tumbleman seems to closely mirror an ostensibly satirical Wikipedia article on how to ban a point of view you don’t like. In his latest blog entry, Weiler posts […]

  • Wow, I must have had a lot of friends to have survived multiple banning attempts from 2007 to 2014. They couldn’t get me on Israel-Palestine or libertarian-related articles, but they got me good on feminism/closing the gender gap issues. (GGTF arbitration). What a RELIEF to not deal with the B.S. any more!! I’ll come back when they hire professional mediators who will have admin powers and have phone verification for editors who start making trouble and/or are suspected sockpuppets. That would solve about 75% of Wikipedia’s problems…