Misplaced Pages

This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Zenwhat (talk | contribs) at 18:40, 12 February 2008. The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

If you think I'm a troll, here's some advice: Deny giving me recognition. Don't read this here. don't leave messages on my talkpage, and don't talk about me behind my back, on WP:ANI or elsewhere.

With that said, since I've been blocked, I've received some encouraging "fan mail," if you could call it that. Some quotes (anonymous) are listed below:

"I'm kind of sorry to see you go. You're a great writer and you're very funny. We don't have a lot of people on Misplaced Pages who can write well. I hope you'll reconsider and come back to help with some articles."

"Keep up the good work. I'll be rooting for you."

"I'm not going to offer you advice , you seem to know quite well what you are doing and how to come as close to the line as you want to. But people have misjudged this in the past, such as Eyrian. Its a risky game, being provocative. I well understand the temptation, though."

In a previous posting to this talkpage :

"Hi Zenwhat. I understand why certain admins were up in arms over you, but I enjoyed all your posts. While some of your jokes were, frankly, kind of mean, they were consistently amusing and frequently thought-provoking."

Kim Bruning's remarks on WP:ANI :

Zenwhat is a extremely intelligent person who unfortunately is badly let down by his equally extremely impetuous nature. If he were to think before he acted more often, he would be a great contributor. He does spot his own mistakes and correct them, which is a sign that he is learning, which is a positive thing. I'm fairly certain that he isn't intentionally trolling. I've been scratching my head about what to do about the impetuousness, though.

In my private discussions with Kim, his statements have basically boiled down to (paraphrase), "Zenwhat is largely right about Misplaced Pages's problems, but he's too brutally honest to the point that he risks ticking off the community and thus losing any chance at addressing Misplaced Pages's problems." He seems to mostly understand things, but I think his eventualism is sort of unfathomable, because it doesn't just rely on patience, but on some far-off dream of things getting better without a clear vision on how we can get from point A to point B.

What drives the swarm to be so angry and vindictive is the fact that they accuse me of being a troll, but there isn't really a shred of evidence to support it, unless you whip out a series of diffs taken out-of-context, like a conspiracy theorist. I've totally revealed my identity to the world. In fact, I've revealed personal information, including my real name that I did not even want to reveal but was forced to reveal, because of all the baseless and insulting subtle accusations of sockpuppetry.

I am willing to discuss any of my actions for as long as you'd like over Skype or any other medium. So far, none of my accusers have bothered to take me up on this offer, although I have developed a friendship with Kim Bruning who knows I'm not a troll and I have been stalked and harassed, on-wiki and off-wiki.

Please, actually read the diff cited below. It's such a ridiculous accusation that I refuse to even respond to it. I offer to help a user and that's trolling. Meanwhile, the person who reverted my edit and the sysop who blocked me did absolutely nothing to help the new user, User:Mark Chung, with his quiz, which was a point emphasized in my post that was reverted, when I said:

You could re-post this question anywhere you like and if anyone tells you, "This question doesn't belong here," or "This is against the rules," don't worry about it. Those folks can be especially annoying if they tell you what you can't do, but don't tell you what you can do or help you actually achieve what you're trying to achieve.

They also did not revert my comment on SlimVirgin's talkpage, asking her to help Mark Chung. If it was trolling, then, well, wouldn't that remark be trolling also? This is really pertinent, because SlimVirgin has supported me privately yet some of my accusers have actually used discussions I've had with her as evidence of my alleged trolling.

It is really confusing how User:JustaHulk manages to get away with calling Wikinews a "harlot" (a euphemism for the original vulgarity) on Jimbo's talkpage, but I tell a newbie, "Ignore all rules," and that's trolling?

Let's put this in perspective here. When an anon made a blanket accusation that his opponents were Jews on the talk page of Palestinian people, I was told to "move on," and the anon user didn't even receive a warning.

Regularly, I come across users pushing POVs, even clearly bizarre ones, like trying to own the article on Satanic ritual abuse or articles relating to circumcision. When I've gone to WP:ANI, these complaints have basically been ignored by the majority there, which is why I've come to regard WP:ANI as totally useless, except for dealing with blatant policy violations. In general, though, it can also be bad, because it leads to the kind of witch-hunting that has led to my block here and the kind of witch-hunting that led to User:Adam Cuerden leaving Misplaced Pages. The community ought to be ashamed of itself for the amount of good users that it abuses and falsely labels as trolls, and then forgets when they are gone. We should never forget Adam Cuerden or any of the good editors who came before him.

Furthermore, the word "troll," on forums and Misplaced Pages alike is often a euphemism for, "I don't like you and this is a neat term I can use to justify blocking you."

To see what I mean, here's a simple thought-experiment for you:

• Are you left-wing? Join Ann Coulter's forum, Bill O'Reilly's forum, Free Republic, forum.crosswalk.com, or generally any forum that's run by admins slanted to the right.
• Are you right-wing? Join liberalforum.org, RevLeft.com, Democraticunderground.com, or generally any forum that's run by admins slanted to the left.
• If you're not interested in politics, you could just try joining forums run by really, really crazy people, like Stormfront, Mises.com, and so on.

In practical terms, in pretty much all forums you have to somewhat be on the admins' good side and not really raise too much hell. That's how human nature works and the pseudoscientific wiki-process, based on naive assumptions of rationality (19th century liberalism or 19th century socialism, take your pick) totally ignores the fact that these assumptions are unfounded.

When the administrators are fairly reasonable (making a mistake here and there, even sometimes banning a user here and there who doesn't really deserve it), then it's not really worth worrying about. But when the administrators are so totally unreasonable that the whole system breaks down, it's pretty counterintuitive to keep your mouth shut and expect things to just fix themselves. On Misplaced Pages, a user cannot in good-faith contribute to it unless they have an extremely low definition of quality or convince themselves that things can somehow get better on their own. This was a point that User:Xiong tried to make to me before and I didn't understand it, but he's right.

Finally, this isn't all just conspiracy theorism on my part, because this process of banning users they don't like under the guise of "disruptive editing" is something that User:Phoenix-wiki and User:Cometstyles themselves threatened me with over Misplaced Pages IRC, after I argued vociferously the points described in WP:FAIL. I can't even prove this, though, because it's an official rule that you're not allowed to post logs from the "unofficial" IRC... ...which is run by Misplaced Pages officials. Unofficial IRC, with a page on Misplaced Pages? Not just that, but with cloaks handed out by Wikimedia staff? Give me a break.

Even now, I'm not even certain if I'll be able to say this stuff here without being suddenly indef-blocked and having my talkpage vanish.

I attempted to go over to meta, to just work on some very basic essays and whathaveyou, and I found users following me over there. One user came by, insulted my work by calling them "rambling" and "irrelevant," and nominated every essay I ever uploaded for deletion. After seeing how every deletion case over there is generally snowballed either in favor of delete or undelete (see groupthink), it was clear that the stuff was all going to be deleted -- not because of consensus, but because you've got a censorship gang over there. As Kim told me privately in conversation, "Misplaced Pages is sort of censored." That's something we need to change, folks.

I am about as much of a troll as John Galt was a criminal.

Blocked, again

You were explicitly asked by Jimbo to stop trolling. You continued here and were reverted here. Therefore, I have blocked you for a week. Any more trolling after the block expires will result in longer blocks. Nakon 05:43, 12 February 2008 (UTC)