"Remember, muslims are allowed to marry Christians or Jews."
Actually, no. MALE muslims are allowed to take non-muslim wives, because the children are considered "Muslim." Female muslims are not allowed to marry non-Muslims at all.
Yet another mysoginistic part of the religion that way.
"I'm very saddened by the way you criticized Muhammad."
I'm very saddened by the fact that you can somehow stand up for a pedophile, rapist, con man, scam artist, and bloody murderer who the world would have been better off never to have been so much as disgraced by his footprints.
You obviously have not really studied the Koran, nor Hadith collections such as the Sunni Big Six, nor the Big Four of the Shi'a, nor the ones the Ibadi, Kurds, and Sufi consider to be "authoritative." Or else you are not looking with an open eye at the totality, but instead at what you can use to justify it.
Islam is a religion of destruction. "Love what Allah loves and Hate what Allah Hates."
Thanks to Islam, much of the cultural works of the Persians are forever lost to the world. The Buddhas at Bamiyan, not to mention millions of other books and statues and writings, are forever lost to the world. Untold numbers of artifacts form under the Temple Mount have been ground into rubble by Muslims trying to alter the site to claim it was not "really" the site of the Temple; this from the same rat-bastards who 200 years after Mohammed's death squatted down a "Mosque" and called it "Al Aqsa" to make a tourist trap from it.
These were not lost through time or through negligence; they are acts of deliberately destruction from the world's most hateful religion.
Oh, wait - the Jews in Israel are protecting thousands of gay Palestinian teens who came out of the closet and ran for their lives away from their murdering "parents."
Tell you what. You provide 4 slave-brides right now, and the right to beat them anytime the husband pleases, and the promise of 72 dark-eyed virgins (or is that crystal clear raisins?) when they die...
and I'll show you the dream heaven of a sexually tilted, absolutely sadistic prick.
Whoops. That appears to be Muslim heaven for you. Might explain a few things.
The proper terms for the doctrine you speak of are Al-Mansukh (abrogated) and Al-Nasikh (abrogating).
Of particular note, the old "there shall be no compulsion in religion" (The Cow, Koran 2: 256) bullcrap that most Muslim apologists try to use to claim Islam is "peaceful" is an abrogated verse that was thrown away after Mohammed took over Makka. It was replaced by such nice verses as "O Muslim, do not take the Christians and Jews as your friends" (The Dinner Table, 5: 51) and "slay the idolaters whenever you find them, and take them captives and besiege them and lie in wait for them in every ambush" (The Immunity, 9: 5).
Oops, I'm sorry. Did I reveal the truth about the world's most barbaric and hateful religion in their own words?
Believing "islamic history" is like believing Joseph Smith used seeing stones to read golden plates out of a hat.
Or that the Hale-Bopp comet was really a spaceship coming to take your spirit to heaven.
Or that Jim Jones was the reincarnation of both Jesus and Buddha.
Or that the evil alien warlord Xenu flew millions of aliens to earth in rocket-equipped DC-7's, dumped them into volcanoes, blew them up with nuclear bombs, and then stranded them on earth to infect apes and turn into modern man.
Christians, Jews, Hindus, Shinto, Confucians, Asa, Sikhs, Baha'i, Jainists, Rastafarians, Unitarians, and Buddhists don't try to suicide-bomb me for not converting to Islam.
I'm sure there's a few religions I missed in there - I apologize to all of you except the Satanists (then again, at least the Satanists are honest about what their religion says).
That's a real funny lie since Mohammed spent time in Jerusalem until he was laughed out of the synagogues for not being able to translate the old Hebrew scriptures properly (getting mud mixed up with a blood clot among other things). Part of his animosity towards the Jews comes from that.
Anyone whose mind is worthlessly closed will be unable to grasp simple truths that challenge them.
That includes bible literalists (amazingly enough, no mainstream church actually insists that its followers take the Bible literally, since they acknowledge that any possible divine revelations made within are colored by the point of view of the person doing the transcribing to paper and any subsequent translation from the original language).
It's also really fun dealing with Mormons on "mission" and hopelessely brainwashed $cientologists.
The Qur'an, being the unaltered word of God, cannot be at fault: Muslims believe that if there is a problem, it must come from their inability to properly interpret and implement the Qur'an's divine instructions.
The Qu'ran, far from being "the unaltered word of God", is actually an horrific and savage compilation of distilled hatred. Work on collecting the verses wasn't even begun until long after Mohammed was dead, and it was pieced together from people who claimed to have known him or known people who knew him. Thus it's put together out of chronological order (already one alteration) and to try to claim "Mohammed" wrote it is laughable.
The same is true for the other Muslim "holy books", the various collections of hadith (sayings of the so-called "prophet") that various factions believe are more or less authentic (the Sunni and Shi'a have their own favored set each, same for other sects).
Islam is not simply a religion; it is a design guidebook for the creation of a totalitarian state in which the "supreme leader" (Caliph) and his stooges get to use religion as an excuse to be really crappy to everyone else. And it's a lot easier to keep your population under control if they're too stupid to know better and terrified that a revolt might stop them from reaching "heaven."
And Mohammed, far from being a prophet, was an opportunist who figured like Akenaten, Joseph Smith and L. Ron Hubbard that he could use religion as a tool and scam. Look at the various things he was "exempted" from. He "limited" other men to only 4 wives (already a mysoginistic bastard but we'll move on), but he himself got at least an even dozen, plus he fucked a 5 year old (Aisha) just because he got bored with adults. He raped a girl who had just seen her entire family slaughtered (Safiya) and then retroactively declared it a "marriage" the next day when his troops started complaining.
Muslims like to try to rewrite history to hide embarassing details - such as the nature of the Ka'aba, their "holy box", which predates Mohammed. Mohammed's grandfather was a pagan priest of a specific deity of the Quraish tribe. He named his son (Mohammed's dad) "Abd'allah", literally "Slave of Allah."
This was before the monotheistic "Allah" was cooked up by Mohammed.
Question: Which pagan deity is Allah? Or else who was Abd'allah named for?
Islam is a joke. The more educated Muslims you get, the more educated ex-Muslims you'll have as they wake up to the utter absurdity of this bullshit. That's why Muslim leaders hate education so much.
Hell, that's why the Muslim religion has a standing death threat for converting away.
Look, fools, you can't have it both ways. Either there are going to be standards, or there aren't. There's already a standard that you don't sell M-rated games to underage kids, this isn't any different.
If he's unwilling to sell games to kids who are flunking out of school? I TOTALLY LOVE THAT STAND. Seriously, think about it. We have major issues these days with schools being fucked up. If kids aren't making the grade, we may love games, but just letting them play the games is not going to teach them to take school (and work) seriously.
Fuck Gamestop for suspending him. They should be putting him on a pedestal and making this a nationwide policy.
While it didn't have the whole game, there's a level in it - The Cradle - that's absolutely, completely spooky. Running around a burned-out building that used to be both an insane asylum AND an orphanage...
is that while those who insist on hating Bush think this is news, this has been "crowd control" tactics for pretty much every political rally or protest that has ever existed.
Democrats regularly strip off shirts and try to confiscate signs that are critical of them at their rallies. Try bringing a counter-sign to one of the Muslim KKK / "Pro-Palestine" events sometime, and see what happens. If you're lucky, they'll just try to cover your sign with theirs or grab it from your hands and rip it up and stomp on it; if you're not, you'll be physically attacked for being a "Jew."
I took a sign asking Obama what he thinks of the racial supremacist views of his "church": when I held it up at his rally, it lasted about 30 seconds, then one of his "staffers" pointed at me and sent cronies into the crowd to take it from my hands and rip it up. Seems they don't want the truth about him pointed out.
If you look at the edits of the various accounts what do you find? A number of people who have been abused. Some on Israel/Palestine, some accounts like "PSPMario" and "Pukachu" that never went anywhere NEAR that topic but were banned anyways because of abusive administrators looking for an excuse.
The goal? It seems that someone found someone they didn't like (ElKabong/KaintheScion) who did break a rule, and decided that it was easy to attack them and add everyone else (like the well-spoken good contributor Enviroknot) as a "suspected sockpuppet" to get them banned for disagreeing with the admins' political POV.
The rest of the accounts? Banned for the same reason - the goal is to keep people banned. Grab a random person, abuse them (like happened to PSPMario, railroaded for trying to improve the PSP article or Pukachu, trying to make mythology articles better), declare them a sockpuppet with no proof, and then extend a universal ban.
Using this abusive tactic, the wikipedia clique and abusive administrators have extended a ban that was supposed to ONLY last until May 2006, has been extended to March 2008. The pattern is clear - every time the ban gets close to expiring, they magic up a new "sockpuppet" and declare them connected with no fair reasoning, and then use that as an excuse to extend the ban and slap someone they've been abusing with an indefinite ban.
The pattern is clear. The administrators involved are CLEARLY ABUSIVE. The treatment of users like RunedChozo by the partisans is beyond the pale - but since they were administrators doing things like this and then lying, they got away with it.
But I guess, despite your protestations to the contrary, that you don't really give a rat's ass about the systemic abuse going on.
no - I've given you several examples. I've never had issue myself, I've had issue watching administrators such as yourself attack people and then attack those who stood up to say that the administrators had it wrong and were violating the rules themselves by their verbal attacks and behavior.
YOU are choosing to ignore this, trying to twist it and refusing to address the subject at hand.
That is typical behavior of a wikipedia admin... and I'm sorry to say you seem, despite your protestations to the contrary, precisely the sort that has ruined any hope of the project living up to its potential.
No... at its best it represents a poorly written, rather unhelpful bit of meaningless prose the net effect of which may be at most "here's a bunch of links regarding what you were looking for."
And even at that, it's rarely comprehensively sourced, since there is regularly warring and a tilted scheme of "reliability" designed to make it easy to bias entries by omission.
There are thousands of better and more reliable sources out there for almost any topic. Wikipedia's sole claim to fame is that it's a gigantic fucking linkfarm that's convinced engines like Google to not treat them like any other spammer's linkfarm, and thus gets top billing on search popups for just about any word you throw in.
Actually, I was never abused personally - I just watched, and was chided by clique members, for daring to stand up for people who were being abused, whether it was clique members who were being rude to (or even swearing at) someone and then blocking them for responding in kind, or abusing them verbally for daring to file an unblock request, or worse.
In the hands of a wikipedia administrator, the rules are not something to be followed, but rather weapons to beat anyone they disagree with over the head with.
What supposed pros are you talking about? The "pro" of having a site that catalogues the obsessive behavior of fanboys and otaku who want to argue over Pokemon, or comic books? The "pro" of having a supposed "encyclopedia" where dates and facts are more often wrong than right?
The "Cons" are - it's completely worthless. It's a mess, and anything that might get referenced on a regular basis is something on which wikipedia's listing should ABSOLUTELY NEVER BE TRUSTED.
WP needs a vast overhaul. It needs the leading clique thrown out the window, it needs transparency in its processes to be 100% there: the clique have been steadily removing any shred of transparency it used to have, so now all Arbcom decisions are made behind closed doors, all proceedings over whether an admin blocked illegitimately or failed to correctly apply policy are made behind closed doors, and the verdict is always the same: Fuck the Non-Admin, Fuck anyone who's not a friend of an admin.
It used to be that the target of a "checkuser" had the right to demand that the results be made public for all to see: this right was taken away.
It used to be the targets of "checkuser" were presumed innocent until proven guilty: now they expanded the listings to include "probable" and "checkuser doesn't say so but I say so so fuck them anyways" verdicts.
It used to be an appeal to be unblocked was to be visible: now admins just blank or remove the appeal of their own block, lock the page down, and laugh their heads off about the abuse of power they've just abused while other abusive admins congratulate them on banning "trolls."
It used to be appeals were to be made to a public list, where the evidence could be shown, the user could prevent their own, questions could be asked, and the process analyzed and checked. Now it's done behind closed doors, on a locked-off list where the complainant can't even see the progress or discussion (what little exists) and no admin gives two shits enough to ever email back the abused person.
It used to be any administrator had the right and privilege to undo a block. Now, the prohibitions on "wheel warring" serve such that any administrator is required to "discuss" the block with the blocking admin... which means in practice the blocking admin never says a word and just stonewalls till either the block expires or the aggrieved user gets offended enough to say something bad about the blocker, at which point they get banned for "trolling."
This is the culture of wikipedia. Rather than transparency and openness, it's about abuse and covering up for it and making it so that nobody can analyze the process and prove when they are being abusive. Real discussions have moved from the open into the closed doors of private, invite-only IRC chat rooms and email so that administrators can wheel and deal and nobody can see what they are up to.
And the same has happened for the cliques - whereas formerly, organized groups had work pages on Wikipedia, now they've taken it offsite and the admin culture gives them a wink and a nod for their organized harassment campaigns to other users who dare to try to fix the articles they've ruined.
Where you look - well there's that blog, there's Holkins' commentary, there's Wikitruth, Wikipedia Review, WCityMike's leaving message.
There was Ikkyu's classic discussion - unfortunately, overly censorious admins much like yourself wiped and locked it - again to hide their own abuses.
You have admins like SlimVirgin, who run around abusing the admin tools to hide things (she's also one of the most prolific liars and frauds when it comes to banning anyone she disagrees with for any reason).
There's another classic by Professor Gann, an academic who gave up on wikipedia here: again, someone who was abused by the system and sees the system for what it is.
You refuse to see that Wikipedia has a major problem - therefore, you are part of the problem. Can I give you a precise number of times the system has been abused? No. Can I point you to key cases, key cases in which to this day the reigning clique of Wikipedia refuse to admit they were wrong and that people were, in fact, abused? PLENTY.
Look at the evidence, rather than the lies and deception the clique and abusers throw around. You'll see quite clearly what Wikipedia is really about.
Abuse on wikipedia is systemic and ridiculous. The number of people who have been through it are numerous. The number of reliable, credentialed academics who've been abused, voluminous. The number of times they have covered up their abuses, the number of sheer scandals. (note that they've deleted all of the Essjay material, to cover up and try to hide what he pulled; a long-running scam to abuse and mistreat and demean Catholics).
Wikipedia administrators regularly abuse their power - in any way possible. The caste system of wikipedia is set up this way; gather thousands of mindless edits (and they keep pushing the boundary upwards, for fear that someone might get in and try to fix the system from within). Decry anyone who rightly points out that the system is broken and needs fixing as a "troll."
This is the method by which wikipedia administrators exist; this is the methodology by which the caste system is enforced. It used to be, way back when, that users were encouraged to seek out another administrator if one was giving them grief for redress: now the policy is against "wheel warring", and no administrator is allowed to undo the action of another for fear of being accused of such, and administrative policies have been changed to enforce this.
In the Wikipedia system, the administrators are the pigs of animal farm - "more equal than others."
However, the core of it is worse than that. Wikipedia is not merely controlled by "consensus": it is actively controlled by cliques whose goal is to bias the hell out of articles and keep them in their biased mode. They operate by getting their friends, members of their clique, elevated to admin status and then patrolling these articles, ostensibly for "trolls" but really for anyone who might try to un-bias them. They abuse these newcomers, make false accusations against them, hurl insults and then have their friend ban the newcomer for fighting back. They abuse the prohibitions on "multiple reversions" like a game; instead of a real consensus, all you have to have is one more guy than the opposing viewpoint and you completely control the damn article - and since you have a sympathetic admin on your side, you can have them block the new user for "edit warring", which comes in real handy when you have your buddy bring them to the drumhead trial system called "Arbcom" and say "see he should be banned he's got X blocks already."
Wikipedia is beyond broken - at its best, it is a worthless pile of crap with some whipped cream sprayed on top to try to make it look presentable. At its worst it is a classic case of letting the inmates run the asylum, of the Lord of the Flies syndrome; the worst abusers of the system are those who are "highly-ranked" and "respected" administrators, who operate by fiat, who can and regularly do abuse anyone else without mercy.
The caste system is mercilessly enforced by the admins - without it, they would not have nearly so much power. The whole point of being an administrator of wikipedia is not to make the encyclopedia better but rather to protect your friends, protect your clique, rise in
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Lie much?
"Remember, muslims are allowed to marry Christians or Jews."
Actually, no. MALE muslims are allowed to take non-muslim wives, because the children are considered "Muslim." Female muslims are not allowed to marry non-Muslims at all.
Yet another mysoginistic part of the religion that way.
"I'm very saddened by the way you criticized Muhammad."
I'm very saddened by the fact that you can somehow stand up for a pedophile, rapist, con man, scam artist, and bloody murderer who the world would have been better off never to have been so much as disgraced by his footprints.
You obviously have not really studied the Koran, nor Hadith collections such as the Sunni Big Six, nor the Big Four of the Shi'a, nor the ones the Ibadi, Kurds, and Sufi consider to be "authoritative." Or else you are not looking with an open eye at the totality, but instead at what you can use to justify it.
Islam is a religion of destruction. "Love what Allah loves and Hate what Allah Hates."
Thanks to Islam, much of the cultural works of the Persians are forever lost to the world. The Buddhas at Bamiyan, not to mention millions of other books and statues and writings, are forever lost to the world. Untold numbers of artifacts form under the Temple Mount have been ground into rubble by Muslims trying to alter the site to claim it was not "really" the site of the Temple; this from the same rat-bastards who 200 years after Mohammed's death squatted down a "Mosque" and called it "Al Aqsa" to make a tourist trap from it.
These were not lost through time or through negligence; they are acts of deliberately destruction from the world's most hateful religion.
Many years of study of Islam - the Koran, Hadiths, various "learned imam" writings.
You should try it sometime.
linking to a site that isn't just out-and-out lies? Or as the Wikipedians would say: "Fails WP:V, WP:RS, Sanity check, and Bullshit Detector."
Oh, wait - the Jews in Israel are protecting thousands of gay Palestinian teens who came out of the closet and ran for their lives away from their murdering "parents."
Tell you what. You provide 4 slave-brides right now, and the right to beat them anytime the husband pleases, and the promise of 72 dark-eyed virgins (or is that crystal clear raisins?) when they die...
and I'll show you the dream heaven of a sexually tilted, absolutely sadistic prick.
Whoops. That appears to be Muslim heaven for you. Might explain a few things.
The proper terms for the doctrine you speak of are Al-Mansukh (abrogated) and Al-Nasikh (abrogating).
Of particular note, the old "there shall be no compulsion in religion" (The Cow, Koran 2: 256) bullcrap that most Muslim apologists try to use to claim Islam is "peaceful" is an abrogated verse that was thrown away after Mohammed took over Makka. It was replaced by such nice verses as "O Muslim, do not take the Christians and Jews as your friends" (The Dinner Table, 5: 51) and "slay the idolaters whenever you find them, and take them captives and besiege them and lie in wait for them in every ambush" (The Immunity, 9: 5).
Oops, I'm sorry. Did I reveal the truth about the world's most barbaric and hateful religion in their own words?
Believing "islamic history" is like believing Joseph Smith used seeing stones to read golden plates out of a hat.
Or that the Hale-Bopp comet was really a spaceship coming to take your spirit to heaven.
Or that Jim Jones was the reincarnation of both Jesus and Buddha.
Or that the evil alien warlord Xenu flew millions of aliens to earth in rocket-equipped DC-7's, dumped them into volcanoes, blew them up with nuclear bombs, and then stranded them on earth to infect apes and turn into modern man.
Christians, Jews, Hindus, Shinto, Confucians, Asa, Sikhs, Baha'i, Jainists, Rastafarians, Unitarians, and Buddhists don't try to suicide-bomb me for not converting to Islam.
I'm sure there's a few religions I missed in there - I apologize to all of you except the Satanists (then again, at least the Satanists are honest about what their religion says).
That's a real funny lie since Mohammed spent time in Jerusalem until he was laughed out of the synagogues for not being able to translate the old Hebrew scriptures properly (getting mud mixed up with a blood clot among other things). Part of his animosity towards the Jews comes from that.
Anyone whose mind is worthlessly closed will be unable to grasp simple truths that challenge them.
That includes bible literalists (amazingly enough, no mainstream church actually insists that its followers take the Bible literally, since they acknowledge that any possible divine revelations made within are colored by the point of view of the person doing the transcribing to paper and any subsequent translation from the original language).
It's also really fun dealing with Mormons on "mission" and hopelessely brainwashed $cientologists.
From the article:
The Qur'an, being the unaltered word of God, cannot be at fault: Muslims believe that if there is a problem, it must come from their inability to properly interpret and implement the Qur'an's divine instructions.
The Qu'ran, far from being "the unaltered word of God", is actually an horrific and savage compilation of distilled hatred. Work on collecting the verses wasn't even begun until long after Mohammed was dead, and it was pieced together from people who claimed to have known him or known people who knew him. Thus it's put together out of chronological order (already one alteration) and to try to claim "Mohammed" wrote it is laughable.
The same is true for the other Muslim "holy books", the various collections of hadith (sayings of the so-called "prophet") that various factions believe are more or less authentic (the Sunni and Shi'a have their own favored set each, same for other sects).
Islam is not simply a religion; it is a design guidebook for the creation of a totalitarian state in which the "supreme leader" (Caliph) and his stooges get to use religion as an excuse to be really crappy to everyone else. And it's a lot easier to keep your population under control if they're too stupid to know better and terrified that a revolt might stop them from reaching "heaven."
And Mohammed, far from being a prophet, was an opportunist who figured like Akenaten, Joseph Smith and L. Ron Hubbard that he could use religion as a tool and scam. Look at the various things he was "exempted" from. He "limited" other men to only 4 wives (already a mysoginistic bastard but we'll move on), but he himself got at least an even dozen, plus he fucked a 5 year old (Aisha) just because he got bored with adults. He raped a girl who had just seen her entire family slaughtered (Safiya) and then retroactively declared it a "marriage" the next day when his troops started complaining.
Muslims like to try to rewrite history to hide embarassing details - such as the nature of the Ka'aba, their "holy box", which predates Mohammed. Mohammed's grandfather was a pagan priest of a specific deity of the Quraish tribe. He named his son (Mohammed's dad) "Abd'allah", literally "Slave of Allah."
This was before the monotheistic "Allah" was cooked up by Mohammed.
Question: Which pagan deity is Allah? Or else who was Abd'allah named for?
Islam is a joke. The more educated Muslims you get, the more educated ex-Muslims you'll have as they wake up to the utter absurdity of this bullshit. That's why Muslim leaders hate education so much.
Hell, that's why the Muslim religion has a standing death threat for converting away.
Look, fools, you can't have it both ways. Either there are going to be standards, or there aren't. There's already a standard that you don't sell M-rated games to underage kids, this isn't any different.
If he's unwilling to sell games to kids who are flunking out of school? I TOTALLY LOVE THAT STAND. Seriously, think about it. We have major issues these days with schools being fucked up. If kids aren't making the grade, we may love games, but just letting them play the games is not going to teach them to take school (and work) seriously.
Fuck Gamestop for suspending him. They should be putting him on a pedestal and making this a nationwide policy.
While it didn't have the whole game, there's a level in it - The Cradle - that's absolutely, completely spooky. Running around a burned-out building that used to be both an insane asylum AND an orphanage...
is that while those who insist on hating Bush think this is news, this has been "crowd control" tactics for pretty much every political rally or protest that has ever existed.
Democrats regularly strip off shirts and try to confiscate signs that are critical of them at their rallies. Try bringing a counter-sign to one of the Muslim KKK / "Pro-Palestine" events sometime, and see what happens. If you're lucky, they'll just try to cover your sign with theirs or grab it from your hands and rip it up and stomp on it; if you're not, you'll be physically attacked for being a "Jew."
I took a sign asking Obama what he thinks of the racial supremacist views of his "church": when I held it up at his rally, it lasted about 30 seconds, then one of his "staffers" pointed at me and sent cronies into the crowd to take it from my hands and rip it up. Seems they don't want the truth about him pointed out.
They took their biggest Living campaign, and killed it.
And why? So they can try to force us into the same arena where pimply Drizzt-wannabes run around.
They just killed the RPGA and D&D. Good for them.
Yawn.
I did my best to contact you on Wikipedia; I offered you up a serious and SYSTEMIC case to examine.
You reply with this?
You just proved how little you really care - to you, like every other wikipedia admin, it's all about preserving the caste system.
So you're an admin?
Interesting. "User:Xeth" shows no sign of it.
Here's one of the most classic cases I can show you - not only does it show you SYSTEMIC problems, it shows how administrators get away with it.
o ckpuppets_of_Enviroknot
i kipedia_sockpuppets_of_Enviroknot
Take the example of this one user: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Wikipedia_s
Look at the various accounts. The abusive administrators going on about this also created another one, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Suspected_W
If you look at the edits of the various accounts what do you find? A number of people who have been abused. Some on Israel/Palestine, some accounts like "PSPMario" and "Pukachu" that never went anywhere NEAR that topic but were banned anyways because of abusive administrators looking for an excuse.
The goal? It seems that someone found someone they didn't like (ElKabong/KaintheScion) who did break a rule, and decided that it was easy to attack them and add everyone else (like the well-spoken good contributor Enviroknot) as a "suspected sockpuppet" to get them banned for disagreeing with the admins' political POV.
The rest of the accounts? Banned for the same reason - the goal is to keep people banned. Grab a random person, abuse them (like happened to PSPMario, railroaded for trying to improve the PSP article or Pukachu, trying to make mythology articles better), declare them a sockpuppet with no proof, and then extend a universal ban.
Using this abusive tactic, the wikipedia clique and abusive administrators have extended a ban that was supposed to ONLY last until May 2006, has been extended to March 2008. The pattern is clear - every time the ban gets close to expiring, they magic up a new "sockpuppet" and declare them connected with no fair reasoning, and then use that as an excuse to extend the ban and slap someone they've been abusing with an indefinite ban.
The pattern is clear. The administrators involved are CLEARLY ABUSIVE. The treatment of users like RunedChozo by the partisans is beyond the pale - but since they were administrators doing things like this and then lying, they got away with it.
But I guess, despite your protestations to the contrary, that you don't really give a rat's ass about the systemic abuse going on.
Go ahead. Prove me wrong.
no - I've given you several examples. I've never had issue myself, I've had issue watching administrators such as yourself attack people and then attack those who stood up to say that the administrators had it wrong and were violating the rules themselves by their verbal attacks and behavior.
YOU are choosing to ignore this, trying to twist it and refusing to address the subject at hand.
That is typical behavior of a wikipedia admin... and I'm sorry to say you seem, despite your protestations to the contrary, precisely the sort that has ruined any hope of the project living up to its potential.
No... at its best it represents a poorly written, rather unhelpful bit of meaningless prose the net effect of which may be at most "here's a bunch of links regarding what you were looking for."
And even at that, it's rarely comprehensively sourced, since there is regularly warring and a tilted scheme of "reliability" designed to make it easy to bias entries by omission.
There are thousands of better and more reliable sources out there for almost any topic. Wikipedia's sole claim to fame is that it's a gigantic fucking linkfarm that's convinced engines like Google to not treat them like any other spammer's linkfarm, and thus gets top billing on search popups for just about any word you throw in.
You mean like all the links you've already been given? Pathetic. Truly pathetic.
Actually, I was never abused personally - I just watched, and was chided by clique members, for daring to stand up for people who were being abused, whether it was clique members who were being rude to (or even swearing at) someone and then blocking them for responding in kind, or abusing them verbally for daring to file an unblock request, or worse.
In the hands of a wikipedia administrator, the rules are not something to be followed, but rather weapons to beat anyone they disagree with over the head with.
What supposed pros are you talking about? The "pro" of having a site that catalogues the obsessive behavior of fanboys and otaku who want to argue over Pokemon, or comic books? The "pro" of having a supposed "encyclopedia" where dates and facts are more often wrong than right?
The "Cons" are - it's completely worthless. It's a mess, and anything that might get referenced on a regular basis is something on which wikipedia's listing should ABSOLUTELY NEVER BE TRUSTED.
WP needs a vast overhaul. It needs the leading clique thrown out the window, it needs transparency in its processes to be 100% there: the clique have been steadily removing any shred of transparency it used to have, so now all Arbcom decisions are made behind closed doors, all proceedings over whether an admin blocked illegitimately or failed to correctly apply policy are made behind closed doors, and the verdict is always the same: Fuck the Non-Admin, Fuck anyone who's not a friend of an admin.
It used to be that the target of a "checkuser" had the right to demand that the results be made public for all to see: this right was taken away.
It used to be the targets of "checkuser" were presumed innocent until proven guilty: now they expanded the listings to include "probable" and "checkuser doesn't say so but I say so so fuck them anyways" verdicts.
It used to be an appeal to be unblocked was to be visible: now admins just blank or remove the appeal of their own block, lock the page down, and laugh their heads off about the abuse of power they've just abused while other abusive admins congratulate them on banning "trolls."
It used to be appeals were to be made to a public list, where the evidence could be shown, the user could prevent their own, questions could be asked, and the process analyzed and checked. Now it's done behind closed doors, on a locked-off list where the complainant can't even see the progress or discussion (what little exists) and no admin gives two shits enough to ever email back the abused person.
It used to be any administrator had the right and privilege to undo a block. Now, the prohibitions on "wheel warring" serve such that any administrator is required to "discuss" the block with the blocking admin... which means in practice the blocking admin never says a word and just stonewalls till either the block expires or the aggrieved user gets offended enough to say something bad about the blocker, at which point they get banned for "trolling."
This is the culture of wikipedia. Rather than transparency and openness, it's about abuse and covering up for it and making it so that nobody can analyze the process and prove when they are being abusive. Real discussions have moved from the open into the closed doors of private, invite-only IRC chat rooms and email so that administrators can wheel and deal and nobody can see what they are up to.
And the same has happened for the cliques - whereas formerly, organized groups had work pages on Wikipedia, now they've taken it offsite and the admin culture gives them a wink and a nod for their organized harassment campaigns to other users who dare to try to fix the articles they've ruined.
I don't see a "pro" here. Do you?
Where you look - well there's that blog, there's Holkins' commentary, there's Wikitruth, Wikipedia Review, WCityMike's leaving message.
There was Ikkyu's classic discussion - unfortunately, overly censorious admins much like yourself wiped and locked it - again to hide their own abuses.
You have admins like SlimVirgin, who run around abusing the admin tools to hide things (she's also one of the most prolific liars and frauds when it comes to banning anyone she disagrees with for any reason).
There's another classic by Professor Gann, an academic who gave up on wikipedia here: again, someone who was abused by the system and sees the system for what it is.
You refuse to see that Wikipedia has a major problem - therefore, you are part of the problem. Can I give you a precise number of times the system has been abused? No. Can I point you to key cases, key cases in which to this day the reigning clique of Wikipedia refuse to admit they were wrong and that people were, in fact, abused? PLENTY.
Look at the evidence, rather than the lies and deception the clique and abusers throw around. You'll see quite clearly what Wikipedia is really about.
Abuse on wikipedia is systemic and ridiculous. The number of people who have been through it are numerous. The number of reliable, credentialed academics who've been abused, voluminous. The number of times they have covered up their abuses, the number of sheer scandals. (note that they've deleted all of the Essjay material, to cover up and try to hide what he pulled; a long-running scam to abuse and mistreat and demean Catholics).
Wikipedia administrators regularly abuse their power - in any way possible. The caste system of wikipedia is set up this way; gather thousands of mindless edits (and they keep pushing the boundary upwards, for fear that someone might get in and try to fix the system from within). Decry anyone who rightly points out that the system is broken and needs fixing as a "troll."
Abuse and attack; ban and call them a "troll" later; lie about the results of "CheckUser", lie about what a user said and what a metric really means, attack attack and do your best to smear anyone who says anything at all.
This is the method by which wikipedia administrators exist; this is the methodology by which the caste system is enforced. It used to be, way back when, that users were encouraged to seek out another administrator if one was giving them grief for redress: now the policy is against "wheel warring", and no administrator is allowed to undo the action of another for fear of being accused of such, and administrative policies have been changed to enforce this.
In the Wikipedia system, the administrators are the pigs of animal farm - "more equal than others."
Jason Scott put it very well indeed.
So did Jerry Holkins: "a kind of quantum encyclopedia, where genuine data both exists and doesn't exist depending on the precise moment I rely upon your discordant fucking mob for my information."
However, the core of it is worse than that. Wikipedia is not merely controlled by "consensus": it is actively controlled by cliques whose goal is to bias the hell out of articles and keep them in their biased mode. They operate by getting their friends, members of their clique, elevated to admin status and then patrolling these articles, ostensibly for "trolls" but really for anyone who might try to un-bias them. They abuse these newcomers, make false accusations against them, hurl insults and then have their friend ban the newcomer for fighting back. They abuse the prohibitions on "multiple reversions" like a game; instead of a real consensus, all you have to have is one more guy than the opposing viewpoint and you completely control the damn article - and since you have a sympathetic admin on your side, you can have them block the new user for "edit warring", which comes in real handy when you have your buddy bring them to the drumhead trial system called "Arbcom" and say "see he should be banned he's got X blocks already."
Wikipedia is beyond broken - at its best, it is a worthless pile of crap with some whipped cream sprayed on top to try to make it look presentable. At its worst it is a classic case of letting the inmates run the asylum, of the Lord of the Flies syndrome; the worst abusers of the system are those who are "highly-ranked" and "respected" administrators, who operate by fiat, who can and regularly do abuse anyone else without mercy.
The caste system is mercilessly enforced by the admins - without it, they would not have nearly so much power. The whole point of being an administrator of wikipedia is not to make the encyclopedia better but rather to protect your friends, protect your clique, rise in