It was a sad little world when I was there because there were unspoken rules to hew to certain lines: only talk about Wikipedia (but don't wish it would go away), don't talk about certain people (but they wouldn't say who), and don't mention Weird Topics (Charles Hoy Fort and his view of the world, UFOs, or riff on all the bad ghost hunting shows on cable TV, etc.) because it will annoy the activist scientist team of
iii (Joshua P. Schroeder - he changed his last name to "Tan", was so obnoxious to the Velikovsky Encyclopedia people they took his page down in 2011 and then put it back up a year later because his threats were nonsense) and
IrWolfie (some physics grad student in Ireland who was in an online fight with believers in Dewey B. Larson's "Reciprocal System"). And let us not forget that Prof. Tan was a member of the Guerilla Skeptics, so he was warping Wikipedia in the name of
CSICOP-style Positivism,
which is what modern skepticism is built on.
I should have seen where things were going when "Monty" Burns (
Zoloft) asked in a huff what a thread meant when I started talking about Reddit's
jcm267 (aka
nolibs,
teh donald,
Buddrick Bundy and 50+ more sockpuppets) and his Crew and all the subreddits they run, and I had to explain that it had to do with doxxing, bad moderator behavior, etc. At the time I don't think I knew that all of the Big Wheels of Wikipedia had run away to Reddit so they didn't have to deal with the stifling environment of Wikilawyering and other hectoring bullshit - if I had, I would have flashed that in front of me like a silver cross to keep the WO vampires away. Wikipedia just isn't firing on all cylinders anymore to justify a rule of "all Wikipedia all the time."
The
Josh Schroeder page at the Velikovsky Encyclopedia website. Prof. Tan now works at a community college on Long Island.
