Was Geo Swan set up by Drmies?

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Jake Is A Sellout
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Was Geo Swan set up by Drmies?

Post by Jake Is A Sellout » Tue Mar 22, 2022 7:35 am

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?ol ... r:Geo_Swan

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?ti ... imissdisco

Since Eric Barbour is still shitting up this forum, I'll keep this one brief.

If you, dear reader, are a budding serious Wikipedia critic, you should be able to flesh out the bones of this potentially major scandal all on your own. And if not, well, you're probably wasting your time and mine.

In short, there are a few good reasons to suspect that in the above linked events, the reason nobody ever seems to have been able to verify whether or not the user called Imissdisco is the real life Dan Trotta, is perhaps because Imissdisco is a sock puppet created by Drmies to fuck with Geo Swan, presumably with the intention of engineering his permanent exile from Wikipedia (which is no bad thing, the point being, the evil means do not justify the pure ends).

It is well established that Wikipedia has a serious problem with not being able or even very willing to remove bad actors like Geo Swan. If not at all, then at least not before they have done serious damage over long periods of time. This is a systemic fault, and the answer to it should not come in the form of pieces of shit like Drmies abusing the trust others have unwisely placed in him. It should come in structural change, ideally the complete and total destruction of Wikipedia. HTD.

For context, Drmies is a highly placed and well respected Wikipedia Administrator, and former Arbitration Committee member. He is deeply committed to Wikipedia, his real identity is known (an unremarkable English professor). He has a long history of being a douchebag, all so far ignored by the Wikipedia community (except perhaps, by his failure to secure a second term on ArbCom). But it would be a step change indeed if it could be shown beyond reasonable doubt this theory checks out.

Even a reasonable doubt would be enough, since if it can be proven the real Dan Trotta has never edited Wikipedia, and if it can be shown Drmies had bad blood with Geo Swan, then it would be a fair bet that 2 plus 2 equals 4 here. If only on the very simple grounds that Drmies the Admin is usually a really lazy bastard who doesn't give a damn for strangers, so seeing him go the extra mile here for someone he presumably doesn't know, even going over to Commons to state his piece, was a real surprise.

It may not be the biggest scandal in Wikipedia history, all be it ArbCom alumni socking is a rarity, but it is certainly likely to interest the Alabama Chronicle, and maybe get him fired.

And more importantly for the mission of this forum, it could cause a real headache for Jake of Wikipediocracy, terrified as he would be of letting anyone step to Beeblebrox over there, if, as predicted, Beeblebrox then used the Wikipediocracy platform Jake grants him willingly to make the case that creating sock puppets to eliminate problem users is EXACTLY what a good Wikipedia Administrators should be doing.

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Re: Was Geo Swan set up by Drmies?

Post by ericbarbour » Tue Mar 22, 2022 8:18 pm

Jake Is A Sellout wrote:
Tue Mar 22, 2022 7:35 am
Since Eric Barbour is still shitting up this forum, I'll keep this one brief.
Yes please. I"m "shitting up" this forum because it was created mostly at my behest. If you don't like it, START YOUR OWN FORUM.

Otherwise your post is okay, except for this part:
ArbCom alumni socking is a rarity
It is NOT. Most of the admins have socks, if not every one of them. Some have hundreds of "undeclared alternate accounts".

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Re: Was Geo Swan set up by Drmies?

Post by wexter » Wed Mar 23, 2022 1:54 am

Wikipedia - "Barely competent and paranoid. There’s a hell of a combination."

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Re: Was Geo Swan set up by Drmies?

Post by Jake Is A Sellout » Wed Mar 23, 2022 8:55 am

ericbarbour wrote:
Tue Mar 22, 2022 8:18 pm
I"m "shitting up" this forum because it was created mostly at my behest. If you don't like it, START YOUR OWN FORUM.

Otherwise your post is okay, except for this part:
ArbCom alumni socking is a rarity
It is NOT. Most of the admins have socks, if not every one of them. Some have hundreds of "undeclared alternate accounts".
Admins <> ArbCom.

I said ArbCom not Admin for a reason, because I know what I'm fucking talking about. Time was, your specialist help here would be to actually give precise details on whether an ArbCom member, current or former, has ever been caught socking. That Eric is long gone. Checked out. Would rather play with Smiley.

Unlike you, I read what people say, so OF COURSE I know fine well the role you played in setting this place up. It is for that reason I am even more pissed off that you are these days, being so lazy and ignorant in virtually every post you make here.

I certainly don't think it is relevant whether or not you liked my post about Drmies, because I think there's a high chance you don't even understand it, let alone have the ability to use it to harm Wikipedia.

If you don't like me having an opinion on what you do based on these perfectly true observations of what you do here these days, then do what Jake would do, or what any Wikipedia dickhead would do, and ban me.

P.S. AS I HAVE SAID MANY TIMES BEFORE, I don't actually care enough about Wikipedia criticism to take the time and effort to set up my own forum.

So, in short....

....stop shitting up this forum (because some of us would like to use it to harm Wikipedia).

HTD.

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Re: Was Geo Swan set up by Drmies?

Post by Bandyboy » Wed Apr 20, 2022 12:23 pm

I never understood the drama about Geo Swan, who was a valuable member of the community and prolific creator of new articles.

The Dan Trotta article looked perfectly fine to me. It was neutrally written and didn't even mention any controversies.

Then the admins and WP cabal ganged up on him and kicked him out. Normally the community refuses to censor negative info from BLPs.

Something smells fishy here.

What's going on?

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Re: Was Geo Swan set up by Drmies?

Post by ericbarbour » Thu Apr 21, 2022 1:52 am

Bandyboy wrote:
Wed Apr 20, 2022 12:23 pm
I never understood the drama about Geo Swan, who was a valuable member of the community and prolific creator of new articles.
Nor do I. And this crap from ten years ago does not actually help much. I defy anyone to explain the following.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia ... n_and_AFDs
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia ... t/Geo_Swan
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia ... e_Maldives

Far as I can tell: he was grinding out BLPs in a very fast and sloppy manner, and the deletionists hated him. Many of the articles he created were about very obscure Muslim extremists and related folks....thus attracting the pro-Israel/anti-Muslim nut squad. The Dan Trotta BLP was just one minor, handy excuse to indef and scream 'NOTHING TO SEE HERE, KEEP MOVING'.

PS, Drmies continues to be a walking shitburger.

Trotta has an IMDB page. Why does he object to a WP BLP? Or did somone posing as Trotta lie, so the Wiki-Cunts had a good reason to toss Swan out? Beats me.
https://www.imdb.com/name/nm6697239/

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Re: Was Geo Swan set up by Drmies?

Post by Geo Swan » Wed May 11, 2022 1:20 pm

I registered with this site because I wanted to ask some questions in this thread.

Jake is a sellout wrote:
"It is well established that Wikipedia has a serious problem with not being able or even very willing to remove bad actors like Geo Swan. If not at all, then at least not before they have done serious damage over long periods of time."
Hmmm. Was I a "bad actor"? I helped cover some controversial topics, and that triggered a lot of controversy. I am not aware of anyone making a serious effort to explain how I was a "bad actor". I strongly suspect that this is because I was not, in fact, a "bad actor".

Jake, if you really think you can explain how I was a "bad actor" I would be grateful if you made an attempt to do so.

Bandyboy, thank you. I think any fair minded person who looks at the Dan Trotta article I started will recognize it was fair and neutrally written - so, not an "attack page".

Ericbarbour, you wrote I seemed to have been "grinding out BLPs in a very fast and sloppy manner". Yeah, I dispute this. Can I direct your attention to the first two paragraphs of my response to one of the urls you linked to Geo Swan here?

The wikipedia standards have undergone a profound evolution. Critics pointed to articles I started in the mid 2000s, that didn't measure up to the more stringent inclusion standards of the mid 2010s, and then claimed I was a serial violator of BLP. A significant number of the articles I started that got challenged were started before the wikipedia even had a BLP policy. Other articles were started after BLP, but were deemed to measure up to the inclusion standards current at that time. No one should be denounced for having drafted content that does not measure up to the wikipedia's current standards, when that content measured up to the standard of the time when it was drafted.

Ericbarbour, in 2012 I drafted BLPs_started_2011-02_to_2012-08 I drafted it because of individuals who were claiming I was violating BLP, about 18 months after the discussion you linked to, Requests for comment/Geo Swan

In August 2012 spent some time looking at every BLP I started from 2011-02 the date of the discussion you linked to. My conclusion then, which I stand by now, was that the BLP I started since that discussion were policy compliant.

You can see a non-serious response on the user talk page.

Returning to Jake's concern that Imissdisco was a sock-puppet of Drmies...
For what it is worth, I believe that the individual who used the Imissdisco ID was telling the truth when they said they were new to the commons and wikipedia. Although we had no way of knowing whether he or she was the real life Dan Trotta, back in March of 2021, when they tried to get the headshot of Dan Trotta I cropped deleted, I now believe there are circumstantial reasons to think they were the real life Dan Trotta. Namely, for fifteen years or so the Canadian Film Centre was uploading very fine images of figures from the Canadian film industry to their flickr page, under a free license. These images were a rich source of images to illustrate articles about these film industry figures. The real life Dan Trotta was an alumnus of the Canadian Film Centre, and Imissdisco said he would make waves there. Within a month or two of this dispute the Canadian Film Centre erased all its 6,000 free flickr images. Now in the spring of 2021 the CFC's executive director for the previous 15 years or so retired, and they got a new executive director. So its flickr gallery going dark may have been a coincidence. But it does suggest Imissdisco really was the real life Dan Trotta, and really did have some influence there.

I initially drafted several more paragraphs, addressing Drmies's and Imissdisco's actions. I decided I am not going to include those paragraphs here. I believe my block was merely the final act of a long campaign of unfair and counter-policy off-wiki demonization of my character and record. So, I won't make criticisms here that could be considered "off-wiki harassment". If I find a way to voice my concerns on a WMF site I may return here with links to those comments.

Finally, I think grown-ups own up when they realize they have made a mistake. I did make a mistake, although one orders of magnitude less serious than what I was accused of. My own personal standard is to not respond in kind when someone is rude, or violates policy. And I think my record of hundreds of thousands of WMF project edits shows I lived up to this standard 99.9 percent of the time. The commons discussion over the Dan Trotta headshot was almost certainly going to close as keep, because Imissdisco (1) did not take the advice of myself, and several other people, to use OTRS to confirm his real life identity; (2) did not offer a serious explanation for why the image should be deleted..

I had considered whether the real life Dan Trotta measured up to GNG. As an exercise I spent some time drafting a Dan Trotta article. I should have waited until the discussion over the image closed, as keep, and then considered whether to put the draft Dan Trotta article into wikipedia article space. Imissdisco's vandalism, his personal attacks on my character and integrity, his name calling, should not have triggered me. My record shows that 99.9 percent of the time I resisted this kind of trigger. I regret I didn't do so this time.

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Re: Was Geo Swan set up by Drmies?

Post by boredbird » Wed May 11, 2022 6:51 pm

Welcome Geo Swan!

I checked to see if you are a Wikipedia administrator but it seems you have been "community banned".

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?diff=1078275105
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?di ... imissdisco

Well done! Bans are the gateway drug to Sucks. Here you will learn the power of the dark side.

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Re: Was Geo Swan set up by Drmies?

Post by Jake Is A Sellout » Wed Jun 01, 2022 12:07 am

Geo Swan wrote:
Wed May 11, 2022 1:20 pm
I registered with this site because I wanted to ask some questions in this thread.

Jake is a sellout wrote:
"It is well established that Wikipedia has a serious problem with not being able or even very willing to remove bad actors like Geo Swan. If not at all, then at least not before they have done serious damage over long periods of time."
Hmmm. Was I a "bad actor"? I helped cover some controversial topics, and that triggered a lot of controversy. I am not aware of anyone making a serious effort to explain how I was a "bad actor". I strongly suspect that this is because I was not, in fact, a "bad actor".

Jake, if you really think you can explain how I was a "bad actor" I would be grateful if you made an attempt to do so.

.....
:lol:

Fucking Wikipedians.

What is it about the legend that is me, that makes you think I care what would gratify you?

----

I am assuming there has still been no effort on the part of the "community" to verify whether Imissdisco is actually Dan Trott.

If so, my work here is done, and I guess even more so now. ;) :oops:

HTD.

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Re: Was Geo Swan set up by Drmies?

Post by Geo Swan » Wed Jun 01, 2022 3:12 am

With regard to your assertion, that I have been a "bad actor"... I believe some embittered wiki insiders have been bad-mouthing me, off-wiki, for the last half-decade or more. You may have read some of this off-wiki bad-mouthing, and accepted it, without critical examination. If that is the source of your accusation, it would be helpful to me, if you helped me trace this.

I am going to assume your comment is not based on an actual examination of my work, and you called me a "bad actor" without making the effort to reach an informed conclusion as to whether I was or wasn't a "bad actor".

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