Re: Wiktionary's "Community" is even worse than Wikipedia
Posted: Tue Mar 21, 2023 12:15 am
And a bonus: Brian Speer, one of the most powerful insiders in Wiktionary history. He has drastically cut back on his work there since 2010, and now just does the minimum to keep his admin and bureaucrat powerz. Sick of the "fun" I guess. "Fun" to him being harassing, bullying, banning and reverting.
Brian Speer
Administrator EncycloPetey. An abusive patroller who is barely known outside the wiki world. Yet another example of a highly educated scientist (in his case, a masters degree in botany) turning a Wikimedia project (in his case, English Wiktionary) into a private playground, and slapping down anyone who disagrees with him. Unlike most abusive admins, he has written a lot of valuable content for Wikipedia, in an obscure scientific area. Not that it helped him.
background
Formerly of UC Berkeley, now a California schoolteacher. Brian authored a large part of UC Berkeley's Museum of Palentology website prior to 1999, according to this. He also dumped a large amount of scientific information onto Geocities pages, all of which are now gone. Obviously Wikipedia was made for him.
WP activity
Showed up October 2005, promptly started writing about plant genera. He likes hornworts.
November 2007 RFA was smooth. His admin activities are fairly typical for Wikipedia, he is not a major banhammer or robotic patroller and has added some good science content to Wikipedia. However, he has a notoriously short temper. [1] [2] [3] [4]
Brian occasionally inserts his own webpages and name into Wikipedia articles as references. [5] He has clearly, repeatedly edited Wikimedia projects during school/work hours.
As mentioned in the Wiktionary article, EncycloPetey is also an admin on Wiktionary since May 2006, a bureaucrat since 2009, and much more abusive there. [6] [7] [8]
Examining his Wiktionary work is impossible, as much of it was oversighted -- in most cases, the only remaining evidence is on en-WP noticeboards. Quote: "From another article's history, EncycloPetey was reverted by a reasonably experienced user with an edit summary and he simply reverted back again without any discussion or anything. Ridiculous."
There are a few examples left in Wiktionary's "Beer Parlour" noticeboard archives.
"EncycloPetey blocked me for three days for cleaning up redirects on two talk pages, with the comment "Disruptive edits: Intentionally changing document content that was decided by vote". This is ridiculous. He also ignored my request on his WP talk page to revert the block. One edit which he reverted was this: [10] Was I being disruptive in removing a circular link that simply brought the reader back to the originating page? Isn't it rather lame for EP to intentionally put such nonsense back in the article, let alone block someone for it? The other was this: [11] Here we had a supposed link to an explanation of the enPR transcription, but the link is simply a redirect to the pronunciation key (AHD, IPA, SAMPA) that the template already linked to. I redirected it to an actual article on the transcription system, the WP page on AHD. (Isn't calling the AHD system "enPR" at best plagiarism anyway?) I could see him reverting me with the explanation that we need a text link to the target of the template, and not leave that to the examples below, in which case I could have reworded the text to say that. But blocking me for three days? There was no warning, no discussion. This was once typical misbehavior for EP, but I'd thought he'd improved recently. What's next, he blocks me because he doesn't like my date format? I'd like to remove the circular link, but he'd probably block me for it again. Can one of you at least take care of this simple and I would think uncontroversial housecleaning task? And what do we do with a sysop who blocks people for trivia? User:Kwamikagami|kwami 09:59, 19 September 2009 (UTC)"
"A couple things. First of all, your edits were not in the right, and EP was correct to revert them. We did have a vote about the name change, and the vote decided enPR. The block was perhaps a bit quicker than I would have done, but looking at your talk page, I imagine it has to do with previous mishaps on your part. You have been talked to about being overly bold with policy page editing (granted this is not a policy page per se, but it's close enough). Concerning enPR vs AHD, I think that most of these ad-hoc pronunciation schemes are all pretty similar, and crying plagiarism is a rather weak assertion, in my opinion. -User:Atelaes 10:13, 19 September 2009 (UTC)"
"Yes, he blocked me almost two years ago for formatting problems that were clearly due to me being a newbie. EP responds to any edits he doesn't like by calling me a "liar" etc. when he obviously knows better (eg linking to diffs that shows he's the one lying). I don't know if this is an emotional problem on his part, but it isn't appropriate behaviour. Are you saying also that it's appropriate for an article to apparently link elsewhere, only to have that link be a redirect back to the originating page? That's improper architecture in any navigation system. User:Kwamikagami 23:47, 19 September 2009 (UTC)"
"I'm confused by your posting. From the title of this section and your tone, I infer that you think it is wrong to be abusive. However, you have posted abuse here and here. Your response to Atelaes also has me confused, since it does not seem to follow thematically from his comments. Could you please explain my "misbehavior" in terms of WT:BLOCK? -- User:EncycloPetey 09:54, 20 September 2009 (UTC)"
"For those who don't want to follow the entire issue, suffice it to note that Kwamikagami's posting to EP's 'pedia talk page reads in part: "Has your medication run out?". IMHO, no other discussion from this user is worthy of attention. (And the underlying issue is long since entirely resolved.) User:Robert Ullmann 10:14, 20 September 2009 (UTC)"
"Agree, not Beer Parlour worthy. User:Mglovesfun 10:20, 20 September 2009 (UTC)"
"It seems we can safely delete WT:VOTE, because when a vote passes, if EncycloPetey doesn't agree with it, he just reverts it. User:Mglovesfun 23:11, 16 May 2010 (UTC)"
"I don't suppose you could've said this any other way. — User:Opiaterein — 23:15, 16 May 2010 (UTC)"
"That's ambiguous. User:Mglovesfun 23:16, 16 May 2010 (UTC)
"I would partially agree with deleting WT:VOTE at the moment. The entire thing has degenerated into the worst kind of political bickering. There are good reasons why wikipedia says !vote. There are also good reasons why we have votes, they are useful, for example, to demonstrate where there is no consensus, and further work is needed. Is the extent of your accusation against EP is only the number/numeral vote? I don't know what exactly the problem is there, but I suspect, like the "UK/US" thingy above, the difference is subtle. The problem with subtle differences is that they really annoy pedants, cf. the greengrocer's apostrophe. User:Conrad.Irwin 23:17, 16 May 2010 (UTC)"
"No, other things, all of the same nature. What's the point then? If consensus doesn't matter, it's each to his own. How can anyone criticize him, me or anyone for just creating or deleting things at will? User:Mglovesfun 23:18, 16 May 2010 (UTC)"
"If I delete his user page, and I have, there's no consensus to do that. But if we disregard consensus, there are no grounds to criticize me other than 'I don't like it because I don't'. User:Mglovesfun 23:19, 16 May 2010 (UTC)"
"Who knows? It's an unsolvable problem, unfortunately. We can hope that each respects the others, but as communities grow, this ceases to be the case. Of course, we could create a police force (or ArbCom if you prefer) that has an (assumed) authority, but it would not solve the problem, merely provide a way of enforcing decisions that some people don't like. User:Conrad.Irwin 23:22, 16 May 2010 (UTC)"
"I don't think EP intends to defend himself. If that were the case, he'd have simply replied instead of reverting my message, which has harsh, yes, but accurate. User:Mglovesfun 23:23, 16 May 2010 (UTC)"
"It's impossible for someone to respond when they've been blocked. You blocked me three times in the span of a few minutes for "Vandalism" (thank you to Daniel and Conrad for unblocking) and then deleted my user page twice. I tried to respond several times, but each time found myself blocked, up against an edit conflict, or distracted by the edit war on my talk page. At this time, I see no point in pursuing the issue (if any). --User:EncycloPetey 23:53, 16 May 2010 (UTC)"
"Like I said on WT:RFDO, I accused him of POV pushing and regretted it. I turned out to be right the first time, and it's horrible that I was right, because it leaves us in this situation. While I hate conflict, I don't like to turn into a 'doormat' either. User:Mglovesfun 23:25, 16 May 2010 (UTC)"
"I should hope he doesn't; that would give you both a chance to have an exciting fight. By remaining non-confrontational, we can hope to engage in more fruitful discourse. User:Conrad.Irwin 23:27, 16 May 2010 (UTC)"
"On voting, not on EncycloPetey: Voting is a good thing. Voting in English Wiktionary has not degenerated at all; by contrast, we are learning how to do it. People are learning how to formulate policies and how to criticize them. People are learning how to express disagreement. Disagreement, dubbed above as bickering, is typical for open systems for collective decision making, as opposed to autocratic, oligocratic and dictatorial ones. --User:Dan Polansky 08:36, 17 May 2010 (UTC)"
Also: [13] There are very few other examples like this remaining in keyword searches of the "Beer hall" archives. They tend to be buried in threads involving various disputes.
According to this, Brian has considerable control over Wiktionary's "Word Of The Day" selection process for their front page feature, effectively making him the Mark Pellegrini of Wiktionary.
Speer was finally dragged to arbitration on en-WP in August 2012 by Lukas Pietsch, over some obscure disagreement.[14] Speer's tendency to revert and block with no explanation or discussion came back to haunt him. Arbcom ordered his desysopping on 7 September. He continued to be a powerful figure on Wiktionary, unaffected by his Wiki-Punishment.
Speer can also be found occasionally on Wikisource (where he is still an administrator] and a few other minor projects. Usually haranging people.