ericbarbour wrote:Anyone who was on Wikipedia Review prior to 2012 remembers Abd. He is a good content writer, obsessed with cold fusion, and has tried to mess with a whole string of WMF projects like Wikibooks and Wikiversity. I literally cannot count how many times he's been blocked/b& since 2007. They've been diddling
his block log and there are entries missing.
Guarantee this is the doing of Mister Fattyfat James Alexander. Someday they will fire him--because he's too pathetic to have real political power anywhere.
Thanks Eric. A bit shallow, I'd say. I saw nothing in my Wikipedia block log that was suspicious, it's how I remember it. That was not a particularly long block log, for someone who took on admin abuse -- successfully.
They detest whistle-blowers, and by 2011, I exhausted due process and left with a defiant test of "self-reversion under ban" which worked when I'd previously tested it as a sysop on Wikiversity (with Greg Kohs, in fact, and it bot him unbanned there), and with another banned user on Wikipedia -- which also worked until they realized this was an Abd Plot to Allow Banned Users to Edit and demanded the work stop. (Self-reversion created a situation with that user where the user who had asked for the ban actually reverted the edit back in. It turned conflict into cooperation. There are people who hate that. I documented that editing on Wikiversity and have rescued the content from the mass out-of-process deletion by the same 'crat who banned me there -- and banned all study of cold fusion, parapsychology, or other fringe topics on Wikiversity, demolishing what had existed for a decade.)
As to cold fusion, I knew about the original announcement in 1989, but had assumed, with everyone else, that it was all a mistake. "Nobody could confirm it," is the common story. I saw an abusive blacklisting in 2009 of a web site that hosts peer-reviewed and other papers on cold fusion, legal copies all, blacklisted by JzG, and asked him to undo it. Those who know JzG might expect how he replied. That ended up at ArbComm and he was reprimanded, though what he'd done amply deserved desysopping, I'd seen others de-opped for less. JzG resigned in disgust, after the case closed, but was able to request his tools back later. And carried a grudge against me for all these years, even long after I was gone.
He was very likely one of those who complained to the WMF, probably about "pseudoscientific cold fusion" or some such nonsense.
I started to pay attention to the article, and discovered that old and weak sources were allowed about how cold fusion was rejected, but more recent mainstream peer-reviewed reviews of the field were systematically excluded. Fast forward, when I left Wikipedia, I began to work on Wikiversity, on many, many topics. Wikiversity is not a collection of "articles," though Wikipedians often think of it that way. It is "educational resources" and includes "learning by doing." I.e., one can do, as part of the original mission, "source studies," where one collects and reviews sources on a topic. Mainspace Wikiversity must be neutral, but opinion can be expressed if attributed. So very much was possible that could not be done on Wikipedia. And it worked for years, there was no conflict over cold fusion on Wikiversity. None. Zero. On other very controversial subjects, when edit warring might have started up, I created owned forks where each position could be fully expressed, with common pages where consensus could be found.
I have since become a journalist-bloggerspecializing in reporting on cold fusion. I'm funded, modestly, enough for expenses, so I get to travel. This is not "promotion" of cold fusion, I document and report verifiable fact. I'm also active with the socio-politics of cold fusion, long story. I'm promoting careful scientific research with fully skeptical analysis.
I don't know the exact nature of the complaints that were made to the WMF, but I know enough to know that they were lied to, and they apparently believed the lies. And I mean lies, not merely disagreements. (The alleged harassing mails are at
http://coldfusioncommunity.net/wikiversity/alleged-harassing-emails/)
I do not know of cold fusion was at all involved with the ban. There was no sign that it was coming, but ... stewards had become strangely hostile. Something was going on behind the scenes.