My Experience with Wikipedia's Autism Politics - lots of Personal Attacks

[ylevental]

Hello,

My name is Yuval Levental. I am currently working in computer vision programming, and am on the autism spectrum. On Wikipedia, I am Yleventa2, and formerly Ylevental. I've all but given up on Wikipedia at this point.

My views on autism: There are some highly gifted autistic individuals, but many advocates are borderline-normal, if they are even autistic to begin with. I was in special education for quite a few years, so I know what autism is really like. The media likes to mostly show alleged autistic geniuses that have very little conflict in their lives. Because of this, adults in my life told me that I didn't need help after elementary school in terms of socialization, which made it hard for me to find work.

Even in my early Wikipedia days, some autism cultists found out about me and started attacking me. One of their accounts was blocked right away. However, they kept IP jumping. One article they went after that I was working on was so badly vandalized, it was ECP for a week! Even one admin wrote about how they were harassing me for four years.

The final straw was when I was trying to delete an article, and a random account appeared and added a bunch of undue weight to the article. Nobody seemed to even question the account, whereas I felt that I had to constantly defend myself at every turn. I sort of started fighting back and was blocked indefinitely, but the block was removed after a year.

I could go on, but they have failed at fighting harassment, and are even creating harassers because of the unstable, chaotic environment of Wikipedia. Additionally, I think Wikipedia takes up way too much space on the internet as a whole.

[ericbarbour]

Welcome, thanks for sharing your story. You are actually unusual--having realized how stupid, incompetent or outright hostile WP administrators often are, you gave up voluntarily. This forum and WPO are still attracting the "wahhhh help me I was banned" types who think WP is "save-able".

Feel free to post more. Since you are on good terms with Koavf, you might ask him for some background. As a longterm insider and major content writer, Justin just HAS to know some further horror stories. He's currently under indefinite ban for "editwarring". His "reward" for caring about Wikipedia.

[ylevental]

You're welcome. I actually tried to keep editing as an IP after being blocked and somehow, they found out and I was tired of being followed. I also don't like how they collect your technical information without consent. Also, they keep way too many permanent records of users. Maybe I will ask Koavf. It's sad that he was banned because he really liked Wikipedia.