User:Blissyu2/Poetlister

From Encyclopedia Dramatica

Note: This is a "2 years later looking back" version of User:Zordrac/Poetlister as written in September 2007. You can also look at a 3rd version. See User:Blissyu2/Poetlister3 as written in September 2008.

Some time ago, when using Wikipedia, I created the page User:Zordrac/Poetlister, a somewhat famous page by Wikipedia terms. It was a mammoth page, with more edits than the George W Bush article, and took me practically every waking hour for the month or so that I spent writing it before it was completed. And I did all of this even after I had quit Wikipedia. I had quit with a good reputation, and sure I was writing on Wikipedia Review but there was no connection between the two accounts. And sure that was my 2nd account, but even if they knew about that, they would know that I had either reformed, or else that they were mistaken that I was never a bad user to start with. And I had quit to sit out the rest of the ban. I had only come in because the guy that banned me wanted my expertise in a particular area, so I agreed to come back.

Now I didn't want to investigate that, let's make no mistake about it. I really, seriously, didn't want to. I mean first off, I didn't want to investigate anything remotely controversial, because it'd blow my cover. I certainly didn't want to investigate SlimVirgin who I considered to be a friend. And besides which I had quit, and Antaeus Feldspar was cyber bullying me (happily, he was permitted to do so). There was no way in hell that I wanted to do it.

Then to add to that, this girl goes and gets herself banned just a few hours after she e-mailed me. And oh how I wish that she'd been banned a few hours before she'd e-mailed me, because I really wish that I had never started communicating with her.

So I thought that she was lying to me, that the whole mediation was a joke, that she was just using me to try to get away with something. I was not about to protest a ban. It is usually pointless to protest a ban. It is about as likely to succeed as Deletion Review. Totally pointless. And this wasn't even someone I knew. I'd never met the girl before. But sock puppets, not just being accused of being a sock of a banned user, but 5 or 6 of them being socks of each other.

But then she started to send me links to different things. So I looked, and started to look through it. What I saw was gross corruption. It was level upon level of corruption. And it looked like it was all coming from SlimVirgin.

So I agreed to just ask SlimVirgin to clarify things. I got such a nasty reaction that it was just absurd. My messages got deleted as harassment. I asked Mindspillage, the blocking admin, for clarification. She didn't even reply. Then I found out that the real blocking admin was Kelly Martin. That in itself seemed odd. SlimVirgin had asked Kelly Martin who had asked Mindspillage, and they all washed their hands of the whole thing. And in turn Lulu of the Lotus-Eaters had asked SlimVirgin. And in turn Antidote had asked Lulu of the Lotus-Eaters. So it went Antidote (regular user)-Lulu of the Lotus-Eaters (powerful user)-SlimVirgin (powerful cabal admin)-Kelly Martin (CheckUser/ArbCom)-Mindspillage (admin with the highest levels of respect). And they all washed their hands of it. It was a convoluted web. It was a mass of lies, so deep that it was difficult to penetrate. But what was worse was their reaction. The sheer nastiness of it all. That they threatened to ban you just for talking about it. And in the case of Lulu he started to harass you and lie about you just for talking about it. It was nasty. It was seriously awful.

And I realised that if I even thought to check it out, I would get banned. I would get banned, and that was about it. I would get banned, and most likely they wouldn't even unban her. And even if they did, so what? It wouldn't mean anything. The level of corruption was so deep that they would never be held accountable for it. They were going to get away with it. Because, like so many things on Wikipedia, you get threats so deep that its like taking on a million people. 1 vs a million are odds that you just can't compete with. So you concede and join the hivemind. That was what it was like. Even if I put absolutely everything in to it, refused to take sides, and detailed a massive page about it, it still wouldn't matter. Even if 30 or 40 people sided with me and worked with me towards it, all prepared to be banned over it, even if 10 or more admins sided with me, it still wouldn't matter.

But I did it, and I thought that at least that page would be out there. I decided that this level of corruption needed to be exposed. Not the question as to whether or not Poetlister had sock puppets, because THAT WAS NOT THE POINT OF THIS. Please, anyone reading this that thinks that the ONE AND ONLY QUESTION is whether or not Poetlister had sock puppets is really pretty fucking stupid. The point is that the level of corruption was so deep that they just threw out accusations, hoping that one would stick. Even if they did use sock puppets, they weren't used abusively. They did nothing wrong. People seriously over-rate the importance of sock puppets. They don't really achieve much.

I mean look at the accusations: 1) They may have got some on-edge articles deleted that should have been kept (big fucking deal, they can be un-deleted with a flick of a button) 2) They may have got some on-edge articles kept that should have been deleted (big fucking deal, you can still delete them) 3) They may have voted someone to be an administrator that shouldn't have been made an administrator (big fucking deal)

Does that justify what happened? I mean ultimately the abuse was all on one side EVEN IF THEY DID ALL THAT THEY WERE ACCUSED OF. Even if they were guilty of absolutely everything that they were accused of doing, they were still innocent compared to the group of people going after this. I mean seriously, sock puppets are okay under certain circumstances, and this is one of those circumstances.

And let's be realistic here. At a bare minimum they definitely knew each other, and definitely went to each other's houses and used each other's computers, or alternatively let each other log in to the other's accounts every so often. That's a bare minimum. But realistically at least a few of them were the same person. The real question is whether Wikipedia should give a shit about a bunch of otherwise good users who did nothing wrong except for have more than 1 account. They weren't trying to evade a ban, they weren't abusing users, they were just editing articles, and adding useful content. Big deal.

What SlimVirgin and the others were doing was horrific. The very fact that it was all permissible was horrific. I mean I always knew that there was a good chance that they were sock puppets. Or at the very minimum what they call "meat puppets" (people who know each other that act in coordination). There was definitely a lot of coordination. But then again, there was also a lot of coordination between SlimVirgin and Lulu of the Lotus-Eaters, so it all balances out. And not to forget Antidote and his 12 sock puppets on the other side. And Antidote's socks were abusive, unlike Poetlister's.

But I decided to protest it, and ultimately I was banned for it. Okay, you can say "Oh but technically you were banned because Snowspinner did a Google search on Zordrac Blissyu2 and found out that they were the same, and because on Wikipedia Review you used the name Blissyu2 and said that you were Internodeuser and Internodeuser was banned for a year, therefore Zordrac was a sock puppet of a banned user, hence that's why you were banned". Wow, thats convoluted! Yeah, but thats not the real reason I was banned. I was banned because I'd protested the ban. Otherwise, why would Snowspinner care? They just went fishing and came up with that. I was a good user, with 4,000 edits, and everyone liked me. They didn't want me to be banned. They were just forced to. Admins protested it.

In the end, Poetlister got unbanned, thanks to my page. And they waited for her to protest my ban. Just one word from her, and the ban would have been lifted. But she didn't say a thing. Oh sorry, she claims to have sent an e-mail to Charles Matthews (who she insists is why she got unbanned, which is a load of bullshit), but of course she can't prove that, so that's just her word. So she claims to have sent an absolutely useless e-mail to someone who is unimportant towards the whole thing. Rather than say writing a message to the Administrator's Noticeboard, which would have been enough to have seen my ban lifted.

So let's get this straight here. I got banned for rescuing her, and once rescued, she refused to do anything to try to rescue me.

It's kind of like jumping in to quicksand to save someone, who then gets out, and spits on your face as you drown. "Ha ha sucker!".

That was pretty bad, but then what made it worse was that then the page got deleted, and she didn't say a thing. Again, a simple protest and it would have been undeleted. But the fact that she didn't even care suggested to everyone that she accepted that it didn't deserve to be kept.

Then my ban expired (after a whole fucking year) and I came back, and then after 1 day SlimVirgin banned me indefinitely. But again Poetlister didn't say a thing. No other admins supported it. But Poetlister didn't say a thing. Just a single word and the ban would have been lifted. But she didn't do it.

It's kind of like her saying "Oh you got out of the quicksand? Here, let me throw you right in to make sure that you're buried for good". Its really nasty stuff.

Then she got banned anyway.

And now what is she doing? Just a few days ago she told me that I had nothing to do with her getting unbanned. So wait, my writing that huge page and passing it on to admins, to get support from them meant nothing? Uh, you honestly think that it was solely Charles Matthews, and that he would have done it even without a page?

That's kind of like me jumping in to save her from the quicksand, then her finding a guy on the other side, kissing him and saying to him "Thank you for saving me", even though he didn't do anything, then spitting on me, and when I get out by myself, she pushes me back in and kicks me to make sure that I die this time.

I mean there is ungrateful and then there is seriously ungrateful.

Then, it doesn't stop there! Now, she has this article on ED, which I wrote, and she now insists that we ban Blu Aardvark from Wikipedia Review because he refuses to delete it from there. And what is she accused of? Of being an attention whore and of being a sock puppet? Wow! Slander! I mean seriously, that's not even as bad as the Blissyu2 page, let alone something really nasty. And the very fact that I'm being accused of it, when I didn't even write anything nasty, is just shocking. Why not accuse BLANKING IN PROGRESS and Voronic of doing it, as they were the people that wrote the nasty stuff? Or is that too hard, because you don't know them?

She quit WR over it, demanding that Blu Aardvark be banned or else she won't come back. Well, quite frankly, what has she ever done for WR? She got made admin for reasons I do not understand as she had about 50 posts. She's moved a few posts, rarely comments, and basically does nothing more than sit around and look pretty. I mean what's the point of her? Her one and only criticism of Wikipedia is that she got banned. She's not a critic, she's a whinger. And she doesn't even focus on the embedded lies, instead she focusses on the stupid argument about it. It was a fucking list for heaven's sakes. A pointless, meaningless list.

And then in turn we were expected to ban Blu Aardvark, who in all real respects created WR. The godfather if you will. He created the Tar Pit. And sure Selina took over WR, but she didn't create it. I invited Selina in, ironically because of the Poetlister ban that Selina also thought was ridiculous. Selina has tried to take credit for it, and indeed she did create the design of the new board, and did have the idea for what software and hosting to use. But she didn't create the whole thing. Igor is the original founder. Blu Aardvark did most of the creation.

And compare Blu Aardvark to Poetlister and it is a joke. One of them was one of our founders, the other is some little meaningless blip.

So what if Poetlister deserved to be banned? I don't even care anymore.

And look, I can understand her creating a new account, Runcorn, to try to get an admin account. But once she had the admin account, why not unban me? Runcorn could have unbanned me, and then put it up at the admin noticeboard. It would have been simple to have done it. And I can bet that there wouldn't have been community approval to reban me. There is no way that there would have been.

Runcorn banned Antidote, and all of his sock puppets. Runcorn fixed up the stupid lists. Runcorn changed blocks on open proxies. But Runcorn couldn't be bothered saying thank you to the people who helped to make it all possible.

The danger with me saying this kind of thing is that it then suggests that I think that what SlimVirgin did was reasonable. Let me make that clear - there was no legitimacy to SlimVirgin's actions. SlimVirgin should have got in to a lot of trouble over it. Lulu of the Lotus-Eaters, with his bullying, should have been banned. Let's not question or dispute that. And all of the people who were banned over that should have had their bans lifted, and SlimVirgin should have been de-sysopped over this - EVEN IF THERE WERE NO OTHER BLACK MARKS AGAINST HER NAME. Which there are of course.

But yeah fuck it, ban the bitch. There is ungrateful and then there is ungrateful. Talk about shooting yourself in the foot.