Wednesday, July 18, 2018

The story of His Excellency, a banned Wikipedian

His Excellency was a user who was highly critical of Wikipedia's purported anti-Muslim bias. He was put on something called "personal attack parole" in a 2006 arbitration case (mostly courtesy-blanked and the old page was deleted from the history, but it can still be viewed here*). Later the same year, this was upgraded first to a 4-month ban after violating said parole, apparently by making anti-Semitic attacks on other editors, after which he was placed on a year of probation. On 3/14/2007, he was indeffed for "multiple cases of IP socking and harassment".

Timothy Usher, a linguist at the Santa Fe Institute, was also sanctioned in the aforementioned arbitration case. The Committee found (in a 6-1 ruling) that "Timothy Usher has engaged in incivility and edit warring regarding Islam articles. In particular, he has personalized the conflict and engaged in harassment of His excellency." He later returned as Proabivouac (misspelled at this link for some reason). Under this username, he was emergency-banned and indeffed by ArbCom on 10/19/2008 for "long-term disruption". The block log for that day reads "Consult ArbCom privately for any discussion of this block; do not unblock without ArbCom's permission".

*Note that this is a very old version of Wikipedia saved in the Wayback Machine so it looks like shit and there's basically no formatting, as is usual for such old captures of Wikipedia pages.

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