Comment by Asa-Nisse | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Asa-Nisse | Hacker News Reader

First of all I dont believe that he banned 2000 users for disagreeing with him. Thats a preposterous assumption I assume it will be very obvious to anyone in a administrative role that he did not for such a pity reason.

However, even if he did ban even one user for disagreeing with him without breaking a rule, then that is a very serious violation in the spirit of wikipedia.

Now I'm sure this goes on and on in such as place as wikipedia. I wonder how many administrators they have that are looking into climate change / weather on a day-day basis.

Far too many people are going to make their decisions on these matters based of what wikipedia says for it to be allowed to be tainted by information not backed up by facts.

> First of all I dont believe that he banned 2000 users for disagreeing with him. Thats a preposterous assumption I assume it will be very obvious to anyone in a administrative role that he did not for such a pity reason.

Right. This is an extremely mendacious way of presenting the basic statistics, that he has made >2000 blocks/bans in general. See http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?user=William%20M.%20Conn... and for a more readable summary of that, see http://toolserver.org/~interiot/cgi-bin/count_edits?user=Wil...

As of right now, he has 2029 block/ban actions to his credit. Looking at just the most recent ones, we see quite a few 3RR enforcements (on non-climate articles), similar edit-warring blocks, basic anti-vandalism work ('vandalism at Plus-size model'), sock puppet blocking, some unblocks, and so on. Looking through the last 70 actions, I see none that obviously pertain to climate change. (2029-70 is obviously <2000.)

So "When he disapproved of the arguments that others were making, he often had them barred — over 2,000 Wikipedia contributors who ran afoul of him found themselves blocked from making further contributions." is obviously a lie; things like that are why I assume the opposite of anything the National Post says.

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