His fixation on "human trafficking"
Purdy created a poor-quality article for Hiram College administrator and human-trafficking activist Roger Cram. Which was deleted in April 2014, after Purdy and crackpot Article Rescue Squadron members such as Green Cardamom (T-C-F-R-B) tried to "save" it. Every area that could conceivably deal with human trafficking and prostitution received obsessive attention from Purdy, even articles about "hypersexuality" and "pantlessness", which Purdy created.
Per journalist Dan Murphy, January 2015:
"Mr. Purdy is currently pushing a dropping of his for "Featured Article." It is about She Has a Name, an extremely minor play by an extremely minor evangelical "abolitionist" from Canada. How minor? Mr. Purdy and Wikipedia have helpfully provided for the little girl in Africa the article "2012 tour of She Has a Name". Mr. Purdy has also written a series of articles about the extremely minor actors who appeared in this extremely minor play.
"The article on the tour is 52,000 bytes long and the article on the play is 84,000 bytes long. Both articles dwarf Wikipedia's treatment of plays ranging from Long Day's Journey into Night (30,000 bytes), Death of a Salesmen (25,000) Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (21,000), The Mousetrap (31,000) and Anything Goes (49,000). These are highly influential and culturally relevant English-language plays that have had an impact on academia and the broader culture that reverberate, each for their own reasons, to this day.
"Well, at least Hamlet and Macbeth are deemed more important topics by Mr. Purdy and Wikipedia than this bit of fluff. But, sorry Will, Coriolanus, Julius Caesar, and King Lear are not.
"(Oh, for Chrissakes: Mr. Purdy has also written a 50,000 byte article called Critical response to She Has a Name. The level of bias and elevation of the trivial to epic lengths in a promotional effort is so great as to make Purdy's "encyclopedia writing" indistinguishable from bad PR work. Would it shock you to learn that the critics have uniformly been moved to raptures by this play, according to Mr. Purdy? Second sentence, particularly delicious since this is supposed to be about a work of art: "She Has a Name, written by Andrew Kooman, has since become tremendously successful, garnering a number of strong endorsements from Canadian abolitionists." Another: "Those who listened to readings of the script at the Scripts At Work workshop are said to have been stunned into silence." He is of course a powerful and valued insider among Jimmy Wales' loving and thoughtful community)."
"This is just from clicking on obscure links about people and things I've never heard of within the Teng article, all written by David Purdy (AKA: Neelix), all within a month of each other last year. All with very poor sourcing, uncritical, and boosterish. All either about evangelical Christianity (many of the articles conceal these links, which is typical for proselytizing groups seeking do-gooder street cred as cover), connected to Teng in some way, or both (some of the below seem solely designed for SEOing Tara Teng's Wikipedia article, i.e. "Riverside Park (Kamloops):"
*Let Me Be a Woman
*Darren Storsley
*Mitch Merrett
*25 Transformational Canadians
*Women of Distinction Awards
*Servants Anonymous Society
*Ron Wear
*Sunny Fong
*David Batstone
*Nicole Dunsdon
*Riverside Park (Kamloops)
*Tania Fiolleau
*Freedom Week
*Buying Sex is Not a Sport
*An Act to amend the Criminal Code (minimum sentence for offences involving trafficking of persons under the age of eighteen years)
*Bangkok Girl
*Natasha Falle
*Ignite the Road to Justice
"And… I give up. There look to be about 15 more."
COI?
"With not too much looking you begin to find clearly "involved" ("involved" is a Wikipedia term for administrators acting with a clear conflict of interest to silence editing opponents) blocks by Mr. Purdy. (This is supposed to be against the rules for their administrators but is generally ignored at leisure).
"For instance Xxxxxf (T-C-F-R-B), blocked for fairly innocuous edits to Purdy's Tara Teng article and to what I can only hope is an article from clients paying for him to surreptitiously create a Wikipedia article for them, Men Are Like Waffles — Women Are Like Spaghetti (it appears to be built around the idea that women struggle to present information in an orderly and concise fashion. Not making this up).
"He also blocked Dicklickerish (T-C-F-R-B) yesterday for the reason that the username was inappropriate (yes) and that it was vandalizing (a lie). Its only edit was to fiddle with some language on one of Purdy's possessions.
"Another recent use of the word "vandalism" by David Mark Purdy to describe edits to one of his articles that he doesn't like. Mr. Purdy then accused his opponent of being a sockpuppet without providing evidence beyond "disagrees with Mr. Purdy, too." The article in question? Sci-Fi Dine-In Theater Restaurant. It is, in Purdy's version, five times longer than the Wikipedia article on Lutèce, 5x longer than the article on Les Deux Magots and twice as long as ElBulli (I just picked these three out of my own knowledge of reasonably "important" restaurants). Jimmy Wales, David Mark Purdy, and friends, refuse to recognize how much damage they are doing to "knowledge" with a popular reference work that routinely gets every ounce of emphasis wrong. "
As of the beginning of 2015 Purdy had accumulated 173,000 edits. His most edited article: She Has A Name, with 604 edits. Tara Teng was second, with 410 edits.
As a result of the Teng squabble, he "retired" on 7 January. And three of the worst Wikipedians imaginable -- Cirt, Harry Mitchell, and Jonathan Hochman -- start blocking people who are trying to fix the mess Purdy left.
Predictably, he waited a couple of months for the "stink" to blow over. And returned on 4 March, and started grinding useless minor changes just as before, without a word of explanation or apology.
27 March: "An item that was overlooked about Neelix, just stumbled over today: Russian Dolls: Sex Trade This TV show is unknown in the US or Canada, as far as I can tell. Neelix messed with it several times because the show is about sex trafficking -- yet at no time did he bother to repair the article's broken English." Also, "As recently as 23 March, Neelix was grinding on Commons with bots--hundreds of category edits per day. And he is still grinding on en-WP itself. Perhaps someone can explain why he, a guy in Canada, spends so much time working on articles about "theme" restaurants at Disney World, such as 50's Prime Time Café, Mama Melrose's Ristorante Italiano, and Sci-Fi Dine-In Theater Restaurant. Is this paid editing, or is he just hopelessly in love with Disney World?"
Weird redirects, and BOOBS
Comical ANI thread [3], November 2015.
"If they think links like Titty constructor, Boobie builder and a dozen variations --> Breast reconstruction and Tiny titties with many variations --> Micromastia and many similar things I strongly suggest they do not have the maturity and judgement we expect in out administrators. JbhTalk 22:10, 5 November 2015 (UTC)"
"(edit conflict) FFS I just found Booby cancer, Booby milk, Booby cyst, Titty cancer, Titty milk - it goes on and on and they have been doing this since at least September. Those redirects just seem to be hidden in the hundreds of semi-automated edits they do per day. JbhTalk 22:19, 5 November 2015 (UTC)"
"Additional Comment -- I have now went back months into this editors contributions, and the thousands upon thousands of absolutely puerile and useless redirects is staggering. Literally there are thousands and thousands just in the last several months. Something needs to be done about this, but I am not sure what. The editor also has many useful edits, but this type of behavior needs to be curtailed and/or there needs to be some type of promise made. Dave Dial (talk) 23:05, 5 November 2015 (UTC)"
Much spluttering and hand wringing and righteous indignation at Jimbo's place [4].
And it finally gets to the Arbcom [5]. He resigned his adminship in the middle of the process. Because Purdy was a "prominent Wikipedia ambassador" in Canada, and had received favorable press coverage, the restriction on redirects placed at AN/I was left in force--and any talk about desysopping him was shouted down BEFORE he resigned.
One result was a MEL Magazine article about his hijinks. Another result was that he resorted to running numerous sockpuppets, to continue his human-trafficking "campaign", in between bouts of likely paid editing of biographies, and a fascination with Miss Universe contestants (probably not approved by the Salvation Army). This went on for SIX YEARS, until he was finally eternabanned by Beeblebrox in June 2021.
The SPI was useless--full of "excuses" why they can't undo what he'd been doing. And one of his most asinine creations,
, is still 86k bytes long, making it one of the "most important stage plays in history". According to Wikipedia.
