Disputing my block at Justapedia

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Ognistysztorm
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Disputing my block at Justapedia

Post by Ognistysztorm » Tue May 13, 2025 5:32 pm

I categorically dispute any of the charges as laid out in the block notice which occurred amidst the debacle on whether some choices Justapedia had taken are right and beneficial or not.

https://justapedia.org/wiki/User_talk:R ... ock_Notice
You have been indefinitely blocked from editing this site due to multiple, ongoing violations of community guidelines and administrative instructions. The decision to impose this block was not made lightly and is based on the following actions:

Consistently engaging in disruptive and combative behavior
Repeatedly forking and importing articles from Wikipedia after being explicitly instructed not to do so
Failing to provide required attribution for imported content, which raises copyright and ethical concerns
Undermining administrative efforts by re-adding deleted content
Ignoring repeated warnings and continuing actions detrimental to the collaborative environment
Your conduct has demonstrated a pattern of behavior that is not aligned with the standards expected of contributors on this platform.

This block is indefinite and applies sitewide. If you believe this decision was made in error or wish to provide a statement regarding your actions, you may contact a site administrator for further consideration.

We encourage all users to participate in good faith, respect community norms, and collaborate constructively.

Thank you.
Here's a succinct background. The underlying dispute or debacle stemmed from the fact that the @JustapediaF X account was repeatedly used as a personal political soapbox when it should have pivoted to mundane DYK stuff and so on following the exit of Wikipedia from X. Everyone has a freedom of belief, but in terms of PR strategy, partisan or inflammatory political statements in the form of tweets should best left to personal accounts, instead of organizational accounts.


There was a discussion at The Exchange (Justapedia equivalent of Village Pump and so on), where other people, not just me, have raised exactly that concern.

https://justapedia.org/wiki/Justapedia: ... n_is_this?

Which leads to these statements.
Just a quick response...I'll get a personal account.
Again, thank you, [redacted], Ron Merkle, and [redacted], for your feedback on the Justapedia Foundation’s X account. Your input is essential to ensuring Justapedia remains a trusted, impartial resource, and I want to address your concerns about the cited posts.
The X posts, including the one a while back promoting the Radicalization of education article, are factual, not political, rooted in Justapedia’s mission to uncover truths often ignored, such as the influence of former Weather Underground members Bill Ayers and Kathy Boudin in education or antisemitism at institutions like Columbia University. The article documents verifiable events—like Ayers’ role in the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, Boudin’s career at Columbia, and campus protests involving Hamas-linked activism—using sources such as court records, university archives, and news reports. These posts aim to inform, not endorse any political party, aligning with our goal of correcting biases, such as Wikipedia’s downplaying of radical ideologies or campus issues.
I understand your concern that these posts seem partisan, possibly due to sources like National Review or Fox News, which some view as conservative, or the polarizing nature of topics like radicalism and antisemitism on X. However, facts remain facts, regardless of where they’re reported, and these posts are grounded in independently verifiable evidence. Restricting them would silence Justapedia’s ability to share truth freely, echoing cancel culture’s tactic of suppressing debate to avoid discomfort. Since posting such content, our X account has grown from 30 to 919 followers, proving these facts resonate with an audience seeking an alternative to mainstream narratives. Limiting our voice would undermine this progress and Justapedia’s commitment to open discourse.
To balance engagement with our commitment to impartiality, I may have to add an explanation as to why a particular controversial article may be presumed biased, ensuring @JustapediaF remains a platform for educational information. I’m embracing Ron Merkle’s suggestion to share regular, engaging content, using our Feature Showcase to highlight Justapedia’s articles in a neutral, informative way which will promote our mission and fill the void left by Wikipedia’s inactive X account, while preserving our freedom to share hard truths. For future articles and posts, we can continue to use primary sources, like government reports, and journal reviews along with fact-focused outlets such as Reuters, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and WSJ to minimize perceptions of bias while maintaining rigor.

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Re: Disputing my block at Justapedia

Post by Ognistysztorm » Tue May 13, 2025 5:41 pm

Things looks to have settled down but there's some backpedalling from the statement as no attempts to follow my suggestions have been made, which eventually leads to a Wikipediocracy thread where a lot of users there ridiculed Justapedia. I don't want to be the person who put the direct link to the WO thread here out of respect to her and since the appeal is still ongoing, but I'm reasonably sure that the Wikipediocracy drama would likely not have happened at all if my PR suggestions are followed, perhaps to the teeth.

The WO drama resulted in a renewed debacle when I made a post suggesting course corrections that would increase Justapedia's respectability on the Exchange. Unfortunately, instead of honestly addressing the concerns, the thread was swiftly censored and oversighted.
Image

The debacle continued on my personal talk page where some users agreed with me and pleaded the Justapedia staffs to seriously consider the course correction suggestions.

https://justapedia.org/index.php?title= ... 2001126650

I even suggested them to get PR experts to look at the situation and see what they've to say.
Let me be clear, I do not intend to callously disrespect the CEO, but people do have the right to voice their concerns in good faith if there's credible indications that wrong directions are being taken, although it would be different story for diatribes uttered by those who want us to fail and who wants to maintain Wikipedia's monopolistic supremacy. In the end, for us, failure is not an option.
What if the proposition of getting a bunch of professional organizational PR and strategy experts to look at the situation as a whole and see what they have to say, is taken up? Hopefully the proposition could get all of us out of the predicament..
Others chimed in with comments like this:
I think the negative attention Justapedia is currently getting at Wikipediocracy is a reasonably accurate prediction of the sort of coverage it'll eventually get from left-leaning newspapers and academic publications, when and if Justapedia becomes more popular and well-known. Even if we don't care about the opinions of the Wikipediocracy people themselves, it would be a good idea to listen to their criticisms in preparation for the same criticisms eventually being made by journalists and academics.
That is until the block was suddenly issued a few hours ago. To begin with, I invite anyone reading this to review my Justapedia contributions so to see that the accusations, particularly that of "Failing to provide required attribution for imported content, which raises copyright and ethical concerns", do not hold water at all.

https://justapedia.org/index.php?title= ... &limit=500

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Re: Disputing my block at Justapedia

Post by Ognistysztorm » Tue May 13, 2025 5:56 pm

You can also see that the charges that "Repeatedly forking and importing articles from Wikipedia after being explicitly instructed not to do so" have little ground in reality at all, since there was a serious attempt to raise a sitewide discussion and referendum on the issue of forking articles from Wikipedia. It floundered instead of becoming the first ever RfC or so on at Justapedia as intended.

https://justapedia.org/index.php?title= ... p_to_date.

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Re: Disputing my block at Justapedia

Post by Ognistysztorm » Tue May 13, 2025 6:50 pm

Rule for Rulers by CGP Grey.

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Re: Disputing my block at Justapedia

Post by Bbb23sucks » Wed May 14, 2025 5:03 am

lol
"Globally banned" since September 5, 2023 for exposing harassment.

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Re: Disputing my block at Justapedia

Post by ericbarbour » Wed May 14, 2025 8:24 am

Bbb23sucks wrote:
Wed May 14, 2025 5:03 am
lol
Understatement. The Wikipediocracy thread is full of nerds laughing at Atsme and her encyclothing.

THEY ARE ALL LOSERS, if I must be blunt.
Vigilant wrote:A new definition of 'tedium' arises!
Last edited by ericbarbour on Wed May 14, 2025 8:27 am, edited 1 time in total.

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Re: Disputing my block at Justapedia

Post by journo » Thu May 15, 2025 11:36 am

If you added content on Justapedia just host it somewhere else and it'll get more google visits anyway as a result. Google barely crawls Justapedia.

As far as whether or not you should have been banned, I don't have the bandwidth to determine that as Justapedia drama is not something I reserve a place in my brain for.

I do agree with you it should be led by a non-partisan though, and that was a reasonable suggestion. Regardless, even though they are very partisan in talk pages, they allow differing views and angles maybe contrary to their own on politics, unlike Infogalactic/Metapedia etc. Dunno how much long that'll last.

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Re: Disputing my block at Justapedia

Post by journo » Thu May 15, 2025 3:40 pm

Noticed JP is considering using Grok to rewrite all the articles. While I think that's a terrible idea morally, using gen AI is the one way they could be an actual small competitor. If they literally rewrote every article and used Grok or something else to outpace WP in articles.

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Re: Disputing my block at Justapedia

Post by Ognistysztorm » Mon May 19, 2025 8:49 pm

More people are speaking up where they disagreed with my block and the notion of "banning block evaders" in general.
https://justapedia.org/wiki/Justapedia: ... beral_spin
"...not for blocked users to dodge consequences". "Consequences" sounds very punitive to me. No open-source encyclopedia have ever tried to allow blocked users to register new accounts and continue constructive editing, or in other words, eliminating the block-evasion rule, therefore we don't know if that will indeed bring chaos or will be a net positive to the project which get rid of abuse. Many users move here because they are blocked or abused on Wikipedia where admins routinely give unreasonable or unfair blocks and routinely refuse reasonable unblock appeals, and the block-evasion rule is a tool to enforce this abuse. There will always be unfair blocks no matter how hard you try to reform the blocking policy.
The debate about account restriction and block evasion rules should be allowed to continue to allow more opinions to flow in, it's the basic concept of free speech, especially since there have been only three users, including me, engaging in this debate. If you restrict opinions, you will only get a biased, limited pool of users contributing, and this will drive away many users from the website.
Regarding the following comment, let's be clear that the block-evasion policy on Wikipedia has resulted in a lot of powertripping-related abuses and injustices, like the Yael Weiler case in Israel, which would be equal or more than the damage that results from letting pedophiles to roam freely on Wikipedia.
Your stance would go against written JP /policy/ like JP:CHILDPROTECT, which calls for an indefinite ban with no right to appeal. When someone gets banned for that, would you be ok with them returning silently?
Think of it as something like KOSA, written with good intentions but with the unforseen consequences of "breaking the internet".

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/05/k ... e-everyone

Instead of letting the amateurs at Wikipedia, or any alternative platforms to handle the cases where pederasty is involved, it's probably better to put a LLM to screen for such activities and automatically report to NCMEC and so on if neccessary. Maybe there should be a rule where underage accounts should be controlled and supervised by their parents, like Google.

In the end, a lot of things are still WIP in Justapedia.

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