Poetlister - the actual story

[zordrac]

The actual Poetlister story has been distorted to include me, when I had nothing to do with it. My role was solely in investigating it. I didn't help Poetlister to create fake accounts, or anything like that. I was certainly never hit on by Poetlister. Proambivouac blatantly lied about it, and, unfortunately, Wikipedia Sucks, amongst others, have perpetuated those proven lies. Unfortunately, I've lost my original investigation which had all of the links in it, so I won't be able to reference that, but here we go.

...

Poetlister is the Wikipedia identity of a man who worked as a tax accountant for the United Kingdom government, who, in his private life, often goes to bondage places where he would sometimes dress as a woman. In the modern vernacular, he is someone who we would refer to as trans, and who we are told to refer to as "she". This is important to understand when we look at why this person chose solely female accounts and did not pick any male accounts. This was not a part of trying to trick anyone at all; rather it was a part of his actual identity.

Over the course of his journey, Poetlister created a number of role accounts, in order to write about different topics, which is completely legal per Wikipedia's rules. Poetlister was not, in fact, the main account, as that was the account primarily for writing about poetry; RachelBrown was the main account, his online alter-ego. Taxwoman was the account that he used to write about tax, a topic he was very familiar with based on his job as a tax accountant, but this one ended up also writing about bondage, which he was also very notably familiar with in his personal life. He also had Londoneye, a note to one of England's main tourist attractions, the London eye, and this role account was used to write about tourism.

The allegation that Poetlister created accounts in order to engage in sockpuppetry is patently false, as this was not the rationale he used to create accounts. He wasn't creating them to evade bans or to do anything that Wikipedia wasn't allowing him to do. These were role accounts. They didn't interact with one another.

Eventually, when RachelBrown was helping to compile lists of Jews, he ran into a problem when another person started to add lies to the article, which were supported by at least 9 sockpuppets. When RachelBrown went to complain about it, the response from the administrator SlimVirgin was that they weren't sockpuppets - and yet they were, and Wikipedia eventually acknowledged that they were, banning 15 different accounts over it - but they banned Poetlister first.

Frustrated, the Poetlister account was used to support the RachelBrown account, so as to demonstrated that he was right, and that the sockpuppets were wrong. This turned into a revert war where facts were ignored and it was all about popularity - and who had the most sockpuppets. Because of SlimVirgin's refusal to treat it seriously, Poetlister felt forced to use all of his role accounts to combat the sockpuppets.

Poetlister complained to Zordrac, a well-known Wikipedia user who was known for helping users with investigations, which he then went to Wikipedia administrators about. Zordrac had done at least 15 prior investigations, not all of which had led to the person being exonerated - as at least a few of them had led to the users being banned. Administrators respected the investigative skills of Zordrac, and he considered the case.

Before Zordrac had a chance to accept the case, Poetlister was banned, so he had to decide whether or not to go ahead with the investigation. He wasn't sure if there was enough to it, since it was just about a list of Jews, which didn't seem to be particularly important and seemed to be potentially racist. But the ban was just so strange, as Poetlister didn't seem to have done anything to warrant it.

Zordrac contacted SlimVirgin about the ban, informing her that Poetlister had asked him just 2 days before then to do an investigation. SlimVirgin said that she wasn't the one who banned Poetlister. Zordrac asked SlimVirgin who was, and then Zordrac contacted them, going through a list of administrators who all denied responsibility. Eventually, it seemed that Poetlister was banned for sockpuppetry.

Poetlister admitted to Zordrac to the role accounts, but denied sockpuppetry, and asked Zordrac not to include that in his investigation because such an admission would, in Poetlister's view, justify an otherwise unjustifiable ban.

Zordrac's investigation included speaking to all of the people involved, including the one who Poetlister accused of using sockpuppets to win an argument. That user was particularly abusive to Zordrac and tried to get him banned for daring to ask questions. Nonetheless, he persisted, and kept asking questions to get to the bottom of the whole thing.

Zordrac's conclusion was that the person with the sockpuppets was the root cause of the problem and that SlimVirgin, along with other administrators investigating the case, failed to get to the root cause of the problem, as they falsely blamed Poetlister when there was clear evidence that the sockpuppetry by the other person came in first.

Other administrators on Wikipedia accepted Zordrac's evidence, and were considering unbanning Poetlister over it, however, they then investigated who Zordrac was, suspecting that he was Blissyu2, the owner of Wikipedia Review.

Blissyu2 had used Wikipedia briefly without creating an account, and was accused of doing a lot of things that were done by other people who he shared an IP range with. As a result, Blissyu2 briefly created the account Internodeuser, in his words "so that Wikipedia had someone to ban". Wikipedia obliged and banned Internodeuser, falsely claiming that 10,000 different people who used the ISP Internode were all the same person, and that that person was Zordrac. Internodeuser was banned for 1 year for "legal threats" that were actually to Internodeuser, not by Internodeuser. The ban was never actually enforced, after 10,000 users of Internode complained that Wikipedia couldn't ban a whole huge ISP.

In spite of being proven not to have done anything wrong, Internodeuser's ban was never revoked. Administrators investigating the ban were split as to whether any punishment was warranted at all, as it was clear that they were talking about multiple different users. Nonetheless, the ban was more about people using an ISP that gave a different IP every hour, and hiding bad behaviours behind an ever-changing IP. It wasn't actually about Internodeuser.

The year-long ban had already completed before Zordrac had started using Wikipedia again, or close enough to, as it was 11 months later into the 12-month ban which was never actually enforced, and since the ban was about misuse of ever-changing IPs, as opposed to anything that Zordrac as a person had done, as Zordrac hadn't done anything wrong at all, other than to prove that Wikipedia were wrong in assuming that they were all the same person.

Nonetheless, for the people who wanted to justify Poetlister's otherwise unjustifiable ban, the discovery that Zordrac was a banned user, who was running Wikipedia Review no less, was enough to permanently ban Zordrac and to insist that Poetlister's ban stayed forever.

Poetlister, for his part, was horrified by the whole situation, and decided to create a new role account, Runcorn, and use that account to get to administrator status by following all of the rules. Runcorn's aim was to get Poetlister unbanned and to right the wrongs.

After over a year of using Wikipedia as Runcorn, Poetlister gained administrator status, and indirectly caused Poetlister's ban to be revoked, though he never tried to get Zordrac unbanned.

Then, as they had done with Zordrac and so many other times before, Wikipedia administrators used irrelevant issues on the side to not only ban Runcorn, but to blame the whole thing on Zordrac.

Wikipedia administrator Proambivouac made up a story in which he claimed that Zordrac helped Poetlister to create the fake accounts based on his own imaginary experience of using sockpuppets, and that this had started based on flirting - as if that changes anything! In spite of having zero evidence to support his claims, the entire Wikipedia community supported Proambivouac's false investigation, and it even generated media interest.

In spite of doing nothing wrong as an administrator, Runcorn was banned permanently from every Wikimedia project, all because he had been wrongly banned as Poetlister because of someone else using sockpuppets over a list of Jews, and SlimVirgin refusing to do anything about it.

This was a story of poor administrators who don't check their facts, and who like to justify bad decisions by lying about irrelevant things later on.

But we pretend that Poetlister was the problem.

Poetlister was never the problem.

Wikipedia is the problem.

While the media should have been talking about how bad an administrator SlimVirgin was, and unbanning Zordrac and Poetlister, and even keeping Runcorn on as an administrator, instead they made it out that they were the good guys, and that Zordrac and Poetlister were terrible, awful people.

Anyone with half a brain would know what the real story was, and that Wikipedia were using their own platform to control the narrative and make themselves look better than they ever really were.

There was a scandal here - but it was not about Poetlister doing anything wrong, and especially not Zordrac - this was a scandal about the incompetence of Wikipedia administrators in going after the wrong people, again and again, and it highlighted the incompetence of SlimVirgin and Proambivouac as effective accurate administrators.

More broadly, this story highlighted that Wikipedia's investigations cannot be trusted.

[ericbarbour]

The actual Poetlister story has been distorted to include me, when I had nothing to do with it. My role was solely in investigating it. I didn't help Poetlister to create fake accounts, or anything like that. I was certainly never hit on by Poetlister. Proambivouac blatantly lied about it, and, unfortunately, Wikipedia Sucks, amongst others, have perpetuated those proven lies. Unfortunately, I've lost my original investigation which had all of the links in it, so I won't be able to reference that, but here we go.

For what it's worth, the book-wiki notes barely mention you in the Poetlister files. They DO mention Proab over and over, because he was nailing PL's socks--but he wasn't as mean or as destructive as FT2. Remember "The Anvil"? I've got absolutely nothing good to say about FT2, dear friend of the lo-rent Nosferatu David Gerard. Many backs were stabbed here and ultimately it was all pointless. Also remember that FT2's installation as the Wikimedia UK CFO was one of the factors that killed WMUK. Kunwar "Paul Sinclair" Singh was, and still is, one of the most toxic and demented figures in Wikipedia's history.

And I still have that timeline of the PL business that you wrote and posted on Encyc in 2006.

So which parts of it are "distorted"?