wow, david gerard

[Lir]

That's a name from 20 years ago!

What a disgusting individual.

It says a lot about Wikipedia that people like that are still around.

[ericbarbour]

Despite losting his main account powerz long ago, I still think he's running a sockpuppet (Maxim) that is currently serving as an arbitrator. Put THAT in your pipe and smoke it (along with some hash to make the misery a bit more tolerable).

Also:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Gerard_(author)

[badmachine]

looks like Gerard resigned before anyone put the boot in. link

[ericbarbour]

looks like Gerard resigned before anyone put the boot in. link

lol, and he said he would resign as bureaucrat, and no one should vote for him.....

I thought about this today and realised: if I had an RFA, would I vote for me? And the answer is, no, I probably wouldn't. Simply from inactivity. I'm not actually around here much, you'll see stretches of weeks with no edits in my edit history, and I'm not active around the various administrative boards, in fact I've been consciously avoiding them because they feel like a waste of my time. That's the opposite of what an admin should be doing.

I'm intensely busy right now and my Wikipedia editing is mostly drive-by. That's not a good way to do admin either, as this incident shows.

Given that, I've sent a note to the bureaucrats that I'm resigning my bit.

In the unlikely event I want to go for admin again, I'd do it via an RFA, in which this discussion would no doubt be a topic.

I expect to keep editing casually. Have fun and see you around on occasion.

- David Gerard (talk) 18:11, 12 July 2025 (UTC)

The pedantic little ASSHOLES paid no attention to Gerard's 20+ year history of abusing his power to protect friends and silence critics and control content. All the twits moaned about was RECENT abuses.

Won't go into details, because I've ALREADY posted his history before, and it didn't matter.

[boredbird]

Gerard helped set the expectation early on that wikipedia should be run by kooks and freaks. EVERYONE felt normal next to David Gerard. And with no obvious qualifications besides very strong opinions.

It looks like he's finally gotten serious, looks sort of normal and has written several books, reviewed in the New York Times.

And, with that, he finally backs away from Wikipedia.

[Ognistysztorm]

Gerard helped set the expectation early on that wikipedia should be run by kooks and freaks. EVERYONE felt normal next to David Gerard. And with no obvious qualifications besides very strong opinions.

It looks like he's finally gotten serious, looks sort of normal and has written several books, reviewed in the New York Times.

And, with that, he finally backs away from Wikipedia.

The damage is already been done though with the impending possible demise of Wikinews likely being a harbinger of things to come. But just for reference for any lurkers in the forum, here's a long blog post about David Gerard by Tracing Woodgrains which briefly went viral last year.

https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/rel ... edia-admin

[ericbarbour]

And, with that, he finally backs away from Wikipedia.

Dream on. He'll return, with sock accounts, inevitably.

https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/rel ... edia-admin

That's still a really nice item. But as far as I can tell, the only people who read it were a few disgruntled LessWrong users. They only "count" as experts in their warped little website. LW is a primary attractant for pseudointellectuals with insane ideas. Who like to type too much and too long.

And that blog post should have mentioned Gerard's longtime abuse of the "oversight" function to control content he liked or didn't like. Stupid things, like helping his girlfriend market her goth-themed dolls on WP. It was a major reason Gerard was such a bad influence on WP in the early 2000s. They yanked it away in 2009 but all he did was use his sockpuppet administrator account to continue his bullshit--more quietly. And that is probably not the ONLY one.

[boredbird]

They yanked it away in 2009 but all he did was use his sockpuppet administrator account to continue his bullshit--more quietly. And that is probably not the ONLY one.

How do you know that User:Maxim is David Gerard's sockpuppet?

[ericbarbour]

How do you know that User:Maxim is David Gerard's sockpuppet?

It's indirect evidence but it does make you go "hmmm".

In this WR thread in November 2007, it was mentioned that Gerard girlfriend Arkady Rose had been using Wikipedia to "spam" her own business. Unfortunately, the link given was immediately oversighted, after which the article itself Ryung doll was quickly deleted, destroying all traces -- and thence forwarded to another article Rainy Doll, which itself was also quickly deleted. The latter two actions done by one of Wikipedia's weirdest, most obscure bureaucrats, Maxim, formerly known as Evilclown93, of all things. Maxim/Evilclown93's edit histories are badly shredded. There's almost no mention of him on Wikipedia Review or elsewhere, and is a good candidate for administrator sockpuppet. Also mentioned in this WR thread.

Many years later Maxim became an arbitrator. NO ONE has figured out any plausible identity for Maxim's owner, so it's almost guaranteed to be a sockpuppet of someone with strong insider knowledge. Since Gerard is the "cream" of insiders and a known sock operator, he's a great candidate.

Maxim did VERY little content work, and that was almost entirely hockey trivia. Most of Maxim's 40,000 edits (since 2007!) were patrolling and lecturing people on talkpages. Anyone wanting to "level up" in that sick little scene knows they have to look as responsible as possible, so they have to write SOME content. The most popular areas include military history (which can be risky because WP is crawling with military fanboy "walters"), nerd crap like anime or video games (also prone to fights), and tedious things almost no WP asshole cares about, such as sports statistics/history.

Please feel free to prove me wrong.

Plus: The name "Evilclown93" was bonus material, because Gerard was in the "goth" music scene and absolutely knows who Current 93 is. Probably owns a stack of their albums.

[ericbarbour]

Need some evidence Wikipediocracy is infested with fools and cum-swallowers? See below. In NO POSSIBLE WAY is Mr. Gerard deserving of "respect" for resigning. Nor for any other reason. The gentleman is a pure troll and I can prove it over and over. He will keep messing around on WP somehow--too deeply embedded.

gerardrespect.jpg (43.15 KiB) Viewed 810 times