Misplaced Pages

And there was this passage, "Treatment of the editor" :

There is a significant difference between an editor who inappropriately uses an alternative account and a person operating sock puppets. Thus, an editor who inappropriately uses an alternative account may still contribute to the encyclopedia through their main account. An inappropriate alternative account is not a sock puppet account and assumption of good faith still applies to the main account of that editor. Aggressive approaches applied to protect the encyclopedia from sock puppets ordinarily should not be applied to the main account of an editor in good standing who inappropriately used an alternative account.

My main account is now Reconsideration. I dropped this Noroton account and no one has any reason other than assuming bad faith -- and with nothing beyond that assumption -- for citing this account as a violation of a single thing. I inadvertently made some mistakes in good faith. What I created the accounts for was editing and constructive comments, and that's what they've been used for, and that's what I enjoy about Misplaced Pages. Crap like the recent comments about me at ANI and at the DRV are what I hate about this place. Thanks for treating me like some vandal, guys -- I'm sure you all must've meant well. Noroton (talk) 03:37, 29 October 2009 (UTC)

Since the other three accounts have been outed as yours, what's the purpose in continuing to use them? I respectfully suggest that you abandon them, and bring this one out of retirement. There's a lot of work to do. 64.208.230.145 (talk) 14:08, 29 October 2009 (UTC)

• Since WR threads and what they say about me has come up here, I'll say that I actually somewhat respect Noroton as a critic, which is why I took the time to approach him. I have respect for people who take a reasoned, principled stance that doesn't shift depending on where he is in good graces. That contrasts with the WR's Horse With No Name, known in these parts as User:Ecoleetage/User:Pastor Theo, who tried to get a couple of Misplaced Pages editors fired IRL because they !voted against him, actually contacting their employers, which is why he is banned here. That's to say nothing of the private e-mails from HWNN talking about how talented and amazing I am, and his comments are still on my blog, at one point posting that he'd like to give me a hug. Now he makes homophobic remarks about me on the WR. Sigh. Noroton at least has principles he follows, and that's respectable. Otherwise, when you read the WR it's best to remember that people like HWNN/Eco are celebrated there as my chief critics, simply because it earns them cred. -->David Shankbone 14:31, 29 October 2009 (UTC)
  • Your being such a gentleman about this is, of course, making me even more uncomfortable about my stupid statements from before. (It's exactly the kind of thing I did with/to LHVU in supporting his RfAdmin re-election so strongly, so I guess there's some poetic justice here! Wikidemon is also being a gentleman about it, although I notice he hasn't taken down his incorrect accusation that I socked while blocked.) That you would have so much more clue about this than half the people commenting on it at AN/I and the DRV is telling about both you and them. Noroton (talk) 17:09, 29 October 2009 (UTC)

I'll take your word for it. If I was in error, I'm sorry - I'll look for my statement and strike it. I think that your ongoing account block serves no constructive purpose. As a suggestion, your unblock request is rather long and goes into some things that probably don't help your case even if true... unblock requests accompanied with complaints about the competence or good faith of the blocking admin and other editors are often dismissed. You could compare it to the protests of someone wrongfully imprisoned - his protests of innocence are used as evidence that he hasn't accepted the wrongness of his crime so his parole should be denied. What convinces me is the simple fact that you didn't mean to violate the policy and you say you'll follow it if it's made clear. And also, thanks for being courteous. I'd like to keep an open mind about encyclopedia content, and hope we can move past old disagreements. - Wikidemon (talk) 18:04, 29 October 2009 (UTC)

Appeal

Noroton (block log • active blocks • global blocks • contribs • deleted contribs • filter log • creation log • change block settings • unblock • checkuser (log))

Request reason:

If I was disruptive, Versageek might still have a point, but then he could simply block me for being disruptive. The idea that "aggressive debat" is disruptive -- a blockable offense -- only applies if what I was doing either was uncivil (or worse) or if I made it much more difficult for the discussion at the Shankbone AfD or DRV to continue. If not, no disruption. In fact, my comments in both discussions were focused on the things that WP:TALK and WP:DELETE and the instructions on WP:DRV tell us we are supposed to be doing in discussions -- talking about policy and facts and (at DRV) whether or not the closing admin acted within policy and procedure. Which is more disruptive: resigning with one account and participating in an AfD & DRV with a new account or blocking an editor in the middle of a DRV that editor started -- causing some confusion on that page -- when even the blocking admin admits the editor had no "intention to be abusive"? I'm not wikilawyering about WP:SOCK: I simply didn't abuse it in the way Versageek said I did. Look: Either I have the right to a clean start or I don't. Versageek doesn't like the idea that I spoke at the AfD while people didn't know my prior conflict with Shankbone, and in a vague, abstract way there could be something wrong with that, although it isn't wrong in the letter or spirit of SOCK, which is about abuses involving simultaneous accounts. The problem he points to simply wasn't simultaneous with the Noroton account, which I'd stopped using by Oct. 5. By sticking "sock" labels on all my accounts and blocking me for a week, which unnecessarily raised the level of drama, Versageek looks like he's trying to affect the DRV, or perhaps he's mad at me for sharply criticizing Jake Wartenberg. Is Versageek punishing me for holding opinions perhaps opposed to his own? When an admin goes beyond policy and confuses sharply opposing (but civil) expressions of points of view with disruption, that suspicion naturally comes up.

Although Versageek didn't bring this up, I will: My using CountryDoctor and Reconsideration and JohnWBarber together could be interpreted as a violation of WP:SOCK, particularly the way that policy is now written. I've said elsewhere on my talk page that when I started using these alternate accounts, they were discouraged but not prohibited by SOCK policy, the language of which focused more on abusive use of alternate accounts.(for instance, the lead then stated, While many reasons for using alternative accounts are acceptable, a number of uses for them are explicitly forbidden. ; from "Avoiding scrutiny" subsection: Alternative accounts should not be used to edit in ways that would be considered improper if done by a single account. it is a violation of this policy to create alternative accounts in order to confuse or deceive editors who may have a legitimate interest in reviewing your contributions. -- No one would have had a legitimate interest to make comparisons between any of my new accounts, ever, or between any of them and Noroton while I was using that account) It wasn't even prohibited for Reconsideration to comment in an RfC for a change in style policy at the time that account did so. Both the Reconsideration and JohnWBarber accounts participated in AfDs, which goes against policy as currently written. My bad, and I wouldn't do that again -- but let's not pretend that any harm was done. The idea of having only one account participate in policy page discussions, AfDs, etc. is so that you don't avoid scrutiny. But anyone who scrutinizes the edits of Reconsideration would gain no insight into JohnWBarber or vice versa, so absolutely no practical problem occurred here. Versageek is concerned about scrutiny involving the Noroton account, but once that account finally wound down its editing and resigned, it stopped being subject to WP:SOCK.

The "scrutiny" that socking improperly avoids is supposed to be "justified scrutiny" (in the words of older versions of WP:SOCK) -- scrutiny of misbehavior of various sorts. Unjustified scrutiny -- scrutiny in order to continually bring up past actions of an editor even though doing so only clouds the issue -- is what CLEANSTART is supposed to help an editor avoid.

The purpose of using separate accounts was originally to avoid having editors who were antagonistic to me start stalking me in areas separate from politics, and I used separate accounts to prevent the kind of unjustified scrutiny that would lead to those antagonistic editors following me. After a while, I became unconcerned about that, but it was why I did it and initially it was not a violation of policy to do it for that reason. I also found I became more annoyed when I logged in as Noroton than when I logged into the other accounts. I'd been planning on unifying the accounts eventually, but I'd hoped to do it silently. Since I knew I wasn't being disruptive with any of the accounts and was never deceptive, it was never a priority for me to unify them (and until recently, I didn't know how easily I could combine the long watchlists). If any admin had simply emailed me and told me I was violating or seemed to be violating WP:SOCK, I'd have looked into it and, finding the more recent language at that policy, simply shuttered all but one account. It would have been just that easy if any admin or checkuser handled it that way. Of course, then we would have avoided the drama at the DRV and ANI. Given the lack of a policy violation involving the Noroton account, I have to wonder at the motives of Versageek or whoever asked him to checkuser my accounts, because this looks like it was designed to affect opinion at the DRV. At this point, I'd prefer simply to have the JohnWBarber account. I'll probably drop that account at some point in the future and -- again-- exercise my right to WP:CLEANSTART. Participating in AfDs with both the Barber and Reconsideration accounts was a violation of SOCK, and I have no intention of violating that policy. There was no ill effect from that violation.

Notes:

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{{Unblock on hold |1=blocking administrator |2=24 hours after blocking, Versageek finally offered an explanation. This happened not on my talk page but at AN/I, where various editors have been smearing me with lies, which have been referred to at the DRV I was participating at. If nothing else, I should be unblocked so that I can point out the smears at AN/I. Versageek's behavior has been disruptive to the DRV, where discussion veered away from the actual subject to my supposed socking. One reason I bring this up is because Versageek's explanation for my block is: ''Using an alternate account for aggressive debates IS disruptive, and being disruptive with an alternate account IS abusive - even if you've recently marked your main account 'retired'.'' Versageek has simply contradicted what all editors are told is policy at the ] part of ]. ''Clean start under a new name: If you decide to make a fresh start, and do not wish to be connected to a previous account, you can simply discontinue using the old account(s), and create a new one that becomes the only account you use. This is permitted only if there are no bans or blocks in place against your old account, and so long as no active deception is involved, particularly on pages that the old account used to edit. That is, you should not turn up on a page User:A used to edit to continue the same editing pattern, this time as User:B, while denying any connection to User:A, particularly if the edits are contentious.'' If we're going to tell editors to follow policy and block them for not doing it, then let's not contradict the clear language of the policy, particularly when the blocking editor doesn't think there was a bad intent behind the supposed motivation (Versageek says of me ''I don't think it was User:Noroton's intention to be abusive - he just stumbled into that trap''). If I ''was'' disruptive, Versageek might still have a point, but then he could simply block me for being disruptive. The idea that "aggressive debat" is ''disruptive'' -- a blockable offense -- only applies if what I was doing either was uncivil (or worse) or if I made it much more difficult for the discussion at the Shankbone AfD or DRV to continue. If not, no disruption. In fact, my comments in both discussions were focused on the things that ] and ] and the instructions on ] tell us we are supposed to be doing in discussions -- talking about policy and facts and (at DRV) whether or not the closing admin acted within policy and procedure. Which is more disruptive: resigning with one account and participating in an AfD & DRV with a new account or blocking an editor in the middle of a DRV that editor started -- causing some confusion on that page -- when even the blocking admin admits the editor had no "intention to be abusive"? I'm not wikilawyering about WP:SOCK: I simply didn't abuse it in the way Versageek said I did. Look: Either I have the right to a clean start or I don't. Versageek doesn't like the idea that I spoke at the AfD while people didn't know my prior conflict with Shankbone, and in a vague, abstract way there could be something wrong with that, although it isn't wrong in the letter or spirit of SOCK, which is about abuses involving simultaneous accounts. The problem he points to simply wasn't simultaneous with the Noroton account, which I'd stopped using by Oct. 5. By sticking "sock" labels on all my accounts and blocking me for a week, which unnecessarily raised the level of drama, Versageek looks like he's trying to affect the DRV, or perhaps he's mad at me for sharply criticizing Jake Wartenberg. Is Versageek punishing me for holding opinions perhaps opposed to his own? When an admin goes beyond policy and confuses sharply opposing (but civil) expressions of points of view with disruption, that suspicion naturally comes up. Although Versageek didn't bring this up, I will: My using CountryDoctor and Reconsideration and JohnWBarber together could be interpreted as a violation of WP:SOCK, particularly the way that policy is now written. I've said elsewhere on my talk page that when I started using these alternate accounts, they were discouraged but not prohibited by SOCK policy, the language of which focused more on ''abusive'' use of alternate accounts.(for instance, the lead then stated, ''While many reasons for using alternative accounts are acceptable, a number of uses for them are explicitly forbidden.'' ; from "Avoiding scrutiny" subsection: ''Alternative accounts should not be used to edit in ways that would be considered improper if done by a single account. it is a violation of this policy to create alternative accounts in order to confuse or deceive editors who may have a legitimate interest in reviewing your contributions.'' -- No one would have had a legitimate interest to make comparisons between any of my new accounts, ever, or between any of them and Noroton while I was using that account) It wasn't even prohibited for Reconsideration to comment in an RfC for a change in style policy at the time that account did so. Both the Reconsideration and JohnWBarber accounts participated in AfDs, which goes against policy as currently written. My bad, and I wouldn't do that again -- but let's not pretend that any harm was done. The idea of having only one account participate in policy page discussions, AfDs, etc. is so that you don't avoid scrutiny. But anyone who scrutinizes the edits of Reconsideration would gain no insight into JohnWBarber or vice versa, so absolutely no practical problem occurred here. Versageek is concerned about scrutiny involving the Noroton account, but once that account finally wound down its editing and resigned, it stopped being subject to WP:SOCK. The "scrutiny" that socking improperly avoids is supposed to be "justified scrutiny" (in the words of older versions of WP:SOCK) -- scrutiny of misbehavior of various sorts. Unjustified scrutiny -- scrutiny in order to continually bring up past actions of an editor even though doing so only clouds the issue -- is what CLEANSTART is supposed to help an editor avoid. The purpose of using separate accounts was originally to avoid having editors who were antagonistic to me start stalking me in areas separate from politics, and I used separate accounts to prevent the kind of unjustified scrutiny that would lead to those antagonistic editors following me. After a while, I became unconcerned about that, but it was why I did it and initially it was not a violation of policy to do it for that reason. I also found I became more annoyed when I logged in as Noroton than when I logged into the other accounts. I'd been planning on unifying the accounts eventually, but I'd hoped to do it silently. Since I knew I wasn't being disruptive with any of the accounts and was never deceptive, it was never a priority for me to unify them (and until recently, I didn't know how easily I could combine the long watchlists). If any admin had simply emailed me and told me I was violating or seemed to be violating WP:SOCK, I'd have looked into it and, finding the more recent language at that policy, simply shuttered all but one account. It would have been just that easy if any admin or checkuser handled it that way. Of course, then we would have avoided the drama at the DRV and ANI. Given the lack of a policy violation involving the Noroton account, I have to wonder at the motives of Versageek or whoever asked him to checkuser my accounts, because this looks like it was designed to affect opinion at the DRV. At this point, I'd prefer simply to have the JohnWBarber account. I'll probably drop that account at some point in the future and -- again-- exercise my right to ]. Participating in AfDs with both the Barber and Reconsideration accounts was a violation of SOCK, and I have no intention of violating that policy. There was no ill effect from that violation. Since I didn't edit disruptively at all with JohnWBarber, at the DRV or anywhere else, there is no reason for anything other than dropping the block entirely, immediately. I have no intention of using more than one account at a time in the future. If a checkuser willing to work with me briefly will email me, I have a privacy concern related to this that a checkuser can handle, or I can contact one when I no longer have the block. ] (]) 16:23, 29 October 2009 (UTC) |3 = ~~~~}}

If you decline the unblock request, replace this template with the following code, substituting {{subst:Decline reason here}} with a specific rationale. Leaving the decline reason unchanged will result in display of a default reason, explaining why the request was declined.

{{unblock reviewed |1=24 hours after blocking, Versageek finally offered an explanation. This happened not on my talk page but at AN/I, where various editors have been smearing me with lies, which have been referred to at the DRV I was participating at. If nothing else, I should be unblocked so that I can point out the smears at AN/I. Versageek's behavior has been disruptive to the DRV, where discussion veered away from the actual subject to my supposed socking. One reason I bring this up is because Versageek's explanation for my block is: ''Using an alternate account for aggressive debates IS disruptive, and being disruptive with an alternate account IS abusive - even if you've recently marked your main account 'retired'.'' Versageek has simply contradicted what all editors are told is policy at the ] part of ]. ''Clean start under a new name: If you decide to make a fresh start, and do not wish to be connected to a previous account, you can simply discontinue using the old account(s), and create a new one that becomes the only account you use. This is permitted only if there are no bans or blocks in place against your old account, and so long as no active deception is involved, particularly on pages that the old account used to edit. That is, you should not turn up on a page User:A used to edit to continue the same editing pattern, this time as User:B, while denying any connection to User:A, particularly if the edits are contentious.'' If we're going to tell editors to follow policy and block them for not doing it, then let's not contradict the clear language of the policy, particularly when the blocking editor doesn't think there was a bad intent behind the supposed motivation (Versageek says of me ''I don't think it was User:Noroton's intention to be abusive - he just stumbled into that trap''). If I ''was'' disruptive, Versageek might still have a point, but then he could simply block me for being disruptive. The idea that "aggressive debat" is ''disruptive'' -- a blockable offense -- only applies if what I was doing either was uncivil (or worse) or if I made it much more difficult for the discussion at the Shankbone AfD or DRV to continue. If not, no disruption. In fact, my comments in both discussions were focused on the things that ] and ] and the instructions on ] tell us we are supposed to be doing in discussions -- talking about policy and facts and (at DRV) whether or not the closing admin acted within policy and procedure. Which is more disruptive: resigning with one account and participating in an AfD & DRV with a new account or blocking an editor in the middle of a DRV that editor started -- causing some confusion on that page -- when even the blocking admin admits the editor had no "intention to be abusive"? I'm not wikilawyering about WP:SOCK: I simply didn't abuse it in the way Versageek said I did. Look: Either I have the right to a clean start or I don't. Versageek doesn't like the idea that I spoke at the AfD while people didn't know my prior conflict with Shankbone, and in a vague, abstract way there could be something wrong with that, although it isn't wrong in the letter or spirit of SOCK, which is about abuses involving simultaneous accounts. The problem he points to simply wasn't simultaneous with the Noroton account, which I'd stopped using by Oct. 5. By sticking "sock" labels on all my accounts and blocking me for a week, which unnecessarily raised the level of drama, Versageek looks like he's trying to affect the DRV, or perhaps he's mad at me for sharply criticizing Jake Wartenberg. Is Versageek punishing me for holding opinions perhaps opposed to his own? When an admin goes beyond policy and confuses sharply opposing (but civil) expressions of points of view with disruption, that suspicion naturally comes up. Although Versageek didn't bring this up, I will: My using CountryDoctor and Reconsideration and JohnWBarber together could be interpreted as a violation of WP:SOCK, particularly the way that policy is now written. I've said elsewhere on my talk page that when I started using these alternate accounts, they were discouraged but not prohibited by SOCK policy, the language of which focused more on ''abusive'' use of alternate accounts.(for instance, the lead then stated, ''While many reasons for using alternative accounts are acceptable, a number of uses for them are explicitly forbidden.'' ; from "Avoiding scrutiny" subsection: ''Alternative accounts should not be used to edit in ways that would be considered improper if done by a single account. it is a violation of this policy to create alternative accounts in order to confuse or deceive editors who may have a legitimate interest in reviewing your contributions.'' -- No one would have had a legitimate interest to make comparisons between any of my new accounts, ever, or between any of them and Noroton while I was using that account) It wasn't even prohibited for Reconsideration to comment in an RfC for a change in style policy at the time that account did so. Both the Reconsideration and JohnWBarber accounts participated in AfDs, which goes against policy as currently written. My bad, and I wouldn't do that again -- but let's not pretend that any harm was done. The idea of having only one account participate in policy page discussions, AfDs, etc. is so that you don't avoid scrutiny. But anyone who scrutinizes the edits of Reconsideration would gain no insight into JohnWBarber or vice versa, so absolutely no practical problem occurred here. Versageek is concerned about scrutiny involving the Noroton account, but once that account finally wound down its editing and resigned, it stopped being subject to WP:SOCK. The "scrutiny" that socking improperly avoids is supposed to be "justified scrutiny" (in the words of older versions of WP:SOCK) -- scrutiny of misbehavior of various sorts. Unjustified scrutiny -- scrutiny in order to continually bring up past actions of an editor even though doing so only clouds the issue -- is what CLEANSTART is supposed to help an editor avoid. The purpose of using separate accounts was originally to avoid having editors who were antagonistic to me start stalking me in areas separate from politics, and I used separate accounts to prevent the kind of unjustified scrutiny that would lead to those antagonistic editors following me. After a while, I became unconcerned about that, but it was why I did it and initially it was not a violation of policy to do it for that reason. I also found I became more annoyed when I logged in as Noroton than when I logged into the other accounts. I'd been planning on unifying the accounts eventually, but I'd hoped to do it silently. Since I knew I wasn't being disruptive with any of the accounts and was never deceptive, it was never a priority for me to unify them (and until recently, I didn't know how easily I could combine the long watchlists). If any admin had simply emailed me and told me I was violating or seemed to be violating WP:SOCK, I'd have looked into it and, finding the more recent language at that policy, simply shuttered all but one account. It would have been just that easy if any admin or checkuser handled it that way. Of course, then we would have avoided the drama at the DRV and ANI. Given the lack of a policy violation involving the Noroton account, I have to wonder at the motives of Versageek or whoever asked him to checkuser my accounts, because this looks like it was designed to affect opinion at the DRV. At this point, I'd prefer simply to have the JohnWBarber account. I'll probably drop that account at some point in the future and -- again-- exercise my right to ]. Participating in AfDs with both the Barber and Reconsideration accounts was a violation of SOCK, and I have no intention of violating that policy. There was no ill effect from that violation. Since I didn't edit disruptively at all with JohnWBarber, at the DRV or anywhere else, there is no reason for anything other than dropping the block entirely, immediately. I have no intention of using more than one account at a time in the future. If a checkuser willing to work with me briefly will email me, I have a privacy concern related to this that a checkuser can handle, or I can contact one when I no longer have the block. ] (]) 16:23, 29 October 2009 (UTC) |decline = {{subst:Decline reason here}} ~~~~}}

If you accept the unblock request, replace this template with the following, substituting Accept reason here with your rationale:

{{unblock reviewed |1=24 hours after blocking, Versageek finally offered an explanation. This happened not on my talk page but at AN/I, where various editors have been smearing me with lies, which have been referred to at the DRV I was participating at. If nothing else, I should be unblocked so that I can point out the smears at AN/I. Versageek's behavior has been disruptive to the DRV, where discussion veered away from the actual subject to my supposed socking. One reason I bring this up is because Versageek's explanation for my block is: ''Using an alternate account for aggressive debates IS disruptive, and being disruptive with an alternate account IS abusive - even if you've recently marked your main account 'retired'.'' Versageek has simply contradicted what all editors are told is policy at the ] part of ]. ''Clean start under a new name: If you decide to make a fresh start, and do not wish to be connected to a previous account, you can simply discontinue using the old account(s), and create a new one that becomes the only account you use. This is permitted only if there are no bans or blocks in place against your old account, and so long as no active deception is involved, particularly on pages that the old account used to edit. That is, you should not turn up on a page User:A used to edit to continue the same editing pattern, this time as User:B, while denying any connection to User:A, particularly if the edits are contentious.'' If we're going to tell editors to follow policy and block them for not doing it, then let's not contradict the clear language of the policy, particularly when the blocking editor doesn't think there was a bad intent behind the supposed motivation (Versageek says of me ''I don't think it was User:Noroton's intention to be abusive - he just stumbled into that trap''). If I ''was'' disruptive, Versageek might still have a point, but then he could simply block me for being disruptive. The idea that "aggressive debat" is ''disruptive'' -- a blockable offense -- only applies if what I was doing either was uncivil (or worse) or if I made it much more difficult for the discussion at the Shankbone AfD or DRV to continue. If not, no disruption. In fact, my comments in both discussions were focused on the things that ] and ] and the instructions on ] tell us we are supposed to be doing in discussions -- talking about policy and facts and (at DRV) whether or not the closing admin acted within policy and procedure. Which is more disruptive: resigning with one account and participating in an AfD & DRV with a new account or blocking an editor in the middle of a DRV that editor started -- causing some confusion on that page -- when even the blocking admin admits the editor had no "intention to be abusive"? I'm not wikilawyering about WP:SOCK: I simply didn't abuse it in the way Versageek said I did. Look: Either I have the right to a clean start or I don't. Versageek doesn't like the idea that I spoke at the AfD while people didn't know my prior conflict with Shankbone, and in a vague, abstract way there could be something wrong with that, although it isn't wrong in the letter or spirit of SOCK, which is about abuses involving simultaneous accounts. The problem he points to simply wasn't simultaneous with the Noroton account, which I'd stopped using by Oct. 5. By sticking "sock" labels on all my accounts and blocking me for a week, which unnecessarily raised the level of drama, Versageek looks like he's trying to affect the DRV, or perhaps he's mad at me for sharply criticizing Jake Wartenberg. Is Versageek punishing me for holding opinions perhaps opposed to his own? When an admin goes beyond policy and confuses sharply opposing (but civil) expressions of points of view with disruption, that suspicion naturally comes up. Although Versageek didn't bring this up, I will: My using CountryDoctor and Reconsideration and JohnWBarber together could be interpreted as a violation of WP:SOCK, particularly the way that policy is now written. I've said elsewhere on my talk page that when I started using these alternate accounts, they were discouraged but not prohibited by SOCK policy, the language of which focused more on ''abusive'' use of alternate accounts.(for instance, the lead then stated, ''While many reasons for using alternative accounts are acceptable, a number of uses for them are explicitly forbidden.'' ; from "Avoiding scrutiny" subsection: ''Alternative accounts should not be used to edit in ways that would be considered improper if done by a single account. it is a violation of this policy to create alternative accounts in order to confuse or deceive editors who may have a legitimate interest in reviewing your contributions.'' -- No one would have had a legitimate interest to make comparisons between any of my new accounts, ever, or between any of them and Noroton while I was using that account) It wasn't even prohibited for Reconsideration to comment in an RfC for a change in style policy at the time that account did so. Both the Reconsideration and JohnWBarber accounts participated in AfDs, which goes against policy as currently written. My bad, and I wouldn't do that again -- but let's not pretend that any harm was done. The idea of having only one account participate in policy page discussions, AfDs, etc. is so that you don't avoid scrutiny. But anyone who scrutinizes the edits of Reconsideration would gain no insight into JohnWBarber or vice versa, so absolutely no practical problem occurred here. Versageek is concerned about scrutiny involving the Noroton account, but once that account finally wound down its editing and resigned, it stopped being subject to WP:SOCK. The "scrutiny" that socking improperly avoids is supposed to be "justified scrutiny" (in the words of older versions of WP:SOCK) -- scrutiny of misbehavior of various sorts. Unjustified scrutiny -- scrutiny in order to continually bring up past actions of an editor even though doing so only clouds the issue -- is what CLEANSTART is supposed to help an editor avoid. The purpose of using separate accounts was originally to avoid having editors who were antagonistic to me start stalking me in areas separate from politics, and I used separate accounts to prevent the kind of unjustified scrutiny that would lead to those antagonistic editors following me. After a while, I became unconcerned about that, but it was why I did it and initially it was not a violation of policy to do it for that reason. I also found I became more annoyed when I logged in as Noroton than when I logged into the other accounts. I'd been planning on unifying the accounts eventually, but I'd hoped to do it silently. Since I knew I wasn't being disruptive with any of the accounts and was never deceptive, it was never a priority for me to unify them (and until recently, I didn't know how easily I could combine the long watchlists). If any admin had simply emailed me and told me I was violating or seemed to be violating WP:SOCK, I'd have looked into it and, finding the more recent language at that policy, simply shuttered all but one account. It would have been just that easy if any admin or checkuser handled it that way. Of course, then we would have avoided the drama at the DRV and ANI. Given the lack of a policy violation involving the Noroton account, I have to wonder at the motives of Versageek or whoever asked him to checkuser my accounts, because this looks like it was designed to affect opinion at the DRV. At this point, I'd prefer simply to have the JohnWBarber account. I'll probably drop that account at some point in the future and -- again-- exercise my right to ]. Participating in AfDs with both the Barber and Reconsideration accounts was a violation of SOCK, and I have no intention of violating that policy. There was no ill effect from that violation. Since I didn't edit disruptively at all with JohnWBarber, at the DRV or anywhere else, there is no reason for anything other than dropping the block entirely, immediately. I have no intention of using more than one account at a time in the future. If a checkuser willing to work with me briefly will email me, I have a privacy concern related to this that a checkuser can handle, or I can contact one when I no longer have the block. ] (]) 16:23, 29 October 2009 (UTC) |accept = accept reason here ~~~~}}

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