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This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Trialsanderrors (talk | contribs) at 08:43, 27 November 2006 (Kiwi! - Deletion endorsed.). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

Revision as of 08:43, 27 November 2006 by Trialsanderrors (talk | contribs) (Kiwi! - Deletion endorsed.)(diff) ← Previous revision | Latest revision (diff) | Newer revision → (diff)
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Full reviews may be found in this page history. For a summary, see Misplaced Pages:Deletion review/Recently concluded (2006 November)


21st November 2006

Misplaced Pages:Long term abuse/HeadleyDown

Misplaced Pages:Long term abuse/HeadleyDown (edit | ] | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) — (AfD)

Significant POV sneaky vandal's LTA page, deleted by user:Pathoschild under the impression he was "inactive". But this was very misinformed. The vandal concerned is a chronic sock user, and has a habit when socks are identified of merely switching to new socks with new names and IPs. This LTA page under his "best known name" (the name Arbcom and many users know him as) is used to allow documentation of this vandal and information for admins, and counters his chronic abandonment of old discovered accounts and switching to new ones. At this time he is far from inactive, is presently back to his old tricks, and apparently seems to have (under a new name) yet another bunch of people knocking on arbcom's door. Please restore urgently, together with any other accidental related deletions, such as his user page/s, catefgories for HeadleyDown socks, etc which might have been deleted —The preceding unsigned comment was added by FT2 (talk • contribs) .

Can we move these pages to Meta or something? I agree with wanting to deny recognition, but it is undoubtedly helpful to have some kind of record of the MO of serial disrupters. Guy (Help!) 09:39, 21 November 2006 (UTC)
  • Endorse Deletion Firstly it's a good idea to ask the deleting admin first in this sort of case, I not you did that after raising this review, but I would suggest ask, wait, bring here if you don't get a response/think the response misses the mark. Secondly can you elaborate on how the page helped people recognise the actitivty (I'd guess the vast majority of people have never read it, yet still recognise the disruption caused without much effort), given the nature of the person where the socks don't have any obvious connection how is a list of previous sock names going to help anyone detect this vandal? I'm quite happy to believe some of the LTA pages had/have some value but vague assertions that it's "important", don't really cut it. Given that your account was only active for about a month prior to the deletion of the page, and the deletion was a couple of months back, I suggest picking up and becoming an expert on this vandal and maintaining that expertise isn't that difficult, so wads of documentation seem irrelvant. Also you claim that the vandal is still currently operating, please elaborate, again this is just a vague assertion, which users do you believe are this particular person and why? We've certainly had those who are the subject of LTA pages (either as the original or an imitator) come and request their recovery in the past (hence actually demonstrating some of the reasoning behind WP:DENY), so it doesn't seem unreasonable to ask for something a bit more concrete before going along with recovery --pgk 12:46, 21 November 2006 (UTC) After some thought and looking a bit closer, I've changed my mind. I'm not going the whole hog to suggest restoration but I do think there is probably a good case for this page, albeit my preferred choice would be to perhaps restore this to userspace, let it get cleaned up to remove the irrelevant stuff like pictures and so on, before making its way back into the main area. --pgk 21:02, 21 November 2006 (UTC)
  • Preserve somehow. Maybe meta, maybe restore, maybe something else entirely, but this information is very useful, and deleting these pages with even the principles of WP:DENY (which is not and should never be guideline/policy) has shown to be a mistake, given the recent issues with Crawford socks and the decided lack of information available about the situations. When losing this information causes our best and brightest users and admins to make otherwise good-faith decisions mistakenly, it's evidence that getting rid of the information isn't working. --badlydrawnjeff talk 13:33, 21 November 2006 (UTC)
    Well there was never a LTA page on Crawford, nor I doubt would there have been. The Crawford sock got picked up and dealt with pretty quickly, I would say that is evidence that an LTA page was largely irrelevant. As I say above I agree some information can be useful, but shrine pages are not. Your blanket assertion that it has shwon to be a mistake is a bit premature, I can certainly cite examples of vandals adding lists of their own sockpuppets to LTA pages and in one instance a screen shot of their own vandalism, I can show examples of one user who engaged in large amounts of pagemove vandalism (via socks) trying to get the LTA page on Willy on Wheels pages retrieved (on several occassions). You are welcome to your opinion on WP:DENY but many differ, similarly "don't feed the trolls" (which in my estimation is an equivelant of WP:DENY) is not endorsed by everyone. We need to take a realistic view from case to case WP:DENY isn't a blanket call to delete all information, it is a call to make sure we don't needlessly "glorify" vandalism or become an Encylopedia of rouges. But merely asserting that the page was "useful" does not make it so --pgk 15:07, 21 November 2006 (UTC)
    • No, there wasn't on Crawford, but the page for Crawford was deleted. We continue to delete these pages, and the information that we can use to make judgements like with the Crawford issue disappears. While I think WP:DENY is silly, I didn't have a firm opinion on the matter until this past week, so I think "usefulness," while not something that's a worthy argument for articles, is entirely necessary when judging issues like this. --badlydrawnjeff talk 15:27, 21 November 2006 (UTC)
      • I'm not necessarily disagreeing with you that "usefulness" is a valid reason, but a vague assertion of usefulness is no better than a vague assertion of "notability", "non-notability" etc. etc. If something is useful it shouldn't be difficult to specify what about it is useful, if it's full of junk it should either be deleted outright or heavily trimmed to prevent such pages becoming shrines. Some of the LTA pages were clearly of the former (does anyone not know that moving a whole string of pages to "on wheels" is unhelpful? Does anyone see value in a list of 100 usernames where there is no visible connection in the name and so cannot be "useful" in detecting further names). Whilst other LTA pages still exist and indeed there is no reason why others shouldn't exist. As I say it's a case of applying common sense on a case to case basis, to me it's just as silly for someone to say WP:DENY delete, delete as someone saying WP:DENY is rubbish ignore, ignore --pgk 15:47, 21 November 2006 (UTC)

In my view, as the person most aware of both HeadleyDown's actions, and also aware of the traffic related to people spotting him, and noting where he was active, this was a very useful resource that was in ongoing use. Its usefulness far outwieghed the issue of WP:DENY. HeadleyDown doesn't use Misplaced Pages to get a "fame page". he's normally used covert socks, new accounts, and gets off on pretending to be a genuine contributor. At present he's been censured on (I think) between 3 and 5 arbcom hearings, permabanned under multiple accounts, and his response to all this has been to continue the same under new IP, new socks, unconnected (on the surface) to his old ones. He's been doing this now at least 2, possibly 3 years, This page is an essential tool that several users refer to in educating people who want to know more in case he's active on their pages, and documenting where he's active. FT2 18:43, 21 November 2006 (UTC)

Sorry to labour this, but you are just asserting a vague notion of usefulness without saying why it is useful, again you stated above he was active right now etc. Come on spill the beans which accounts do you believe are this user. Indeed it's been deleted for nearly 3 months without anyone "noticing". I also note you created the page on 7 July, your earliest remaining edits to any article are from 11 July. Doesn't sound that complex to me if a brand new user can sign up and right up an LTA page on them. Looking further at the page it contains such useful information as " Known IPs: Any (uses IPs around the world)"," Physical location: Believed Hong Kong or possibly UK". Can you tell me how that information is useful for others to know they are dealing with the same vandal? (OK, I picked the worst two points I could just glancing down, but there is other stuff although arguably not as vague, still no where near being useful in identifying this guy) --pgk 19:21, 21 November 2006 (UTC) Struck through the above, my mistake I misread the date from the earliest contribution it is July 11 but 2004. --pgk 21:02, 21 November 2006 (UTC)
To address "and also aware of the traffic related to people spotting him, and noting where he was active" , to address this 4 other people than you edited the page. One changed some spaces to underscores, one replaced some ip with use of the {{ipvandal}} template, one added a picture (Irrelevant picture) and one tagged it for speedy deletion. --pgk 19:35, 21 November 2006 (UTC)
(Above points discussed with Pgk by email FT2 23:45, 21 November 2006 (UTC))
  • (Comment as deleting administrator) I'm sorry if my presumption that the malicious user was inactive was incorrect. I judged this from the edit history, which was only edited meaningfully by FT2 between 07 July 2006 and 23 July 2006. There being no content edits in nearly a month, I assumed it was a temporary vandal spree. Had you asked me directly, I would have restored it immediately and sent it to Miscellany for deletion instead. As it is, I have no opinion on this page. —{admin} Pathoschild 00:28, 22 November 2006 (UTC)
Understandable and reasonable. I figured once deleted it needed to be requested here rather than via direct approach to deleting editor. If that impression is incorrect then that's something learned today :) FT2 01:30, 22 November 2006 (UTC)
  • Restore. I recently went looking for the deleted article, and I didn't understand why I couldn't find it. It had valuable details for identifying the malicious user and understanding the scope and seriousness of their abuse. The difficulty in collecting those details allowed an especially long period of abuse. Given the record, I would not at all be surprised to see the malicious user return; in fact, I expect it -- especially now that the banning administrators have retired or otherwise withdrawn. Without the information on the deleted page, well-meaning editors and administrators will have to start all over again. The intention of WP:DENY is laudable, but at least in this case, incidental recognition would be the lesser of two evils. -- Shunpiker

PircBot

PircBot (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) — (AfD)

Deleted for being 'none notable software', but it has 100k+ Google hits and it's a commonly deployed IRC bot framework Darksun 02:53, 21 November 2006 (UTC)

I'd also like to add that PircBot is heavily referenced in the book 'IRC Hacks' by Paul Mutton, published by O'Reilly . --Darksun 02:59, 21 November 2006 (UTC)

WiktionaryZ

WiktionaryZ (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) — (AfD)

The article deals with a preparatory project for the Ultimate Wiktionary as part of the Wikimedia Project. Andres 01:43, 21 November 2006 (UTC)

Andres 02:19, 21 November 2006 (UTC)