deleted essay by Blissyu2 (reupload)

In an ideal world, a lot of things would have happened differently. We can't change the past, but we can perhaps learn from them. In this essay, I am going to stick to what I think now, in 2022, should have happened in relation to my early experience with the English Wikipedia in 2004-2006 and what I would like to see happen in the future.

Some Wikipedians have criticised me by saying that I should have made an account and that none of these cases of mistaken identity would have happened if I had simply made an account, but I disagree. I think it is quite reasonable to use something without an account to start with while you are trying it out, and that is precisely what I was doing. I did make an account in November 2005, after I had decided to use it properly, and while using that account I was well-respected and was never blocked (at least not until I was banned permanently for having been incorrectly banned a year earlier, a ban that was never enforced). There were certainly no examples of me actually breaking any of Wikipedia's policies, certainly no examples of "vandalism" that I have been accused of. At worst, I created some articles that were subsequently deleted after RfDs and had some additions to existing articles deleted - but that was never considered by anyone to be worthy of a block, let alone a permanent ban, and in none of the discussions to legitimise my ban has any of that been mentioned at all. They were all legitimate attempts to create legitimate articles and to contribute constructively. There has never been any serious debate about that. This was a situation of mistaken identity.

Some Wikipedians at the time complained that the issue was that my ISP, Internode, hadn't filled in their DNS lookup correctly as it looked like they were a school, but in fact that was the fault of Wikipedia who had not updated their DNS lookup. There were external lookups outside of Wikipedia that proved that it was a legitimate (and quite expensive) ISP, and not a school.

Even if it was a school, it did not justify the blocks and bans that were imposed on it.

The issue was that a small percentage of people who used that ISP without creating an account (an estimated 8 out of an estimated 800 users of Wikipedia from that IP range) used Wikipedia to vandalise, and those people deserved to be blocked.

The question then is how do they deal with that 1% of bad users of that ISP without hurting the 99% of users of that ISP who were good users?

The answer, you might say, is to tell people to create an account so that there are no cases of mistaken identity, however, when I tried that, that account was immediately banned for a year for the crimes done by other people, proving that Wikipedia had no interest in legitimately dealing with this.

In fact, had I never created the "Internodeuser" account, I would never have been banned.

So it therefore cannot be said that creating an account is the solution.

So what then is the solution?

What perhaps should have happened is for the Wikipedia administrators who were blocking people on an ISP for what was done by other people who share the ISP to have considered the possibility that they were wrong. There should have been a discussion about it to firstly establish the facts surrounding it and then work out what to do about it. While it was impossible for Wikipedians to identify the estimated 8/800 people on that ISP range who were doing the wrong thing, there could have been something else that they could have done.

One way around it would be to require people to use their Internode email address as part of creating an account, and to ban editing with the IP range but not the creation of new accounts. In this way, the 8 people who were doing the wrong thing would have been quickly banned and the other 792, including me, who were not doing the wrong thing would have survived intact.

Given this error, we then have to look at what they could have done better.

The 1-year ban was decided in an Arbitration that was not open to make a ban. That Arbitration was solely about the contents of the Internodeuser user page, which proved the wrongness of the misidentification of me as the sole vandal on the IP range, when in reality I wasn't a vandal at all.

The Arbitrators hearing that matter ought not to have considered a ban, let alone one for as long as a year, and ought not to have extended a simple request to become so serious.

It was this alteration from whether or not to delete a user page (which should have been handled in an RfD, not an Arbitration) to something that resulted in a year-long ban and ultimately a permanent ban that has lasted for now 17 years that created the problem, and they should never have had the power to do so.

There were many errors that led to this, including the fact that there was another user page created by another user about me that sought to get me banned under false pretexts, which was ultimately an aim to falsely garner support so that he could become an administrator (which worked, incidentally) and was not a legitimate user page.

What should have happened is that that user page should have been deleted.

If that user page had been deleted, then my user page would never have been created, as mine was only created to give an opposing view and to prove him wrong.

Therefore, what Wikipedia should have done was to:

(1) Delete the offending user page that lied about me so terribly

(2) Saving that, allowed my responding user page to exist

(3) Saving that, dismissed the Request for Arbitration as baseless and false

(4) Saving that, to have not allowed themselves to extend the Request for Arbitration to then allow them to ban me for a year

There were 4 mistakes on top of each other on that issue, and the only saving grace was that it was such a poorly-run procedure that they decided not to enforce the unjustifiable ban that was tacked on the end of it.

I then created my first account "Zordrac" a year later, having no idea that I even was banned (as nobody told me and it was never enforced), let alone that it was still in place, let alone that I was somehow in violation of it, and it was not in any way a sock puppet by any reasonable definition. I couldn't use Internodeuser even if I wanted to as I didn't know the password, as I had used some weird password that I had no way of remembering - not that I wanted to use that name anyway.

While using "Zordrac", I didn't get blocked at all and was widely credited by the community as being a good Wikipedian.

This should have been enough to warrant my ban being undone, as consistent good use of Wikipedia is justification for a ban being lifted.

However, instead my ban was ultimately extended and then made permanent without any consultation by anyone at all, solely based on the opinion of one Wikipedia administrator.

In fact, the majority of Wikipedia administrators disagreed and I was unblocked several times over.

What should happen now:

(1) My ban should be removed, against Internodeuser, Zordrac and all of the false claims of sock puppets.

(2) I should be allowed to use a new name "Blissyu2", the name I use on Simple Wikipedia, to give a fresh start.

(3) There should be no negatives against me for any false claims about me.

(4) I should be allowed to make a "fresh start".

(5) There should be an agreement to not allow anyone to mention anything related to this, and I shall be required not to mention it myself.

That's it!

I hope that in time this can occur.