User:Apotheon

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Apotheon is right.

I am an itinerant pedant and Individualist. I have been called a scholar and a gentleman, but I don't let that sort of slander get me down.

I got started at Wikipedia by writing short, high data density articles about a couple of dinosaurs that I noticed were missing entries, and went on to start making minor edits to a number of articles relating to Japanese history and martial culture. I'll probably add more in that area in the future, as it's a subject of some fascination for me.

Once upon a time, I was the first bona fide employee of the Wikimedia Foundation, then I moved to Colorado. For several years, I wrote for money, mostly on the subject of IT Security, but that engagement ended around the same time the publisher's CSS changed so that most of my articles with code samples in them have horribly broken formatting now (and, no longer being a contributor, I no longer have access to the editing interface to fix any of that). More recently, I've been programming. Such is the life.

My Bacon number is three. I don't have a finite Erdős number yet.

I favor copyfree licensing, relatively honest politicians (an endangered species, if in fact there are any left at all), non-aggression, and the Unix philosophy.

I also tend to babble about programming from time to time -- especially in Ruby.

Disturbing Trends[edit]

  • I find the GNU/FSF biases of Wikipedia pretty damned unenlightened and annoying. Double-standards for article "notability" that never affect GNU projects or FSF propaganda are not seemly for an encyclopedia that pretends to take an NPOV position. Consider, for example, the fact that the tmux article was deleted but the GNU Screen article remains sacrosanct, or that a term with growing usage ("copyfree") for a licensing policy distinct from others is somehow a "redundant neologism" when applied to software templates, but the quite redundant DFSG, OSI, and Free Software definitions all get to remain in place and get propagated across the site (probably because they do not exclude copyleft software licenses).
  • Given the way certain policies are applied, it seems like people deleting things have a significant advantage over those trying to improve them on Wikipedia (all else being equal, and sometimes even if the people deleting things are basically just applying a bias-confirming blackout effort to certain subjects).

Evidence of Malice[edit]

JBsupreme[edit]

User JBsupreme clearly has biases with regard to specific software pages. Consider this https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk%3AJBsupreme&action=historysubmit&diff=369922555&oldid=369482031:

== tmux deletion ==
In the archive of the deletion discussion (I didn't even know the thing had been brought up for deletion until today), you suggested someone might mention some "significant" references to tmux on your talk page. Here are some mentions I've found in the space of about three to five minutes surfing around the Web:
* tmux, a BSD alternative to GNU Screen
* tmux vs screen questions on openbsd-misc
* Replacing window(1) with tmux -- in the NetBSD base system, suggesting it is at least considered notable by the NetBSD community
* Scripting tmux
* tmux(1) in base -- it looks like it might make it into the FreeBSD base system, too
* Migrating to tmux from GNU/Screen
* Screen vs tmux at WikiVS
I'm curious about the reasons tmux is considered non-notable while GNU Screen, splitvt, and Twin (windowing system) are considered notable. There really isn't anything more notable about GNU Screen, as far as I can tell, other than the fact it has received more coverage by simple fact of having been around a lot longer. The actual notability of any instances of independent coverage of it do not seem greater, it does not serve any earth-shattering purpose that tmux does not serve just as well, and so on. It seems that either tmux should be undeleted or GNU Screen should be deleted (along with probably 98% of the other software articles on Wikipedia), especially since I'm not aware of any operating system maintainers talking about adding GNU Screen to the base system such that even on a non-GUI system there would be a terminal multiplexer.
I look forward to your response. Since I don't actually check other pages on Wikipedia very often these days, please feel free to ping me on my own talk page. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Apotheon (talkcontribs) 23:32, 25 November 2009 (UTC)

He chose to ignore my questions for seven months, almost to the very day (one day short), then quietly deleted them along with a lot of other material on his talk page, rather than consider offering any insights into his reasoning, admitting that it is an inconsistent policy he pursued with regard to deletion, or any other actions one might expect of an honest attempt to work with the community that makes Wikipedia such a valuable resource.

I notice splitvt no longer has a Wikipedia page, but no answer was forthcoming as to why GNU Screen or Twin is "notable" in a manner that tmux was not.

Don Cuan[edit]

This jackass just went around deleting everything he could find related to anything "copyfree" then, when I reverted some of his vandalism, started reverting edits I had made to other, unrelated articles, and making edits to pages in sections that were currently in discussion on talk pages where I had recently participated in discussion of how to edit those sections (and his edits did not take any of the discussion into account) without contributing to the discussion at all, as well as reverting my reversions without even consenting to any kind of reasonable discussion on the matter. I wash my hands of this shit, for now at least.

As detailed to some extent in discussion currently archived on my talk page, he seems to have some kind of moral opposition to engaging in, or even paying any attention to, any community process related to determining things like notability. He just makes unilateral snap judgments and starts deleting shit. The deletion bias of certain elements of the Wikipedia editor community pretty well guarantees he'll get away with such vandalism for as long as he shows any interest in it.