The idea is brilliant and I love the concept of safe keeping humanity’s knowledge in a single database in which we all have grown to love. There’s an article for everything. Those who say Wikipedia is inaccurate are truly ignorant as the administration is inhumanely strict and prevents any drop of tainted information from seeing the light of days.Having said that, I’m giving Wikimedia specifically the Wikipedia encyclopedia a one star rating. The administration is a beast — truly totalitarian and ruled by corrupt and power hungry administrators. I’m thankful they prevent vandals. I’m thankful they have the tools to correct information. But they’ve grown wicked, and if you go against their preferences in editing, they band together to prevent you from further contributing.My experience with Wikipedia goes back to 2013. I’ve grown quite knowledgeable on the ins-and-outs of Wikipedia, the policies, and it’s guidelines. But after a long battle, the administrators prevailed in getting me banned completely. It began with one preference driven editor, then he brought out another powerful admin, the two being a famous tag team and banning people, and the rest of the administrators followed. There’s about 200 administrators and all of them seem to be chums. They do not freight about the immortality of their actions as they know they will face no consequences. They are at the top of the chain. Not even the folks of the Wikimedia Foundation — the office workers and data maintenance — have a say. I offered large sums of money to get my account back but to no avail.I’ll let out the elephant in the room: “Sergecross73” is a wicked one. It all began when I made a BLP error in my edits. He knows that the less people contributing to Wikipedia, the more room there is to make it his own. He banned me for three days without warning. In that time I argued with him on my talk page, and since administrators have emotions too, he obviously became angry that I went against wishes. He doesn’t want commoners disobeying him after all. When I was finally unbanned, I went on my merry way before facing a weeklong ban without warning. Basically, Editor #1 reverted Editor #2’s BLP related edit because it didn’t contain a source. I reverted Editor #1’s reversion because Editor #2 did in fact have a source in his added information. Sergecross73 didn’t like this though... HIS preference was that Editor #2 needed to have exactly TWO citations, not just one. I didn’t know Sergecross73 had a specific quantity in mind but nonetheless I was blocked. I apologized and tried persuading Serge into realizing it was a mistake and that I’d gladly comply with anyone’s opposing views. I always have and I always would’ve. Talk pages exist for a reason. Serge doesn’t think mistakes mean anything though. Even though I accidentally went against his ways, in a technical perspective, he says “He disobeys my preferences. No matter the circumstance. He’s gone.”The last paragraph is what lead on to over a year of constant disputes. During my week long ban I threatened to make another account and continue editing, and here’s why:===I love editing Wikipedia. The past few years have been amazing and I’ve had an intense care for the encyclopedia. I constantly strived to better myself and improve my edits. I fixed and revised typos, proof read, added sources, collaborated with other editors, actively used talk pages, heard all view points and rarely got into disputes. It’s become a huge hobby of mine and throughout the last year Sergecross73 became Hellbent on completely separating me from something I was passionate about. I even told him how much I loved editing but he twistedly perceived my explanation as my “vanity project” as opposed to an explanation as to why I’d never do any Wikipedia harm.And side note, I really never have done Wikipedia harm. At all. And if I have done it harm, than it was an error and I most likely would’ve complied with the opposing viewpoint.===Disagreeing with the ban Sergecross73 placed on me I began leaving bluff messages on my talk page: “Fine I’ll just edit using another account.”I then (complete bluffs:) listed a fake To Do list. “On other account: 1. Correct typos on Squirrels 2. Add citation on Beyoncé 3. Delete false information added to Physics 4. Add leah oh in NBA” etc.Despite having no proof of my fake activity, Sergecross73 indefinitely banned me and revoked my access to my talk page. That’s it. Over 10,000 edits and three years down the drain.Side note, Sergecross73 LOVED using past warnings against me. I was a good and honest user so I never erased things from my talk page. Sergecross73 saw the rookie mistakes I made during my first year, and some of the older warnings I received (which I in fact took to heart and used the criticism to better myself) and applied them to my most recent BLP related edit (an error) to finalize the ban.Now it was finally time to make a new account. I know sock puppetry is the number one sin of Wikipedia but we all forget the reasons they’re placed: to prevent vandals and people who disrupt Wikipedia; NOT to eliminate users administrators have personal grudges against. It’s also a way of tracking IP activity and pinpointing all edits to one person — which is fine by me, I’d love if all my edits were pinpointed to one account, but whose fault is it that this isn’t the way things can be?Using my first sock account, I built up quite a reputation. I got a few barn stars and had hundreds of edits — MOSTLY just being typo fixes and citation related. Sergecross73 somehow found out my account had similar activity to my original and blocked the account, even though there wasn’t any malice there.The cycle continued over and over again. Many accounts down the drain. “Chrissymad” who isn’t an administrator joined the bandwagon and treated it as a game, creating a “sock drawer” and using petty insults against me despite my gentle nature. Quite the trash talker. The only administrators more notorious than Sergecross73, “Ferret” joined around this time. I can see why Wikipedia user Ferret has such a simple name: all of the hate pages and complaints online about Sergecross73’s tyranny will trace back to him, but Googling “ferret” won’t necessarily bring up the Wikipedia editor now will it?Ferret all of the sudden began adding potential sock puppets that weren’t even ME to the sock drawer and now I was being blamed for edits (by the way, most of which didn’t even seem harmful) that weren’t even MINE. He didn’t even use IP-technology, he just saw that people were attempting to edit typos I was trying to edit, and the dude hates my guts so much (due to an argument we had) that he doesn’t care who gets injured along the way, as long as there’s no chance I get to engage in something I love.I asked my friend to log on her computer and try making some typo fixes that were bugging me but she got banned too. She was enthusiastic about trying Wikipedia but her plans to edit articles that were of her interest was stunted and she didn’t have a chance to be a part of the community because ferret saw that she had relations with me and thus wasn’t worthy of contributing.Over the course of my time on Wikipedia, I was thrilled to contribute photography of my own to various articles. An article about dogs that had no photos now had a beautifully taken photo of a dog that met all the relevancy of the article. And so on. Ferret took it upon myself to get every last photo I’d uploaded to Wikimedia Commons taken down on grounds that they A. belonged to a sock, B. were low quality (which they weren’t by any means), and C. weren’t mine — he backed up this claim in saying a few of them were screenshots. Which they were, I emailed photos from my phone and camera to myself, and downloading them takes awhile so I used the application “Screensaver” to quickly instill them within my files. Ferret is cruel, every photo I ever uploaded was removed and all articles that had a picture of mine were affected.Ferret is also slanderous. He told various people that my sole intention of contributing to Wikipedia is “putting pictures of my friends on Wikipedia articles”, which is outrageous. I took a picture of a mountain — clear, relevant, and the only photo on the page — but since my friend was standing there, smiling, in the bottom left corner, it could back up his slanderous claim. Ferret said the same for other pictures. One article was about genetics and I was attempting to show the correlation in facial features of sisters. One article was about facial scarring and I took a cool picture that went well with a paragraph. I uploaded some clear and concise sports photos too. Nonetheless Ferret began disregarding my original BLP related errors and began telling administrators “this guy uses socks to upload photos of his friends to Wikipedia”. All administrators mindlessly believe each other without a second thought so what was I supposed to do?/// Apparently there's a character limit so here: https:// docs . google . com/document/d/1-4anInEXv6fQGM_MgrG5jHjkU1IF_QrpdCZX30-WJYA/edit?usp=sharing. /// Links aren't allow so I had to adjust the format of the one to my Google doc. Just get rid of some spaces for full story. ///
