User:ToBeFree/Controversial edit log

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This is an old revision of this page, as edited by ToBeFree (talk | contribs) at 03:04, 2 September 2019 (→‎Possibly controversial situations: fix month name at second occurrence as well). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

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Introduction

The mere existence of a page with this name might one day be reason for people to oppose me in an RfA. That's okay, if you think that an administrator should never have made any controversial edits in the past. I rather think that this page is a very useful way to explain some parts of my edit history, and that learning from mistakes is, in the end result, better than never having been in such a situation. I am human, and it takes time, and sometimes errors, to learn. This page documents that I am capable of learning, willing to learn and - honestly - overall a nice person. Shit happens; understanding that it has happened is the important part.

The mere existence of a comment that mentions "RfA" as a possibility for the future might be considered a reason for opposal by some people as well. Especially if I make mistakes after clarifying that I do see this as a possibility. My answer to that is: I am self-confident and honest enough to create this page anyway. If that's really considered to be a problem by many people in the future, I'd be surprised. I'm still human, and I'm still learning. Just like everybody else, including all current administrators.

This page will, of course, continue to exist and be expanded forever... Hopefully not, but you know what I mean. Especially in terms of administrator accountability, I consider it to be a useful idea that others might want to implement too. If you are an administrator or "administrator-hopeful" reading this, have made mistakes in the past, and do not have such a log, please consider clicking here. If there have been too many issues to list in the past, a short summary might be a nice idea.

If you would like me to include a bad edit below, please add a message on my talk page, specifying the exact edit (diff) that you are complaining about. Please consider that you might be happier if I notice and include it myself one day.


Bad edits

Looking at this, I have been unnecessarily allergic to modifications of my talk page comments. My signature was suddenly appearing below text that I did not write. It is good for me to have learned that this is a pet peeve of me, and knowing this will help me to react more calmly if it happens again.

  • 2019-04-26, 5 years ago: Silly me dropping my global Huggle bot password in a Wikidata revert summary (wikidata:Special:Diff/925352416). It is disputable whether hastily saying that it wasn't my Wikipedia password (wikidata:Special:Diff/925355871) was downplaying the severity of the issue. The permissions required by Huggle are pretty comprehensive and would have encompassed admin tools like blocking users and protecting pages. Bot passwords prevent a takeover of the account, but they do not prevent automated misuse. The standardized nature of bot passwords further makes it easy to identify them in a huge list of recent changes, allowing an attacker to write a script that waits for incidents like this one to happen, disrupting Wikipedia during the 80 seconds that I needed to fix the issue. Potential damage in a nutshell: 80 seconds of remotely controlling my account.
    Actual damage: Likely none, but this is extremely hard to verify because it involves searching all logs on all projects listed at Special:SiteMatrix.
    Actual damage: Luckily none, per phab:T221998#5141555 ~ ToBeFree (talk) 20:21, 26 April 2019 (UTC)

Possibly controversial situations

These situations have not been completely "bad" in my opinion, but might cause an onlooker to raise an eyebrow. I will try to avoid these issues in the future.

  • The title of this page is possibly self-referential. See #Introduction.
  • 2018-03-19, 6 years ago: Relatively unnecessary ANI report. I should have tried at least once to remove the personal attack myself. I should also have read WP:OWNTALK and WP:UP#CMT.
  • 2019-05-13, 5 years ago: Unnecessary request and RfC to create a page in the full-protected MediaWiki namespace: See the withdrawal notice at Special:PermanentLink/896892472#Request for creation for a summary.
  • 2019-05-16, 5 years ago: Although theoretically covered by WP:NOTCOMPULSORY, I consider myself to be voluntarily bound to WP:ADMINACCT. For this reason, my initial message at User talk:ToBeFree/Archive 6#Frank Millet Edits (which I had quickly struck) was inappropriate. I have also overestimated the time needed to deal with the request. Diffs: 897377918, 897378668, 897379971, 898631971.
  • 2019-06-03, 5 years ago: Unnecessary COIN thread creation (Special:Diff/900094129, User talk:ToBeFree#tbf-incorrect-2019-06-03, Special:Diff/900111983) – theoretically justifiable by WP:BURDEN (no inline citations in challenged text), but done only because of a misunderstanding on my part.
  • 2019-06-04, 5 years ago: Insufficient reason given for image replacement revert based on negative press coverage (heise.de, netzpolitik.org, dewiki) of the photographer's behavior towards reusers. Diffs: 900279765, 900280497, 900281271.
  • 2019-06-04, 5 years ago: Using a German machine translation service that, contrary to Google Translate, produced nice results but led to unclear copyright status. Revision deletion request: Special:PermanentLink/904425280
  • 2019-08-01, 2019-08-05 and 2019-08-21, 4 years ago: August was an extremely stressful month for me. When I see suspicious editing patterns, I usually keep an eye on the situation and message the user when in doubt. In August, though, I have lacked the time to do so properly. Instead, I have created noticeboard reports to make administrators aware of possible needs for intervention. This may seem worrying, as ANEW/AIV reports may look as if I would have blocked the user. This is not the case. I would not have blocked these users; the whole point of creating the reports was to let other administrators have a calm, detailled look while I was stressed.

Previous accounts

"84.60.151.175": A child's first steps at Wikipedia

German non-business IP addresses are often dynamically assigned, like this one. For this reason, only the edits described below have actually been made by me.

Recoverable diffs:

When I was 10 years old, in 2006, I was very proud of already having an own internet domain. There was a colorful website with an iframe menu, created using Word 2000's wizard and uploaded via LeechFTP by myself. One page on this website was dedicated to a game called Chris Sawyer's Locomotion, for which I had created some absolutely useful, indispensable modifications... like replacing airplane sprites with bus images, to create flying buses.

One day, I randomly stumbled upon the German Wikipedia article about the game. I knew nearly nothing about Wikipedia except that it is visited by many people; all I saw was a blue link labelled "edit section" above the "External links" section. I was happy about what I believed to be asking for a link to my fan page. I added my link and submitted the edit. There was no edit filter warning me about this; the AbuseFilter extension did not exist before 2008. I did the same on the de:Transport Tycoon page.

The next day, I had a look at de:Chris Sawyer’s Locomotion again. It looked as if I had never edited it, and I was seriously wondering if I had correctly submitted my edit. This time, I added two links: One to my website, and one to a frequently visited, well-known fan forum.

One day later, the title of my link had been modified to be less promotional. At that point, I understood that someone else had modified the article as well. I was content with the new version and understood the change.

Some weeks later, I received a public message at the large Locomotion forum. An experienced forum user (now site owner) asked me if it was me who had "sneaked in" the link again, and told me that continuing to do this would cause me to "get into big trouble" with the Wikipedia community. Oooooh no! Especially at that age, this really scared me. I promised to never do it again, and I quickly went to the article to remove my link... but someone (maybe the message sender) had already removed it. Today I understand that he knew my age, and that his message may have been intentionally intimidating. Well, at least it worked.

I would have linked to diffs, if they existed! This is strange. The German article page has allegedly been "created" on 24 March 2008. This is not the case. The edit history also contains no trace of the 2006 edits. The edit to de:Transport Tycoon available at this diff. I guess the second one got lost in a deletion.

"Sonictroot": My constructively used previous account

I am not entirely sure, but I believe that I simply did not know about the possibility of renaming a Wikipedia account. I did not like my old username anymore and registered "ToBeFree" on the German Wikipedia. Later, I learned about the new "Single User Login" process and requested usurpation of the same-named English Wikipedia account that had been abandoned without any contributions.

More about the usurpation:

German non-business IP addresses are often dynamically assigned, like this one. For this reason, only these specific edits have actually been made by me.

"InfiniteAdventures": A silly reservation attempt

I had originally registered this account to reserve a name, without ever intending to make real edits using the account. I have openly disclosed my identity by logging it as "account creation" by my main account, and by disclosing the connection on the user page before making any edit with the account. Afterwards, I have made the account global using Krinkle's "Global SUL" script and made edits to the English Wikipedia:Sandbox to protect the account against usurpation by any other person. I made just enough edits to allow the account to become "autoconfirmed", because I believed that an autoconfirmed account would not be renamed on request by anyone else. This is probably actually true. I was not aware that this permission had been required to create articles during WP:ACTRIAL. I have never attempted nor intended to create an article using this account.

Creating this account and making the sandbox edits has not been a violation of the WP:SOCK policy at any time. This is not, and has never been, a shared account or a "role account". The wording of the original disclosure, "maintained by ToBeFree" might sound like a temporary assignment, but it has never been temporary. It has also never been intended for spamming or speaking in the name of a group. I have never been intending to create articles, never been intending to add links, never been intending to join discussions, and also never been intending to promote anything by creating this account. The only reason was to prevent anyone from registering this nick on Wikipedia. It was all about vanity, not profit.

About two weeks later, I thought about the account again, had a closer look at the username policy and understood that the original name is violating that specific policy by unambiguously representing the name of a product. I also decided that "reserving" Wikipedia names is a silly idea, so I sent a global rename request. The new name is "SoulOfTheInternet", which has been my secondary nickname on IRC and internet forums for years. If I ever become an administrator, this account will be renamed to "ToBeFree (mobile)" or "ToBeFree (non-admin)".

Note: I have, right now, entered "SoulOfTheInternet" into Google, and I found at least two things that have nothing to do with me.

  1. A suicidal person using the same name on Reddit has written disturbing posts on Reddit about 3 years ago. They have even used CamelCase capitalization. That has not been me. I have been using the name on IRC and internet forums before the Reddit account has been registered, and I have nothing to do with it.
  2. A professor from Canada has published a book with the title "The Soul of the Internet" in 1997. I am not affiliated with them or their book in any way.

Just like "ToBeFree" (or "to be free", and all spelling variants), this name is not as unique as I hoped it to be. Not even my CamelCase is unique.

There may be one question left: Why would anyone attempt to "reserve" the original name on Wikipedia?

The answer is: Because suddenly, in 2018, someone has publicly announced the upcoming release of a commercial game with the name that we had been using as children for an e-book fun project since 2010. Ironically, I had been working on a complete rewrite of our novel for months, planning to release a freely licensed hardcover book edition to fulfill our childhood dream. I became defensive when I saw that a computer game company was possibly about to threaten our usage of the name. Without thinking much about it, I registered two domains with the novel's name and created the account on Wikipedia. I had even been considering registering spelling variants of the name as well. That was all very silly.

Ironically, this involvement in Wikipedia and the global rename request may have subtly reawakened my interest in all the fascinating meta-stuff happening behind the scenes at Wikipedia. I have requested the "rollback" permission shortly after, and a wonderful journey began.

Userspace trash

User:ToBeFree/Trash

Unnecessary historic pages

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