User:Rick31415

E-mail response Greetings. Perhaps your misunderstanding is this: User:Mattwilkins is not a "Wikipedia entry", i.e. it's not an article. It's a user page. Users are allowed to put on their pages pretty much what they want, as long as it's not defamatory, offensive, personally attacking, and so forth. Edits by others to people's user pages, especially when they accuse them of being trolls -- as your edits did -- are universally seen, and treated here, as vandalism. If there were an article on this person, that's another matter -- you can make any edits in conformance with reliable sources. On a user page, however, if a person wants to claim he's the king of Swaziland, we pretty much allow that. Hope this helps, Antandrus (talk) 13:52, 11 April 2008 (UTC)

Humblest apologies, my mistake. I had no idea that openly fraudulent information was allowed on Wiki, I always assumed that at least some accuracy was, well, attempted. I don't exactly encourage my students to use Wiki, but I'll certainly inform them of this policy.

In any event, I made no such accusation, simply stated a verifiable fact, although I guess it's irrelevant in light of this policy of acceptable misinformation.

Who gets to determine what is offensive? As a member of Team Judge, I find it very offensive to have my team misrepresented in this way. While misrepresenting my organization isn't a "personal attack", it's rather annoying to have people come and say "but I was told Judge didn't support MMOs" among other misprepresentations.

Should not these pages have a disclaimer or something, indicating that the information could be, in fact is encouraged to be, invalid despite any attempts to correct for accuracy? It's not uncommon at all for students/people to reference Wiki, and knowing that the mission of Wiki can be so easily subverted seems like good information to provide.

Thank you for your time, and apologies for my ignorance regarding acceptible deliberate misrepresentation on Wiki.

I guess I have no choice but to set up my own user page with deliberate innaccuracies, to balance out this problem.

Take care,

Rick

You're still not getting it, and I'd appreciate it if you'd knock off the sarcasm. It doesn't matter that he's a lying scumbag and whatever else you can show, he can do that. "I had no idea that openly fraudulent information was allowed on Wiki" -- it's not a Wikipedia article, it's a user page. If you have an issue with its accuracy, please discuss it with the person who wrote it, on his talk page. User pages have no more encyclopedic validity than Myspace pages, and no one polices them for accuracy. They're places people write about themselves, ostensibly for the good of the project. We have no referencing, verifiability, or reliable source requirements for what people put on their user pages. Please see WP:USERPAGE. Thanks, Antandrus (talk) 17:48, 11 April 2008 (UTC) Response to your second e-mail. I concur that he's engaging in questionable behavior here, but the end result is the same: fraud is allowed on user pages. Since this is the first time in four years I've seen someone bring this exact issue up -- accuracy and verifiability of claims someone makes on their user page-- probably the right place to post is the Village Pump (policy). I'd be curious to see what other people have to say. The only related issue I remember seeing is people claiming credentials (for example, I say I have a doctorate, which is true). The project has pretty much agreed to treat those claims with skepticism when the person is not posting with his real name. Anyway, hope this helps. I also suggest just addressing Matt directly here regarding his claims. By the way we have a rule (somewhere) about not pasting e-mail verbatim, so I know this may seem a little obscure to others reading this conversation: the gist of it is Rick has proven the inaccuracy of the claims Mattwilkins makes on his user page. But, it doesn't matter, it's a user page, you can lie in any manner you like on a user page, as per Wikipedia policy. Cheers, Antandrus (talk) 20:25, 12 April 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for the clarification. Joy, Rick