User:Zblace/Disclosure

DISCLOSURE:

After a very long inactivity in Wikipedia it is during 2019 and 2020 that I returned to active use mostly due to wanting to work on LGBT+ UserGroup activities, CEE content and HR Wikipedia issues. I also got back to my media literacy teaching and started instructing first time users on basic concepts, but also some meta overview and advanced tips 'n' tricks to get them onboard quicker than what the usual self-learning documentation-reading curve would provide for (especially on HR and SH Wikipedia where documentation is either missing or 'sub-optimal'). My focus was most often minority groups (LGBTIQ+) or less represented majority (Women and Youth). I would periodically face challenges that were badly/under/not-documented in local languages. For example unlike in USA the issue of IP range blocks is common in HR (providers are super 'cheap' with giving 'real' IP addresses). Therefore I started creating accounts for others relatively often. From local artists, activists to even students in different countries. Knowing how complicated this can get I even asked for help when I did University class demo. I also noticed people often had more than a single account, especially as I worked a lot with people who experienced hostility.

As of May 2020 I used a secondary user account 2020W to be able to edit more safely and to anonymously as I would write content related to mostly (green and left) politics, feminist/LGBTIQ+ and alternative culture in Croatia (I did few non-intentional edits also). I did this against the bias, suppression and control of conservative, nationalist, right-wing and even pro-fascist work of Admins of Croatian Wikipedia. At the time there was no work done by WMF or other entities in Wikimedia to deal with the situation. I hoped at least to defuse the attention from my primary account with my own name that I have used from the start of Wikipedia. During this time I did not use the account to vote or for other similar activities.

In late 2020 I confirmed use of 2020W account to a Simple Wikipedia Admin and CheckUser and stopped actively using it early 2021. Once the situation on HR Wikipedia got better in change of leadership, with 1 person globally banned and 3 other admins removed I stopped using the account alltogether. I made a mistake of not disclosing it or explicitly retiring it.

In February 2021 with the goal of supporting a queer organization, I created User:QueerSport as the organization was in a blocked IP range and under a deadline. For me this username sounded like generic name, as is gay athlete, as there were already QueerSport .org, .net, .info, .eu. However, not to EN and Simple Wikipedia admins, so it was percived as COI. The account was used only 11th, 12th and 20th of February 2021 as it was part of an ill-fated research attempt/test on Simple Wikipedia (of which both WMF Trust & Safety and local Simple Admin and CheckUser were informed). The account got blocked in Simple anyway after disputes with a few usual suspects and some admins who would not prevent conflict but left it to escelate in RfD process. The account was renamed QueerSEE but never had other active use.

6 months later 2020W and QueerSEE were linked to my main Zblace on the CU list and got blocked on English Wikipedia. This also triggered a global lock of those accounts and also of my primary account. The reason given was: "Long-term abuse: Zblace"...however as you can maybe figure out by now via links to contributions, these were neither long-term used, nor abused in the way that this was harmful to Wikimedia as a whole. There was a shared understanding also between admins on Simple (where I was blocked) and steward who did the global lock of my primary account and me that my work was underinformed, with communication in the escalated conflict inadequate, but intention was not malicious. Therfore the situation with global lock was cleared after direct communication with the steward who performed the global lock.

This disclosure is to serve as transparent overview of circumstances and conditions that document my secondary account use.