User talk:79.73.26.160

For attention of Cullen328
Good evening,. First, I apologise for pinging you from an IP talk page but I am seeking advice and I don't want any page watchers weighing in for the present. I am prepared, if necessary, to take this matter to a designated forum like ANI but, as I say, I would appreciate a prior discussion with a sysop whom I respect. One of the main reasons why I respect you is because you made this post on 2 August and showed that, although you were the blocking admin, you do have respect for Lugnuts as a human being. I was equally pleased to see this post by User:The Rambling Man on 18 August. As both said, editors are real human beings and WP:GRAVEDANCING is an abhorrent practice.

Which brings me to User:Blue Square Thing (BST) who has been doing just that for over four years. I am not linking his username just yet until I see what sort of advice you can provide but I will do so if you prefer it. Anyway, I am the former User:BlackJack and, after making over 100,000 edits, I got myself blocked at the end of 2017. I don't offer excuses but what happened was that I became sick to the teeth of never-ending issues on the site. I admit that one of the issues was BST himself because I considered him, with justification given his record of appalling errors and misinformation, to be incompetent. Anyway, I decided to abandon BlackJack and make a fresh start. Unfortunately, the issues would not go away and I fouled up, which was my own fault. At the time, I was under considerable real life stress because my wife was seriously ill and I was facing a court case over someone trying to defraud my late brother-in-law's estate. I was his executor and we would have had a huge financial loss if our case had failed. Fortunately, we had a top-rate QC and we won, but that happened much later.

Much of my work on WP concerned the early history of cricket but, to be fair, it was largely created in the 2000s when the site was a different world and the goalposts were nowhere near where they are now. Then, it was a case of creating articles as placeholders, really, and there was no inline citation functionality. Even so, when I created an article, I always supplied a list of source books and would say, if necessary, which one applied to a particular statement. If you look at the original version of 1795 English cricket season, that is a good enough example.

Without getting into too much detail, that article reached a point after occasional tweaks during several years of neglect where it was a start-class in need of more work. You can take this article as typical of my early work on the site, one of some 14,000 I think I created. Subsequently, it is typical of the way BST comes along to wreck my work out of pure spite, dancing on my "grave" as he does so. You can see this countless times if you look at articles created or developed by me across a broad spectrum but especially those in the Category:English cricket in the 18th century and Category:English cricket in the 19th century trees. His edit summary comments range from lies to libel via sarcasm and spite. He has got away with it for so long, I can only assume he is one of the WP:Unblockables.

I won't bombard you with a mass of examples at this stage but here are some of the libellous ones. If you look at his contributions and see the range of edits on 2 August 2021 from this one at 17:31 to this one at 17:41, he insists that an eBook written by me in 2005 "has been clearly discredited by leading cricket historians and the ACS as unreliable, especially with regard to 18th century cricket". That is a lie and it is also a libel which wrongly implicates The Association of Cricket Statisticians and Historians (the ACS) who actually ran a series based on my work in their quarterly journal. Not only that, The Cricket Society asked me to submit one of my essays from the work and they published that in their journal. I still have contacts in the ACS, though I am no longer a member, and one of these chaps has kindly informed me about BST's libellous attack. As for what the ACS guys think, they would not touch WP with a bargepole and they strongly object to "Red Face Thing", as they call him because of his errors, putting words into their mouths and trying to implicate them in his vendetta against me. I'm afraid you'll have to just believe me about all that but I can supply details of the publications if you wish. Needless to say, the ACS can hardly be said to have "clearly discredited" a work they have themselves serialised. I think to do so would make them look rather stupid, and that is something they are not.

I've no doubt you can find hundreds of BST's malicious edit summaries and, sometimes, talk page comments. I would mention that it is not just myself he attacks because he does not take at all kindly to WP:NEWBIEs who make understandable errors and he seems to have a particular problem with Indian editors. I can give you plenty of examples.

One of the worst issues with BST is his insistence that the statistical database CricketArchive is paramount among cricketing sources. It is not. In fact, its reliability is highly questionable and I for one think it should only be used if a writer wants to refer to a match scorecard and only then as an example of the scorecard or as help in verifying that the match did actually take place. CricketArchive has been built by voluntary contributors who have submitted scorecard data but there is little or no oversight; the method is very similar to that employed at IMDb and similar sites. Transcription errors from original sources are carried through to publication and there are serious software issues which impact pages like player profiles, career totals and so on. If you look at 1795 English cricket season again, you'll see that BST has removed the list of book sources I provided, all of which are widely recognised as reliable. In their place, he has effectively handed the article over to CricketArchive and has introduced false and misleading content which has reduced the article from a start in need of more work to a stub which is frankly risible. For example, despite what CricketArchive arrogantly claims, there was no first-class cricket in the 18th century, as the WP article on that subject explains quite well.

I've tried to keep this as brief as I can but there is so much to be considered that it is very difficult to do so without losing key points. Unlike some people who have been blocked, I accept that I was my own worst enemy because of the stress I was under and it was my own fault I got blocked. I wish the site well and I would like to see it grow to a point where it eventually receives academic acceptance, but I am not going to stand for someone like BST constantly having a go at me and lying about me and my work. I look forward to seeing your comments and will happily answer any questions you may have. All the best. Jack. 79.73.26.160 (talk) 19:57, 22 September 2022 (UTC)
 * Hello, Jack. I am sorry but I do not think that I can be of much help. The only thing that I know about cricket is that it is popular in the UK and India, that bats and balls are involved and that there is something called a wicket. That is literally all that I know. So I am in no position to evaluate competing claims about the reliability of sources. Your stories of the early days of Wikipedia, especially stuff about "placeholders" are of little interest to me. I have been editing since 2009 and the very first article I wrote, Dirk van Erp, was well referenced as have been all the other articles I have written, and not a single article I have made major contributions to has ever been deleted. That is because I prioritize quality over quantity, and do not like stubs referenced to database entries. Not a bit.


 * Now, on to your personal situation. If the sockpuppet investigation is accurate, you have a record of socking going back to 2010, possibly as recently as last month. Strictly speaking, this message is block evasion which I do not like but I will give you the courtesy of a response - just once. My advice is to engage in no sockpuppetry for at least six months, participate productively in other WMF projects and then try the standard offer. But if all you want to do is pursue your longstanding grudge against another editor, then Wikipedia is not the place for you. I have no idea how you would go about reporting BST to ANI without creating another sock account, and that would be a spectacularly bad idea.


 * Good luck. Cullen328 (talk) 21:34, 22 September 2022 (UTC)