Sorry for the delay - I've been on the Aran Islands and away from internet access for most of the past week. The Wikipedia situation is now sorted (phew!) but I wonder how many other people have been caught in the same trap and not been able to kick up a fuss from without the Wikipedia project?

...can someone ask on that Administrators' Noticeboard if someone can provide the link to the relevant "Requests for checkuser" archive?

And also point out that there is no reference to either me or User:Halton on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:RFCU/ - i.e., proper procedures before blocking have not been followed in this case. Most people do not check this sort of thing, so it's worth pointing their browser in that direction.

From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Hayden5650

User:Gerry Lynch openly admitted to homosexuality which immediately sets off alarm bells due to the Homosexual agenda. More specifically, looking at Gerry's editing patterns from May thru June 2006 he edited immensely every day, except on June 3rd 2006, where he only made one edit which coincides with the day of Runcorn's first edit. From then on over the next couple of months, Runcorn seems to focus entirely on adding stubs and cats and all that sort of crap to articles, no doubt for the sole purpose of bringing up contribution numbers, which is naturally followed by credibility. I'm sure if you could cross reference 2 graphs with edits numbers per day running up the 'y' axis and time along the 'x' axis, you would soon very clearly see that low editing periods for one user are matched by high editing periods for the other, and vice versa. --Hayden5650 09:18, 24 July 2007 (UTC)

Interesting indeed. I'm not sure if I get the 'homosexual agenda' comment, unless it shows some familiar editing pattern. But yes, I see your point about contribs - Alison ☺ 09:21, 24 July 2007 (UTC)''

Groupthink, obsession with circumstantial evidence, and a little bit of outright homophobia. Nice bunch of peoople they are.

At this stage, someone must be asking why I care? Why not just walk away from Wikipedia and let the college kids and computer geeks on a power trip get on with it? Well, Wikipedia is, like it or not, the most used reference source on the internet. Do a Google search for most people or places and their wikipedia entry is one of the first five hits. Banning from Wikipedia, used cleverly and subtly, could be a way of writing whole shades of opinion into the back pages of public opinion. This is fairly disturbing stuff.

And in the real world, software similar in principle to that used to declare me a sockpuppet is increasingly being used to detect 'terrorists' and 'criminals'. Even the most cursory glance at my Wikipedia edit history would demonstrate that I am not a sockpuppet; and you'd like to think in real life that people would carry out similarly simple checks before they threw people in jail, or worse. Well, ask Lotfi Raissi (if you'll excuse the link to wikipedia) about that.

I edit on Wikipedia using my real name. My real name is verifiable as a real person by a simple google search. I have been using wikipedia without any problems for three years.

Yesterday I logged in to update some of the Turkish election pages on wikipedia. I found that I was blocked by [[User:Dmcdevit]] for allegedly being a sockpuppet of a user named Runcorn. I have never heard of a user named Runcorn. If I were a sockpuppet, it would be rather silly to use my real name.

Indeed, Wikipedia's own advice on sockpuppets states that "sock puppet accounts usually show much greater familiarity with Wikipedia and its editing process than most newcomers. They are more likely to use edit summaries, immediately join in existing edit wars, or participate vocally in procedures like Articles for deletion or Requests for adminship as part of their first few edits. They are also more likely to be brand new or a single purpose account when looking at their contributions summary." I.e. - someone who has made over 1000 edits, most of them relatively minor ones, over three years.

I was unable even to request that my page be unblocked, as my work IP address has also been blocked, so when I got home that night I requested that my page be unblocked. When I logged in this morning I found that my block had been confirmed by a wikipedia user who claimed that a computer programme said that I was a was indeed a sockpuppet, and that she had no reason to doubt that and was maintaining the block on my account indefinitely!!! I can't appeal this, because my account and my IP address have been blocked!

The page where my case is discussed is at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Administrators%27_noticeboard/Incidents#User:Gerry_Lynch_Unfairly_blocked_as_a_sockpuppet

If you are a wikipedia user, please, please, help!

Jimbo Wales' libertarian paradise is turning in to a Kafkaesque nightmare...