John D'oh

"John Doe" is an alias for an anonymous poster who showed up in URC in November 2004 and without obvious provocation[1] posted an article entitled "What doctors/researchers think about wearing a helmet" which consisted mostly of selective quoting of abstracts from a Medline search for all papers referring to bicycle helmets, with the apparent aim of showing that doctors/researchers universally think that wearing a helmet is a good idea and will prevent serious injuries. Despite his initial position that "If you want to read about the benefit of wearing a helmet while riding a bicycle, all you have to do is research the matter", it soon became clear that his concept of research omitted such important steps as, for example, winnowing the abstracts to find which were actually relevant, or for that matter reading the actual papers themselves: had he done so he would have found that many of the papers he referenced were irrelevant, some of them did not support his position, and some contained basic procedural or arithmetical inaccuracies that render their conclusions insupportable. URC posters made many attempts, often at considerable effort, to explain that "research" requires more than keyword matching and cut and paste, but without success: most followups suggesting the employment of critical reading faculties met with one of two responses:

He then started some other threads on the topic of helmets (all of them substantially standard post no. 2) but showed no interest in talking about any other aspect of cycling and was monotonously predictable in his posts on this one. He doesn't appear to be UK-based either. Consequently, the hypothesis adopted by many regulars is that his standard response no. 1, usually reserved for those who post actual evidence, is not aimed at the person he's quoting, but is, rather, self-referential: a placeholder post to note where a troll would have been posted if he had the wit to do so. John Doh's comedy potential is strictly limited and soon exhausted. There is no realistic chance he will ever become better informed: this is probably a good thing since he is such an obviously uncritical zealot that even the most clueless newbie is unlikely to be taken in. It is just possible that, rather than being a troll, it was a sock-puppet for one of the regulars haivng some fun at the expense of the rest of us, but on balance given the intelligence of the possible suspects I don't think it was half subtle enough for that. He has not been seen for some time, and is not missed. At all. Not even slightly. [1] John Doe showed up in URC after a discussion of helmets in rec.sport.skating.inline, in which one or two URC readers were posting. Although uk.rec.cycling was not mentioned during that discussion, it's possible that he used Google Groups or similar to learn more about the people he was talking with there and decided to pay us a visit. The Management would like to acknowledge the invaluable assistance of Daniel Barlow in the preparation of this mini-FAQ. Specifically, most of it is a straight Copy'n'Paste, which is How We Like It :-)
 * the one-word top-posted response "Troll." (above the untrimmed quoted contents of the original post, including extended headers) - whihc is usually taken to be self-referential, of course.
 * a post along the lines of "web site: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?db=PubMed; Search criteria: "bicycle helmet" "head injury" children; Results:....." and a list of partial abstracts copied & pasted from the online Medline search (after a while he started cutting out some of the ones which contradicted him, without acknowledging their existence).