Me and Wikipedia/Open letter

This is an open letter to a small group of people. You know who you are.

Go and boil your bottom, sons of a silly person
You, the people to whom this is addressed, are banned from Wikipedia, usually not due to any action on my part. A banned user may not edit Wikipedia. At all. Under any account. Jason Gastrich, Jonathan Barber, Gregory Kohs, Judd Bagley, Don Murphy - you are banned not because of anything I did, but because of what you did. Which was, in the main, self-promotion.

I can certainly empathise with the likes of Lee Nysted and Don Murphy, whose problems were not wholly of their own making.

Your mother was a hamster and your father smelt of elderberries
I find it amusing that you obsess over me. Why? I was less than one tenth of one percent of the Wikipedia admin community. Sure, I committed such flagrant abuses as blocking an editor whose sole contribution was an article titled "Paki Bastard" with the content "sWEATY CUNT, i HATE HIM", but for some reason none of the other admins seemed to regard this as a pressing problem. Wiki admins are funny that way.

So: I am not banned. I can edit whenever I like, either anonymously or using accounts. And - get this - nobody cares. I mean, really, nobody cares. I am just some middle-aged guy from England. Nobody in their right mind would give a damn whether I edit Wikipedia or not. What difference does it make to the world if I choose to walk away from the whole sorry bunch of you and edit the occasional article on some obscure but worthy topic in which I have no vested interest? Do you honestly think the world gives a damn? I somehow doubt it. But I do think it's worth volunteering the occasional hour to document obscure but important topics. So I will probably be around Wikipedia - under one name or another - for a while. Or not. Depends whether I can go cold turkey, really, and how much singing I have in the calendar. And how much the wife lets me spend on building the railway layout.

The thing is, though, that even if I did want to return to the JzG account and get the sysop bit back, all I have to do is ask. That's it. And the reason I don't is not because you are a bunch of shameless self-promoting fools who make life a misery for those around you - although that is certainly true - but because I can no longer be arsed to clean up the crap you leave behind you.

There are a thousand more admins, at least some of whom are prepared to clean up the crap you leave behind you.

And that's an end of it, really, because ultimately the problem is not me, it's you. I've walked away from the lot of you - despite your apparent desire to pursue me - but Wikipedia's collective memory, of which I was a very small and insignificant part, remembers you and why you were banned.

I fart in your general direction
So, if you think you've found one of my other accounts, congratulations, award yourself a putty medal and share your joy with all your friends. That, plus a couple of bucks, will get you a cup of coffee. Sure, it will make you look sad and obsessive, but what the hell. I am no longer invested in Wikipedia, and accounts mean nothing to me. Find one, I'll make another. I am allowed to because unlike you I am not banned, and I can do it because unlike you I am not here to promote myself, but instead to build a great encyclopaedia. For values of great that are not intimately tied to my own vested interests. Feh, what the hell. It's just zis website, you know?

Any time you're in England be sure to look me up, I will buy you that coffee. Now go away or I will taunt you some more.

Guy