Jonathan Barber

Who the hell is Jonathan Barber, I hear you ask.

Quite so. Who the hell is he? Nobody seems to think he is worth mentioning, with the single notable exception of Barber himself. As wp:User:JB196 he made a royal nuisance of himself, and continues to do so under various other names, because the Evil Wikipedia Admins wouldn't let him promote his self-published book in wrestling articles on Wikipedia.

Although he protested vigorously at being "outed" by name, it turns out that he outed himself.

Barber started down a disruptive path asserting intellectual ownership, and insisting on credit for, move lists he posted on the website http://www.obsessedwithwrestling.com. No novel content was ever shown, and eventually his shameless self-promotion and Wiki antics led OWW to delete his postings.

His MO is to add very large numbers of cite and notability tags on articles initially with the aim of deleting articles he'd contributed to but eventually just trying to fuck about generally with any wrestling-related article.

He was banned in September of 2006 following a particularly lame edit war on wp:Vic Grimes, see this edit where he tries to remove all the information he claimed to have added to the article.

Many sockpuppets and abusive anonymous edits followed, including a wp:Joe-job intended to get oww blacklisted at the meta spam blacklist.

He now hangs out on Wikipedia Review telling anyone who will listen that Wiki admins are abusive because some accounts he swears are not him have been blocked for exhibiting the same behaviour as his many sockpuppets. Whether he is lying or not is open to debate; since the entire source of the problem is his own fuckwittedness the issue is moot. One really forfeits the right to insist on assumptions of good faith after one has wasted so many hours of other people's time in this way.

Barber, then, is the canonical example of a frustrated vanity spammer, the kind of person to whom Wikipedia should and does give the bum's rush, but in doing so causes much drama as grudge-bearers and the vanity spammer himself tease out the inevitable by pretending to be a genuine user committed to enforcing policies and improving the project.

I don't have a good idea how to deal with such querulousness and outright trolling within Wikipedia processes; the usual tactic is Revert, Block, Ignore, but when each new incarnation insists they are a New and Genuinely Helpful user even this becomes very difficult, even if the drama is at least contained to a minimal locus.