Rfwoolf

From ChapmanCentral

wp:User:Rfwoolf is a perfect example of the sort of frustrating, rules-mongering timewaster that makes Wikipedia joyless for people like me who have to clean up after him.

After some comments from others I wondered if I was perhaps being a bit harsh on him, but looking back at it, no I wasn't. Rfwoolf pursued a grudge for over six months based on the fact that I "unilaterally salted" an article. As the logs clearly show, what I actually did was to restore the deleted history under the deletion review template. Just that. Why am I the bad guy here? Because I restored the history to facilitate a deletion review and the history proved beyond question that the article as Rfwoolf posted was indeed a repost in all but identical terms, so the other admins who deleted it as a G4 were right, with the result that the deletion was endorsed. Shoot the messenger, then. And keep shooting him for six months.

As I said towards the end of the debate: He had months to fix the deleted article, he did not fix it. He had months to file an RfC, he did not file an RfC. He had months to make contributions to the encyclopaedia, he did not make contributions to the encyclopaedia. And the debates he spawned are a perfect example of the kind of shit that is making this project joyless for those prepared to actually take on the occasional hard case, because even the blindingly obvious easy cases now bring crowds of malcontents to cheer the trolls on.

Rfwoolf: put down the stick and step away from the horse carcass.

History

With an average mainspace edit rate of one per fortnight over a couple of years, Rfwoolf finally managed to singlehandedly destroy what little enjoyment I was still getting out of Wikipedia, the straw that broke the camel's back. He did it like this:

• wp:Anal stretching was deleted by consensus at wp:Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Anal stretching. Rfwoolf was told he was free to create a new article. What he did was to repost three times an all-but-identical article which was therefore deleted under criterion G4 of the criteria for speedy deletion. This deletion was reviewed and endorsed.

From the logs:

• 16:46, December 30, 2006 Nishkid64 (Talk | contribs | block) protected Anal stretching (It was unprotected apparently. [edit=sysop:move=sysop])
• 03:46, December 24, 2006 Trialsanderrors (Talk | contribs | block) restored "Anal stretching" (1 revisions restored: Restore protection only)
• 03:45, December 24, 2006 Trialsanderrors (Talk | contribs | block) deleted "Anal stretching" (per Wikipedia:Deletion review/Log/2006 December 18)
• 23:39, December 18, 2006 JzG (Talk | contribs | block) restored "Anal stretching" (67 revisions restored: deletion review)
• 23:39, December 18, 2006 JzG (Talk | contribs | block) protected Anal stretching (Template:Delrev [edit=sysop:move=sysop])
• 17:55, December 18, 2006 TheProject (Talk | contribs | block) deleted "Anal stretching" (G4)
• 15:59, December 18, 2006 Can't sleep, clown will eat me (Talk | contribs | block) deleted "Anal stretching" (speedy G4)
• 01:15, December 2, 2006 Yomangani (Talk | contribs | block) deleted "Anal stretching" (Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Anal

So that's one deletion per AfD, two per WP:CSD (all by different admins, all forming exactly the same judgement of the similarity of the content), one protected deletion review and one wp:WP:SALTing. Five separate admins involved. not unilateral by any stretch of the imagination. Rfwoolf told me he had a new, different, fixed version - when I checked the deleted history I found it was almost word for word the same article. You will note that I restored the history to facilitate deletion review, which is hardly an act of ill-faith. Several people went to considerable lengths to help Rfwoolf avoid the problem, but his response was aggressive, not particularly civil, and in the end the lack of any other significant contributions to mainspace led to the conclusion that this obsessive focus on anal stretching is not motivated by a desire to build a great encyclopaedia.

Speedy deletion criterion G4 exists precisely to stop gaming of the system in this way. An article is deleted by consensus, you can't fix that by removing a couple of words and then pretending you have solved the problems that got it deleted.

So then he involved the wp:WP:AMA, that serial enabler of timewasters and trolls, thanks to its indiscriminate selection of advocates. That spun the dispute out for another few weeks. AMA eventually got shut down, thank God, but not before a period where equal weight was given by the advocate to Rfwoolf's baseless assertion of "unilateral" admin abuse and my presentation of the facts of the case. wp:Wikipedia:AMA Requests for Assistance/Requests/December 2006/Rfwoolf. See if you can spot, from the handling of the case, which of the two protagonists here has thousands of edits and which has an edit rate of one per fortnight.

Rfwoolf then created a "new" article with what he described as "gold standard sources". Up to a point. For example, an article in a surgical journal talking about anal stretching during colorectal surgery. This bears no relationship whatsoever to the subject of the article, and I know that because I used to work for US Surgical who were then probably the leading manufacturers of colorectal surgical instruments; I have attended lectures by eminent colorectal surgeons and actually do understand what the journal articles were about - butt plugs had, please believe me, nothing to do with those journal articles.

He also used his user page to attack me, which I stopped by temporarily locking the page, and then created an "evidence" page, continuing to detail his baseless assertion that this wonderful and valid article was unilaterally killed off by evil rouge admin abuse. And all this time, all the pointless timewasting twat had to do was rewrite the article, so it did not get nuked under G4. By this time he had wasted several orders of magnitude more time and bandwidth on prolonging the dispute than had ever been given to the disputed article. All along he has been insisting that he was trying to create a perfectly valid article and was stopped from doing this by the evil admin. Wrong. He reposted an all-but-identical copy of a deleted article, which was deleted by several other admins (never me), and he never fixed that. All he ever did was argue the toss.

I can live with people who actually work on articles on pathetic subjects of no obvious merit, but I find it much harder to live with people whose primary activity is sowing dissent, and who do virtually nothing of benefit to the project to offset the cost of that dissent.

Anyway, everything died down until I was feeling a bit stressed and Woolf popped back up with his crap yet again, still insisting that he was right, still having done no actual work to fix the problem. I told him to fuck off. Eventually I marked the attack page for deletion. He claimed it was a scratch pad for an RfC. Bollocks - not only had it lain unedited for months, he had already raised his baseless complaint several times and it was dismissed every time. ATrollEnabler came along and helped him to escalate and prolong the dispute until I became heartily sick of the whole project, and that was the catalyst for me deciding that right now I have had enough.

Here's the mfd on his baseless "evidence" page: wp:Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/User:Rfwoolf/Evidence and here's the deletion review of that: wp:Wikipedia:Deletion review/Log/2007 July 12, with its extensive Wikilawyering by Rfwoolf and ATren's apparent outrrage at me telling the pointless twat to fuck off. Sorry, ATren, but resurrecting a baseless complaint months later and the total lack of balancing beneficial input to the project makes Rfwoolf a pointless twat who should fuck off. Even if you object to the language, the fact remains unchanged. Attack pages untouched in user space for over five months get deleted, end of story, and it really does not matter at all whether the victim tells the attacker to fuck off or not, it's not in any way relevant to the principle that attack pages get deleted.

Congratulations, Rfwoolf, on really getting the worst out of me. Your value to Wikipedia will, if you keep editing at the present rate, rise to zero at some time early in the next century. I hope you don't need an EEA up your arse before then, eh?

Oh, and you still never got round to writing a properly sourced article on the subject, which would probably have passed DRV with ease as there are many references to the sexual practice of anal stretching. Talk to Uncle G some time about how to really rescue a crap article on a good (or at least encyclopaedic) subject.

Rfwoolf has a userbox proclaiming that he thinks he should be an admin, and another lamenting the lack of an article on anal stretching. The solution to both problems is the same: stop trolling, start writing.