User:Martin Hogbin/Departure lounge

Why I have retired from Wikipedia

  If you want to comment please do not do so here but on the talk page.

After having been an editor on wikipedia for nearly 10 years I have decided that it is time to leave. At least until things change drastically.

The fundamental principles of Wikipedia may be summarized in five "pillars". Just follow these rules and you will not go far wrong. Unless you meet up with a minority group group who want to use Wikipdia to promote their point of view. Suddenly the rules seem to change and a new and completely undefined crime of 'disruptive' editing (of the talk page, not the article itself) is held against you. basically this seems to mean trying to promote, by civil discussion, the generally held majority opinion on the subject.

This is what you can get banned for - really!

Evidence of disruption is presented in Wikipedia:Administrators'_noticeboard/Archive278#Martin_Hogbin; I determined consensus. Ths is what the admin who banned me said:

Links to TP discussions with accusations of POV, cherrypicking, promotional editing; and repeated propositions in lengthy, ill-formed RfCs.

• Early edit establishing a pattern about article and editors: "Were those sources cherry picked by someone who wants promote veganism or were they a selection of representative sources on the subject?"
• "this article still reads like a promotional article for the Vegan Society"
• A few weeks later, accusations of POV/promotional editing: [["There is a great fuss made in some places about paid-for editing and how companies are said to pay people to promote them in WP. Here we have unpain editors giving commercial organisations free adverts"
• Two-week discussion on the word "commodity", which delivers no change in the article because the consensus is that the word "commodity" does not, pace Hogbin, carry a rhetorical value promoting the philosophy of veganism in Wikipedia’s voice.
• Even innocent little questions on the talk page get turned into accusations.
• This RfC runs from 12 to 26 July 2015 and is finally closed because it is too vague to deliver anything meaningful.
• Another discussion that runs for two weeks and goes nowhere.

For that, I got this ban:

I am hereby banning Martin Hogbin for one year from abusing the talk page Talk:Veganism, and will allow him only one single edit, big or small, in one single thread, written out in one single paragraph, every 48 hours.

There must be procedures to appeal if you have not broken any of the rules stated in the five pillars

Yes! This is how the procedure works: [1]

A bunch of really nice editors turns up and tells you deserve everything that you got for...??? Well you deserve it anyway.

Conclusion

The principles set up by Jimmy Wales count for nothing. If you disagree with the wrong people, however civil you are and even if you follow the recommended dispute resolution procedures exactly you can get banned. All editors are equal but some are more equal than others. I herby claim the silver medal in the fight for the original principles of Wikipedia.