Ronny22

Are you pro-Trujillo?

September 2007

Welcome to Wikipedia. Everyone is welcome to contribute constructively to the encyclopedia. However, adding content without citing a reliable source, as you did to Rainbow Sandals, is not consistent with our policy of verifiability. Take a look at the welcome page to learn more about contributing to this encyclopedia. If you are already familiar with Wikipedia:Citing sources please take this opportunity to add your original reference to the article. Thank you. Moonriddengirl 16:50, 10 September 2007 (UTC)

WTC 7

"When I wrote the BBC was not the subject of the article" I meant the fact that the BBC reported that the building had collapsed was not germane to the article since the fact of the BBC reporting it was not part of the WTC 7 story. We can't have a whole list of when reporting agencies reported the collapse. I reverted your removal of NYT refs from the article. --PTR 14:52, 22 September 2007 (UTC)

Your edit history

I need to air my concerns here. If I am out of line, please forgive me and set me straight.

In the article on Joseph Knight, Sr., I read that two years after marrying Polly Peck, he married a second time to Elizabeth James. I assumed there should be some explanation for why two marriages so close. Was he divorced or widowed? In reading other sources, I found no reference to an Elizabeth and Knight was still married to Polly until her death in 1831. I removed this statement and since you added it in Oct. 2007, I glanced at your other edits.

In Black Hawk War (Utah)#Circleville Massacre, you wrote that the Mormons publicly displayed decapitated Paiute heads, again without a source. I doubted the perpetrators would do this while also trying to cover up their crimes. A brief check of the sources returned no reference to this sensationalistic detail. On this website about the Survivors of the Circleville Utah Massacre Project, they noticed this new claim of heads displayed on poles, and counter that this is not logical and is not found in the sources. So I also removed a sentence of yours from that article too.

Examination of all WP edits

This is my examination of all 33 of your edits to Wikipedia, with #1 being the first edit and #33 placed out of order since its article was deleted and it doesn't show up in your edit history. You may take my views as my opinion awaiting concurrence.

Questionable

All of these edits seemed suspicious or dubious to me.

1. Reaction to the assassination of John F. Kennedy - Reverted as unencyclopedic
3. Idarado Mine - Identified as a "coal" mine but this was later changed to "gold", which is the standing wording in the article.
5. Jimmy Hoffa - in the infobox stated he was a gangster, later removed
6. Thai Elephant Orchestra - stated it is composed of 100 elephants, removed by founder
8. Black Hawk War (Utah) - discussed above
9. Pine tar - clearly vandalism
10. McCormick Field - Claimed an astroturf renovation in 2007. Later reverted [1][2], but the date for a renovation in 2007 remains.
12. Poblacion - inserted "bar" into list of establishments typical to Philippine city centers; reverted
13. Fublaines - Indicated the population in this French commune declined 19% between 1999 and 2006. Later changed to a population increase (hopefully correct, but still unsourced), but not before being linked to (translated into?) several other languages [3][4][5][6].
14. Beira, Mozambique - claimed murders of tourists and security risks, removed during an article cleanup
17. 7 World Trade Center - Cited a YouTube video and claimed the BBC reported on WTC7's collapse before it actually happened. Reverted.
18. 7 World Trade Center - Removed content and sources from the New York Times, arguing NYT isn't the article's subject. Reverted.
20. Steampunk - Added "Respiratory Clams" as a musical group. Removed. The only result from Google for this phrase is one page of nonsense advertising meta keywords.
22. Joseph Knight, Sr. - discussed above
24. Nuba fighting - claimed to be unpopular on TV outside of Sudan. Removed and called "unintelligible mess".
25. Etiquette in North America - Asserts men seeking gay sex seek adjacent/closely-situated urinals (sourced to Slate Bathroom Sex FAQ). Reverted.
26. Etiquette in North America - Disputed and reversed the gay sex revert. Reverted by same user as before, stating "irrelevant spam".
27. Georgia (country) - Changed around some wording and inserted the claim that the state of emergency lasted for 15 days. This whole political section was removed and moved into Politics of Georgia (country) where the claim of 15 days remains today.
28. Steampunk - Added another musical group (again), this time citing an Amazon link that is dead for me. Removed with comment that it was actually a non-Steampunk album.
29. Etiquette in North America - Reversed prior revert on gay-sex again, claiming vandalism. Removed in two parts.
33. Rainbow Sandals - Unsourced edit led to the notice above from September 10, 2007. The article was later deleted, and then restarted, so this edit history is lost.

Undetermined

I don't know enough to say whether these edits are valid or not.

4. Juan Bosch - Looks like removing POV
11. Ubercode - Inserted the term "platform-sharing"
15. Image gradient - Added term "code switching" without explanation, removed during later edit
16. Jamba, Cuando Cubango - Added geographic coordinates
19. Survivalism - Removed an external link
30. Ecological engineering - Added to list of published literature
31. Environmental technology - Adding abbreviated forms of phrases
32. Ecotechnology - Changed around some wording, added a reference and removed postgraduate section.

Acceptable

These edits seemed clearly helpful or valid to me.

2. Edited own talk page
7. Industry - Reverted vandalism
21. Peak oil - Removed recent crazy POV additions by a different user.
23. Pitch (resin) - Removed dead link and fixed a spelling error

Interpretation

Having accidentally stumbled across these edits, I see a pattern I was not expecting. Nearly all these edits provide no sources, with a few exceptions using weak sources. The articles edited are a random assortment from a broad range of topics. Often incorrect material was introduced boldly before being reverted. However, not all incorrect information was reverted, and some has continued to persist for years, as is evidenced by the Black Hawk War and Joseph Knight articles. If this is vandalism it is hard to detect, since these edits are mostly ambiguous, nuanced, and obscure, not flagrant or obvious as one would normally expect vandalism.

Changing simple digits or plausible facts is the worst kind of vandalism. Dubious material like this contributes to Wikipedia's credibility problems and siphons away time from editors to verify such claims. I am usually careful to assume good faith so I hope I am not wrong here. I mean no harm and await assurance that there is nothing malicious going on here.

This account appears inactive since Feb. 2008, so I feel weird perhaps talking to a brick wall. I still felt I should document my concerns and invite others to respond, without hiding on my talk page away from the user in question.

User:Hard2Win

Without expecting it, I found that User:Hard2Win had recurring related edits with User:Ronny22, sometimes working on the same content, without any talk page communication. This could be harmless, but these edits seem so aimless that I question how this could be content collaboration:

• Jamba, Cuando Cubango: Ronny22 — Hard2Win
• Beira, Mozambique: Ronny22 — Hard2Win
• Nuba fighting: Hard2Win — Ronny22

Hard2Win's contributions are very similar to Ronny22 that I must wonder whether they are the same person or operating under the same odd designs. Both have made a limited number of edits that are ambiguous, nuanced, obscure, unsourced, and at times dubious. Both have edited only a smattering of some of random articles, some of which are the same, including Beira, Mozambique; Jamba, Cuando Cubango; Survivalism; Steampunk; Nuba fighting; Environmental technology; and ecological topics (Ronny22 edited Ecological engineering & Ecotechnology and Hard2Win edited Industrial ecology).

Conclusion

Am I crazy or out of line? I'm trying not to be a conspiracy theorist but what can explain this behavior? It doesn't seem like overt vandalism and some of their work is valid. And their methods of using fake information seem skilled at avoiding easy detection.

Is there rhyme or reason to this editing pattern? Should any of these edits be trusted or retained? Are these shenanigans a test or techniques for building a reserve of sock-puppets with an established edit history? Are there other users playing this weird game? I thought I noticed other strange edits in some of the affected articles during the same time period.

Maybe I'm just naive about how Wikipedia works. ——Rich jj (talk) 21:49, 17 March 2010 (UTC)