Here are some ways they work the F-bomb or whatever into a Wikipedia conversation. I’m starting with the so-called leadership, the big shots, the hat-collectors. These are the people who set the tone for the whole project.
No doubt the list will grow.
Feel free to chime in. No annoyance is too petty, no big shot is too much of a sacred cow.
The list
Bishonen (also Bishzilla, etc.) admin
..He isn’t calling anybody a cunt either, but I’m not sure using the word to make a remark more “colourful” (juicy?) or “memorable” is any better….Bishonen | talk 20:52, 9 November 2018 (UTC) [diff]
Carrite (Tim Davenport), resident Marxist at Wikipediocrazy
..There should be an ArbCom case if this is not met with a ban at AN/I and this person should be out the fucking door, end of story…. Carrite (talk) 14:11, 2 April 2016 (UTC) [diff]
…the RFA system is fucked up… Carrite (talk) 15:46, 2 August 2018 (UTC) [diff]
- Drmies (Michel Aaij), admin, former arbitrator
(edit summary) yeah fuck you too. don’t know what I am supposed to have done to you, but I’m sure you’re very oppressed Drmies (talk) 00:24, 13 August 2018 (UTC) [diff]
…I have on more than one occasion told all of you (YOU TRUMP EDITORS, FOR FUCK’S SAKE, ALL OF YOU) that you are making this a nasty place to work, but your nonsense is worse than that of others…. Drmies (talk) 15:51, 6 May 2018 (UTC) [diff]
As for “fucking fascist state” and other Godwin-tending utterances: this is a website. That’s all it is: a website… Drmies (talk) 15:15, 26 January 2016 (UTC) [diff]
“Fuck off” on Commons
If an editor drops something on my talk page that I have no interest in whatsoever, something that contains personal attacks and furthers a complaint from another project, can I just say “fuck off” or is that blockable on Commons? Asking for a friend. Drmies (talk) 19:25, 2 July 2021 (UTC) [link] 
Jimbo, (Jimmy Wales)
Utter fucking bullshit.–Jimbo Wales (talk) 22:06, 25 January 2016 (UTC) [diff]
- Keilana, (Emily Temple-Wood) co-Wikipedian of the year 2016
…She and her husband were the hematology power couple of the 20th century (words I never thought I’d say in a row) and guess who had an article? Yeah, her husband. Guess who got the Nobel Prize alone for their collaborative work? Yeah, her husband. I’m still really fucking salty about this. “Just a technician”, my ass. Add her to the long list of “women who got totally screwed out of a Nobel because they worked with their husbands/other dudes/were women”. It’s a long fucking list…
– from “Shit I cannot believe we had to fucking write this month”, Wikipedia Signpost [URL] - MjolnirPants
So can we fucking please stop personalizing everything and just discuss the fucking issues at hand? MjolnirPants (talk) 12:42, 10 July 2018 (UTC) [diff][DGAF userbox] - MrX
Are you fucking kidding me?! You have the balls to accuse ”ME” of hounding, when I am the one who has compiled evidence of hounding, stalking, and battleground behavior by the OP direc ted at me? How did you, Mongo, and ψλ even know this page existed? We’re you all stalking my every edit? I never discussed this pafe with anyone; I never linked to it; I never mentioned ψλ’s name. I’m so fucking thoroughly sick of the constant drama and battleground bullshit on Wikipedia that I could puck. How about you and your whole busybody crew fuck right off!! …MrX 18:43, 17 May 2018 (UTC) [diff]
nagualdesign (Joe Haythornthwaite)
,… because I’ve been using Photoshop for nearly 20 years and I know what I’m doing, not because I’m some sort of cunt. nagualdesign 17:06, 6 July 2018 (UTC) [diff]
Pardon my language but what the fuck?!…nagualdesign 01:08, 13 January 2018 (UTC) [diff] Fuck you too, buddy. nagualdesign 02:05, 23 February 2018 (UTC) [diff]
- Newyorkbrad (Ira Brad Matetsky), admin, arbitrator
Fuck offArchive request as withdrawn. Newyorkbrad (talk) 14:27, 30 October 2013 (UTC) [diff]…I would prefer not to need a weeks-long case focused on a series of questions like “when is or isn’t it proper to tell another editor to ‘fuck off’?”… Newyorkbrad (talk) 19:13, 23 October 2017 (UTC) [diff]
- Opabinia regalis, admin, arbitrator
I don’t quite agree with the reasoning above – “too complex for AE” means “too complex for self-selected volunteers who aren’t actually obliged to do fuck all”… Opabinia regalis (talk) 16:24, 29 June 2018 (UTC) [diff]
Ritchie333, admin
Changes “founding member” to “founder member” (??), edit summary “fuck off, nationalist”… Revision as of 06:33, 21 May 2018 by user: Ritchie333 [diff]
creates a redirect WP:CLUSTERFUCK in shouting all caps to Wikipedia:Article titles. 09:36, 27 June 2018 by user: Ritchie333 [diff] [deletion discussion]
Honorable mention (off wiki)
- Fae (Fæ) (Ashley van Haeften), former admin, former chair of Wikimedia UK
Retweeted “This man is a complete and total cunt. No other word sums him up better.” May 2018. [Screenshot.]
- Gamaliel (Rob Fernandez), former admin, former Signpost editor-in-chief, Board of Directors, Wikimedia DC
“WTF is wrong with people.” Facebook Wikipedia Weekly, August 15, 2018. (See: WTF portal) Screenshot:
- Tony1
(email) “go fuck yourself” …”gross cunt”…Tony1 16:47, 15 April 2013 (UTC) [diff]
Gender Desk 
Here are some from MrX, Drmies. You’ll need to scroll down to Atsme’s statement.
What a gold mine, although it pains me that all these people appear to hate Trump.
Since you’re alive on this globe today, I’m fairly certain you’re aware that disliking Trump isn’t really a discerning characteristic these days. ^^
Reminds me of Derek Jacobi’s wonderful line from I Claudius:
Caligula: Do you think I’m mad?
Claudius: Mad?
Caligula: Yes, sometimes I think that I’m going mad. Do you – be honest with me – has that thought ever crossed your mind?
Claudius: Never. Never. The idea is preposterous. You set the standard of sanity for the whole world.
I am shocked. Shocked, I say. Simply SHOCKED!!! Why are you enabling this sort of vulgarity?
Added. (Didn’t mean to neglect you dahlink.)
An honorable mention, surely, to Emily Temple-Wood for her [url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2016-02-17/Op-ed]op-ed[/url] “Shit I cannot believe we had to fucking write this month”.
Did you get Jimbo’s foul-mothed lies about James Heilman: “James has made a lot of noise about why he was dismissed which is utter and complete bullshit. He wrote a nice piece for the Signpost about transparency which implied that the board got rid of him for wanting more transparency. Utter fucking bullshit.–Jimbo Wales (talk) 22:06, 25 January 2016 (UTC)”
No RB, you are not “muted”, your comment was spammed by Askimet. https://whatismyipaddress.com/blacklist-check I will occasionally put the blog on moderation if I am planning to be away for a while, but any actions taken about specific users have always been transparent. Like the time my Evil Twin put “Rogol” in the dungeon for the duration of the 4th of July holiday, cough cough.
Keilana did indeed establish her anti-pearl clutching credentials with that op-ed and deserves to be mentioned, she would certainly want to be on the list. Jimbo is usually the prince of civility, his remarks were all the more remarkable for being totally out of character. In retrospect it was not wise to try to cover up the staff mutiny.
These are somewhat stale though, being more than two years old, and I have already written about them. Surely there is something more recent. What about the Bishonen tribe? Has the Manchester tribe tried to regroup or were they just there to goad Corbett? And I never did write about the LaMona fiasco, I seem to remember their departure from AfC was tied into Manchester somehow.
My goal in life was always achieving #1 status on CurseBird, but I just don’t post to Twitter often enough. This will have to do. Thank you from the bottom of my heart, you have touched and inspired me to reach for the stars!!!
“From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs”
Don’t forget MPants at Work. Here’s two scoops delivered in a high profile discussion over on commons. I’m assuming they used the jarring language for gravitas or to stand out among the crowd of first responders…
There is a DGAF user box???!?
I added “nagualdesign” too, here’s a permanent link to the thread. https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Commons:Administrators%27_noticeboard&oldid=310616312#What_appears_to_be_an_inappropriate_indef_block_of_User:Rowan_Forest
None of them admins though, so probably just “monkey see, monkey do.”
Looks like J.B. “pee-pee” Hunley is auditioning for this list. https://genderdesk.wordpress.com/2018/07/31/j-b-pee-pee-hunley-canvasses-wikipediocracy-for-rfa-votes/
One of his nominators Ritchee333 is already on the list, might do to have a look at the other one Alex Shih.
“founder member” is British English; “founding member” is American English. I did not know there was a difference there; you learn something new every day working this “job”. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/founding_member
Hence the “nationalist” epithet. No excuse for that; he should have assumed good faith that the American making that change thought that they were just correcting an error. It’s an edit that I could have made.
Of course, since the band is British it makes sense to prefer using British English for this article.
So he recognized it as American, which is why he told him to “fuck off”.
It’s not here: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/founder
Makes it sound like a fish, flounder, like they’re floundering, failing, flailing. Why don’t they say “charter member” or “original member”; seems better to use a word that everyone can understand, especially since it’s obviously been misunderstood at least once already.
But yeah, thanks for the explanation, it just seemed like a non sequitur. Not that that is much of an improvement over acting hostile just out of the blue.
Re: seems better to use a word that everyone can understand
Indeed, per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Article_titles#National_varieties_of_English
“Very occasionally, a less common but non-nation-specific term is selected to avoid having to choose between national varieties: for example, soft drink was selected to avoid the choice between the British fizzy drink, American soda, American and Canadian pop, and a slew of other nation- and region-specific names.”
Looking at the diff again, the subject is Richard Wright who was an early member of Pink Floyd, says “his position in the band was tenuous to begin with”, he moved in with some of the members while the group has a different name, but was replaced while traveling, then rejoined for a recording and the group was renamed after adding two guitarists. Can that be considered “founding” a group? As of 1985 “his contract said he could not rejoin as a full member”.
Also his main influence “Miles Davis and John Coltrane”?… and he “frequently used Egyptian scales”? This does not strike me as the type of guy who would have wanted a “fuck off nationalist” type of bio. This is Pink FLoyd already, not some local garage band. Why would you want language that can only be understood by the small percentage of British English speakers?
I doubt if anyone will change it though, isn’t the guy an admin? They’d probably get indeffed, and the admins would all close ranks in the secret IRC channels to get them globally banned. If someone tried it as an IP, I bet they would have checkusers all over them. Nobody is going to risk his temper.
This is interesting: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Richard_Wright&type=revision&diff=805680046&oldid=805343746
It was “founding member” for years on the disambiguation page until last October, when an editor changed it with edit summary “BrEng”. This editor was later blocked for 6 months per Arbitration enforcement by an Admin who, like the most recent candidate, wanted to work this beat and only got the bit after a “crat chat” (I supported that one because, despite his limited edit history, he had demonstrated good character and aptitude for work on the “behavior patrol”).
Oh, the same editor changed the article, too, just over a year ago.
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Richard_Wright_%28musician%29&type=revision&diff=792334802&oldid=792147134
A slow edit war then? By rights, they should post something on the talk page, or maybe link the word to a definition if they’re going to insist on using it. It does look like an error.
There isn’t really an edit war here. There’s the issue that if this is changed for one founding band member it should be changed for the others too. Actually, this term is quite commonly used per this search https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Search&limit=500&offset=0&profile=default&search=founder+member&searchToken=8klabjn2mj4zxrs1iscsxd7z9
I’m really surprised that I don’t recall running into it before.
I’m not sure there’s an easy answer for this.
An interesting search, I’m curious how you did it.
I’m not sure if this means something, but there seems to be a preponderance of articles about India or the subcontinent in that list. Maybe it’s something they teach in the schools there. I think it best to tiptoe slowly away before it gets added to this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Lamest_edit_wars
It still looks like vandalism, though, especially with all the gratuitous profanity. It’s a sad thing when you can’t tell the vandals apart from the admins.
Just type “founder member” into the search box near the upper-right corner of any Wikipedia article page and hit the “Enter” key. Or click on the magnifying-glass icon at the right side of the search box to go to this page
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?search=&title=Special%3ASearch&go=Go
The page will show you Results 1 – 21 of 120,614. You can show more than 20 results on a page by clicking on one of the larger numbers at the bottom of the page.
India was under direct rule of the British Empire from 1858 to 1947. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Raj
Hence the use of British English in that country, which along with China is one of the two most populated countries in the world. Thus the influence of BrEng spreads much farther than that island in Europe.
It’s best to “assume good faith” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Assume_good_faith and do a little research before accusing someone of vandalism, when you see a revert that leaves you a bit puzzled.
It is considered good practice to provide a summary for every edit, especially when reverting (undoing) the actions of other editors or deleting existing text; otherwise, people may question your motives for the edit. Edits that do not have an edit summary are more likely to be reverted, because it may not be obvious what the purpose of the edit was. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Edit_summary
I suppose you could add to that “edit summaries with gratuitous profanity rather than a clear rationale for the reversion”. It’s a shame that sometimes you need to assume that an editor using gratuitous profanity is editing in good faith. I know, “using gratuitous profanity in good faith” seems like an oxymoron (a “contradiction in terms”).
Thanks for the search tips, there used to be a way to search a user to see if they were using a particular word, but I can’t seem to find that tool any more.
Since this is Gender Desk and not Wikipedia we don’t have to assume anything here. If someone approaches a stranger on Wikipedia and starts spouting profanity, we assume pretty much the same thing as if they did it on the street.
The search documentation is here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Searching
Over 8,000 articles with the “f” word https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?search=insource%3A%22fuck%22&title=Special:Search&go=Go&searchToken=2e5es7mmqtvn8hv0lwko3hz3a
Over 22,000 talk pages https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?search=insource%3A%22fuck%22&title=Special:Search&profile=advanced&fulltext=1&ns1=1&ns3=1&ns5=1&searchToken=csx6kgdq0jweqb45liksky7qx
Looking for me on talk pages https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?search=insource%3A%22fuck%22+%22User%3Awbm1058%22&title=Special:Search&profile=advanced&fulltext=1&ns1=1&ns3=1&ns5=1&searchToken=87tx87spi9de8j5joybmubzmm
Hmm, first time I’ve seen this (I wasn’t pinged) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Boyd_McDonald_(pornographer)
If he’d spelled Katharine Hepburn’s name correctly, I wouldn’t have noticed this
I’m pretty sure it was a standalone tool that lost functionality, or perhaps just the links, during one of the tool migrations, but …
as a search term seems to work after a fashion, but it only seems to find the page, not the exact user, which in your case gives only false positives.
ha! who knew about the foundling members? ^^ Also, I wish I knew why when you type in a search using the insource:”searchstring”, it gets converted to a web address with a token. It appears that this prevents robotizing the searching.
As you probably know, I’m on a mad quest to identify Wikipedia’s major sources. I wonder if you have any suggestions for feminist sources, GD? Trying to find Ms. magazine, I originally ended up on Morgan Stanley’s page. ^^
I’m not sure what a token is or why it matters, but probably someone reading this will know.
I don’t know what a “feminist source” is either. If you are trying to understand feminism, try Geek Feminism wiki, people have quoted that to me in conversation. Others recommend Feministing, but I have never looked at it. Prepare to be bored. Better to follow someone’s Twitter feed and see what links they post or what has been re-tweeted a million times.
Also depends on the topic….business? arts? law? Different sources for each.
There are two approaches to solving this. One is to search a user’s contribution history, edit-by-edit. You would write a script (program) to do this using the API https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/API:Main_page This method could also look for gratuitous profanity in edit summaries. The standalone tool you can’t find may have used this method. This is the harder, more resource-intensive (time-consuming) method.
The other way is to take advantage of the search index. All words are indexed so whatever badword you want to look for can quickly be found in the index giving you a list of all pages with the word. Likewise a particular user name can be quickly pulled from the index, and it’s easy to combine the badword and user name searches to get a list of pages that match both searches. There is also an API for searching so scripts could be written to use this method too https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/API:Search_and_discovery CirrusSearch is the name of the technology currently used for Wikipedia. https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:CirrusSearch This method has the advantage of speed, by taking advantage of the index, but won’t help you find profanity in edit summaries.
One you have used the index to narrow your search to a list of pages that have both the badword and the user’s name you can use regular expressions (commonly called “regex”) to hone in the cases where the user uses the badword in a signed statement. This can be hard to code, but work like magic once you have found a good regex to solve the problem. Entire textbooks have been written on the topic of regular expressions, which come in various variants. A particular regex variant is used in CirrusSearch. Regex is what you use to eliminate the false positives. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Searching/Regex https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:CirrusSearch#Regular_expression_searches
I’m close to having a good regex, but not quite there. Here’s an example.
First, the basic search for word and user insource:”fuck” “User:Cassianto” returns 19 pages including false-positives https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?search=insource%3A%22fuck%22+%22User%3ACassianto%22&title=Special:Search&profile=advanced&fulltext=1&ns1=1&ns3=1&ns5=1&searchToken=6k874r5dtunjg0eqmwurq3tin
Here I narrow it down to five where the user used the word in a signed statement, but the results don’t show the statement https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?search=insource%3A%22fuck%22+%22User%3ACassianto%22+insource%3A%2Ffuck.%2A%5C%5B%5C%5BUser%3ACassianto%5C%7C%5C%3Cspan%2F&title=Special:Search&profile=advanced&fulltext=1&ns1=1&ns3=1&ns5=1&searchToken=4k4as4pfk0ln3akkcuyh9czp4
Here I have a search that shows one signed statement in the results. This search is too restrictive because it eliminated the other four which were not false positives. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?search=insource%3A%22fuck%22+%22User%3ACassianto%22+insource%3A%2Ffuck%5B%5E%5Cn%5D%2A%5C%5B%5C%5BUser%3ACassianto%5C%7C%5C%3Cspan%2F&title=Special:Search&profile=advanced&fulltext=1&ns1=1&ns3=1&ns5=1&searchToken=6o41fy3pnj7t1rl6ih21xihvs
I see that my last comment was put on moderation. I’m guessing that’s not because I was personally put on moderation, but because my examples used an incivil word. Feel free to bleep out that word, and to hide the URLs behind a piped link. I don’t know how to do that with this limited user interface.
It was moderated for number of links, which I don’t have the option of de-selecting, but have now increased to an impossibly high number.
You can put links on text in the comments, but I can’t show you how to do it because it will try to execute the markup. If you’re curious, the easiest thing would be to register for a free WordPress blog and make a draft post to experiment with their text editor. You can create article text with their visual editor then switch to text editor and paste that markup in the comments. It won’t bypass the moderation filters though. I can also edit comments on request.
You can now post 50 links in one comment without tripping the moderation/spam filters.
Funny you should use Cassianto as an example.
This was all done a few years ago with charts https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Communicating_on_Wikipedia_while_female
Tempest on the technical front, no surprise that the C-suite is defending their staff. https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2018-August/090646.html
User:Lourdes started a Request for Comment asking whether the use of a specific term related to “makin’ bacon” was sanctionable or not. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Civility#Request_for_comment_on_the_specific_term_%22fuck_off%22_%E2%80%93_sanctionable_or_not!
Other editors edit-warred with her to keep this discussion off the centralized discussion notices template. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Template:Centralized_discussion&action=history
In the four days I spent at last weekend’s Wikiconference North America, I didn’t hear the term uttered even once. I wonder if doing that at a Wikimedia-sponsored event would be considered to be a “Safe Space” violation.
Apparently Lourdes’ RfC stems from earlier noticeboard discussions about the potty mouth of User:MjolnirPants
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia_talk:Civility&diff=prev&oldid=866092525
I don’t think they came from a Wikimedia conference.
You might consider whether this user should join your list.
Oh, just saw this after I posted my comment, it looks like it is part of the RfC so this is a tricky business, how to talk about a word without actually using the word, in this case over and over and over and over. I’ll look later in more detail, after all it’s Sunday and maybe we should offer up some prayers for Lourdes, she’s going to need it.
Oh how horrible, I was going to say at least they kept it off of Jimbotalk this time, but… https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Jimbo_Wales#Discussion_re_RfC
Safe space is still a thing, https://wikiconference.org/wiki/2018/Safe_Space_Policy but the implementation still leaves a lot to be desired. Maybe “unwelcome sexual attention”? I see there was a workshop https://wikiconference.org/wiki/Submissions:2018/Event_safety_workshop but I don’t see any associated powerpoints, IME it is always the woman who comes off at a disadvantage, no matter what the situation. In one case we lost a long-time contributor, as well as the good will of her institution and another high profile institution we were trying to establish a relationship with. I have also been at events where there was an incident I was not aware of at the time, so there is probably not a good way to evaluate the policy. I don’t think they have to be reported to the WMF, but again, there is not a standard for what kinds of paperwork can be kept, and what kind of reports have to be submitted, as there would be in an employment situation. Whereever there is secrecy, or conversely a lack of privacy, there is always a huge potential for abuse, especially of the powerless.
Okay there are several discussions both past and ongoing, For the moment I think I will just let them play out.
The user is already on the list, even though they do not seem to be an admin or any kind of “power user”.
Plus there was this https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Administrators%27_noticeboard/Incidents&type=revision&diff=865763947&oldid=865763763&diffmode=source#User:MjolnirPants
and in particular this https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Administrators%27_noticeboard/Incidents&diff=865738754&oldid=865708539 from the administrators’ noticeboard just a few days earlier.
Oh look, Pudeo v. Jorm is playing at AE, Guerillero has bubbled up to defend the accused.
Oh my. And in the edit summaries.
Permanent link in case it gets archived before I can get to it: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Enforcement&oldid=982914487
In case this is (still) helpfull, here’s a tool for searching edit summaries: Edit summary search. It requires already knowing the potty mouth, so it can be used only for confirmation.
Also, here’s Drmies asking an innocent question on commons: Commons:Village pump/Archive/2021/07.
Hope the links work, sorry if they don’t and eventually thanks for fixing them.
This is always helpful, thank you so much.
And I see someone gave Mr. Drmies a very sensible answer.