User:Brrryan

Here is a weird one for you:

So I was randomly tooling about this virtual labyrinth of information we call Wikipedia in my own casual manner when I detected what seemed to be a problem with an article, and as I took a closer look the thought arose that maybe the best way to grasp the situation would entail experimenting with a sandbox on my user page.

That's when I learned that nearly a year ago, a full two years after the creation of this user account, an admin stated here on this page that I was a sockpuppet for someone/something called "Scibaby". So as my user page was then devoid of content, the page was deleted, with a nice little one-line log asserting so-and-so's certainty of my sockpuppetry, along with someone else's anonymous observation that the admin who'd made this note was the only contributor to my user page. I wasn't contacted; I wasn't banned in any way; I continued to use Wikipedia in my own aforementioned casual manner on a regular basis.

To clarify:

1) I don't know or care who or what "Scibaby" is. Actually, for a few minutes I cared, so just now I wasted a bunch of time trying to get to the bottom of it. Something about ip ranges, anonymizers, and somebody or something creating new identities with alarming persistence toward God-knows-what nefarious end. Whoever/whatever it is, it's got nothing to do with me.

2) Yes, in the course of my mundane existence, I have had the occasion within the past year to use computers in locations where the use of anonymizers is standard procedure. So the thing is that when you are perusing Wikipedia and you hit the "edit" tab, if you get the rather cryptic notice that you cannot log in because of a "range used by [whatever]", then that is when you realize that the stupid anonymizer is on, so therefore that is when you turn the thing off or, if you cannot, you forget about fixing the grammar on the article you were just reading about the history of underwater basket weaving or Elizabethan poetry or what-have-you, or you wait until later.

3) Newsflash: People and organizations employ anonymizers for reasons that generally have nothing to do with Wikipedia.

4) I am nobody's sockpuppet, nor am I anyone's meatpuppet, nor do I have any. I mean, I like the Meat Puppets, but isn't that neither here nor there?

5) I guess I'll leave this text here as a placeholder until such point arises that I decide to have an actual userpage, just to guard against the absurdity of the deletion of a nonexistent page.

6) With abundant respect to the many bright individuals who devote countless hours to strengthening and maintaining the quality of Wikipedia, and to the unique culture that thus arises here: I haven't bothered with a user page previously because, for me, it's sort of beside the point. Or maybe it was beside the point, up to this point, because if I wish to express myself I've got other venues for that. I mean, sure, going on what's here, you can look at my opening sentence, you can notice that it's also the opening sentence of a story by David Foster Wallace, and you can draw your own conclusions. Might it be just as likely as my being a sockpuppet that I am actually DFW's wraith?