Banned! Wikipedia blocks Overstock.com from editing
By Ema Kwiatkowski
Known for having a media director that obsessively stalks critics, Overstock.com’s IP address range has now been banned from editing on Wikipedia.
Longtime Wikipedia staffer, David Gerard, posted this on the Administrators’ Noticeboard Tuesday afternoon:
“I’ve just blocked 65.116.112.0/21, which is an IP range (a) owned by Overstock.com (b) widely used by them for spamming, COI editing and attempted intimidation of administrators dealing with them. I strongly suggest against unblocking this range under any circumstances”
Wikipedia and Overstock.com’s Director of Social Media, Judd Bagley have had a long battle. Bagley has earned near legend status on Wikipedia as an agenda pusher, vandal and stalker.
Wikipedia has been known to ban PR firms and entire countries, so banning a company is not so unusual. Gary Weiss explains on his blog:
It’s fairly unusual, though not unprecedented (see comments), for an entire company to be declared persona non grata by Wikipedia. That requires an unusual degree of sleaziness, which is of course Overstock.com’s primary export to the civilized world.
With the advent of the wikiscanner, anonymous edits are going to become a thing of the past. Companies who have been using Wikipedia to misinform will have to rethink their strategy. We now can easily find out who they are.
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September 5th, 2007
The block of an entire country was when all of Qatar, which goes through a censoring web proxy and thus has one outside IP address for everyone, was accidentally blocked from editing because the blocking admins thought it was a single broadband user playing up. Oh how we cringed when we found out. That is hopefully unlikely to happen again, and will get unblocked quick-smart if it does …
September 11th, 2007
Great news, I was recently banned from wikipedia for a post the banning admin created himself but with my name under it. I thought it was highly creative. Please don’t take my word for it.
Take this for example:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanley_Meyer
So this is what a wikipedia page about a world famous US inventor looks like. Stan doesn’t even have a page with his name.
The man who showed how to run a car on watter was not worthy of his own page.
Either the wiki or the scientific community screwed up. I’m afraid it looks like it was both.
January 13th, 2008
Hi everyone,
Just wanted to introduce myself. This seems like a nice place and I look forward to hanging out here :)
Pam
http://sacredheartdietforreal.blogspot.com/