During the period 2007-2011, attempts on Wikipedia to frighten DIO and DR have repeatedly occurred. And Wikipedia (WP) has done nothing about it. Besides assisting and even joining the campaign to intimidate DIO into silence about establishment misbehavior. The several episodes are enumerated below. They collectively illustrate the utterly ruthless and unprincipled extremes that establishments will resort-to when trying to suppress information embarrassing to their invariably power-addicted archons.
DIO persons have been impunitively vandalized
and slandered on hapless Wikipedia for years by
a goon indebted to a rival journal which DIO has
repeatedly shown to be technically out of its depth.
[These revelations occurred naturally out of our researches.
Some have been reported sardonically (as a better response
than counter-shunning) in reaction to the opposition's decades of
arrogant censorship, slander, and attempted exiling of
DIO — last-ditch desperate recourses, resorted-to
in frustration that none of its seething rage has succeeded
in finding mis-math or mis-science in a single piece of research
debuting in DIO during our 24 years of publication.]
We have christened this impedimental goon
“Stall-Wall”.
His purpose is
protecting the public from knowing of
(or believing)
items embarrassing to the establishments he serves.
[The term “goon” is used here to signify
the heart of the tactic being employed. (In ice hockey,
the term is “enforcer”, but the aim is the same:
a team induces an untalented team-member to pick a fight with
one of the opposition's top performers, figuring that if they maim
— or eliminate — each other, the opposition's loss is greater.
In scholarship, it's the ploy of the unprincipled, craven
Mind-Behind — who's found
that He is too untalented in scholarship to compete in the open.)]
Wall in 2007 began to pester such Wikipedia pages
as Aristarchos of Samos, where DIO was and should be prominent,
since it's solved (e.g., DR's invited 2001/6/27 talk at the British Museum:
DIO 11.1 [2002]
‡1 [pp.4-9] — which Wall
has persisted in eliminating from Wikipedia)
the empirical basis of more Aristarchan data than any other journal:
DIO 9.1 [1999]
‡3 [pp.30-42];
DIO 11.1 [2002]
‡1 § [pp.4-9];
DIO 14 [2008]
‡2 § [pp.13-32].
Stall-Wall's stated purpose was opposition to the foul sin
of “site-pushing”,
one among the spectrum of ploys Wikipedia editors use to justify
censorships which too often blight the integrity of their enterprise.
Stall-Wall also attacked the WPbios of DR and of the world-famous
DIO board-member
Charles Kowal.
The deceptions and lies Stall-Wall entered on those pages resided
there for years on end,
which gives one some idea of why legitimate academics
look askance at Wikipedia's chimeral pretensions to reliability,
as against just being an extremely useful source
(which could be of even greater use if not polluted by vandals, goons,
coverup-censors, and hired huns.).
The intended spectre of persistent censorship and smear-deceit was the initial method Stall-Wall adopted, to damage public access to DIO's findings.
The threat of unstoppability by use of myriad anonymous public IP#s exploited a weakness inherent in Wikipedia. Stall-Wall made this threat explicit in 2007 and on 2010/12/8 (“I use endless IP's”) — as if to sneer at Wikipedia's inability or (see idem same day!) even unwillingness to block him, which is obvious from the repeatedly ineffectual record (idem).
A repeated Stall-Wall ploy has been the attempt (e.g., 2008/4/18 at IP#217.41.51.240 and 2011/1/5 at IP#93.97.194.200) to fake it as a Hell's-Angels grunt-groupie, by going on WP pages relating to such activity not long after badgering DIO-related WP articles, so that the History (of the IP# used) would show such connexions, in order to frighten DIO into believing that lurking, invisible, notoriously extortionist anonymous criminal elements stand ready to commit injury or worse, to enforce Stall-Wall's consistently establishment-protective attacks on DIO. (Isn't Wikipedia fun?) The sham is a deliberate attempt to engender fear and paranoia, even while a fellow DR-hater pseudo-shuddered at purported paranoia in B observations that Stall-Wall's threats had inadvertently (having been launched before Stall-Wall learned his identity had been known) provided an invaluable peek — behind his users' Respectable veneer — into the customarily clandestine fear-engendering establishment-speak which by fear-contagion is the vascular system of the shun.
When WP editors attempted to protect the DR WPbio from Stall-Wall, he threatened them (including a young WP Administrator), as well as DR and his colleagues.
The threat against DR-associates was made real
(as noted above) in repeated
harassment of the WPbio of the immortal astronomer Charles Kowal
(discoverer of Chiron, two Jupiter satellites, numerous asteroids
— and recoverer of the earliest of all observations of Neptune: 1612),
who is one of the world-class scholars that comprise
the elite DIO Board.
Stall-Wall reinserted a slanderous lie into Kowal's WPbio in mid-2008,
where no WP Administrator detected it —
vandalism which was finally removed by DR after this false libel
had been promulgated by wouldbe-Reliability-adjudicator Wikipedia
for 2 1/2 years.
On 2008/3/10, a Wikipedia Administraitor, “Vsmith” deleted
() from the DR WPbio virtually all references to
DR's own journal, classifying DIO as unReliable — without
even claiming to have established a single unreliable citation.
This is particularly revealing of the level of expertise that's been
dominating WP's overseeing of DIO-related WPpages,
since DIO is far and away the most technically competent
journal in the astronomical history field, a journal whose findings have been
repeatedly confirmed.
[The only other journals in the field are the arrogant but
ever-fumbling JHA,
and the Journal for Astronomical History & Heritage.
(The latter journal is useful and welcome; but, e.g.,
its hefty 2010 output [vol.12] contains not a single equation.)]
The 2008/3/10 Vsmith edit of the DR WPbio deleted the entire section
on the discovery of the planet Neptune, which DIO and DR
have researched and mss-mined longer and more thoroughly than anyone —
with assistance
from the New York Times, the AAAS,
the National Optical Astronomical Observatories,
the Royal Astronomical Society.
Vsmith simultaneously threatened to delete more.
[Vsmith's familiarity with DIO's quality is a larf.
He refers to DIO as
a mere “blog”
and DR's achievements as “junk”,
despite DIO's eminent boards and its well-known
detailed 2000 sinking of the Byrd N.Pole hoax,
co-published with the University of Cambridge.]
When DIO's Keith Pickering restored a few of the items that Vsmith had baselessly censored, Vsmith threatened to turn the entire DR WPbio into a stub.
Vsmith also wreaked vengeance via deletion on a Pickering site.
Why the Establishment Assault Won't Stop —
And Won't Work:
The reason establishments have had to resort to such repulsive extremes
as above-itemized is simple: all its standard suppressive methods are
ineffectual against DIO:
Financial threat won't work since DIO is independently funded.
Threaten publication-cutoff? Not exactly applicable!
Smears are of little use since most DIO scholars are well known to be at the very top of their field.
Sneer at amateurish scholarship? This has been repeatedly tried — and has backfired every time — resulting in over-kill doses of demonstrations of who the actual amateurs are.
DIO has long described itself as an experiment. But we did not at the start anticipate how vile, how low, how vicious, how amoral establishments are. (How do you think they get&stay established?) If the measure of the value of a scientific experiment is that one learns from it, then the ugly, filthy, murderous reaction to our uniquely free journal has made our experiment more valuable than any of our initial expectations. Who can be down-hearted about that?
All scholars who long to see genuine academic freedom should keep watching, to see where establishments' frantic reaction to us goes next. It could get even uglier — because the fixers will never get ethical but will continue to try ANYthing to cover their scabs. But, then, DIO isn't going to go away, either.