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Richard Symonds
me ladies, I'm the Cavalry Chase me ladies, I'm the Cavalry (AKA Richard Symonds or simply Cavalry) is a disgraced Wikipedo admin known for his war on the GNAA, shilling for the Liberal Democrats, then abusing his position as a CheckUser to have his enemies banned and manipulating Wikipedia to libel them. He tends to use CheckUser tools on any user who opposes his view points, a blatant violation of the CheckUser guidelines. True to the double standard at Wikipedia, he himself operates several sockpuppets whose main function is to back up all arguments he makes, a high crime for ordinary Wikipedians but not a problem for admins. Like HighInBC, he can't stand the GNAA, and abuses Wikipedia's COI noticeboard to round up support for bans on known GNAA members. In 2015, Symonds faggotry was exposed, and he was desysopped for the lulz and for graet justice in a humiliating ArbCom decision, which found that he had leaked information to The Guardian, and abused his position in order to gain a political advantage for his party, the Liberal Democrats.
— The BBC |
His numerous sockpuppet accounts
Symonds successfully manipulates Wikipedia despite his ArbCom desysop via several sockpuppets, one of which is an admin account belonging to his imaginary girlfriend, Panyd. In addition, he hates ED with a passion, and defames the writers of this truthful article, which has existed for several years before the ugly, ugly truth was exposed by old media:
—Richard Symonds, white knighting for another abusive Wikipedo |
Panyd
Panyd is a sockpuppet of The Cavalry who he claims to be his wife. Countless hours have been spent by him trying to prove it to be a legitimate person. Going as far as to write a nice little backstory for his alleged schizophrenic lover. This is all bullshit, of course, because Wikipedia users can't get any pussy.
However, his blatant sockpuppetry did not amuse his fellow Wikipedia aspies, who decided to file a sockpuppet investigation case. The evidence brought forth included:
It should be noted that the user, who filed the report, was blocked one month later.
LiteralKa, as well as other GNAA members, were not invited to their wedding. They have yet to forgive The Cavalry for this atrocity.
Elena
Panyd later opened a twitter account and chose to follow Cavalry. She listed her name as Elena Salvatore which may be a fake alias, as opposed to Cavalry who remained as Richard Symonds.
Unlike her boyfriend, who refused to follow her back, Jimbo Wales showed an interest in her, and paid her the attention she deserved, as an upcoming Arbcom member.
It is possible that he is too distracted by Angela following him.
His reaction
—Here we learn that The Cavalry is either a sockpuppet owner, or controlling boyfriend. |
Long story short, the Arbitration Committee decided that this was no concern, and the case was declined CheckUser. It is almost certain they figured him out in the process, but he is an honorary member of the Wikipedia hivemind (Archive), thus is above the law of the land.
Fiona
The Panyd account later claimed to be named Fiona and revealed 2 sock accounts:
- All Hail The Muffin, for making edits when she is schizophrenic
- Fiona Apps, supposedly her full name
A Bristol Wireless article later wrote about her speaking at a "Girl Geek Dinner" held August 18, about why women don't edit Wikipedia. Pics were taken.
2011 concluding
2 things of interest happened recently.
- November 22: Panyd announced she would be running for ArbCom.
- November 24: Cavalry announces he was hired as "Office & Development Manager for Wikimedia UK" and will step down at end of term (when "Panyd" will hopefully get his seat, naturally). This was due to a potential conflict of interest between having this job and holding an administrative position. Though it's apparently okay if your girlfriend has that position. Sort of like Hillary Clinton marrying Vladimir Putin, what could go wrong?
London "meetups"
Panyd allegedly attended multiple Wikimedia events in London prior to her trip with her "husband" to Wikimania. EdSaperia, one of the main voices in the IRC meeting, was registered shortly before Cavalry's "resignation", and uses the same obscure ISP, Be Unlimited, as the Cavalry.
GNAA COI
One day while TOW admins were brainstorming on what to do with the Gay Nigger Association of America article, The Cavalry decided to file a Conflict of Interest complaint on AN/I. He created a list of all known Gay Niggers and requested a topic ban (which later progressed into full bans). Immediately, floods of replies asking for these users to be banned spammed up the page, proving that most Wikipedians in fact do not assume good faith. Particularly Diego Grez who went on to make a slew of personal attacks on Twitter, despite it being a bannable offence. The Cavalry then decided to close the discussion, thinking that the consent of two users would be enough to give out topic-bans to multiple editors. This itself was enough for the shit to hit the fan, and a large argument quickly broke out. Seeing as several of the admin hopefuls were supporting him, he decided to gather his friends together and make them agree upon a community consensus that would allow him to further abuse his e-power. Unfortunately for him, there were more opposing view points than he had expected, and began to go about finding ways to remove these. Checked comments include:
Previous Quote | Next Quote
Further bullshit
The Cavalry soon decided that a link to the discussion on Twitter was a violation of WP:CANVASS, despite the definition of the policy being "the intention of influencing the outcome of a discussion in a particular way is considered inappropriate." Apparently, linking to a discussion board is attempting to influence its outcome.
This lead to LiteralKa, head of GNAA public relations, receiving an indefinite block for "Exhausting the community's patience". He was also credited for sockpuppetry after editing Simple Wikipedia under a different name, despite this not being a ban-worthy as WP:SOCK says nothing about "cross-wiki sockpuppetry".
Minions
Cavalry is not limited to a single meat puppet. He always has some (or perhaps socks) in reserve to do his bidding. Ignoring his girlfriend, this includes, but is not limited to:
- User:Bsadowski1 (Brian Sadowski of Chicago, IL), a SysOp on English Wikipedia, CheckUser at Simple Wikipedia, and new Wikimedia steward claiming to deal with spam/vandalism issues. Compare: Cavalry bans a guy and 12 minutes later Bsadowski enforces it globally.
- Diego Grez - His Mexican "butt buddy"
Desysopped
Symonds, like many other UK Wikipedos, is a Liberal Democrat "to the last". In an embarrassing arbitration case, it was determined that Symonds abused his position in order to gain a political advantage for his party during the UK general elections by falsely claiming that "Contribsx" was Conservative Party member Grant Shapps and then leaking this to The Guardian. The only two problems with this were:
- Shapps's account had not been used for several years, yet checkuser guidelines only call for this information to be held for 90 days
- The Guardian's use of a timestamp, which notably differs from the current version
—Symonds, on his now deleted Twitter |
—Risker |
—Dick Symonds, busted |
None of this would have caught the notice of anyone, except the timing of this might have affected the outcome of the UK Elections, at the time less than two weeks away. ArbCom correctly perceived this as an attempt by Symonds, a known liberal activist, to smear the opposition by abusing Wikipedia, and then eliminating the opposition by concocting fake checkuser evidence.
In June, Symonds was desysopped for great justice, which hilariously caused The Guardian to throw him under the bus for the lulz, while The Telegraph just pointed and laughed.
Legal fallout
In August 2015, news broke out that Wikimedia UK Emails related to the Shapps-Symonds affair were deleted. Coincidence or design? Well, does this mean that Symonds and WMUK don't have anything to worry about? Legal experts say otherwise.
Since the outbreak of controversy, Symonds' userpage contained a link to a Guardian article that asserted that he was right about Contribsx, (archive) but in August, Symonds removed that statement (archive) in response to a blog entry by Vordrak.
See also
- Bureaucratic Fuck
- Deletionist
- Jimbo Wales and Rachel Marsden, a similar conflict of interest
External links
- E-mail: [email protected]
ImTheCavalry- Panyd
Richard Symonds is part of a series on Visit the Wikipedia Portal for complete coverage. |