Lead statements: Wikiversity mainspace has become a "junkyard" of abandoned, low-quality content that serves education purposes only poorly. This state of affairs was brought about by arguably incompetent administration and incompetent policy/rule making. A decent remedy would include desysopping bad/incompetent/dishonest administrators, installing at least one professional administrator and greatly improving the rules to make it easier to move bad content out of mainspace to user space (or delete it, in some cases). Something like receivership can be considered. Unfortunately, if all inferior administrators get removed, hardly any administrator will be left. (Inferior administrators include Jtneill, Mu301, Atcovi, Juandev, Koavf and Guy vandegrift, as per below. Former highly problematic administrators include Abd and Marshallsumter.)
Disclaimer: Collecting this kind of material requires careful attention and is challenging as for mistake avoidance. I am ready to make corrections based on feedback/comments provided, whether in Blogger/Blogspot or on wiki. I am repeatedly reviewing the material for problems.
Other limitation: What follows is so much more chaotic/poorly organized than it should be.
Outline about what is wrong in the English Wikiversity:
- Too much worthless junk
- My Blog subpage was deleted there by Atcovi (still in Wayback Machine in recent revision)
- As alleged "vandalism", which I cannot confirm to be accurate.
- Atcovi is one of the editors guilty of all that junk being there unaddressed.
- Speculation: he is trying to remove/hide criticism.
- Hardly any good administrator
- Dave Braunschweig was something of an exception: he was pretty good
- With good administration, the junk can start to be moved to user space
- I proved this can be done during my one year of curatorship/semiadministration
- Evidence or signs
- Unequivocal support of Juandev for admin – huge red flag (see also below)
- Failure to protect me from desysopping – failure to protect the cleaning force
- Perhaps more controversial and I can hardly be neutral about myself
- The embarassing failure to block disruptor Harold Foppele
- I have a page about what I consider to be the Harold Foppele scandal at Meta.
- Example bad administrators
- Jtneill
- Been there more active since 2008 and did too little to prevent the junk from accumulating.
- Created many arguably worthless stub pages in the field of psychology, which contributed to the spirit that anything goes.
- Nominated Juandev for admin, which is absurd as per the criticism below and under that, "Juandev".
- For the page Fairy Rings, applied "Clear objective that is in scope" as a rationale for keeping. This rationale should not be a condition sufficient, or else too much substub junk has to be kept (link).
- (From another blog post) When I was dealing with the troll Harold Foppele, he did not help me
with him and instead tolerated his copyright violation, as per his user talk page,
where he wrote "I've removed the copyright tag [...]", after which I
wrote "The page still contains copyright violation. [...]"
- We could have blocked the troll early on for copyright violation alone, if the admins including Jtneill cooperated with me.
- In 2019, wrote: "[...] However, I not in favour of an editing block. Marshallsumter continues to make many helpful edits. -- Jtneill - Talk - c 05:15, 8 October 2019 (UTC)" ⟹ utter failure to notice the problems with the "lectures" by Marshallsumter ⟹ lacks capability to curate Wikiversity.
- In his May 2026 RFD nomination on Harold Foppele physics pages, he was not even able to take a stance on whether the pages should be deleted other than that they should be reviewed for deletion. At least he made the nomination, which quite possibly is going to lead to the right outcome (removing out of mainspace). In any case, lacks capability to curate (properly assess pages for deletion, keeping, moving to user space, etc.)
- (Maybe I should not be so overcritial. When a dubious philosophy page by S.Perquin was in RFD, I also did not take a clear stance on deletion. This was because original research was allowed and I was not clear what would allow me to vote delete/move out of mainspace. At least, I criticized the page on substance on the page's talk page (WM). And at least, I did participate on RFD and cleanup processes, unlike most.)
- Proposed a deletion policy in passive voice and without signing his post, in May 2026. Thus, he stated e.g. "It has been revised and moved [...]" instead of "I have revised it and moved [...]".
- Before he made that proposal, he made changes to the page without discussing his changes anywhere or placing rationales for these changes.
- Used ChatGPT to edit the page, a red flag; the edit summary does not indicate what the edit does but merely which tool was used to make the edit and where the session is.
- In a somewhat similar fashion, he pushed his views on use of GenAI not by starting a Colloquium discussion with a wording proposal (as I did) but rather by editing his proposal in Wikiversity namespace.
- Changed "learning outcomes are scarce" to "learning outcomes, or research aims are scarce", which will make it harder to delete bad content.
- He will be able to defend pages like Fairy Rings and its subpages, which he did before (the pages I nominated were eventually deleted, but not on his proposal).
- To wit: "Keep. Clear objective that is in scope. Delete the test database pages. -- Jtneill - Talk - c 12:01, 22 November 2025 (UTC)".
- The edit summary incorrectly states "Per suggestion: Wikiversity talk:Deletions#Maybe a change for Proposed deletion (prod)?": the discussion link does not propose the above change.
- The discussion link shows a professionally/competently made proposal by PieWriter.
- Incidentally, he failed to try to make it a policy since 2008, for 18 years. Better late than never?
- Mu301
- Been there more active since 2007 and did too little to prevent the junk from accumulating
- Supported Juandev: "Juandev has been a trusted and valued contributor to our community for a
very long time. His comments and suggestions have provided valuable
insight into how we can provide a thriving and vibrant learning
environment. I have very strong support for this nomination. --mikeu talk 03:25, 16 January 2026 (UTC)"
- Stated about Koavf: "Very helpful and productive contributor. --mikeu talk 02:01, 22 May 2026 (UTC)".
- Untrue, by my lights: I have not seen Koavf contribute much of content. For this to be true, "contributor" would have to mean administrator doing almost no content contribution work and almost no curatorial (article deletion) work. I do not see how Koavf's editing activity constitutes "productive contribution".
- Koavf is not productive even as a curator; in 2025, he did almost no curatorial work.
- From my review of his 2025 activity, Mu301 does very little content contribution and editing work and almost no curation (making sure bad pages get deleted), but does find time to exercise political power by using his power tools and voting in editors.
- Guy vandegrift
- Defended absurdly bad page having 4 photos (Student Projects/PhotoTalks, RFD), contributing to the spirit of junk keeping.
- But: did a pretty good (if incomplete) job at moving Marshallsumter pages out of mainspace.
- I sense he is actually a nice guy; PhotoTalks case is some kind of weak spot of his. But I don't know.
- Juandev
- Hindered my attempt to keep some minimum standards for mainspace content: "I just wonders since when is low-quality unwelcomed in Wikiversity? Juandev (discuss • contribs) 06:39, 26 October 2025 (UTC)" (here).
- Attacked me in my curator role, which eliminated an effective cleanup force: myself (here but also previously, e.g. on my talk page, in support of Harold Foppele).
- Supported keeping pseudoscience as pseudoscience. Wikiversity:Requests for Deletion/Archives/22,
"What about to tag it as pseudoscience and keep it. Wikiversity is a
free lerning environment and if someone want to learn here how to
meditate, why not. What I would propose here to use or create a template
for it, which would indicate its a pseudoscience or its an Original
research."
- An aside: meditation is not pseudoscience, in general.
- Koavf (Justin)
- Failed to block disruptor Harold Foppele in Nov 2025 (link).
- If he was unhappy with my substantiation work as for the block, he should have done his own substantiation work.
- Anyone should be able to raise an issue with even subpar substatiation - collecting/putting together substantiation is everyone's responsibility.
- Supported Juandev thus: "Support globally trust user. —Justin (koavf) [...] 08:54, 4 February 2026 (UTC)"
- Untrue: Juandev is not globally trusted.
- Now in May 2026 RFD on Harold Foppele pages, he apparently changed his mind and wants to delete all the Harold Foppele (pseudo-)physics pages, albeit with no articulation of a rationale: "Delete all Not worth keeping. ―Justin (koavf) [...] 08:27, 17 May 2026 (UTC)".
- (I think these pages should better be moved to user space, at least as a lasting testimony for the auditors. At least, here is Wayback Machine for one of them.)
- His signature is this: "―Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯L" No-one should be allowed to wave his political ideology (here, anarchism, etc.). in a signature, I think, let alone an administrator. (Anarchism is a disruptive political pseudo-philosophy, all too easily leading to failed adherence to rules and processes.)
- Atcovi
- Engaged in sockpupetry/meatpuppetry in his own admin election from year 2013 under Draubb user name.
- "For your Information everyone: I do not commit sockpuppetry, Yingshong
is my brother and Hommbo is my cousin. These two truly support me and
know a lot about me. And yes! I do have a substantial experience! I was
here for around three years and I have made very useful pages to
Wikiversity! [...] --Draubb [...] 27 May 2013"
- Failed to provide proper licenses for files. Wikiversity:Candidates for Custodianship/Actovi4: "Atcovi is by far our most scofflaw user at Wikiversity when it comes to
uploaded files. There are currently 16 files missing source or author
information. 15 of those files were uploaded by Atcovi. He has been
repeatedly notified of the missing information, but simply ignores the
requests and the requirements. If he's not willing to meet licensing
requirements for content he uploads himself, he's not yet ready to
enforce licensing on others."
- Attacked a major cleaning force (me) instead of only attacking the problem he cared about, Wikidebates and their design as collections of all arguments free from censorship.
- Suggested I was an obstacle to cleaning Wikiversity (here). The "Review of my curatorial work" below shows the opposite is true; I was number one cleaner in 2025 by far.
- Deleted my problem handling and tracking page on Marshallsumter, in May 2026. Without this page or similar, I would have hardly been able to handle the massive Marshallsumter problem and figure out he was likely a prankster. The page is still in Wayback Machine and in my view shows how problems caused by highly disruptive editors (which Marshallsumter was) can be systematically and properly managed, investigated, tracked and addressed.
- This looks like Atcovi's trying to hide tracks of his curatorial incompetence (he was a curator since 2015) as well as that of other Wikiversity administrators: the page is/was the most detailed documentation of the Marshallsumter problem I know of (hardly anyone noticed the problem for 7 years, I think).
- Moved my pages outside of mainspace to my user space apparently with no process and with a dubious rationale (this is quasi-deletion; user space is not indexed by Google). I have more notes on the matter in Meta, especially in my Meta blog. I know of no policy or guideline to support such a move, nor do I find much of precedent. May 2026.
- When I raised the issue on his Meta user talk page (Wayback Machine), he refused to engage with me and requested my block. An indefinite block was implemented. (Meta, from my experience, is a place run often by dubious characters. I guess I asked for what happened. Hello to Jan Hus, a Czech national hero. For instance, if on my wiki someone registered user name "XXBlackburnXx", I would block them for an inappropriate user name; on Meta, this is a steward.
- And thus, Meta is part of the problem. When I find evidence that Atcovi engaged in highly problematic behaviors for multiple years, that is "hounding" according to them. Compare that to the treatment of Brett Kavanaugh, for whom putative or real misdeed was raised from decades ago. Meta admins could have said: oops, the vetting processes in Wikiversity and Meta are subpar; people are not paying enough attention to the profile of the person being voted into a position of power. That did not happen. (Admittedly, one can object that Atcovi was a minor; not so much for Kavanaugh. But even for Kavanaugh, one can insist he was young and foolish, back then.)
- He stated in April 2026: "Wikiversity's biggest issue in recent times was the hosting of low-quality, trash content. Thankfully we've done a great job in removing pseudoscience and other embarrassingly trash content (Wikidebates, for example), but the biggest concern moving forward is proper maintenance IMO. [...]". That is a gross misrepresentation: 1) the English Wikiversity is full of trash content (which I called "junk") and there is no "great job" being done; 2) Wikidebates were in general not trash content but rather some of the best/most interesting that Wikiversity had to offer, by my assessment.
- On Meta, removed my posts inconvenient for him from archiving history, including one on Involved closure of the Community Review in the English Wikiversity (May 2026). Such a behavior is typical of bad actors who want to escape scrutiny.
- Bad vetting of administrators, examples
- Juandev has history of incorrect use of personally identifiable information (PII) yet they) made him an admin in 2026 again.
- Marshallsumter had bad history in Wikipedia and started doing the same kind of bad things in Wikiversity yet they made him an admin.
- He lost adminship many years later, after having left behind many dubious pages in the mainspace (quite possibly some kind of prank on his part).
- I created page Change request on articles by Marshallsumter, which proved eminently useful in my investigation; that is, the wiki with its markup, revision history, autoTOC, refs etc. is super useful.
- Atcovi has a history of sockpuppeting/meatpuppetting to get himself elected under the username Draubb (evidence), yet they made him a full admin (=custodian) (in 2021).
- A lot of history of hat-hunger and hat-collection as well
- E.g. the 2021 nomination was his # 5 in the English Wikiversity.
- I saw other nominations elsewhere that raised doubt.
- Abd – it seems it should have been clear that he should not have been made an admin ("custodian"), but I am still researching the question, as per below; he supported Marshallsumter.
- Internetworked badness, one bad actor supporting another.
- Abd was indefinitely blocked on 1 May 2011 in Wikipedia, a red flag
- A community ban in WP came in June 2011.
- Quoting part of the lead: "Abd has been a disruptive presence on this wiki for several years now. This disruption is characterized by attempts to influence project governance in ways orthogonal to accepted modes (e.g. delegable-proxy, self-reversion whilst blocked/banned, placing huge walls of text inside collapse boxes which "you don't have to read" but will be referred to nevertheless as being accepted if not read, maintaining unacceptable pages in userspace on the claim they constitute "evidence" in arbitration cases); a latter fixation on the topic of cold fusion, including promotion of copyright-violating external links and support for other site-banned editors; and sockpuppetry in the support of that same cause. An aggravating factor is Abd's participation at external and sister-project sites where they pursue the same agenda, and COI pursuit of commercial interests in cold fusion"
- Even if the English Wikiversity did not want to automatically block Abd as well, they should perhaps at least not have made him an admin.
- In En Wv, Abd received probationary custodianship (their word for adminship) on 9 June 2010, as per a message by Jtneill.
- The first use of blocking tool by Abd is from July 2010.
- On 20 April 2010, Abd wrote as a response to what to my view was a reasonable delete vote by Kaldari: "Wikiversity is not a place where pseudoscience is excluded, and WV pages are not required to be NPOV unless they are represented as such. Pseudoscience, fringe science, emerging science, all can be studied on Wikiversity. "Rantings" is uncivil. Thanks for understanding this. --Abd 17:27, 20 April 2010 (UTC)". An early red flag since pseudoscience is allegedly not excluded?
- There are all sorts of red flags in the custodianship nomination for Abd. There was also a second nomination.
- Despite all the red flags, the following oppose is not unequivocal but merely qualified: "Oppose I am opposed to full custodianship primarily on procedural grounds i.e., the mentor didn't recommend for full custodianship and a new mentor wasn't found before a discussion and vote about full custodianship was conducted. However, I have been encouraged by Abd's willing engagement and good faith efforts to help and contribute to Wikiversity, his civility, and his transparency in discussing his ideas and actions. -- Jtneill - Talk - c 15:21, 6 August 2010 (UTC)"
- To be clarified: there were some blocks of Abd back in 2010 already in Wikipedia. I suspect that a careful review of Abd in the spirit of critical rationalism could have discovered enough red flags to prevent his adminship. But that would require more research.
- Lead remedy - receivership
- Emulate to some extent "receivership" for the English Wikiversity
- An imperfect analogy; which one is better?
- Desysop all the bad admins listed above
- Bad at least as per the Harold Foppele scandal
- Put in at least one professional admin appointed by the Wikimedia Foundation
- The "community" will probably protest.
- That should not matter: they have proven unable to properly administer the project.
- Is "conservatorship" also an analogy worth considering?
- Alternative remedy - handle the most eggregious cases of badly assigned adminship
- No adminship for sockpuppeteers/meatpuppeteers ==> desysop Atcovi.
- No adminship for those who incorrectly use PII ==> desysop Juandev.
- Sent an admonition/reprimand to the talk pages of the now demonstrably incompetent administrators
- To the effect of: we would ideally removed your power tools but we are keeping them so you can help Wikiversity further.
- Alternative remedy - closing the English Wikiversity project
- My assessment: the potential for the project is great.
- Minus: the project has been taken over by incompetence, laziness, complacency and sometimes perhaps by malice.
- I find quasi-receivership or the like much better than closing.
- The English Wikiversity has proven extremely helpful to me; I love it. I feel sorry for the project and its lost potential.
- Root source of the problems
- Excessively broad conception of what is educational about an "educational resource"
- Pushed e.g. by Juandev, who, to my knowledge, produced hardly any pages worth keeping.
- There may be some, but a glance at pages created by him suggests most of the pages should be moved to user space.
- Or they could be deleted, as he seems to prefer.
- The overbroad conception was accepted by some other users as well.
- Whether a page can be useful for someone else but the creator is often not considered.
- My (Dan Polansky's) role in the English Wikiversity
- I was a curator (=semiadmin) for about a year from 2024 to 2025 before I was desysopped and blocked.
- I was nominated by Jtneill; I did not ask for the role of a curator.
- Before that, I was a moderately large content contributor.
- I created many Wikidebates and got thanks from the guy who launched the Wikidebates, on my talk page.
- I created a page explaining my views on Wikidebates and defending them.
- I even created a Wikidebate on whether Wikidebates are a good thing (meta).
- I created other pages. Some of the best include Technology as a threat or promise to life and its forms, I think.
- An incomplete list of my contributions is in the history of my user page, before the sockpuppeteer/meatpuppetter Atcovi removed it.
- I made a lot of cleanup by moving pages to user space, including those by Marshallsumter (using my curator tools, which made it possible to move pages without leaving a redirect behind).
- I made a report of that cleanup effort in my Blog page in user space, but that was deleted by the sockpuppeteer/meatpuppeteer Atcovi. See Review of my curatorial work below but also the Web Archive version.
The above outline is very incompletely covered below, if at all. What follows now are rather complementary paragraphs.
Limitations of this write-up: The above should be ideally better linked and substantiated than it is. That is a lot of work. Unless someone contacts me to ask me to do more work on it and is planning to do something significant about the English Wikiversity, I do not have the energy to do all the work now. On the other hand, the referencing is now not too bad either (although it is no match for MediaWiki-grade inline referencing).
Recent criticism from Wikipediocracy: There is some criticism from Wikipediocracy ("Wikiversity is a mess", 10 Nov 2025). Incidentally, the editors are attacking my content. I find the criticism not compelling; if, as a engineering review moderator, I would get this kind of material as comments on a review, I would dismiss it as poorly articulated.
Disclaimer: my conflict of interest: I was desysopped by Mu301 after he received an email from the sockpuppeteer/meatpuppeteer Atcovi. I was later indefinitely blocked by Atcovi, as a result of what I think was a dubiously conducted community review about myself, with dubious participation criteria and dubious participation (is the absence of posts from multiple admins an act of cowardice or shirking of responsibility?). I can easily be seen as just a disgruntled editor. However, I think that there is quite a bit of evidence that I really cared about the project. It would have been so much better for me to just pretend not to see the problems and mind my own business, editing my articles. Perhaps I should have rejected the curatorship nomination, which came from Jtneill (I did not nominate myself; I am not a hat collector but rather usually hat refuser.)
Admissibility of this form of criticism: The idea that this form
of criticism is not admissible and must be censored, if present, is part
of the problem. Often, problems cannot be effectively addressed unless
they are properly documented and tracked. That is at least suggested by
the corporate practice of problem reporting, issue tracking, etc. I
worked at two large international corporations, the German SAP (business
software) and the American Honeywell (embedded software for aerospace),
and both are very competent at problem reporting and issue tracking.
This is an inspiration. (They are rather different companies in style.)
Why is this in Blogger: Sockpuppeteer/meatpuppeteer Atcovi already deleted two pages where I collected criticism of Wikiversity, with rather dubious rationale: Problem reports (about Wikiversity problems), archived at Wayback Machine, and my Blog page (alleged vandalism per log), also archived at Wayback Machine; see also list of userspace deleted pages for me). Pages on wiki are liable to be deleted by those who would rather stiffle/censor criticism than face it straight on and refute it or discuss it. The anti-free-speech/anti-Millian tendencies are well alive in many cultures and environments. I find wiki editing greatly superior to Blogger, but Blogger is not too bad and that's what we have when there is this attempted censorship and opposition suppression. I could perhaps build this on Meta, as I would like to do, but I fear to be harassed and blocked as a result.
The Harold Foppele case: This is one of the most revealing cases of overt administrative neglect and incompetence. I document the case in detail at Meta. As of 13 Mar 2026, many pages created by Harold Foppele are still in mainspace: Quantum, Quantum A Spooky Action at a Distance, Quantum: The Secret of Cohesion: How Waves Hold Matter Together, Quantum: A Walk Through the Universe, Quantum Noisy Qubits, Quantum mechanics measurements, Quantum Computing Algorithms in the NISQ Era, Quantum Ultra fast lasers, Quantum Matter Elements and Particles, Quantum mechanics, Quantum optics beam splitter experiments, Chess, Speed of sound experiments, Chess/Board Configurations, Number of independent spatial modes in a spherical volume, Quantum A Matter Of Size, Quantum Formulas Collection, Quantum/See also, Quantum/Andrew N. Jordan, Quantum Computing Algorithms in the NISQ Era/Quiz, Quantum/See also/Images, Chess/Play with other Wikiversitans, Completing the square, Python/Handler for references at Wikiversity pages. Perhaps the non-quantum mechanics pages are not so bad; I haven't looked.
The KayYayPark case: I was requesting help from custodians in vain, e.g. here and here. Months elapsed before proper intervention took place.
Mini-audit idea: Check for yourself. For instance, use the random page function 20 times and ask yourself how often what you see can possibly be of hardly any use to anyone but the author.
Review of my curatorial work: I posted the following to my Wikiversity Blog, which was deleted by Atcovi (the links do not work, though; I produced this by placing the wiki markup to preview in a Czech Wikiversity and copying and pasting the HTML here). Italics below indicates it is a quoted text originally published elsewhere.
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