Tuesday, March 17, 2026

English Wikiversity as a junkyard and the bad admins

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 above Jtneill, Mu301, Atcovi, Juandev, and Koavf, as per below.)

Outline about what is wrong in the English Wikiversity:

  • Too much worthless junk
    • Mainspace is full of matter than is not useful to anyone but the creator
    • The portion of the English Wikiversity that is solid and inspiring is very small, by my assessment
  • I may have still some notes on this (too much junk) in my user space
  • My Blog subpage was deleted there by Atcovi
    • Without sufficient reason, I think
    • 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
      • 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 under "Bad vetting of administrators" 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).
    • 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)"
        • Untrue, by my lights. Incidentally, there is no "thriving and vibrant learning environment", athough the sentence can be interpreted as stating that while it is perhaps not there, Juandev nonetheless provided "valuable insight" on how to create it. Juandev does not provide valuable input, by my assessment.
    • 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.
        • 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)"
    • 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.
  • 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 - I do not know whether it was clear he should not have been an admin; I would need to find out more; he supported Marshallsumter
      • Internetworked badness, one bad actor supporting another
  • 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.
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) and my Blog page (alleged vandalism per log); 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.

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.

It is quite possible that I will be indefinitely blocked in the English Wikiversity, as per the proposal made by user Atcovi at Wikiversity:Community Review/Dan Polansky. As part of a potential farewell, let me review some of the results of my curatorial work that I have done in the English Wikiversity since September 2024 when I was made a curator, over a year ago (Wikiversity:Candidates for Custodianship/Dan Polansky). The work can be seen in part in the action log, Special:Log/Dan Polansky.
Item Description/Note
Completing the clean-up after Marshallsumter I have moved ca. 680 pages created by Marshallsumter out of main space and Draft space into user space; ca. 330 were moved out of main space. Data is at User:Dan Polansky/Change request on articles by Marshallsumter. I thus largely completed the important work started by Dave Braunschweig and Guy vandegrift, both unfortunately inactive. I opened a Colloquium discussion for this to make sure there was enough consensus (Wikiversity:Colloquium#What to do with remaining Marshall Sumter pages) and then interacted with Marshallsumter on his user talk page, which lead to discovery of evidence supporting the notion that he is very likely an intentional disruptor and hoaxer. I waited at least a month to make sure enough time was given to collect input. This was a lot of effort and also risk (one can easily make a communication mistake), but the result seems very important, bringing an embarassing chapter of the English Wikiversity history likely to the close. I in fact moved some of his pages before I opened the discussion in Colloquium, but then realized opening a discussion to produce evidence of lack of serious opposition was very much preferable.
KYPark's literature pages I proposed moving them out of mainspace via RFD and then I implemented the proposal when there were no objections after at least a month (Wikiversity:Requests for Deletion#Literature). These were about 500 low-value pages (a search "intitle:/KYPark.Literature/" finds 482 pages. By my assessment, these pages were an embarassment. The pages are now at User:KYPark/Literature. (I now requested more KYPark's pages from other root page for removal, via another RFD, Wikiversity:Requests for Deletion#Pragmatics/History.)
Smaller clean-ups I moved a range of pages to user space, as per the move log. Examples include User:Andra Rei/Human Behavior, User:Jaredscribe/Foreign policy from Obama to Trump, User:Ktucker/Start a Wikiversity Project, User:Journey Into the Other Side of Nothingness/Ontorealis. There are many more. Part of it was moving bad pages by User:MarsSterlingTurner to his user space and then requesting his block for block evasion. Example page: User:MarsSterlingTurner/Consciousness. He kept on creating bad pages until he was blocked.
User:Saltrabook pages I got on the case of Saltrabook, starting an inquiry about a possible copyright violation: User talk:Saltrabook#Possible copyright violation. The English Wikiversity needs to figure out whether the person (or persons) who control that user account could have been able to author the pages inserted; unless the user starts cooperating and properly responding, it is perhaps advisable to delete all pages created by him as a preemtive measure. Dave Braunschweig and Guy vandegrift did some decent work toward limiting problematic conduct of that user account, but probably more needs to be done.

From what I can tell, I was the biggest driver of the English Wikiversity clean-up in 2025 by far. One can review WV:RFD, WV:Request custodian action and WV:Colloquium to in part verify or at least plausibility check this notion, as well as the page move logs (I was usually moving pages without leaving a redirect instead of using the deletion tool). My page move log, 4000 last move actions (all are from 2025): here.

Some good structural things for which I did not need curator tools were the following recent proposals relating to GenAI:

Unfortunately, there does not yet seem to be enough support; I cannot claim the proposals passed. The first one has no support at all, it seems.

I have also made some mistakes. One learns, just like Popper's beetles, Popper's Kepler or Popper's Einstein (a nod to the great Austrian-British philosopher). --Dan Polansky (discuss • contribs) 08:17, 20 November 2025 (UTC) 

Contacting me: Anyone who cares about these problems and wants me to add some detail to this page can contact me by email from the wiki interface e.g. in the Czech Wikiversity or the Czech Wiktionary.

Openness to comments: Collecting this amount of evidence is all too likely to lead to some inaccuracies. I plan to review all Blogger comments, if any, and correct them as far as applicable.

posted by Dan at 6:01 AM

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