User:Egil/Sandbox/rktect

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1 Background
2 The nature of the 'attacks'
3 Contributions of rktect
4 Articles under attack
- 4.1 New articles, same story
- 4.2 Direct links to previous and ongoing VFD discussions
5 See also
6 Selected claims

[edit] Background

The article Historical weights and measures, begun in February 2003, used to contain reasonably sober content, and was gradually evolving and improving as a Wikipedia article should.

A snapshot from August 2004: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Ancient_weights_and_measures&oldid=5188805

After this point, things became more complex, and the article begun to be subject to various kinds of pseudoscience, original research and patent nonsense.

Due to is evolving size, the article was split into Ancient weights and measures and Medieval weights and measures in December 2004.

The latest incident caused so much confusion in the history and discussion pages that, in order to make the situation more managable, the Ancient article was then further split into:

[edit] The nature of the 'attacks'

Beside minor issues like bizarre and sloppy langue and markup, the same content copied to a good number of pages, most of it irrelvant to the context, the major problem is the twisting and fabrication of facts, which seems to be towards showing:

All ancient measures of length are directly derived from the circumference of the Earth, and that the exact size of the Earth was known throughout historic time.
All ancient measures are defined by each other.
Resistance towards Metrication. (e.g. [1], second half)

[edit] Contributions of rktect

What is believed to be user rktect seems to operate under 5 different users:

Another possible candidates is 172.195.118.82, but this is an AOL address.

[edit] Articles under attack

The articles are in various states, depending on who is reverting what, and when.

Everything under Ancient weights and measures, see above.
Mile ok
Eratosthenes needs work
Gabriel Mouton ok: 22 oct 2005
Livio Catullo Stecchini
Anti-metric movement ok
Squaring the circle
Imperial unit ok: 16:48, 30 September 2005
Stadion ok
Foot (unit of length) ok
Comparative metrology ok: 20:31, 23 September 2005
Pseudoscience
Damascus steel
Proto-Indo-Europeans
Metrology needs work
Unit fraction
Conventional Egyptian chronology
Cubit ok: 02:09, 22 October 2005
English unit ok: 16:24, 15 October 2005
Systems of measurement ok: 13:22, 22 October 2005
Pace (measurement) ok
History of measurement ok: 16:37 22 oct 2005

[edit] New articles, same story

After a while, new articles were created that contained essentially the same material. Most of these articles have been or are on VfD, but as articles are deleted, essentially the same content is moved over to new articles.