Schizoid Gibberish Wiki Author

The new bane of Wiki (July 2009). An individual who keeps creating new pages, adding comments, and adding links to new pages, all of which are utter nonsense. Most contributions incoherently reflect typical themes of paranoid obsession (aliens, government, the environment, economics, religion, hidden symbols), some are confused "mathematics" or pseudo-code, and a few are eerily poetic, visionary and reminiscent of cyberpunk science-fiction.

There is clearly a sharp intelligence hidden in the madness. The pseudo-code, while dreadfully off-topic and unrelated to anything useful, indicates programming skill in a variety of paradigms - especially LogicProgramming. The other statements indicate quite an imagination, albeit one directed outside any fruitful pursuit and spewed across unrelated WikiWiki pages. We are fortunate that SchizoidGibberishWikiAuthor seems content to say his piece and move on, making no attempt to restore reversed pages. I half imagine the author contribute to this page, unaware whom it describes.

{The hard part may be telling the difference between cutting-edge brilliance and a mental disorder.}

Update 2010 July: The consensus seen in ShouldTopBeBanned is that people who post senseless, illogical nonsense are harmless contributors to WikiWiki - i.e. so long as they aren't abusing other people. Lest we hold a DoubleStandard, we should stop deleting SchizoidGibberishWikiAuthor's contributions on that basis.

What double standard? I haven't seen any calls to ban him either.

To "ban" in WikiWiki is technologically synonymous with "delete all further contributions". So SGWA has been banned without a call for it.

Current Theories:

The individual is off their meds.
Needs to be diagnosed and placed on meds.
Has been enjoying a staggering quantity of non-prescription "meds". (I'll have what he's having!)
The messages are in code and are part of a plot against the USA/world.
It's an evil plot against forward-thinking Wikis.
An AI or TuringTest experiment.
According to the University of Sodonis, it happens because blkjsdf asdl;fkjasdf;lkasdf las sdflkjlasdf laskdfjlaskdf fllooooooog.

In the opinion of this writer, the first three points above are an order of magnitude more likely than the last three.

Furthermore, I wonder if SchizoidGibberishWikiAuthor should be renamed to 21stCenturySchizoidMan, in a gratuitous King Crimson reference. :-)

Who says it is only one individual?
Me. Analysis of the IPs from which SgWa posts indicates it's from a fairly tight geographical region of downtown Toronto, with occasional forays into the surrounding 'burbs. It might be multiple individuals, but why? The content is consistent.

Uh, to the author: A better frame for such stream-of-consciousness verbiage would make it more accessible. This Wiki values dry boring logic over leaps of creativity, so when we start reading something that crosses the line we fail to recognize it as Art. The framing makes it only look like an attempt at logic that failed. That's very damaging, whereas a rebuilt GreenCheese, for example, would readily use and enjoy the new poetry! --PhlIp

New theory! SGWA is a prototype forum-spamming bot, designed to take a seed from the page and produce 'stream of consciousness' that lead to arbitrary injections of 'desired' links (links to MetaModel and arbitrary theories, now; links to products and sites promoting them, later).

Alternative Hypothesis: SGWA is some other sort of bot, like the one described at http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/No%2c_We_Need_a_Neural_Network.aspx

Actually, both of the above theories spark my interest, and they may be close to being on-target. Perhaps it is a class project on this type of artificial intelligence that tries to both use data taken from a site in some sort of like-minded logical way, and at the same time try to create new material that is compatible with what is found on the site. There are issues that I have with this theory, and that is that it does not seem to be learning and improving over time, and it seems to be stuck on certain themes as a Schizoid individual would be. I'm still betting on a live individual, but this idea(s) is also tantalizing as well.

Do you think that maybe SGWA doesn't know about RecentChanges, and is unaware therefore of this page's existence? Wandering the old pages of Wiki alone, stopping only now and then to add his/her thoughts. Never once knowing that we're in here talking about them.

That's kind of spooky.

He (or it) likes to link to their own articles -- making them easier to find! ;->

 So when you find a SGWA page, check the in-Wiki links to see if they're spam too.

(Not all of the SWGA-linked pages are junk; some are legit. So please don't delete carelessly.)

See SchizoidGibberishWikiAuthorContributions for the more interesting contributions that the SchizoidGibberishWikiAuthor has made to this wiki.

Some things I have seen lately, suggest that there could indeed be a connection between GV and SGWA, and it would explain a lot of the bizarre behavior...

So I decided to run a little experiment to see how well people can tell. I took a page recently deleted SGWA and replaced it with some useless but definitely not SGWA content.

TogetherWeAreNorad? had "fake" SWGA content: "Be afraid of melding with aliens. You might become something powerful but very dangerous to your own people. That is what happened to Norad." [deleted]

"Real" or "fake", gibberish is still gibberish. It gets deleted.

 SGWA IP address on 11-10-2009 [74.13.108.59]
 SGWA IP address on 03-19-2011 [74.13.110.105]

It appears that the SGWA is a customer of Bell in Canada, with DSL service.

 229.104.250.63.static.addr.dsl4u.ca on April 18th, 2011
 bas2-unionville55-1242393660.dsl.bell.ca on May 1st, 2011

They're definitely Canadian. Yep; SGWA is a Bell DSL customer.

dsl-173-206-89-182.tor.primus.ca - June 2014

So, do we have any better handle on this...um...whatever it is? It's now Feb 2011 and SGWA seems to be still spouting. I am getting tired of RecentChanges being clogged up with useless kaka. Can't we find a means to HardBan this critter? Noise is not welcome here.

Is it just me, or has anyone else realized that we seem to have lost this SchizoidGibberishWikiAuthor after the Japan earthquakes/tsunamis disaster? 3-14-2011

As of 3-19-2011, our old friend the SGWA is back!!!

I think we have a SGWA "copycat" or probably just an ordinary link spammer. They post HTML with anchor tag links to FreedomIsPriceless. That's not the usual SGWA style.

BackpackingThroughTheKarmaMarket is an intriguing concept.

What, they cancelled the tram?

The odd part is that when SGWA is on his/her meds, they may post perfectly normal material. There are topics like OneTruePath that may be from the in-between state.

OneTruePath may be a bit silly, but it's quite coherent and from a geographically-distant IP block to SgWa's usual location.

Thanks.

Imagine if SchizoidGibberishWikiAuthor and GrammarVandal got together and had bunches of children! Wikis would be terrorized for generations by the Bach-musical-family-lineage equivalent of trolls.

I think I met him.

In summer 2014, I was in Toronto. He always posts from IP addresses in downtown Toronto. Walking toward the waterfront on Sherbourne Street at roughly at the junction of Richmond Street East, we came across a young man -- perhaps twenty-two years old -- of apparent African descent and dishevelled but clean dress, running randomly back and forth in agitation whilst ranting at the top of his lungs to no one, with the typical fever-bright blank stare and wooden expression of the un-medicated schizophrenic.

His rants were exactly like the content found on SchizoidGibberishWikiAuthorContributions. Imagine it read out loud, very loud, in an articulate, well-enunciated, but emotionless monotone.

I didn't try to talk to him, and I doubt we could have communicated any more sensibly there than here, but our eyes met briefly. I'd like to think there was a fleeting moment of lucidity where perhaps he felt, somehow, that his occasional poetry was appreciated here and that we shared, if only for a second, that most sentient of bonds -- a sliver of acceptance -- that is ultimately all we have to lift us above the drowning mad waves of existence itself.

It must have crossed your mind at least once, "Now's my opportunity to break his fingers so he can't type".

No. No it didn't.

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