No rest for the wiki

Wednesday, 6 December 2006 — 12:15pm

Well, this is interesting. Today I discovered that someone has, on two separate occasions, attempted to create a Wikipedia entry under “Nicholas Tam”, which is an esteemed name that I would prefer remained unsullied. Both times, it was deleted. The second time, it was protected; now nobody can write a Wikipedia entry under that name without first obtaining administrative approval. Naturally, I would never do this myself: I’m keenly observant of Wikipedian etiquette, and well aware that autobiographical masturbation is best conducted in the privacy of a user page.

At first I thought the culprit was my kid brother, who occasionally spams my referrer logs with frivolous queries like “Nick the ugly canadien who goes to café”. In fact, the date of the entry’s first attempted creation coincided with my brother’s birthday, which is, if anything, circumstantial. Alas, it was but an alignment of the stars. Upon an examination of the entry’s edit history, it seems that there was indeed an individual who assumed my fine and noble name and wrote about himself, no doubt miffed that it is I, not he, who represents at least the first twenty Nicholas Tams in the World According to Google.

The deleted entry reads:

Nicholas Tam is a distinguished student, sportsman and debater in Victoria, Australia.

Wrong! Nicholas Tam is a distinguished student, sportsman and debater in Alberta, Canada (pick a city – there are only two that count, and I’m not sure about the northern one). For the sake of argument, we’ll consider Scrabble a sport.

But that’s not all, no sirree. Not only does he create a vanity article, when it is (properly) tagged with a notice for speedy deletion, he removes the notice. When a passing volunteer leaves him a message on his talk page expressing the nature of the problem, he removes the message. We have here a genuine troll, it seems – and thanks to him, there’s one more hoop to jump through if you are to write a well-earned article about me once I’ve achieved something sufficiently prominent, which is bound to happen sooner or later. Vandal! Charlatan! Fie upon him!

You’re on, Nicholas George Park Wing So-Called Tam from Victoria, Australia – if that’s your real name. The gloves are coming off. I will find you. I will get you.

But soft! What’s this I see on my talk page?

Looks like I’m not the only Nicholas Tam on the planet. So, is my Canadian counterpart also Eurasian? Tamazoid 10:40, 1 December 2006 (UTC)Nicholas Tam (of Australia)

Ha! You don’t know the half of it, kid. I have always been at war with Eurasia.

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