Earlier this week Aaron Ringel’s Wikipedia page was deleted. Yes, it is embarrassing for VA’s 48th House District Delegate Bob Brink’s young challenger – but it wasn’t Aaron’s fault. The humiliation is actually the fault of the attention-seeking blogger from Red Nova, Josh St. Louis, who has a history of failure on Wikipedia. And in fact, St. Louis was so embarrassed by it he eventually changed his user name on Wikipedia.
But that was not St. Louis’ first failure on Wikipedia. No, his first failure (that I’m aware of) was actually the Speedy Deletion of the page he tried to conceitedly create for Red Nova itself under his screen name "Not Jim Moran." Apparently no one told him that creating a Wikipedia article for your own blog is seen as self promotion/advertising – a big no-no on Wikipedia (not to mention Red Nova isn’t noteworthy enough for its own article anyway). I conveyed my condolences last Monday, which triggered his first bout of shame – and his second failure on Wikipedia.St. Louis' second failure on Wikipedia was that, after not liking having it pointed out that other members of Wikipedia had cataloged his failures on his own user page, he tried to delete them. Unfortunately, nothing ever really goes away on Wikipedia – there’s always record or history of changes. Furthermore, when a user thought the profile’s deletion was vandalism and put it all back – "Not Jim Moran" was forced to delete it all a second time. (I could count the second deletion as the third fail but I am not because I don’t want to appear overly harsh and unsympathetic.)
Now, some of you may be wondering why the links have been going to Wikipedia pages referring to a user named "Darthmaul8907." Well, St. Louis' third failure on Wikipedia was hoping that switching his username to "Darthmaul8907" would help hide his ... lack of success so far. But unfortunately again, this also does not make unsuccessful history cease to be. It’s understandable wanting to hide the history of "Not Jim Moran" on Wikipedia – the deletion of his pages had drawn quite a few eyes earlier in August alone, while "Darthmaul8907" has not.
To conclude, St. Louis' third and final failure on Wikipedia (again, that I am aware of – there may be many others under other user names waiting to be found) took place last Friday, August 7th, when Wikipedia finally killed Aaron Ringel’s extremely short lived article, after it was flagged for deletion on July 30th. It was an amateurish attempt by a novice just knowledgeable enough to be dangerous.
And St. Louis proved quite capable of delivering collateral damage, because a public failure like this on Wikipedia for Aaron Ringel, where the entire community agrees that he isn’t noteworthy enough to warrant notoriety, is far more embarrassing than if St. Louis, aka "Not Jim Moran," aka "Darthmaul8907," had never added Ringel to his list of failures at all.
