[tz] Wikipedia - blocking time zone contributors - massive insertion of errors by AlanM1 - win-win if people cooperate

[Tobias Conradi]

In Wikipedia several accounts that added Olson/IANA time zone
information have been blocked and marked as sock puppets of Tobias
Conradi. Since User:Tobias Conradi did not edit since years, because a
handful of people once decided to block him, the only evidence for
"sock puppeting" is given as "behavioral".

Behavioral for the User:TimeOfChange is to edit time articles:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/TimeOfChange
No single talk page edit or anything else.

Lately User Royaume du Maroc got blocked, who created:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_in_Florida
A listing of states that have more than one IANA time zone
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Time_in_the_United_States&diff=493140655&oldid=492035648

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_in_Idaho

Expanding the listing, maybe to create more state specific articles
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Time_in_the_United_States&diff=493143720&oldid=492035648

Then User:AlanM1 jumps in, who later in a discussion when User Royaume
du Maroc was already blocked writes
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Administrators%27_noticeboard/Archive236#AlanM12012052901

"... I created some and edited some other "Time in state" articles for
the purpose of specifying exactly which counties (or other divisions)
are in which time zones. He jumped on it at the same time, apparently
prompted by my email to the tz list" - this AlanM1 seems to be on the
tz mailing list. I emailed one Alan (an "Alan Mintz") that is on the
list showing that it was the other way around, and AlanM1 jumped on
it, but AlanM1 did not fix his claim in WP.

Does AlanM1 believe Royaume du Maroc did a time travel?

BUT NOW THE REAL PROBLEM. AlanM1 is deleting IANA time zone from
Wikipedia e.g. Shiprock, South_Pole, Longyearbyen, Ljubljana
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=List_of_tz_database_time_zones&diff=496194923&oldid=495945650

and at the same time introducing
| [[ISO_3166-1:|ISO_3166-1:]]
|
| [[PST8PDT]]

into a list that claims to be based on a zone.tab listing. PST8PDT is
not in the current zone.tab file.

Also the minus signs are changed into hyphen minuses, so that UTC
offset articles which use the minus sign are now reached via
redirects.

Furthermore the order of the elements in that list is not more the
same as in zone.tab, and the first column that allowed sorting in that
order got removed by AlanM1.

Maybe some readers here with an account on Wikipedia can revert the
introduced errors and explain to AlanM1 what the errors are.

E.g. due to South_Pole removal in the data templates, at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_in_Antarctica
there is now "[[ISO 3166-1:IANA time zone id not in
Template:Tz/country code|IANA time zone id not in Template:Tz/country
code]]"

Also due to not using the data templates at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tz_database_time_zones
Wikipedia is now open to inconsistency between this list and data
display in other places. Before the change the list showed to a wide
extend the data contained in the templates, so people could easily
check for correctness.

If the data in the templates is well maintained then it could be used
in the infoboxes on the city pages, then thousands of articles could
display information offset information obtain from IANA.

That way also the tz mailing list could attract more feedback on time
zone changes. It could be a win-win for IANA and Wikipedia.

-- 
Tobias Conradi
Rheinsberger Str. 18
10115 Berlin
Germany

http://tobiasconradi.com/