Pagans complain about Qworty's anti-Pagan editing
| “ | Although his particular reign of terror did not wipe out modern paganism, he has to have done more damage to Wikipedia's image than Tomás de Torquemada managed for the Catholic church in Spain. | ” |
In the continuing saga of User:Qworty's outing as author Robert Clark Young, several blogs and websites including Salon.com covered the now-banned user's anti-Pagan editing. In an article published on 22 May 2013, TechEye—calling Wikipedia (albeit inconsistently) "Wackypedia"—described Qworty's edits as a "reign of terror" and were pleased to find that he had not succeeded in removing several prominent Pagan biographies from the encyclopedia. The article cited one of Qworty's talk page comments as saying that practitioners of Stregheria (Italian Paganism) were "mentally ill, delusional people". The same day, Pagan blogger Jason Pitzl-Waters wrote on the group blog "The Wild Hunt" about Qworty's lack of NPOV and revenge editing against Jeff Rosenbaum, a prominent Pagan figure. Pitzl-Waters also quoted Qworty's previously mentioned comments about Stregheria at length and mentioned Qworty's numerous sockpuppets, concluding his piece with a call for his readers to help improve Wikipedia's Pagan content (see Wikipedia:WikiProject Neopaganism).
On 24 May 2013, Andrew Leonard published a follow-up to his earlier article on Qworty (see related Signpost coverage) in Salon. Leonard pointed out the irony in Qworty's accusations that prominent Pagan writer David Jay Brown edited his own article, which was deleted in November 2012. Leonard quoted Qworty's comments during the AFD: "[Brown sees himself as] a modern-day messiah who combined all of the powers of Jesus and Freud and Einstein and Marx and, oh why the heck not, Timothy Leary, lol." Leonard states that Qworty's editing in this area was brought to his attention by the Pagan community after he published the initial outing article, and that the Pagan community was very concerned about Qworty's deletion nominations, as they felt those people were notable. Leonard noted the irony in Qworty's comments about Brown seen alongside his inflated writing about himself, quoting both extensively. Both Rosenbaum and Brown responded to Leonard's request for comment, saying that though they had violated the rules about spam and COI years ago, they had since learned how to edit properly and had contributed productively. Right as the story of Young's identity broke, Brown nominated his article for deletion under the same rationale Qworty had posted for his biography, what Leonard called "hilarious in its own perverse way"—though the article was kept.