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I am semi retired from the American Wiki, very short stay here, I guess.
What I have learned during my brief excursions away from small "regional" Wiki's into the big scary American Wikipedia: small Wiki's are generally made up of editors who are really passionate about their local language, and try to cooperate as much as they can, mostly using common sense. The American Wiki, on the other hand, has a few (probably many) controversial articles that resemble virtual battlefields. There are so called "cabals" of users ganging up on other users, taking digs at other users while skillfully remaining barely within the boundaries of "American Wiki Law", they are constantly calling on all sorts of "rules", but very rarely on common sense, it is like dealing with bad lawyers.
There are users who literally *live* on Wikipedia, they are always there, they never take breaks away from the articles on their "watch list". They even have *users* on their "watch lists" and they stalk them, although I really doubt they realize that that is what they are doing and it is very possible that they do not do it out of malice, but just out of misplaced passion. I have been stalked by a couple (just check out older revisions of my (s)talk page). These users show a high level of intelligence and semantic skills, but also a high level of paranoia, they seem to be convinced that past users come back to haunt them in the form of "sock puppetry" (which could of course happen, but not every editor you disagree with is a sock puppet of some imaginary "enemy" from the past). I have been accused of being a sock puppet of a guy who I thought was Russian given the name, but who upon further investigation (out of curiosity, I just could not resist) I now believe to be from the UK, possibly an English White Supremacist. I hinted at checking the IP addresses or even contacting me personally, but my proposals have fallen on deaf ears. They probably think that I am so cunning that I can magically appear on two different continents at the same time...
The peak, or the all time low, was getting sucked into a weird discussion, plus edits and counter edits, regarding the Azov Battalion/Regiment and its use of the Wolfsengel, a Nazi Symbol, which aside from being pretty scary, it is even banned in Germany and possibly other countries. Pro Ukrainian Editors seem to be convinced that if one, yes one Battalion or Regiment, fighting the Russian Separatists in Eastern Ukraine are deemed to be Neo Nazis, then *all* Ukrainians will be seen as Neo Nazis, and therefore they have been trying as hard as they can to make it look like the Azov folks are not really Neo Nazis... It is like saying that if we show that there are klansmen in the US, then the whole world will think that all white Americans are KKK folks... Go figure...
Nonetheless, I give everybody the benefit of the doubt and, who knows, they possibly have reasons to act the way they do.
Peace out.