The president rejects accusations against himself and Çakar over the wiki attack.
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Lazia, 31 January 2020 — President Emiel van der Huijsen has categorically denied that he or Deputy Prime Minister Hasan Çakar had any hand in the recent wave of vandalism on MicroWiki, and has condemned the bans imposed on the pair by the encyclopedia’s community as “an insulting and defamatory attempt to try and curb anti-GUM sentiment”.
Earlier in the month MicroWiki, the online micronational encyclopedia, was struck by a large wave of vandalism in which trolls created a succession of throwaway accounts — among them handles such as “AdammiaFan44”, “Micronations.com” and cruder variations — to deface a range of articles, including the official page of the Confederation of Mahuset. The vandalism was swiftly condemned by both Van der Huijsen and Çakar, yet the MicroWiki administration, the Konmalehth and the Grand Unified Micronational nonetheless pressed ahead with attributing it to them — a step the president casts as an attempt to silence opposition to the GUM.
Granted an interview by the Courant van Lazia, the president was unequivocal. “Absolutely not — neither one of us had any kind of involvement in the vandalism that took place,” he said. “What would I have to gain by posting propaganda in favour of the Grand Unified Micronational or the European Union? I have been incredibly critical of both in the past, so I simply see no reason why I would even be involved in the first place.”
Asked about claims that his IP address had been linked to the trolls, Van der Huijsen said the address in question belonged to the VPN service he uses, a fact he said he had disclosed to MicroWiki staff at the time. Of the “whistleblowers” who supplied the alleged evidence against him, he was conciliatory: though saddened that they had come forward, he said he had “no reason to doubt” that they genuinely believed him responsible, and bore them “no ill will whatsoever”.
The president confirmed that the Mahusetan Intelligence Agency had a suspect of its own. It believes Thomas Bainbridge — the Chair of the Grand Unified Micronational and King of “Hrafnarfjall” — to be involved with, or at least associated with, the surge of vandalism. The episode itself he dismissed as “a petty, pathetic joke made by a group of bored trolls”, of a kind that served only to make MicroWiki less pleasant to use.
On the bans placed on him and Çakar across the MicroWiki community’s platforms, the president was scathing, calling them “an insulting and defamatory attempt to try and curb anti-GUM sentiment” and “incredibly excessive” even had the accusations been true. He accused his critics of hypocrisy, noting that in a plainly non-serious article one MicroWiki administrator, Adam Belcher, had boasted of the so-called “2015 Wikia raids”, in which senior figures of the community — among them Jonathan Austen, Adam Belcher, Joseph Kennedy and Bradley of Dullahan — had set out to vandalise chatrooms and articles on MicroWikia, a rival encyclopedia.
A member of the MicroWikia community himself between roughly 2010 and 2014, Van der Huijsen said he recalled repeated instances of MicroWiki users trolling the rival platform, citing one Alexander Reinhardt, who he said had created a mimicking micronation and threatened at several points to expose his identity to Wikia staff. He confessed himself “incredibly saddened” that states he had counted as friends had been so quick to blame him. “I believed the friendship between Mahuset and these states to be deeper than something that could’ve been thrown away at the drop of a hat,” he said. “Sadly, it seems I was mistaken.”
As to what follows now that Mahuset finds itself barred from the MicroWiki community and its services, the president said there was as yet no fixed plan, though the Confederation would “probably seek to establish some kind of new World Union with Mahuset and Hasanistan”, and would accelerate its move to independent services such as its own Miraheze wiki — “admittedly through necessity and not through choice”. He would not be drawn on how the community’s decision might ultimately affect Mahuset and its citizens, saying only that he did not yet know. His closing hope was a simple one: that the “actual vandals” would “come out and admit their responsibility”.
Edited for the relaunch of the Courant van Lazia.
