Rick Olney is a comics producer, comics convention organizer, and comics con-artist. I haven’t heard of this guy until today, but he’s been up to no good since the mid-2000s by not paying artists for their work or for making appearances, including big names as the dearly departed [I don't know why I thought that] Chuck Dixon and Gail Simone, and then threatens anyone who DARE speak out for what he did to them! You can read more about him here (2009) and here (2006) and witness his assholery in the comments on both links (he’s “orcafresh” in the Gail Simone Forum thread on CBR)! Oh and Sep pointed out to me that he was featured here in 2007! i.e. He implied that “Gail Simone” (quotation marks Olney’s, not mine) slept her way into the industry. Seriously.

( Some people like to dig their own grave. A few will not stop until they reach China. )
( ETA 1, 2, and 3 )
ETA5: wankismyfandom has pointed out that we've been spotted. Let's give him a round of unenthusiastic golf claps!

I have three close friends inside this hobby and business of comics, as well as outside the realm of imagination mediums for each other of them!

HE HAS THREE FRIENDS. THREE. THAT'S MORE THAN ONE AND TWO. IT IS ONE PLUS TWO!

(And WHY HELLO THAR, GAIL SIMONE FORUM! :D)

ETA5: It's official. Lucasfilm is sending Rick Olney a Cease and Desist. He is to return both the remaining maps and any monies (haha- Rick's fave word) that he collected back to me. Shazam. All the maps must be accounted for and any missing from the number I sent shall be paid for. - Matt Busch

Remember Rob Granito? Well, he's still out there, attempting to channel the 'controversy' (read: having his art-tracing, resume-faking ass busted) into some kind of career.

At last word, he was trying to sell his story to the highest bidder, but ended up just doing a couple of email interviews with Bleeding Cool.

( Hold your nose, there's some serious bullshit ahead... )

From a mouse at wank_report .

For at least the last six years, a guy called Rob Granito has been going to comic book conventions and getting them to give him a free table as an official guest by showing his resume which includes various cartoons and DC and Marvel Comics.

Then some unnamed anonymous person noticed that his convention bio claimed "his most recent projects have been the comic strip Calvin and Hobbes". Say WHAT? Calvin and Hobbes, the comic that ended in the 90's and was produced singlehanded by Bill Watterson? This anonymous benefactor put Rich Johnston of comic site Bleeding Cool on the case.

And Rich didn't need to be Sherlock Holmes to crack it - a few phone calls proved none of the comic book companies he claimed to be connected to had even heard of him.

Granito's rebuttal? He claimed he "was a ghost artist for most of the projects I did", despite the fact that Marvel and DC don't hire ghost artists. Also, he claimed to work with the famed DC Editor "Jay Diddilo" who... does not exist. Maybe he heard of DC head Dan DiDio and didn't remember properly? The mind boggles.

( Money, lies and plagiarism )

Did your inker mysteriously disappear from your totz awesome, no pay job? Need a new inker for free? Just ask yourself, what would Rob Tracy (a.k.a. quikthnkr) do?

1. Post your request on DA. In the Paid Job section.
2. Argue when people inform you of the rules. (Rules are like, opinions, man.)
3. Grudge against artists who want to get paid for their work.
4. Grudge against previous co-workers.
5. Argue with people who give you solid advice.
6. Insult possible volunteers.
7. Calmly explain that the poor economy means that artists should be grateful for no pay, dead end jobs.
8. When all else fails declare yourself the winner.

Thanks to anon's wank report.

ETA: Locked post at artists_beware (open membership). Cache for original post by issendai (deleted).
Also, previous wank from the same guy, courtesy of issendai.

Edit: False alarm, the author of the wank is underage.

But have some cake in compensation.

In Soviet Russia you hunt Fox, in Fascist America Fox hunt YOU!

--Wikipedia IRC channel comment.

Well, Wankas, it's time to wrap up this sorry mess. When last we left this probably-on-the-wrong-community-(oops!)-but-oh-so-wanky story - may as well finish it here, right? - Jimbo Wales had gone on a rampage deleting 19th-century art, and anything he thought was pornographic. There's a lot of wank, so I'm going to select some of the best juicy tidbits, and the rest can mainly be found on The foundation-l mailing list archive and the archive of Jimbo's talk page.

So, we begin with the big reveal: after edit warring to keep the images deleted, he finally stated why: Fox News was about to attack Wikipedia:

On the "Foundation-l" mailing list:

Much of the cleanup is done, although there was so much hardcore
pornography on commons that there's still some left in nooks and crannies.

I'm taking the day off from deleting, both today and tomorrow, but I do
encourage people to continue deleting the most extreme stuff.

But as the immediate crisis has passed (successfully!) there is not
nearly the time pressure that there was. I'm shifting into a slower mode.

We were about to be smeared in all media as hosting hardcore pornography
and doing nothing about it. Now, the correct storyline is that we are
cleaning up. I'm proud to have made sure that storyline broke the way
it did, and I'm sorry I had to step on some toes to make it happen.

Now, the key is: let's continue to move forward with a responsible
policy discussion.

( Juicy details, but a little long for on the front page )
Jimbo on what he chose to delete

...I deleted some things that I assumed would be undeleted after a
discussion. I wanted us to take an approach that involved first
deleting a lot of borderline things, and then bringing them back after
careful case by case discussions.

That proved to be quite unpopular, and I'm sorry about it.

and

I had thought that a good process would be to engage in a very strong series of deletions, including of some historical images, and then to have a careful discussion about rebuilding. That proved to be very unpopular and so I regret it. It also may have had the effect of confusing people about my own position on what to keep and what to get rid of.

However, that didn't mean he actually wanted things to be discussed now:

I have redeleted the image for the duration of the cleanup project. We will have a solid discussion about whether Commons should ever host pornography and under what circumstances at a later day - June 1st will be a fine time to start.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 17:31, 7 May 2010 (UTC)

But, hey, Wales is Wikipedia's Godking. He'll come out of this fine, right? Sure, there's a petition for his powers to be removed, but it'll never happen, right?

Jimbo Wales, May 9th

In the interest of encouraging this discussion to be about real
philosophical/content issues, rather than be about me and how quickly I
acted, I've just now removed virtually all permissions to actually do
things from the "Founder" flag. I even removed my ability to edit
semi-protected pages! (I've kept permissions related to 'viewing' things.)

I do not want to be a tyrant or dictator. I do not want us to fight
about that kind of thing, as it's really a distraction from our work.

What I'm interested in is this video:
http://www.vimeo.com/8709616

Please watch it - it's 8 minutes long, and well worth it. This video
moved me deeply - it shows what our real impact on the world is, and I
think if you watch it, you'll feel the way that I did.

That's right, wankas, Jimbo Wales had to give up practically all his administrative powers over this.

Results

But, hey, the crisis was averted by Jimbo's actions, right? He said so several times:

"There was a crisis situation and I took action which ended up averting the crisis..."

"...as the immediate crisis has passed (successfully!) [...] Now, the correct storyline is that we are
cleaning up. I'm proud to have made sure that storyline broke the way
it did..."

And so on! So, surely Fox News was happy that Jimbo made sure that they got what they wanted?

Despite Content Purge, Pornographic Images Remain on Wikimedia

By Jana Winter - FOXNews.com
( Quotes from the report )

...Nope. Didn't help at all. (I should point out that Fox's report bears little relation to reality - the number of images deleted has been enumerated, and was about 400, not the thousands they claim, and note they don't mention they're talking about 19th-century and early-20th-century artworks until around the third page - but, then, if you know FoxNews, would you be surprised?)

----
ETA 1: How badly did Jimbo mess up? Even after he voluntarily gave up his administrative rights, people were complaining he didn't give up enough, because he might be able to take them back in future. Laaknor and and Avi "helped" Jimbo by fixing this loophole and a bug fix has been stepped up in priority because one of the view-only rights he kept so he could do his job had some administrative rights attached. [Other posts: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8]

ETA 2: Fox News mentions one image in their article as being particularly horrible. They give enough description that I was able to find it. It's this French cartoon from the early 20th century. Judge for yourselves whether it's worth the conniptions they have over it. And, yes, they're by an artist who's famous for his decadent illustrations of this type - but how dare Wikipedia include famous French artist!

Also, for those interested, here's one of the images Jimbo deleted personally, and wanted to delay discussion of restoring the file for a month.

ETA 3: Oh my god: It all makes sense: Jimbo was trying to completely purge Commons of anything the least bit controversial to kill the story, figuring it could be brought back in a couple months! Consider:

( Evidence )
...He wanted to get Commons completely purged while attention was on it, then - and then only - allow the restoration of encyclopedic material when attention was off it.

...I'm stunned.

Right. This is a bit complex, and I should point out that I'm a bit involved with some of the wanking near the end, but I think this is too big to miss out here.

It began in early April, when Larry Sanger, arguably co-founder of Wikipedia, announces that he Reported Wikipedia to the FBI, alleging some of the hosted images violated the law.

There was brief discussion of this, but not much happened until this week, when Jimbo Wales decided to make it policy to purge some content from Wikimedia Commons, Wikipedia's image host. Jimbo Wales isn't actually in charge of Wikipedia anymore, but he states that the Foundation will be issuing a statement shortly. It includes the wonderfully double-think line,

Although there is a common saying that "Wikimedia Commons is not censored," this statement should not be interpreted to imply that we do not make editorial judgments about the appropriateness of content. We do, all the time, and we must.

And continues to him saying that "explicit sexual content and other imagery without serious merit [must be] deleted."

Admins are concerned about this, and begin editing the proposal, trying to make it into a workable policy. Eventually, it's edited into a policy with fairly widespread support, which excludes non-photographic works, allows works of historical, artistic, or other merit, and so on.

...And that's when Jimbo begins deleting 19th century artworks, diagrams and sketches meant to explain sexual acts, and so on. When Wikipedia has a bot which automatically removes all uses of a file when it's deleted, making it extremely hard to put files back.

And all hell breaks loose.


Finally, the Foundation issues the statement Jimbo said was forthcoming:

The vast majority of that material is entirely uncontroversial, but the
projects do contain material that may be inappropriate or offensive to
some audiences, such as children or people with religious or cultural
sensitivities. That is consistent with Wikimedia's goal to provide the
sum of all human knowledge. We do immediately remove material that is
illegal under U.S. law, but we do not remove material purely on the
grounds that it may offend.

Having said that, the Wikimedia projects are intended to be educational
in nature, and there is no place in the projects for material that has
no educational or informational value. In saying this, we don't intend
to create new policy, but rather to reaffirm and support policy that
already exists. We encourage Wikimedia editors to scrutinize potentially
offensive materials with the goal of assessing their educational or
informational value, and to remove them from the projects if there is no
such value.

...And after that statement, going directly against all Jimbo's claims, his actions begin to look even worse.

Total damage:

11 admins left the project.

Jimbo Wales took a big hit in reputation.

Jimbo took it upon himself to announce his intent to FoxNews, and Slashdot without telling anyone on the project about this, damaging Wikipedia's reputation as it now looks like nothing he said is going to happen as he did.

Calls for Jimbo to lose all deletion rights

And Muslim users are left wondering why images offensive to them, as they depict the prophet Muhammad, are defended, but not images Jimbo merely dislikes.

ETA 1: The rebellion has begun: Most of the undeletion requests from here down are things Jimbo deleted himself.

ETA 2: More wank in the last two threads here (at present, no doubt will increase.)

ETA 3: And, of course, as you do when someone in a position of power has become a huge troll, there's a petition!

ETA 4: Hoo... boy.

ETA 5: Jimbo evidently did this because Fox News was threatening his money supply, by trying to manufacture a scandal, and contacting Wikipedia donors about it. Isn't being paid to edit a bannable offense on Wikipedia? Not that Wales doesn't know a few things about taking money away from Wikipedia. And that link doesn't even include the attempt to get donors to Wikipedia to pay for a trip to a Russian massage parlour. UPDATE: Better, even wankier link about what's going on with Fox News!

ETA 6: My favourite of the new smackdowns.

(Just to note, everything on Wikipedia is archived (unless the founder decides to mess everything up - and even then it's usually visible by admins. That's the very definition of a Wiki. As such, I've been linking to a mixture of live threads and snapshots of points in time. I'll try to switch over to snapshots as threads close.

ETA 7: Hoo, boy, this has blown up so badly overnight. Widespread calls for Jimbo to lose all powers but that of a figurehead, him publicly revealing that he lied to the community about the reasons for his actions, and a whole bunch of other stuff. Going to give this a couple days, then make a new post updating.