Rome Viharo



I was harassed, libeled, outed, shamed, and within 5 weeks banned indefinitely off of Wikipedia.

Rome Viharo (User:RomeViharo) is a disgruntled ex-Wikipedia editor who was banned and then created an entire website named to pointlessly complain about his ban and whine about "harassment". Although complaining of being harassed, Viharo does the exact same thing, and has doxed Wikipedia editors on his website, while also spreading unfounded allegations (e.g. skeptics create articles on Wikipedia by receiving PayPal cash-payments, or RationalWiki "is gas lighting, lying, & covering up cross platform harassment" ) and the Guerilla Skepticism conspiracy theory. The forum banned him for making these baseless claims.

Prior to his antics on Wikipedia, Viharo trolled online message-boards and forums, also resulting in bans. His various internet usernames include Bubblefish,  PillyM, WWHP, Tumbleman,   23canaries  (suspended in 2017 on Reddit) and hoofish. In April 2018, Viharo appeared on the Gary Null Show to spread nonsense and misinformation about skeptics on Wikipedia and RationalWiki; Null is an alternative medicine quack.

Viharo's website, "Wikipedia We Have A Problem", was suspended by GoDaddy in early 2020, the domain no longer exists. As of December 2021, Viharo continues to create sockpuppets on Wikipedia and promote conspiracy theories on forums that a group of skeptics are out to target him.

Viharo considers himself an online moral crusader who fights "misinformation" and "fake news" — despite his promotion of those same things.

OS 012/AL 012/Aiki Wiki
It looks as if someone took a philosophy text book, cut it into lots of tiny little pieces, and then stuck them back together at random." Sometime before 2003, Viharo created OS 012, based on this bit of tri-positional logic:

While this isn't necessarily a stupid idea, it was and is entirely unclear how (or if) Viharo planned to actually implement this idea. It also reads a lot like the labels on "Dr." Bronner's Soap.

That didn't stop Viharo from trying to spread this self-described "OS 012 meme" "virally". In practice, that meant picking fights with other users on forums and trying to convince people that their views were simultaneously right, wrong, and neutral — all for "world peace". Apparently this "meme" was quite successful, because Viharo claimed that "[t]he exact number of online users spreading [OS 012] is impossible to determine, however online records suggest a figure no less than 50,000." Despite his boasts, he was not above asking for money to spread the idea. Which, we're probably supposed to think, is right, wrong, and neutral all at once.

Viharo called OS 012 the "global dialectic for personal interaction on the Internet" and claimed that it "resolves all conflict and war" as well as "increase thier [sic] own intelligence". Indeed, it was "a highly effective dialectic, completly [sic] undefeated". Unsurprisingly, some of Viharo's claims went so far as to clash with known physical laws.

In 2014, Viharo re-branded OS 012 as AL 012, supposedly symbolizing its mysterious algorithmic property. Sometime later, he again re-branded it as Aiki Wiki, a "platform for online collaborative consensus building and publishing". In this regard, Aiki Wiki appears to take a different approach than a traditional wiki (like this one): while most wikis are focused on publishing some particular body of information, and developing some consensus-building process to facilitate that goal, it appears that Aiki Wiki would start with a consensus-building procedure and publish what comes of that procedure.

As of 2021, Viharo has yet again rebranded the concept as "non-dual consensus building".

Google consciousness
In 2011, Viharo and business partner Maf Lewis delivered a talk at TEDx that discussed whether the popular search engine Google is sentient. Although the talk was publicized as a "proposal that Google has a form of consciousness", Viharo states that he is neither promoting nor denying that Google is conscious, but discussing whether accepting philosopher Daniel Dennett's ideas would mean that Google is conscious. This is not an absurd idea in itself, but Viharo didn't stop there.

Viharo also discussed the idea that social media could be revolutionary. While most of us agree that social media has had a big impact, Viharo went a bit farther than most, saying, "we will eventually see social media replace government as we know it today," and that Egypt could be the first civilization to do this, arguing that "in principle, a few of their citizens, a few of their students could jump online using something like Google Labs and Wikipedia." One might observe that, as of 2013, fewer than half of Egyptians used the Internet, and in 2011 not even two-fifths did, so the replacing of government with social media would have amounted to some serious disenfranchisement.

Perhaps most worryingly, Viharo devoted portions of his TEDx Talk to shamanism and the allegedly magical properties of ayahuasca.

In order to promote interest in his TEDx Talk, Viharo pursued a marketing strategy of deliberately angering people on internet forums. In 2011, Viharo created a blog about Google Consciousness to attempt to further spread the idea.

Viharo has since classed the talk as a "creative work", which apparently means that none of his statements in the talk can be taken seriously (Essay:Rome Viharo revisits Rational Wiki, a critique).

Rupert Sheldrake
Viharo stated that he was "a known 'defender of Rupert Sheldrake' in his TEDx and Wikipedia controversies" but that was "different [from] … 'promoting' [Rupert Sheldrake's] views, or even defending his views". However, in September 2013, Viharo (then operating on Wikipedia as "Tumbleman") questioned whether Rupert Sheldrake's "morphic resonance" is pseudoscience: There is no reasonable claim an editor can make regarding Morphic Resonance as Pseudoscience as the term is used and defined in science unless you are claiming it is P[seudo]S[cience] because it is not falsifiable. That appears to me to be the only supportive claim an editor can make to hold Morphic Resonance under That's the exact same issue with String Theory, and under the terms, string theory is pseudoscience.

Viharo completely ignored Wikipedia's policy on because he claims to be agnostic about everything.

Although claiming not personally to support Sheldrake's theories, Viharo has posted that Sheldrake's critique of "the scientific materialistic philosophy" and his other ideas are "worth spreading". Despite this, according to Viharo this doesn't qualify as promoting or defending Sheldrake's views.🇱🇮

In what could be termed a classic case of flogging a dead horse, a video posted by Viharo on YouTube in January 2015 portrays his Aiki Wiki platform facilitating all the revisions to the Rupert Sheldrake Wikipedia article that Viharo unsuccessfully argued for during his incarnation as "Tumbleman".

The "skeptical conspiracy" and GSOW
In 2013, Viharo joined Wikipedia and attempted to edit articles. When his edits were rejected, Viharo adopted Sheldrake's claims that a conspiracy of "ideologue" skeptics were targeting him for abuse. In an interview with parapsychology advocate Alex Tsakiris, Viharo said that there was "definitely a conspiracy" of skeptics who were personally targeting him. He characterized the struggle as "a war of ideas", and compared it to "Americans and Nazis" fighting against each other in World War II.

Viharo posts about Wikipedia's claimed abuses on his blog,. Although he blamed Guerrilla Skepticism on Wikipedia (the group that Sheldrake claims is conspiring against him) when first posting as "Tumbleman", Viharo has since retracted his claim that the group caused the incident; however, he still considers the skeptics on Sheldrake's page to be a "group" of skeptics.

Viharo attended the 2014 Electric Universe conference to (anonymously) deliver a presentation in which he claimed abuse by "the skeptic activist movement".

However, no such conspiracy of skeptics appears to exist.

Viharo now dedicates a lot of his time obsessing over the Wikipedia editors involved in banning his sockpuppets. A section on his website "Editors and Admins Involved" lists 10 editors, who find themselves doxed with ad hominem and rumours posted about them. Viharo has also requested personal info about the editors on the Skeptiko forum.

Viharo has branded these efforts as "case studies" into Wikipedia.

Victim complex
Viharo has repeatedly claimed on his website that he has been "cyberbullied" and "harassed". He has compared himself to victims of rape.

For example, Viharo claims that he thought he was editing anonymously on Wikipedia (because he was using the username "Tumbleman") but "was outed" by another user "within three days of arrive [sic] on Sheldrake's article". However, in his first edit on the talkpage of Rupert Sheldrake's article, he linked to his userpage as "Rome Viharo", though he removed his name a minute later. While Viharo claims this was accidental, it's difficult to "accidentally" edit Preferences, edit the signature field, add one's real name, and save changes.

Wikipedia We Have A Problem
Rome Viharo has built an entire website around the controversy, containing another thirty five thousand words (largely nonsense).

It is clear to me, if only from his extreme verbosity, that this guy (Rome Viharo) is just a troll trying to soak up as much of everyone's time as possible. Every comment elicits a gigantic reply from him, no issue is too small for him to write thousands of words on it.

Wikipedia We Have A Problem was a fake news website that Viharo used to publish misinformation, made-up stories and wild allegations about Wikipedia and RationalWiki admins. It went offline in early 2020, although Viharo later copied some of its contents to his personal blog.

Viharo, originally editing as "Tumbleman" was permanently blocked from Wikipedia in October 2013 for disruption and sockpuppetry. He was blocked for a year from RationalWiki in January 2014. Disgruntled, he created the website Wikipedia We Have A Problem, to protest against his bans and spread a paranoid conspiracy theory that a were responsible for cyberbullying him and getting him kicked off these wikis. No evidence for the conspiracy theory appears to exist, nor was Viharo harassed. He was banned on Wikipedia for disrupting, trolling and causing a flame war on the Rupert Sheldrake article, as well as using multiple accounts; for similar shenanigans on RationalWiki.

In November 2013, a user named "David1234" created the Rome Viharo RationalWiki entry after Viharo's name was briefly mentioned on Rupert Sheldrake's RW article. Viharo to claimed the article was created by a RationalWiki sysop, who he claims was an editor involved in his ban from Wikipedia a month prior. No evidence is presented for the allegation. Viharo also claims, without evidence, that the skeptic was involved in editing his RW article; Farley denies having any involvement, yet Viharo persisted in accusing Farley of having made edits on his RationalWiki article. Farley responded in January 2018:

[Rome Viharo] claimed an RW article was "constructed by" me, but the edit history of that article clearly shows I've never touched it.

Viharo's obsession with trying to connect RationalWiki editors to his Wikipedia ban stems from a delusion the same group of skeptics have harassed him on both wikis.

On Twitter, Viharo has spammed an article from his website named "The Attack of David Gerard's 50ft Troll Farm".

ISHAR
My stint with Deepak Chopra only lasted around 5 months, yet this blip in my professional career is highlighted as a feature of my biography on Rational Wiki to create more suspicion of me to an audience already suspicious of Deepak Chopra. For Rational Wiki, its [sic] important to frame me as someone who promotes literature their audience finds suspicious, and according to them, it’s okay to warn the world about my associations with Deepak Chopra so the reader questions my integrity. By December 2013, Viharo shifted his focus to Deepak Chopra, confronting skeptic Tim Farley on Twitter to claim organized skeptics were guilty of "abuse" in editing Chopra's Wikipedia biography.

In 2014, Viharo created Deepak Chopra's ISHAR and became its director of operations. In an interview with the Huffington Post, he explained ISHAR's origins: ISHAR emerged from trying to find solutions to deal with the large amounts of misleading information on the internet, especially information promoted by skeptic activist organizations.

On this article's talk page and elsewhere, Viharo has defended his decision to help Chopra by insisting that he does not support Chopra's ideas, that merely helping Chopra with the technical stuff is not an endorsement, that he was just doing his job, and that building a platform designed to be Chopra's "Woo-pedia" wasn't helping Chopra promote anything. However, on Wikipedia, Viharo used a sockpuppet account ("ChopraMedia", later renamed to "SAS81") to attempt to get other users to remove skeptical sources from Chopra's Wikipedia article. He was then discovered and permabanned, because he was using a new account to evade a previous ban. He nonetheless insists he "won the wiki war" (emphasis in original), a wording which should tell you something about his goals: not to build a reliable encyclopedia, but forcefully push his boss's ideas — an activity he was allegedly paid by Chopra himself to do:

One of those people who contacted me was Deepak Chopra, who gave me a small grant to continue my research into wiki wars on Wikipedia, using Deepak Chopra’s Wikipedia article as my next study into consensus building.

Viharo later claimed on his website that he was fired from his director position at ISHAR by the president of the Chopra Foundation, and ISHAR's website confirms that he no longer held that post.

Ban from Wikipediocracy
The forum Wikipediocracy banned Rome Viharo's account WWHP in December 2021 for whining about non-existent harassment and spreading unsubstantiated claims about skeptics targeting him; his thread was deleted but a webpage capture still exists. Immediately after, Viharo complained on another forum, Wikipedia Sucks, about his ban and described Wikipediocracy as a "troll farm" participating in harassment and spreading misinformation.

Viharo labels any website a "troll farm" that has banned him and not tolerated his antics.

Despite complaining of misinformation — Viharo joined Wikipedia Sucks to post misinformation about Wikipedia skeptic editors he has been in a feud with since 2013. This includes making incorrect claims and dubious insinuations about Tim Farley's Wikipedia account activity:

In their minds, they are fighting misinformation. Problem is, they use misinformation to fight misinformation, making them just another troll farm too. While I do not have solid proof, it is consistent that this account is Tim Farley. The original media operation I caught them conducting is one of the reasons I took on Sheldrake's BLP problem.

RationalWiki
Who woulda thunk the Rational Wiki community could be so much fun? One wonders why they failed to include a picture of a kitten with a swastika on it’s [sic] forehead or a starving kid in africa [sic] and jokes to his malnourishment.

In a minor climax of his long-standing desire to stab at RationalWiki for the heinous crime of simply documenting his many shenaningans, on the 8th of June 2016, Viharo claimed via Twitter that "This year I'm going to be initiating legal recourses" against RationalWiki, alleging — you guessed it — "harassment and slander". And just to set the record straight that we're in the wrong to count him among our top cranks of the internet, he made sure to point out that "The internet is waking up".

Viharo now believes that "Rationalwiki is publishing misinformation to damage control their involvement".

Stopped clock
To his eternal credit, at least he doesn't support Trump. See? We can be fair and balanced.