Wikipedia:My little brother did it

This page is intended as humor. It is not, has never been, nor will ever be a Wikipedia policy or guideline. Rather, it illustrates standards or conduct that are generally not accepted by the Wikipedia community.

Shortcuts WP:BROWP:BRO WP:LILBROWP:LILBRO WP:BROTHERWP:BROTHER WP:LITTLEBROTHERWP:LITTLEBROTHER WP:LITTLESISTERWP:LITTLESISTER

This page in a nutshell: Blaming your little brother for actions made from your account is unlikely to work.

Little Brother (Imouto)

Tsundere-type Dangerous Domestic Beast
Maintenance Level: High Risk; High attack damage against Wikipedia
Currently attacking your last sanctuary on Wikipedia
Basic Biological Traits
Habitat	Your account (unauthorized)
Ability	Destroy your 20-year-old account in 2 seconds
Skills
Active Skill	Attack Administrator
Weakness	None; Your account's dark history
Care & Feeding Requirements
Danger State	Quiet
Ecological Relationships
Contract Partner	Your account
Warning: Once received, this creature is non-refundable and non-exchangeable. Please treat with care and keep confined.
v t e

If you've been blocked for vandalism, you can always appeal your block. But unfortunately, vandals usually find that abusive administrators will refuse to unblock vandals or even go so far as to prevent further appeals by protecting their talk pages or revoking their talk page access. Rest assured, however, there is one sure-fire way to get yourself unblocked, and back to vandalizing Wikipedia. Just blame your little brother!

Why blaming your little brother works

Since owning up to the vandalism yourself would obviously never work, you're stuck with blaming someone else for it. You could blame your friend, and some people do, but more likely you will decide that the best person to blame would be one of your family members, since they could easily be on the same computer you're using. Chances are, they're not on Wikipedia anyway, so they'll never know.

You probably won't try to lay the blame on an older sibling, cousin, or your parents, because they're supposed to be more mature and beyond "that sort of thing". Younger children and boys are particularly troublesome, so a 5–8 year old boy would be especially devious and naughty, and would certainly be the sort to replace articles with "poop", "peepee", and other inappropriate nonsense. Perfect!

But what if I don't have a little brother?

So what? You're lying anyway; just pretend you have one. The administrator looking at your unblock request has no idea how many siblings you have. Better still, they're supposed to assume good faith, and since we've picked the perfect person to blame, they'll have no choice but to take your word for it! You'll get even more points if you promise never to let your brother on your computer again because of what he did. Bang! Instant unblock, and you're home free – until of course, you vandalize another page, and you've already promised to not let your brother back on the computer ever again. However, you never said that you only had one little brother...

What if the admin knows about the little brother excuse?

Claim to be a teacher who was showing their class why you can't trust Wikipedia! We love it when people disrupt the site to prove a point, we won't just disregard your claim as a childish lie, and we think any action taken by a teacher is justified. In fact, if you really are a teacher, some more brilliant lesson plans similar to vandalizing Wikipedia to demonstrate its unreliability include:

• teaching racial equality by addressing minority students only with ethnic slurs,
• discouraging sexual harassment by having everyone in the class spank each other,
• teaching healthy dieting by having students do the cinnamon challenge, One Chip Challenge, or even the Tide Pod challenge,
• discouraging gang violence by joining a gang,
• teaching the importance of fire safety by playing with matches at a gas station,
• teaching hygiene by never washing your hands and coughing in students' faces.

Clearly, vandalizing Wikipedia is a much better option than explaining that:

• Wikipedia is not a stable source,
• Wikipedia is written by volunteers (not accredited scholars),
• Wikipedia avoids original research,
• Wikipedia only summarizes academic and journalistic sources (which are good sources for research papers).

Seriously, though...

Don't try to lay the blame on someone else. All we know is that your account made edits which it shouldn't have—we can't tell who's on your end of the computer screen or smartphone. As you might guess from the existence of this essay, this is a very common unblock request, and is mainly declined. In fact, if you are a registered user, this guarantees you won't be unblocked, because if true this means your account has been compromised and must remain blocked for security and attribution reasons. Please take a look at some of the links below for more information on how to properly request unblocking.

Insulting the admin's intelligence is the last thing a blocked user should want to do, and in fact it often goes to show how a person has failed to change and in many ways shows why a user shouldn't be unblocked, but rather lose further privileges if they haven't already.

See also

• Wikipedia:Give 'em enough rope
• Wikipedia:Guide to appealing blocks#Examples of bad unblock requests: some other false claims that won't work
• Wikipedia:Sarcasm is really helpful
• Wikipedia:Compromised accounts
• On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog
• Shaggy defense