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Revision as of 04:39, 28 December 2008 view sourceWizardman (talk | contribs)Administrators401,106 edits →Arbitrators' opinion on hearing this matter (0/1/0/2): cmt← Previous edit Revision as of 17:47, 28 December 2008 view source Newyorkbrad (talk | contribs)Autopatrolled, Administrators45,486 edits →Ncmvocalist/Clerking: rm case as declined, tally 0/7/3/1 after 5 daysNext edit →
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=== Ncmvocalist/Clerking ===
'''Initiated by ''' ] (]) 08:35, 24 December 2008 (UTC)


==== Involved parties ====
*{{userlinks|Ncmvocalist}}
* Users listed at ] - to list a few specific, obvious ones:
**<s>{{admin|Coren}}</s> <small>Coren is an Arbitrator, not a Clerk. ] 12:40, 24 December 2008 (UTC)</small>
**<s>{{admin|Rlevse}}</s> <small>As above, Rlevse is an Arbitrator. ] 17:50, 24 December 2008 (UTC)</small>
**{{admin|Ryan Postlethwaite}}
**{{admin|AGK}}
**{{admin|Penwhale}}
*{{admin|Coren}} <small>(Moved here. Coren isn't a clerk. ] 12:46, 24 December 2008 (UTC))</small>
*{{admin|Rlevse}} <small>(Moved here, as with Coren. ] 17:50, 24 December 2008 (UTC))</small>

;Confirmation that all parties are aware of the request
<!-- All parties must be notified that the request has been filed, immediately after it is posted, and confirmation posted here. -->
*Ncmvocalist, please notify the parties as to the presence of this request. ] 12:45, 24 December 2008 (UTC)
**Given the habitual nature by which the clerks have discussed my edits on the mailing list, I did not wish to snatch what may be the clerks final opportunity to do so. Still, I should've at least asked someone else to notify the parties rather than assume that the clerks will become aware of its existence due to their regular presence - my bad. ] (]) 10:37, 25 December 2008 (UTC)

==== Statement by ] ====
Note: certain clerks became involved (and are still involved) in this conflict since earlier this year (2008) - ] and ] fall in this category, so despite being appointed as arbitrators for 2009, they will need to recuse from this matter.

In October 2008, I opened a discussion at ] about certain out-of-line clerks - this discussion was greeted with several responses. The way this was resolved is found at the bottom of ]. Or so I thought....

I made this edit in the past couple of days. It is a well-established norm that community members are allowed to edit arbitration pages (even PD or case pages) to make obvious maintenance edits - arbitrators have noted this on arbitration talk pages, and we regularly see such edits happening. There were no errors with diff 1 or edit 1 - but shortly afterwards, I was given a "final warning" by Ryan Postlethwaite because I dared to edit the page when it specifically notes that only arbitrators and clerks may edit it. I was not amused. Later, Coren and Rlevse threatened to block me for any uninvolved edits I make with regards to arbitration .

AGK has told me that my conflict lies with the Committee who designs rules rather than with the clerks who enforce them, while Ryan Postlethwaite has told me that these two groups of users are the ''only'' users who hold authority over edits on arbitration pages. I don't quite agree that such logic can apply here. My own impression is that making obvious maintenance edits like that one which I made is acceptable from any uninvolved member of the community. Unless either the Arbitration Committee or the clerks revert the edit as being wrong, such edits are usually deemed acceptable - partially why those pages are watchlisted.

Targetting an editor because of the frequency or volume of edits they make on arbitration pages is an idea that has been recklessly pushed since this conflict began - the clerks involved in this have persistently refused to look at the actual content of the edits. No arbitrator has ever approached me because they had a problem with my edits - I therefore consider that the problem is the clerks; the conflict does not lie with the Committee.

When an editor either reinserts statements on a case page, make personal attacks, vandalises arbitration pages, or inserts personal non-arbitrator votes on a PD page (some examples), both the clerks and the Committee are expected to treat that editor as if they are banned from those pages. However, the Committee has never treated a community member as a topic-banned user merely because (a) the editor makes OK edits on the arbitration pages, and (b) does so several times. The clerks appear to have created their own system where they will sanction anyone who dares question them - please stop this power trip. No one edits perfectly, but I know for a fact that most of my edits have contributed to improvement in all areas of dispute resolution - there'd be 0 community support if the opposite was occurring.

Via motion or case, I request the Committee to:
# find that was correct and helpful;
# find that the clerks involved should not have issued such warnings in response to that edit or a series of such edits;
# remedy my request by reversing/removing those warnings as ineffective/inappropriate;
# remedy my request by prohibiting those involved from imposing or enforcing sanctions upon Ncmvocalist (myself), under any capacity, when it comes to arbitration enforcement, and
# remedy my request by allowing for updates to be made to relevant (existing) policies and guidelines so that they include the commonly accepted (yet unwritten) arbitration norms.

I thank the Committee for their time in considering this matter. ] (]) 08:35, 24 December 2008 (UTC)

::There are indeed very few users that I've ever told are unwelcome on my talk page - somewhere during the omnibus case, Lar was made well-aware that he was one of them, and some of ArbCom were aware of it too. He really had no justification whatsoever for ignoring that. ] (]) 03:50, 26 December 2008 (UTC)

;First response to Kirill
:With respect Kirill, it was not an idea I came up with by myself. Your statement that ''We have never reported abstention counts'' seems to be contradicted by the following cases - ], ], ], ] etc. ] (]) 15:11, 24 December 2008 (UTC)

:Also, you're effectively saying that my edit was not ok, but was. ] (]) 03:50, 26 December 2008 (UTC)

;First response to FayssalF
:I've kept these two potential problems in the back of my mind too. On the first, I don't see it as being a bad thing when extra resources are being directed to an area - tensions will only rise if there is a disagreement combined with conduct problems on those pages (eg; edit-warring, pointy editing, civility, harassment). It may happen very occasionally, but (I think) no more frequently than it did before I began making edits relating to arbitration. On the second issue, well, it seems that is an issue at the moment. As for authority and responsibility, I don't see the problem with - if you do, please let me know. ] (]) 15:33, 24 December 2008 (UTC)

;Question to Newyorkbrad
:''Administrative issues affecting the committee and the arbitration process should be addressed through means other than a formal case.'' Could you specify - through what other means may I request for Committee intervention with regards to the warning/sanction (concerning arbitration) imposed by clerk/involved arbitrator? ] (]) 16:48, 24 December 2008 (UTC)

;A few general responses
:As a side-note, I am disappointed with one of the clerks who suggested that this request was brought as a result of a grudge – to put it bluntly, if I have a grudge, there’s no reason for me to refuse to speak up at venues such as RFA, or the elections. Given this conflict, I specifically refused to vote for either Coren or Rlevse during the elections, although I did vote on all other appointed arbitrators.

:Like my edit to Piotrus 2, could also be classified as "opening and closing requests" per ] - although both edits could be controversial if one rigidly insists that they are, they essentially were fine, or so was suggested by the uninvolved arbitrator I contacted - to be on the safe side, it was to be raised internally to ensure others agreed with that view, especially with the increased activity of NQArbitrators. However, the threat precipitated this request and the discussion ceased.

:If there was no threat, there would be no request to raise. I'm at a loss as to how some of the Committee suggest that raising this request equates to perpetuating drama (rather than as a means by which the case may be resolved). A completely uninvolved member of the community, TotientDragooned, understood my position without difficulty below, so this is not a matter of misunderstanding. Below, Deacon of Pndapetzim was also able to see what I was seeing, as was Elonka who added input and .

:There really was no justification for such a threat/ban if no other attempts have been made to attempt to resolve this dispute (as suggested by Vassyana below). I've previously noted that the Committee is welcome to ban me at any time, in any way, if my edits were so problematic. NONE of the Committee had approached me over any problem - note also that Coren and Rlevse (and the clerks) did not approach the Committee prior to the threat. Has it come to the point where Coren and Rlevse act as mouthpieces for the entire Committee?

:I personally requested ArbCom to officially confirm/reject ] after looking at the merits of the request - the Committee responds by indirectly confirming the ban. Regardless, the Committee is knowingly/unknowingly forced to choose between two possible outcomes - each outcome will have its own implications for this project. ] (]) 10:37, 25 December 2008 (UTC)<small>modified at 16:11, 26 December 2008 (UTC)</small>

;Re Penwhale's response(s)
:On the original point regarding refactoring, the concern was valid and there was a resolution that with the guideline updated, I have no inclination whatsoever to touch such statements for any reason. Meanwhile, Rlevse's choice of words was unlikely to invite a positive or productive response - but AGK stepped in at the right moment. Note again - I voted on all NQArbitrators, but specifically refused to do so for Coren or Rlevse, given this conflict.

:A few days later, following the Piotrus case, Ryan then proceeded to issue a final warning - I reverted it. I then proceeded to indicate (to AGK) that the issue raised at WT:RFArb (the one that the clerks are having) is not resolved after all. AGK left a comment, and noted that he is ''notifying the clerks'' on the mailing list. Having realised the merits of my edit, any clerk involved could have done for the time being - they specifically chose not to. I honoured a reasonable request not to go to the clerk's noticeboard, and meanwhile, Ryan was not the only one who had the pages watchlisted. I responded (showing no sign of letting this discussion drop dead). According to my talk page history, Ryan then followed up (attempting to discuss), with AGK and yourself doing the same shortly afterwards. It was at this point I approached a neutral arbitrator and before we got very far, our communications ceased. Why? 2 hours later, prior to any response whatsoever from myself, Coren issued the threat, and some 3 hours later, Rlevse endorsed it - it predictably precipitated this full request. Had I and the involved clerks still been in discussion mode, and you all gave it enough thought, you would've realised: trying to tie my hands, and then threatening to tie my feet (if I undo the ropes) achieves exactly what you'd expect it to achieve - exactly what the clerks were made aware of in past communications.

:None of you recently approached other members of the Committee despite your regular correspondance with them; none of you got a neutral party to explain the issue to the Committee so they could provide assistance. The ropes came out, and when I brought it here, the Committee chose to indirectly endorse using ropes, with Deskana directly doing so now. (Perhaps you predicted this would be their response - but regardless,) ArbCom was forced to choose between two possible outcomes (confirm/reject), and the truth is that each outcome will have its own implications for this project. ] (]) 18:28, 25 December 2008 (UTC)<small>slightly modified at 16:11, 26 December 2008 (UTC)</small>

::Am I? The arbitrators, clerks and myself are at odds with what is considered acceptable and what is not. No recent attempts were made by the clerks to clarify what types of edits should be reserved to certain users, either from the community or the Committee. By contrast, I've contacted more than one arbitrator a few hours before Coren's warning and I was assured that the issues would be raised internally for the Committee to consider. However, despite the lack of attempts by the clerks to actually resolve the festering dispute (whether it was by going to the community or uninvolved arbitrators), they felt they would force their position to prevail in this dispute through these warnings. These warnings support the clerks own point of view, which they voiced quite clearly through previous emails, and at the WT:RFArb discussion I cited above. Forcefully imposing a point of view when it is universally known that there are differing views on the matter (both by the community and the Committee) is in no way an adequate attempt to discuss or resolve an issue. So for the final time, I will conclude: the outcome of this request will have its own implications for this project. ] (]) 10:11, 26 December 2008 (UTC)

====Statement by ]====
Okay. …

Two issues here:
# Whether your edit to the ''Piotrus 2'' case was a permissible one.
# Whether the Clerks are going on a "power trip."

To the first: your edit was indeed a correct one. But, in accordance with the rules set down ''by the <u>Committee</u>'' (read: the Committee, not the Clerks), non-Arbitrators are not permitted to edit final case decisions. With that thinking, your edit was reverted, and you were advised of this rule. Your response was to revert that warning and again cry elitism. There's no issue here; a clear line has been drawn for what edits may be made to the Committee's own pages, and you quite clearly refused to respect that. Perhaps for an average editor the edit would have been permitted; technically speaking, it probably shouldn't have been—but quibbling over technicalities isn't something we usually do (an aspect juxtaposed to the job description of a clerk, you could say :-)). However, you've been warned countless times in the past to refrain from making edits that could cause you to appear to be an official clerk when you are not. The clerks have received complaints in the past about your making edits that make you appear to be a clerk when, in fact, you were for that specific case not a neutral and impartial figure.

To the second: well, I seem to have covered above why the clerks are reluctant to allow your edits to pass. Your edits have demanded some serious time and effort in discussion—whether you're allowed to make edit X, where we draw the line between helpful gnoming edits and appearing to be a clerk when one is not, and so on—and in issuing warnings. That your application to be a clerk was declined some months ago may also have some bearing on why you believe us to be actively on a power trip.

What can I say? Much ado about nothing. The clerks—and I speak personally here, and in the entirety of this statement, rather than on behalf of the clerk body—are not on any kind of power trip. Your edits have been helpful in themselves, but collectively, troublesome. When a candidly-speaking editor informs you of that, however, it seems an absurd notion to you—and, seemingly, one that warrants a Request for Arbitration. Sorry, but no.

] 12:40, 24 December 2008 (UTC)

<blockquote>
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! style="background-color: #ffd8a0; border: 1px solid lightgrey;" | Addendum re. "with whom Ncm.'s quibble lies."
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Your quibble ''does'', incidentally, lie with the Arbitration Committee. It was Coren—who is (]) an Arbitrator, not a Clerk)—who banned you from editing Arbitration Committee pages except as a neutral third party and as a party. Part of your quarrel seems to be that you disagree with this banning; my only comment on that note is that it was something you ought to blame yourself for. ] 12:43, 24 December 2008 (UTC)
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! style="background-color: #ffd8a0; border: 1px solid lightgrey;" | Offer to resign.
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I have no intention of clinging on to my position as a clerk out of personal motives; I contribute as a clerk out of a desire to keep the Arbitration process ticking over and because my temperament seems suited to the position. In this case I sincerely believe the clerks office is being dragged through the mud by an editor with a grudge against it for reasons I have noted above but will not expand upon here; if, however, the Committee is of the opinion that I have behaved inappropriately, please indicate so and I will resign as a Clerk. (Uninvolved editors in good standing are also welcome to suggest this.) ] 13:16, 24 December 2008 (UTC)
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! style="background-color: #ffd8a0; border: 1px solid lightgrey;" | Reply to Fayssal.
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With respect, I fear you've made that comment without any background knowledge as to the history of Ncmvocalist and Clerking. He recently applied to be a clerk, but the application was rejected on the grounds of a lack of impartiality and judgement on clerk matters. During the ''Geogre-William M. Connolley'' case, Kirill proposed a remedy (which was later adopted, I believe) which deferred the matter of how to handle Giano's conduct to the community at large; shortly afterwards, after he had been acting as a ''de facto'' clerk for several weeks, Ncmvocalist posts to ] a Giano ban discussion. That discussion caused severe confusion amongst some editors in the community; it was not known whether Ncm. was acting on behalf of the Committee as a Clerk, as a Clerk but as an individual, or as an editor in his own right. That is but one example of Ncm.'s acting in a way that makes him unsuitable for a clerk. Oh, and incidentally, his application to become a clerk also met with opposition from members of the Committee as well as clerks; I doubt they would be happy as you are at him becoming a clerk. ] 13:36, 24 December 2008 (UTC)
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! style="background-color: #ffd8a0; border: 1px solid lightgrey;" | Ruminations on Ncmvocalist.
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I would echo a point made by several clerks below: Ncmvocalist has been of notable assistance across the Committee's pages. At the beginning of this month, in fact, I on his user_talk page noting my satisfaction with the assistance he was giving in updating Committee templates such as ], and encouraged him to continue assisting us in that role—but also advising him that, if he was considering assisting in other ways, he is welcome to contact me to double-check whether it was appropriate. Regretfully he didn't do so.<sup></sup> He isn't quite the personality looked for in a clerk but he ''is'' useful and helpful in his contributions; he simply doesn't know where the line is—the issue here is how he is going to sort that out, rather than the actions of the clerks. ] 18:06, 24 December 2008 (UTC)
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:;Response to Deacon of Pndapetzim
::Your comments that the clerks are asking Ncm. to refrain from making clerk-like edits because he "isn't in the club" are ones I can assure you are incorrect. Previously, I've invited Ncmvocalist to file an application to become a clerk; I've enjoyed IRC discussions with him, where he has been friendly and warm (as well as insightful and knowledgeable, where Wiki matters are necessary); I certainly bear no ill-feeling towards him. (As Coren notes below: of all the clerks I've opposed Ncm. least, and only where necessary.) He's been encouraged by us to find other ways to contribute for the following reasons, which are probably best outlined by my at ]:
::<blockquote class="toccolours" style="float:none; padding: 10px 15px 10px 15px; display:table;"><p>I am not missing anything here. Every "clerky" edit Ncmvocalist makes adds to the likelihood that an editor may mistake him to be a clerk. Case in point for why that's a bad thing: in the ''Geogre-William M. Connolley'' case, the ArbCom passed a decision that remanded the issue of how to resolve Giano's conduct problems to the general community; Ncm., who had been making a number of edits that were technically supposed to be left to the clerks, proceeded to initiate a thread on ANI that proposed a ban of Giano; due to the image that Ncm. had acquired&mdash;of being an official and appointed clerk&mdash;he was mistaken to be acting on behalf of the committee, and subsequently caused a lot of confusion. To me, the clear way of resolving that problem is to gently guide Ncm. away from acting as a clerk. He has ''repeatedly'', and over a long period of time, refused to honour that request. The ban is a way of neutralizing this problem.</p><p>I am rarely a fan of bans -- I doubt many contributors are -- and I especially dislike bans of any type of established contributors. Ncm. is obviously established, and, furthermore, is a helpful contributor; his record in areas other than clerking are a testament to that (and, indeed, each individual edit he makes to "clerk pages" have been, if we analyze in a vacuum, constructive and productive -- that was my thinking behind leaving him message, in fact). It's become ''such'' a problem, in fact, that something has had to be done; ultimately, the committee has had to step in because the clerks' office is reluctant to overstep the mark and give the appearance of trying to 'shunt out' an editor who has been irked at it in the past.</p><p>Further point of observation: the clerks are certainly ''not'' on a personal vendetta against Ncmvocalist, and nor are they on any kind of ownership campaign. In fact, each clerk I have worked with, I can safely say, level-headed, here for the benefit of the project, and exceptionally professional -- in other words, not the type of people to be petty enough to stop otherwise constructive edits because they "aren't allowed.")</p><p>The issue here isn't with personal vendettas, and nor with needless bureaucracy. The problem with Ncm.'s edits is with their ''cumulative'' effect; see above for exemplification.</p><p>Hopefully this sheds some light on a matter that remains somewhat shady .</p></blockquote>

::] 13:15, 26 December 2008 (UTC)

====Statement by ]====

Some background. This dispute has been festering since early September when Ncmvocalist enquired, by email, about to the possibility of becoming a Clerk for the Arbitration Committee. The clerk body felt almost unanimously (ironically enough, AGK being pretty much the only clerk not outright opposed) that he was unsuitable to be a clerk, and he was discreetly told so by email so as to spare him any possible embarrassment. It is to be noted, like AGK did above, that Arbitrators also chimed in with strong reservations about his suitability. (edit: not all clerks did chime in specifically; but those that did unfailingly expressed reservations).

When, after that, Ncmvocalist continued to make clerk-like edits to the case pages, we contacted him again (by email at first, then on his talk page) about being careful to only do edits that every editor is allowed to do. He stated in no uncertain terms that he does not agree with those limitations, and that he would be pushing those limits. He then got some passing arb involvement to okay, out of context, ''some'' of the edits he has done and brandished that support for some of his edits as a permission to do ''any'' edit.

In the past four months, and despite the clerks' repeated admonitions that he not do so, he has gradually increased the breadth and depth of his edits to RFAr infrastructure and case pages. Given the number of complaints received by confused participants in RFAr, the clerks have returned to his talk page to ask him to stop. He has explicitly refused to do so.

At that point, I stepped in and directed him to desist from editing arbitration pages entirely.

As a matter of fact, the Arbitration committee ''does'' ] the RFAr, Arbitration and case pages. Editors at large are not allowed to edit them except in the manner prescribed by the Committee. The committee has elected to ''delegate'' some of housekeeping and maintenance of those pages to a select number of trusted and ''uncontroversial'' editors. Ncmvocalist has willfully disregarded that, and has stated his desire to ''continue'' disrupting the case pages. The directive to stop was proper, and the threat to block, while regrettable, was justified by ''four months'' of his ignoring the clerks' increasingly stern warnings.

I recommend that the Committee reject this case as unripe for arbitration, but that they pass a motion clarifying the status of the arbitration pages and permitting the clerk body to enforce those limitations when disruption occurs (as it had) before things degenerate, as they have now. &mdash;&nbsp;]&nbsp;<sup>]</sup> 14:30, 24 December 2008 (UTC)

As for Ncmvocalist's suitability for clerking: even if strong reservations had not been expressed when he originally requested back in September, I cannot fathom how a controversial editor who is refusing to cooperate with the existing clerks and refuses to stay within the procedural confines of the RFAr system can possibly be a clerk. That's, like, the ''opposite'' of helpful. &mdash;&nbsp;]&nbsp;<sup>]</sup> 14:34, 24 December 2008 (UTC)

;A point of terminology

The "threat" being referred to is nothing more sinister than a typical ''topic ban'', where an editor being disruptive in a specific area but otherwise productive and unproblematic is directed away from the problem area. The notification that ignoring the topic ban will lead to blocks is entirely normal. &mdash;&nbsp;]&nbsp;<sup>]</sup> 20:12, 25 December 2008 (UTC)

====Statement from ]====
I'm supposed to be on vacation, and I'd like to remain mostly on vacation so my statement will be brief, and I will probably not respond to other statements/questions/all and sundry until I get back.

As I've told NCMvocalist and others - he does excellent work. He updates the Arbitration templates, he makes good edits, catches typos, etc etc. He still needs to stop. There are *two* tensions in clerking, both official and unofficial. One is the specific actions: to make the correct edits, and/or catching your mistakes and/or correct them as needed. NCMvocalist generally speaking, makes the "correct" edit. The second is to pay attention to the overall effect. Clerks are meant to be cogs in the arbitration machine - when functioning as clerks our purpose is to make the purpose move along, minimize drama, minimize the appearance and the substance of conflict of interest, avoid the substance and appearance of unnecessary conflict, and otherwise protect the arbitration process as a whole. Part of that is knowing when you need to back off - even when you're doing everything absolutely correct.

As the clerk office functions now, it needs to be low key, pushing cases along, and doing boring paper pushing - and remaining boring in all those actions.

A filed RfAr doesn't count.--] (]) 17:26, 24 December 2008 (UTC)

==== Statement by ] ====
The issue of Ncmvocalist wanting to become an Arbitration Clerk was first mentioned around mid-September. At that time, there were, according to , six active clerks, one away/inactive, as well as two clerk-trainees. The consensus after discussion was that the number was sufficient at the time even though several people have mentioned ''positive'' things about his edits at the time.

Fast forward to mid-October. By this point, there have been questions about whether NCM was an official arbitration clerk. After some discussion among the clerks, to NCM's talk page. It lead to ], which did not have significant results due to several arbitrators having different views.

Fast forward another month to late November. Several of NCM's edits start to be questioned by ''other users''. show that on Nov 23, ] made a formatting change to the template and NCM reverted with the edit comment ''Undid revision 253591376 by Ms2ger (talk) any arb. who prefers Ms2ger's changes, please rv me. thanks.'' which ''could'' be read as an official view (in the end, the reverts were kept).

What really started to bother the clerks, though, was regarding . The edits ended up '''collapsing''' people's statements/comments. Coupled with the various re-formatting he has done to the page, I found it necessary to address my concern to him . This also went, at length, to a discussion currently visible at ]. The final straw came yesterday, when Piotrus 2 case was closed. Due to the abstentions on several rulings affecting majority for each item, it was necessary to post the abstention votes where they are in place. The closing clerk, ] omitted to state those votes while closing the case, and . While the edit itself would sooner or later have to be made to conform to previous case standards, the problem becomes apparent when a non-clerk/arbitrator start to edit the vote counts. The final case pages have had this sentence, ''Please do not edit this page directly unless you are either 1) an Arbitrator, 2) an Arbitration Clerk, or 3) adding yourself to this case'', for a while. Granted, when enforcement is needed, it is noted on the page in a different section, but generally, other sections of the page have always been off-limits to non-arbitrators/clerks because, as I was once told, the page contents reflect people's statements prior to case opening (and their comments post-opening go on the evidence subpage), so they should not be altered in anyway. I personally have had to deal with this issue various times when I was clerk for ] and enforce a rigid reversion of new statements as well as people adding/removing other editors into/from the case.

I think the bottom line is: Misplaced Pages is a constantly changing forum, but yet, because Arbitration is the final step regarding dispute resolution, there needs to be written rules on restricting certain types of edits to certain approved editors (e.g. clerks). I believe the bottom line of this request would be for the Committee to set up unambiguous rules stating what types of edits are restricted to approved arbitration clerks. If the conducts of editors need to be looked into, then I shall abide by it. Like AGK, I also maintain that if my conducts were found to be unbecoming of the position, I will immediately resign from the post. - ] &#124; <sup>] / ]</sup> 17:54, 24 December 2008 (UTC)

=====Responses to Ncmvocalist=====
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NCM, my edits will show that I have attempted to communicate with you. Specifically, , which is normally done only by a clerk and when requested.. 8 days later, , while needed, blurs the boundary of what needs to be done on an "official" basis.

Overall, NCM, your edits are welcoming, as I have said more than once, but until you have been formally appointed by the Committee, I must regrettably say that some of them crosses the line of what a helper can do. Because of the fact that you apparently cannot understand the fact that there are things only certain people ''should'' do, the warning was given. Not to mention, . The problem is not about "substance" of edits -- it's about the fact that, because RfAr is the final step to dispute resolution, we need things to be formalized. I note that you have not responded to the ] of your talk page, where three separate clerks have tried to explain to you that there are things that are best left to the appointed clerks. In reality, the warning was given due to the fact that you have evaded the issue and rolled back Ryan's attempt at explaining things to you.

The clerks as a whole do not disagree with all of your edits-- it's the edits that make you seen like a formal clerk when you're not in fact one that we have trouble with. And because we do not want to make that judgement call every single time, the warning was given as such. And I shall note that as of this response, a sitting arbitrator . - ] &#124; <sup>] / ]</sup> 12:29, 25 December 2008 (UTC)

*Further Response:
:You're skirting the issues here. We welcome people that help and assist us, but in your case, it has escalated to the point that people have mistaken you for an official clerk, which is why we have been trying to steer you away from making certain edits. We're not questioning the contents (or motives, in fact) of your edits; we're questioning whether it's appropriate for someone to make those edits that would be seen as official when they're not associated/appointed. Since you have not taken heed of the problem, the restriction was placed on you so that lines are clear. - ] &#124; <sup>] / ]</sup> 04:42, 26 December 2008 (UTC)

:*1 more response:
::From ] there are various things that are set out to be done ''specifically'' by the Clerks. It's, by no means, an explicit set; however, the vote edit could be classified under "Opening and closing cases" which is specifically mentioned to not be done by informal helpers.

::Here is another issue: there is a ] which the clerks use to discuss matters. Clerks check the case pages to make sure things are done correctly, especially in the case of Ryan, who is still relatively new at the issue. Two problems here: (1) we needed him to understand where he made mistakes so that in the future he would not make it again and (2) you added the abstention votes ''but failed to inform the clerks'' or post to the noticeboard saying that you have done so. Due to the fact that it's a voting matter (and needs to be seen as official), clerks should have at least been notified, if not the ones making the edit.

::I'll make it clear here: You have been helpful when you actually communicated with us. The thing is that we do not want the clerk+trainee/informal helper line blurred (regarding needs to be done on behalf of ArbCom). You have been pushing and testing the limit of that line, and you have not stopped when asked to take a step back. Is Coren's sanction drastic? Yes. Is it overboard? Perhaps. But I currently see no way asking you to relax and take a step back without explicitly having a restriction placed on you. - ] &#124; <sup>] / ]</sup> 10:53, 26 December 2008 (UTC)
|}</blockquote>

=====Side note to Kirill=====
<blockquote>
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The practice of listing abstentions at least dates back to April 2007, in particular, ]. I shall note that, for clarity, and I was not officially appointed to a full clerk until July 2007. I note that during this period of time all my helper actions were communicated via ] and supervised. I shall also note that I did not gain ] until September 22, 2007. - ] &#124; <sup>] / ]</sup> 01:40, 26 December 2008 (UTC)
|}</blockquote>

=====Response to TotientDragooned=====
<blockquote>
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The problem is that there is a need for bureaucracy here. There are sensible things that people have edit-warred over, and clerks are expected to remain neutral and step in. Arbitration Committee appoints clerks to help make sure RfAr related pages do not turn into battlegrounds. We're not preventing him from making minor edits-- the problem lies in the fact that NCM is effectively testing what he can and cannot do, and when told that his edits are crossing boundaries, he is not willing to listen. - ] &#124; <sup>] / ]</sup> 04:42, 26 December 2008 (UTC)
|}</blockquote>

=====Addendum=====
Both Rlevse and AGK have mentioned that Ncmvocalist has made an thread in ANI '''' proposing a ban on Giano; it is actually on the AN board. I have provided analysis of the thread that may offer insights.

Prior to the closure of the Geogre-WMC RFAR case, based on a proposed remedy that did not eventually pass. When El_C asked him to ":Please use the arbitration pages and spare the rest of us the farce", his response was . shows that at least El_C believes Ncmvocalist to be at least Also in that thread, Ryan Postlethwaite , which can be implied that Giano also believes Ncmvocalist was acting under ArbCom authority.

Then, after sensing that the thread would not get anywhere, with comment
<blockquote>
Self-closed - this is not going anywhere with the same disruptive trolls responding. Ncmvocalist (talk) 18:31, 15 July 2008 (UTC)
</blockquote>
His actions related to this thread in addition to the fact that multiple people assumed he was either going to be a future clerk or he is acting under ArbCom authority, has now changed my stance (and view) on Ncmvocalist and I now must regrettably ask him to consider backing off from ] related pages as to not mislead other editors. - ] &#124; <sup>] / ]</sup> 14:33, 26 December 2008 (UTC)

==== Statement by ] ====
I have to echo what Coren and Penwhale have said. The clerks have been dealing with this issue for some time. NCM wants, or at least wanted, to be a clerk and was told several times he was not suitable. One piece of evidence, . Of course, this does not mean he can't edit at all in arbcom areas. But the problem is that his edits have been repeatedly so "clerky" that many of the clerks were told by members of the community that they thought NCM was a clerk. That coupled with several judgment issues makes this a problem and I'm glad it's getting aired out. I predicted long ago that something like this would eventually happen. Also note, NCM did not follow instructions to notify parties here, not even after AGK reminded him.<span style="font-family:Verdana,sans-serif"> — ] • ] • </span> 18:06, 24 December 2008 (UTC)
:Addendum. AGK mentioned this on the RFAR talk page. I've copied it from there, unaltered, "Every "clerky" edit Ncmvocalist makes adds to the likelihood that an editor may mistake him to be a clerk. Case in point for why that's a bad thing: in the ''Geogre-William M. Connolley'' case, the ArbCom passed a decision that remanded the issue of how to resolve Giano's conduct problems to the general community; Ncm., who had been making a number of edits that were technically supposed to be left to the clerks, proceeded to initiate a thread on ANI that proposed a ban of Giano; due to the image that Ncm. had acquired&mdash;of being an official and appointed clerk&mdash;he was mistaken to be acting on behalf of the committee, and subsequently caused a lot of confusion. To me, the clear way of resolving that problem is to gently guide Ncm. away from acting as a clerk. He has ''repeatedly'', and over a long period of time, refused to honour that request. The ban is a way of neutralizing this problem." via AGK as noted, <span style="font-family:Verdana,sans-serif"> — ] • ] • </span> 00:11, 26 December 2008 (UTC)
::Case in point from this talk page "So are you saying Ncm is not a clerk? That's a big surprise to me. Is there an official list of Arbcom clerks somewhere? Short Brigade Harvester Boris (talk) 23:51, 25 December 2008 (UTC) " For the list, see ]

==== Statement by ] ====
It seems to me that Ncmvocalist wants to be a clerk and is doing everything he can to achieve that, but it keeps backfiring on him and this is an attempt to force the issue and perhaps even get back at the clerks. As others have stated, his judgment is lacking, as shown by the edit war that Rlevse mentions, and the failure to follow the simple instructions of notifying people. Yes I had a part in that edit war. Also Rlevse is the one that finally protected that template(s). This is not the sort of user that should be associated with clerking or even appearing to be associated with clerking. I'm one who at one point thought he was a clerk and I was glad to learn he wasn't. This RFAR seems ill thought out and as some arbs have noted, no prior attempt to resolve it has occurred. It also appears that the clerks have talked to him privately to resolve this without anyone losing face but Ncmvocalist has now forced the issue and IMHO it is his persistent failure to work in cooperation with others that looks bad here, not the clerks. He seems to have a problem "getting it" and I think Coren's ban was justified.

====Statement by ]====
I am neither an arbitrator nor a clerk, but from time to time I have edited arbitration pages myself, offering a correction here and there: Fixing a typo, adding a diff, etc. I have also occasionally made other more substantive changes, especially in Arbitration Enforcement areas, such as creating a section for notifications or other logs. I have seen other editors make these kind of non-controversial edits as well, and these kinds of edits seem a reasonable activity on the "encyclopedia that anyone can edit". I am uncomfortable with the idea that arbitration pages should be restricted to ''only'' arb staff, though I think it's reasonable to have a list of certain activities which are generally staff-only, and we do seem to have such a list at ]. If Ncmvocalist is taking the "anyone can edit" freedom too far, such as by removing things from view, modifying vote counts, or other ''major'' changes that may either cause confusion, disrupt an arbitration case, or escalate a dispute in some way, and he does not seem to be abiding by requests to restrict his activity, then a total ban from arbitration pages for this one editor may be appropriate. Perhaps Ncmvocalist could be more helpful in other areas than informal arb clerking? We definitely have ]. --]]] 19:56, 24 December 2008 (UTC)

====Comment by ]====
I am not too happy with some of the clerks myself as their tone can be impolite or annoying. But in general clerks don't matter all that much as they dont affect the cases they help format. I dont understand why anyone would rfar clerks in general. This is a general RFAR and my statement is general as a result. I am not vouching for or against any specific clerk. --<small> ]</small> <sup>]</sup> 21:18, 24 December 2008 (UTC)
:Who will be clerking this since all clerks are recused? ;) --<small> ]</small> <sup>]</sup> 21:20, 24 December 2008 (UTC)
::No one at this rate; no arbitrator wants to accept a case or make a motion.--] - ] 23:05, 24 December 2008 (UTC)

==== Statement by Uninvolved ] ====
My thoughts on this issue:
# Misplaced Pages is an encyclopedia everyone is encouraged to edit, provided these edits are productive (helpful and non-disruptive.)
# Misplaced Pages is not a bureaucracy.
# Edits to arbitration pages need extra care in order to be productive.
# Because of their training and authority, clerks are especially equipped to make productive edits to these pages.
# Non-clerk edits to arbitration pages can nevertheless be productive.
# Preventing non-clerks from making such edits harms the encyclopedia for the sake of bureaucracy.
# Threatening to block someone for a productive edit is rarely helpful.
# ''This particular'' edit was productive.

If ] has a history of disruptive edits to arbitration pages, I agree this problem should be (politely) addressed, but not by censuring him when he genuinely helps.

==== Statement by Uninvolved ] ====
In the words of ] (paraphrased); when you make an edit, make sure it's helping Misplaced Pages, and if it isn't, don't make that edit. As I see it, what does not fall into the ideal "constructive" editing that is expected of contributors, can usually be considered disruptive. Let's look at it conversely. If an edit that is made does not slow process, damage credibility, distract contributors, or anything else that would be considered ''disruptive'' - it's not disruptive. Assistance at RfAr among non-clerks and non-arbs should generally be appreciated. What NCMvocalist does is act as though he is a clerk - he clearly has a willingness to help out at ArbCom. Which is why it becomes harder to tell somebody that such a position isn't for them.

I have seen NCMvocalist around the Wiki, and have built a generally positive impression of him. He is willing to assist people in need, and has some interesting viewpoints in discussions. The question remains, is his presence at RfAr helpful, and to what extent should we allow him to participate? Ultimately, I do see quite a bit of good coming from him, however the clerks have made a good point which he opted against abiding by. Clerking should be left to the clerks. Admonishing him from making clerk-like edits has proven ineffective, and non-compliance with friendly requests to discontinue his out-of-process editing is not appreciated. Coren's decision was a last resort move to ensure that things at ArbCom follow the exact process they're supposed to. Process is especially important for an area like this.

Every decision we make should be ]. Is what this person doing disruptive? Clearly not 100% of what he's done is disruption, and shouldn't be (and hasn't been) treated as such. But eventually, when a number of fellow editors (particularly the clerks) have politely asked somebody to stop what they're doing, one has to consider the obvious - if people are asking me to cease doing X, I should probably cease doing X. That's common sense.

There are a lot of ways to assist the Arbitration Committee without being a clerk. You can comment on a case and add your opinion to it (as I am doing right now); you can discuss and add evidence over in the evidence page; you can discuss remedies at the workshop page - the list goes on. Why not help out some other part ArbCom and leave all the boring clerking to the clerks?

====Comment by mildly amused ]====
Wikipedians are huiman beings, and as such do not need to act like computers. If Ncmvocalist makes a good uncontroversial edit not critical to the process, great! It's saved time and work. The warnings given to Ncmvocalist look like pettiness ... examples of hanger-on turf-warring. The arbs need to chide their clerks for having little common sense, and find some other chide for Ncmvocalist in order to leave the clerks with a feeling of fairness. That's about all that needs done atm. ] (<small>]</small>) 07:19, 25 December 2008 (UTC)

====Comment by ] ====
Any article edit should be measured by whether it makes the article better. Any non article edit should be measured by whether it makes the project better. An edit might well be technically acceptable, or even "correct", when considered in isolation, and yet ''not'' make the project better, when considered in context. ArbCom has norms for how things are to be done on ArbCom pages, presumably because ArbCom has preferences about how they are to be formatted. ArbCom has clerks, presumably because it wants things carried out in certain ways. ArbCom has processes for apprenticing and approving clerks, presumably because not just anyone can clerk to ArbCom's satisfaction. If the clerks as a body have been telling someone that he is not ready to be a clerk, if they have been telling him that his edits are not universally helpful, if the general public has been telling him this, if arbitrators themselves have counseled him about what he does, then the prudent person would heed that, try to understand the issues, and modify his behavior. Ncmvocalist has not done that.

I carry no special weight, I'm just another editor, but when I brought my concerns (with edit) about certain case page edits, as part of a thread where NYB was NCM that there was an issue, NCM's response was ). Rather an inappropriate response to a quite mild admonition, especially for someone who aspires to be a clerk. I'd say it is NCM that actually isn't "getting the message".

Now... does this require an actual case? Well, if NCM was someone that responded well to informal counsel, if NCM was someone that took hints, if NCM was someone that one could have a reasonable discussion with, without NCM getting his back up and declaring he is right and others are wrong... then no, of course not. But NCM does ''not'' appear to be such a person. Some sort of more structured message appears to be required here. Which is a shame, as it is a big ''waste of time'' to need to do so. But apparently it ''is'' needed since informal counsel and warnings have not worked. Waste the time ''now'', to avoid wasting ''more'' time later. Deliver the message. Doesn't have to be a case, per se, but NCM needs to ''get the message''. Perhaps if NCM undertook not to edit case pages at all, unless in his own section, but instead to bring things to the attention of clerks for their action, and undertook to be less argumentative? ++]: ]/] 21:49, 25 December 2008 (UTC)
==== Statement by ] ====
I was a clerk at a time when the current procedures were set up (many routine aspects of clerk activity were originated by me). The general rule is that minor, uncontroversial changes are permitted. More substantial changes may be requested on a talk page. But obviously a blatant error should be fixed at once by whoever spots it. Tangling all that up into a "procedure" is inadvisable. Those who can get away with fixes and tweaks are good at it, those who cannot aren't and pretty soon they stop or are stopped. --] 22:55, 26 December 2008 (UTC)

====Statement by ]====
Any chance of someone editing some ol' articles? ] (]) 23:02, 27 December 2008 (UTC)

==== Clerk notes ====
:''This area is used for notes by non-recused Clerks.''
*Recuse. As does, er, every Arbitration Committee Clerk. ] 12:25, 24 December 2008 (UTC)
*Recuse for being named as a party (though, because of the fact that Arbitration clerks as a whole is named as party, it'd be interesting to see who could end up clerking the case should it get accepted). - ] &#124; <sup>] / ]</sup> 17:54, 24 December 2008 (UTC)
*In the somewhat-unlikely case this case gets accepted, and on the time it is on this page, I volunteer my services to clerk in such a way as to enforce very basic decorum. '''<font face="Arial">]<sub><small>]</small></sub></font>''' 18:37, 24 December 2008 (UTC)
**'''Recuse+comment''' I say we make the new arbs clerk it themselves in that event.--] (]) 20:36, 24 December 2008 (UTC)
***Thanks for volunteering, Maximr. I suspect we will not be worrying about who will Clerk this until the case is actually accepted. ] 22:38, 24 December 2008 (UTC)
*<s>I guess I recuse :) ] (]) 11:11, 25 December 2008 (UTC)</s>
**Although this request was unfortunately named (as with the parties section), I would have suggested that either you or John Vandenberg be the clerk (except, John resigned, and is an arbitrator now). Rationale? My understanding was that although you have/had access to all relevant discussions relating to this dispute, you had no direct involvement/participation in any of them. The clerks/Committee obviously trust you, and I do too, as I've had no issues with either of you on this at any time, and my interactions with either of you have not resulted (and are unlikely to result) in conflict. That said, I respect the fact that both of you may feel otherwise, and/or my understanding may be flawed (either because it's incomplete, inaccurate, or no longer true) - if that is the case, I apologise for my mistake/assumptions. ] (]) 11:44, 25 December 2008 (UTC)
***It does not look as though we need a Clerk. ] 12:09, 25 December 2008 (UTC)
****The only person who I could possibly be considered as having a conflict of interest towards would be you, Ncmvocalist; I agree with your statement about my involvement (I ''have'' largely kept to the sidelines), and my recusal was based on public perceptions of my involvement rather than any actual involvement itself. However, given your statement above, I'll withdraw my recusal, in the event a clerk is needed needed (a clerk will be needed even if the request is rejected), as the only person who I could have a conflict of interest with (yourself) feels that I need not recuse. Regards, and seasons greetings to all, ] (]) 13:09, 25 December 2008 (UTC)
*****We will probably have some incoming trainee clerks who may well be able to take care of this, if it's of any assistance. Festive greetings, ] 13:14, 25 December 2008 (UTC)
******How about we remove this request as rejected, and then you all go off on the side somewhere and have tea or eggnog while sorting out your differences. ] <sup>]</sup> 16:46, 25 December 2008 (UTC)
*******This should be left to be processed as any other case would be, unless Ncmvocalist chooses to withdraw it. To that end, as case clerk, I won't be removing it until it satisfies either the number required for acceptance or rejection, which won't be until at least January 1. ] (]) 16:48, 25 December 2008 (UTC)
********Thank you. Per the resignation message at ], Deskana was to serve as an active member on the Committee until new arbitrators were appointed (which was done at ], prior to this request being made). I'd appreciate clarification on whether the resignation is no longer effective or if the message was somewhat inaccurate or if I've misinterpreted his voting below. ] (]) 10:31, 26 December 2008 (UTC)
*********That should reasonably be interpreted to mean that Deskana resigns effective when the new arbitrators officially take office, i.e., on January 1st. ] (]) 16:07, 26 December 2008 (UTC)

==== Arbitrators' opinion on hearing this matter (0/7/3/1) ====
*Not-quite-Arb '''Recuse''' as I was a clerk during some of the backstory to this. <span style="font-variant:small-caps">] <sup>'''(])'''</sup></span> 13:22, 24 December 2008 (UTC)
* Ncmvocalist, I personally appreciate your work and dedication to the project. That said, I generally see no problem with your involvement in ArbCom-related pages. However, I see two little problems and they are rather of a hypothetical nature... Imagine many other users doing the same as you do. That would probably generate tons of unnecessary tensions between users themselves prompting endless drama and waste of wiki resources. Another possible problem would be the difficulty of distinguishing between maintenance and substantive edits to the ArbCom-related pages. Any edit made to those pages carries a responsability. It is not about elitism but it is rather a question of responsability. Take it this way... the function of a clerk is limited and defined within that scope while it is not the case for other users. By the way, I'll be glad to see you becoming a clerk soon. -- ] - <small>]</small> 13:27, 24 December 2008 (UTC)
**@AGK. Thanks for the detailed background which I am aware of some of it. Are we able to forgive people if they --especially people with no bad intentions-- decide to change and, in this particular case, follow Kirill's advice below? I am using the word "decide" because it is up to Ncmvocalist. -- ] - <small>]</small> 14:00, 24 December 2008 (UTC)
**In reply to Daniel's e-mail... If the clerks won't feel at ease with working alongside Ncmvocalist within a team then I'd not support Ncmv's clerkship. We don't need problems but rather harmony. -- ] - <small>]</small> 14:49, 24 December 2008 (UTC)
* '''Decline'''. The principle that the layout and contents of arbitration case pages is subject to the Committee is well-established, as is the principle that certain of those pages may normally only be edited by members of the Committee. We have chosen to delegate some of that authority to the arbitration clerks; but it is fundamentally still our authority, not theirs. As AGK states above, your complaint is directed against the Committee itself, whether or not you realize it; the clerks act based on our direction, not of their own volition.

: As far as the details of the present situation are concerned: while we generally ignore the rules when editors make minor edits that they're technically "not authorized" to make, this permissiveness extends only to edits which are minor and uncontroversial. A substantive change to Committee procedure should only be made after consultation with the Committee, not simply because you happen to think it's a good idea. (And fundmentally changing how voting totals are reported is certainly substantive. We have <s>never</s> not usually reported abstention counts; and while a good argument may be made that it would be a good idea to do so, that decision really shouldn't be made unilaterally.)
: I recall saying, at one point, that I thought you'd make a good clerk. I continue to hold that opinion; but you ''must'' learn to cooperate fully with the other clerks and with the Committee if you're to take on that role. The clerks are supposed to assist us in reducing problems on the case pages, not generate more of them. ] 13:45, 24 December 2008 (UTC)
*'''Recuse'''; as clerk and arb both, obviously. &mdash;&nbsp;]&nbsp;<sup>]</sup> 14:13, 24 December 2008 (UTC)
*'''Decline'''. Administrative issues affecting the committee and the arbitration process should be addressed through means other than a formal case. Sidenote 1: Casenames should be NPOV rather than argumentative, such as would be usable if the request were to be accepted; we certainly would not open a case, even if we accepted it, called "Out-of-line Arbitration Clerks." Sidenote 2: Actually, the number of arbitrators abstaining on a given proposal, along with the numbers supporting and opposing, have always been published in the final decisions going back well before I was a Clerk. ] (]) 16:25, 24 December 2008 (UTC)
*'''Recuse'''; as clerk and arb both, obviously.<span style="font-family:Verdana,sans-serif"> — ] • ] • </span> 17:55, 24 December 2008 (UTC)
*NQA '''Decline'''. Even in cases involving the clerks and committee, there should be some prior attempts to resolve the issue. Just patently disagreeing with the actions and warnings is not an attempt to resolve the issue. In this case, I see no previous attempt to civilly discuss this with the clerks and Committee. Raising a case at this juncture only serves to perpetuate the drama, rather than resolve the issue. ] (]) 18:07, 24 December 2008 (UTC)
*'''Reject''' per Kirill. ]] 18:36, 24 December 2008 (UTC)
* '''Decline''' per Vassyana. On an unrelated side note, there's nothing like the threat of having a case with no clerks to remind you how much you appreciate them. --] <small>]</small> 23:17, 24 December 2008 (UTC)
*NQA '''Decline''', Vassyana sums it up well, an arb case seems to be a rather inefficient way to resolve this, for which some mediation or discussion may be adequate. Cheers, ] (] '''·''' ]) 11:37, 25 December 2008 (UTC)

* We don't "own" pages related to arbitration, but editing of them is limited in certain ways in the interests of due process. On these pages there is a distinction between maintenance-type edits and edits with some substantive impact on the operation of the process; these latter types of edits are reserved to the arbitrators, or to those to whom they have delegated the tasks (the clerks have been generally delegated these functions). As I've stated elsewhere, we should restrict people from making such edits but at the same time it's incumbent on us to explain the distinction and indicate where the line falls. Per Brad, this is not something to be resolved by a case, thus I would '''reject''' this request; rather, this is something to be resolved with further dialogue, and making further efforts to clarify what types of edits are reserved to the arbitrators and their delegates. --]&nbsp;(]) 00:35, 26 December 2008 (UTC)

----


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GabrielVelasquez

Initiated by Icalanise (talk) at 16:55, 27 December 2008 (UTC)

Involved parties

Confirmation that all parties are aware of the request
Confirmation that other steps in dispute resolution have been tried

Statement by User:Icalanise

User:GabrielVelasquez is a persistent violator of WP:CIVIL as can be evidenced by his conduct at Talk:Gliese 581 c (see the archives of that page) and by past filings at WP:ANI (here and here). He has accused me in the past of sockpuppetry/being a sockpuppet and of being "damage control" for various groups of scientists due to my disagreements with his viewpoints on various subjects. Attempting to discuss the matter with GabrielVelasquez Resolution through Wikiquette led to further sockpuppet accusations and an accusation of bribery , so the matter was taken to RfC/USER (which also covered his attacks on several other editors which were in much the same vein). This itself has recently failed when GabrielVelasquez recently posted accusations that I am a liar who is motivated purely by revenge , that I run away from discussions and has made further negative comments about my character , which have been posted several weeks after the closing of the RfC/USER and were apparently prompted by an edit I made to an article RfC (my edit and GabrielVelasquez's response ). I seek a resolution to this matter which results in an end to these attacks. Icalanise (talk) 16:55, 27 December 2008 (UTC)

Response to comments regarding mediation

I am extremely sceptical that mediation, which is a voluntary discussion between parties, will help here, given previous history of attempts to communicate with this editor by several different parties. For example, the Wikiquette process (which is again a voluntary discussion approach) failed and led to more accusations that I am a sockpuppet and an accusation that I was bribing the third-party editor who had agreed to take on the case. Indeed it was the failure of the voluntary discussion approach at Wikiquette that led myself and User:Cyclopia (another editor who GabrielVelasquez accused of sockpuppetry, and who was then accused by GabrielVelasquez of harassment when he attempted to resolve the matter ) to pursue the RfC in the first place. Icalanise (talk) 20:22, 27 December 2008 (UTC)

Since I mentioned him, I have left a note on User:Cyclopia's talk page about the existence of this discussion. Icalanise (talk) 20:29, 27 December 2008 (UTC)

Clerk notes

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Arbitrators' opinion on hearing this matter (0/1/0/3)


user:ScienceApologist

Initiated by seicer | talk | contribs at 20:42, 22 December 2008 (UTC)

Involved parties


Confirmation that all parties are aware of the request
  • , , , , , ,
Confirmation that other steps in dispute resolution have been tried

Statement by user:Seicer

I believe that at this point, the community's patience has been exhausted of ScienceApologist (talk · contribs · deleted contribs · page moves · block user · block log), similar in nature to Guido den Broeder (talk · contribs · deleted contribs · page moves · block user · block log), would be appropriate. As such, I proposed a community ban of ScienceApologist, threaded under WP:ANI#SA - once again.

Per Misplaced Pages:Banning policy#Community ban, ScienceApologist has been proven repeatedly that he is disruptive in a specific area of Misplaced Pages, notably science/pseudoscience-related articles. A topic ban may be effective, but only if it is enforced, but that has thus far shown to be ineffective. He has also exhausted the community's patience to the point that multiple blocks and editing restrictions have not given the results desired.

SA is also under Misplaced Pages:Arbitration enforcement, although this has been proven ineffective. SA also has 14 blocks that I can count, that are not adjustments or refactors.

In reply to the "wikistalking" commentary, I was a mediator for Cold Fusion, and as such, I implemented editing restrictions for the duration of the mediation, and although SA initially agreed to be a participant of the mediation process, he refused to participate in a constructive manner, and was thus removed as a result of the mediation, and the disruptions that ensued post-mediation due to edit warring and general hostility, I have passively monitored SA's contributions, as has other administrators. He has been the subject at ANI/AN, RFC and etc. far too many times, and his general negativity, as expressed here and elsewhere, is not warranted.

In the past, SA has lobbed death threats, which are explicitly forbidden under policy.

At today's WP:ANI#SA - once again, SA has filed a retilatory and frivolous community ban request against myself, and by extension, Jehochman. He has also engaged in refactoring other editors comments or rendering them impossible to be threaded, such as this and this.

Relevant links may include:

List of blocks or notifications relating to Misplaced Pages:Requests for arbitration/Martinphi-ScienceApologist can be found here. Another list relating to Misplaced Pages:Requests for arbitration/Pseudoscience can be found here.

Trimmed statement for space; see history for details or future case page.

Comment by Sceptre

As some of the involved parties are outgoing arbitrators (e.g. FT2) and incoming arbitrators (Vass, Coren, Jay, and Rlevse), I reqeust that opening doesn't take place until the New Year; we are unlikely to settle an arbitration case in nine days. Sceptre 20:50, 22 December 2008 (UTC)

Never mind, can't read (and was mistaken about FT2, but the peasants are revolting...). Ho hum. Sceptre 20:57, 22 December 2008 (UTC)

Comment by AGK

Two points:

  1. FT2 is not an outgoing Arbitrator, insofar as I'm aware.
  2. No cases will be opened until 1 January 2009, per my notice at the top of the page and my announcement at Misplaced Pages talk:Requests for arbitration#Moratorium on Request acceptance—even in the event the required majority of net support votes is reached.

AGK 20:56, 22 December 2008 (UTC)

Now moot per Sceptre's response above. AGK 20:59, 22 December 2008 (UTC)

Statement by Jehochman

The community is deeply divided over this matter. SA aims to improve the encyclopedia and their editing improves many articles. However, their behavior drives away productive contributors, leaving articles exposed to increased activity by advocates of fringe ideas. On balance, the time and disruption caused by SA are intolerable. Additionally, there has been a history of gaming the rules, including recent sock puppetry Any attempts to control SA's behavior result in cataclysimic severe disruption, including:

  • confirmed block evasion
  • mock death threats, resulting in a call to the police
  • a pointy request for community sanctions against Seicer
  • crusading for opponents to be blocked or banned
  • retaliatory editing of Elonka Dunin (No comment on the validity of the edits, but they immediately follow Elonka's sanctioning of SA.)

Please help us resolve these matters. The community has repeatedly failed on its own. As you can see on this page, there are administrators who would oppose strong sanctions on SA. It is better to arbitrate before somebody applies controversial sanctions, rather than afterwards. WP:AE has no magical ability to create consensus where none is possible. A delay of one week is fine; queue it for processing. Jehochman 20:57, 22 December 2008 (UTC) and 10:48, 23 December 2008 (UTC)

The list of parties needs to be trimmed to just the essential ones, please. Jehochman 21:13, 22 December 2008 (UTC)
SA, at Cold fusion the Committee chose not to rule on your behavior, and you chose not to answer the allegations. Your history has not been wiped clean. We have no rule against double jeopardy. No decision means that nothing was decided.
The latest WP:ANI thread could have ended pleasantly, SA, if you would have backed down and retracted your incivil remarks, rather than disrupting the discussion with a retaliatory proposal against Seicer. It is fully within your power to end this conflict. All you need to do is stop using incivility as a weapon against other editors, stop socking, and stop disrupting. As strongly as I try to prevent you from disrupting, I will support you if you renounce disruptive tactics. Jehochman 21:22, 22 December 2008 (UTC) and 10:52, 23 December 2008 (UTC)
Footnotes
  1. I personally find it impossible to edit any article where SA is hurling bile at other editors.
  2. User:FT2 and User:Lar are familiar with the full details of the two most recent incidents.
  3. SA frequently undermines the formation consensus with tactics like argumentum ad nauseum, incivility, sock puppetry and battleground tactics. When an editor's involvement is guaranteed to derail a discussion that is "cataclysmic" severe disruption.
Mentorship

SA mentoring with Durova is fine and may be a part of the resolution. However, I think we still need to have a case to produce 1/ principals for guiding similar situations 2/ findings of fact, and 3/ a plan for dealing with contingencies, such as relapses or the termination of mentorship. Jehochman 20:37, 24 December 2008 (UTC)

Statement by User:ScienceApologist

This request was precipitated by a few comments on Misplaced Pages talk:Scientific standards which resulted in a Wikiquette alert which was immediately passed on to Misplaced Pages:ANI#SA_-_once_again which post-haste turned into a shitshow. User:seicer has been advocating for banning/blocking me for some time and decided to do this again at the urging of the newest hater-of-SA, Jehochman. That is the SUM TOTAL of what has transpired since the last arbcom case in which I was involved. All other "evidence" secier/jehochman point to was presented before arbcom in the cold fusion case as well as there being a request in the workshop for banning me. I take it on faith that the arbitrators considered this request. Of course, maybe the "new" arbcomm should take it. You know what they say, if you don't get the result you want, take it back to court until you do.

I recognize and take responsibility for the issues related to the findings of fact and principles that arbcom made in the cold fusion case. However, I think that in the interest of cleaning slates, and considering that arbcom has already looked at most of the evidence presented again (and again and again) by seicer, I believe it prudent that the decision as to whether to accept this case be judged on my activities solely today.

I think that there are three activities which people are upset about: me accusing another user of disrupting a Misplaced Pages page, me quoting a physicist who called cold fusion "shitty researchers doing shitty research", and me asking for a community ban of the user who brings this arbitration case before us today. Is this activity really enough to warrant an arbitration case? Or is this a case of users who want to see me gone looking for any and all dramatic excuses? I note that there is some disagreement over this matter in the community. Some people think the entire thing is overblown. Others think that I'm such a disruption to the encyclopedia that I shouldn't be allowed to stay.

I remind the committee that I am under certain arbitration restrictions in both the Pseudoscience and the Martinphi-ScienceApologist cases. I believe that this could be taken to WP:AE and sorted out there (possibly). Alternatively, the accusers could actually try to have a conversation with me, for once. There is no reason to take this back to arbcom and rehash the story again. I do not think that User:Seicer or User:Jehochman should be trying to police my actions as they have proven problematic at best in their interactions with me.

ScienceApologist (talk) 21:04, 22 December 2008 (UTC)

Comment by uninvolved GlassCobra

I've never been involved with any pseudoscience articles, nor have I interacted extensively with ScienceApologist. I do note the high quality of material and work done by this user, as well as SA's note that most of the evidence presented was previously given at a rejected ArbCom case several months ago (actually, I'd be very interested in seeing a response from Seicer to that statement). Having reviewed the comments here to this point, I'm not sure that accepting this case is the right course to take; it seems that Seicer simply repeats his accusations and desire to have SA banned ad infinitum, and will not stop even if this ArbCom case were to go against him. GlassCobra 21:25, 22 December 2008 (UTC)

Comment by User:Rocksanddirt

I am unsure that this is a helpful way to resolve the ongoing dispute between SA and other users. SA has had numerous conflicts that follow some set patterns. The trouble begins when SA loses patience and becomes rude, and then editwars. There are several types of users that SA conflicts with 1) editors who are POV-pushing-fringe-science-nutters, 2) admins/editors who abhoor editwarring in all its forms, 3) admins/editors who like editors who are POV-pushing-fringe-science-nutters. --Rocksanddirt (talk) 21:32, 22 December 2008 (UTC)

Another thought....I hope that this doesn't end up with a Giano solution, as that has worked not at all. --Rocksanddirt (talk) 22:58, 22 December 2008 (UTC)
Response to JzG's comments - I don't participate in fringe articles as I find dealing with SA's rudeness and editwarring disruptive to my aggreement and participation with him on POV and sourcing issues. --Rocksanddirt (talk) 23:01, 23 December 2008 (UTC)
Response to John Nevard's comments - SA has driven me away from articles he's invoved in for the most part. and I typically agree with his POV. --Rocksanddirt (talk) 04:48, 26 December 2008 (UTC)

Comment by William M. Connolley (talk)

S: I believe that at this point, the community's patience has been exhausted of ScienceApologist: clearly no: the only reason this has come here is because the community ban proposal failed. The comparison to GbD is unhelpful.

J: However, their behavior drives away productive contributors. Disturbing if true. Who has been so driven? cataclysimic disruption - no; not even close; hyperbole won't help here.

However, SA's conduct is far from perfect. But one example: the "revenge" ban request on Seicer was wrong, and SA should realise this.

SA does valuable work holding back the tide of psuedoscience drivel that constantly assaults wiki, and deserves recognition for this, but desperately needs to learn to be civil.

William M. Connolley (talk) 22:00, 22 December 2008 (UTC)

Comment by Short Brigade Harvester Boris

Perhaps there are some problems to be addressed, but a hyperbole-laden RFAR is not helpful. Along with WMC's calling out of "cataclysmic disruption" note the accusation In the past, SA has lobbed death threats, which are explicitly forbidden under policy. If you really think "I'll put fluoride in ImperfectlyInformed and MaxPont's water to poison them" is a serious threat, please watch Dr. Strangelove repeatedly until enlightenment is achieved. Short Brigade Harvester Boris (talk) 22:24, 22 December 2008 (UTC)

Comment by Shell Kinney

I'm a bit concerned by this request for a number of reasons. First, it consists mostly of material already reviewed by the Committee with a bit of hyperbole for flavoring. Second, since the proposed ban failed on ANI, it seems a bit like forum shopping to request the same here. And finally, using ScienceApologist's tongue in cheek (albeit pointy) counter community ban proposal as evidence is putting far more weight on the incident than deserves. I've advocated a bit more sense and civility from ScienceApologist for quite some time, but absent clear evidence that already existing sanctions aren't working, there's little the Committee can do here. However, if the idea is to look at the area as a whole and explore ways to remedy the limited avenues for dealing with persistent yet civil POV pushers, please, I beg you, have at it ;) Shell 22:33, 22 December 2008 (UTC)

Comment by (uninvolved) user Lambiam

Can we cut out the drama already, instead of magnifying it? ScienceApologist is to be commended for his continuing defence of the encyclopedic character of articles involving fringe science or pseudoscience, battling tenacious POV pushers, who may try to fight back by resorting to "process" if they can't get their way on content.  --Lambiam 22:50, 22 December 2008 (UTC)

Statement by user:Shot_info

Yep - here we go again. You would think that certain admins would have better things to do with their time (hint: go edit an article). But here we are - again... Shot info (talk) 22:44, 22 December 2008 (UTC)

Statement by (sticking his nose in) user:ThuranX

Round and Round until some folks get their way. This happens over and over, and the same result comes from the community. SA is brusque and coarse at times, but factually, he is, in an extraordinarily high percentage approaching, but not at, 100%, right about the facts in various articles. It's hard to write about the good he does without lionizing him, and seeming to ignore or trivialize his faults. However, he is quite often the bulwark against the raging stupidity that many fans of a pseudo-science try to add to articles. I'm not talking about people who want to add the history of an idea, or the faulty science behind such concepts, but the 'it really works and you're supressing it because you're the men in black/the man/the PTB/ blah blah blah' types. And to be clear, not all of that type wear tin-foil hats. Some write well, present their arguments with deceptive reasonableness and good salesmanship, heck, some are even professors and published authors. He fights all that down, and then we're surprised when he lashes out sometimes when he feels he's being unduly criticized or attacked on all sides. It's not hard to run a game on here against one or two editors, if you can communicate off-wiki; we've seen that before. The ArbCom should turn this down, stop wasting their time on this, and let the guy do what's needed here, which is prevent WP from becoming a bigger joke than it already is. ThuranX (talk) 23:01, 22 December 2008 (UTC)

Comment by Mathsci

Jehochman's evidence is slender (what is the relevance of the Dunin biography?). It seems to be a reiteration of his presentation in the cold fusion case. SA is often, without provocation, extremely uncivil; however he seems to have his heart in the right place and is a valuable asset to WP. Mathsci (talk) 22:48, 22 December 2008 (UTC)

The "Giano solution" would also probably be a recipe for disaster if used here. Equally this kind of confrontational method has gone well past its sell-by date. Mathsci (talk) 05:26, 23 December 2008 (UTC)

Comment by GRBerry

The community is indeed deeply divided here, and hence this is an appropriate situation for arbitration. I urge the committee to take the case.

Past arbitration gave SA a one year civility parole (since expired) that failed to achieve the desired result of SA becoming an editor who remains civil.

Discretionary sanctions exist in the topic area he is interested in editing, but the small set of admins regularly active at WP:AE is frankly out of ideas that they believe would be useful short of topic bans. SA has also developed a recurring pattern of retaliating against and/or attacking admins that have sanctioned him. And most or all of the WP:AE regulars have sanctioned SA previously, thus the community would have a major drama flare were any of them to actually do something significant. That is the reason why multiple incoming Arbs should probably recuse - because of their prior arbitration enforcement. Mentoring has been tried repeatedly - Jehochman was one of the mentors and now believes that SA should be banned.

The only discretionary sanction I would give a chance of working short of a broad topic banning would be prohibiting SA from interacting with users to whom he is regularly uncivil. The MartinPhi-SA community separation appears to be working, and the ArbComm has used similar sanctions recently (Abtract-Alistair Haines and others). But if this is done on a routine basis it will become a topic ban for SA. I urge the community to think creatively about ways to reform SA's unfortunate editing habits without a total ban. GRBerry 23:18, 22 December 2008 (UTC)

Comment by Rschen7754

Honestly, I know nothing about the situation here. All I have to say is that proposing the community banning of an administrator is a bad idea, out of process (you should come to ArbCom first to request desysop), and disrupts Misplaced Pages. In addition this was after the administrator had requested a community ban on SA. This community ban request seemed to me to be disruptive. This is my reasoning behind my speedy closure of the community ban discussion on Seicer. --Rschen7754 (T C) 23:35, 22 December 2008 (UTC)

Comment by DreamGuy

I don't have much experience with the articles SA is normally active on, but I can say with some experience that the administrators most often after SA's head have, from my experience with them, been admins of the "let's crack some heads and get things done" type, which causes more problems in the long run than it solves. As SA points out, it appears to just be some admins who didn't like that they didn't get their way the last time they complained and are complaining again without much having changed in the meantime. What I'd like to see is some genuine good faith efforts to solve the problems instead of just swinging the bat to try to get their own way. I've looked through the recent (i.e. new since the last time SA was brought here) threads linked to above, and while SA has been at times less than civil in speaking to others, the complainants in question have been less than civil in actions to him (assuming he's using sockpuppets despite lacking any proof of such, assuming bad faith, constantly bringing up old conflicts as reasons to threaten him/ignore what he has to say). Uncivil actions are worse than uncivil comments, but enforcement here seems to be just the opposite. And certainly people who are ostensibly here to help solve problems should be taking steps to do just that instead of escalating them all the time.

The thread where SA reported someone to AN (or ANI) was exactly what an editor should do, and he was right in that editor was abusing Misplaced Pages. Strangely things quickly devolved into calling SA into question instead of addressing the problem. SA's efforts to get the pseudoscience articles more in line with Misplaced Pages goals are exactly on track, and such effort tends to bring conflict with editors with a long history of POV-pushing and attempts to game the system. The mediator at cold fusion (complainant above) admits to making editing restrictions and forcing SA out... this is not how mediation standards work, or at least not in any fair real world mediations. Mediators do not set themselves up as WP:OWNers of an article and start making unilateral decisions, or they shouldn't be anyway. Every time I've seen someone try that here the results have been predictably disastrous.

Some people voting below have said they want to look at this to see how to deal with pseudoscience articles, as the way we've done it for years hs obviously failed. Someone else commented on whether we should look at if civility rules here do what they were intended to do or cause more problems as people try to game them (my apologies if I read too much into that statement), which I definitely agree with. I would suggest, however, that if arbitrators want to look at those issues they recommend opening up a new case specifically about those issues instead of voting to look at SA specifically, as the people who routinely practice bad faith here instead of good faith use the existence of ArbCom even looking into something (or sometimes the fact that anyone ever asked them to even if it was declined) as evidence that the editor is irredeemably bad and should be banned/ignored. In fact, it appears that that's already been going on in this case. DreamGuy (talk) 00:20, 23 December 2008 (UTC)

Comment by Tarc

Having seen the name "ScienceApologist" frequently pop up at AN/I, today was (as far as I recall) the first time I have commented on any of it. Having browsed through the history provided, I voiced the opinion that a community ban was appropriate, and was of course (as is his right to defend himself, not contesting his right to respond) questioned by SA on this. The gist of his defense truly does boil down to, quote, "Jerks who do good work should be welcomed and channeled appropriately.", which then flowed into a bit of a soapbox on why I am "a very problematic Misplaced Pages user" for placing more of a value on civility than editorial experience. I have to ask, is there some reason why we cannot expect a user to possess both civility and expertise? Why must it be an either/or game?
What this appears to have come down to is that ScienceApologist expects to receive a wrist-slap ever time he acts uncivil, because that is all that has ever been done. His knowledge and perceived value to the Misplaced Pages as en editor has become a hardened, encrusted shield. This is a horrid precedent to set for others.

Statement by Elonka

I can't see as a new case is needed, since uninvolved admins are already authorized to block, ban, or otherwise restrict ScienceApologist (or any other editors disrupting the topic area), per Misplaced Pages:Requests for arbitration/Pseudoscience#Discretionary sanctions. Implementing sanctions in the topic area does take a bit of backbone and fortitude, but that goes with the territory in ArbCom enforcement areas -- if the disputes there were easy to solve, they probably wouldn't have risen to the level of ArbCom cases to begin with. It should also be noted that administrators do have a bit more clout in dealing with ArbCom enforcement issues now, since the ArbCom recently passed a motion which prevents the overturning of enforcement actions: "Administrators are prohibited from reversing or overturning (explicitly or in substance) any action taken by another administrator pursuant to the terms of an active arbitration remedy, and explicitly noted as being taken to enforce said remedy, except (a) with the written authorization of the Committee, or (b) following a clear, substantial, and active community consensus to do so." With this new motion, I am optimistic that it will be much more straightforward to implement discretionary sanctions in the future, and make them stick. --Elonka 03:59, 23 December 2008 (UTC)

Note from Lar

Just as a note (and nothing more, difficulty in an area is not a reason to shy away, but it is a reason to be aware there is difficulty in an area) there have been a fair number of CU cases already. They tend to be fairly dramatic in their own right, and the outcomes sometimes are inconclusive. An outright ban may be problematic without some very creative enforcement strategies, or fairly high levels of collateral damage. So.... all that said, I sure wish there was a way to resolve this without needing a ban. ++Lar: t/c 05:00, 23 December 2008 (UTC)

PS... what Cla68 said! I always recommend meatball:VestedContributor as good reading. Go reread your answer to my question about Vested Contributors if you need to. If this case is accepted it's as good a place as any to wrestle with this continuing problem (and better than some, it's not a Giano case, so that's something anyway.)... ++Lar: t/c 06:22, 23 December 2008 (UTC)

Comment by Cla68

One of the concerns that at least several of you new arbcom members are aware of and have discussed is what to do about "established" editors who build a lot of good content but at the same time and consistently break a lot of the rules/policies. This case fits that scenario. Please take the next week to consider how you're going to handle this in a way that is effective, benefits the project foremost, and sets a precedent for how these types of cases should be handled in the future. Cla68 (talk) 06:09, 23 December 2008 (UTC)

Comment by Hipocrite

Arbitors should note that SA attempted multiple times to archive his ill thought-out attempt to ban Seicer here with an archiving template, again here via archiving template.

This was undone by Jehochman here - without any note made to SA that he had undone the archiving/collpasing, and without any notation made on the page that SA had, at any point, done the archiving/collpasing (only a small comment that Jehochman had undone the collpasing - without comment on the archiving), and without the insertion of any archival templates that would have redone the archiving but removed the collapse. Post the archiving/collpasing and removal of same, Smashville asked SA to archive the section. Jehochman responded, saying ""No, no. Don't delete anything. Leave it here for everyone to see. If SA wants to refactor their own comments, that is their choice, but they may not delete anybody else's remarks.". Jehochman was the one who, prior to his comment, removed SA's archiving/collpasing (not deletion). Jehochman did not comment on the page that he removed the archiving, merely the collapsing. Jehochman, in response to someone who requested deletion, neglected to state that SA had previously inserted hat/hab, the farthest it is appropriate to go on a notice board page towards content deletion, and that Jehochman was soley responsible for the removal of the hat/hab. This lack of transparency throws Jehochman into disrepute, and leads me to question if he is reliable enough to delete revisions or view deleted content.

I note that the distinction between archiving and collapsing may be confusing to some. I consider the addition of hat/hab to be both hiding from view and archiving. Removing hat/hab without the insertion of polltop/pollbottom or similar is the removal of both the archive and the collapse. Removing hat/hab and adding polltop/bollbottom is merely the removal of a collapse.



Statement by JzG

As I have said before, the problem here is that SA is single-handedly defending a large number of articles against long-term determined civil POV-pushing. We lack a good method for controlling long-term civil POV-pushing, as evidence the length of time it took to get Pcarbonn restricted. SA is, as a result, suffering burnout. The correct way to manage burnout is a Wikibreak, which appears to be what he's doing. Do we need to hang him out to dry in the mean time, or can we wait and see if a break helps? For the rest of it, what Cla68 said. Guy (Help!) 22:58, 23 December 2008 (UTC)

Statement by Caulde

Whilst, to an extent, this evidence has been presented and brought to the committee's attention before this date, I would think a proper exploration of actions involved would do no harm. Endorse Cla68's comments. Caulde 23:42, 23 December 2008 (UTC)

Statement by uninvolved Cosmic Latte

Endorse statement by ThuranX above. SA strikes me as a passionate, articulate, and highly intelligent editor who, despite his interesting temperament, is a clear net positive to the project. I fear that further, laboured discussion of his activities would have the primary effect of distracting all parties from the goal of encyclopedia-building, and I think that the quality of SA's work with respect to that goal should have earned him the community's patience, however begrudgingly it may have to be given.

Statement by ImperfectlyInformed

There are several problems with the way ScienceApologist approaches Misplaced Pages. First, he assumes bad faith of everyone who disagrees with him. If you're not with him, you're a crazy fringe lunatic true believer pseudoscientific crank, and he's not afraid to say it. Since this is often not true and inflammatory in any case, it's a problem. His tendency to characterize those who disagree with him as 'anti-science', while those who are not are 'pro-science', helps to divide Misplaced Pages into a dramatic battleground. In reality, most long-term contributors here are not 'anti-science'. Since on average people most people on Misplaced Pages are reasonable, the correct decisions are not terribly complex, and most of these questions can be yes/no, Condorcet's jury theorem generally applies. Anti-science is a vicious word that gets thrown around far too often, and it is certainly insulting. There are people who have different interpretations of neutrality than ScienceApologist. In some cases his scientific views may not be reflected in reliable sources, or contrary to them. Other people simply like to see Misplaced Pages reflect a diverse amount of topics.

WP:FRINGE is a well-written, neutral guideline. It includes statements such as "a lack of consideration or acceptance does not necessarily imply rejection, either; ideas should not be portrayed as rejected or labeled with pejoratives such as pseudoscience unless such claims can be documented in reliable sources ... ideas should not be excluded from the encyclopedia simply because they are widely held to be wrong. By the same token, the purpose of Misplaced Pages is not to offer originally synthesized prose "debunking" notable ideas which the scientific community may consider to be absurd or unworthy". Obviously the reverse also holds: fringe theories should not be promoted. Neither is acceptable. WP:FRINGE includes, as an example, that the Port Chicago disaster could mention a notable conspiracy theory even though it hasn't received mainstream coverage. I agree. This is something that I would be very surprised to see ScienceApologist support, yet it remains as a testament to the fact that Misplaced Pages covers a lot of information.

ScienceApologist's methods are often crude. In my experience, he rarely uses noticeboards (at a recent NOR/N, all 3 uninvolved editors, and 2 involved, concluded he was wikilawyering). In many cases he would probably receive support at noticeboards or through RFCs, but apparently they are either too slow, or he doesn't want to risk it. In my experience he rarely adds sources or copyedits, instead preferring to simply delete large amounts (over 20k deleted). With more precise deletions, he would be more effective, but he has so far not learned this. Often he will precede an AFD with a pointless redirect , and his AFD record is not great (50% kept), reflecting a fair amount of POINTy AFDs -- GRBerry points out that 50% is not bad if targeting borderline cases, and looking through the list I can understand most of them. I'm not sure why he does things which he knows aren't going to last, and I can only conclude that he is addicted to drama. He enjoys engaging in petty edit-wars; for example, adding unsourced trivia to the lead of an article he doesn't like . Similar petty edit-wars happened recently at Cold Fusion over the use of "two-thirds" vrs majority. Most experienced editors would try to get support.

Although ScienceApologist could be a good contributor, and probably was in the past when he worked on mainstream articles, he's devolved into making scenes, which make him the center of attention in things like this. Most people learn. For whatever reason, SA doesn't. It's as if he's escalating the situation so that at some point he can be banned and then make a huge fuss about how Misplaced Pages is "anti-science". He should at least be banned from Rational Skepticism articles, since he doesn't seem to have the demeanor for it. II | (t - c) 05:40, 24 December 2008 (UTC)

Statement by peripherally-involved Jim Butler

I've had limited interaction with ScienceApologist and in my experience his methods of interacting vary from trenchant-but-civil to outright tendentious, edit-warring, WP:IDIDNTHEARTHAT, etc. I'll add diffs and evidence and so on soon on the appropriate pages. But I have mixed feelings about this whole thing.

  • On the one hand, I applaud the effort, by anyone, to keep bullshit (whether fringe or highly notable pseudoscience) out of Misplaced Pages. I have no personal animus toward SA and I'm not out to "get" him and push through a ban.
  • On the other, I've noticed that SA's mission, more and more, seems to have become something of a righteous jihad. (Just read his user page as of today.) With an "ends justify the means" mentality, he's been crossing all kinds of Wikiquette lines for a long time... see block log. We have a lot of scientist-editors who don't get all dramatic like that. I summarily reject the notion that because SA is on some special mission, it's OK for him to play bad cop. What if everyone acted that way? The collaborative glue holding WP together would fall apart.
  • Finally, to invoke WP:SPADE, he's simply not as smart (relative to his peers here) as he seems to believe he is; he tends to spout Science 101 type bromides in discussion. But the truth is, fer cryin' out loud, that lots of us have advanced degrees and are advocating a little more nuance, a little more attention to the demarcation problem, than SA generally thinks is necessary.

Not sure what to do: perhaps he could use some protracted disengagement... go for a nice long walk on the beach, play with a puppy, get some therapeutic touch done, relax with an orgone generator (kidding).

This I do know: When one editor feels that he's fighting a lone fight on WP, something is wrong either with that editor, or WP, or both. Maybe he could hook up with some relevant Wikiproject and accept some degree of mentoring and gently-enforced toning down of edits. If his content edits really are good, and he's receptive, then that ought to work. OTOH, if his edits lack support from other scientist-editors, then he is a one-man tendentious editing factory and certainly needs to be reined in. regards, Jim Butler (t) 09:02, 24 December 2008 (UTC)

Statement by Badger Drink

Do we not remember what it was like being 8 years old? Are we all only children? Have none of us memories of taunting our sibling into losing his or her cool in front of our parents to "win" an argument?

Being an encyclopedia, and not a social-focused contraption for nerds of various persuasions to hang out and make like-minded friends on, I believe it's in the project's best interests to keep ScienceApologist around. If and when the time comes that we decide it's best to become Wiki Soup for the Web, then perhaps we should consider whether the extreme emotional sensitivity of certain fringe-area contributors outweighs the project's need for academic reliability and credibility.

ScienceApologist - like many of us - is human, and to treat him like a first grader for expressing perfectly natural frustration in response to the never-ending, repetitive setlist of WP:IDIDNTHEARTHAT → WP:WQA is utterly reprehensible - it's chaining the project to a tree to protest deforestation while the entire forest is burning. Handing out speeding tickets in the middle of a Blitz. Ignoring the cause, treating the symptom. It is, I imagine, privately humiliating to him, it is definitely embarrassing to those watching from the sidelines, and it is yet another reason for teachers, professors, and those outside the "drama circle" to continue to regard Misplaced Pages as the "middle school newspaper" of encyclopedias.

Are his methods as polished as other men of science around these parts? Perhaps not. Perhaps, as Mr. Butler above says, ScienceApologist's average level of discourse is closer to Science101 than not. But I am not altogether convinced that Science201 and above connects with the fringe-pushers and other assorted miscellany. To frame it in another light: collegiate English allows us a much broader range of emphasis and precision, but when dealing with a non-native speaker, it's best to Keep It Simple, Stupid.

Similarly, while civility is something we all feel most comfortable with, I believe there comes a point where excessive civility gives the false impression that these beliefs are valid, or that they are gaining validity. It is important to keep in mind that most fringe-pushers do not have the frame of historical-academic reference that the "pro-science" (as ridiculous a phrase as "pro-breathing", perhaps, but the most simple delineating term I can manage) crowd has. To the fringe-pushers, these theories of controlled demolition, intelligent creation, and homeopathetic wonders are brand new and cutting edge - which is why, so often, they feel it important to remind us of Galileo the mocked-but-eventually-vindicated astronomer, Edison the elementary-school retard, or Einstein the beyond-the-fringe-of-audience-comprehension genius. At some point, as troubling as this may seem to those entrenched in the habit, it is utterly necessary to drop the gentility and make it quite clear where these ideas stand - not just in the parlance of the oftentimes-obtuse and impenetrable men of academia, but in the clear (and perhaps bomdrastic) English of the crude, average bub on the street (Stephen Hawking vs Penn Jilette, if you will). For the sake of the children getting tinctures instead of vaccinations, if nothing else.

I urge ArbCom to send a clear message to all fringe-advocates and Fringence Nightingales alike that a) some contributors are more equal than others, and b) gaming the system through the typical loop of the Civil POV-pusher is flat-out not to be tolerated - that is to say, even humored - any longer. Whether ArbCom feels that would be best displayed by declining this case outright, or accepting it to consider the actions of all involved parties, is a decision best left up to the committee itself. Badger Drink (talk) 09:19, 24 December 2008 (UTC)

Statement by Brothejr

Looking over the various statements here and also the comments within the recent and past AN/I cases against SA is rather troubling. First, I've noticed all sorts of people saying that he is the only one battling the fringe and that if he is banned the fringe will take over. The problem with that statement is that there are all sorts of people out there battling the fringe who do it with way more civility then SA. The only reason why we never hear of them is because they handle it way better then SA does. Second, another troubling aspect I find with this whole affair is how the community looks the other way when it comes to SA's attitude, actions, and incivility, because of the thought that he is the only one taking it to the fringe. (For examples, just take a look at the past AN/I case and some of the comments above.) The result of this is instead of helping to council him to act better and more civil, he is emboldened to act ruder and more aggressive because he knows that nothing will be done to him. In past arbcom cases, mediation cases, and other dispute resolutions, he has said that he does not think to well of those dispute resolutions and will most likely ignore them when he can get away with it. Third, if any other editors or fringe POV pusher had acted the way he does, then they would have been blocked or even indef blocked a long time ago. Yet, we never see that with SA? It seems that the community has turned a blind eye towards SA, his actions, and his incivilities. That, to me, seems the most troubling of all. It is one thing to discount accusations from fringe POV's on AN/I against those who are keeping them in check, but it is another thing to be continually shown evidence of actual misconduct and then ignoring it. It smacks of a double standard being applied to this editor. I would think that if we do not tolerate incivility from fringe POV pushers, then we should tolerate it even less and expect far better civility from those who are working against the fringe. Brothejr (talk) 12:36, 24 December 2008 (UTC)

Statement by Durova

Writing to inform the Committee and the community that ScienceApologist has entered voluntary mentorship with me. Although the timing is oddly coincidental, the current RFAR actually had little to do with it. No opinion on whether arbitration should open; this just appears to be a good place to let people know. Best wishes to all, Durova 20:06, 24 December 2008 (UTC)

Statement by Peter Damian

I don't know if my support will help: I hope it will. I have a high regard for the writing of this editor, and for the logical approach he takes to the problem of pseudoscientific promotion on Misplaced Pages. Having experience battling this myself (mostly in the area of 'pseudophilosophy' - philosophy is as 'hard' and logical a subject as physics or mathematics) I sympathise with his position. It is a Sysiphean task, occasionally you drop the boulder and you lose control. We should not regard that as a problem: it should be occasion for renewing our support for this brave man. I can say no more. Peter Damian (talk) 21:01, 24 December 2008 (UTC)

Statement by John Nevard

I'm disappointed in not seeing some more substantive evidence regarding productive users SA has driven off Misplaced Pages - the only editor I could think of who could even approach the description was Martinphi, who is still slightly active. If ScienceApologist gets more attention than other editors who work to stop fringe theories being promoted as science, it is because of differences in how he operates.

He works on a wide range of pages with few allies to aid him in opposing those who push a more fringe POV. He focuses less on creationism and politicized science, mainstream topics that many understand, and more on the fringe views held by the credulous, whether spiritualists or perpetual-motion believers. And because these opponents of Misplaced Pages's purpose are less well equipt to argue in an intelligent forum, instead of fighting POV-pushing editors to a stalemate, he wins. Naturally that can't go down well with fringe believers or those who believe in a faux-even handedism. Nevard (talk) 01:21, 26 December 2008 (UTC)

Statement by Gandalf61

I think the focus of this arbitration case should be ScienceApologist's recent interactions with other editors, set against the background of his past behaviour and his history of contributions to Misplaced Pages. Any discussion of wider issues and general principles quickly becomes academic and theoretical unless it is informed by specific instances. And the case at issue here is ScienceApologist.

That SA is frequently rude and uncivil does not seem to be in dispute. So that leaves two questions on the table:

  • Are there any valid mitigating arguments to excuse or even justify his behaviour ?
  • If not, what actions, if any, should the community take ?

Some say that SA is single-handedly protecting Misplaced Pages from being overrun by a wave of fringe theories and pseudoscience. If this were true then during SA's recent break from editing (Dec 3 to Dec 19), WP:FTN would have been awash with a backlog of reports and requests for assistance. I count 11 reports to FTN during this period - less than one per day. The image of SA as a lone, brave hero holding back the forces of chaos does not stand up to close scrutiny.

Some say that SA only directs his aggression towards "fringe advocates" and "POV-pushers", so these are the only editors who take issue with his behaviour. I think my own experience with SA shows that this is not true. When SA was repeatedly uncivil to me at Misplaced Pages talk:Scientific standards, and finally called for me to be admonished for "obsessive disruption" and implied that I am a "wikistalker" and a "content-hater" he was not combating pseudoscience or defending Misplaced Pages. He was lashing out at an experienced and reasonable editor who just happened to have politely disagreed with him.

Some may say that belligerent editors like SA are needed to defend the values of Misplaced Pages which the more peace-loving editors such as myself enjoy, and we should not expect such editors to always conform to policies such WP:CIVIL, any more than we expect guard dogs to behave like the sheep that they protect. The question of whether Misplaced Pages really needs such guard dogs is a philosophical debate which could run and run - but it is irrelevant to this case. The simple fact is that this guard dog is out of control. He has started attacking the sheep, and this needs to be dealt with.

Given all this, some still say that SA's positive contributions to the project outweigh his rudeness. Speaking from my own experience, SA has gone a long way beyond the point at which this "on balance" argument can hold water. His rudeness is not an occasional lapse - it is deliberate, calculated, repeated and unrepented. Unlike almost all other experienced editors, SA seems to be unable or unwilling to control himself and to conform to the accepted standards of Misplaced Pages behaviour.

Everything else I wanted to say has already been covered by ImperfectlyInformed in his statement above, which I completely endorse.

I believe an appropriate community action would be to find some way to enforce a cooling off period on SA whenever he starts to be aggressive. For example, once he has been uncivil on a page, in article talk space or elsewhere, then he could be prohibited from editing that page again for a period of one month. At best that would encourage him to interact politely with other editors; at worst it would at least act as a brake on the extent of his rudeness.Gandalf61 (talk) 17:10, 26 December 2008 (UTC)

Comment by MaxPont

For uninvolved editors and admins I would like to point out that it is proven far beyond any reasonable doubt that ScienceApologist is a highly disruptive editor who blatantly disrespects the community rules. Just look at this compilation of evidence from the recent Arbcom (the fourth where ScienceApologist was a named party. MaxPont (talk) 09:59, 27 December 2008 (UTC)

Clerk notes

This area is used for notes by non-recused Clerks.

Arbitrators' opinion on hearing this matter (6/0/3/0)

Maria Thayer

Initiated by Rwiggum (/Contrib) at 17:21, 10 December 2008 (UTC)

Involved parties

Confirmation that all parties are aware of the request`
  • G.-M. Cupertino
  • Dismas
  • Verdatum
Confirmation that other steps in dispute resolution have been tried

Statement by Rwiggum

This issue began when G.-M. Cupertino reverted one of my edits to the article. The article is one of an actress, and my edit consisted of putting her filmography into a table format, removing what I felt to be ancillary information (including the number of episodes she appeared on for each television series and several DVD extras) and un-linking several non-existent articles. I later reinstated my edits. When they were again reverted, I took it to his talk page to try and discuss why he felt my edits were harmful to the article. He believed that my revisions removed important information, while I believed that such information was not necessary and hurt the visual layout of the page. This is not an isolated incident, either. On several occasions, the user has replaced tabled filmographies with direct copy-pastes from IMDB. 1 2 3 4

Since my very first interaction with him, G.-M. Cupertino has been largely hostile and unwilling to reach a common consensus. I have tried to work with him to get this issue resolved, but he has been extremely resistant to my attempts. He has also deleted all of my postings on his talk page, so here are the revision histories that make up the most complete versions:


Likewise, in addition to being openly hostile toward me, he has continually removed his postings from my talk page as well. Here is the most recent revision of that, in case he removes it again:

After my continual insistence that he stop deleting content from my talk page, he chose instead to vandalize it twice under an IP:

Throughout this entire process I have been civil, cordial and willing to work to a conclusion. However, G.-M. Cupertino has been hostile and unwilling to make an effort, and has continued making unconstructive edits with no regard for other editors and a general indignation to those who tried to help him. (I am not the first one to bring this issue to his attention). I simply ask the arbitration committe to help me bring this incident to a peaceful conclusion. Rwiggum (/Contrib) 17:21, 10 December 2008 (UTC)

Additional Note Another user has brought to my attention some more instances of G.-M. Cupertino's difficulties with others. (I tried to keep it to more substantial edits to the user's talk page, as G.-M. Cupertino has made several edits and additions to his posts. The full messages can be found here.)

Rwiggum (/Contrib) 17:35, 10 December 2008 (UTC)

Additional Note #2 Yet another user has come forward to express their frustration with G.-M. Cuperiono.

And the user also brings up a very valid point: It isn't that I feel that Cuperino's contributions are entirely worthless, on the contrary. A lot of these pages need filmographies. The major problem is his complete unwillingness to work with other editors to improve the articles. Rwiggum (/Contrib) 17:37, 10 December 2008 (UTC)

Additional Note #3 and Question It appears that I misunderstood the initial comment by Dismas on my userpage. He wasn't just directing me to his talk page and Cuperino's previous postings, but he was posting me here, to a user page he created to chronicle his dealings with Cuperino.

This leads me to my question: Now that the request for arbitration has been started, would it be too late to include him in this discussion? It seems as though he has quite a bit of insight into this situation as well. Rwiggum (/Contrib) 22:15, 10 December 2008 (UTC)

Additional Note #4 Dismas and Verdatum have been added as Involved Parties. Rwiggum (/Contrib) 22:26, 10 December 2008 (UTC)

Additional Note #5 It seems as though he's getting worse. He's taken to making personal attacks, as well as removing some of the disputed content from pages wholesale. Rwiggum (/Contrib) 14:59, 11 December 2008 (UTC)

Additional Note #6 Here are a few more: At this point, he has moved past unconstructive edits and into the territory of pure vandalism. Rwiggum (/Contrib) 15:11, 11 December 2008 (UTC)

Additional Note #7 I apologize for making so many additions in such a short time, but he has now moved onto nominating all of the articles for speedy deletion, in addition to continue removing filmographies. At this point it is clear that his edits are intended to be viscious and in bad faith, and if arbitration isn't the correct way to go about this, then I need to know what to do with him. Rwiggum (/Contrib) 15:16, 11 December 2008 (UTC)

UPDATE The user has been temporarily blocked for his edits: Rwiggum (/Contrib) 15:25, 11 December 2008 (UTC)

Statement by G.-M. Cupertino

Statement by Dismas

I am not involved in the article for which this arbitration was started. I have however dealt with Cupertino on several occaisions. In almost every case he has been difficult to deal with.

When I put links to WP guidelines and policies into my edit summaries, he does not take the time to read those guidelines and policies. He has claimed that he doesn't have time to be reading pages of rules even when specific parts of policies are pointed out to him. I could understand if he didn't read every word of a particular guideline but he won't even take the time to skim them for relevant info. Although, somehow he has been able to hold onto the line at the top of every guideline that says that guidelines are not to be enforced on every page and are left to editor's discretion. He uses this excuse liberally to explain his edits. Due to having to re-explain guidelines to him, he now smugly inserts the word "mandatory" before every instance of using the term "guideline".

He has been uncivil on many occasions, whether on my talk page or in edit summaries.

Only by having an admin intervene or get a third opinion, through WP:3O, have I been able to speed up the process of reaching an agreement with him. For a long time now, he's had an "admin for emergencies" listed on his talk page. As far as I have gathered, this admin at one time helped Cupertino out and has since been listed there. They seem to be one of the few people that Cupertino listens to.

Only by posting things to his talk page does he ever engage in any sort of communication and even then it's spotty. He doesn't seem to have learned that this is a collaborative project. Instead of reading an edit summary and asking what something stands for, why someone has reverted his edit, or why someone has tweaked an edit that he's made, he simply reads it, dismisses it, and puts the article back to his version. When going through the effort of getting him to realize that dates were not to be linked 100% of the time, one of his rants was about how some 'powers that be' made some changes to the rules and didn't make him aware. When the recent notice was put at the top of everyone's watchlist about the discussion over dates, I made sure to point out to Cupertino that he could have his say on the matter. When I checked the discussions just now, he had still not weighed in with his thoughts even though this was such a hot button item with him previously.

Due to the fact that I've had to deal with him in so many cases and have had to go to such great lengths, I felt that at some point things may come to arbitration with him. Therefore, I have been building a record, of sorts, of his actions. You can find this at a sub-page of my user page, here.

With all that being said, I do have to say that he is able to do a large number of tedious edits seemingly without any scripts. When they are good edits, it is a very good thing to see. I just wish that he was more communicative and more receptive to changes because then he wouldn't waste so much time undoing various things. Dismas| 19:34, 11 December 2008 (UTC)

Statement by Verdatum

I am not involved with concerns on this article itself, but instead regarding the actions of User:G.-M. Cupertino. I first had a disagreement with him in regards to the Kyra Sedgwick article. It resulted in in the following discussion , where he made Legal Threats, Personal Attacks failed to Assume Good Faith, failed to remain Civil, and acted as though he owned the article. The first argument, regarding WP:BLP, was resolved eventually, and the second argument, regarding Filmography, was eventually resolved through a compromise after making a request for a third opinion.

I found interacting with this user most off-putting. His correspondence were consistently in an aggressive tone (as seen in the above link). He overlooked requests for discussion, instead choosing to voice brief agressive arguments in the Edit Summary . I added messenges to his talkpage , both of which were immediately removed by him, which as I interpret WP:TALK is alright, but it makes threaded discussion difficult. I scanned the user's contributions and found a general history of the same agressive argument style. I gave him the benefit of the doubt, assuming it was just a matter of a language barrier, and unfamiliarity with some guidelines and policies, still I continued to watch his talkpage, in case I could try to aid with any future altercations he might have with other editors.

Shortly there after, I was contacted by User:Dismas regarding concerns about this editor . I believe that resulted in Dsmas opening a RFA/UC which was quickly closed for not yet being a last resort.

After noticing a long string of back a forth edits on User talk:G.-M. Cupertino‎, between Cupertino and User:Rwiggum on my watchlist, I glanced through them, and decided to drop Rwiggum a note about Cupertino's editing style .

Any other issues on the matter are merely practices I've witnessed in sporadically monitoring his contributions, but I'm not yet comfortable enough with this process to know what level of detail I should cover, and would mostly be redundant to the statements of the other editors involved. -Verdatum (talk) 23:50, 10 December 2008 (UTC)

Suggestion by uninvolved Sandstein

In view of G.-M. Cupertino (talk · contribs)'s comments at , noted by Kirill below, I suggest that this issue is most expediently resolved by indefinitely blocking G.-M. Cupertino for gross incivility and personal attacks, as well as threats of physical harm. An arbitration case is not required for this.  Sandstein  18:04, 13 December 2008 (UTC)

Comment by uninvolved NVO

I "met" with G.-M. Cupertino (talk · contribs) only once on a subject not worth any quarrel. We did not agree then on notability issue, but, again, it is unimportant. However, I was bemused by G.-M. C.'s deletion of that discussion from my talkpage . When this arbcom case popped up, I realized that this is G.-M. C.'s routine modus operandi that has been complained about by other editors to no avail. This arbcom case is an example of current "administration" failures. G.-M. C.'s incivility and 3RR violations had to be handled by admins way before. Where were the admins when they were needed? the first block of G.-M. C, ever, was effected by User:Orangemike after the arbcom filing. Contrary to what User:Sandstein said above, arbitration is required, because of the admins' failure. NVO (talk) 13:37, 14 December 2008 (UTC)

Comment by uninvolved Ncmvocalist

There are some real issues with this user's conduct; a clear lack of receptiveness to any sort of feedback, let alone community feedback. This reminds me of certain conduct I unfortunately experienced with certain other users (example) - though the conduct issues are somewhat different, it comes down to the same problem. The example nearly managed to let his disruption go unnoticed for a long period of time (nearly greater than 2 years) - I note that it was only after several community discussions, and an unfortunately horrible wait that the example recently received a 3 month block for a lack of receptiveness to community feedback, among a couple of other issues. However, the sense of disruptive off-wiki coordinated editing with certain other editors (example) was something that could not be addressed. Perhaps, one day I will have no choice but to make a request for arbitration on these examples...but that'll be another case for another day. Back to this case....

Fortunately, there is no sense of such disruptive off-wiki coordinated editing yet, and G M Cupertino's lack of receptiveness to feedback is more clear cut; as with his conduct issues. An RFC is likely to prolong the dispute more than necessary in this case. It would take more than a couple of community discussions to demonstrate that the conduct has not ceased before sanctions may be imposed - even though we are reasonably confident that regardless of how much we AGF, the conduct will recommence in the future. There is no doubt that it is one form of problem editing that has adversely affected other users contributions.

Based on my own experience with the above examples, this user's conduct will continue to be a problem, sometime in the future - unless there are measures in place to prevent it from happening. If the Committee is willing to provide long term solutions/sanctions (such as bans) for this sort of problematic conduct, then this case should be accepted - if ArbCom will only go to the extent of providing minor sanctions or admonishment, then this case should be rejected. Ncmvocalist (talk) 08:10, 15 December 2008 (UTC)

Clerk notes

This area is used for notes by non-recused Clerks.
  • Recuse from clerking duties on this case.
    In the course of my work for the Mediation Committee, I recently rejected a Request for Mediation pertaining to this dispute.
    AGK 23:35, 12 December 2008 (UTC)
  • While this has passed 10 days without being accepted and hence could be removed as rejected, due to the impending start of the new arbitrators on January 1 and the recusals to that effect below, this request will be left for the first week of January for the new arbitrators to vote on it. Please do not remove this case from the page; anyone seeing a non-Arbitrator or non-Clerk removing this request under the 10-day clause should revert and provide a link to this comment. Daniel (talk) 05:14, 21 December 2008 (UTC)
  • Update: The moratorium on delisting or opening Requests has been lifted, and the new Arbitrators are now fully voting. Requests may, effective immediately, be delisted per the 10-day clause as per normal operation procedures. AGK 11:13, 27 December 2008 (UTC)
Yes, if you factor in CHL's one-week-in-the-future vote, this would be accepted on 1 Jan, assuming no one else votes. Right now, I'd say let this run til 1 Jan and take appropriate action at that time. — Rlevse • Talk • 14:12, 27 December 2008 (UTC)

Arbitrators' opinion on hearing this matter (6/3/2/1)

  • Comment. At first glance this does not look as if the situation is ripe for an Arbitration Committee case. There may be user conduct issues, but it is not clear to me that others attempts to resolve the problems have been tried. Since Arbitration is the last step in dispute resolution, some preliminary steps need to be tried if they have not been done yet. See Dispute resolution for methods of to give users feedback. For example. Request for commentFloNight♥♥♥ 21:31, 10 December 2008 (UTC) FloNight♥♥♥ 21:37, 10 December 2008 (UTC)
  • Awaiting more statements. There are very real conduct and civility concerns here, but per FloNight, it might be possible to address them short of arbitration. Newyorkbrad (talk) 00:39, 11 December 2008 (UTC)
    • G.-M. Cupertino has stated that he has stopped editing in an area where his edits have proved contentious. I would appreciate an update on whether alleged problems persist with his editing in other areas. Newyorkbrad (talk) 16:28, 24 December 2008 (UTC)
  • I agree with what has been said above, and would reject the request at this time. G.-M. Cupertino's refusal to participate in mediation is worrying. Nevertheless, there are other methods of dispute resolution available. I would recommend making a request for comments; see the instructions here. If that fails to reach a suitable outcome then arbitration may be appropriate. --bainer (talk) 02:12, 12 December 2008 (UTC)
  • Accept. The nature of the comments here suggest to me that a user RFC would not accomplish anything substantive; there are some concrete problems we can address here. Kirill 05:44, 13 December 2008 (UTC)
  • Accept a case dealing with G.-M. Cupertino's wider editing. Sam Blacketer (talk) 23:45, 13 December 2008 (UTC)
  • Recuse. I'm outta here too soon. --jpgordon 00:06, 17 December 2008 (UTC)
  • Recuse, as with Josh, though I would urge the Committee to accept it. James F. (talk) 18:15, 17 December 2008 (UTC)
  • Note: Our newbie arb hats aren't fully on but we're being asked to comment...The failure of GMC to participate neither in RFC or here does not bode well for the success of a full arbcom case. Therefore, I ask a sitting arb to make a motion to deal with GCM. — Rlevse • Talk • 01:07, 22 December 2008 (UTC)
  • Accept given events of past several days and that GMC would likely not participate in an RFC. Rename case to GMC and look at broad editing and behavior issues. 12:14, 27 December 2008 (UTC)
  • Not-quite-Arb Motion? I echo Rlevse's comment and welcome a motion from a sitting arbitrator. --ROGER DAVIES  16:13, 23 December 2008 (UTC)
    • I think a motion would be inappropriate in this case because there has been no previous case and it does not seem to be an emergency. Opening a full case is often useful in disclosing the background and sometimes shows up factors which are not apparent from the statements. Sam Blacketer (talk) 16:24, 23 December 2008 (UTC)
  • Not-quite-Arb Accept. From the looks of it, all a user conduct rfc would do is have the same few people saying GM's editing is bad, then it'd be archived with nothing coming out of it. Arbitration seems the best course of action to look at the conduct issues presented. Wizardman 16:49, 23 December 2008 (UTC)
  • Not-quite-Arb Accept as an RFC will seemingly achieve little. --ROGER DAVIES  17:03, 23 December 2008 (UTC)
  • Not-quite-Arb Accept; it would appear that an RFC will simply delay the inevitable landing of this case back on the Committee's role, and the matter is only likely to have grown more acrimonious by then. — Coren  19:14, 23 December 2008 (UTC)
  • NQA Reject. I see no reason that this cannot be handled at the community level. I believe that there are admin who would be willing to block based on a sensible ANI report and few to none willing to unblock. There is no indication that blocking or otherwise sanctioning this user would be divisive to the community. As for the "admin failure", I see no evidence that this has been raised for administrator intervention. Rather than ask where the admins were when they were needed, we should ask: Where are the 3RR reports? Where are the ANI complaints? Where are the efforts to inform the project administrators that intervention was needed? We cannot expect administrators to be all-knowing and interject in situations that have not been raised in the venues they watch for such reports. Regarding the assertion that this would require a long process involving multiple discussions to resolve, I have seen absolutely no evidence that this is the case. Regardless, at least attempting a community discussion to impose sanctions should be a necessary prequisite to asserting that such a discussion would not work. This is exactly the kind of request that arbs should reject. For this sort of situation, we're the last resort to be used when all other recourses fail, not the go-to crowd for obvious sanctions. Vassyana (talk) 17:55, 24 December 2008 (UTC)
  • NQA conditional accept. I suspect that Vassyana is right—I think the community could handle this. If they do so in the next week, I would consider the matter moot, and so my vote should not be taken as a sign that ArbCom has taken over the case. That said, if nothing happens in the next week, we should take it. Cool Hand Luke 22:41, 26 December 2008 (UTC)

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Request to rename : Misplaced Pages:Requests_for_arbitration/Piotrus_2

List of any users involved or directly affected, and confirmation that all are aware of the request:

  • None.

Statement by Geoff Plourde

Ladies and Gentlemen of the Committee;

I am filing this request after consultation with others. I believe that the current title of this case is not accurate due to the immense number of sanctions in this case, on users other than Piotrus. I am proposing therefore that it be renamed Eastern european disputes.

Geoff Plourde (talk) 01:15, 28 December 2008 (UTC)

Response to Rlevse
A motion was filed here, but Arbitrators did not act on it despite support from several members of the community. Geoff Plourde (talk) 01:56, 28 December 2008 (UTC)
Clerk note: This remark moved from the Arbitrators' section. AGK 02:12, 28 December 2008 (UTC)

Statement by AGK

I concur with this. The Piotrus 2 arbitration case (t) (ev / t) (w / t) (pd / t) involved 19 parties (or so), a substantial number of whom remedies were passed on; I don't think the current name is an appropriate title—nor one which accurately reflects the scope of the case.

Inaccurate naming gives a poor impression to editors reviewing the decision; remedying this would be a step in the direction of ensuring all decisions are easy to understand—a direction which, when proposed in the recent ArbCom RfC, the Community quite eagerly assented to.

I'm hoping the Committee can agree to retitle the case.

AGK 01:40, 28 December 2008 (UTC)

Clerk notes

  • I've moved 1 comment by Geoff to his own section. If you'd like to respond to a comment by another editor in the thread or by an Arbitrator, you can do so in your own section; by doing so we avoid unnecessary threaded discussion in-Request. Thanks, AGK 02:12, 28 December 2008 (UTC)
  • Normally (as far as I know), case name is set when the case is opened (because there are numerous links and notifications). And there are various precedents where parties not indicated in case name have been sanctioned. - Penwhale | 03:48, 28 December 2008 (UTC)

Arbitrator views and discussion

  • Question--did anyone ask this before the case closed, by any method? — Rlevse • Talk • 01:47, 28 December 2008 (UTC)
  • We have not, traditionally, renamed cases merely because the final decision dealt with users whose names did not feature in the original title; the only occasions I can recall where we undertook this sort of change involved removing names, not adding them. I'm not convinced that the idea of matching the title with the scope, in and of itself, is worth the confusion that radically renaming the case will cause; is there some substantive benefit to doing so? Kirill 03:20, 28 December 2008 (UTC)

Request to amend prior case: Misplaced Pages:Requests for arbitration/JarlaxleArtemis 2

List of any users involved or directly affected, and confirmation that all are aware of the request:


Statement by Martijn Hoekstra

Following discussion on WikiEN-l I would like to ask the Arbitration Committe to review the effective options we have to limit the impact of the disruptive behaviour of the individual behind JarlaxleArtemis (better known as Grawp). The measures we have used so far (as listed by soxred93: Huggle, ClueBot, Notices on IRC, Spam blacklist, Abuse filter (in the future), and as added by Christopher Grant, adminbots as Miza's) haven't been able to effectively stop disruption to a satisfactory level. His ISP, Verizon, has so far been unresponsive. Options that have been suggested are stronger attempts at contacting Verizon, preferably by people who have a clear connection to Misplaced Pages and/or the Wikimedia foundation. Another option discussed are various forms of placing large rangeblocks if Verizon remains unresponsive. It is clearly preferable if rangeblocking is not needed, but there are some voices that rangeblocks may be an option to make it known to Verizon that we are nearing our last resorts, and without their assistance to stop the abuse, we may have no other choise.

Therefore I would like to ask the arbitration committe to guide the discussion on the enforcement on the ban on Grawp, and on additional measures that can be taken.

Statement by JzG

The user is already banned and is unlikely to be anything else this side of the heat death of the universe. Anything else should be down to the community, and perhaps the office.

For the record, I think we definitely should contact Verizon and inform them that if they do not take action then we will have no option but to rangeblock them, I strongly suspect that the adverse PR which would attach to that would be sufficient even for them, but I guess it depends on which Verizon business unit we're dealing with and at what level. I had the devil's own job getting a major outage sorted, but our man in the States called the VP of Verizon global customer services on his cell (at his barbecue at home) and there was an engineer on site 15 minutes later. Maybe Jimbo can make the call if I get him cell number :-)

Anyway, it's not clear to me what change ArbCom can make here, irritating though this vandal undoubtedly is. Guy (Help!) 23:43, 26 December 2008 (UTC)

Statement by SirFozzie

I mostly agree with Guy. On Wiki activity such as rangeblocks will be of limited use, he already recruits folks to do his dirty work on various messageboards and the like. Any action to be taken can be STARTED with rangeblocks at the EN-Wiki level, but probably either ArbCom or various OFFICE members will have to recommend to the Foundation that certain actions be taken at the Foundation level to minimize the disruption of this persistent troll. SirFozzie (talk) 00:18, 27 December 2008 (UTC)

Statement by other user

Clerk notes

Arbitrator views and discussion


Request to amend prior case: TTN

List of any users involved or directly affected, and confirmation that all are aware of the request:


Statement by Collectonian

I am requesting that the original restrictions against TTN be extended. Since they have lifted, he has returned to many of the behaviors that caused his initial restrictions, including wholescale merging of character lists to their main articles, characters to character lists, etc. He is doing all of these without any previous discussion and without performing any actual merging just redirects. He is doing no tagging before so issues may be addressed. And he is completely ignoring/disregarding any on-doing merge discussions that may be happening on that page and falsely claiming he has "merged" the content rather than just redirected. While he is generally not edit warring after they are reverted, he has done some. He is doing this silently, and ignoring all requests that he instead start discussions before doing such inappropriate merging as they almost always go against multiple-project consensus and a general overall consensus that fictional series can have a single character list. If his edits are reverted, rather than start proper merge discussions, he takes the articles to AfD. This seems to very much be the same sort of disruptive behavior that caused so much trouble before, and is causing hassles for multiple projects attempting to clean up articles. As such, I think the original restrictions need to be extended until TTN can learn to actually "work collaboratively to develop a generally accepted and applicable approach to the articles in question" rather than just clearing out dozens upon dozens of articles because he personally thinks "there is nothing to merge" despite consensus saying otherwise and thinks there is some deadline for cleaning up articles.

Addition: One of the most recent issues relates to List of D.N.Angel characters. This list already was tagged and had an active discussion to merge all of the character articles to the list. TTN came in, delinked the articles and redirected the individual articles to list, without performing a single actual edit nor really merging a single bit of content (despite his claim that he did by saying so in his edit summary). When this was undone in favor of allowing them to be properly merged, he immediately took all of the articles to AfD. This is NOT following the normal nor proper process for dealing with fictional articles. There was already consensus to merge the articles, an AfD was neither nor appropriate. However, TTN wanted them gone NOW rather than allowing editors to do the merges properly, so he attempted to have them delete. And considering his earlier actions with randomly redirecting character lists to their main articles (wiping out almost all the information, then doing a mediocre "merge" of a few sentences to try to get around it), it seems highly likely he would have revisited this list in another month and wiped it out completely.

I was one of TTNs supporters in earlier actions, but it seems he is getting worse and worse, acting purely on his own views rather than actual established consensus, guidelines, and project efforts. Regardless of the reason why, in the last ArbCom, TTN WAS restricted from this behavior. -- Collectonian (talk · contribs) 05:11, 21 December 2008 (UTC)

Response to Guest9999
That is only accurate for a few of the minor characters. For others, much information was lost in the merges, such as Daiki Niwa's section. Also, proper merging should include going ahead and cleaning up stuff. If there wasn't some apparent rush, I would be really merging this PROPERLY by also adding the missing sources and doing fact checks, as was done with my many merges at List of Tokyo Mew Mew characters (currently being prepped for FLC). The lack of references is pretty irrelevant in this case, as he did not just leave out OR, but everything possibly salvageable from the original articles, including plot summary. And in the case of his redirecting character lists, tons of information was lost for no good reason at all. There is a right way and a wrong way to do this stuff, and TTN's methods are wrongs. He isn't even doing just one series, but doing some 10-20 per day, without discussion, falsely claiming he merged stuff when he did nothing but do a redirect, and leaving others to go back and clean up behind him. Yet some people act as if that's fine, yet will throw a right hissy fit over people doing "drive by tagging" because they didn't do any "real work." And though TTN has already been involved in multiple ArbComs, AN/Is, RfCs etc, he is still being allowed to continue being disruptive, despite requests and attempts to discuss alternative and better ways of dealing with the problem. He is showing no desire at all to actually work in a cooperative manner, only do what he wants the rest of the editing community be damned. Yet, others do similar things and its "hey, you stop that now because it isn't in line with consensus nor being a community." -- Collectonian (talk · contribs) 20:38, 25 December 2008 (UTC)

Statement by A Nobody

The most recent Administrators' noticeboard thread concerning the user in question is at Misplaced Pages:Administrators'_noticeboard/IncidentArchive500#User:_TTN_blanking_pages_after_discussion_says_KEEP. These mass nominations are attracting negative attention as seen at Misplaced Pages talk:Articles for deletion/Archive 48#Deletion_spree. TTN has also removed a caution/warning from an admin who brought this up earlier and saying he is merely trying to get articles merged and redirected given his recent Articles for deletion (AfD) record is just not true. Notice that only about 25% of his AfDs were outright deleted (it is not called Articles for Redirecting or Articles for Merging), which suggests a remarkably poor "success" rate. AfD is not for merging and redirecting, but he apparently does not mind misusing it for that purpose as he admits here. These AfDs are becoming increasingly frivolous with sources that the nominator can and should have easily found himself (see Misplaced Pages:Articles for deletion/Sissy and Ada, Misplaced Pages:Articles for deletion/Egon Olsen, and Misplaced Pages:Articles for deletion/Eddie Quist). Consider, for example, Misplaced Pages:Articles for deletion/Prinny. The article contains out of universe information easily found from Google searches (see Prinny#Cultural_impact) and yet at AfD it gets the same copy and paste bot-like nomination that once again does not accurately apply to all the articles being nominated. It is as if categories of fiction are just having their contents discriminately nominated even though some of the articles vary considerably in terms of potential and actual notability and verifiability. Even those who frequently argue to delete are starting to get annoyed with this (see ). Also, not sure where this was archived to, but there is a revealing diff there (this one), which shows TTN’s disregard for the community. It is telling when even admins who do close his nominations as delete are getting tired of the nominations as seen at Misplaced Pages:Articles for deletion/Mainframe (C.O.P.S.) (yes, I know that nomination was actually by a different editor, but the wording is identical to part of the wording used in the copy and paste TTN nominations). From just today, see also and for additional quarrelling with other editors. In fact, he is driving people away from the project. So, the user is unwilling to discuss with admins who caution him (see ), is bringing articles to AfD that he admittedly wants merged or redirected but does not want to discuss with the actual article creators and writers on the articles' talk pages as they might argue against what he wants per , and has nominated well over 200 articles for deletion (see ), a minority of which were actually outright deleted (I gave a more detailed breakdown of his edits at Misplaced Pages:Requests_for_adminship/Sgeureka#Oppose to contrast him with another editor). How many times does he have to be sanctioned before he alters his way of going about things? You know, to be fair, maybe there is something problematic about those of us with obvious biases participating in these discussions. Maybe they need new blood as it were. This is a big project and I think he can and should try his hand at something else like article creation or sourcing for a change. Show the community that you are not only about deleting things, but that you too can build content as well. Randomran and others with whom I have disagreed in AfDs have all made efforts to improve articles as well, as I tried to show at Sgeureka's RfA, and in some cases even offered the occasional “keep” argument in discussions. I cannot say to them, “You never argue to keep” or “You never add sources”, because they can prove that they have done these things. I urge TTN for his and the community’s sake to make a voluntary good faith effort to work on something other than deletions and you will at least make it that much harder for those to criticize you, because otherwise this copy and paste approach to nominations is very bot-like and thus does not truly consider the individual merits of the articles under discussion. Sincerely, --A Nobody 20:43, 20 December 2008 (UTC)

Reply to Masem's 06:44 comment
Actually, he does focus on a large majority of articles from a single work of fiction at one time. Generally, he seems to pick one category or two a day and nominates a block of articles rapidly with the same word for word nomination regardless of the variance of the various characters or weapons notability (I have even seen some where characters are labeled weapons, weapons characters, etc.). Sincerely, --A Nobody 06:47, 21 December 2008 (UTC)

Statement by Colonel Warden

I was picking up a few of the pieces of TTN's trail of destruction today. Aside from the aftermath of the unnecessary AFDs, I noticed that he took a big bite out of the Ringworld article in passing. This was done without any discussion and seems quite unhelpful since Ringworld is multi-award winning novel which certainly merits a good article here and the information included highly structured stats. I have reverted but might easily have missed this. As for Collectonian's complaints above, I have little direct knowledge of those articles but, if she considers TTN's treatment unacceptably destructive and dismissive then this is telling as I usually find Collectionian to be quite a hard-line deletionist. So, please restrain User:TTN again, as requested. Colonel Warden (talk) 20:55, 20 December 2008 (UTC)

Statement by not impartial and not-currently-but-formerly-partly-involved Casliber

I echo the above, and view Collectonian's position as highly significant and worth noting. I feel that TTN is unable to edit in a collaborative manner which is incompatible with the writing of an encyclopedia. Cheers, Casliber (talk · contribs) 20:59, 20 December 2008 (UTC)

Statement by New Age Retro Hippie

I find it worrisome with regard to his use of the AfD process - he's got roughly 43 active requests for deletion, and he's participated in roughly only two or three of the discussions in any of those. - The New Age Retro Hippie used Ruler! Now, he can figure out the length of things easily. 21:07, 20 December 2008 (UTC)

And note, I'm not calling for probation or the b&, merely that TTN either needs to cut down on AfDs or increase his participation in them. - The New Age Retro Hippie used Ruler! Now, he can figure out the length of things easily. 04:43, 21 December 2008 (UTC)

Statement by TTN

I try work as collaboratively as possible with people, but there is a point where it is not possible to directly deal with fans or projects that feel the need to take two years to take care of small problems. I use a mix of merge discussions/strait merging, redirects, and AfDs to get things done, and of course some people will have a problem with it. Collectonian acts like I absolutely never deal with people, though I recently asked the video game project for input twice (here and here), and I do start merge discussions, though they are overshadowed by the number of articles that do not need to be merged at all. Other complaints are just issues of personal preference in dealing with bad articles (whether to tag first, only use talk page discussions for these kinds of articles, ect), so this is the kind of thing that belongs in a RFC/U or some other similar forum of discussion.

Statement by Ryan Postlethwaite

I believe this is being handled effectively by administrators and there's no need to sanction TTN at this point in time. The major problem we've had with TTN in the past is the edit warring to keep his merges/redirects in place. I still see the odd reversion, but nothing like what we were seeing 12 months ago. We encourage our editors to be bold and this is just what TTN is doing, if he steps back and starts edit warring again going against the bold, revert, discuss cycle then perhaps we can look again, but that's not happening at the minute. I do have some concerns about the way TTN merges his edits, and this led to a warning for not attributing edits properly (something which I will block for if he does it again, although a quick scan of his contribs shows he's attributing correctly at the moment), but that is a simple administrative issue which can be dealt with as such. To sum up - there's no need for the Arbitration Committee to step in here. Ryan Postlethwaite 22:34, 20 December 2008 (UTC)

Statement by Goodraise

(Edit conflict) As far as I understand it, TTN has previously been restricted for edit warring, which nobody here seems to accuse him of. - He has been accused of going "against multiple-project consensus and a general overall consensus that fictional series can have a single character list". Note, that this quote is not covered by the link provided. He has been accused of misusing AfD for merging. The diff provided, where he supposedly admitted this behavior, only shows him talking about redirects, not about merging. Are people actually expecting of him, to start a merge discussion, after a redirect of his has been reverted? What would he be supposed to start the discussion with? Perhaps, "I suggest article A be merged into article B, but since I can't find anything in those articles worth merging, someone else will have to perform the merger." Then, he has been accused of having "disregard for the community", as is supposedly evident by yet another misread diff. - TTN has picked himself a dirty job. And he is doing that job in an admirably civil way. A hothead like myself probably couldn't do it. -- Goodraise (talk) 22:37, 20 December 2008 (UTC)

Statement by Black Kite

I have sympathy for both viewpoints here, but I think TTN is stuck between a rock and a hard place. There are a lot of articles, mostly fiction, that are candidates for either deletion, a merge or redirection, but how to deal with them? The obvious answer is to be bold and redirect/merge them, but often (and probably because it's TTN to an extent) this will get reverted, leading to the edit-warring problems we had before, which at least TTN has generally avoided this time. Adding merge tags is generally fruitless because many of these articles are so obscure and ignored that no reasonable discussion will ensue. And so we go to AfD, where - yes - many end up with results of Merge, but at least they've then got the weight of an AfD behind that merge. I know this is another layer of bureaucracy, but possibly some sort of parallel discussion page such as Articles for Merging (AfM?) is an idea which would cope with this. Black Kite 22:50, 20 December 2008 (UTC)

Statement by Randomran

I think we need to be very specific about the problem here.

First what this is not.

  1. TTN's previous ArbCom case was not for merging or redirecting articles. It was for edit warring.
  2. There are a lot of people who do not like that User:TTN is being too WP:BOLD. There is absolutely nothing wrong with merging, cleaning up, even redirecting entire articles WP:BOLDly.
  3. If anyone, including User:TTN, makes a WP:BOLD edit that you disagree with, the correct action is to revert it.
  4. If anyone, including User:TTN, is unhappy with being reverted... the correct action is to discuss it. (This failure to do so is what led to his last punishment, which I agree with.)
  5. If the discussion results in no consensus, then solicit feedback from more editors.
  6. I haven't seen evidence that User:TTN is misusing the WP:BRD process.

But that said, I can see why this case keeps on coming back to ArbCom in good faith. (Although I suspect that a few people really just want to be rid of someone they disagree with, regardless of whether or not he follows our behavioral rules.) I don't think TTN is breaking any policies in any clear way (being incivil, failing to assume good faith, edit warring...) But I think that we need ArbCom to answer a few specific questions about more gray-area behavior:

  1. If your effort to redirect an article results in a revert, is it appropriate to solicit further discussion at an AFD?
  2. Is it disruptive to boldly redirect an article for issues that haven't been described through either a discussion or a tag?
  3. Is it misleading to summarize your edit as a "merge", when you've been highly selective in the content you've merged? (See: Misplaced Pages:Smerge#S)
  4. Is there such a thing as WP:GAMEing the WP:BRD process through sheer volume? If so, what is an appropriate level of activity, keeping in mind that some Wikipedians are highly active, and others only check in once a week, or less.
  5. Does the collective amount of these behaviors amount to WP:GAMEing the system? ("See #9: Borderlining".)

I would be uncomfortable penalizing TTN for any of these behaviors, because I think these are questions that nobody honestly knows the answer to. (At least, I sure as hell don't know the answer. Take #1 as an example: the vast majority of the AFDs that TTN puts together results in deletion or a redirect -- so it's not like he's particularly out of step with the community. But then again, it's not called "articles for redirection". It's not called "articles for discussion". It's articles for "deletion". Is an AFD an appropriate way to settle a disputed redirect? I think you'd get a different answer from everyone here.)

However... I do think we should find out if any of these behaviors are considered disruptive, so we can know once and for all where to draw the line. Once we have a clear line, there will be no excuse for crossing it. Vice versa, if these behaviors are acceptable, we also need to know. I'm a little tired of how ArbCom is being used here, when I don't think that other forms of dispute resolution have been tried. ArbCom should be used based on the quality of the behavior, not a judgment on the person. I don't see TTN doing anything remotely as bad as what he did around a year ago, and the fact that he was here a year ago should not turn every disagreement with him into a request for ArbCom to step in.

  • Additional comment: Something to keep in mind: TTN has no real power. AFAIK, he's not even an admin. He cannot delete content: only start an AFD. At most, he can redirect, which can easily be reverted if he's truly alone. Yeah, TTN has a lot of patience and time to go after lots of articles at a time. But he is not responsible for their deletion/redirection/merging any more than the article itself can be owned by a single editor. That responsibility belongs to the consensus of editors. It is literally impossible for TTN to singlehandedly override consensus. It is literally impossible for TTN to singlehandedly delete entire topics. Collaboration is too ingrained in WP's processes.

    Despite being unclear as to what TTN is actually doing wrong, I think there are legitimate questions in this RFAR. (I tried to pick them out above.) But many of the honest questions are being overshadowed by hyperbole. While I hope ArbCom disregards the hyperbole, I hope they don't disregard the honest questions that people have. I think we ALL want to know where to draw the line. It will prevent us from wasting ArbCom's time unless there's a real problem, and it will also show everyone (including TTN) how to behave.

    One more thing. The fact that most of us don't know where to draw the line would make it unfair to enforce some invisible behavioral policy upon TTN before it's been made clear. I think we should WP:AGF and presume that TTN has learned his lesson from the last arbcom case. We should assume that the new TTN wants to abide by our behavioral policies. (Indeed, he's stopped edit warring.) And if TTN is actually doing anything wrong (which many people don't think he is -- honestly and in good faith), then we should assume that the problem here is a lack of clarity in our policy, not a lack of cooperation. Randomran (talk) 03:48, 25 December 2008 (UTC)
Reply to DGG Moved from DGG's section per rules against threaded discussion. Daniel (talk)
Sorry to barge in, but I figured I could since you mentioned me by name. It sounds to me like your biggest issue is the quantity (or maybe the speed?) of the AFDs put forth by TTN. If so, then I don't really disagree with your overall message. Just that we need a clear statement about what a disruptive level of activity is. I would even be comfortable adding something to WP:GAME and WP:POINT for future reference, and would fight hard to make sure that rule stays there. Randomran (talk) 19:58, 21 December 2008 (UTC)

Response to John Vandenberg

  • I'm very pessimistic about exploring how the restriction affected content. First off, this is a behavioral issue, not a content issue. Second off, since I expect a lot of people to take the bait on the question... I also expect a lot of people saying "things were so much better with the restriction! We need to stop TTN from deleting good content," while another group says "things were so much worse! TTN is helpful in that he flags a lot of bad content". In other words, you'll get an entirely partisan answer. Finally, TTN can't delete content. He can only nominate it, or boldly redirect it. Are we going to treat him as though he WP:OWNs the changes, when others added their analysis at AFDs, merge discussions, and assisted with redirects and merges? That seems like a double standard. Randomran (talk) 17:09, 27 December 2008 (UTC)

Statement by Peregrine Fisher

Misplaced Pages is not cleaned up in a day, because it's a lot of work, and people's feelings will get hurt. TTN seems to have taken the job on by himself, and he's forced to cut corners and ignore other peoples feelings. TTN needs to learn to play nice and work with other people. - Peregrine Fisher (talk) (contribs) 23:14, 20 December 2008 (UTC)

Comment to a few of the TTN supporters here. I don't disagree that TTN enforces our policies and guidelines. This case reminds of a few other arbcom/ANI situations. It's the question of whether someone who is a "net gain" is allowed to, basically, be mean to other editors. It seems the answer to this is sometimes "yes". I personally believe the answer should be "no". I don't know if arbcom can answer this question in some general way, but it would be cool if they could/did. Let's say TTN correctly cleaned up 10,000 articles, and alienated 100 editors (I think those numbers are within a factor of the real numbers). Is that OK? If TTN alienated just DGG, that would be too much for me. 10,000 articles to 10 IPs? Maybe that's OK, I don't know. I think a positive result of this situation would be that TTN, under penalty of small blocks, must work collaboratively with others. A big block just makes him take time off, then go into maximum attack mode (within whatever restrictions are on him), as far as I can tell. - Peregrine Fisher (talk) (contribs) 09:02, 21 December 2008 (UTC)

Statement by DGG

Let me word this as a reply to Randomran, A occasional or closely targeted bold redirect without discussion is not disruptive--I've done this myself from time to time, even on characters when I see an obviously unsupportable article and a good target. Dozens of them in close succession for multiple article groups are disruptive. It is not wrong to try for a redirect as a compromise, and if not obtained, to try what you really wanted, which is deletion. It is wrong to do so routinely for multiple article groups. Nominating 5 articles in one day for deletion is reasonable. Systematically nominating 5 items or more a day, every day, is not. TTN has a valid point--the articles on these subjects are horrific--anyone coming here will soon see this. But the way to improve them is through discussion and cooperative work, not rushing "madly off in all directions" Stephen Leacock, disregarding all opposition. To nominate articles for lacking references to show notability is useful. To refuse to check first is not so good. (as in every AfD he's placed) To reject references when offered is not good. (multiple afds) To reject even awards as showing it is probably even worse . It shows a determination to be rid of the articles regardless of how. To nominate for deletion or redirection or destructive merging in very large quantities without cooperative work results in random articles being handled in incompatible ways, which is not helpful--especially when done regardless of the importance of the underlying subject . It results in decision by trying to wear out everyone else, and hope to be the last person standing. In desperation, to reduce our areas of interaction, I came on line today intending to propose to TTN that I would simply abandon defense of some classes of articles (games, and children's video), if he would cease trying for the deletion or quasi-deletion of som other classes (classic fiction & works based on classic fiction). Some people, even looking from outside at WP, have called me "patient," , (7 paragraphs from the bottom); for my discussions see my talk page archive on fiction. But he is driving me away from the topic to the extent that I am some days reluctant to start looking at the latest AfDs, or even at WP at all.

I have repeatedly online and offline offered to work with TTN on these articles, as I work with others--and when i do , I give very orthodox advice. . I've worked cooperatively in a friendly & constructive way with people I consider rather extreme deletionists, such as Orange Mike. The only people who have ever not been willing to are a few trolls and SPAs--and TTN. I have specifically offered many times to help with proper merges, (for example) since it is true that sometimes appropriate redirects or merges that he proposes are unreasonably rejected, and I've been ignored--possibly because I offer to help only for the appropriate merges. WP:BRD only works if all three parts are followed--otherwise its bullying or obstruction. There are three things to which a wiki is extremely susceptible: zealots, refusal to discuss, and gaming. See the unanimous WP:Requests for arbitration/Episodes and characters 2#Principles arb com view on this DGG (talk) 00:12, 21 December 2008 (UTC)

Reply to Masem
nobody but TTN does this quantity, and does it without discussion. The quantity is the problem. "Any sin if persisted in will become heinous" Samuel Johnson. I'm referring to refusal to discuss as the "sin," not deletionism) DGG (talk) 06:01, 21 December 2008 (UTC)

Statement by Caissa's DeathAngel

It is tough to say whether TTN is actually breaking the rules here. Certainly, individually his actions are in agreement with WP:BRD. However, these are not isolated incidents, these are a huge number of incidents and I believe that collectively they may well be gaming the WP:BRD. Articles for Deletion is not to my mind a place for redirects and mergers. While merge and redirect may be an outcome of the process, no article should ever be submitted there with that intention in mind. I also believe that discussion should occur before an article is sent to AFD. It is very easy for us as editors to occasionally let something lie a little too long, and we may need a bit of prodding (no pun intended) to remind ourselves to sort an article which may be a candidate for deletion. But that discussion should to me come before the AFD. Attempting a redirect straight away I do not object to. I do however object to the article being sent to AFD immediately upon the redirect being reverted, especially when the revert edit summary requests a discussion. That discussion may lead to the merge/redirect being vindicated, but at least the discussion will have happened. To me, the best place for this discussion is on the article's talk page, or that in to which it is suggested it be merged. Not AFD, which is not in any way a discussion page.

Does the fact that so many cases of this amount to justification for extending sanctions on TTN? I would feel more comfortable if that were the case, but that is no what this is about and it would be a gross violation of policies to let my personal feelings affect how this judgement should be made. Perhaps the best solution is requesting that TTN cool off with his use of WP:BOLD and perhaps engage in discussion a bit more readily before sending articles to AFD rather than letting the AFD be the discussion. Whether there is any basis for this to be enforced or an official judgement however I leave to those better versed in such interpretations than I to decide however. Caissa's DeathAngel (talk) 00:26, 21 December 2008 (UTC)

Statement by nifboy

In my mind the discussion of many similar articles has, for articles TTN is not involved in, gone something like this:

Editor1: {{plot}} Editor2: {{sofixit}} 2 years go by without any substantial change. Maybe a small-scale edit war but nothing substantial unless Editor1 is dedicated enough to basically rewrite the article from scratch, which can only really be done for high profile articles (hence the success of the Final Fantasy Project, for which step 1 was basically "Merge together a whole bunch of middling characters").

I don't think this is tenable in the long term. So when TTN comes along as asks, "Guys, can we talk about these articles now?" I generally approve. Even if the article hasn't been tagged before, getting the issue on the table and making sure people know about it right away is preferable to letting it stagnate before doing anything about it. Nifboy (talk) 02:06, 21 December 2008 (UTC)

Statement by SirFozzie

Agreed with Ryan, I'd hope ArbCom quickly rejects this "Clarification" as yet another attempt to sanction TTN for behaviour that complies with Misplaced Pages policies. SirFozzie (talk) 02:09, 21 December 2008 (UTC)

Statement by KojiDude

FWIW, I beleive the statements posted by A Nobody and Collectonian bring up very real problems, (with evidence to boot, something many arguments here lack ) which need to be considered. It seems to me that TTN has realized very little about the issues his rapid nominations and editting patterns raise, and it would be a net positive to have the sanction restored. Dude needs to chillax.--Koji† 03:24, 21 December 2008 (UTC)

Statement by Protonk (talk)

As I am a poor writer, I will begin this with a caveat. While this issue itself appears perennially before Arbcomm without apparent differentiation from request to request, I agree that each request can be made in good faith. Like all content/conduct disputes, no one here has the benefit of speaking from stoic impartiality. The folks calling for TTN to be restricted are probably genuinely interested in stopping conflicts and encouraging dialogue. They are probably also interested in being rid of TTN. The folks (like me) calling for this to be dismissed are also genuinely interested in working in the 'pedia harmoniously. We are also interested in protecting folks like TTN from being censured, restricted or blocked. Both of our camps' concerns (where they are direct or proxies) are legitimate. TTN isn't the white knight simply because 90% of fiction articles are 'bunk'. Nor is he the bad guy simply because he proceeds aggressively and methodically.

Having equivocated, I'll try to move to the point. This motion should be rejected as it stems from a vague admonition in E&C2 ("The parties are instructed to cease engaging in editorial conflict and to work collaboratively to develop a generally accepted and applicable approach to the articles in question"), is largely unchanged from previous rejected motions, is (as Randomran points out) unrelated to the disputed issue in E&C2, and hinges upon what is a thorny community issue.

  • Previously rejected motions were argued before the committee with the same collection of information and basically the same motivation. Upon the expiry of TTN's restriction, he moved immediately into the prior area of dispute and began editing specifically within the guidelines set by the case. As he (and others) has said multiple times, the use of AfD and placement of redirects is the only venue allotted him to clean up or remove articles on fictional works. Unless we present some clear reasoning why this request is different from all the others we find ourselves in a position where the committee is being used as a standing threat against an editor proceeding along their normal editing path. The result is a chilling effect against editors who wish to clean up articles on fictional subjects. Either something novel should be addressed here or the motion should be rejected.
  • The impetus for E&C2 and the reason for restriction were the same. TTN was edit warring to maintain articles in his preferred state. If we want to ask for community action on his actions which are manifestly different from edit warring, we should be filing a new RFAR. If we think that the community cannot answer the questions his behavior poses, it might be time to do so. But we can't just keep using the result of E&C2 as an albatross around TTN's neck. Unless the suspect behavior is the same, the remedy should be different.
  • Finally, and most importantly, this problem isn't a user conduct issue. Or it isn't solely a user conduct issue. TTN is still doing this because he has the patience and the motivation to do so--not because of some unique malevolence or mania. The community is close to answering the fictional notability question (see WP:FICT), in the middle of answering the 'spinout' question (see the WP:N RfC) and nowhere near answering the merger/deletion/redirect question (in other words, answering the question of what the appropriate fora for these discussions are). Until those questions are answered and some process exists to discuss mergers centrally and enforceably within or without AfD, we cannot use the ARB as a blunt instrument to prevent those merger discussions from occurring.

TTN has a pretty impressive record at AfD of nominated articles eventually being deleted, redirected or merged. He's not doing it to prove a point. He's not tilting at windmills. If we don't like the outcome of his discussions or don't like the volume of them, that's tough. So long as we don't see deletion nominations rejected by the community or some recurrence of past behavior, we should not continue to bring these requests here.

An update with some comments

Ok, this request seems to be settling on two things:

  • Fait accompli: E&C 2 contained another provision that discussion is not to be overwhelmed by editing rate. If TTN is in violation, this is the likely problem. However, I want to caution the committee against interpreting this to mean discussion moves at the same rate in all venues at all times, nor should they treat discussions as a convoy where the pace is determined by the party wishing to proceed the slowest. More specifically: AfD discussions are centralized, semi-formal and predictable where talk page merger discussions are free form, local and relatively open ended. The expected speed that a talk page merger discussion would proceed at is not the expected speed that an AfD would proceed at. Consequently the rate at which new discussions can be opened or closed is different. 3-5 or even 8-10 AfDs a day is not an unheard of pace nor is it fast enough to presume that TTN is choosing the pace in order to disrupt opposition.
  • Out of process mergers: This is the second major 'charge' against TTN that appears to be materializing. To me, it is less compelling than the first. The community is currently at a point where policy (WP:DEL and WP:AFD) does not match with practice. The policy says that merger discussions are to be remanded to talk pages and not discussed at AfD. This plainly ignores practice--AfDs result in redirects and mergers all the time (fiction AfDs especially because they have a logical parent article). We should assume (this won't be hard to do) that TTN has a good faith belief that every article he nominates should be deleted. If we (the community of people that read the AfDs and comment) say "merge" or "redirect" that doesn't somehow void the AfD itself. Likewise the fact that every fiction article has a logical parent isn't grounds to force editors to engage in a merge discussion perfunctorily just in order to go ahead with an AfD. ArbCom stepping in and enforcing this will do just that. Protonk (talk) 08:24, 25 December 2008 (UTC)

Statement by MuZemike

I do not see what I would call any significant signs of edit warring as a result of TTN's extreme usage of the BRD process that would constitute any restrictions in terms of this RFAR case. If users wish to nail TTN for mass-AFDing articles or for abusing the BRD process to the point of gaming the system, then use the dispute resolution process as intended, just as the WP:BEFORE process should be used as intended prior to nominating articles for deletion. Hence, I believe this to be another attempt at forum-shopping with ArbCom until the desired effect is achieved.

However, (huge caveat not present in my previous statement in the last request for clarification) even I find it a trifle annoying when I traverse through the day's AFDs and see the same types of articles nominated with the same reasons for and against deletion and with the same users going after each other like in some sort of a dog fighting ring. If users wish to nail TTN for that (along with the merge/redirect issues), it seems that starting at RFC/U (as boldly recommended by a very conscientious editor here) would make more sense and then work from there. I am afraid, however, that the community's patience especially those returning to this RFAR case is wearing thin; I don't know if the community is willing to wade through the lengthy process anymore. Hence, I think, in the near future and especially with the new arbitrators coming in, there will be a lot of friction between the Misplaced Pages community in general and the ArbCom to get troubling issues resolved. MuZemike (talk) 04:37, 21 December 2008 (UTC)

Statement by Sceptre

Yawn. Of course, it just wouldn't be RFAR without people screaming for E&C modifications to get rid of TTN... every other week. Sceptre 04:40, 21 December 2008 (UTC)

Statement by Masem

I have to agree with others that TTN is following the same process than anyone can for approaching merges of content, and he is pretty spot-on in identify articles that are inappropriate per guidelines, including the in-progress FICT that has been developed across a wide range of editors. If this was anyone else but TTN, people would simply blink and move on, since these fall into the bounds of suggested methods of editing. As long as it's understood that a "merge" result from AFD is completely acceptable from discussion, and (as been pointed out before to TTN, which it looks like he's following) the merge is noted in the merge target per GFDL, it's hard to see what TTN is trying to do as requiring any action above and beyond what admins can do. --MASEM 04:50, 21 December 2008 (UTC)

Reply to DGG's 06:01 comment

If TTN was focusing on a large majority of articles from a single work of fiction at one time, as to invoke the fait acomopli approach that he was warned about before, then yes. But from the checking I've seen, he does maybe a few articles from different works, or when there is a block, he will put a multiarticle AFD togther. (I don't think this is 100% perfect, but this is from spot-checking). Both of these help to make sure that the articles that should be kept will be caught by those that want them to be without overloading them. The other thing seems to be that TTN does monitor those article he deletes, which is much better overall than "drive-by" editing Given that the general barrier to deletion/merging of an article seems to be much higher than the creation, "rapid tagging of articles for AFD" does not seem to disrupt WP save for those whose areas of fiction of interest are being merged. --MASEM 06:44, 21 December 2008 (UTC)

Statement by Nsk92

Basically I agree with everything Collectonian said. Agressive mass redirects without discussion on articles where there is an active and still largely unresolved controversy about notability are clearly disruptive and it looks like TTN's behaviour is getting worse. It appears that TTN has not learned the lessons from the previous arbcom sanctions. Extending and expanding those sanctions would seem appropriate. Nsk92 (talk) 06:55, 21 December 2008 (UTC)

A few general extra comments. Some editors here suggested that an RfC or a WP:AN discussion or individual administrator intervention may be more appropriate courses of action here than an arbcom action. I don't think that is correct. In view of the massive number of articles affected by TTN's actions, this is not a problem that can be easily dealt with by individual administrators (and, in fact, a coordinated approach is preferable). Given how divisive the fiction notability wars are, it is rather unlikely that a WP:AN discussion would produce any conclusive result and to some extent the same is true about an RfC (which may still be useful, but would take quite a long time whereas the disruption caused by TTN's continued actions is considerable and ongoing). It does seem to me exactly like a case where expanding arbcom's previous sanctions is the right and most efficient remedy, at least in the interim. It is true that the previous arbcom sanctions on TTN were concerned with edit warring, but their intent was clearly to prevent disruption and since as prectice shows they were not sufficient, it is appropriate to expand those sanctions. User:A Nobody raises some valid points and examples above. It does look like many of TTN's AfD nominations are done fairly indicriminantly, with something close to a templated nomination text and with no real attempt to find sources first and to see if an article is salvageable. This type of behaviour is contrary to WP:DEL's intent and, when done on a massive scale, is disruptive. I should say that personally I am fairly indifferent to the issue of notability of fiction articles and the related notability wars; but I do want them to be resolved in some way since these notability wars destabilize WP:N and other notability guidelines. To the extent that I do have a position on the issue of fiction articles, it is probably fairly close to that of TTN. But I think the kind of WP:BATTLE unilateral tactics TTN deploys are inappropriate and disruptive and some more constructive approach aimed towards establishing consensus on underlying issues is necessary. Waging a one-user all-out war against fiction articles on Misplaced Pages is not the answer. Nsk92 (talk) 14:10, 21 December 2008 (UTC)

Statement by Nihonjoe

I think TTN means well. I don't think there is any malicious intent in what he is doing. However, his methods tend to be very disruptive and don't lend themselves to achieving a useful end result. As many others have stated here (and elsewhere), it's not what TTN is doing, it's how he's doing it. I think that if he made a more concerted effort to work with the community he is so intent on "reforming" he would find there is already an effort underway to make all the improvements he seems to want. Granted, they aren't moving as fast as he seems to want them to, but he needs to understand that there are only so many people who can do the work, and flooding them with additional work in the form of all the AfDs and other issues he piles on only makes them have less time to do the actual cleanup work already on their plates. While there may be members of WP:ANIME who may think they want TTN gone, I think what they really want is for TTN to work with them rather than rumbling over the top of them. If TTN shows that he can and will actually do this, rather continuing on his merry way—damn the torpedoes—when whatever restrictions are placed on him expire, then I think there can be a solution to this issue which will be good for everyone involved. ···日本穣 07:54, 21 December 2008 (UTC)

Statement by Y|yukichigai

As Kirill pointed out, the fait accompli principle from E&C2 covers this situation. This is a perfectly rational request for clarification and/or amendment, because it looks like TTN is attempting to accomplish his goals (once again) by way of fait accompli.

I'm not going to say TTN is wrong in wanting to merge some of this content. I'm not even going to say he's wrong in declaring some of it completely unfit for Misplaced Pages. I will say he's not right about all of it. More importantly though, he's going about it completely wrong, proceeding on a delete/merge/redirect binge with no regard to the community or even existing merge efforts.

Yes, he isn't edit warring currently, but I'd argue it's only minimally reduced the, shall we say, "pissed off" effect his edits generate. Much of the community does not welcome his contributions or even presence, and strongly enough to complain to administrators and the arbcom semi-regularly. That sounds like reason enough to examine a re-extension of his editing restrictions. -- Y|yukichigai (ramble argue ) 08:47, 21 December 2008 (UTC)

Statement by sgeureka

I have high respect for the work of Collectonian and TTN, and while TTN is doing a lot of good work by being bold, it will occasionally backfire when other good and sincere editors like Collectonion stand up to deal with the cleanup issue in a different manner (usually with the same end result - the unimprovable bad standalone articles will be gone). Nothing that a reminder of Misplaced Pages:Assume good faith and Misplaced Pages:There is no deadline can't solve (this applies to both parties), so no arbcom involvement is necessary. – sgeureka 11:54, 21 December 2008 (UTC)

Statement by Sephiroth BCR

As people have previously noted, TTN was originally brought before ArbCom due to his edit warring, none of which is apparent here. What this report is ultimately about is TTN being impatient in attempting to subvert the existing venues for merging the articles of articles that fail our notability guideline when the Anime and manga WikiProject has a very effective cleanup task force that has a proven track record of successfully merging articles without loss of content or the mess of repeated AfDs. In several recent AfDs (see , , , ), he attempted to move around a merge discussion that was already in motion here. Whether he believes that there is "no content to merge" or not, he has no reason to take matters into his own hands when editors of the anime and manga project were fully capable of handling the situation and ensuring that the information was merged properly (and the merge discussion is in support of a merge too!). I realize that TTN may be cynical of any such efforts due to long experience of fictional walled gardens in which such merge discussions never produced any substantial change, but it has been repeatably pointed out to TTN (see , , ) that the cleanup task force for the anime and manga project is capable of performing such merges and that his intended goal will be fulfilled in any case. Now, I respect TTN's work. I believe that he does a lot of good for the project, but he needs to show the necessary discretion in realizing where his efforts can best be focused. If anything, I would ask him to respect the existing processes, and leave the job for them rather than going through everything with a chainsaw. — sephiroth bcr 12:49, 21 December 2008 (UTC)

Statement by MacGyverMagic

Finding the diffs to back all this up will take a while. Please be patient.
  1. As User:MuZemike has said above, I have considered opening an RFC on this editor's behavior. While I can see merit in the idea that a lot of these articles need merging (I even defended a recent merge of his), I find that the way he goes about achieving his intended goal is disruptive.
  2. TTN has nominated articles for deletion where a redirect or merge was undone even though the merge discussion was still ongoing with no concensus (and even though the redirect/merge could have been reinstated). The particular case I remember was split 2-2 between support and oppose on the merge. This seems to indicate that he wants immediate solutions.
  3. Another indication of his immediatism is the sheer amount of deletion nominations he makes in a day. It makes it impossible for interested parties to improve all the affected articles in time because they're given too much work at once.
  4. In a previous arbcom ruling which had as one of the supported principles: "Editors who are collectively or individually making large numbers of similar edits, and are apprised that those edits are controversial or disputed, are expected to attempt to resolve the dispute through discussion. It is inappropriate to use repetition or volume in order to present opponents with a fait accompli or to exhaust their ability to contest the change. This applies to many editors making a few edits each, as well as a few editors making many edits." TTN was restricted in that debate but has again started in the behavior that that RfArb found to be disruptive.
  5. There is also no indication that he checks if the article is verifiable, rather than verified per WP:BEFORE before nominating an article for deletion. In his nominations he says that the subject is not independently notable from the main topic, which supports the idea that the articles does not warrant its own entry, but he never suggests or considers merging the articles he's nominating (in whole or in part). Just because something isn't independently notable, doesn't mean it's unverifiable or unencyclopedic and shouldn't be covered at all.
  6. Furthermore, there are basic disagreements on what constitutes reliable sources when people make attempts to improve articles TTN nominates (contrary to what he says, you only need multiple sources to indicate notability, for verifiability only one suffices) Whether a source is reliable is something to discuss too if it is contentious and shouldn't be decided by a single editor.


In short: I believe this editor should be restricted from making mass nominations on AFD and only make merges/redirects after the extend of the merges in question have been thouroughly discussed (and editors have been given sufficient time to address any issues). - Mgm| 13:21, 21 December 2008 (UTC)

Statement by TheFarix

The issue with TNN's recent actions is that he is refraining form the consensus building process because, as he already stated above, it is too slow and sometimes result in outcomes he disagrees with because of "fandom". While he and his supporters are citing WP:BRD to justify his actions, one must remember that WP:BRD is meant to initiate the consensus building process. Building a consensus is one of the fundamental cornerstones in editorial decision-making. Instead, TNN has is using WP:BRD to bypass this consensus building process altogether. --Farix (Talk) 14:15, 21 December 2008 (UTC)

Statement by Kung Fu Man

I'm going to say up front this is pointless. TTN does do a lot of mass deletion and blah blah blah, but at the same time, so do many other editors, myself included. Yes, he can be a stubborn jackass and push things to an extreme when he feels something should be a certain way. Then again, we all can. I've butted heads with him on more than one occasion, but I've also seen him actively question himself if his standards were too high and back down when it was shown editors were working on an article.

In the cases of these merges and redirects he's getting the hammer for, I'll be blunt: almost every one (there are exceptions of course) I've seen has been an article with an extreme narrow scope where a merge or redirect would be a better idea than a full article, because notable or not enough information doesn't readily exists to make a full fledged encyclopedic article despite all the jumping up and down over how notability must exist because one brief mention is found. If that was enough for an encyclopedic subject we'd see an Ash McGowen article singing my praises; thankfully it isn't and common sense needs to apply, in that there is a lot of cleaning needing to be done on Misplaced Pages.

TTN should definitely cool his jets more, but other editors should too, and realize what discussions are worth having. Encyclopedic content is not being lost by a merge, nor by a removal of content than on the surface appears to be unsourced original research. I think if you want to enforce anything, push for editors to not go to him when they feel an article should be removed and instead take care of it themselves and get the blame good or bad.--Kung Fu Man (talk) 14:41, 21 December 2008 (UTC)

Statement by Gazimoff

I have nemtioned this at at a Request for Clarification, both in one I initiated shortly after TTN's editing restriction came to an end here, and in one I commented in about a month later here. In both cases, the request for clarification was dismissed despite several concerns raised.

To clarify the point, for those who seem to miss it through my verbose discussion of the argument previously:

  • My concern is not regarding the edits as individual actions, but the large quantity of edits in a short space of time that presents a fait accompli.

By bombarding editors with a large quantity of redirects or AfDs, you reduce their ability to react meaningfully to each individual one. If there was a single AfD on a specialist topic at a given time, you would expect a deep and meaningful discussion along with some work to improve sourcing and other requirements. Once this is scaled up to 50 AfDs, the editing resource is stretched so thinly that it can't possibly meet the demands of every discussion happening.

My final concern is Arbcom's reluctance to grasp the nettle and deal with the issue one way or another. Either grant TTN carte blanche to perform contentious edits as heavily as he can manage, or call time on his actions and rein him. Without a clear message either way, I can assure the members of Arbcom that another Request for Clarification will be raised by another well-meaning yet concerned editor within another three month period. Gazimoff 15:34, 21 December 2008 (UTC)

Statement by PeaceNT

Misplaced Pages is a collaborative project; collaborative being the operative word. Though it would be unreasonable to require everything be discussed in advance, editors should not constantly force their way in the face of loud crticism from the community. It is true criticism doesn't automatically mean what TTN does is wrong, but it suggests TTN needs to use feedback and improve their manners. Only when TTN knows how to work with others should we deem a restriction on him unnecessary.

These days TTN is starting a myriad AfDs - too many that he himself would not be able to comment on. This is hardly a good method of discussion, not to mention the enormous pressure put on editors working on a rescue, and the likely damage on legitimate content because AFD commentors may mistake those "merge" nominations for normal "delete" nominations. We have a very heavy workload at AfD already. That Misplaced Pages doesn't have an "Articles for merge" page is not an excuse. Misplaced Pages has a process for merge: starting proposals on talk pages. Everyday editors all over the project are patiently following this merge process without much trouble. People do not flood AFD with merge nominations like TTN does.

It should be noted that TTN's comment on this very page suggests that he won't discuss with "fans" or projects who he knows will disagree with him. This is wrong. The more potentially disagreeable an action is, the more important it is to discuss. TTN was restricted by arbcom not because of what he wanted to do, but how he did it, and now after the restriction period it seems he is repeating the old patterns. --PeaceNT (talk) 18:02, 21 December 2008 (UTC)

Statement by Stifle

TTN should be congratulated, not sanctioned. Sure, he's ruffling feathers, but that's bound to happen with the area he's involved in. Stifle (talk) 11:03, 22 December 2008 (UTC)

Statement by ThuranX

I have seen a number of threads on TTN on AN/I in the past years. Now he's conforming to the restrictions placedon him by ArbCom and the community, and still those who won't really improve things can't stop gunning for him. I am constantly frustrated by the number of editors who see Misplaced Pages as a cruft farm, and expand things here based on their love for a character or notion, bloating articles with nonsense about episode 17, season 9, scene 4, line 36 or whatever. When editors who work hard to make more and more articles look comprehensive without looking childish fold things together ,or insist on some rigorous standards of writing, not unlike a term or research paper, too much of this community rebels, screaming bloody murder instead of looking at is as real editing. I support TTN in this, as I do in almost all his efforts, and think this is a colossal waste of ArbCom time. ThuranX (talk) 12:40, 23 December 2008 (UTC)


Statement by Jtrainor

While individually some of these merges may have merit, the fact that a) many are being done very quickly, b) many of them are redirects instead of actual merges and c) TTN ignores discussion about them means that collectively, they are quite disruptive. Jtrainor (talk) 20:56, 23 December 2008 (UTC)

Addendum: If TTN is attempting to use the AFD process to circumvent merge discussions, this is a textbook abuse of process. Jtrainor (talk) 23:27, 23 December 2008 (UTC)

Statement by Kww

Another week, another unsupportable complaint to Arbcom about TTN. I repeat my normal request: reject this RFAR, and then make it clear that bringing this back to Arbcom again will result in blocks. This has gotten beyond ridiculous.—Kww(talk) 22:29, 23 December 2008 (UTC)

Statement by User:White Cat

Okay... As an involved party on both E&C rfars... and as an involved party on 3 other rfars (which are relevant as far as I care)...

user:TTN (and several others) has been mass removing articles for over a year now. Weather TTN is meaning well or not is besides the point. What he is doing is harming the site. This is a serious problem and is not a content dispute. The disagreement isn't over the phrasing of a certain piece of text. Instead it is over weather or not an ENTIRE TOPIC belongs to the site or not. This mass removal is a trend not based on policy or consensus.

Detailed coverage on fiction related topics such as articles on episodes and characters are not banned from Misplaced Pages the 💕. In addition at no point had there been any conclusive discussion in weather or not such articles should go. There is no policy or consensus basis for TTN's mass action.


“ Any mass action not based on consensus is disruptive. ”

In current practice very popular shows such as The Simpsons or Doctor Who enjoy the liberty of having detailed sub articles on them. Less popular shows such as works of fiction particularly older shows and shows from countries that are not native English speakers (like anime) are being mass removed under the guise of notability. Some of these articles are on wikipedias most visited articles. For example the Japanese anime Naruto is generally in the top ten of the most visited articles and yet we do not consider any of the shows episodes notable enough to have an article. If that is our metric for notability then it is seriously flawed and needs a complete overhaul.

This is because in TTN's words:


“ Now they only have any sort of "power" over the big series like Harry Potter due to numbers, but things like that will always go slowly due to numbers anyways. I'm just sticking with picking off smaller ones, and then trying to tackle larger ones every once and a while. Once the weaklings are fully gone, it'll probably get easier to deal with the larger ones. ”

This behavior prevents articles from developing. Development of an article is a long and painful path and it takes many years for an article to develop from being a stub to a featured article. In the time period it takes for an article to develop small communities are also formed within our community such as show-specific wikiprojects. These small communities work together and write articles in great speed and it no longer takes years for an article to become featured. Doctor Who wikiproject is such a "small community" that develops articles with great speed. TTN isn't willing to give articles a mere two years to mature which is not only preventing article development but also the development of "small communities" that would create. This creates an causality dilemma.

In addition to all that in the past some users have used this trend to cause various sorts of disruption including but not limited to trolling, vandalism, and harassment. For example User:Jack Merridew, a user convicted of harassment and sockpuppetry, had been making edits just like TTN which had lead to the circumstances arbcom is familiar with.

Arbcom to date has not made a very serious attempt to resolve this dispute so far and I'd ask arbcom to perhaps shoot Misplaced Pages:Requests for arbitration/Episodes and characters 3 instead of amending a past case. (no offense intended)

-- Cat 22:10, 24 December 2008 (UTC)

Maybe arbcom should sanction TTN to write a few featured articles on fiction. :) -- Cat 17:39, 25 December 2008 (UTC)

Statement by User:Guest9999

The particular incident that seems to have started this whole thing off again involved TTN ignoring an active merge discussion (Talk:List of D.N.Angel characters#Merging character pages) and redirecting pages, then taking them to AfD after being reverted. However on further examination it is apparent that when TTN undertook these actions the merge discussion had been under way for almost two months and had not recieved any comments for approximately one month. I think it is fair to say that a discussion with no comments in a month cannot be considered to be active by Misplaced Pages standards. Looking at the initial three weeks or so of the discussion all five users who took part supported merging the pages. During the near two months the discussion was open - one month of which it lay idle - any of the users who were involved in the discussion could have merged the articles - likely without opposition - but none did. After TTN redirected the articles any interested editor could then have completed the merges but instead, the editors (who had all supported merging) decided instead to revert the redirects and revive an arbitration case. If anything this incident shows why TTN chooses to use - for the most part - AfD discussions rather than pursue merge discussions and other such measures. A process that after two months has yielded five comments and zero improvement to the encyclopaedia is not one that works well. AfD might not be designed for article merges but it is - in theory - a discussion based attempt at identifing consensus. The simple fact that TTN is able to nominate the number of articles he does every day shows the scale of the issue at hand; there are thousands of articles like them in the encyclopaedia and judging from the recent discussions he has started there appears to be a consensus to merge a large proportion of these. Having a page as a redirect for a while in no way prevents information from later being merged - be it the next day or a month later. Having hundreds of individual articles which can never meet Misplaced Pages's inclusion criteria not only encourages more similar articles to be created but impedes the implementation of a high-quality, encyclopaedic treatment of the topic (such as those found at Characters of Carnivàle and Characters of Final Fantasy VIII). What TTN does must be very repetitive and tedious (likely a major reason why far more editors do not carry out similar actions), I do not think there is any doubt that he thinks he is doing the "right thing" for the project and would not be doing so otherwise. If anyone is truly at fault here it is the community for our collective failure to define an inclusion standard for fiction or develop an effective process for implementing any standard over the thousands of articles which as free standing works have little chance of improvement to a state where they meet the standard of content and quality required by all Misplaced Pages articles. Guest9999 (talk) 09:21, 25 December 2008 (UTC)

Your summary of "what started it" is incorrect, as is your presumption that the discussion was old or stale. Yes, it was clear to merge, but that doesn't mean merging will happen instantly, nor that it should be done without REALLY merging. The discussion ended a month ago, but hello, there are major holidays at this time of year and there is no WP:DEADLINE for doing the merges. The page needed a reformat first, and there are only a handful of us in the anime project working on doing this many merges PROPERLY. The fact is, yes, the individual characters were unnotable and merging was a go. TTN didn't need to do anything at all here, but he did. TTN also completely redirected a valid character list to the main article claiming the character list wasn't necessary either. The anime project IS working at dealing with those many bad articles and I'm not going to disagree on your last statement because I obviously don't think they are necessary either. However, simply redirecting wholescale dozens of character articles AND character lists without discussion, consensus, and proper merging is not a valid way of dealing with them. If TTN is too lazy or too busy to actually merge the articles he claims to be merging and to help fix up the target lists, he shouldn't be sending dozens of them to the projects to deal with and should let those projects deal with them on the schedule they can comfortably work with. -- Collectonian (talk · contribs) 15:07, 25 December 2008 (UTC)
To be fair in this instance all the articles to be merged are completely unsourced and most of them consist of only a description of the character. Given that the main - equally unsourced - list article already included a description of each character the amount of information to actually be merged from each article seems minimal. As an example your merge of Rio Hikari () didn't actually add any information from the individual character article it only involved rephrasing information already in the list article and including new information not found in either (note this is no way a criticism of the merge only a comment on the form it took). A similar pattern seems to be emerging for the other articles being merged. The discussion shows a consensus to merge the topic areas, with no sourced information from the individual articles and a brief character summary already present in the list article redirecting the pages seems reasonable and in no way prevents any information from being merged at a later date. As you say there is no deadline for merging but in the meantime isn't a redirect to a brief summary better than a poor article that will never meet Misplaced Pages's inclusion criteria, bogged down in original research and unnecessary plot detail? Especially if the article contributes little to nothing extra by way of sourced, encyclopaedia information over what is present in the list. Misplaced Pages will never be "complete" and all articles are - to a greater or lesser extent - a work in progress, I think the only disagreement is in how to manage the information that will eventually be retained. Using TTN's method a little information can be lost - at least in the short term - but the remaining "good" information becomes far less obscured by unsuitable content that is was always going to be removed at some point. The balance of article creation vs. information presentation has been skewed regarding fiction to such an extent that it is likely that a large proportion of Misplaced Pages's articles on fictional topics do not represent a standard - either in content or presentation - which reflects the consensus of the community. TTN's methods are clearly not perfect but during this whole lengthy saga neither "side" has shown any hint of a willingness to compromise and we are left with this situation. There is clearly a need for a visible process via which the community can consider fictional topics as a whole in a timely manner in order to determine how information pertaining to the topic should be presented and there is clearly a need to give interested editors the time to enact any consensus which is established. As it is we currently have one process which is likely to attract little attention and can proceed for months with no improvements and little impetus even when there is a clear consensus and one process that was never designed for the job and therefore often also results in no improvement for the opposite reasons. I think I've gone wildly off topic here but the point is frankly I don't really see how any further sanction against TTN would improve the situation, it wouldn't really solve the underlying problem that a lot of Misplaced Pages's coverage of fiction does not reflect our policies or guidlines or the content expected of a high quality encyclopaedia. This is accepted by most people on all sides of the discussion, the only disagreement is on how the problem should be solved. We are all working towards a common goal. Guest9999 (talk) 18:48, 25 December 2008 (UTC)

Response to response from User:Collectonian to User:Guest9999

Broadly I agree that, ideally, your way is the "right way" to do things, the main problem with it is that it is seen by many not to work in terms of the project as a whole in its current state. Whereas TTN's methods are more visibly - and actually - effective in removing poor content from the encyclopaedia on a large scale and within a reasonable time frame. In terms of ignoring consensus I think the fact that this discussion comes up time and time again is an indicator that any consensus as to validity or otherwise of his methods is questionable at best. At this point I think there is reasonable evidence of a consensus that aspects of fictional works which have received no reliable third party coverage in their own right but are important in terms of the work of fiction (such as many fictional characters) should be covered in "List of..." articles rather than stand alone pieces. Currently we have thousands of stand alone articles on non-notable fictional elements of this type, sometimes with a grouping list article. To the typical user quickly getting rid of the stand alone articles, leaving only the list article - even without any true merge - looks more like moving towards the consensus position than any other method currently available. Personally I think some kind of "Fiction for discussion" process where users could bring a set of articles to a central forum would be a good idea. The process could involve a week of discussion to try and establish what the consensus was for the group (merge these, keep this, source that, etc.); followed by a set period for implementing the changes (maybe three weeks, a month - maybe dependent on the number of articles involved) at which point any "to merge" articles which hadn't been properly merged would be redirected (obviously any merging could still take place after the implementation period simply using the article's history). Most people would have some problem with such a process - even if it didn't devolve into the kind of battleground regularly seen on this page - and I can't see it being anyone's ideal but that's the nature of a compromise (Except on Misplaced Pages where the nature of a compromise seems to be writing out your unaltered opinion in the most stringent possible terms under the heading of "Compromise"). Guest9999 (talk) 00:38, 26 December 2008 (UTC)
  • There should also be discussion on what is good spinoff material in the first place. Many times I see material split off when it doesn't need to be or I see delete !votes for stuff not being "independently notable" while split-offs aren't independent to start with. - Mgm| 11:59, 26 December 2008 (UTC)
  • I think that the counter argument to that is that if something isn't independently notable then it shouldn't have been "spun out" in the first place. I think the community is generally accepting of articles that have actually been been spun out for size or presentation reason and contribute to a high quality encyclopaedic treatment of a topic. The large tracks of independently created unsourced, original research and plot detail that make up a considerable proportion of the articles in question are another matter. Guest9999 (talk) 22:45, 27 December 2008 (UTC)

Statement by JzG

In many areas, Misplaced Pages leads the world in documenting minor fictional elements by direct summary from the primary source. TTN is not the only one who finds this a problem. I suspect that if the fanboys were better at self-policing then we would not have this recurrent problem, but as it is we get AfDs with snowstorms of "keep" votes because obviously Pikachu's left foot is waaaaay notable. Exaggeration for comic effect aside, the Wikiprojects are dominated by people who are fans and much of Misplaced Pages's coverage of fictional topics reads as fanwanks as a result. I would say that TTN's best approach would be to start a centralised discussion on a single series or group, establish what can and cannot be reliably documented by reference to independent secondary sources (because, after all, that is a very very long-standing principle) and work from there. And I think White Cat is just the editor to help him do it.

Alternatively, perhaps the time has come to change WP:NOT. At present, it says that Misplaced Pages is not a directory. In several areas, such as Canadian senior-school amateur hockey, Misplaced Pages is a directory because the fans will vote Keep to absolutely anything rather than have a single redlink in the series, even if there are no reliable independent sources about the team, only the occasional score printed in the local paper. Substantial sections of Misplaced Pages, including much of the fictional element coverage, is absolutely a directory compiled form primary sources by us. Guy (Help!) 12:14, 27 December 2008 (UTC)

Clerk notes

Arbitrator views and discussion

  • Awaiting additional statements, but I am concerned, particularly by the allegation that encyclopedic content is being lost. Newyorkbrad (talk) 22:38, 20 December 2008 (UTC)
  • Why am I not surprised... Kirill 03:37, 21 December 2008 (UTC)
  • FWIW, in case I am active yet or not, recused as I am non-impartial. Cheers, Casliber (talk · contribs) 08:45, 21 December 2008 (UTC)
  • Recuse, should this extend to after January 1. I'm trying to read this impartially, but in this case I don't trust myself due to my involvement in E+C 2. Wizardman 01:20, 22 December 2008 (UTC)
  • I may have a motion to offer once the new arbitrators take their seats or sooner if the currently sitting arbs request it to speed things along. — Coren  19:11, 23 December 2008 (UTC)
  • NQA Recuse. I have enforced sanctions against TTN as an administrator. While I unblocked under an agreement with TTN, my action was very controversial. Vassyana (talk) 01:03, 26 December 2008 (UTC)
  • I am not inclined to reinstate a restriction if nobody has assessed how well that restriction affected the content. There are a lot of opinions about whether TTN should or should not be restricted, however there is not a lot of opinion about the effect of the TTN restriction over the last six months. It is obvious that TTN would prefer to operate unrestricted, and many think the project is benefiting from TTN being unrestricted, but how productive was he when restricted in this way? Did the state of this topical area degrade while he was restricted? Did it improve? The AFD Delsort list would be a good place to start researching. I'd prefer to see stats, graphs and specific examples. John Vandenberg 15:19, 27 December 2008 (UTC)
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