User:Amerique/RFARB2.0



Please do not edit this page directly unless you wish to become a participant in this request. (All participants are subject to Arbitration Committee decisions, and the ArbCom will consider each participant's role in the dispute.) Comments are very welcome on the Talk page, and will be read, in full. Evidence, no matter who can provide it, is very welcome at /Evidence. Evidence is more useful than comments.

Arbitrators will be working on evidence and suggesting proposed decisions at /Workshop and voting on proposed decisions at /Proposed decision.

Involved parties



 * SOCK






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General Statement
This 2nd request for arbitration primarily concerns the conduct of user UCRGrad. This request is for the committee to determine if this user's actions pertaining to the University of California, Riverside article constitute any violations of WP:OWN, WP:CIVIL WP:STALK, WP:NLT, WP:NPA, or WP:AGF. A related concern is whether UCRGrad and Insert-Belltower's consistent pattern of partisan support for the other's contributions qualifies as meatpuppetry and thus as ongoing violations of WP:SOCK for both users.

With regards to an observation in the first RFARB that this is not a "one impossible editor situation," the users offering statements below in support of this request are entirely open to and invite the scrutiny of the committee as to the appropriateness of our actions vis a vis UCRGrad and Insert-Belltower. The UCR talk page has achieved a 13 page archive largely as an unmitigated consequence of a multitude of editors with different viewpoints using entirely different approaches attempting to counter the work of just 2 well coordinated users. These disputes are not and never were a matter of two reasonably articulated or proportionally represented “sides” having an intellectual or political disagreement, but were entirely driven by the personal conduct of these two users vis a vis those involved in contesting them. The situation calls for the Arbitration Committee's intervention.

Requests for comment

 * On UCRGrad:
 * On Insert-Belltower:

Further Evidence of trying and failing to resolve the dispute
(provide diffs and links)
 * Talk:University of California, Riverside consists of 13 archives as of Aug 27, 2006. As evidenced by Archive 1, the talk page was fairly quiet until UCRGrad arrived. Most of the overwhelming reams of discussion are aimed at resolving NPOV disputes concerning UCRG and I-B's preferred version.
 * An RfArb was filed this year; although it failed it is significant evidence of dispute resolution and the severity of the dispute as 7 different editors were involved.
 * A straw poll was created on the UCR Talk page, posted on WP:POLLS, and also posted to the other University of California article Talk pages. UCRGrad participated in the poll but after it was clear that most of editors participating in the poll were posting opinions contrary to his own UCRGrad announced that the poll data is "inadmissable" as it was not scientifically created and administered.
 * User_talk:Aeon1006/AMA an attempt by an AMA Advocate to mediate the disputes. The process was terminated by the advocates of both parties who recommended and endorsed User Conduct RFCs against both UCRGrad and Insert-Belltower.
 * Mediation was proposed but was immediately dismissed by UCRGrad
 * 2 months later, mediation was again proposed (by a different editor) and immediately dismissed by UCRGrad
 * An RFC was proposed and filed and drew immediate criticism and ridicule from UCRGrad who characterized it as a "crutch" and stated that filing an RFC was "request[ing] 3rd-party intervention and cross[ing] [your] fingers that they will side with you."
 * Mediation was again proposed as a last resort before going to the ArbCom again, and was rejected as before.

Statement by party 1
Please limit your statement to 500 words

Statement by Amerique
Since the last RFARB was rejected, I took some time off from WP, but continued to monitor the UCR article. I noticed another user, Teknosoul02, who was not involved with the first RFARB, was the only editor engaged with UCRG and IB and seemed to be the only user at all still committed to making any improvements to the article in doing so. I started advising him on his talk page as to what I perceived would be effective approaches to resolving his disputes with those two, and eventually got pulled back into engaging with UCRG/IB directly after it seemed that Technosoul would not pursue an RFC or other 3rd party interventions on his own behalf.

The main purpose of my direct involvement on the UCR talk page following the first RFARB was to negotiate content compromises and engage the other parties involved in long term content disputes with UCRGrad and Insert-Belltower in appropriate WP:DR processes. After a belated search of the article RFC page revealed that a content RFC was implemented in April, 2006 by Tifego (he never revealed it on the UCR talk page, or I would have used it to support the first RFARB), I set about designing and implementing a survey to map out contentious areas of the article. Once the survey was posted, I requested advocacy for assistance in negotiating consensual NPOV agreements for disputed areas as identified by the survey. Acting AMA coordinator Caruso responded to my request, following which user Insert Belltower requested advocacy against my activities in advising other users. Soon I was contacted by IB's advocate, AEON1006, who requested me to respond to IB's charges on his advocacy page. The eventual outcome of Aeon’s review of all the involved user talk pages, the UCR talk archives, as well as his observations of IB and UCRGrad's evasive accounts of their own behavior that he witnessed in his own advocacy page, resulted in Aeon and Steve terminating the advocacy case and recommending conduct RFCs on both IB and UCRGrad, which were implemented within the next week.

I won't go deeply into the consequences of Aeon's decision to support editors following WP’s stated policies and guidelines, but he took some flack for that, only from UCRGrad, who disrupted his next mediation case in retaliation, but from RyanGerbil10, who lifted a one-week ban he imposed on UCRG after UCRG threatened him with an RFC on adminship abuse. RyanGerbil subsequently referred to Aeon on several talk pages as having been "misleading," but this editor has not been able to identify how or where Aeon has ever misrepresented anything in the matter of his attempted reconciliation with IB over his advocacy case.

Since the RFCs have been in place, other than make some more contributions to the UCR article and a few controversial interventions of my own on the UCR talk page and elsewhere, I've mainly been observing how UCRGrad and IB have responded in terms of behavioral changes to the evidence amassed in the conduct RFCs. While they have shown some signs of willingness to compromise, and, to their credit, have shown themselves to be more polite and less uncivil than some other editors who have belligerently contested their edits, still they’ve largely set themselves up as gatekeepers of the areas of content they’ve edited, which most other editors involved, both old and new, regard as POV. Thus, the conflicts continue.

Statement by party 2
Please limit your statement to 500 words

Temporary injunction (none)
=Final decision (none yet) = All numbering based on /Proposed decision (vote counts and comments are there as well)

Remedies
Note: All remedies that refer to a period of time, for example to a ban of X months or a revert parole of Y months, are to run concurrently unless otherwise stated.

Log of blocks and bans
Log any block, ban or extension under any remedy in this decision here. Minimum information includes name of administrator, date and time, what was done and the basis for doing it.