User:Captain Occam/evidence

Since David.Kane and Ludwigs2 have covered the topic of the mediation pretty well (I largely concur with them about this), I'm going to focus on what I view as the main sources of instability for these articles. I apologize if this is unduly long, but since none of the other people commenting here have provided a significant number of diffs (as Maunus specifically pointed out), I feel that it's important for me to provide ArbCom with some actual evidence for them to work with. Please let me know if I’m acting inappropriately by doing this.

Disruptive behavior from Mathsci
There are several different ways that Mathsci has been disruptive, so I’ll provide a few examples of each.

Personal attacks


Note what I said in my initial statement about Mathsci regarding this dismissive comment as being sufficient justification to revert any efforts we made to improve the article based on these complaints, despite his being opposed by a five-to-one majority about whether these NPOV problems existed.



In which Mathsci accuses me of being a holocaust denier, which is completely unsupported by anything in my blog or elsewhere. Since it’s stated on my userpage that I’m of Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry, I think Mathsci could have predicted how offensive I’d find this.

In which Mathsci quotes a post from David.Kane’s (off-wiki) blog in an attempt to discredit him. Although David.Kane had apparently stated that this blog belonged to him sometime last year, he had never linked to this particular entry, so for Mathsci to dig it up and quote it is borderline WP:OUTING.

It would be helpful if ArbCom could clarify whether when an editor admits that a particular off-Wiki blog or account at an off-Wiki site belongs to them, this gives other editors blanket permission to quote anything they can dig up at that site on-Wiki, even if the person has never linked to that particular page or post. Mathsci has done this in my own case also, but the example involving David.Kane is probably sufficient to demonstrate what I’d like clarified.

Forum shopping
Mathsci has made repeated attempts at AN/I to obtain blocks or topic bans for the editors that he disagrees with, without making any attempt at dispute resolution first, often hijacking unrelated threads started by other people for this purpose. His first recent attempt at this was started by Muntuwandi as a complaint about TechnoFaye, but hijacked into a complaint by Mathsci about Ludwigs2. His second is here, started by Ludwigs2 and hijacked by Mathsci; his third attempt at this in Ludwigs2’s case was here. He then began to do this in my own case, hijacking an unrelated complaint I had made about Slrubenstein here, then posting a new complaint about me when the one he’d hijacked didn’t produce his desired result. Most recently, he’s made a new complaint about this regarding David.Kane, which contains a collection of several complaints about all of the users he disagrees with. While this was going on, he also made two complaints about these users at WQA here and here, where he was admonished by several other users for his forum shopping and WP:BATTLEGROUND attitude. This is a good example of how uninvolved editors have reacted to Mathsci’s behavior in this context.

I think links are more appropriate than diffs to demonstrate the forum shopping problem, since linking to the entire threads is able to demonstrate both Mathsci’s persistence in seeking topic bans for the editors that he disagrees with, and how when hijacking threads he's cut off all discussion about their original topics.

Edit warring
Mathsci has violated 3RR on these articles twice in the past three weeks. The first time involved six reverts in under 24 hours:. When I reported this at AN3, Mathsci modified my report in order to evade consequences for this, which had the desired effect—before I could react to his change, an administrator closed the report based on the assumption that Mathsci was correct to claim that one of these edits wasn’t a revert. (The edit that Mathsci claims wasn’t a revert was removing content from the article that he’d previously removed less than an hour earlier, after it had been added back.) Also note Mathsci’s personal attacks in his modification to my report.

More recently he’s also made six reverts in 24 hours on the History of the race and intelligence controversy article:    , and reverted it twice more within four hours after that:. This case is a little more complex, because he was not restoring the exact same material each time, but in each case it was undoing some or all of a change made by another editor. When I attempted to warn him about this behavior in his user talk, he reverted my edit five minutes later with the edit summary “rv trolling”. Apparently he not only considers himself entitled to disregard 3RR; he also does not think other editors should have the audacity to bring it up with him when he does.

Threats and intimidation
This is probably the most common problem. A large portion of the time, when Mathsci is in a content dispute with any other editor, his means of attempting to resolve the dispute is by threatening the other user with blocks or appeals to ArbCom, sometimes at the exclusion of discussing the content itself. Some of the earlier diffs I linked to earlier also contain examples of this, but here are a few more:

In which Mathsci threatens Keegan, an uninvolved administrator, with an ArbCom case because Keegan had the audacity to criticize Mathsci for his claim that I’m a holocaust denier.

A few examples of threatening edit summaries from Mathsci:

Disruptive behavior from other users
Although I agree with Ludwigs2 that the majority of problems with this article involve Mathsci’s behavior, there are a few other users who have behaved in a disruptive manner that I think should at least be addressed. There are two in particular that I’m thinking of.

Slrubenstein’s personal attacks, and assumptions of bad faith
I consider Slrubenstein to be reasonable and civil the majority of the time, but from time to time he seems to get into moods where he’s unable to focus on content rather than attacking the editors he disagrees with. The most recent time this happened was for around two weeks in April, which demonstrates that it isn’t an especially common problem, but I think it still deserves attention. Here are a few examples of the behavior that resulted from this:

In which he states that he is unable to assume good faith about me at Mikemikev: “I cannot assume good faith on their behalf. I just cannot. They are charlatans. And if this is how I feel about them, I cannot interact with them or work with them on the same article, you know how important AGF is.”

Muntuwandi’s assumptions of bad faith
A recurring problem from Muntuwandi is his assumption that if an editor has a personal viewpoint about this topic, that in itself is sufficient to discredit their contributions to these articles, even if there’s no evidence that their contributions are in any way contrary to NPOV. One example of this is his comment here, to which I responded asking him why it should matter whether Varoon Arya has a point of view about this topic if all of his contributions were consistent with NPOV. Muntuwandi replied again continuing to claim that it was a problem for Varoon Arya to have a point of view, even if "his actual contributions comply with NPOV". Another attempt to discredit Varoon Arya by searching for evidence that he has a personal viewpoint about this topic, without commenting on his contributions themselves, is this comment: "All these edits suggest a POV, albeit one that is buried in subtlety."

He’s also done the same thing in my own case, bringing up posts from my (off-wiki) blog in an attempt to prove that I have a personal point of view about this topic, and that this in itself is sufficient to discredit my contributions. One example of this is here. Since I’ve linked to this blog entry on-wiki at one point in the past, his quoting it isn’t a WP:OUTING issue, but what I’ve written in my blog should be completely irrelevant here if Muntuwandi can’t demonstrate anything wrong with my contributions themselves. This issue (with regard to my blog) was also discussed last fall here. The most recent example of this from him is this comment, which misrepresents what I said in the comment from me that his own comment was referring to, as I pointed out in my reply.

Muntuwandi is currently under probation due to his past history of sockpuppet abuse. I would like ArbCom to evaluate whether these assumptions of bad faith ought to be considered allowable within the terms of his probation, or a violation of it.

Major changes made without discussion
In addition to the problems I’ve pointed out involving some of the long-time contributors to these articles, there’s one other recent cause of instability there that I’d like to see addressed. Several times recently, editors have attempted to make major changes to the article without attempting to discuss them beforehand, and they (or other editors) have edit warred to add them back when these edits have been reverted. This problem arises most often with editors who are new to the articles, but some of the “regulars” have been guilty of this also. It’s been done both by editors who take pro-environmental and pro-hereditarian perspectives, and I consider it equally disruptive in both cases.

One recent example of this is these edits from an anonymous IP:   , repeatedly adding several (pro-hereditarian) paragraphs that virtually everyone on the talk page agreed was WP:UNDUE, while completely disregarding 3RR and making barely any attempt at discussion. Another more recent example of something similar is Arthur Rubin’s attempt to revert the entire article to a version from five months earlier without discussing it beforehand. This revert was undone by WavePart around two hours later, after which Verbal added it back, even though there was obviously no consensus for it. A third example is AnwarSadatFan’s repeated removal of from the article, whose inclusion is supported by consensus, without making any attempt to justify this removal on the article talk page:.

I don’t know what the solution is to this problem, but if ArbCom could come up with one it would definitely improve the stability of the article. Is there a way to require that editors not keep reinstating a change that they’ve made no (or almost no) attempt to discuss on the talk page?

2over0
I think it’s worth mentioning that I think 2over0 may have acted against the norms expected of admins by blocking me without any discussion or consensus, and also without providing any specific examples of the behavior for which I was blocked. He also hasn’t responded to any of the requests in his user talk for an explanation of this block. ImperfectlyInformed’s comment there may be the most pertinent explanation of what’s wrong with the manner in which I was blocked. Since the process of me trying to figure out how to appeal this block is still ongoing, though, and my list of evidence is already probably longer than it should be, I’m not going to go into more detail about this at the moment. Perhaps one of the editors who’s been involved in discussing this issue with 2over0 can provide more details about it.