User:Durova/Mattisse evidence

Moved from arbitration evidence due to length. Context is necessary here, which prevents the evidence from being terse.

Mattisse is a productive editor
Mattisse has contributed 75 DYK articles and was a major contributor to the Rudolf Wolters featured article, and has contributed over 66,000 edits.

Phase 1: Durova the Good (before proposing probation)
To the best of my recollection, Mattisse and I first came into contact at Requests for arbitration/Zeraeph where she and I participated in different aspects of the case. A year later I provided an outside view at the third request for comment on Mattisse's conduct. It was one of the gentler views posted and Mattisse responded positively:
 * Thank you Durova I am willing to initiate contact with you. Perhaps you can clear up my misunderstandings. —Mattisse (Talk) 05:11, 8 January 2009 (UTC)

I followed up at Mattisse's talk page with a friendly greeting.

The next encounter with Mattisse occurred at the Buckingham Palace featured article review The FAR itself was already six weeks old when I joined it for two posts. Casliber had requested time to obtain additional sources from a library, so I posted in mild encouragement for that solution:


 * Taking the risk of posting to a discussion where good faith is in short supply. Let's remember our shared goal of providing a useful encyclopedia. This article received 67,000 page views last month. Hardly any of those readers know or care which editors wrote it, much less what our internal disagreements might be, but a part of that readership uses the article as a first stop in research and is not allowed to cite Wikipedia. Casliber has made a reasonable request that would serve those readers better. Thank you, Casliber, and wishing you success. DurovaCharge! 04:35, 16 March 2009 (UTC)

Mattisse's reply:
 * It is true that good faith is in short supply, since an RFC was opened on me, in part because of my nomination of this article, Buckingham Palace for RFAC. The RFC was back in January by Casliber. (In fact, you User:Durova, defended me in that RFC, saying that the charges were mere editorial disagreements.) That is why I am surprised that finally in March Casliber is just now getting to the library, having made this one of the premises of the RFC against me. But I join you in the expectation that Casliber will complete the references for this article, since in the meantime he has started numerous other articles and received many DYKs. Hence it is not for lack of time that this article has been neglected by Casliber. Please note the RFAC on Restoration comedy just now opened, and the disrespectful way the nominating editor is being treated there. —Mattisse (Talk) 04:47, 16 March 2009 (UTC

Two things are worth noting here: Mattisse devotes more energy to the putative motivations of other editors than to the merits of the article, and Mattisse overstates my support. I had not dismissed the RfC complaints as "mere editorial disagreements". Actually I had written Obviously there is a conduct problem here and I hope Mattisse takes steps to correct it. The main thrust of my opinion had been that the opening request, which was largely meritorious, appeared to have overstated its case on a couple of points. In a conduct request where failure to assume good faith is an issue, it is important to demonstrate as much good faith as one wishes to receive. Mattisse mistakes an attempt to bring out her good side for validation.

My second and final post to the FAR was an attempt to refocus the discussion:
 * Well, yes those other things are going on. But are any of them pertinent factors to this FARC? The discussion here is in service to the article's readers. Let's remember that foremost. DurovaCharge! 05:21, 16 March 2009 (UTC)

Afterward I posted to the FAR talk page, requesting that editor conduct issues be discussed at talk. Mattisse's reply came at the FAR itself and continued to discuss her own RfC.

The next day I followed up again at Mattisse's user talk with a header Good faith is infectious where I encouraged her to give more good faith in order to receive more of it, and to separate conduct issues from content discussions. The full dialog is here.

Phase 2: A proposal offered at Mattisse's own request
A principal reason why Mattisse's conflicts have not been resolvable at the community level is because of her unwillingness to separate conduct issues from content discussions. In the immediate leadup to this arbitration case I sought a community based solution, first directly at her talk page (full dialog here). Relevant excerpts:


 * Really, your work on the content side is superb. If you'd slow down please and discuss the availability of reliable reception sources at the peer review that started this dispute, all of this will probably come to a very simple and congenial resolution....DurovaCharge! 22:44, 5 May 2009 (UTC) 


 * It is not possible. I cannot comment there any more, nor on the article talk page. I tried there and got nowhere. I was outnumbered by at least five to one. And now they are all coming out of the woodwork, defending the article...If I criticize the article, I am accused of bad faith. An AN/I thread was opened because I dared to take a stance in the peer review. MY RFC was brought up and discussed....Mattisse (Talk) 22:54, 5 May 2009 (UTC)

Meanwhile I posted to the ANI thread, which had already been ongoing for a while before I read it. After Mattisse's reply at user talk that no congenial solution was possible, I posted again seeking suggestions. Mattisse offered one, and specifically invited me to propose a sanction upon her.  I took her up on the offer because she had always appeared to trust me and because arbitration was likely to follow if the community didn't produce a solution. So I put up the mildest one possible. It really did nothing more than specifically say administrators could take actions they were arguably empowered to do anyway; the aim was to reduce drama in advance in case refactoring or blocking became necessary.


 * Mattisse is placed on probation at good article and peer review processes. If Mattisse makes a post deemed to be gratuitously uncivil or bad faith or in violation of WP:LINKVIO, then any uninvolved administrator may remove or refactor it as appropriate. If Mattisse follows an editor from these processes to other pages in violation of WP:HOUND and WP:POINT, then any uninvolved administrator may block as appropriate.

Phase 3: Durova the Bad (after the proposal)
Even though Mattisse had declared that no amicable solution was possible and had specifically invited me to propose a sanction, from the moment I actually did so her attitude toward me changed dramatically. I had not lost patience with her or been rude to her or provoked her in any other way. Notice the sudden difference in her tone.


 * ''Pass this and anything else you so desire. You have no respect for the work I have done... Because of one editor, User:Cirt, who is under mentorship for POV regarding Scientology, coincidentally the subject of the article that I questioned that started this fuss, and coincidentally his "mentor" is User:Durova who started this proposal, I am faced with the humiliation of being supervised by editors I do not respect. Sorry, but I do not trust their judgment....Mattisse (Talk) 02:51, 6 May 2009 (UTC)

I had in fact proactively disclosed that mentorship to Mattisse five hours earlier, and she subsequently invited me to propose a sanction on her and thanked me for the disclosure. She raised no objection to the mentorship and expressed no distrust in me until after the sanction was actually proposed. Afterward she appeared to reread my words in an entirely new light, then she expanded her ANI comment to something suggestive of a conspiracy theory, then shortly afterward amended it again to include Cirt in the putative "FAC group" that she claimed was on a political mission to ostracize her. Soon afterward she started the "Plague" section at her user talk; I became a charter member.  Then she went to the Scientology arbitration proposed decision talk and repeated the insinuation that my mentorship of Cirt was the real motivation behind proposing a sanction on her (not mentioning that she had invited me to propose it while she knew full well that I mentored him).  Then she added a putative motivation for my action, based upon a supposed opinion I had never expressed.

Mattisse's next post to ANI constitutes subtle vandalism: she adds an asterisk before the section header, which prevents the header from displaying properly and hinders navigation for other Wikipedians. In the same post she expands upon the conspiracy theory, specifically naming Giano and Cirt (which by this point implicitly includes me) in a "petty clique". In her very next post she does name me, and accuses me of conspiring with Cirt to start the ANI thread (which I certainly hadn't done; I was rather obviously one of the latecomers to reading it). She also mistakes the probation proposal for a topic ban, which probably was what someone else would have been proposed if I hadn't stepped forward with a milder formulation. Note also that so far, no one has noticed or corrected Mattisse's vandalism of the proposal subheader. Then she posts a third time to the still-vandalized section, effectively flooding the proposed sanction with irrelevant commentary while most onlookers remain hampered in their ability to find the proposal.

Then Mattisse expands upon the "Plague" list. Apparently it is to be believed that I mentor Cirt because of his POV on a topic. Mattisse doesn't attempt to account for the fact that I interacted with Cirt for nearly a year and through a full arbitration case on that topic before I began to mentor him, nor that my evidence to a subsequent arbitration case makes it very clear that at one point I nearly proposed a topic ban on him. Shortly afterward Mattisse explicitly adds Giano to the putative cabal with me. Anyone who has a passing familiarity with Requests for arbitration/Durova would be hard pressed to refrain from laughter. Mattisse herself could not be completely out of the loop because she had mentioned Giano's name to me six weeks earlier and I had replied ''Well, Giano and I disagree more often than we agree. Let's leave it at that.'' Along with all the other putative cabalists, I soon receive an invitation from Mattisse to give evidence against her.

Until this evidence presentation was well underway the attempt to muster good faith explanations for Mattisse's actions had been leading toward areas in which I profess zero expertise: rationalization, confabulation, etc. One set of actions precludes them all. The chances approach zero that a Wikipedian of over 66,000 edits would accidentally vandalize the section header to conceal her own sanctions discussion, and then accidentally flood the concealed discussion with irrelevant commentary. I submit to the Committee that Mattisse took those actions deliberately in order to prevent the proposal's majority support from achieving consensus, and as proof of that Mattisse managed to locate and post to the concealed section twice more before Moni3 corrected the header formatting. Please review the aspersions Mattisse was casting upon the motives and reputations of various experienced editors in light of her vandalism: this is evidence of calculated intent.

Phase 4: Apology notwithstanding
John Carter points to Mattisse's apology submitted at RFAR. That apology is date stamped 22:01 8 May 2009. Two days later, despite Mattisse's pledge to contribute to the encyclopedia as unobtrusively as possible, which she had modified from her original pledge Meanwhile, I will not be contributing to the encyclopedia until this is cleared up, one way or another after I pointed out that she had already broken that vow in less than a day.  Although I struck through that comment and withdrew it as soon as Mattisse made the modification, two days later Mattisse disrupted a constructive proposal I raised about Template:Did you know standards.

See this thread. I proposed a modified standard for expansion DYKs based largely upon the Uncle Tom DYK drive: an article about a sensitive subject had contained one paragraph of useful information followed by a laundry list of BLP violations.  For two years editors had objected to the BLP violations and attempted to remove them, only to see those violations consistently restored and converted into WP:RS violations and WP:SYNTH violations. In order to get rid of the BLP violations and stabilize the article I had obtained a dozen sources and undertaken a 5x expansion, which was difficult because BLP violations had constituted 984 of the article's 1512 characters. Obviously some kind of formal recognition would (and did) stabilize the article on BLP-compliant terms, and equally obviously it would take a lot more than twelve sources to make this difficult subject a GA.

Mattisse posted eleven times to that thread, always in full opposition, and never once acknowledged that the reasoning behind the proposal might be accepted at face value. Instead she repeated what looks very much like a talking point to assert selfish motives for the proposal. All quotes below are contained in the permanent thread link above. Observe:


 * 1) (ec) Do not like the idea. That is for medal collectors rather than those interested in new content... Mattisse (Talk) 19:52, 10 May 2009 (UTC)
 * 2) Perhaps there needs to be another "award" for those that do not fit the rather simple guidelines of DYK. Mattisse (Talk) 20:05, 10 May 2009 (UTC)
 * 3) (ec) Yes, a mid-way "award" for the award collectors is a good idea. Mattisse (Talk) 20:35, 10 May 2009 (UTC)
 * 4) (ec) Agree. I have pretty much dropped out of reviewing DYKs because of these issues anyway—more editors wanting more awards for an ever expanding pool. Mattisse (Talk) 21:09, 10 May 2009 (UTC)
 * The reader is left to contemplate why Mattisse is this persistent about discussing the structure of a process she claims to have nearly dropped out of, at a time when she has also pledged to minimize involvement in conflict.
 * 1) I also did not know about DYK until after I had created and substantially improved many hundreds of articles, unrewarded by any trinket. I do not believe that most editors create and improve articles for a trinket reward. Mattisse (Talk) 21:13, 10 May 2009 (UTC)

After five iterations of the insinuation I asked her what she meant. She avoided the question by changing the subject.
 * Interesting. Do you mean to suggest that the primary example raised--Uncle Tom--was disingenuous? That it wasn't exapanded or submitted to stabilize a page that had been plagued by persistent BLP violations for two years? DurovaCharge! 21:20, 10 May 2009 (UTC)
 * I think that is a major misunderstanding of what I said. Please read it again. I was not addressing BLP violations or anything of the sort. —Mattisse (Talk) 21:29, 10 May 2009 (UTC)
 * Right: the statement entirely ignored the possibility that the stated reasons might be accepted at face value. DurovaCharge! 21:33, 10 May 2009 (UTC)

Mattisse continued to dominate the discussion and posted there more often than anyone else until the proposal died. I am left with the uncomfortable suspicion that she cares more about undermining my standing within the community than about either DYK or BLP. Undoubtedly I am not the first to harbor such a doubt. As productive as Mattisse is, what she gives with one hand she takes with the other: how many other productive editors has she driven away?

Phase 5: An offer to refactor
Shortly after posting the evidence above I went over to Mattisse's user talk and offered to revise and modify this presentation, if she objected to any part of it. The discussion that followed is available here. The result was not fruitful. After three requests for dialog, Mattisse claimed that she does not understand my evidence or the offer to refactor, and then asked me to cease communication.

It is not feasible to believe that Mattisse cannot understand arbitration evidence or refactoring. Mattisse presented competent evidence in the Zeraeph arbitration case three sections below my own heavily refactored evidence in the same case. According to Soxred's edit counter, the evidence page of the Zeraeph arbitration is Mattisse's ninth most heavily edited page in Wikipedia namespace; she made 57 edits there.  By the time of Mattisse's first post to that page substantial parts of my evidence had already been refactored.

What Mattisse asks is that we suppose her capable of posting nearly five dozen times to the same arbitration page where the most heavily refactored evidence was my own, without her ever noticing or comprehending the very visible strikethroughs that were there. She wants so much good faith that we are to believe that a featured article writer who is one of the site's best copyeditors and a prolific DYK contributor (both with submissions and reviews)--who keeps getting called back to GA and FA processes because of her superb input-- has a cognitive blind spot in one instance only: an opportunity to have negative evidence against her refactored and softened. I submit that this is no blind spot; this is playing dumb. As a woman who prefers to be taken seriously, I dislike attempts at playing dumb. Why conclude that? Read on.

I kept the offer to refactor open at Mattisse's talk considerably longer than the original terms, and I kept it open in good faith. Maybe it would have been better to have withdrawn the offer sooner, because rather than supply any reasons for extending more good faith (which Zeraeph supplied when her opportunity came), Mattisse provided fresh reason to withdraw the remaining good faith I already had. No one is obligated to make a proactive offer to tone down their evidence; I wanted to be totally fair and upfront. Yet during the dialog at Mattisse's user page she misrepresents a chronology and makes a false accusation in an edit summary. Here's what she wrote:: "revert page so that question is the one I answered rather than the question that was changed after my answer". Now here's what actually happened. Late in the discussion I had expressed a suspicion of getting the run-around, and five minutes later thought better of part of a statement and shortened it. Mattisse subsequently posted a reply, which probably edit conflicted with me, then afterward she restored my post while she made a false claim that I had altered my post after her reply.  Obviously the chronology proves I had not done so. She could have called it an edit conflict, but she cannot excuse the claim she made. Since she has requested no further contact, a reasonable conclusion is that she has no remaining excuse.