User:MaxPont/ArbComEvidence

This is a user subpage of MaxPont. Please do not edit this page. It is created to provide supporting evidence for the ArbCom Cold Fusion that could not be included due to the size limit of evidence. No links lead to this page except for a few embedded links on my own evidence post. This is an allowed use of subpages under WP:subpage. I have also asked the experienced Administrator Jossi and he said that this is allowed under Wikipedia policies and guidelines.

The ScienceApologist Scandal
Let me first say that ScienceApologist has made productive contributions to Wikipedia. Few people understand the ins and outs of the WP regulatory framework better than ScienceApologist and he has contributed to amending several WP Policies and Guidelines. At best he makes knowledgeable improvements to Science articles.

But that is not the issue here. The problem is his confrontational style. Considering the endless controversies that can’t be kept in check due to his editing style, I think it is time for the WP community to think hard about – on balance – if his positive contributions really can make up for and excuse his disruptive behaviour and constant breach of community rules. To make a few analogies. Would the police commissioner accept if one of the best detectives in the force was a zealot who won his investigations by beating suspects to confess and tampering with evidence? Would a hospital accept if one of their best surgeons bullied the nurses and sometimes showed up drunk for duty? No, brilliance and fanatical commitment does not excuse blatant breach of core values and rules for an organisation.

After the excellent post by Durgas Trident above I can only add a few additional facts and comments. ScienceApologist now has a track record of 28 blocks (my count), two Arbcoms (and counting). He has been given all the chances in the world to comply with community rules. And his response is to show contempt for the Wikipedia community and the conflict resolution process. As he wrote in this Arbcom:

"Laughable, considering the utter incompetence of many of the people responsible for the "decisions" (about the ArbCom members) …. It's petty, silly, and I hate it …. I don't care if Wikipedia survives or not, and usually hope that it fails a miserable death and gets buried in the sands of time …"

Read this quote again. This is nothing but an utter contempt for the Wikipedia community. In addition, ScienceApologist has almost explicitly said that he disregards the WP:Civil rule and his text on the top of his own talk page is a plain ridicule of users who want complain about his incivilities.

One of his worst formal transgressions is that he falsely presented one of his own proposals as an enacted WP by referring to it as WP:MAINSTREAM    . That is, he presented a draft proposal as an enacted WP - a pure bluff - tantamount to perjury or planting false evidence in a normal court of law.

Another example is his way of referring to a “principle” he made up on his own user page (one-way linking) as if it was a part of the Wikipedia framework  

There are no more excuses for ScienceApologist. He should know better. He knows all the WP policies and guidelines. He knows exactly what he is doing. His My-way-or-the-highway attitude is impossible in a collaborative environment.


 * Added Dec 1st: Ongoing edit wars by ScienceApologistMaxPont (talk) 19:31, 1 December 2008 (UTC)

The damage to Wikipedia by the ScienceApologist scandal
IMO, the fact that ScienceApologist has been allowed to continue for such a long time is one of the worst scandals in the history of Wikipedia. I can understand that editors with a reputation of deep knowledge, intellectual honesty, and a mature attitude over time will build trust and be given the benefit of doubt. But that is not the case here. This is about an abusive bully with a self-declared zealotry in favour of the official goals of Wikipedia.

A part of the responsibility falls on the top admins in the higher echelons of the WP hierarchy who have been unwilling to deal with this problem. (Though I can understand that the hyper aggressive way he has attacked admins who dared to challenge him (such as Elonka, see above) can explain this to some degree.)

But the main responsibility falls on all those editors who believed that they shared his goals and refused to see the problems. Representing the establishment and the mainstream scientific consensus carries responsibility. You would expect maturity, self restraint, and intellectual honesty from this camp. Instead, ScienceApologist has contributed to a brutalised editing environment on Wikipedia with his thuggish editing style. I think it is necessary for pro-establishment POV-pushers and the “Scientific community” to do some hard thinking about how they view this project. Is this an all out war fought with no holds barred? Do we accept any means possible to suppress the various minority opinions that are unsupported by the establishment? Or can different POVs co-exist and can we accept the diversity where minority opinions are allowed to present their discourse with the proper disclaimers?MaxPont (talk) 10:25, 30 November 2008 (UTC)

Additional Evidence presented by User:MaxPont
I have checked these diffs and found that they are valid. I would like to present these evidence as my own, even though they have been compiled by another blocked user (but not a banned user). These are now my evidence and I take responsibility for them. The WP rules for MeatPuppets does not apply in this case. I have not been asked by any other user to post these evidence. I have never used sock puppets and I am not a sock puppet for anyone else. My edit history goes back to 2006.

/MaxPont

This evidence is presented per FT2 "Accept to look at all aspects. Dispute of this kind arise fairly often; let's see if we can resolve this in a way that helps other similar disputes."

ScienceApologist


To even list the troubles with ScienceApologist is beyond the scope of this evidence. They range the full gamut of disruptive editing, with the debatable exception of major vandalism; they even include off-wiki problems such as email flames. The overarching themes are made clear in his own statements:

"I am a status quo promoter."

"The issue is that a scientific point-of-view carries the most weight for describing observable reality. End of story." No matter what the subject of the article, science is the only show in town.

Also,

"I've found that the heavier the touch, the more likely it is that people will notice."

ScienceApologist hopes Wikipedia "fails a miserable death", and has absolutely no respect for its rules or community.

His block log
He has been blocked 21 times if we counted correctly, and if you don't count the socks which were blocked for abusing multiple accounts.(His known accounts.)

2 times as Joshuaschroder

19 times as ScienceApologist

Requests for arbitration/ScienceApologist: (November 2006)
Counseled:

Requests for arbitration/Pseudoscience: (December 2006)
Deprecation

Edit warring

failure to extend good faith

ScienceApologist cautioned

Requests for arbitration/Martinphi-ScienceApologist: (November 2007)
Sock puppet abuse

Another finding of "incivility, assumptions of bad faith, and personal attacks"

Restriction

Sam Blacketer also spoke to him

Attempts by his friends and others to reform him
ScienceApologist's talk page has been deluged with pleas from his friends, such as Orangemarlin, Jim62sch, and Shoemaker's Holiday to tone it down. He responds:



Examples:













And many, many more

Attempts at mentorship
There have been attempts to mentor ScienceApologist, which failed. One of his mentors was Jehochman, a longtime defender of ScienceApologist, who presented evidence above. The others were Anthony and Fritzpoll.

Added:

Two of the attempts at mentorship failed for unknown reasons (apparently not related to ScienceApologist ). The third mentor, Jehochman, has presented evidence here and said he would "stop defending" ScienceApologist who accused him of harassment.

Also, for a while, his friends gathered round and refactored his posts to make them more civil.

Response to jossi
I'm proposing to put you on trial for the Wikipedia crimes you perpetrated against me





Response to Elonka
Instead of modifying his behavior, ScienceApologist attacked Elonka on multiple occasions, and attacked her Wikipedia article. For instance:

accusation of harassment







And refused her instruction in his usual high-handed tone (see edit summary).



[http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk%3AScienceApologist&diff=249575678&oldid=249564182 Elonka is instructed to get another administrator to make actions against me. Her declaration here is non-binding per previous discussion.]



Response to Jehochman
includes Jehochman with Elonka as harassing him.

Response to John Vandenberg (Jayvdb)
the block

[http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk%3AScienceApologist&diff=193695391&oldid=193693869 Another day, another block. I love you all.]

Response to GRBerry
Wikipedia is a playground for authority-obsessed sycophants hoping to weild arbitrary power over those they can scold for behaving in ways they think is "naughty".

Response to Rlevse
I suggest that you take this as fair warning that I consider your attempts to offer "guidance" as tendentious and borderline harassment...In short, I think you need to find another "project" with which to occupy your time.







Response to Vassyana
Responds to a ban by deleting the ban announcement and saying "Vassyana is BANNED from editing this page".

Many other responses and diffs could be presented.

Disruption
ScienceApologist practices huge amounts of disruptive editing, including edit warring, incivility, unwillingness to abide by consensus, dictating to other editors, various abuses of the DR process such as accusations of COI, and attacks on pages of editors he is in conflict with, such as tag bombing the Elonka Dunin article the same day Elonka banned him from FRINGE )

ScienceApologist is out to get other editors


Even by "Machiavellian" means.

"I have a list of people I think should be banned from editing articles relating to pseudoscience. I've been successful at getting a number of people banned in the past, but at this point have found it more successful to simply be a stick-in-the-mud when it comes to this stuff. Most fringe-proponents simply get too tired of hitting their heads against the brick wall to continue. I simply let them wear themselves out. Some have more patience than others. Those are the ones I have the most trouble dealing with."



In other words, this is his objective (User left Wikipedia).

"I'm at the point now where I don't believe any civility complaint has any merit. However, it may be politically expedient for a person to use civility to get an uninvolved drone of an administrator off their ass and block a POV-pusher... Yep, I'm Machiavellian about it, through-and-through." (emphasis added)

"At least when we do it in a flurry, there is a risk that they will mess up and make too many reverts or say something off-the-cuff, or fail to properly annotate their contributions.... Sometimes someone has to lose and someone has to win." 

He thinks of WP as a battleground:

"I cannot believe that there are no less than six people operating on those pages that deserve to be kicked out of Wikipedia. I haven't seen such a high concentration of problem-editors since my days fighting the plasma cosmology wars." 

POV pushing
ScienceApologist is an admitted POV pusher, and uses unreliable sources (see below) and purposeful disruption to push his POV. Any POV pushing is forbidden on Wikipedia, and even editors who support the most mainstream view do not get to write articles to promote that view. In many instances, it is debatable whether he is actually promoting the mainstream view, or whether he is promoting the skeptical view, as shown by the sources he finds reliable, many of which are promotional sources which do not pretend to be unbiased.

ScienceApologist believes that there is no distinction between "between 'skeptical' organizations and 'scientific societies'," which leads him to represent sources such as Quackwatch and Skeptic's dictionary as always representing the scientific consensus mainstream view.

Repeated

The Arbitration Committee dealt with this here

Even when it is the mainstream view, Wikipedia should not denigrate its subjects directly.

ScienceApologist is an agenda-driven editor
Even in articles on fringe subjects, science should take up the most space

"Simple statements of fact such as “there is no scientific evidence for this belief” are challenged... When it comes to material reality, the group that has by far the most significant viewpoint is the scientific community.... Whenever an article begins talking about material reality, the scientific viewpoint absolutely must be given the most weight. This needs to be done in spite of the fact that people hold beliefs that contradict scientific facts." 

"Science owns material reality."

"The way Wikipedia will deal with it if I have anything to say about it is that where there is a claim of an observation, the related scientific field will be the major source (that is, most heavily weighted) for describing whether or not such an observation has validity." 

Very informative argument with DGG.

Every claim, including religious ones:

"Editors who think that SPOV is somehow contrary to NPOV and use the religious exceptionalism argument haven't really thought through what exactly SPOV is." 

SPOV = NPOV

Edit warring
ScienceApologist edit wars continually. Example:



He's been doing that for a long time

Creating his own policy
ScienceApologist tries to write his own policy and then enforce it "fix for WP:MAINSTREAM". He wrote the Parity section of WP:FRINGE to allow unreliable sourcing so he could use sources such as the Skeptic's Dictionary and Quackwatch and the blogs of individual scientists.

ScienceApologist even cites his own userpage as if it were policy.

Another example is trying to take out particular attribution such as this and this, only then writing his own policy to support it. That he wrote original policy in a guideline is another issue. The NPOV policy of the time did not mention it.

ScienceApologist overrides consensus
ScienceApologist believes that "oftentimes the will of the community is counter to what is best for creating a reliable encyclopedia... One persistent problem: most encyclopedias are controlled by content-experts, but Wikipedia is not." 

ScienceApologist says that when his agenda of being:

"a status quo promoter. NPOV-PUSHER."

Is thwarted by consensus, it is an "obvious" exception to consensus policy and the other editors are disruptive.

"Maybe you're upset that I wasn't involved in the fake "consensus" discussion that you had with yourself, Levine, Anthon01, and a number of other alt-med POV-pushers. You seem to have a very short fuse and have hit upon me as someone you want to take down."

ScienceApologist refuses mediation
ScienceApologist often refuses mediation, or sets extreme conditions before he will accept.



Incivility


ScienceApologist is under a restriction by the Arbitration Committee to avoid incivility.

Instead of being civil, however, he tries to make others jump through hoops when he is uncivil.

He is still a highly uncivil editor, and the best testimony of this is the statement on the top of his talk page, rather than the abundant diffs.

revert because Pcarbonn is lying in his edit summary.

Heading "Martinphi hypocrisy" changed with edit summary "synonym in case association with hypocrisy is offensive to a Christian."

Other diffs appear in other evidence sections.

Pages protected
ScienceApologist has made it necessary to protect numerous pages, sometimes on multiple occasions:


 * Cold Fusion (Jan-08)


 * Electronic voice phenomenon (Jan-08)


 * Homeopathy (Jan-08)


 * Homeopathy (Jan-08)


 * Quackwatch (Jan-08)


 * Rue (Jan-08)


 * Thuja (Jan-08)


 * Thuja Occidentalis (Jan-08)


 * Atropa Belladonna (Feb-08)


 * Rue (Feb-08)


 * Thuja Occidentalis (Feb-08)


 * What the bleep do we know (Feb-08)


 * Eric Lerner (Mar-08)


 * Mpemba Effect (Mar-08)


 * What the bleep do we know (Mar-08)


 * What the bleep do we know (Mar-08)


 * Reiki (Apr-08)


 * Chiropractic (May-08)


 * Chiropractic (May-08)


 * Parapsychology (May-08)


 * Parapsychology (May-08)


 * Alternative Medicine (Jun-08)


 * Atropa Belladonna (Jun-08)


 * Fringe Theories (Jun-08)


 * Remote viewing (Jun-08)


 * Atropa Belladonna (Jul-08)


 * Cold Fusion (Jul-08)


 * Fringe theories (Jul-08)


 * NPOV (Jul-08)


 * Quackwatch (Jul-08)


 * Quackwatch (Jul-08)

ScienceApologist uses unreliable sources
ScienceApologist promotes unreliable sources such as Quackwatch and blogs on his userpage. (ArbCom finding on Quackwatch.)

He believes that "Carroll is an excellent source. See WP:RS". Carroll's online Skeptic's Dicionary is a self-published website which differs from the book version, and states "...The Skeptic’s Dictionary does not try to present a balanced account of occult subjects." It is much like Quackwatch.

ScienceApologist promotes blogs and personal websites as reliable sources  (only mention of radionics in this parapsychologist's blog).

This repeats on other articles.

ScienceApologist makes unsourced POV statements
ScienceApologist, at the same time he says that "No experiment can prove anything," will make unsourced statements which cannot be proven (and edit war about it).

Statement about what is measurABLE, rather than what has been measured. This is a typical edit, inserted on many different pseudoscience pages.

As with all paranormal beliefs, none have any scientific basis.

Nominating articles or user pages for deletion
There is a point where nominating articles for deletion becomes disruptive. Nearly all of the articles and user pages which ScienceApologist nominates for deletion are kept by overwhelming majorities, and have often survived AfD before. Sometimes, nominations have seemingly been retaliation or attacks (he also removed material out of Pcarbonn's userspace  even after it was obvious an AfD was "keep".

Other examples, ongoing:

Redirecting page he tried to have deleted. See AN/I thread here.



Continued attacks on parapsychology and pseudoscience
ScienceApologist has continued to attack various pages on parapsychology, for example trying to edit war an associating with the Ghostbusters movie into the lead of the FA Parapsychology article itself. . He attempts to make sure that parapsychology is not treated as in any way scientific, despite Arbitration Committee findings to the contrary.









This kind of pattern repeats in many other fringe venues.

Why the Committee needs to take action
ScienceApologist often gets off (as here ) because he has friends, but also because his actions are considered individually. ArbCom needs to look at the whole picture.

ScienceApologist is the beneficiary of a double standard
Wikipedia is not supposed to treat editors differently, based on who their friends are, or what their POV is. When an editor is disruptive or POV pushes, having friends is not supposed to help. Rather, uninvolved administrators should treat that editor as they would any other editor who acted in a similar manner.

This has not happened with ScienceApologist.

ScienceApologist has probably been warned and helped more than any other editor in the history of Wikipedia. It is up to the Arbitration Committee to see that ScienceApologist, who is an enormous detriment to the project, is no longer allowed to disrupt, no matter how many friends he has. There is probably no way to do this except to block him completely and permanently. MaxPont (talk) 09:17, 1 December 2008 (UTC)