User:MegX/Statement

Here is my statement regarding the disputes involving an anonymous editor (User: 123.243.65.185) and subsequently (User: 203.214.145.120) on the Wikipedia article Guitar. Note: addresses 123.243.65.185 and 203.214.145.120 are both Australian IPs.

1) Despite numerous requests to said anonymous editor, to follow Wikipedia etiquette and guidelines, the anonymous editor has continually chosen to ignore these guidelines. This includes amongst others a refusal to signing and dating their responses, and their article edits. He has not helped his cause by engaging in personal attacks, which have been witnessed by other editors.

2) The anonymous editor has also broken Wikipedia rules regarding ban evasions by using a second account. The rules are: Using a second account for policy violations will cause any penalties to be applied to your main account. Users who are banned or blocked from editing may not use sock puppets to circumvent this. Evading a block or ban causes the timer on the block to restart, and may further lengthen it. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Sock_puppetry#Forbidden_uses_of_sock_puppets)

3) Wikipedia has a policy of What Wikipedia is Not. This includes Wikipedia is not a soapbox, a battleground, or a vehicle for propaganda and advertising. Therefore, Wikipedia content is not: Propaganda, advocacy, or recruitment of any kind, commercial, political, religious, or otherwise. Of course, an article can report objectively about such things, as long as an attempt is made to approach a neutral point of view. You might wish to go to Usenet or start a blog if you want to convince people of the merits of your favorite views. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:What_Wikipedia_is_not#Wikipedia_is_not_a_soapbox) My edits on the Guitar article has been about maintaining a NPOV. I’m not interested in national agendas. The article I reverted to does not seek to attack or denigrate the achievements of anyone and is quite compatible with other encyclopaedia entries such as found in Britannica and Oxford. If you look at the history summary I have also clearly labelled all my edits. The same cannot be said with the anonymous editor which has made no attempt at labelling and has done nothing but promote his POV.

4) One of the most startling admissions from the anonymous user is that they appear not to know about guitars or music history (http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Music_of_Iran&diff=prev&oldid=150956472). One must question why a user with no prior knowledge is editing in an article on guitars. Furthermore, anonymous user has stated: “Anyway I will leave you all alone as I do not give a hoot about the guitar, I stumbled onto this page looking for the history of tanbur which is what I have studied.” On would have accepted this in ‘’good faith’’ but why does he keep revert editing the article and making personal attacks if he doesn’t give a hoot as he claims? There are plenty of guitarists and guitar groups on Wikipedia, for which I am a member of, which he did not consult for information yet he went to a Music of Iran talkpage for support. Why drag in editors from Iran for a guitar article? If he claims there is no nationalistic flag waving, his actions tell a very different story from what he says.

5) The anonymous user has also accused me of not backing up my edits with sources. I need not go further than this: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Guitar&diff=148658917&oldid=148467236. It clearly showed that I added a total of 4 references. These are clearly indicated in the text. Furthermore my edit was clearly annotated in the summary box. All 4 sources were written by guitarists and/or guitar historians.

6) The anonymous user has repeatedly referred to the Encyclopaedia Iranica to back up his argument. Why is an Iranian encyclopaedia being used in a guitar article? Maybe if the encyclopaedia had anything to do with guitars it might have some relevance but alas no. Using the Encyclopaedia’s own search engine reveals no guitar article nor does the article index have any articles on “guitar”. One has to question why this encyclopaedia with an obvious nationalist flavour is being used at all in this article. Furthermore, the encyclopaedia’s author Ehsan Yarshater is not a guitarist or a music historian. It is hardly a reliable source for guitar history, even if you ignore the media controversy surrounding that encyclopaedia.

7) The anonymous user has accused me of being biased towards “Greco-Romans”. How he assumes this from the edits is anyone’s guess. If you look at my contribution I have clearly added Hittite, Roman, Moor, and Spanish, no Greeks/Greece. That is hardly being biased towards anyone. The guitar’s development is clearly from an amalgam of ideas, not just Iran, which I have repeatedly stated so. Also, one person did not invent the guitar either, as claimed in an earlier version of that article, which was mentioned on the Talk page and commented upon.

8) The anonymous user has a problem with the word Elam. The objects in the image in question date from a period when Susa was the capital of Elam, a state that also included parts of southern Iraq (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elam). It is therefore historically correct to call it Elam. (I also question whether those images were actually taken by the person who uploaded them or not. They look like something scanned out of a museum catalogue, which means a possible copyright violation). Furthermore the anonymous editor has gone on to say that Iranians are Aryans (http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Guitar&diff=prev&oldid=149574084) One could also argue, using anonymous editor’s own arguments, that the people of Elam were not Aryan and thus not Iranian, because they existed before the movement of “Aryans” into their territory. Therefore his argument not to use Elam in this context is flawed. I find it ironic that anonymous editor has also accused me of being a racist yet he is quite willing to use the term Aryan, that has historical racist connotations. People who know me know that I favour no race or ethnicity. I flatly reject his smear that I am a racist.

9) I suspect that this issue involving the edit reversals will continue for sometime. When you are dealing with an anonymous user who uses sockpuppets, it is almost impossible to reach consensus. I have argued before in numerous Wikipedia mailing lists and forums that anonymous IP edits should be banned from editing. I have also gone on record arguing against the politicising of articles, and that only neutral credible sources should be used in all referencing.

I stand by my position on this issue.