User:Nightscream/My 2013 Arbitration Case response

Jessica Nigri, Niemti, and my block by Salvidrim
Regarding the matter of the Jessica Nigri article, I reverted the article because I did not think that the material in question was still in dispute, and thus, there was no intent on my part to edit war. Let me explain what happened. On December 5, I noticed that someone over the course of the prior month or so had added a large amount of material to the article that violated policy, including a large number of clearly inappropriate sources with which Niemti had replaced the fact tags that I had placed in the article on November 15. These sources included: I removed these sources, and in addition to this, my edit also included a number of other alterations, including:
 * 17 links to Nigri’s Facebook page that were being used to support material that goes directly to her notability, as this violated WP:PSTS and WP:SELFPUB. (At the time, I thought that the Facebook page in question was a fan page, which would’ve violated WP:USERG.)
 * A number of videos from Nigri’s own YouTube account, as well as numerous other YouTube videos from anonymous, uncredentialed users, as well as some other fan sites and blogs, and other user-generated sources like ComicBookMovie.com, as this violated WP:USERG. In doing this, I painstakingly went through each and every source and checked it out, since I figured that some of those YouTube videos might’ve been from notable/reliable sources, and indeed, some where, in particular videos on the official YouTube channels of IGN and KassemG. In total these clearly unreliable sources numbered about 90. For context, the remaining sources in the article numbered 76.
 * Removing the external link with which the name of Nigri’s online store to that store with a bare link, in violating of WP:EL and WP:NOTADVERT.
 * Removing material that failed verification, such as the passage mentioning Trader Joe’s, since the source cited for it made no mention of it.
 * Adding some additional fact tags.
 * Adding publication info that was missing from numerous citations, per WP:CS, such as authors, dates, etc.
 * Addition of section headings consistent with other BLP articles of this type.
 * Wikilinking some terms.

Niemti reverted all of my edits, with the edit summary “goto WP:USERG, press ctrl+F, type "facebook" in the search bar, learn2read, kthxBYE”. He didn’t just revert the edits that he felt did not comply with his interpretation of WP:USERG. Instead, he did a blind, mass revert of all of the edits. I tried to open a dialogue on his talk page, but it pretty much went nowhere. He repeatedly kept telling me to “learn to read”, “learn to hear”, etc. (even placing that message in a heading). He kept speaking on the issue of the Facebook page by citing WP:SELFPUB, but dismissed my attempt to point out to him that that policy actually supported my position, not his, and never even addressed the issue of the anonymous YouTube accounts, the other user-generated sources, etc. On the issue of the other material that I improved that did not pertain to the sourcing issue, like the addition of the missing publication info, he claimed that this was “unneeded”, an ridiculous claim that was obviously meant to cover up the fact that he merely did a blind revert of the entire article instead of reverting only that which pertained to the sourcing issue. He even claimed, in response to my pointing out that his insults were violations of WP:CIV that it was I—not he—who was being “obnoxious”, even though I never spoke to him as he did me, and he said this to me at the very beginning of the conversation.

Eventually, two other admins stepped in and inform him that he was clearly violating policy: Masem, who told him he was violating WP:NPA, and Sergecross73, who seconded my point that citing Facebook violated WP:SELFPUB. Niemti reacted with the following angry message, partially screamed in all-caps:

Jesus Christ you dudes: "Self-published or questionable sources may be used as sources of information about themselves, especially in articles about themselves, without the requirement that they be published experts in the field," (btw: I'm pretty sure jessica Nigri is "a published experts in the field" of Jessica Nigri, or cosplay npw seriously speaking) These requirements also apply to pages from social networking websites such as Twitter, Tumblr, and Facebook." Seriously. GOD. I CITED IT RIGHT THERE ABOVE ALREADY. HOW CAN IT BE ANY MISUNDERSTOOD I DON'T KNOW WHAT THE HELL. I'm taking it to the admins.

Another user, ChrisGualtieri, and another admin, PresN, chimed in that Niemti had violated WP:CIV in this manner numerous times, with PresN telling Niemti, “You need to cut out the "learn2read and learn2hear", "WP:SPERG" (he didn't catch it, but I did), the all-caps, and the usual brow-beating of anyone who disagrees with you. You turn every discussion into a fight, regardless of who is correct about what point, and you refuse to read other editor's points or even consider that they could be right about any part of what they said. This is the exact thing that got you banned from WP:GAN and got me to block you before; I'm perfectly willing to do it again. I don't really care about the state of one over-blown article about a model, but I do care about people creating an incivil and abusive environment, since that's the kind of thing that pushes editors to retire.” I was astonished to hear this, and have since learned that Niemti has been the subject of at least three ANI discussions regarding whether to ban him, another impose sanctions, and/or topic ban him, and this is all in the past year alone:,. As a result he was banned from two topics.

Not surprisingly, Niemti’s conduct at the ANI he started about me wasn’t much different. He began a thread there with a title that indicated that it was somehow me “against” Jessica Nigri, claimed that my edits were the “disruption”, repeatedly utilized the non sequitur that the sheer amount of the material it removed made its removal inappropriate (as opposed to whether it met WP:IRS), admitted that he had edit warred, etc. The other admins there pretty much told him that he didn’t have a case against me, and one admin, Someguy1221, pointed out that I had been acting in good faith, etc. This did not surprise me, and because these reactions by those participants had already been made by the time I got there, I saw no reason to say anything; I said what I needed to say on his talk page, and it seemed that the others in the community didn’t buy his fallacies and had supported me (or so I thought), so I didn’t stay.

Figuring (naively, perhaps) that that matter had been resolved, I returned to the Jessica Nigri article, and examined the talk page to see if Niemti or anyone else had begun a discussion on any of the issues pertinent to my removal of Niemti’s material. The only discussion on the talk page was whether to keep the Public cosplay and modeling table, and the consensus appeared to be for removing it. Because (I thought) Niemti had clearly engaged in disruptive or tendentious editing when he did the blind, mass revert of all of my edits, and because doing so reverted other things not related to the issue of sources that he refused to discuss on his talk page, and because it appeared to me that he was not getting support at ANI, I genuinely thought that it was acceptable to revert the article to its last policy-compliant. As a result, I was blocked by Salvidrim, who also reverted the article back. I tried to explain this in my unblock request, explaining that there was no ongoing discussion that I was aware of, so there was no intent to edit war on my part. This was distorted by the responding admin, Fluffernutter, into “I was right”, an argument I never used or even implied, and certainly do not subscribe to with respect to edit warring. To not believe this, you’d have to believe that I deliberately did something that I knew would result in my being blocked, which is absurd.

In addition, Salvidrim provided, as part of his rationale for the block, the claim that I had been “specifically notified” not to edit war. Now let me ask those of you assembled here something: When an editor tells you that they “specifically notified” another editor of something, what do you immediately understand that to mean? Would I be wrong to understand that that refers to a message given directly to an individual, as on their talk page? Because that’s what it sounds like to me. But in fact, I received no “specific notification”. The “notification” Salvidrim says he gave me was this post in the ANI thread that Niemti started against me, a thread that I never posted in, and had stopped reading some time earlier. Salvidrim’s based his block at least partially on the assumption that I had read a message on a board I wasn’t reading. He refused to acknowledge this point, and when I opined that this was deceptive on his part, he took this opinion on my part as an “insult”. I also tried to point out that Niemti was no longer disputing the issue of the sources, as he had abandoned the discussion on his talk page when he said he was “taking it to the admins”, which is why I thought the matter had ended, but Salvidrim interpreted this to mean that I was saying that my edits had not been disputed prior to my last revert, during the dispute.

PinkAmpersand claims the last part of this edit summary of mine (“Revert again, and you'll be blocked.”) is something that should only be said to a vandal. I believe that one editor asked me about that on my talk page, and I indicated that I would’ve gotten someone else to block him.

Rtkat3 and the Gotham City article
Beelbebrox’s claim that my block of Rtkat3 exhibited little preventative purpose because it occurred a month after an action. This is his opinion, and one that does not seem informed by the facts of Rtkat3’s edit history, or how prior attempts to address his policy violations have failed to resolve them. Rtkat3 has a history of disruptive editing, including adding detail bloat, adding arbitrary section headings, and most importantly, repeatedly adding unsourced information, which he has claimed on more than one occasion is derived from various wikis, despite having been informed that wikis are not considered reliable. Last year, for example, he had been warned eleven times by seven different editors/admins about his disruptive editing, all but three of which were for addition of unsourced or poorly sourced material. Four of these warnings were by me, including a final warning in December of last year. This year, he has been warned eight times by eight different editors/admins (including seven that were not among those from last year), all for sourcing issues. Clearly, these warnings were having zero effect, as he would not even directly acknowledge that he understood the related policies. So when I recently saw that he added a large amount of unsourced material to an article again, I felt the block was perfectly appropriate, which it was. Beeblebrox says that the block occurred a month after the addition of the material. So what? Is it my fault that I didn’t catch it sooner? There’s nothing in the blocking policy that I could find that would indicate that blocks must be immediate. In fact, it does say that blocks should not be enacted where there is no current conduct issue of concern. What I’m guessing here is that perhaps Beeblebrox thinks that it was not “current” because the addition occurred a month earlier. This is a non sequitur. If an editor has been engaging in a pattern of disruptive behavior or policy violation for month after month, year after year, and his behavior is completely unaffected by dozens of warnings by multiple editors who try to inform him of the relevant policies, then it is a current concern. I’m not certain about this, but the thinking that I’m tempted to infer from the free ride that admins seem to want to give to editors like Niemti and Rtkat3 is that no action should be taken if the violation is completed, as opposed to in the middle of being performed, which is silly.

Left unchallenged, you can be assured that Rtkat3 would definitely have continued this behavior. Blocking him, therefore, would indeed prevent him from persisting in this behavior because it lets him know that it would no longer tolerated. If you want proof that a block got his attention in this regard, then here it is: Following the block, he actual conducted a dialogue in which he asked me for clarification on the need for references. In going through his exchanges with the editors who had issued all those prior warnings to him, which included examining those editors’ talk pages, I could not find a clear instance of him doing this. Whether Beeblebrox’s premature unblock hindered this wakeup call is unclear, but it is clear that it got Rtkat3’s attention, and I think he knows now that he won’t be permitted to do this any more. So it was most certainly preventive. The fact that Beeblebrox can’t see this would seem to be an ideological viewpoint, or just a lack of vision, rather than a question of fact, as he portrays it.

It should also be noted that the policy on unblocking says:


 * “Except in cases of unambiguous error or significant change in circumstances dealing with the reason for blocking, administrators should avoid unblocking users without first attempting to contact the blocking administrator to discuss the matter. If the blocking administrator is not available, or if the administrators cannot come to an agreement, then a discussion at the administrator’s noticeboard is recommended. ”

(This is also consistent with what I’ve seen from other administrators who have indicated at times that an unblock may even require consensus, such as User:Henrik here.)

However, Beeblebox did not first contact me nor discuss it. What he did do was to leave a message on my talk page indicating that he already unblocked Rtkat3. Now maybe this is again a question of how different editors may read or interpret a policy, but somehow I don’t think that when that policy was written, that “first attempting to contact the blocking administrator to discuss the matter” was meant to mean “tell him you already did it, whether he likes it or not.” So why did Beeblebrox do this? Why does he complain that I supposedly violated the blocking policy, while simultaneously doing so himself? If he is truly so adherent to the language of WP:INVOLVED, then why did he blatantly violate it?

And as far as the accusation that I was an involved admin, I wasn’t. At least, not according to WP:INVOLVE, which states:


 *  “In general, editors should not act as administrators in cases in which they have been involved.” 

Cases. Not “articles”. Cases. It does not say, therefore, that an administrator is involved purely because he has edited an article in the past. In fact, it flat-out states:


 *  “One important caveat is that an administrator who has interacted with an editor or topic area purely in an administrative role, or whose prior involvements are minor or obvious edits which do not speak to bias, is not involved and is not prevented from acting in an administrative capacity in relation to that editor or topic area.” 

My prior edits to the article were indeed minor or obvious edits that did not speak to bias. (Keep in mind that I actually retained the material that Rtkat3 added that was sourced, and some other material that I issue-tagged. So it’s not as if I did an indiscriminate revert.) Can anyone falsify this? In addition, the policy also indicates that when the administrator’s action is one that any other reasonable administrator would come to the same conclusion, that the action is valid:


 *  “In straightforward cases (e.g. blatant vandalism), the community has historically endorsed the obvious action of any administrator – even if involved – on the basis that any reasonable administrator would have probably come to the same conclusion. ” 

(Note that vandalism is only one example offered, and not the only case in which this is allowed.) Here is where the issue may be fuzzy, because it raises the issue of whether a case is said straightforward, and whether any other administrator would agree with the first administrator’s actions. I would hold that adding large swaths of unsourced material to article is a fairly straightforward, and assumed that reasonable administrators would agree with me, for reasons I explained above. Beeblebrox may disagree with this, but it is unclear whether that is reflective of the admin community as a whole, or whether I should’ve been expected to automatically know this. If a preponderance of those assembled here do not agree that this was reasonable, and for that matter, that my entire reading of WP:INVOLVE is wrong, then fine, please tell me. Explain to me how or why the text in that policy does not say or mean that I’ve indicated it does here, and I assure you, I will incorporate this into my future activities.

Past incidents brought up by Beeblebrox
As far as Beelbebrox’s assertion that I have been “feuding” with AlanSohn, there isn’t any “feud”, much less any desire to “continue” antagonism on my part, as this is just a characterization on Beeblebrox’s part. AlanSohn has a history of incivility towards countless editors and admins that stretches back years. You don’t have to believe me. Just peruse the two recent ANI threads here and here and see what so many of those editors are saying. One favored ploy of his that he seems to have developed recently is to self-servingly label edits as “malicious” or “destructive and disruptive”, not because they actually fit the use of those terms found in policy pages, but simply because he disagrees with them. Again, don’t believe me? Just look at the first five posts in the second of that second ANI thread. Are all those other editors and admins “feuding” with him as well, Beeblebrox? Or did you just arbitrarily bring up a conflict I’ve had with another editor—irrespective of whether the my and the community’s charges against him are unfounded—because you thought that doing so would paint a negative picture of me, even if it had nothing to do with the specific matters at hand here? Tell me, how does WP:INVOLVE or the blocking policy pertain to my conflicts with AlanSohn?

As far as the other past incidents that were brought up, I have sometimes made mistakes in my role as admin, much as any human being would. Sometimes these were the result of ignorance of certain permutations of blocking policy or admin-related guidelines, which I think may have been the case in the April 2008 matter. Sometimes they the result of judgment calls on my part, with which the community did not agree. Because these occurred up to five and half years ago, I cannot recall comprehensively the exact sequence of events that led up to them (which is partially why it took a while to research those threads to compose this response). At least some of them pertain to the activities of the banned user Asgardian, who terrorized the comics-related article editing community for something like three and a half years before I managed to spearhead an effort to get him banned, something that User:Newyorkbrad conceded to me in person should not have taken three and a half years. Asgardian constantly exploited the cracks in the system in order to game it, constantly violating policies related to WP:OWN, WP:CIV, etc., and unfortunately, the reaction of the other admins I often tried to go to for help was indifference, which is unfortunately too typical at ANI, and which is how he was able run rampant here for as long as he did: People would insist that we get uninvolved admins to intervene, but typically these admins would do little or nothing. In at least one of these occasions, as I recall (and I’m going off memory here), the September 2009 matter, I blocked him because I felt that it was what any other reasonable admin would’ve done, which as mentioned above, is permitted by WP:INVOLVE. What I do recall more clearly, was the April 2012 matter, in which I mistakenly believed that edit warring did not apply to reverting unambiguous policy violations, apparently because of something I remembered incorrectly someone had told me about 3RR back in April 2007. This error on my part was pointed out, and I acknowledged it.

Conclusion
The first matter being used here against me was a misunderstanding/confusion on my part, and the second was not a violation of WP:INVOLVED, based on the language of that guideline.

Sjones23 claimed that I never acknowledge my errors. In fact, I have acknowledged and apologized for my errors countless times, and have often thanked those who have pointed them out to me, as indicated here:

Please note that I have never observed people like Asgardian, AlanSohn, or Niemti to make statements like this, because they’re content to continue brazenly violating policy with impunity, and the community persistently did or does nothing about them. They’re not interested in knowing that the community has a problem with their behavior, or in learning or improving their habits. I, on the other hand, am, and my record shows this. I have not developed a reputation for slithering through the cracks in the system to deliberately manipulate it for my own ends. I have always strived to be open, direct, transparent and honest about my practices, and about my failings. If any of my evidence or arguments can be falsified, or the conclusions on which I base them, please do so. And if the community here should find that the viewpoints or arguments I have provided are falsified, then please allow me to amend the situation make helping me to become a better administrator. All I ask is that Is for some clarification on the aforementioned points I brought up about WP:INVOLVED.

Does anyone here dispute that my prior edits to the Gotham City article were indeed minor or obvious edits that did not speak to bias? Am I wrong the use of the word “cases” refers to disputes, and not to articles that I have edited in the past?

I would also like to know how I am to proceed if the person who challenged my edits is no longer discussing them. Am I supposed to start the discussion on that article’s talk page? And if I do, what happens if he doesn’t respond? Is it disputed that any other reasonable admin would’ve come to the same conclusion?

I want to make clear that the above questions are not stated to be ironic, rhetorical or defiant; they’re meant literally. I wish to understand how you all feel the texts of the pertinent guidelines are properly interpreted and applied in certain situations. Thank you. Nightscream (talk) 04:31, 13 December 2013 (UTC)