User talk:2600:1004:B173:3C77:F411:73A6:C261:C00C

ANI
I have removed your post at WP:ANI and will block any IP adding it again. Yes, we're all equal but when you use an IP that has never made another edit, and when your other contributions appear to be from other widely dispersed IPs, you have to accept that it looks like a blocked user pushing some kind of campaign. I looked at the revision-deleted material you mentioned and it appears to feature off-wiki forums with discussion of who-knows-what that is somehow related to an editor here who is subject to harassment. If you have a concern regarding and you feel that your comments on her talk page are unwelcome, you will have to contact the Arbitration Committee by email and provide evidence of a problem. Johnuniq (talk) 07:44, 21 January 2024 (UTC)
 * If this is a matter for ArbCom, may I raise the matter at Wikipedia_talk:Arbitration_Committee? As I explained at ANI, I am not seeking any administrative action, just an explanation from Bishonen about her use of revdel. But if I contact ArbCom by email it will be impossible for Bishonen to participate in the discussion, which defeats the purpose of discussing it. 2600:1004:B173:3C77:F411:73A6:C261:C00C (talk) 07:58, 21 January 2024 (UTC)
 * Didn't I explain it above? I am not familiar with the background but is there something you doubt about what I wrote? If I've got a detail wrong, please mention it. Does the issue ultimately concern WP:ARBR&I? Are you using a different IP from widely separated ranges for most of your posts? Who knows, maybe Bishonen is wrong but given the background described here, I think you will have to be content with discussing the matter at off-wiki sites, or emailing Arbcom who will evaluate your concern. Johnuniq (talk) 08:13, 21 January 2024 (UTC)
 * I only edit from a single IP range, although it is a very broad range that is shared by several other individuals. To answer your other question, it's necessary to explain that there basically are two separate issues:


 * 1. There is the fact that another IP user was misidentified as me, and that my attempt to address the error was revdelled without a clear explanation of why. All of that happened within the past week. This issue does not relate to WP:ARBR&I.


 * 2. There is a much longer-term issue involving a right-wing troll who has been trying (with some success) to generate negative media attention for Wikipedia, and who also is the underlying cause of the harassment you mentioned. That issue is what the external links in my initial post were concerned with. This matter does relate to WP:ARBR&I, and I've emailed ArbCom about it twice before, once in 2020 and once last August.


 * My hope was to discuss only issue 1, not issue 2, and the first issue does not seem like something that should require arbitration. Is your argument that even so, the first issue can only be discussed with ArbCom privately, because in your view the two issues cannot be separated from one another? 2600:1004:B173:3C77:F411:73A6:C261:C00C (talk) 09:19, 21 January 2024 (UTC)
 * You always have the option of creating an account. Then you would not be misidentified as another individual who obscures their contributions by IP hopping. Have a look at your current /64 range: 2600:1004:B173:3C77:F411:73A6:C261:C00C/64. That shows nothing other than four comments related to this discussion. Under those circumstances, isn't it reasonable that sometimes you would be misidentified? Is there a specific reason for you to want that cleared up? Suppose you proved that someone was wrong and that they confused you with another IP. Would that matter? How would you prove that other than by making a claim? I don't see the point. I agree that contacting Arbcom would not be a good idea but for me, that's because it would just waste their time. However, that is the recommended procedure if you want to complain about an administrator failing to account for their actions and another administrator (me) removing your report with mention of blocks. Johnuniq (talk) 09:43, 21 January 2024 (UTC)
 * Okay. While you're giving me advice, I should ask you about the second issue as well, because I and other editors have found ArbCom mostly unresponsive to our emails about it, and most attempts to discuss it on-Wiki have been shut down for procedural reasons. Perhaps you can suggest a better approach.


 * As I said, both the media coverage and the harassment are long-term results of an attempt by a right-wing troll to damage Wikipedia's credibility. I'm aware of around five media articles and one academic paper that have resulted. I still don't fully understand which external links are allowed, but presumably it is acceptable to link to the most recent article because it was quoted in the Signpost last month, and also has already been linked to on many other Wikipedia pages. The other media articles are broadly similar.


 * In the section of that article that the Signpost is quoting (the section titled "More Cognitive Distortions"), there is a long list of articles where citations to reputably published academic papers were removed for dubious reasons, which includes diffs of the removals. The list concludes by stating that these removals were "all done by the same person", and the accompanying diffs show that is the Wikipedia user being referred to. By making such edits, he is - presumably unintentionally - supporting the troll's efforts to produce this negative coverage. Then on social media, the troll and his supporters present Generalrelative as a sort of "poster boy" for everything that is wrong with Wikipedia. (I cannot link to those Twitter discussions, as they include doxxing.)


 * The same troll also tried to do something similar at RationalWiki, but RationalWiki's administrators eventually caught on to it. That's what the off-Wiki pages I linked to in my initial post were about. On one of those pages, the perpetrator boasted of how his efforts were achieving greater success at Wikipedia: I've shifted focus to Wikipedia, where the resulting media coverage gets far more attention, and where another person (a real leftist!) metastasized my changes across dozens more articles than I ever edited directly. It is clear from the rest of the discussion on that page that the "real leftist" he mentioned there is Generalrelative.


 * Various other IP editors have openly said that they support the way Generalrelative is producing this negative coverage of Wikipedia, for example: . But for my part, my principles require me to try to get him to understand how his actions are supporting a troll and making the problem worse, and that the overall situation is unlikely to improve unless he can show self-awareness about that. That is what I was trying to communicate with the external links in my initial comment.


 * My assumption is that there is no other possible solution to this situation, because ArbCom seems uninterested in addressing it. But can you suggest any other solution? 2600:1004:B173:3C77:F411:73A6:C261:C00C (talk) 04:54, 22 January 2024 (UTC)
 * Your "most recent article" link is just another space-filling ramble of discontent. It would take a month to digest all the details. That's why it would be hard to get any attention for whatever is the claimed problem. Please bear in mind that there are a lot of very talented people on the internet, and many of them are quite, umm, strange. They might have had good ideas but now they struggle to make sense. Are you sure there is anything worth reading at that link? Is so, please quote a couple of words so it can be found. Regarding a solution, the general advice is to focus on one content issue at a time. For example, you might give a diff of an edit and briefly outline what it is doing and what you believe to be a problem with the edit. Do not mention users or off-wiki people—just focus on content. A quick look at a couple of the on-wiki links in your most recent message suggests there are a bunch of IPs or users with a small number of edits making quacking noises in relation to WP:ARBR&I topics. Their comments are understandable only to those in some clique but it looks like they think certain edits are wrong and that is good because it makes Wikipedia's bias more apparent. They should stick to commenting at Twitter or somewhere that people might care what they think. Johnuniq (talk) 05:22, 22 January 2024 (UTC)


 * Thanks for the response. I appreciate what you've said about how difficult this issue is to understand, because that helps to explain why ArbCom has never seemed to understand it. Perhaps it won't be possible to adequately explain this to someone without any background in this issue, but even so I'll do my best to answer your question.


 * For a concise summary, it may help to read the comment by that is quoted in the article, especially her comment's final paragraph. The removals of high-quality academic sources described there have occurred on several dozen articles, including many articles about uncontroversial topics. There also is one other quote from the article that helps to understand what is happening: "This overall situation demonstrates critical point: that when research about race and IQ is rejected, this inevitably produces a domino effect on other, normally uncontroversial areas of psychometry and behavioral genetics. As Wikipedia's susceptibility to manipulation becomes well-known, it is similarly inevitable that trolls and ideologues will exploit this vulnerability in order to demonstrate such points—something that already has occurred at another wiki site."


 * The reference to the "trolls and ideologues", followed by the RationalWiki link, seems to be a deliberate allusion to what the trolling at both RationalWiki and Wikipedia has been intended to demonstrate. The person behind that,, is a well-known advocate of "racial hereditarianism" (as Wikipedia users prefer to call it). But he has recognized that it presents a strong argument in favor of "racial hereditarianism" if he can demonstrate how rejecting that idea requires also rejecting mainstream academic sources such as those that Sennalen linked to, on Wikipedia articles about topics such as the Flynn effect. It is a Reductio ad absurdum argument. He is starting from the premise that hereditarianism is false, and then showing how this assumption leads to absurd results. On one of the RationalWiki pages that I linked to, Deleet has made this exact argument.


 * This issue has affected so many articles that I do not believe it would be possible to address it on one article at a time. If something is going to be done, it must address the core issue. Am I understanding you correctly that from your perspective, there is no way of doing that? 2600:1004:B173:3C77:AC7A:179C:D173:FA7B (talk) 07:48, 22 January 2024 (UTC)
 * I have to do some other things and cannot consider all this at the moment. If I haven't responded in 48 hours, please ping me again as a reminder. Johnuniq (talk) 07:52, 22 January 2024 (UTC)
 * Wikipedia has built-in limitations—what is published here depends on what reliable sources say. If sources are not in agreement with current knowledge, articles here will have the same limitation. The alternative would be to allow people to publish the based on what they know. Some thought will show that such a plan could not work at Wikipedia. I understand that documenting complex cases is difficult but I did not ask for that. Instead, I wanted one diff showing incorrect information (as defined by WP:RS) with a brief explanation of how it is known to be incorrect. Actually, I think this discussion might have reached a natural conclusion because I have explained the situation regarding your removed post at ANI and have explained that if you decline to create an account you will have to live with the fact that sharing a shifting IP with a banned user with similar interests means you will be considered as indistinguishable from the banned user. I understand that you have said your intentions are the opposite of the banned user but people don't really care about intentions as the result is the same—attention is drawn to off-wiki drama with fact-free claims that do not focus on article content and reliable sources. Johnuniq (talk) 03:52, 23 January 2024 (UTC)