Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/BLP issues on British politics articles/Evidence

Arbitration case pages exist to assist the Arbitration Committee in arriving at fair, well-informed decisions. This page is not designed for the submission of general reflections on the arbitration process, Wikipedia in general, or other irrelevant and broad issues; and if you submit such content to this page, please expect it to be ignored or removed. General discussion of the case may be opened on the |talk page. You must focus on the issues that are important to the dispute and submit diffs which illustrate the nature of the dispute or will be useful to the committee in its deliberations.

Submitting evidence
 * Any editor may add evidence to this page, irrespective of whether they are involved in the dispute.
 * You must submit evidence in your own section, using the prescribed format.
 * Editors who change other users' evidence may be warning or sanctioned by arbitrators or clerks without warning; if you have a concern with or objection to another user's evidence, contact the arbitration clerks by e-mail or on the talk page.

Word and diff limits
 * The standard limits for all evidence submissions are: 1000 words and 100 diffs for users who are parties to this case; or about 500 words and 50 diffs for other users. Detailed but succinct submissions are more useful to the committee.
 * If you wish to exceed the prescribed limits on evidence length, you must obtain the written consent of an arbitrator before doing so; you may ask for this on the |Evidence talk page.
 * Evidence that exceeds the prescribed limits without permission, or that contains inappropriate material or diffs, may be refactored, redacted or removed by a clerk or arbitrator without warning.

Supporting assertions with evidence
 * Evidence must include links to the actual page diff in question, or to a short page section; links to the page itself are inadequate. Never link to a page history, an editor's contributions, or a log for all actions of an editor (as those change over time), although a link to a log for a specific article or a specific block log is acceptable.
 * Please make sure any page section links are permanent, and read the simple diff and link guide if you are not sure how to create a page diff.

Rebuttals
 * The Arbitration Committee expects you to make rebuttals of other evidence submissions in your own section, and for such rebuttals to explain how or why the evidence in question is incorrect; do not engage in tit-for-tat on this page.
 * Analysis of evidence should occur on the /Workshop page, which is open for comment by parties, arbitrators, and others.

Expected standards of behavior
 * You are required to act with appropriate decorum during this case. While grievances must often be aired during a case, you are expected to air them without being incivil or engaging in personal attacks, and to respond calmly to allegations against you.
 * Accusations of misbehaviour posted in this case must be proven with clear evidence (and otherwise not made at all).

Consequences of inappropriate behavior
 * Editors who conduct themselves inappropriately during a case may be sanctioned by an arbitrator or clerk, without warning.
 * Sanctions issued by arbitrators or clerks may include being banned from particular case pages or from further participation in the case.
 * Editors who ignore sanctions issued by arbitrators or clerks may be blocked from editing.
 * Behavior during a case may also be considered by the committee in arriving at a final decision.

Caesar's wife must be above suspicion
That was Pompeia (wife of Caesar), but it is also true of editing BLP articles about politicians, not just the British ones. My two cents is that anyone who edits a high profile BLP article about a politician should realise that their actions will be scrutinised not just by other Wikipedians, but also by the mainstream media. This means that they cannot afford to get into spats with the subject of the article, or do or say anything off-wiki that would compromise their ability to do the job on-wiki. Unlike the mainstream media, I don't have any problem with Philip Cross being a frequent editor, but edits to articles involving living people and politicians have to be handled with care. The media had a field day with the goons tweet, which led to his actions and Wikipedia as a whole coming under intense scrutiny. WP:WRW says most of this already.-- ♦Ian Ma c M♦  (talk to me) 17:27, 8 June 2018 (UTC)

Bias in editing Antisemitism in the UK Labour Party
The page Antisemitism in the UK Labour Party, while not a biography, contains a significant amount of content related to BLPs in British politics. The page is currently something of a WP:COATRACK of anti-semitism claims and rebuttals about Jeremy Corbyn. Many of the issues there are best considered content disputes, or are back-and-forth editing where single diffs may be unhelpful or misleading. That said, I feel several editors have a clear POV when editing that article. One of them is Philip Cross.

Regarding Philip Cross's edits, many involve a mural that Corbyn made comments about in 2012. The material regarding the mural was initially added by PC, and then reverted by Slatersteven with the comment Not about an incident on 2018, nor should this just turn into a list of every accusation against Corbyn, it should not be an attack page. (editmsg spelling fixed). I find the combination of and  to be puzzling; I don't understand his standard for "fresh developments" here. He has also added material about Corbyn's anti-semitism to other articles, such as Jonathan Freedland and Chris Williamson. Overall, it appears that his objective here is to add material suggesting that Corbyn supports anti-semitic causes, and to minimize material claiming otherwise.

Cross is by no means the only problematic editor on this topic. Rather than provide diffs here showing POV and civility concerns by other editors, I point the committee to an ANI post by Tanbircdq on this topic about the editing of Alssa1 (and note that I expect follow-up posts in that thread to address editing concners of different editors). power~enwiki ( π, ν ) 15:48, 12 June 2018 (UTC)

KalHolmann has acted in contempt of ARBCOM
I note their user page (diff), which attempts to describe their crusade against Philip Cross in epic terms. I note their removal of evidence (diff) following an ARBCOM decree that off-wiki evidence is prohibited in this case. I note various diffs (including Special:Diff/846281199) casting aspersions against ARBCOM with regards to procedural issues. If KalHolmann is unwilling to abide by the procedures used by ARBCOM (which have been in effect for a significant period of time before this case), I question on what grounds they expect others to abide by those decisions. I note that I have presented no evidence of misconduct by KalHolmann in editing, and I am skeptical of sanctions based solely on inattention or dislike for the standing procedures of the Arbitration Committee; likewise I also am skeptical of sanctions based on evidence in a case requested by people professing such animosity. power~enwiki ( π, ν ) 22:50, 17 June 2018 (UTC)

Evidence presented by Govindaharihari
Cross is a prolificic contributor. If you edit in a wp:npov wikipedia policy compliant manor you will not raise the heckles of the internet and living people that you are changing their biographies, that is just a fact. Many editors are changing biographies without coming under attack from grieved parties. When you come under attack for such editing of living peoples life stories to then go to the internet to further the dispute with them is a step too far for a wikipedia editor that wants to continue editing those articles. I would have done this by motion but we have a case, so considering the editing and real world reactions of Cross, I think it is in wikipedia's best interests to restrict this contributor and I support a WP:BLP block on this editor from british political articles. Govindaharihari (talk) 20:46, 9 June 2018 (UTC)

Evidence presented by JzG
Assertions were made about and COI. I checked the following:
 * The sources presented, which to my eyes would clearly fail WP:RS for any mainspace edit.
 * talk:George Galloway and archives, where there is little to no evidence of any meaningful discussion about the issues Galloway raises. Prior to KalHolmann's COI claims, the talk page was basically tumbleweed.
 * special:Contributions/Philip Cross, who has over 130,000 edits in 14 years to thousands of articles.
 * special:Contributions/KalHolmann, the then complainant, who had then around 3,000 edits, mainly to politically charged articles.

Bluntly, it looked like trolling.

That said, I continued to follow the discussion, reconsidered, and took it to the admin board. I watched, but did not take any meaningful part in, that discussion. I also read the off-wiki sources. I was persuaded by people like Cullen328, who I hold in very high regard, that regardless of the self-evident hyperbole surrounding the claims (email sent to arbs separately), there was a serious user conduct issue. I don't see it as a COI, I see it as someone who was attacked for what they wrote on Wikipedia, reacted inappropriately with off-wiki taunts, and became sufficiently involved that they clearly, as they admit, should have walked away. But I could easily be wrong about that, the waters are very muddy. Hopefully the sequence of events will become clear in this case.

I framed the statement at the admin board as I did because I reviewed a sample of PC's edits and most of them were uncontroversial in and of themselves and I missed the extent of PC's off-wiki trolling of Galloway. Yes, PC's edits are often net negative in tone. The same applies to most edits to a lot of articles on unpopular people. They are often unpopular for a reason.

If there is any truth to the claims and statements made by Galloway, outlined again by email noting the source, then it would be an absolutely massive problem. I doubt this, though other facets of that discussion, per email, are deeply disturbing. His most vocal defenders don't appear to acknowledge that he is a divisive, consciously provocative and widely disliked figure. Of course he is still entitled to an accurate and neutral article, even if that may not exactly reflect his self-image.

If it's just a case of an obsessive editor and the tribalism that besets much of current politics, then there should be nothing needed other than to endorse the existing topic ban and some work by the community to frame better guidance on how to handle off-wiki attacks relating to Wikipedia edits. Clearly we can't allow every article subject to veto edits to an article just by attacking the editor off-wiki, but equally there is a line, and it's probably good to explore where it is and how best to handle it.

What I am looking for, and I hope someone can show me, is evidence of engagement around the article itself. That the people most concerned about Philip Cross have reached out to Galloway and advised him how to engage the Wikipedia community to address any legitimate concerns he might have over his biography. I have tried this myself but without success so far. I am well aware that people can become hurt and angry about Wikipedia articles even if they are 100% accurate and true, and I have no idea if Galloway's article is NPOV or not. It's very difficult to address concerns over an article when your main route for communication is the kind of off-wiki statements presented to date, which are long on conspiracism and personalisation and short on specific "please change X to Y based on Z source". I hope at least he's been given the OTRS email address, which I passed along to someone who is in touch with him. Guy (Help!) 23:15, 9 June 2018 (UTC)
 * is wrong: it is quite routine for people to be upset by accurate and unassailably neutral articles. Some people are upset by the mere existence of a biography, whether neutral or not. It is telling that up to the point of KalHolmann bringing his COI complaints, there was no significant engagement on the Talk page of Galloway's article. Guy (Help!) 22:11, 11 June 2018 (UTC)

Deleted attack pages
I deleted three drafts per WP:CSD. user:Hut 8.5 previosuly deleted the last of these under the same rationale.

Philip Cross's edit statistics
I started a statistical check of Philip Cross's edits at User talk:173.228.123.166/pc-analysis, examining a quasi-random sample of his edits. It's still incomplete but I'm convinced by now that the bulk of his edits are fine, and that they generally reflect decent taste and judgment in editing. Some analysis can be found here. I'm not claiming this data that PC's edits are free of serious problems, but only that most of the edits fall outside the problem areas or otherwise don't have problems. So I think we can dismiss the picture being spread off-wiki of PC making 10,000's of horrible edits. If horrible edits are present (they might be), then the quantity is much lower than some of us might have feared. 173.228.123.166 (talk) 08:26, 10 June 2018 (UTC)

BLP edit counts and diffs
Section rewritten (original version)

I've tabulated the BLP articles that PC has edited over the past year (since 2017-06-01, up til 2018-05-29) at User talk:173.228.123.166/pc/blp-count on the theory that these recent edits are more important than older ones. I then split out the edits for the top 5 on that list:


 * User talk:173.228.123.166/pc/Craig Murray
 * User talk:173.228.123.166/pc/George Galloway
 * User talk:173.228.123.166/pc/Toby Young
 * User talk:173.228.123.166/pc/Ken Loach
 * User talk:173.228.123.166/pc/Paul Dacre

I also did User talk:173.228.123.166/pc/Tim Hayward (academic) since he's a non-politician who was cited in a specific diff.

These do look tendentious by the edit summaries. By the timestamps, he leaves the articles alone for reasonable periods but has bursts of editing in them. I leave it up to others to check individual diffs. A tabulation over PC's entire edit history (done earlier) is at User talk:173.228.123.166/pc-blpcounts. BLP edits are around 49k of his 130k total edits.

Overall I don't see any support for Craig Murray's claim that "the purpose of the “Philip Cross” operation is systematically to attack and undermine the reputations of those who are prominent in challenging the dominant corporate and state media narrative. particularly in foreign affairs." I see a wide-ranging, mostly pretty good editor who sometimes gets overheated about certain kinds of articles and specific people.

These edit lists take a little bit of cut/paste nuisance at my end, but I can do more on request if anyone wants any specific ones (don't go crazy). Please post any requests to /Evidence talk rather than my user talk. 173.228.123.166 (talk) 06:16, 11 June 2018 (UTC)

I made an edit list User talk:173.228.123.166/Antisemitism in the UK Labour Party cited by power~enwiki. The few edits I clicked on looked like simple wording fixes and other copyedits, but I didn't check very many. 173.228.123.166 (talk) 21:57, 11 June 2018 (UTC)

I would not edit any Wikipedia Page edited by Philip Cross
I have edited a large amount of non-Wikipedia material in the past. I have considered editing Wikipedia. Quite recently, my attention was drawn to a change in George Galloway's page. The change seems attributed to Philip Cross and seems to change his mother's political leaning from Republican to Nationalist with zero comment on the huge difference between the two political positions.

As someone who could be considered a Primary Source for such an edit, I know that such things besmirch the people that this kind of edit has been applied to. I also know that to those not interested in the politics of Nationism and Republicanism, there seems little difference. The presentation of Galloway in the page is a gross, unfair and hugely distorted misrepresentation, as a consequence, which will go largely unequestioned by the General Reader. It really comes across as the 'Dark Arts' that got the News of the World closed.

As Philip Cross edits articles they become gradually less about the Person and more about the Media default for that Person. His edits are incredibly well delivered and read fluently and clearly. They also read as though they are managed by a hugely experienced and competent copy editor for a Mainstream Media outlet. In essence, his edits of Journalists tend to the fawning and his edits of non-journalists tend to the scathing.

I will not be editing any page edited by Philip Cross. Any edit would be removed, reverted, reworded: anything to prevent a non media image of living persons while ensuring that any genuine contributions can be undermined by the mumbo-jumbo of Wikipedian Jargonising. The entire affair has highlighted that editing Wikipedia should be left to the profession Public Relations and Journalists who, it seems, have decided that Wikipedia is "theirs". In essence: anybody with any interest in editing Wikipedia for British Politics is hounded out by Philip Cross.

It would help to weed out the propagandising by extremely competent Wikipedians who know the system inside out and use it to remove any edit that falls outside of their editorial control if Wikipedia were to make the names of Page Editors more visible. Then I could simply not read anything written by Philip Cross. Because, all protests aside, I now no longer believe that Philip Cross is anything other than employed to ruin the reputations of one set of people while polishing the reputations of others. The Dark Arts.

Is this relevant? I suspect Wikipedia will decide that, no, it is not relevant. It is merely the anonymous whining that goes on.

Evidence presented by Huldra
One of the basic pillars of Wikipedia, WP:5P4, tells us that: "Wikipedia's editors should treat each other with respect and civility."

To me, it seems as if our WP:BLP policies is sorely lacking. Presently, we can treat a WP:BLP person (and I nearly wrote "BLP-'victim", here), who we are writing about, with the utmost lack of respect...and not be blocked.

It cannot be right that Wikipedia editors can be allowed to treat persons with WP:BLP article in a way which, if they had treated their fellow Wikipedians the same way, would have gotten them instantly blocked, as they would have been violating WP:NPA.

I hope this arb.com will see to it that people with a WP:BLP have, as a minimum, the same rights as any Wikipedia editor. Huldra (talk) 23:38, 13 June 2018 (UTC)

Any newspaper worth its salt gives people room to answer accusation made against them. I am just looking into one example on Wikipedia: Tim Hayward (academic): when 'The Times' alleged that the group, which Hayward was part of, was spreading "disinformation" favouring the line of the government of Bashar al-Assad in the Syrian Civil War. Professor Hayward responded: “I do not accept that I am spreading ‘disinformation’.,

User:Philip Cross then edit warred to keep Hayward response out of the article, only the accusation to remain: 21:47, 12 May 2018, 23:22, 12 May 2018 23:35, 12 May 2018...and lots and lots more, exactly the same, Huldra (talk) 23:07, 20 June 2018 (UTC)

I have sent my further concerns, relating to off-wiki information  to arbcom-l@lists.wikimedia.org, Huldra (talk) 23:15, 21 June 2018 (UTC)

There has been significant coverage of antisemitism during Corbyn's tenure
There has been a hugely significant amount of coverage of antisemitism in the Labour party, as can be seen in this google search. A particularly good summary can be found here. There are famous incidents such as the mural, which directly involves Corbyn. Similarly involving Corbyn, we have the Facebook group scandal, the Paul Eisen scandal , the Stephen Sizer scandal, as well as referring to Hamas and Hezbollah as "friends". Then there's the issue of his allies, such as Ken Livingstone, and the Momentum group which backs Corbyn has had several issues too. Many of the figures involved came to prominence because they're far-left Labour members, Corbyn's allies. Hence, when they were insignificant members before, they now are in power within the party.

There was only sporadic coverage of antisemitism vis-a-vis Labour before Corbyn
As can be seen at this google search, there were only infrequent mentions of antisemitism and labour before Corbyn's election as Labour leader in September 2015. These include calls for a crackdown by Ed Milliband, as well as general coverage of increasing antisemitism on the left (ironically, the preceeding reference is a left wing publication that had its own scandal ). Either way, events like this did get coverage, but they were sporadic.

Conclusion
As a result of the above, any article about antisemitism within the labour party will find that it seems to focus on Corbyn. There's simply a huge amount more material to work with since Corbyn. Furthermore, this scandal has been one of the defining issues of Corybn's leadership.

Evidence presented by Tanbircdq
The first time I encountered Philip Cross was when I added some quotes about Galloway here to which Cross removed with extreme prejudice with the edit summary "rm typical Galloway hyperbole", "typical" being the appropriate WP:OWN word used by Cross. He then went on to WP:WIKIHOUND me on several articles he's never edited on before ensuring these articles have his preferred version and then leaving a message on my talk page here.

Cross' Twitters exchanges with Galloway, (including other politicians and journalists Matthew Gordon Banks, Craig Murray, Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed, Tim Hayward (academic), Piers Robinson and Media Lens whose articles he's edited) but  However, four days later, Cross edited George Galloway's article, eventually leading to a legal threat from Galloway and

This has now disturbing received mainstream media, including BBC World Service and BBC News, he's receiving Barnstars for, and being congratulated and commended for as a badge of honour by other Wikipedia editors.

I think Philip Cross' clearly bringing the encylopedia into disrepute and this conduct can't be tolerated. Wikipedia editors shouldn't be editing pages of subjects who they are publicly let alone privately in dispute with.

I think an indefinite topic ban is the only acceptable sanction in the best interests of Wikipedia which shouldn't be limited to George Galloway's article but extended to British political articles. Tanbircdq (talk) 22:47, 21 June 2018 (UTC)

Evidence presented by {your user name}
before using the last evidence template, please make a copy for the next person

{Write your assertion here}
Place argument and diffs which support your assertion; for example, your first assertion might be "So-and-so engages in edit warring", which should be the title of this section. Here you would show specific edits to specific articles which show So-and-so engaging in edit warring.

{Write your assertion here}
Place argument and diffs which support the second assertion; for example, your second assertion might be "So-and-so makes personal attacks", which should be the title of this section. Here you would show specific edits where So-and-so made personal attacks.