Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Nightscream/Evidence

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Nightscream's block of Rtkat3 was improper
Rtkat has been editorially involved with the page in question for at least the last 23 months and Nightscream for at least 16 months.

The only edits from Nightscream at Talk:Gotham City are replies to edit requests from periods when article was protected.

Rtkat3 made this edit on November 7.

Nightscream edited the article on November 10, November 30, and December 5

On December 6 Nightscream made this edit, undoing much of Rtkat3's edit of November 7 and expressing his disagreement with it via edit summary.

Four minutes later Nightscream blocked Rtkat3, making it clear in his block notice that the edit of November 7 was the immediate reason while also asserting that Rtkat3 engaged in "persistent addition of unsourced OR and other information and ignoring repeated warnings" Whether true or not, it seems clear that Nightscream was involved in the article as an editor and disagreed personally with Rtkat3's edits.

Rtkat3's edits may indeed have added unsourced or improper content to the page, but they were not vandalism. As this is an article about a fictional city where Batman lives there is no chance of a BLP violation so none of the exemptions to the involved admin policy would seem to apply. Beeblebrox (talk) 19:57, 15 December 2013 (UTC)

Nightscream engaged in edit warring and used his admin status in furtherance of said edit war
During the same period as the above incident, Nightscream was engaged in an edit war at Jessica Nigri.

None of the edit summaries of his reverts mention vandalism, BLP concerns, or other accepted exemptions to the edit warring policy:    The reverting of essentially the same edit and use of nearly identical edit summaries is classic edit warring behavior.

At this point the page was protected. Another admin chose to revert the article to the state it was in before the edit war began. Nightscream edited through the protection to revert them, using essentially the same rationale used previously

Again, whether Nightscream's editorial stance was correct or not is not the relevant issue, the issue is that he clearly engaged in an edit war and used his admin status to revert to his preferred version after it was no longer possible for the other user involved to respond in kind.

Beeblebrox (talk) 20:16, 15 December 2013 (UTC)

Nightscream's recent misuse of admin tools is neither an isolated incident nor an innocent mistake

 * ANI April 2008
 * Note this comment from Nightscream which precipitated the closure of the thread: " I'll make it a point from now on not to mix conflict participation with administrative actions. I apologize for failing to do so up until now. Nightscream (talk) 03:04, 23 April 2008 (UTC)"


 * AN February 2009
 * A very long discussion of a block issued by Nightscream in a situation where they were involved. Partial quote (the discussion is very much in TLDR territory):"I not only do not find the opinion that involved admins are preferred not to be the blocking admins in such disputes, but I explicitly stated that I agree with it...Nightscream (talk) 17:49, 13 February 2009 (UTC)"


 * ANI September 2009
 * Note this closing comment from Nightscream regarding the involved admin policy: "I will make sure to read over that policy more carefully. Thanks to everyone here, and you especially, xeno. Nightscream (talk) 01:56, 3 September 2009 (UTC)"


 * ANI April 2012
 * Thread regarding Nightscream's understanding of the edit warring policy, among other things.


 * Current discussion on their talk page
 * Regarding the recent edit warring and block for same.

An important point when reviewing this is how Nightscream's response to being confronted about misuse of the tools has changed over the years. Back in 2008 and 2009 he admitted his error and pledged not to repeat it. In these recent incidents he has refused to acknowledge he made any errors.

Beeblebrox (talk) 20:20, 15 December 2013 (UTC)


 * Now that NS has presented their own "evidence" it is even more clear that he does not believe the rules apply to him and he is willing to go to great lengths to explain why rather than ask an uninvolved admin to handle these situations. And we also see attempts to make this about me, or about whether the other users he was in disputes with were wrong in their editorial positions, precisely what this case is not about. And of course the interesting argument that if he personally believes a dispute is resolved he is then free to edit through protection that was placed to stop an edit war he was participating in.


 * The bottom line here is that the community has demonstrated again and again that it supports the involved admin policy. NS is an unrepentant serial violator of that policy. As such it is logical to conclude that if he retains his administrative status he will continue to use it in this manner, which is simply not acceptable. Beeblebrox (talk) 00:41, 25 December 2013 (UTC)

Niemti definitely is part of the problem
As part of my statement on the request case page, I mentioned the past edit warring of Niemti, who was also involved in the recent situation with Nightscream. I don't know if Niemti should have been included in this case or not, but Nightscream's response to the request focused heavily on Niemti. For the sake of completeness, I will repeat here that I have also observed edit warring from Niemti at other times. He has been blocked three times under this account, once for abusing multiple accounts and unblocked three days later, once (by Beeblebrox) for edit warring, and once for personal attacks or harassment (and then, there is his prior account's lengthy block log). I recall that there was a fair amount of edit warring on his part at Psylocke for example, and note quite a bit of undos there earlier this year, including edit-warring over an image while a discussion was taking place, and edit-warring over categories , and another edit war with Lucia Black and TriiipleThreat over images several weeks ago. BOZ (talk) 20:49, 16 December 2013 (UTC)

Evidence presented by Salvidrim!

 * I'm terribly sorry that the holidays prevented me from actually presenting my own evidence, but I endorse everything presented by Beeblebrox above and cannot think of anything extremely crucial to add to what he presented. I think Nightscream's flawed rationalizations of his violations of WP:INVOLVED in his own evidence section under this one show beyond the shadow of a doubt that he is wholly unable to step back and admit mistakes, and also that he believes that his actions were correctly based in policy and that he did nothing wrong, which is an arrogant delusion. ☺ ·  Salvidrim!   ·  &#9993;  22:41, 29 December 2013 (UTC)

Evidence presented by Nightscream

 * My block of Rtkat3

I was not an involved admin in that case, 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”, which I understood to refer to a particular editorial dispute, meaning an admin shouldn’t use their admin status to promote his/her preferred version of the article over the other editor’s, and not that an administrator is considered “involved” purely because he has edited an article in the past, which makes no sense. In fact, policy 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. I actually retained the sourced portion of the material Rtkat3 added, and tagged some of it. So it’s not as if I did an indiscriminate revert. Also, the policy indicates:


 *  “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 vandalism is only one example offered (“e.g.”), and not the only case in which this is allowed. Adding large swaths of unsourced material to article is a fairly straightforward situation, especially when you consider that Rtkat3 had been warned 18 times by 13 different editors/admins over the course of the previous two years for disruptive editing, all but three of which were for sourcing issues ( ). For this reason, I was confident that reasonable administrators would agree with me. Beeblebrox may disagree, but this doesn’t mean that his view of that part of the policy reflects a consensus of community admins. (If it does, then please tell me, and I will naturally follow it.)

Also, 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.” 

Beeblebox did not first contact me nor discuss it. Instead, he left a message on my talk page indicating that he had already unblocked Rtkat3, which I don’t think is what the above passage meant. So why did Beeblebrox request an ANI case for my supposedly violated the blocking policy, when he did just that himself?


 * The Jessica Nigri article, Niemti, and my block

The reason I reverted the Jessica Nigri article is because I thought the conflict had been resolved at that point. Had I known otherwise, I would not have reverted it. This is what happened: After I attempted to engage the other editor, Nietmi, in discussion on his talk page, he responded by insulting me repeatedly, cryptically citing WP:SELFPUB without elaborating on how that policy supported his position and not mine, making references I could not understand ("SPERG"), and at one point screaming in all-caps. On the matter of the his blindly reverting all the other edits I made to the article, such as all the publication info I added to the valid citations, he replied merely that that information "wasn’t needed" (a dodge meant to cover up the fact that he didn’t feel like going through the article and precision revert only the WP:SELFPUB-related edits he disagreed with), and on all the other policies I invoked during the discussion, such as WP:USERG (which I cited in regards to the uncredentialed YouTube videos he cited as sources), he offered no response at all. Three other editors joined the discussion, one of whom, Sergecross73, informed him that he was wrong on WP:SELFPUB. The two other admins, PresN and Masem, informed him that the material for which he cited SELFPUB didn't belong in the article, and that he was in clear violation of WP:CIV, which that admin mentioned was not the first time Niemti had been cited for this. These two admins were among those who in previous ANI discussions, told him that sites like Facebook and YouTube should be avoided per WP:SPS and admonished him for his incivility. (I subsequently learned that in the first eight months he’s been using his current username account, Niemti was blocked four times for personal attacks, edit warring, sock puppetry, etc., and that he was topic banned twice this year alone from two different topics, and was the subject of other ban discussions.) I was not surprised by this, and took it as confirmation of my interpretation of policy. Niemti did not accept this, and said he would start a discussion at ANI, where the responding admins also told him that he had no case. I took this as further confirmation of my position. I figured that was that, and did not monitor the discussion past a certain point, and since neither Niemti had essentially abandoned the discussion on his talk page, and did not attempt to start a discussion on the article’s talk page, I took this to mean that the matter was settled. So I reverted the article back to its last policy-compliant version.

After Salvidrim blocked me, I tried to explain this repeatedly to him and to Fluffernutter, the admin who declined my unblock. Fluffernutter took my explanation to mean “I was right”, even though that was not my argument. Salvedrim took my argument to mean that my edits had not been disputed at all, an interpretation that utterly mystified me. I repeatedly clarified to them that these were not my arguments, but neither responded to this. I tried to point out to Salvedrim that there was no ongoing discussion on the matter, as the only discussion was the one I started that Niemti abandoned, but Salvedrim merely responded by saying, "If source reliability is not disputed, then... good ?", but without addressing my point that I had no intent at the time to edit war. In order for you to disbelieve this, you need to conclude that I knowingly and deliberately did something that I knew would result in my being blocked. Does anyone here find that plausible?

Two other points need to be raised in regards to my block: First, Salvedrim provided, in his rationale for my block, the claim that I had been “specifically notified” to cease editing the article. "Specifically notified" sounds like a message you leave on an editor’s talk page. But the “specific notification” he referred to was a message he left on the ANI discussion, after I had stopped reading it. He offered no explanation for why he thought I had read that message, or why he thought I was still reading that discussion, as I hadn’t even posted in it. I pointed this out to him, and again, he did not respond to this point.

Second, Salvedrim stated that I failed to engage in discussion. In fact, I was the one who started the discussion on Niemti’s talk page, which led to the ANI discussion for which Salvedrim was the closing admin.

I may have jumped the gun in reverting the article. Perhaps it was impatience, and/or perhaps it there was some part of me that convinced me that the matter had been resolved due to a reluctance on my part to keep checking back at the pages where Niemti was spewing his vitriol at me. Whatever the case, I acknowledged that I should not have reverted the article, in contrast to Beeblebrox’s statement that “In these recent incidents he has refused to acknowledge he made any errors.”


 * Past incidents

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, and others were the result of judgment calls on my part, with which the community did not agree. The September 2009 matter, IIRC, occurred because I felt that the block in question was what any other reasonable admin would’ve done, as per 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.


 * In conclusion

The first matter being used here against me was a misunderstanding/confusion on my part regarding a dispute that I incorrectly thought was settled, and the second was either not a violation of WP:INVOLVED, based on that policy’s language, or a case in which clarification of that language is needed. If the Arbitrators here inform me that it is the consensus of admins that my prior edits to the Gotham City article were not minor or obvious edits that did not speak to bias, or that I am wrong in that the use of the word “cases” refers to disputes, and not to articles that I have edited in the past, then please tell me, and I will conform to this. But whether I am wrong or not, I acted in good faith in both instances, without any intent to edit war or violate Blocking Policy.

I have always tried my very best to not only uphold policy, but to follow it as well. Sometimes this requires discussion or clarification of the language and intent of policy, and whenever such clarification has been required, I have always adhered to it. This situation does not require de-sysoping, but merely discussion and clarification.

Happy Holidays to you all. :-) Nightscream (talk) 02:47, 24 December 2013 (UTC)

Evidence presented by Jc37
''While I'm off compiling diffs tonight, please read (or re-read) the Feb 2009 link in Beeblebrox's evidence for my comment in the past which still seems to apply today - you may need to scroll down some to find it. Several knowledgeable admins (including Hiding and Emperor) contributed to that discussion, and I think it's an important read. - jc37 17:29, 31 December 2013 (UTC)''
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