Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Motions/Jack Merridew one year unban review/mentors page

Page for Jack Merridew and mentors, and  to review current editing restrictions and develop new ones if needed. (No one else edit this page.)

Indefinite block lifted with editing restrictions
1) After reviewing User:Jack Merridew's ban at his request, the Arbitration Committee agrees to unblock his account with the following conditions:


 * 1) User:Jack Merridew agrees to edit from one account only "Jack Merridew" on all WMF wikis and unifies that account.
 * 2) User:Jack Merridew discloses all prior socks.
 * 3) User:Jack Merridew agrees to not edit using open proxies.
 * 4) User:Jack Merridew agrees to completely avoid White Cat on Wikipedia English pages. No editing the same pages, no comments about White Cat by name or innuendo. No harassment of White Cat in other venues. This restriction will be interpreted in the broadest way with no allowance for any attempt to skirt the restriction in any manner.
 * 5) User:Jack Merridew agrees to avoid all disruptive editing.
 * 6) User:Jack Merridew agrees to a one year mentorship by,  and , who will closely monitor for any contact with White Cat.
 * 7) It is specifically noted that this is not a "clear your name" unblock, but rather is done on the recommendation of Wikipedia English administrators that are knowledgeable about Jack Merridew's past disruptive editing and now support his return based on his good editing record on other Foundation wikis where White Cat and Jack Merridew both have accounts.
 * 8) Should Jack Merridew violate the restrictions imposed upon him in this decision, he may be blocked for one year by any uninvolved administrator, with any blocks to be logged at Requests for arbitration/Jack Merridew ban review motion


 * Passed 7 to 0 (with one conditional support discounted as conditions not met), 09:46, 9 December 2008 (UTC).

Mentors' Summary of previous year
I note that I have received emails from both sides (A Nobody and Jack Merridew) who have been frustrated with each other and required some flame-dousing by other parties. Jack Merridew is an intelligent person who has alot to offer, but has a sense of justice to the extent that he can be (and has been) disruptive to prove a point, and can be distracted by (and gravitate to) negative interactions (such as confrontations at AfD) instead of constructive ones elsewhere (Jack has the potential to write Good and Featured content readily). Ikip provides a summary here, which shows a fair degree of controversy over the past year. My prediction is this - we have two courses. If we lift restrictions, I predict Jack will continue being helpful to many but will at some stage have a run in with another editor who he disagrees with. Turbulence will ensue and a block may result. if we keep mentorship, we may have some chance of dousing flames before major disruption happens. Then again, maybe I am overrating mentorship, I don't know. I know Jack will hate me saying this but my feeling is that keeping mentorship, and keeping the clause on disruption might maximise chance of continued editing. My timeline would be nine months with no further close calls and we lift mentorship. I really want to see an end to the pattern of behaviour outlined above.
 * Casliber's summary:


 * John Vandenberg's summary:

It is important to note that Jack is not a single-issue editor. He has created about 40 articles in the last twelve months, and has assisted user:Himalayan Explorer/user:Dr. Blofeld create many more. A significant portion of his [ 4000 mainspace edits in the last year] are gnoming and content improvement unrelated to the AFD battles. He does however have a strong bent towards excluding FICTION/PLOT/FAN, and countering systematic bias. He cares deeply about Wikipedia quality. He has crossed the floor to defend articles about topic which he thinks belong in this encyclopedia such as [ here]. He has also "rescued" an id.wp 'crat who found himself in hot water with en.wp admins.

But we are here to talk about the restrictions. The only restriction that has been a cause for concern has been the "avoid all disruptive editing" clause. Disruptive editing is the behavioral guideline for this. The only "pattern" of edits which have caused concern has been Jack's interaction with a few of the ARS members, and especially his focus on their methods at AfD which have aroused the ire of a sizable segment of the community. Who is being disruptive and who is protecting the encyclopedia? The jury is still out on that one.

This clause has served its purpose; Jack has demonstrated that he is not here to disrupt the project. He is here to build and shape it. As a result, Jack has participated in the trench warfare that is the AFD system as we know it, of which WP:ARS has become the self-selected front-line. Jack has at times stepped across the lines with snide remarks and has led many to believe that he has been wikihounding the ARS members. However it has all been above board, and he has been quite willing to accept ad-hoc restrictions from his mentors where necessary to keep in the good will of the community at large. In order to reduce the negative interactions, I tried proposing a productive stalemate between Jack Merridew and A Nobody. ; A Nobody did not (A Nobody was willing to reduce his involvement, but wanted to continue editing articles at AFD). Subsequently, A Nobody ended up being the subject of an RFC/U. I suggested that Jack open an editor review, and he did. Sadly the only feedback there was from Casliber.

Looking forward, I believe that the disruptive editing clause needs to go if Jack is to have a decent chance of making it through another year without being dragged in front of arbcom. If the conflict continues to escalate, an RFAR is the most likely outcome, and that will happen whether or not Jack Merridew is a party. If the committee feels that restrictions are needed, that clause should be replaced with a more targeted behavioural restriction, or a restriction from AFD (for his own good). If the committee doesn't restrict him next year, I am confident that Jack Merridew and the mentors can work on different approaches to this meta debate in order to reduce conflict over the next year.

This will not be terribly helpful, as I have been on wikibreak due to wikiburnout for most of the year, but I'm back now. Having gone through the last year or so of Jack's contribs, there seems to be an awful lot of bland and inoffensive wikignoming, which is all to the good and highly commendable. A few minor scuffles, of course, but in this project in these times that is unavoidable. The brief rows with Daedaelus969 and Ottava Rima can in the first case be dismissed as trivial and in the second as the result of Ottava's lamentably overactive sense of persecution, and we can find no fault in Jack's actions (Ottava's proposal at the current RFAR to have Jack blocked can be take just about as seriously as his proposals to have myself and others desysopped). The scuffle with A Nobody, however, was rather more serious. I was around for Part 2 of this, which flared up briefly when, I think, Jack left a slightly unpolitic comment at A Nobody's RFC, after back in April A Nobody had accused Jack of wikistalking. Now, Jack has not, I think, genuinely wikistalked anyone, but could perhaps have been rather more careful to avoid creating the perception of doing so. I recognise his frustration at being treated as a "second-class user" in this regard, but that, unfortunately, is the price he has to pay for his history. So long, however, as he continues to be careful, the future looks bright. Moreschi (talk) 00:46, 21 November 2009 (UTC)
 * Moreschi's summary:
 * As far as restrictions are concerned - shrug. White Cat has been a long-term absentee since April and I'm sure Jack knows not to go near him should be return. In the last year of editing there would seem to be little requiring further restriction. Moreschi (talk) 00:50, 21 November 2009 (UTC)

Jack Merridew's summary of previous year
The last year — 20 months, really — has been a waste of time. There is no road back; it's a lie.
 * —  Sincerely , Sockpuppet First Class, Jack Merridew Puppeter template.svg  03:09, 25 November 2009 (UTC)


 * the sappers have been clearing the road ;)

The core question here is am I here to do good? I am. I was nominated, successfully, for adminship on Wikisource, by John. He stated that: I have come to realise that he has meant well all along, and he has come to realise that what he perceives to be a problem needs to be shared with the community, and a collaborative solution found. He was referring to en:wp. See: s:Wikisource:Administrators/Archives/Jack Merridew (Ottava, especially, should see that page;).

I have been critical of issues and users on this project. There are issues and problematic users, here. In spades. The core issue is, and always has been, defending the project from such problematic editors. For my first threeish years here, I was not much engaged with the broader community. When disputes kicked-up, no one knew much about me. Recall that in my first case with Cool/White Cat, I was basically let off with a warning and he was sanctioned and placed under mentorship. *That* mentorship failed (without a review; it just ran its year), and I scuttled my account. I tried to start over with Moby Dick. And Jack. And during these timeframes, I could not help but notice the problems continuing.

Much fuss has been made over my critical view of A Nobody. It's not as if I'm alone; many others have been critical of the users I am critical of. He took great exception to, characterizing it as religious fanaticism. I'm not; really. He seems to have resolved to "show me the hand" after I in his editor review. He my comment with the edit summary: reverted admitted sock account used to harass other users for years. He sought to revert-out any edits of mine; repeatedly. The page is intact now and there's a lot of critical discussion of his action there. Since then, he has repeatedly attempted to invoke the year-ban and has sought immunity from criticism by me. More recently, A Nobody has sought to delete-proof articles at AFD by disruptively cross-merging stuff. There is a of a close of that whole long discussion and it's looking very much like a strong consensus against this sort of disruption.

I am here to help this project. I have more than 5 years into working on the WMF projects. My en:indef pushed me out onto the wider range of projects and I have significant contributions on dozens of them. I refactored http://www.wikipedia.org/ — note that the orbiting links are now expanded to not just link a word such as "English" but also include "The Free Encyclopedia" and the article count. It's a CSS trick. I worked on *all* the portals; nb: they're not wiki-text.

On id:wp, I did a large amount of work on navigation templates. Some months back I did a ton of work on our good Doctor Blofeld's WikiProject Intertranswiki. There are a large number of subpages and navigation templates and a lot of templatized boilerplate. This sort of crosswiki effort is key to the future success of these projects. I've seen a lot of the projects and while I may not be able to read their languages, I can read their code. Autonomy of projects is a fine concept, but everyone would benefit from more cooperation. I happened to notice today that Click (used in the overdone sig, above;) is now deprecated and has an older implementation on Wikisource that is full of issues. At a code level, there needs to be a huge increase in crosswiki coordination. For MediaWiki itself, this seems under control, but for templates, CSS and Javascript it is a major mess. The smaller projects are full of old versions of this sort of thing; they drew copies of stuff from en:wp (and some others, I'm sure) during the first year or so of their lives and often that's what they still have.

I'm good with code, sometimes too good. Some months back ep:wp reached three million articles. I don't see mere numbers as any sort of thing to celebrate. A great many of the articles here are of poor quality or on ludicrous topics. I put up a temporary user page with the current article count in white on a black background. I coded it such that the blackness extended to fill the screen (my screen, at least; there were unit-misalignments). I guess I'm well watched because several folks showed up and forcibly changed it to not hide the MediaWiki UI. I resisted because it was just a user page and it was temporary. I soon found the page protected against me ;( I know that I should have been less flip about it ;) Maaf.

   Pura Ulun Danu Bratan

Durova has suggested to me that more content work would be good and this is what Cas advised in my editor review. I believe both have said the Bali article should be a good article. I agree. My restrictions attract drama because they make me a target. When one of the shit-storms hit, I was working on Pura Ulun Danu Bratan and I see I've not been back to it. I do not actively seek drama, I seek solutions to problems. Sometimes this is gnomish stuff and sometimes it's large scale meta issues. I have been far more communicative in the last 20 months. People have seen this and more than a few times I've gotten a "well said" comment. I've seen my comments quoted and my code reused. So, maybe it's not all been a waste of time. I'm looking forward to the next year. I had higher hopes for this one, and will pull those along; maybe this means I'm an Immediatist. There might even be a page to go read about that term. Yup.

I wish all restrictions to be lifted so that I am on equal footing with other editors. Please. I'm not going run amok and am tired of being treated as a second class editor. The mentorship is due to expire anyway, but I will listen to folks on an ongoing basis. I have learned that I can't go it alone. I listen to folks that make sense not because I am required to, but because I want to. I am a much more known person these days and am open to dialogue with anyone who has a concern. I am on these projects because there is so much good here; the Monuments to the soul's magnificence as well as a chronicling of all of humanity's bloody deeds. These Blood items need to be covered and documented in detail in order that we understand them and our nature better. This is the core purpose of these projects. This is what cataloging Human Knowledge means. The Rose items, too, of course:


 * "Homer. The Divine Comedy. Greek statuary. Aqueducts. Paradise Lost. Mozart's music. Shakespeare, complete works. The Brontës. Tolstoy. The Pearl Mosque. Chartres Cathedral. Bach. Rembrandt. Verdi. Joyce. Penicillin. Keats. Turner. Heart transplants. Polio vaccine. Berlioz. Baudelaire. Bartok. Yeats. Woolf."

Cheers, Jack Merridew 13:28, 29 November 2009 (UTC)