Wikipedia:Mediation Cabal/Cases/2010-04-25/London Victory Parade of 1946

Where is the dispute?
London Victory Parade of 1946

Who is involved?

 * User:Chumchum7
 * User:Varsovian
 * and others

What is the dispute?
For the record, I'm not Polish nor do I speak Polish.

As far as I am aware there had been WP:ANI and arbitration reports and actions, as well as ongoing ARBCOM discretionary sanctions around the subject area - none of which I had been involved with. I have been most active on this article for about 6 weeks, and during that time an administrator, Fut.Perf., has identified this as a battleground article and has warned editors of WP:DIGWUREN restrictions coming soon.

In my opinion, I felt there were various long-term WP:OR, WP:SYNTH, WP:NPOV, WP:POINT, WP:AVOID and possibly WP:TE issues with User:Varsovian's editing on this article. Varsovian disagreed. I took to Talk page discussion with him about article content, attempts to refer to WP policy and guidelines, eventually resorting to expressing my heartfelt concerns here and here. He took the latter as an accusation of racism, here. I took Wikibreaks, I made RFCs, I directly approached administrators and editors for outside input, I flagged the article at WP:MILHIST and elsewhere to broaden out the input. I got little help. During my work on the article Varsovian created a WP:CFORK as Polish participation at the London Victory Parade of 1946. I made a request for deletion of that article at Articles for deletion/Polish participation at the London Victory Parade of 1946, which resulted in several editors coming in for discussion and their decision to redirect back to the original article. Since then, I have made a Wikiquette alert after what I felt was an offensive piece of WP:OR by Varsovian that appeared to push the Nazi Waffen-SS as a relevant to this article, although as far as I can see no verifiable source has connected the Nazi Waffen-SS to the subject of the article. An editor has referred to Varsovian as WP:TROLL in a recent edit summary. Varsovian has protested against this allegation.  My main concern is for the quality of WP and that policy and guidelines are being understood and adhered to, particularly WP:VERIFIABILITY and WP:OR.

Content is of secondary concern to me, and subordinate to my WP guidelines and policy concerns. In short, the content debate seems to be about whether or not the British Labour government treated the Poles fairly or unfairly in the London Victory Parade of 1946, whether Poles under British command and the Conservative Opposition of the day had a moral case, whether modern historians are accurate about what happened, the extent to which political or national POVs are blurring reality and whether the controversy is justifiable in the first place.

A couple of content issues, among others:


 * Is it verifiable that Polish forces being absent from the Parade was something to do with some of them having served in the German forces in WW2? I don't think so.


 * Is it verifiable that Poland had a Soviet-backed regime in June 1946, and is it verifiable that had something to with why some Brits and Poles objected to that government having been invited to send a delegation? I think so.

To repeat, I care more about WP guidelines and policy than content disputes here.


 * Supplementary note: Since the opening of this case, there has been a related ANI filing here resulting in an arbitration enforcement warning here . The ANI  is now closed. -Chumchum7 (talk) 05:33, 27 April 2010 (UTC)

What would you like to change about this?
Dialogue went into cross-purposes and misunderstanding, and has pretty much broken down. I think it is time for some important and lasting lessons about WP policy and guidelines, which I would like to be adhered to in the editing of this article, long term.

How do you think we can help?
Please don't "take sides". Please see if WP guidelines and policy are being adhered to in the long term by looking through the edits over the last 6 weeks in particular, but also over the last year as reference. To quote Fut.Perf. - "The problem with the article has never been that the weights of the different topic aspects are objectively too difficult to balance out. The problem has been a dispute owing to national agendas, OR tendencies and ownership attitudes". Please give us some fundamental and lasting lessons about WP policy and guidelines.

Mediator notes
I'm going to close out this case as 1) it's old and 2) FutPer has put an edit ban in place under WP:DIGWUREN. Since that's been triggered I don't think MedCab should get involved in a case that is under administrative action. --Wgfinley (talk) 22:19, 24 July 2010 (UTC)