Wikipedia:Requests for arbitration/Karmafist/Evidence

Anyone, whether directly involved or not, may add evidence to this page. Please make a header for your evidence and sign your comments with your name.

When placing evidence here, please be considerate of the arbitrators and be concise. Long, rambling, or stream-of-conciousness rants are not helpful.

As such, it is extremely important that you use the prescribed format. Submitted evidence should include a link to the actual page diff; links to the page itself are not sufficient. For example, to cite the edit by Mennonot to the article Anomalous phenomenon adding a link to Hundredth Monkey use this form:.

This page is not for general discussion - for that, see talk page.

Please make a section for your evidence and add evidence only in your own section. Please limit your evidence to a maximum 1000 words and 100 diffs, a much shorter, concise presentation is more likely to be effective. Please focus on the issues raised in the complaint and answer and on diffs which illustrate behavior which relates to the issues.

If you disagree with some evidence you see here, please cite the evidence in your own section and provide counter-evidence, or an explanation of why the evidence is misleading. Do not edit within the evidence section of any other user.

Be aware that the Arbitrators may at times rework this page to try to make it more coherent. If you are a participant in the case or a third party, please don't try to refactor the page, let the Arbitrators do it. If you object to evidence which is inserted by other participants or third parties please cite the evidence and voice your objections within your own section of the page. It is especially important to not remove evidence presented by others. If something is put in the wrong place, please leave it for the arbitrators to move.

The Arbitrators may analyze evidence and other assertions at /Workshop. /Workshop provides for comment by parties and others as well as arbitrators. After arriving at proposed principles, findings of fact or remedies voting by Arbitrators takes place at /Proposed decision. Only Arbitrators may edit /Proposed decision.

Karmafist has been welcoming new users with a message including "wikipolitical" links
Here is one of more than 50 such greetings from March 12. In the middle of a fairly standard looking welcome message appear these paragraphs:


 * Also, if you could, please sign my petition


 * If you'd like to know what's going on in regards to the internal workings of Wikipedia from an experienced user, here's an insight into the unwritten rules of this place.

I do not believe anybody is arguing that Karmafist has not issued many welcome messages such as this, so I do not think it is neccessary to provide a great number of diffs demonstrating this.

The "petition" link is to User:Karmafist/manifesto (March 12 version). This manifesto and petition is clearly intended in good faith and is on the whole inoffensive, but it does endorse notions of how wikipedia should be run that not everyone would agree with, for example:


 * 1) A sociocratic (not democratic) bicameral legislature (with a lower house made up of all users and an elected upper house) to decide the projects' policies and guidelines.
 * 2) An understanding that once these policies and guidelines are agreed upon by the community, that they must be followed until changed by the community.
 * 3) An understanding that the role of the Arbitration Committee is judicial.

The second link is to User:Karmafist/wikiphilosophies (March 12 version). It contains among other content a number of very negative statements about the current state of Wikipedia. (Quoting these portions out-of-context didn't feel right here. Please read the page.) &mdash;Bunchofgrapes (talk) 03:37, 15 March 2006 (UTC)

Tony Sidaway has been flamebaiting by robotically editing Karmafist's welcomes
Despite the fact, as stated by Bunchofgrapes above, that Karmafist's welcomes are disputable, Tony Sidaway has been ruthlessly and robotically editing Karmafist's welcomes on those said newcomers' talk pages, presumably without the abovesaid newcomers' nor Karmafist's consent as the number of changes is so massive:


 * User talk:Sansan helenyu as shown above by Bunchofgrapes:
 * User talk:Mrbinn:
 * User talk:Penpusher, in which Karmafist wrote an edit summary "here comes the thugs":

It's important to note that:
 * 1) Those edits (and of course the remaining 40s) are identical. To some extent we may consider Tony Sidaway spamming or mass vandalizing. Imagine you added some main to a number of articles and somebody replaced them with seedetails in a row. You'll always think of that as vandalizing.
 * 2) What Tony Sidaway replaced with Karmafist's message is the standard welcoming note, which is confusing as it looks in some ways similar to Karmafist's.

Tony Sidaway's act would severely confuse newcomers that the person who originally welcomed them has retracted his own message and replaced it with something else, as newcomers are usually not used to viewing edit histories.

From the above, Tony Sidaway's act is severely provocative. Karmafist has already shown his greatest courtesy in not edit warring against Tony Sidaway on the newcomers' user talk pages. With such flamebaiting by Tony Sidaway, it is a human being's natural reflection for Karmafist to reject a negotiation with Tony Sidaway. -- De ryc k C.  04:48, 15 March 2006 (UTC)

Karmafist's history of welcoming new users
Karmafist has a long history of welcoming users in a friendly manner using the standard template. He started in August, and on October 12 began to record his efforts. On January 2, he changed his modus operandi to use a personal template that referred newcomers to his own "wikiphilosophies", and on February 8 he added a request for the new user to sign his petition or manifesto.

October

 * 12 October, 2005
 * 14:28
 * User:Karmafist/welcome: creates the page and lists 200 users whom he has already welcomed. The first was 7 August and the 200th was 10 October.  During that period he was using the standard "welcome" template.

December

 * 1 December, 2005
 * 00:46
 * User:Karmafist/welcome: adds 247th user to list. Still using standard template.

January

 * 1 January, 2006
 * 10:52
 * User:Karmafist/welcome: adds 710th user to list. Still using standard template.
 * 23:59
 * Template:Kwelcome: First version of own welcome template (the original has since been userfied to User:Karmafist/Welcome and the version at the original location now just redirects to Template:Welcome)
 * Adds the words " If you'd like to know what's going on in regards to the personal workings of Wikipedia from an expert, here are my views on the project as whole", which link to User:Karmafist/wikiphilosophies. At that date the latter document looked like this (from a previous edit on 20 December).
 * 2 January, 2006
 * 00:01
 * User talk:Dustysoul first welcome with Template:Kwelcome
 * 21:55
 * User:Karmafist/wikiphilosophies: adds very negative criticism of the Wikkipedia-related IRC channels: "Almost all wiki related channels other than #wikipedia, especially technically related ones, are worthless since they are filled with silence, which apparently is more favorable than assisting you, someone more ignorant of something than them."
 * 22:00
 * User:Karmafist/wikiphilosophies: adds "alternative" way to make policy. "Step 1. Find a policy that's faulty. Step 2. Blantantly ignore it, advertise your civil disobedience if wished. Be nice while doing so. Step 3. Until people give you a compromise or real world reason to stop, just don't. The winner is the person who edits the most without breaking WP:3RR or WP:CIVIL.

February

 * 8 February. 2006
 * 19:26
 * User:Karmafist/wikiphilosophies: adds "Also, if you could, please sign my petition." This links to User:Karmafist/manifesto.  This is what it looked like at that time.
 * 20:22
 * User:Karmafist/welcome: notes that he has welcomed his 1981st user. Still using the kwelcome template, now with his wikiphilosophies and solicitation to sign his petition.
 * 11 February
 * 03:53
 * Template:Kwelcome: User:Netoholic adds a deletion tag to the template.
 * 03:56
 * Templates for deletion/Log/2006 February 11: Netoholic writes deletion nomination, the grounds being the divisiveness of the template.
 * 05:32 and 05:53
 * Template:Kwelcome: User:Sean Black userfies it with the edit summary: "Personalized template, doesn't belong in the main template namespace"
 * 12 February
 * 20:02
 * Template:Kfwelcome: Karmafist creates a duplicate of the template. There was some edit warring on this template, but finally it was made into a duplicate of Template:Welcome by User:Mailer diablo, who closed the deletion discussion.
 * 13 February
 * 06:19
 * Template:Kwelcome: User:FreplySpang redirects the template to Template:Welcome.
 * 15 February
 * 06:26
 * User talk:NSLE: Karmafist responds to a request by NSLE to stop welcoming new editors with that template: "I respect newbies, since they're often intelligent people in the real world, and they overwhelmingly just ignore the petition so far), but I respect you and all the help you've given me, and that(with you and others) is the driving force behind that manifesto for me anyway, so I might as well give it a rest. I can still do normal welcomes in the interim."

Second assertion
Place argument and diffs which support the second assertion, for example, your second assertion might be "Jimmy Wales makes personal attacks". Here you would list specific edits where Jimmy Wales made personal attacks.

First assertion
Place argument and diffs which support your assertion, for example, your first assertion might be "Jimmy Wales engages in edit warring". Here you would list specific edits to specific articles which show Jimmy Wales engaging in edit warring

Second assertion
Place argument and diffs which support the second assertion, for example, your second assertion might be "Jimmy Wales makes personal attacks". Here you would list specific edits where Jimmy Wales made personal attacks.