Wikipedia:Requests for arbitration/Prem Rawat/Evidence/History

A brief history of Prem Rawat
I analysed the history of Prem Rawat using the IBM History Flow visualisation tool as a guide. Using that tool, the different phases of development of the article can quite clearly be seen. On an article with a history as long as this one, it only provides an overview of what has happened in the article's past, but it is nevertheless useful for identifying periods of major change and periods of constancy in article development.

Given that there have, to date, been 4981 revisions to this article, there's a hell of a lot of material to work through here. I hope this is going to be a useful outline, though if people more familiar with the article than I can see any major things that I've missed, by all means point them out on the talk page.

The story
The article was started in May 2004 by an IP editor. In June 2004, Andries tagged it with disputed, and after that it began to be expanded, with major contributions from Andries, Jossi and a number of IP editors.

The criticism of Prem Rawat page (now a redirect) was started at the end of June 2004 by Jossi. The article was further developed until there were more disputes at the end of August 2004, by which stage it looked like this.

Throughout September 2004, an alternative draft was prepared, with significant contributions from Zappaz, Jossi, Richard G., Andries and Gary D. That version was applied towards the end of September, and after that the article remained substantially the same until May 2006.

In the middle of May 2006 (for a week or two from around the 13th), the article was reorganised, largely by Momento, so that it looked something like this by the end of May. In this form it remained essentially the same until January 2007.

Around the 19th/20th of January 2007 there was another restructuring and expansion, coinciding with an effort to merge in the criticism of Prem Rawat page. By the end of January it looked like this. After that, the article remained largely the same until May 2007.

A large change occurred in May 2007. From about the 10th of May until the end of the month, there was a dispute between two alternate versions of the article, the existing long version which had essentially been in place since January, and a new shorter version of about half the length (which is largely the same as the current version of the article). Most of the difference came from omitting the "reception" section, which was a collection of both positive and negative reactions to the subject. The shorter version had been worked on here since around March 2007. The discussion around which version to implement can be found mainly in this talk archive.

Ultimately the shorter version prevailed and formed the basis of the article until February of this year. Around the 8th, AzraelUK spotted that the contents of criticism of Prem Rawat, which had supposedly been merged in January 2007, were not in the main article, and restored the criticism page. In fact it had been merged, but removed later during the May 2007 reworking. Francis Schonken, who had performed the merger, noticed this and re-added it to the article. This then prompted a bit of an edit war, and the emergence of a potential third version with a shortened criticism section.

There was further conflict through February and into March, with the present version probably being most similar to the "third way" version, including a "reception" section in this form.

Analysis
Despite the fact that this article has been edited so very many times, there have essentially only been three major versions of the article in play in the last three and a half years: the September 2004 version, which survived essentially intact (despite some reorganisation) for around two and a half years, and the two competing May 2007 versions.

The various versions have essentially contained the same content on the life, activities etc of Rawat. On these matters the differences between revisions have essentially been stylistic or matters of phrasing and emphasis, which are content issues and are not of themselves matters for the committee.

Indeed, there has only been one major difference since late 2004, over the inclusion or exclusion of either a "criticism" section or a broader "reception" section, whether in the main article or in a separate page. This issue is not a pure content question, but one involving questions of the application of our core content policies, and so is one that is appropriate for our consideration.