Wikipedia talk:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Tothwolf/Proposed decision

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Proposed decision - Theserialcomma?
Hi there. I just noticed the proposed decision and I wonder, what about, who has been named as a involved party? Shouldn't the proposed decision at least mention whether the allegations against them have been correct or incorrect? Regards  So Why  18:22, 5 January 2010 (UTC)
 * A couple points: 1) One arb writes the initial draft of the case and it is their opinion alone. So other arbs may (or may not) add additional proposals. 2) It is common for cases to be silent about whether allegations are true or false. ArbCom is not an investigative body. The ruling only need focus on the issues that are necessary to resolve the dispute so that people can return to the core mission of writing the encyclopedia articles. So Finding of facts and remedies may not directly address all the presented evidence. This is a general reply and does not reflect the merits of a mention in this specific case. I hope that helps. :-) FloNight&#9829;&#9829;&#9829;&#9829; 22:27, 5 January 2010 (UTC)
 * I also wonder why there're no proposed consequences for regarding WP:AGF, although he's been accusing me of puppeting without backing up that claim. Should I've requested to be added as an involved party first? (If that's the case I'd like to do that with this comment.) It's all laid out on the Evidence and Evidence talk page. thommey (talk) 01:04, 8 January 2010 (UTC)

Comment by uninvolved author Alainr345 who had past interaction with Tothwolf
It's the third time I post this comment below, because the first 2 times it was deleted for not being at the right place. Now can you guys have a little bit of respect too for REGULAR editors who are not versed into all your bureaucracy, please, thank you (I think the place where to put comments for arbitration cases is not clear, as is demonstrated by Dougweller's bit of text posted December 19th). Don't remove this section again or I will build a case of disrespect against these administrators. I don't like to be (implicitely) censored by guys I've never seen or heard about. --Alainr345 22:29, 8 January 2010 (UTC) "'While not a party to this particular action in any form or fashion, I would like to add that I personally have had no bad experiences with Tothwolf in the past. --  Alain  R 3 4 5   Techno-Wiki-Geek    21:53, 8 December 2009 (UTC)'"

Future arbitration guaranteed, thank you!
I would like to thank the ArbCom for this particularly "editors reminded", so-2008 decision, which managed to radicalize some editors, who now vote "keep, it's open source" or similar in practically all AfDs involving such software, e.g. Articles for deletion/HOCR (software), just to counterbalance the "radical deletionists" (real or perceived). This pretty much guarantees another ArbCom case down the road. Pcap ping  18:36, 10 January 2010 (UTC)

Proposed remedy 1 and enforcement items 1 and 1.1
Is there a reason the verbs here are "may be blocked" instead of "should be blocked?"

Consider the arbitrator comment when the issue was brought here, "The problem seems to be a lack of engagement by the administrator corps," it seems appropriate that it should also be handed back to those same administrators who lacked engagement with a more strongly worded request for them to deal with it. Tothwolf seems to have been given mercy on more than half of a dozen previous attempts at WP:WQA and WP:ANI because of his social relationships with administrators who were willing to play obfuscation of the underlying civility problem. If Arbcom, the last step of dispute resolution, doesn't provide a strong call to act on the problem, I have no faith the problem will be acted on.

I will also note the length of time, six months in proposal 1, is shorter than the time the problem has lasted. Miami33139 (talk) 21:36, 12 January 2010 (UTC)

Good faith nom (to delete), not withdrawn => speedy keep?
This is given as 2nd in the list of examples of Tothwolf assuming bad faith with the nominator (JBsupreme), but if you look at the AfD closure, it was closed as speedy keep hardly a day later by admin User:Brandon; nobody but JBsupreme though the article should be deleted. Although the closing admin did not give a rationale for the speedy part, the only choice in WP:SK is that the nom was in bad faith (point 2), because none of the other apply. Perhaps you should also sanction User:Brandon for assuming bad faith with JB?Pcap ping  15:41, 18 January 2010 (UTC)
 * grasping at straws.  16x9 (talk) 16:04, 18 January 2010 (UTC)
 * the article should have been deleted, in my opinion. the keep arguments were weak. Theserialcomma (talk) 21:35, 18 January 2010 (UTC)
 * impressive attitude. Pcap ping  07:40, 19 January 2010 (UTC)
 * I thought so myself. 16x9 (talk) 16:06, 19 January 2010 (UTC)
 * It's probably a snowball close. Tim Song (talk) 22:08, 18 January 2010 (UTC)
 * it was a snowball close, but it seems to have been based on head-counting votes without weighing the mediocre/non-existent strength of the arguments Theserialcomma (talk) 23:46, 18 January 2010 (UTC)
 * Speedy keep and SNOW keep are often used as interchangeable terms for closing a discussion early, in this case probably because the AFD closing script does only support adding "speedy", not "SNOW". There is no assumption of bad faith if one uses "speedy" instead of "SNOW" - and the guideline at WP:SK does not decide it anyway: It explicitly lists only common situations where speedy keeping can happen and does not say that there are no other reasons for doing so. Regards  So Why  17:10, 19 January 2010 (UTC)
 * I'm willing to WP:AGF that speedy was SNOW here. Thanks, Pcap ping  14:49, 21 January 2010 (UTC)

FYI - Miami33139
Miami33139 is still attempting to alter, hide, or otherwise remove comments I make. --Tothwolf (talk) 17:15, 19 January 2010 (UTC)

Theserialcomma as well: --Tothwolf (talk) 17:21, 19 January 2010 (UTC)


 * Soapboxing and personal attacks should be removed.... However, in this case all parties should have asked one of the clerks on this case to do so. 16x9 (talk) 00:31, 20 January 2010 (UTC)

Dueling pianos
I've already emailed some of this directly to ArbCom, but I may as well expand this to include more diffs and contrib links and post it publicly so that everyone can compare these for themselves.

Regarding proposed findings of fact # 2 Arbitration/Requests/Case/Tothwolf/Proposed decision:

"It is more likely that Miami33139 has identified articles to propose or nominate for deletion from categories or lists of articles, rather than by any malevolent following of Tothwolf's contributions list (for example:, five consecutive deletion nominations of members of Category:Internet Relay Chat bouncers, gateways and proxies)." (emphesis mine)

This was written as "It is more likely ..." noting this as a possibility, and not a hard fact. These diffs and the category links/diffs below nullify that hypothesis:        

(The above diffs are already on the Evidence page, but it might be easy to overlook some of them given the sheer volume of evidence.)

Category:Internet Relay Chat bouncers, gateways and proxies (history):
 * Tothwolf
 * Feb 25, 2009: contribs
 * Sep 24, 2009: Wikistalking trigger: diff
 * Miami33139
 * Sep 25, 2009: contribs
 * Sep 25, 2009: First deletion nomination of batch: diff

Category:Internet Relay Chat bots (history):
 * Tothwolf
 * Feb 25, 2009: contribs
 * Miami33139
 * Sep 25, 2009: diff
 * Nov 16, 2009: diff, diff
 * Dec 20, 2009: contribs

(See also deleted contributions)

These were not the only categories I created which Miami33139 targeted. Another related example is Category:Internet Relay Chat games (CFD nom) which was another category which I created where Miami33139 CFD'd the category after prodding/AfD'd most of the articles that I had previously added there.

Much more (including lots of non IRC-related material) can be found in the wikitable here.

--Tothwolf (talk) 23:15, 22 January 2010 (UTC)


 * Obviously, the committee did not think that that sequence of events was more plausible than simply finding the articles by navigating the categories you created, and where you were the sole editor. At this point, WP:STICK seems to apply. Pcap ping  15:02, 24 January 2010 (UTC)

The use of my username as the case name was supposed to result in a much more "neutral" case name when compared to the case name Jehochman originally used ("Hounding of Tothwolf") when he filed the RFAR (RFAR link). Unfortunately it seems to have had the exact opposite effect, which was a concern noted by both myself and Jehochman from the beginning. I've already had discussions with ArbCom about the case name, and even though twice now there has been willingness to rename it (months back as well as last week), nothing has been done and the current case name has only made it easier for some of those involved in this case to attempt to muddy the waters and redirect the focus of the case from their behaviours to absolutely anything they could possibly find or even create that they hoped might otherwise discredit me. [I was going to include some diffs here but it seems to be a waste of time so I'm not going to bother digging through my notes for them.] While I understand the reasoning behind your WP:STICK comment, even you understand that this won't simply go away if left unresolved as it is now. The fact remains that I have not been the only target of these three individuals (cf. User:Ed Fitzgerald and others), but afaik I was the first that they've targeted while working as a group. If their behaviours are not addressed, even if I were to simply "disappear" entirely from Wikipedia, the behaviours that have been documented by both myself and others (both past and present) are going to continue (as they have even during this case) and will continue to be disruptive towards the goal of building the encyclopedia. As noted above, these diffs (the first of which are the beginning of the wikistalking behaviour from Miami33139)        cannot be attributed to any sort of "category navigation" and Miami33139 admitted on-wiki to finding some of these from my contribution history. Similar diffs are easily found for all three individuals named in this case. The other thing that should probably be said here is that while I have been somewhat limited in what I can personally do in response to the on-wiki harassment efforts of these three individuals, their efforts off-wiki, including attempts to damage my reputation, are a completely different matter. The efforts of one of these individuals to breach the security of my personal webserver to gain access to my email, personal information manager, project holding area, etc did not go unnoticed and their ISP's abuse group was notified and very cooperative. Logs of the DDoS attack I was the victim of the day the RFAR was filed were also kept (a sample of which, including a list of the IP addresses involved was also provided to ArbCom). --Tothwolf (talk) 21:51, 24 January 2010 (UTC)
 * That's one possibility, although I don't think the committee as a whole was even aware of the finer details such as what I noted above. Another possibility, which is unfortunately far more likely, and which is currently being discussed by the larger online community outside of Wikipedia, is that the name chosen for this case (case name discussion) resulted in an inherit bias and may have led to the drafting arbitrator simply discarding nearly all of the evidence I presented (viz: WP:SPADE, and yes WP:AGF etc, but even Occam's razor supports this). None of the evidence I presented appears to be used or addressed in the draft  at all.
 * so now you are accusing us of libel ("attempts to damage my reputation"), hacking ("breach the security of my personal webserver to gain access to my email"), and ddos attacks. give me a fucking break. hacking and ddos attacks are felonies, of course, and so i hope you've contacted the state and federal authorities, whose job it is to assist you in apprehending these shadowy criminal hacker slanderers, whom you claim are either me, miami, or jbsupreme. the only problem is that your accusations, without evidence, have now put you in the position of publicly accusing us of being felonious criminal hackers and slanderers - WITHOUT IRREFUTABLE EVIDENCE. no police report, no nothing. you make the public accusation, but you provide NO PUBLIC EVIDENCE. for this disgusting behavior, i would implore arbcom to permanently ban you from wikipedia. calling us criminals, hackers, DDOSers, and accusing us of any felonious misdeeds, when you are blatantly wrong and without evidence to back it, means that you've crossed the rubicon into disgusting new territory of egregiously unacceptable incivility.
 * and finally, i must say that i appreciate your fantastic wikilawyering and gaming the system here. see, this arbcom case filed against you has unilaterally admonished you for your unacceptable behavior, and you are days away from the case being closed, and the sanctions becoming official. however, it's not officially closed yet, so you are gaming the system by sneaking in personal attack after personal attack. this way, you are technically not violating your official restrictions that have already passed because the case hasn't officially closed. the good news is that your negligent incivility, malicious and paranoid accusations, and obtuse fabrications (we are paid editors! we are email hacking you! we are DDOSing your unknown server! we are actively damaging your off-wiki reputation!) have finally caught up to you, and your abuse has not gone unnoticed. i am glad this arbcom was filed against you because now your shenanigans have been scrutinized by enough uninvolved admins to where you're done. farewell, and please remove your personal attack diffs from your talk page, or i'll be reporting it to ANI after the arbcom closes. someone else will end up removing it after it goes to ANI, but you could just do it yourself. do you really want more drama? just remove your attack diffs against us on your talk page and go back to gathering your hacking logs to send to the FBI. no more drama. no more personal attacks. no more false accusations. just move on. bye. Theserialcomma (talk) 07:50, 25 January 2010 (UTC)