As some of you may know, I am a school teacher IRL and I do Wikipedia editing with my students. So maybe we ought to take this as a training experience for all those involved, both Rexford and the editor who blocked him.

For this to work, all have to agree to learn new ways of dealing with these situations. Rexford says hes is a Wikipedian in Residence at the Africa Centre in Cape Town. Then I suppose it would be best for him to get the edit block lifted, and I am sure we can help him with that. I hope that he will be willing to go through a bit of online training to help him avoid such issues in the future - advice, emails, chat sessions, etc.

On Fri, Apr 3, 2015 at 9:03 PM, rupert THURNER <rupert.thurner@gmail.com> wrote:

gabe, i put a message on rex's talk page. asaf, i am always appreciating unconditional help :) to me copyright violations and blocking are separate topics. a block is justified for somebody stubbornly doing things again. if rex copied over texts 2012, than it is just bullshit to block him 2015. i mean which world are we living in?

rex copied over text, and added a reference where he got it from. he saved the time to write it himself. this was allowed in germany until 150 years ago and made it prosperous. i had to have not only one conversation with real people, experts, until i could make a distinction that copying a cc0 licensed text is ok, while copying a company or persons website text is not ok. even if i put a note where i got the text from. and even if i know the person does not care or even more so, appreciates it.

i d guess a couple of chats with rex should solve comprehension issues same way we all walked through when touching wikipedia. i fully with douglas here.

rupert

On Fri, Apr 3, 2015 at 3:00 PM, Asaf Bartov <abartov@wikimedia.org> wrote:

Before I could offer what meager help I can, I'd like to have the facts before us.  Rex, it is a puzzling choice by you to evade the simple question of whether you, to your knowledge, violated copyright.  It would help if you could offer an explanation.

Cheers,

   A.

On Fri, Apr 3, 2015 at 3:29 AM, Gabriel Thullen <gabriel@thullen.com> wrote:

Yes, you are right about the criteria.

But...

The way I see things, certain rules should be open to interpretation. I am suggesting that a clean start may be the best way to deal with this situation, under the condition that our friend spends 6 months or so learning the ropes. The criteria is intended to prevent edit war specialists from creating new accounts as soon as their current one is blocked. I really do not think that this is the case here.

24.130.172.5 was hounded by an IP (24.130.172.5) who started contributing on Febuary 10th 2015 with a surprisingly good knowledge of how Wikipedia works. I do not like that type of anonymous contributor at all. If you know how to contribute, you use your account. Anyway, this IP did declare (https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Administrators%27_noticeboard/Incidents&diff=prev&oldid=650110340):

I definitely made the mistake of using the speedy deletion banner when not 100% of the current article was copied. My analysis was that the articles started with copyrighted content and therefore it would just be better to restart with a clean slate. I won't make this assumption in the future. Spearmind saw me concentrate on Ghana articles (as said that's because I was reviewing article creations by Nkansahrexford who concentrates on Ghana) and assumed that I was on a mission to delete articles about Ghana. What I deplore is Spearmind's attitude on his talk page. I tried to establish a dialog and asked him to use the talk pages instead of just removing banners but he would not listen and became aggressively defensive.

Tonight I finished reviewing article creations by Nkansahrexford and applied one additional copyviocore banner to Thomas Mensah. A few other articles have copyvio issues but at a much smaller scale and I decided to let it go. There were also a few copyvio issues from the same user on Commons (see his talk page there).

Thanks to everybody who helped with this situation. 24.130.172.5 (talk) 06:32, 6 March 2015 (UTC)

If this IP knows so much, why does he/she not contribute under his/her user name ? What is wrong with being User:Badzil if that is who he/she is ?

But that is not the issue at hand. Apart from the fact that the admin who did the blocking claims to have take a "taking a long wikibreak and will be back on Wikipedia at some point probably" since mid-March (he has done plenty of work since, including the edit block) what can we do to help Nkansahrexford while he is being harassed by an experienced user who prefers to contribute anonymously?

Of course the best way could be negociation. Has anyone interceded on his behalf? Has anybody helped him start negociating?

Gabe

On Fri, Apr 3, 2015 at 10:38 AM, Florence Devouard <anthere@anthere.org> wrote:

But the policy, in its introduction, states

A clean start is not permitted if there are active bans, blocks or sanctions (including, but not limited to those listed here) in place against the old account.

See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Clean_start#Criteria

Sorry Gabe... but no. I stand by my position. First negociate, then restart (whether a fresh or not a fresh; but in all cases, in all transparency).

Best

Ant


Le 03/04/15 00:16, Gabriel Thullen a écrit :

I am terribly sorry that you feel shocked by my proposition. Please note that my proposal does correspond to "Wikipedia rules", I just tried to spell it out a bit.

We are not talking about how to bypass Arbitration Committee sanctions, we are talking about an editor who has been blocked.

The details can be found here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Clean_start

I really think that our friend should try to make a clean start, spend the time it takes to get a feel of how Wikipedia really works, and then these complicated issues we are facing right now will seem a lot simpler.

Best regards

Gabe

On Thu, Apr 2, 2015 at 7:31 PM, Florence Devouard <anthere@anthere.org> wrote:

Well... I am... shocked by this proposition.

What you propose is plain and simple a way to go around a block. This comes in opposition with Wikipedia rules. So you recommand to "not respect the rules" ? Uh....

Ethically speaking, I think it is wrong as well as it is cheating and a lack of respect for the community and its way of operating.

Technically speaking, this is probably not possible as his IP is likely to be blocked as well for new account creation.

I think the ONLY way to deal with that is
1) to pause and reflect on why that happened
2) to talk with the one who blocked and to propose to be on probation with a solid-established wikipedian to "review" additions and help deal with these copyright issues
3) to keep low profile and indeed to focus on small edits, small improvements, categories => create a good track record.

Anthere

On Wed, Apr 1, 2015 at 10:45 AM, Douglas Scott <douglas.i.scott@gmail.com> wrote:

If we can address the cause of concern about the perceived copyright issues and address them then I think it should be quite simple to get it reverted.  

What are the copyright concerns that Wizardman has?

Cheers,

Douglas.

On 1 April 2015 at 12:38, Florence Devouard <anthere@anthere.org> wrote:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:BlockList?wpTarget=Nkansahrexford&limit=50

No expiry date.... uh.... :-[

Le 31/03/15 22:27, Nkansah Rexford a écrit :

Eventually, I'm blocked from Wikipedia.

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