James-

this does not belong on wikipedia-l. I have therefore copied it to wikien-l, and all replies should go there.

1) There was an edit war on the "Mother Teresa" page after you moved away about 20K of text to a separate "criticism" page in clear violation of our neutrality policy, which states that no preference should be given to any side.

2) I have warned you repeatedly not to make any substantial changes to the article while the major issue of whether the text was to be moved to a separate page was not settled. You ignored these warnings and pushed forward to edit the text, including your movement of 20K of text to a separate page, and complain that these edits were reverted together. This is simply disingenuous and you know it.

3) A sysop protected the page in an attempt to cool down the edit war. This was a largely symbolic gesture since we are both sysops, but we chose not to edit the page while it was protected. However, this precluded non- sysops who had announced that they wanted to make edits to the page from doing so. To prevent this unfortunate situation, I unprotected the page with the comment:

"removing protection for now (I was involved so I won't edit for another few hours if Jtdirl won't, but others should be able to)"

I did not edit the page for the next few hours and nor did you, the edit war seems to be over and I considered the matter settled. To call an unprotection to allow *others*, non-sysops, to continue editing the page while I myself refrained from doing so an abuse of sysop power is, again, very disingenuous.

The important facts in this matter are this:

You moved virtually all the criticisms of Mother Teresa to a separate page without discussing this on the talk page first. Three users (myself, Bryan and Jiang) disagreed with this. I and Bryan Derksen reverted your changes. It might be argued that it would have been "wiser" to just wait a day or two and then address the matter again, but that is clearly wrong -- had we done so, you would have reorganized the entire article(s) according to your idea of NPOV, making it very difficult to reach any kind of consensus on the matter.

In addition to that, you continue to play your usual games, which consist of - personal attacks (always singling out one contributor, even though several users have expressed disagreement with your actions) - false accusations of abusive behavior - disingenuous tactics like your behavior in the edit war, piling changes upon changes to bully your way through - making false claims (e.g. repeatedly claiming that the criticism section was merely based on "a single TV show", whereas I have shown you the multitude of sources on which it was based, including several books and newspaper articles and an editorial in "The Lancet")

I chose to ignore your continuous stream of attacks against me, but other users would not have shown the same amount of patience and be driven away by your behavior, which resembles that of a schoolyard bully.

In spite of this unacceptable behavior on your part, I have repeatedly offered to seek a cooperative, consensual solution for the alleged or real NPOV problems on the page in question. In fact, I was working on reaching a consensus with Bryan and other contributors while you continued reverting to your style. Everyone can see this by taking a look at [[Talk:Mother Teresa]].

It is time for you to stop playing strategic games against other contributors, and to start working in the spirit of mutual cooperation. Now is a good moment to do so -- I fully approve of your recent edits of the article (provided you haven't again started moving away the criticism section). Yet you continue your bullying tactics against other contributors. You do not want peaceful cooperation, you want to pick fights and win. That is not how Wikipedia works.

I can and will work with you on this article, provided you make a serious commitment to seeking consensus on your changes. That cannot always be done, of course, but there are reasonable courses of actions in the cases where it can't (act based on established precedent, hold a vote, ask Jimbo etc.). Just trying to get "your way or the highway" will not lead to any kind of solution.

So here's my offer: Make the changes to the criticism section you find important. I will edit the parts which I don't like and if we can't agree, we'll go to the talk page. Once the criticism section is edited, we will take a look at the entire article and if it is too long (32K), we will summarize individual sections and split them away, regardless of their content. If it is still below that size, we won't do that. If the criticism section is still too dominant, we will together try to expand the other sections of the article. How about some wiki-cooperation for a change?

Regards,

Erik