Hi Zoe,
I've a serious allegation to make about a fellow Wiki. I wrote a page on the Irish Potato famine which became rather controversial with two people. One of them threatened to revert any changes I made, and make sure I could not revert his changes back.
He rewrote one section of the page in a decidedly POV, dodgy historical way. When I tried to revert, I found that many of the earlier versions had been vandalised, by him, so as to ensure that either I could not revert to them or that if I did, the page would be so littered with POVs (his interpretations of what he thinks my POVs are!) as to be pulled off.
Here's an example of one of the paragraphs vandalised. The changes he made are in capitals.
One issue which divides the perspective of Ireland on the history of the Famine from some BOGUS attitudes among the FAKE Irish - living abroad, is the claim, made by some of the latter, that the Famine amounted to genocide by the British against the Irish. Few Irish historians accept such a PATENTLY FALSE definition, which would imply a deliberate policy of extermination. While all are agreed that the British policies during the Famine, particularly those applied by the ministry of [[Lord John Russell]], were somewhat misguided, perhaps ill-informed and frequently counter-productive, with Professor Joe Lee calling what happened a 'holocaust', [9] Irish, British and American historians of the cailbre of Professors [[F.S.L. Lyons]], John A. Murphy, Joe Lee, Roy Foster, and James S. Donnelly, Jr, as well as historians Cecil Woodham-Smith, Peter Gray, Ruth Dudley Edwards and many others have long dismissed claims of A DELIBERATE POLICY OF genocide. PERHAPS MORE THAN A STRONG BELIEF.
I spotted this paragraph by chance. I saw other dodgy add ons as well. I had to go back to the version before he began his first of a series of (seemingly innocent) changes (announcing how he was correcting a spelling or a grammatical mistake, etc) to find a version that had not been vandalised.
The person responsible is Stevertigo.
What should we do about this? It is one thing to row over interpretation, but to deliberately vandalise earlier versions so that they cannot be used or would get pulled as being POV, is astonishing. I know how annoyed many of us are with 172, but at least (as far as I know) all he does is revert versions, not vandalise earlier versions as well so that no one can revert his revertions. I don't fancy having to stand guard over an article most people are happy with, all because some twat is determined to find some way of screwing it up
If this is the standard of behaviour that Stevertigo is bringing to Wiki, then he should be banned.
JT
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If this is the standard of behaviour that Stevertigo is bringing to Wiki, then he should be banned.
I have noticed other strange edits from Stevertigo. But his later version seems to strive more for NPOV. Let's keep an eye on his contributions. I'll post a separate mail explaining what I think could be done in cases like this one.
Regards,
Erik
James, All you can do is to ask for help from the people on the mailing list, and try to revert back to a reasonably NPOV article and make the needed changes. Or give up. That's pretty much what I've done. I'm tired of being the bad person whenever there are problems, and I never get any support. See the articles in support of 172 below. Why should we care? Zoe
james duffy jtdirl@hotmail.com wrote:Hi Zoe,
I've a serious allegation to make about a fellow Wiki. I wrote a page on the Irish Potato famine which became rather controversial with two people. One of them threatened to revert any changes I made, and make sure I could not revert his changes back.
He rewrote one section of the page in a decidedly POV, dodgy historical way. When I tried to revert, I found that many of the earlier versions had been vandalised, by him, so as to ensure that either I could not revert to them or that if I did, the page would be so littered with POVs (his interpretations of what he thinks my POVs are!) as to be pulled off.
Here's an example of one of the paragraphs vandalised. The changes he made are in capitals.
One issue which divides the perspective of Ireland on the history of the Famine from some BOGUS attitudes among the FAKE Irish - living abroad, is the claim, made by some of the latter, that the Famine amounted to genocide by the British against the Irish. Few Irish historians accept such a PATENTLY FALSE definition, which would imply a deliberate policy of extermination. While all are agreed that the British policies during the Famine, particularly those applied by the ministry of [[Lord John Russell]], were somewhat misguided, perhaps ill-informed and frequently counter-productive, with Professor Joe Lee calling what happened a 'holocaust', [9] Irish, British and American historians of the cailbre of Professors [[F.S.L. Lyons]], John A. Murphy, Joe Lee, Roy Foster, and James S. Donnelly, Jr, as well as historians Cecil Woodham-Smith, Peter Gray, Ruth Dudley Edwards and many others have long dismissed claims of A DELIBERATE POLICY OF genocide. PERHAPS MORE THAN A STRONG BELIEF.
I spotted this paragraph by chance. I saw other dodgy add ons as well. I had to go back to the version before he began his first of a series of (seemingly innocent) changes (announcing how he was correcting a spelling or a grammatical mistake, etc) to find a version that had not been vandalised.
The person responsible is Stevertigo.
What should we do about this? It is one thing to row over interpretation, but to deliberately vandalise earlier versions so that they cannot be used or would get pulled as being POV, is astonishing. I know how annoyed many of us are with 172, but at least (as far as I know) all he does is revert versions, not vandalise earlier versions as well so that no one can revert his revertions. I don't fancy having to stand guard over an article most people are happy with, all because some twat is determined to find some way of screwing it up
If this is the standard of behaviour that Stevertigo is bringing to Wiki, then he should be banned.
JT
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james duffy wrote:
I've a serious allegation to make about a fellow Wiki. I wrote a page on the Irish Potato famine which became rather controversial with two people. One of them threatened to revert any changes I made, and make sure I could not revert his changes back.
James, if the history has been edited somehow, that's a serious bug in the software. The whole point of the history mechanism is that older versions are available so that we can either revert, wholesale, or at least copy and paste good stuff that somehow got lost.
I haven't yet reviewed the article to form an opinion about who is right or wrong in the content battle, but really, all of us (even sysops) are "equal" in the content wars. So if you can explain further just how you think the history was messed up, that would be helpful.
--Jimbo
Jimmy Wales wrote:
james duffy wrote:
I've a serious allegation to make about a fellow Wiki. I wrote a page on the Irish Potato famine which became rather controversial with two people. One of them threatened to revert any changes I made, and make sure I could not revert his changes back.
James, if the history has been edited somehow, that's a serious bug in the software. The whole point of the history mechanism is that older versions are available so that we can either revert, wholesale, or at least copy and paste good stuff that somehow got lost.
I doubt it is possible to change the old versions without developer access or shell login.
Maybe there are several old edits by the same offender which were reverted, and you just clicked on the vandalized version?
Magnus
On ven, 2003-01-17 at 10:46, Magnus Manske wrote:
I doubt it is possible to change the old versions without developer access or shell login.
Maybe there are several old edits by the same offender which were reverted, and you just clicked on the vandalized version?
The problem appears to have been that some of Stevertigo's edits were marked as reversions, spelling corrections, or other such 'minor' edits but in fact contained additional, very controversial, changes.
Someone else not looking closely might then use one of them as a base for reversion or additional editing and retain the problematic text in later edits unintentionally.
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)