== Summary: Step by step, my initial "extreme disturbance" disappears. ==

james duffy wrote:

Toby Bartels wrote:

...

Furthermore, you apparently protected the page to win an edit war that you were taking place in.

I did nothing of the sort and how dare you suggest it.

I dared suggest it because I thought that it was true. You know that I've never been on any campaign against you, and I've mostly had only good comments about you in the past. Please don't respond to me as if I'm engaging in personal attacks.

You are correct; you did nothing of the sort. That was my mistake. And I feel much better about the situation having realised that mistake! Assuming that the IP had initially been blocked appropriately, you simply reverted the addition of a banned user and protected the page to stop them from coming back with different IPs. That's all quite reasonable, assuming the initial blocking, which reduces my "extremely disturbed" state to merely "disturbed". The issue now is the initial blocking.

An anonymous user appeared and added in highly POV rascist material into a page.

The material was not racist! But it was indeed POV. Newbies need to be taught NPOV all the time. After all, the material that they were addressing is legitimate but not covered in the article. If this person was new to Wikipedia -- discussed below -- then it's easy to imagine that they didn't realise that it /is/ covered in Wikipedia, just elsewhere. And given that, a link in the Demographics section would be helpful (nothing more is needed), so there's even an NPOVisation of the additions, which is to replace them which such an explicit link. And even if that ends up not being the best solution for the page, still a good-faith discussion with the user is the right response. And indeed, that's what was happening on the talk page -- where the user was belligerent but not bannably so (the "baboons" and obscenities came later -- see below).

The material could not be substantiated and the language used suggested it was someone trying in a very blatant way to POV the article.

It's blatant only to somebody that understands NPOV. If one believes that the claimed facts are undeniably true, then there's nothing blatantly biased about it at all.

I reverted the addition and notified those who had worked on the article as I suspected they might be better placed to deal with the issue. The user in question proceeded to re-insert his anti-zionist rant and verbally abuse everyone else who touched it.

Actually, you /didn't/ revert the addition until the very last time, after the blocking. That's what made me happy above! ^_^

I checked his list of contributions to try to ascertain whether this was a rather naive newbie with a problem of grasping NPOV, or a vandal. (The page in question had been subject to nakedly sectarian vandalism for a while.) All the evidence I could find was of a user who had made other contributions that had been seen as vandalism and had been reverted elsewhere. When he continued abusing other users, in the belief that he was a vandal I blocked him.

This is exactly the kind of evidence that I was hoping to see! That's why my previous posts explicitly mentioned the possibility that you'd left something out of your explanation, some additional history that would explain your actions. It's disappointing to me that you /still/ won't explain it. After all, there are no other edits in the IP's contribution history, nor in the contributions of any of the other IPs that you blocked, so how am I supposed to know what this evidence is?

Although you still aren't saying just what it is, you do seem to be implying now that there was past history. So I checked further back in the edit history of [[Israel]], where I saw that /another/ IP was doing the same thing a few days earlier. If nothing else, that changes the nature of the edit war a good deal! (I said before that it was just over 6 hours, but this new IP lengthens it.) It would have been nice if you'd mentioned this other IP (not a 68.120.*.* IP, BTW), so that readers would know about it.

Even better, I see that this other IP had been talked to about NPOV (on a user talk page) and that the user must have seen it too, since there was a reply. Furthermore, the reply indicates that the user has no interest in learning about NPOV. So that explains why the user was /not/ a newbie and did /not/ simply have trouble with NPOV. This reduces me from "disturbed" to "concerned". Mainly, I'm concerned that your blocking notice mentioned vandalism, rather than willful refusual to abide by NPOV. Gone are the days when new IPs are blocked only for vandalism, but the concept of vandalism (like "He has a small penis.") is still useful to distinguish the types of problematic users.

He then came back as a new IP added in the same POV stuff and called people ''fucking morons'', ''fucking hypocrites, etc

Indeed, but this was only after you blocked his first IP for "vandalism". It seems likely to me that he (or she) felt provoked by your actions, to which he responded in anger. He hadn't written this stuff before. So I wouldn't feel any better about the blocking if an unjust blocking had /caused/ somebody to lose their cool, rather than being the /effect/ of such behaviour. Luckily, I've discovered the valid cause of the blocking above, but these insults from several hours afterwards don't enter into it.

Among his talk page comments were

<Sarcasm> Yes, I'll admit it: everyone here on Wikipedia is a paid propogandist for the worldwise Zionist colonialist genocidal conspiracy! That's why we have articles on Israeli terrorism and Deir Yassin massacre, and why the Palestinian page doesn't even *contain* the words "terror" or "terrorist" or "terrorism". </Sarcasm> Look, there are lots of facts in the world. It's a fact that the Israelis assassinated Muhammad Sadr, the Islamic Jihad leader in Hebron. It's a fact that afte that, two Palestinian militant groups, Islamic Jihad and Hamas, claimed responsibility for a deliberate attack on a civililan bus that killed quite a few people, including many children. It's a fact that the Israelis then killed Abu Shanab, one of the founders of Hamas, in the Gaza strip.

As a matter of fact, that was /not/ among his talk page comments. Thos comments were written (and signed) by [[User:Jnc|Noel]]: http://www.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Talk:Israel&diff=1330912&oldid=1330886 Furthermore, there is nothing objectionable about those comments! They are not vandalism, nor are they any other reason to block an IP. I suppose that you're just misinterpreting things in anger.

I have disagreed with some users on the page who have been pushing a less than NPOV pro-Israel stance. I reverted and requested the banning of a user who inserted rascist anti-Israel attacks all over wiki. I have regularly reworded mentions of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict on the current events page to remove one-sided comments from either side and ensure equality of language and interpretation.

Yes, you have been a good supporter of NPOV! (That's why I can understand that you would view the repeated insertion of POV text in an edit war as vandalism.) I understand your "republican monarchist" dilemma and sympathise. I'm definitely /not/ accusing you of bias in this matter; the question was the response to bias in somebody else.

I was NOT involved in an edit war with this IP contributor. I was simply doing what I was doing with /everyone else/, ensuring that NPOV standards were followed. The behaviour and threats of the user in question pretty much shows that he was not some poor newbie wrongly treated but someone determined to vandalise articles.

I guess that this has all been covered above.

/If/ I had abused my sysop powers to 'win' against an opponent, I would not have drawn attention to the fact by contacting other users, by putting a note on the Vandalism page and sent a note about it around on the wiki list, would I?

Actually, this is probably what made me "***extremely*** disturbed", rather than only "extremely disturbed", in my initial post. It seemed that you expected our disapproval of the POV edits to cause us to overlook your violation of explicit protection guidelines. So that's one reason that I was happy to realise my mistake, that you had not violated those guidelines at all. ^_^

I stand over my decisions and resent your gross and dishonest misrepresention of them.

"gross" is debatable; I hope that I explained my mistakes. But "dishonest" is wrong. My post was in good faith. I'd be insulted that you would accuse me of doing otherwise, if I were the type to be insulted by what I'm sure you wrote in anger.

So now, only these issues remain: * Your initial post to the mailing list didn't explain the history of the situation, which could hinder readers' understanding of it. In particular, you never mentioned the 67.30.99.* edits that proved that this wasn't a newbie NPOV error. * When I misunderstood the situation (variously), you responded in anger. It was only because I know that you're normally a reasonable person that I went back and rechecked my understanding before replying now. That's how I discovered the 67.30.99.* edits, but other people might have been too insulted by your reply to look for them. * The word "vandalism" continues its unfortnate loss of meaning, as it gets applied in a banning notice to (deliberate) POVness. Although obstinately and deliberately engaging in POV edits is reasonably bannable, that's not what the word "vandalism" means. * An accusation of racism on behalf of the Israeli government has been Orwellianly interpreted as racism on behalf of the accuser. (In a more complicated context, that can be a wise deduction, such as when people excuse all lex solis regimes except Israel. But many people are just ignorant about that situation.) None of these issues makes me "extremely disturbed", and I don't see the need to follow them up here, although I'll talk about them further if anybody wishes to.

So I'm happy now. ^_^

-- Toby