VeryVerily wrote: I'm somewhat of a newcomer here, so pardon me if I'm not up-to-date on what is evidently a fairly old issue. As I understand it, the "wrong ArbComm ruling" you're complaining about here is that for at least the next 4 months, you are "required to discuss all reverts on the relevant talk page". Is that correct?

Sorry if that last E-mail looked messy in your mail reader; somehow the formatting got messed up. VV

Correct, a holocaust denier will get rough treatment quick. The crimes of Communism, such as the deliberate attempt to starve the Ukrainian people into submission, while the Soviet Union was EXPORTING FOOD, as pointed out in The Black Book of Communism are whitewashed by point of view editors. Fred On Feb 26, 2006, at 10:29 PM, VeryVerily wrote:

On 2/27/06, Fred Bauder <fredbaud(a)ctelco.net> wrote: VeryVerily ought to be able to edit provided he is No one is stopping him from editing. All that is being required is that he discuss reverts on the talk page. How can we do that? He left Wikipedia for a year. His current edits are mostly to AC pages. Arbitrators who feel I don't believe there are any arbitrators who feel that. Theresa

On 2/27/06, VeryVerily <veryverily(a)gmail.com> wrote: I don't imagine the current AC (I cannot speak for past committees, though I fully expect they would say the same) will penalise you for other people causing conflict with you. If people abuse the AC decision to block you spuriously, I expect the AC will have some very clear things to say on the matter. I believe we are giving you the chance to show yourself to be a legitimate user. That is my intention. I am certain that none of the AC considers reversions of vandalism to count in your ruling. I personally undertake to unblock you if anyone blocks you for reverting vandalism. Visit not the sins of the father on the son. I was myself not a member of that committee, and do not consider myself responsible for the decisions, whether they were right or wrong. We have undertaken to look at your case again when we have some more evidence to base our actions on. If you can manage four months of good editing (and I see no reason why you cannot), your restrictions will likely be lifted. That doesn't fulfill my description of "get stuffed". -- Sam

On 2/27/06, VeryVerily <veryverily(a)gmail.com> wrote: Sorry for any lack of context. I don't know enough to comment retrospectively. I am considering the future. The past is past. Sorry, I've lost you. Which block was this? I don't think that would really help anything. I will acknowlegde, though, my belief that errors were made. I don't know to what extent, but errors were made. The reason that we have been fairly slow in relaxing most of the restrictions is that you have hardly been contributing, so we don't know how necessary things are. I wish you luck in showing the community your good intentions, and earning trust. No-one is asking you to make uncontroversial edits. We are only asking you not to cause conflict, which is something everyone should be doing all the time. I will take into account any harassment you get. -- Sam

Because the people with whome you were edit warring with are under AC restrictions now. And if my good intentions aren't During those 1 1/2 years you were edit warring. No one is doubtimg your good intentions anyway. What we doubt is your ability to not edit war. Since you *could* do it then why don't you just do it? What it would prove is that you *can* edit uncontroversially. I would love to be proved wrong on this. Theresa

You'll note I was replying to Sam Korn, who did refer to such doubts. In fact, every arbitrator seems to be telling something different, and treating it like an absolute, self-evident truth. Since you *could* do it then why don't you just do it? What it would Huh? Any idiot can make a thousand uncontroversial copyedits. What would you be wrong about in that case? VV

VeryVerily wrote: There _are_ people who, if all they could edit were articles on flowers and bunnies, would get into an edit war on flowers and bunnies. Now _you_ may be certain that you're not one of those people, but others may not know you as intimately as you know yourself. As you say yourself, proving the fact would take nothing but patience and self-control. The fact that you took a one-year Wikibreak suggests you have some of those. So why not go do that? If you start doing it right now, you'll get quite a few uncontroversial copyedits done even before this thread here is over. Besides, those uncontroversial copyedits also improve the encyclopedia. That's something you seem to care deeply about. We don't want to have an encyclopedia that's full of misspellings, do we? -- Ilmari Karonen, not pretending to speak for the ArbCom at all

I don't think anyone is seriously suggesting this. All noted cases follow a pretty obvious theme, e.g., me preventing an attempt to deny the almost inconceivable scale of murder and death created by a communist regime. Again, if this were a Nazi denying the Holocaust I had fought, I'd be being feted as a hero on the mailing list right now, and everyone would look the other way if any "rules" were broken. I think I've addressed this point several times. (a) The arbitrators still refuse to specify what *isn't* grounds for a block. (b) I'd be a second-class editor, and everyone I tried to work with would know it. (c) I didn't leave for a year then come back with this appeal so that nothing would change, and there remains no justification for it. Actually, though I did much copyediting in my day, I honestly don't care that much. It's misinformation that bothers me much more. Indeed, misspellings have an upside, as they remind the casual reader that those articles are amateurish and not credible, so when they read on Wikipedia that Pol Pot was a kindly old man cruelly smeared by the corporate media, they won't take it too seriously. VV

It didn't "turn into" that. I gave the latter as an example of the former. But there is a point here, that maybe they're not so different, to wit: (Actually, so did I, but this is overlooked.) Don't be so sure. I've been amazed by what people are willing to fight over around here. The most seemingly innocuous edit may be deemed provocative by someone. I'm reminded of [[User:Ark30inf]] and Arkansas, or that [[DNA]] mess, and a few experiences of my own. With conflicting, vague, and possible out-of-my-control requirements - no "interpersonal disputes", no "causing conflict", etc. - copyediting may be all that's safe. Or not even that. Last time I was being stalked, my simple attempt to fix the capitalization in an article "provoked" an edit war, as the user was simply reverting all my edits (my restoring of such edits was then offered by the AC as proof of my bad behavior). VV

VeryVerily wrote: Hmm. Does Godwin's Law apply now? :-) I'm going to make some observations. VeryVerily, please understand it is *not* *you* I am talking about here. (I've never interacted with you; I haven't looked at your edit history; I don't know what kind of editor you are.) There are some editors who are: (1) extremely knowledgeable about a significant subject area, (2) passionate about that subject and about improving the Encyclopedia, but (3) in the end, sadly, unable to participate in the project. Their participation is impossible because they are simply incapable of working within the structure which Wikipedia has set up, where partisans on opposite sides of a contentious issue (partisans who, in real life, might well want to be killing each other), work together cooperatively to craft an NPOV article. You need more than just knowledge and passion to conduct that mission: you also need things like diplomacy and humility and patience, and not everyone possesses all of those skills. It takes two to make an edit war. If you are engaged in an edit war, no matter how Right your cause is, no matter how True your facts are, no matter how Wrong your opponents are, you are partially at fault. Wikipedia *can* *not* afford too many edit wars. They are ridiculously expensive and destructive and timeconsuming. They take up everybody's time (especially the beleaguered arbitrators), they discourage other editors from participating, they leave the contested articles unreadable for long periods of time. Even after the cases are arbitrated, the toll continues, because the aggrieved parties can never accept the results, and continue to appeal their cases by posting long, overwrought messages to Jimbo's talk page and the like. For example, there's an article [[Palestinian exodus]] describing the flight of Palestinians from what is now Israel after the 1948 war. It appears to have been edited primarily by people sympathetic to the Palestinian side of that conflict, and reads (to me, at least) with a pretty significant POV bias. There's an editor by the name of Zeq who has been trying to fix it, which ought to be a laudable cause, because it (probably) does need fixing. But he hasn't been able to do it dispassionately, and he ended up getting banned from editing that article. On several counts, I believe he is in the right. The article is biased, and his opponents have worked to keep it that way. But the difference is that his opponents appear to have done better at playing by Wikipedia's rules than he has, which is why he has been banned and they haven't, and their view (for now) prevails. This is very sad, very wrong, and not how the Encyclopedia is supposed to work. But until an editor comes along who is knowledgeable and passionate about the Israeli side of that conflict, *and* who is able to edit a contentious Wikipedia article dispassionately and diplomatically, the lopsidedness is likely to remain. And of course that's hardly the only example; this pattern recurs all the time. There's ample documentation of the problem; there's ample help available in the form of lists of suggestions for editors who want to learn how to work more effectively within Wikipedia's environment; I'm certainly not the first to be pointing any of this out. But, of course, one of the traits of the problematic editors is that they don't have enough self-reflection to realize that they're the ones those lists of suggestions are aimed at, and they don't have the disposition necessary to actually adopt and apply the suggestions. It's all too easy for outside observers to recognize when one of these disputative situations has cropped up, which is one reason that the aggrieved parties often feel they're being discriminated or conspired against. The same hallmarks ought to make it easy for the participants to recognize themselves as well -- if only they could. I was going to describe some of the hallmarks here, but they'd break the flow of an already too-long message, and VeryVerily would think I was talking about him, so I'll list them somewhere else. The bottom line, however, is that *it is possible to edit a Wikipedia article on even a highly contentious subject without having all these horrible problems*. If you are having these problems, *you are doing something wrong*. You can't blame it on your opponents or on "the system"; *you are part of the problem*. You are going to have to change your attitude and the way you work on Wikipedia. It's too bad when a passionate and knowledgeable but disputative editor can't be perfectly accommodated. But the process of trying to accommodate disputative editors does not scale -- Arbcon is under increasing amounts of pressure as more and more aggrieved editors demand their right to be heard, and it's only going to get worse as the numbers of editors increase. Steve Summit [[en:User:Ummit]]

The point is I can run afoul of these "rules" despite my best efforts. I can't speak to your edit history. Given that community norms have changed in the last two years, I'd be likely to do a lot more of that were I allowed to stay under acceptable conditions. Read my appeal. I went to the ArbComm asking for help. They diddled and dawdled, and then ignored me, and eventually at least seemed to decide that I was at fault, presumably because they never really looked at the case. I wasn't worried about being mistaken for anything, as it was a fairly simple situation to explain. Persistent vandals have been around almost from the beginning. VV

Well not in the current form, as I'm not comparing anyone to Nazis. There have, however, been several high-profile cases of admitted Nazis editing here, and the rules were generally suspended in favor of simply getting rid of them and reverting all their edits. Stalinists don't get that treatment, though. When dealing with others in a contentious issue who are cooperative, I've never had a problem. There are those such as Ruy Lopez who are not interested in cooperating or NPOV and just wreck articles. I spent many hours trying to talk to him until realizing that doesn't work. In point of fact, this ideal is not very common. Most partisans in a contentious issue have trouble cooperating. But as long as they're somewhat reasonable, we can usually slog through anyway. (There may even a flurry of edit warring in the middle.) My point is that the denial of murder of millions is emotional enough in the case of Nazism that people will overlook this and regard what they think as Right and True (that the Holocaust happened) as Right and True enough to not require observation of norms of cooperation and compromise, but when it comes to communist regimes deniers are treated like just another editor. I never said that I did break any community rules in dealing with these deniers of history. Rather, I noted that, even if I skirted them, there is a double standard. I'm not sure it's that dire. I've seen edit wars go on, and then things get sorted out and the article is better than it was before. You can still argue that edit wars are bad, but dragging on for months is pretty uncommon. I don't think so. Anyone's who's gotten involved in the [[Khmer Rouge]] article can see what's up. He's been a problem for ALL of us. Some people have a note on their user page such as, "This page has been vandalized 56 times." Are both parties equally to blame? Is this a confession of what a bad user he or she must be? I think almost everyone would say no, some are here up to no good. In general, I believe the ArbComm needs to come down a lot harder on those who are not here with good intentions, not putting valid content into articles, and not contributing to the encyclopedia than they do, and much softer on those who are dealing with such people and tick over some revert count now and then out of sheer frustration. The Palestinian Exodus case sounds like a bad and sad one. I expect your prognosis is a bit too optimistic and utopian, but I can't say for sure. Thanks for sharing your thoughts. But I don't think it's quite the way you've spun it. Ruy Lopez was allowed to function here for two years with no administrative sanction to speak of. If anyone is disputative, he was. The ArbComm should have distinguished better between attackers and defenders, and have no excuse not to have. I think you need to too. (One more comment: I may well have stayed if my only restriction was, say, a 1RR with a timeout in a few months. Then I would at least be able to guess when I might be blocked and could still do counter-vandalism and the like. This approach makes some sense if they really think a user reverts too much. But they took the road they did, despite all my explanations, which, in the end, were for nothing. Maybe it's my fault for having misplaced faith in the users on the committee and wasting my time appealing to them.) VV

On Feb 28, 2006, at 1:40 PM, VeryVerily wrote: I was going to wait for the case to actually wrap up to comment, since I clerked it, but this is frankly beyond the pale, and since the case is going to go to closed any time now, I'll comment. I went into the evidence page expecting the request to overturn the ruling to be cut and dry. It was a long time ago, I hadn't heard anything of you in months, I figured you must be being sensible and that it would be an easy matter of summing up your contributions. I was FLOORED to see that your sole grounds of appeal was that year- old evidence and decisions were a great travesty, and wrote a summary that was an unsubtle hint that providing some of the evidence that the arbcom was asking for would be a good idea. I left a note on your talk page to that effect. You basically told me to go fuck myself, though to your credit you were somewhat more civil than that. Here's the problem - regardless of the previous case, you were, when you edited Wikipedia, one of the most committed revert warriors in existence. You and 172 still have an all-time record for the size of a revert war. And how were you sanctioned for your 40RR violation? You weren't. You avoided any sanction for being one of the worst of the worst in terms of edit warring until the case you're appealing. And the arbcom, not being stupid, is well aware of that. So basically you're splitting year-old hairs and ignoring the fact that if that case wasn't the one that brought you down, another case would have, because there were easily a dozen that could have been made. And yet all you had to do - ALL you had to do - was present some evidence that you were sorry, that you'd mellowed out in the last year, that you could work with others. The arbcom told you that after the first case, I told you that during your appeal, and the arbcom is telling you that again right now. And instead you presented yourself as the same old vicious bulldog ready to attack anything and anybody that stood in his way. You bungled the evidence presentation in this case in an epic manner, and turned sympathetic people against you in doing it. -Phil

"VeryVerily" wrote Well, your approach to the case has been both original and counter-productive. I suppose originality has something going for it. With any luck, the rest of this thread will indicate how mistreated you have been. It seems to be going that way. Charles

On 2/28/06, Steve Bennett <stevage(a)gmail.com> wrote: Heh Being confrontational under certain conditions pretty much has offical aproval thses days. Would you agree to have the arbcom remedy imposed on you? When it comes to article content being right is everything. -- geni

On 2/28/06, geni <geniice(a)gmail.com> wrote: Avoid interpersonal dispute, not edit war, and discuss reverts before making them? Sure, if you do too (and VV). One month? Steve

As ye olde former Arbitration Committee member, I think 1) VeryVerily is something of a dick (or, more specifically, he's rather incapable of ignoring antagonistic behavior, and quick to get antagonized). 2) The Arbitration Committee is being way too punitive and antagonistic. 3) After staying away for a year, he shouldn't have any restrictions on his edit behavior outside of those on the general community. In other words, we should assume good faith and not engage in probation. Obviously, lots of people are going to be watching him as if he were wearing the scarlet letter no matter what, and they'll probably find something to jump on eventually, since we all make mistakes/do things that upset another editor (e.g. Raul reverting a perfectly normal edit because it came from a friend of a troller, or any of my various bothersome edits) and then give VV enough rope to hang himself in a contentious arbitration hearing. But it's just wrong for the ArbCom now to single him out. My $.02.

On 3/1/06, The Cunctator <cunctator(a)gmail.com> wrote: I could. I'm not going to. We are short staffed in that area already and I'm testing a new account. -- geni

On 2/28/06, VeryVerily <veryverily(a)gmail.com> wrote: See http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Don%27t_be_a_dick It's not just that you get antagonized, it's that you engage in wheedling lawyerly arguments when you're riled up. Believe me, I'm on your side here, but you need to just stop making your arguments over and over. Bringing up your point once suffices. (Or it doesn't, but repeating it won't help, either.) Yes, it's mindblowingly frustrating to be in your position (I often am, myself) but you still have to be the better person. The trick is to mollifying petty autocrats is to be unpredictable in your responses to antagonism--sometimes contesting, sometimes walking away, ideally finding points of agreement. I find simply cataloguing attacks on me (with anything I did to provoke it) and providing no other response to be both satisfying and a good way to break cycles of criticism. Look for the points of agreement. Recognize that what most people are looking for is a sense of contrition for driving them crazy. Because you have driven people crazy, and you're kind of doing so now.