[WikiEN-l] Admin status: we are asking the wrong question

[james duffy]

>I agree.  The text is highly problematic in places, and needs NPOV
>work in many ways, *however* it is certainly not "vandalism" or
>anything of the sort.  It needs softening and formalizing.

Whatever about the text's problems, the central one was that it was on the 
wrong page. That page was exclusively to do with a political science 
definition of 'communist state', which is to do with a system of government 
based on marxism-leninism in which party and constitutional organs of the 
state are blurred because of a fundamental principle of marxism-leninism; 
put simply that the party is the state and the state is the party. The page 
is not a discussion group on communism, there are plenty such pages, but 
purely a discussion of a political science definition of the working of a 
system that in contrast to pluralist democracies does not separate the means 
by which a political elite come to power (the party) and the manner in which 
they exercise power  (the constitutional organs of the state). That is all 
that page is about. Nothing more.

User after user lined up to tell Fred Bauder that (a) his contribution was 
not NPOV (which he admitted, calling it himself 'unbalanced') but more 
importantly, (b) even if perfectly NPOV was on the wrong page. Yet he 
consistently ignored every contributor and reverted to his poorly written 
irrelevant material, burying major changes as minor edits, on occasion 
reverting minute by minute. He listened to no-one else, paid heed to no 
advice but continually planted irrelevant material on the wrong page. It 
took nearly 20 reversions by a list of people, many of whom came to see what 
the argument was and immediately agreed that what he was putting on the page 
was 100% irrelevant to the content of the page, for him to stop.

If I went to a page on 'Federal Republic' which was simply talking about the 
definition of what a Federal Republic is, and plonked in statements about 
the United States treatment of native Americans when everyone on the page 
kept saying 'stop. This is the wrong page for it' and kept doing it in the 
face of everyone else's opposition twenty times, that would rightly be seen 
as agenda-driven vandalism. Similarly if I went to 'Constitutional Monarchy' 
and in the middle of a page on the legal and constitutional definition of 
constitutional monarchy plonked in reference to Prince Charles in a taped 
telephone call telling Camilla Parker Bowles he wished he was her tampon 
(which he said), or if I went to the page on 'Conferation' and in the face 
of universal opposition plonked in references to the collaboration of Swiss 
banks with Nazi Germany, that would be seen as blatent vandalism on a page 
that was not on that topic.

The issue isn't the content, though there was as Fred Bauder himself 
admitted a problem of lack of balance there. The issue is simply and clearly 
that in spite of the appeals of people on the talk pages, in spite of the 
comments of everyone bar Adam that what he was doing was putting information 
on the WRONG page, FB continued to do so and did so nearly 20 times. This 
was after he had tried time and time again to remove the relevant political 
science definition from the article on China and put in a POV term. In other 
words in the space of a few days he had tried to add POV content to two 
pages, tried to stop one being linked to the other, and when he failed there 
tried to change the whole meaning of the second page to insert his political 
agenda into it, even through he was told by everyone that he was 
deliberately twisting the contents of a page to put information on it that 
was not relevant to that page.

One could argue that he did not understand the meaning of the 'communist 
state' page, except that everyone clearly did; those there at the start and 
those who came into the debate later on. So either he was unable to grasp 
what the entire planet could as to the nature of the contents, or he could 
but was determined to ignore the consensus, ignore the definition, ignore 
the advice and ignore the evidence on the page and add in his own 
propagandistic stuff regardless, having failed to get it accepted on other 
pages. If the latter, then given that he made nearly 20 attempts to force 
his irrelevant 'unbalanced' add-ons, disguised as minor edits, he was 
engaged in the blatent POV vandalism of the article. That is the widespread 
view of the people who worked on that page.

Finally, he is now on the w-list accusing people who were simply concerned 
with keeping a page on a political science definition focused on the 
political definition, not on his broader view on communism, of being like 
those who deny the Holocaust, a libelous accusation for which he has offered 
no apology. If he manages to rewrite his paragraphs in a NPOV manner, there 
are many pages into which it can be included. But it was and will remain 
irrelevant to a page that is simply to do with a political science 
definition, not a broader analysis of communism. And trying to force his 
stuff through 'minor edits' onto a page when everyone tells him it is the 
wrong page for that information, and doing so 20 times, is blatent 
vandalism.

JT

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