[WikiEN-l] Re: [Wikipedia-l] Eric's abuse of his sysop powers
Erik Moeller
erik_moeller at gmx.de
Mon Oct 20 20:43:00 UTC 2003
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
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