[WikiEN-l] Re: [Wikipedia-l] Eric's abuse of his sysop powers

Tue Oct 21 00:12:51 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.

Not so. NPOV requires balence in content. The critique in such detail 
clearly violated wikipedia's NPOV policy. It doesn't matter if it was 70% 
glorification or 70% demonisation of MT or anyone else. Making an article 
overwhelmingly one sided where the vast majority of the text is putting 
forward one view, expecially when when the text isn't about the person the 
article is about at all but about her religious order, is unambiguously 
against NPOV. I did not remove the criticism. I put it up front in the 
opening paragraph. I moved the main complex text to a link article, linked 
/in/ the text of the article, and was in the process of summarising the 
criticism in a couple of paragraphs, so that the information would be there, 
expressed unambiguously, without turning the entire article on Mother Teresa 
into 'Christopher Hitchens on Mother Teresa's order and how they washed 
their bed linen and used needles', which is what chunks of the stuff you 
added in was about. Doing that makes perfect sense and absolutely in keeping 
with wikipedia's 'be bold' editing policy. But your response was to 
/immediately/ place the link article on the VfD page, dump the text and keep 
reverting the article back to the over long, badly written, biased and 
frequently off-topic article in place of a properly written, NPOV, balanced 
piece that covered the pluses and minuses of MT without letting one side, 
/either/ side, dominate. That is the basic definition of NPOV.
>
>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.

Again, not so. All I did was try to NPOV a POV mess of an article. Most (but 
not all) of the problem was with that 20K text, which did not belong there, 
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,

You know I am not on during the daytime. So I didn't have a choice, just 
came back to find you were editing away again, having unprotected a 
protected page in clear breach of sysop rules.

>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.
>
No I didn't. I moved a body of text, much of which was about her order, not 
about her, to a separate article and attempted to put a shorter summary in. 
Others on the page had already complained about what you had added in but 
you went ahead regardless.

>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)

I have to say at this point that a ban of Jtdirl is no longer out of the 
question for me.—Eloquence 22:07, Oct 20, 2003 (UTC)

Given that he is editing a page about a person that is supposedly all about 
love, he carries a great deal of hate inside him.

You can play up your oh-so-critical "lapsed Catholic" attitude as much as 
you want

Here you have Jtdirl, the valiant defender of truth and neutrality who makes 
all people happy and contented.

I have big doubts that you would engage in an edit war over Sun Myung Moon, 
but of course with your proven pro-Catholic bias it seems obvious that you 
would want to defend the fiction that has been built around Mother Teresa, 
without any substantial arguments to support your edits.

Who made all those attacks, Eric?

>- false accusations of abusive behavior

And what were those comments above then?

>- 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")

All of which I mentioned in the short summary which you called censorship.
>
>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.

What was that again about personal attacks?
>
>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).

So why then accuse me of a 'pro-catholic bias' and censoring criticism of 
MT, when I was doing nothing of the sort, merely trying to NPOV an article 
and give stuff not about MT its own article?

>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.

Which is why, I suppose, every edit I made for ages tonight was screwed 
around when you went in and began changing past tense to present tense while 
I was trying to save NPOV changes. So much for co-operation. And throwing 
accusations of 'pro-catholic bias' really is constructive and non-bullying, 
I  suppose?
>
>I can and will work with you on this article, provided you make a serious
>commitment to seeking consensus on your changes.

Others users earlier criticised your constant adding in of more and more 
detractors' claims and said that it unbalanced the article. Here and 
elsewhere your usual approach has been 'be bold' when you think you can get 
away with it, cry 'consensus' when someone stops you.

>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.

More threats from 'The User Who Does Not Make Threats', eh?
>
>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?

I have co-operated with many people on wikipedia. The only fights I have had 
here in ages have been with you, when you tried to POV not one but a series 
of articles on religion. Each time you accused me of a 'pro-catholic bias'. 
Others said the edits were perfectly NPOV. Bias has no place in a wikipedia 
article, whether it is bias for or against RCism, protestantism, Islam, the 
Jewish faith, etc. How is it that it is your edits on religious matters that 
draw criticism from people and accusations of bias.

You are perfectly entitled to hold humanist views and be critical of 
organised religion, but what you cannot do is go around turning articles 
into polemics for your opinion. I have been accused of bias for and against 
Australian republicanism, the British monarchy, Israel, communism, etc often 
simultaneously, for standing up to both sides and saying 'that is not NPOV'. 
I have turned religious articles that were seen as unsalvageable into 
articles that were praised as NPOV. What makes you think I want to turn an 
article on Mother Teresa into a POV polemic. I don't. If I was trying to 
'silence the facts' I would have simply deleted them, not moved them up to 
the opening paragraph and given them their own article. But I am sick and 
tired of wild accusations of 'pro-catholic bias' for trying to do a 
professional editing job on sloppily written one sided articles, whether 
they are pro- or anti- catholic, pro- or anti- MT.

On this article, comments made on your massive add-in include

In this article, 1/3 described her life and work, and 2/3 described 
detractor's claims. And this is for someone who won the Nobel Prize for 
Peace. Is this NPOV? --Kaihsu 16:35, 26 Aug 2003 (UTC)

Why is there such a long DIATRIBE against this person in an aricle which is 
supposed to have a neutral POV? The criticisms are written with such bias 
that even as a stand-alone article it currently violates NPOV.205.188.208.72 
21:38, 19 Oct 2003 (UTC)

I think the best solution would be to summarize the controversies here, and 
move the whole text to another article. This one has gotten way too long in 
my opinion. Dori 19:06, 26 Aug 2003 (UTC)

Who said anything about hiding. Like most other people, I see an article 
that long (which looks more like a book report) and I shy away. I said 
summarize and link to the long article. If you want to write your PhD thesis 
here, then go ahead. Dori 21:43, 26 Aug 2003 (UTC)

In moving the text, I was doing no more than reflecting the will of those 
users you ignored and told " It is not a place for apologetics" as if they 
too were part of some big pro-catholic conspiracy to stop you telling 'the 
truth'.  If you want to lecture people on NPOV, start practising it. If you 
want to accuse everyone else of bias, start looking just how neutral /you/ 
are in your edits, and just how many facts as opposed to opinions you have. 
And don't lecture everyone else on your behaviour when your approach is to 
break sysop rules if you can't get your own way, accuse everyone else of 
bias if you can't get your own way, and throw around POV allegations like 
confetti against those trying to fix a poorly written article that veers 
between glorification and demonisation of the subject and misses NPOV by a 
mile.

JT

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