This is a page for working on Arbitration decisions. The Arbitrators, parties to the case, and other editors may draft proposals and post them to this page for review and comments. Proposals may include proposed general principles, findings of fact, remedies, and enforcement provisions—the same format as is used in Arbitration Committee decisions. The bottom of the page may be used for overall analysis of the /Evidence and for general discussion of the case.

Any user may edit this workshop page. Please sign all suggestions and comments. Arbitrators will place proposed items they believe should be part of the final decision on the /Proposed decision page, which only Arbitrators and clerks may edit, for voting, clarification as well as implementation purposes.

Motions and requests by the parties

Hipocrite and Mathsci are added as parties

1) Please add the following parties:

Hipocrite (talk · contribs · deleted contribs · logs · filter log · block user · block log)

*Mathsci (talk · contribs · deleted contribs · logs · filter log · block user · block log)

This addition is solely with respect to actions related to the ban of Abd from Cold fusion, the underlying causes or conditions, or the use of administrative tools by William M. Connolley, while involved or showing favoritism, in this or other incidents.

Comment by Arbitrators:

I haven't reviewed the case in enough detail yet to know whether any additional parties should be added. However, at this point, I believe that all the editors who have been listed are on notice that the case exists and that their names have been mentioned, so that they can provide evidence if they wish. If any formal additions or changes to the list of parties are warranted, the arbitrators working on the draft decision will presumably follow up; the key point being that no party be mentioned in a decision or subject to criticism or sanction without fair notice and an opportunity to be heard. Please note that any editor with useful input is invited to make a statement at the accept-or-decline stage, so the suggestion that an editor's having urged us to decline the case warrants his addition as a party is unwarranted. I would also note that while the convention has developed of leaving parties' statements on the case page and moving non-parties' statements to the talkpage, this does not have substantive significance, and where the clerks wind up leaving someone's statement does not govern who the parties are. Newyorkbrad (talk) 15:15, 16 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Note also that Hipocrite retired from editing, for unrelated reasons, three weeks ago now. Newyorkbrad (talk) 15:15, 23 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Comment by parties:

Proposed. A number of involved editors commented extensively on the Request page, showing strong support for banning they had previously advocated, and for the rejection of this case as frivolous. I have not presented evidence of this beyond their own display on the Request page, however, that should be sufficient to establish a risk to them of admonishment or sanction, and therefore of their right to notice and special participation as parties. The above editors were added to the list of parties by me, ~~before the acceptance of the Request,~~ and were notified, but Mathsci edit warred to remove his name, and William M. Connolley reverted Hipocrite's insertion, then edit warred at User talk:Hipocrite over the notice, which seems to have been a last-straw incident leading to the retirement of Rootology. ~~These parties~~ Hipocrite should be added ~~and their comments restored to the Request page,~~ and notice to Hipocrite should be restored as well.
Hipocrite did not comment on the Request page, having "retired," but previously retired under a cloud, returned, was extraordinarily disruptive while active, and was the primary cause of the two recent protections of Cold fusion and thus of the actions of WMC leading to this case, aside from whatever prior agenda WMC may have had. --Abd (talk) 13:20, 15 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Having now realized that it's reasonable to consider the case accepted when there were four net votes, instead of when acceptance was declared and the case pages set up, and for simplicity, I have withdrawn the proposed motion to add Mathsci, and I ask that Verbal and Stephan Schulz's comments be removed from the Request page, unless they desire to be parties, and I apologize to the committee and the community for disruption that resulted. (It would have been quite enough if someone had suggested to me: once there were four net votes, the case was to be considered accepted and no changes made -- and this should be made clear in general.
To Bilby. Hipocrite was centrally involved in the events leading up to the ban, as evidence will show, and I do not believe that a voluntary, reversible, very recent retirement should be suffice to exclude oneself from consideration. It was an error for me not to include Hipocrite from the start. --Abd (talk) 19:16, 15 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]
To Mathsci. The other names were removed by Ryan yesterday, but the clerk overlooked the moving of non-party arguments to Talk. Evidence will show that Hipocrite created the disruption allowing WMC's intervention at Cold fusion, pursuing an agenda that WMC favors. Hipocrite accepted the ban because banning me was his goal, and the dual bans gave WMC cover. --Abd (talk) 13:24, 16 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]
To Newyorkbrad. I agree that the list of named parties may be moot, because of notice provided already. No claim was made that, simply by urging denial of the case, editors should be added to it; the additional editors named by me were, in fact, involved in the underlying events; other editors urged denial and were not added. Two issues remain that are not moot.

Hipocrite's notice was removed by a party to this case, so if Hipocrite reviews his Talk page, he may not see the notice. The notice should be replaced pending resolution of this case.
As to the comments left in place, leaving non-party comments prejudices the record; there are good reasons for the practice of removal, and it was only an accident that they were not. All other statements were removed, and the two in question only remain because, at that point, they were listed as named parties. --Abd (talk) 15:36, 16 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Comment by others:

I'm quite opposed to expanding the list of involved parties at this point. Hipocrite, being retired, is unable to be involved in proceedings, and therefore cannot present his case. I agree that he was involved in the events, but I'd be very uncomfortable with including someone in his situation, and in my view that involvement was not central to what is being discussed here. In regard to MathSci, he has strong opinions about Abd, as expressed, but the case is in regard to Abd and WMC's actions. It's likely to be messy enough as it is - it would be far better to keep to focus as narrow as possible. - Bilby (talk) 15:27, 15 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]
I suggest that Abd email ArbCom directly requesting the removal by the clerks of the other names which he added to the list. If Hipocrite has retired and nobody has so far mentioned problems with his behaviour that need to be examined, why add his name? Please drop the motion entirely to keep things simple. Mathsci (talk) 02:59, 16 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]
I'm opposed to the adding of MathSci as unnecessary expanding the scope, and the focus should remain on WMC admin actions and Abd's general behaviour - the central concerns. Hipocrite I'm less concerned about, he was heavily involved, but as he's disabled email and retired after an argument with Jimbo it would seem a bit pointless now - and since Abd didn't include him originally, error or not the case wasn't taken with H as a party. Also, he accepted WMCs actions and wasn't then involved with Abd's behaviour. Like Bilby, I think these two editors are not central to the issues presented by Abd or raised in the comments. I'd also ask Abd to tone down his rhetoric a bit (eg "Evidence will show that..."), thanks. I also don't see why my comment, or any others, should be removed - leaving a comment doesn't mean you become a party to the case. Verbal chat 14:25, 16 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]
I would support the addition of User:Hipocrite as he was a central player in all of these events. His behavior at Cold Fusion was disruptive and provocative. His actions directly led to the issue at hand, regardless of whether those actions were premeditated with a specific agenda or simply the result of poor judgment. The treatment of User:Hipocrite in comparison to the treatment of User:Abd by User:William M. Connolley should be examined to shed light on User:William M. Connolley's state of mind regarding User:Abd and his level of objectivity in this case. An examination of whether or not User:William M. Connolley acted in support of User:Hipocrite in some way, whether wittingly or unwittingly, also seems relevant to this case. --GoRight (talk) 23:28, 18 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]
RE: "I don't think this should distract everyone from the issues of behaviors of these two editors interactions with each other." - The scope of the case is, as I understand it, whether WMC's use of his administrative privileges was appropriate, or not, as well as Abd's editing that led up to the ban in question. Since the ban WMC issued covered BOTH Abd and Hipocrite it seems appropriate to examine his application of the ban on all parties involved, not just one, as this may reveal an underlying bias.
I really don't think others should be added to this case. The scope of this case from what I'm being told is Abd's editing behavior and whether WMC was involved or not. As for the comment "The treatment of User:Hipocrite in comparison to the treatment of User:Abd by User:William M. Connolley should be examined to shed light on User:William M. Connolley's state of mind regarding User:Abd and his level of objectivity in this case. An examination of whether or not User:William M. Connolley acted in support of User:Hipocrite in some way, whether wittingly or unwittingly, also seems relevant to this case." I don't think this should distract everyone from the issues of behaviors of these two editors interactions with each other. --CrohnieGal^Talk 15:12, 19 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Expand the scope of the case to cover Abd's behaviour over the last two years

2) Apart from the ban itself and the issues surrounding it, this case should also cover Abd's overall approach to dispute resolution, including how Abd's conduct has evolved in the last two years, to understand why he is returning to Arbcom as a party in another dispute with another admin in the same article, just three months after the Abd and JzG case, and why one month ago WMC's page ban was so resoundingly endorsed by the community, to the point of WP:SNOW. The last case already advised and urged Abd to take heed to good-faith advice, but Abd has decided that Arbcom had backed all of his views and that it only decided to give him "some good advice", see here.

The evidence here shows a pattern of repeated complaints about meatpuppeting, too long comments, bad faith assumptions, confrontational editing, etc, issued by many unrelated editors from many different POVs over many months about many topics, ranging from harsh criticism to terse expositions of problems, and it's worrying that, when faced with very recent examples of the criticized behaviour, Abd saw no problem in his editing here. I also stated here that I have only scratched the surface of all the complaints and advice given to him over years.

This case should decide if Abd has been taking heed of all that advice, if he is willing to start doing so now, if Abd even acknowledges that he has a problem with his editing (as in "the first step is admitting that you have a problem"), if Abd is going to keep thinking that there is really a cabal, if Abd will keep thinking that anyone opposing him is either part of the cabal or misguided or wrong, and if a full ban or an extremely strict edit restriction is going to be the only way to stop him to stop that part of his behaviour which is highly disruptive.

If the case closes without addressing this, then I predict that Abd will be swiftly community banned in ANI in a short time, in a drama-filled thread which will leave a bad impression in many editors who have been helped by Abd and who won't understand all the complicated issues surrounding the situation. I also predict that Abd will claim that him not being banned means that Arbcom thinks that he is right, which will only confuse more those editors that trust Abd.

Comment by Arbitrators:

Comment by parties:

Proposed. Past tomorrow I will start expanding the warnings list with more diffs so arbs can weigh just how many editors have given Abd advice on what to change and why, and to show that the advice given to him by the end of 2007 is the same that has been given to him very recently, and the same that has been given to him regularly over almost two years. --Enric Naval (talk) 23:04, 19 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Notice that I don't want to cover the events that caused the warnings, I want to cover how not taking heed to all those warnings has brought Abd to the current situation of being banned from an article that he wants to edit, and brought him twice in front of Arbcom in three months. I note that Abd is now directly stating that the advice given to him by me is incorrect, I think that it's up for the arbs to look at the warnings by other editors I collected and decide if they fit my own advice and if they address correctly Abd's conduct in the cold fusion article.

About being unfair to Abd, notice that WMC's administrative actions have been already brought to the community and been widely endorsed by it, while Abd's conduct has been widely criticized by the community over a long time and not just in the cold fusion article, so it's perfectly appropiate to ask that we examine Abd's behaviour in more depth, even if causes complaints of unfairness. Also, Arbcom is supposed to solve the problems that the community can't solve, the community has not found a problem with WMC's administrative conduct, but it has found a problem with Abd's editing. (Arbcom is supposed to have teeth, you see, it's the last recourse on WP:DR, and it shouldn't have to avoid addressing clear problems for fear of looking unfair, arbs should have clear by now that any outcome negative towards Abd is going to be claimed to be unfair anyways, regardless of what they actually do)

Tomorrow I was going to start gathering more evidence, so, I'll be in a better position to show if this motion is warranted or not. If arbs raise issues about the motion, I'll see if I can address them with a better-worded motion, with better evidence, or if I should abandon this motion. --Enric Naval (talk) 07:45, 20 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Oppose Enric is seeking to drastically expand this case to cover every possible error -- or courageous action -- I might have taken over the last two years. Remember, the "advice" offered me, so many times, has been quite incorrect. Subsequently, my positions have often been confirmed, either by ArbComm or by editorial consensus. JzG did act while involved. His blacklistings were improper. The blacklist was being used to control content. The link to lenr-canr.org at Martin Fleischmann was accepted. Except for one withdrawn page (which may be resubmitted, I have new evidence on it), and in spite of strong efforts from a number of editors whose comments appear in this case, every page from lenr-canr.org that I submitted for whitelisting was accepted. Newenergytimes.com was delisted. The "proposed explanations" for cold fusion -- there are many, and a few of the theories are covered in multiple reliable secondary sources, some of them peer-reviewed, such as Naturwissenschaften -- were being accepted into the article. That's what Hipocrite edit warred against and that's what WMC removed with his revert to the May 14 version. From our present article, you would not know that these theories exist. That's the "quiet" that is so pleasing to some. Enric has raised many old issues, such as statements by a few editors at RFA/Abd 2, solicited by Yellowbeard, blocked for canvassing and now indef blocked, who sought out prior disputants and invited them to comment. Enric previously promised, if the case was rejected, to immediately take the matter to AN to push for a continued ban, even without any edits justifying that. For him, this dispute has become highly personal. Without his prior move to AN/I over the ban, it's entirely possible that this entire flap would have been quieted. If we assume that I'd edited the Talk page -- I had no intention at all of editing the article -- WMC would have blocked me, I'd have submitted an unblock template, and we'd have had a decision by an uninvolved admin, and that might have been that. Instead, we have this mess. It's not only WMC's stubbornness (and/or mine), it's Enric's passion for banning me, yet he never followed dispute resolution for any of it, beyond warning me, his version of DR; likewise he does not understand that the noticeboards are not part of DR, either. He should be reminded. --Abd (talk) 04:46, 20 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Comment by others:

I think this would be a little impracticable. However, while Abd continues in his evidence to assert there are those out to get him or that there is a cabal, his longer term interactions with the users that he claims are in dispute with him should be taken into account. As Brecht wrote: Denn wie man sich bettet, so liegt man. Mathsci (talk) 05:09, 20 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I'm inclined to oppose this: if the scope is widened in regard to all of Abd's actions, then I'm concerned that it is also reasonable to ask that the scope should be widened to cover all of WMC's actions. And even if it was not expanded to include WMC, I'm in agreement with Mathsci that increasing the scope would make the discussion impractical. That said, I would assume that Abd's editing practices in regard to Cold fusion are within scope (in so far as they show cause for an article ban), as are those interactions mentioned by Mathsci, and that any findings in regard to these topics could serve in a potential future RFC/U or community ban discussion. - Bilby (talk) 05:24, 20 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Oppose - Expanding the scope to cover the editing and behavior of just one of the named parties would be grossly unfair. If the scope is to be expanded to cover a multi-year span of behavior let it be for all the named parties, including Enric. Enric has been on a crusade against Abd and trying to get him banned for quite some time (diffs to be provided upon request) and this motion is simply one more example of that behavior.

Enric fails to WP:AGF on a regular basis, and not simply against Abd. Recently Enric also tried to make a case for having me banned by falsely accusing me of being a sock puppet. Enric has also ~~rabidly~~ vehemently pursued a ban on Jed Rothwell despite that fact that he is currently indefinitely blocked and unable to (legitimately) edit anywhere on the project. His constant droning on about these bannings is disruptive here, on the administrative notice boards, and basically anywhere he edits. I believe that the extent of this WP:HARASSment and the WP:ABF evidence behind it would be an appropriate topic for ArbCom to review. I would issue a motion to this effect, but unlike Enric I am not looking to have those with whom I disagree banned or barred from participating on the project.

Another prime example is the ANI thread that is being discussed here as part of WMC's ban where it purportedly WP:SNOWed against Abd. The only trouble was that the snow was yellow and it was coming from editors like Enric who initiated that discussion despite the fact that at the time Abd had not violated the ban WMC imposed. There was, in essence, nothing to actually talk about in terms of substance or policy violations, it was all drama and it was all started by Enric. And it was all bolstered by involved editors. Such activities are clearly disruptive and waste valuable editor time.

Abd had asked that the ANI thread in question be closed to AVOID disruption. Enric created it. I also suspect that the WP:SNOW seen there was more a function of the ban in question being a strictly limited one of one month and on a specific page. A full community ban would be quite different, I suspect, despite Enric's fantasies to the contrary. --GoRight (talk) 06:42, 20 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Please refactor the word "rabidly": remember WP:NPA. Enric Naval has patiently engaged in discussion with Abd longer than most users. He does not show signs of "acute pain, violent movements, uncontrolled excitement, depression and inability to swallow water". Nor does he appear to be experiencing "periods of mania and lethargy, followed by coma". Please try to avoid using this kind of inflammatory rhetoric. Mathsci (talk) 07:08, 20 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I chose my words carefully. See rabidly, specifically definition 1b which was the meaning I had intended. That definition is not inflammatory, it is an accurate description of his behavior. One need look no further than this RFAR to see that. Never the less, per your request I have refactored the word accordingly.

"... rather than contribute to the mediation process ..." - You appear to be, let's say, factually challenged. Abd has embraced the Cold Fusion mediation since it first began. Just go look at the discussion there. --GoRight (talk) 08:01, 20 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Mediation cases are privileged as much as anything is on wikipedia and are not supposed to be used in Arbitration. can I suggest you both redact any reference to mediation from your comments? Cheers Spartaz ^Humbug! 08:55, 20 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]
- Done. Mathsci (talk) 09:03, 20 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Not sure this kind of motion is needed or necessary. Past actions can be used to illustrate/clarify current ongoing problems. Previous postings can also be used to indicate current patterns of behavior (e.g. offers of meatpuppetry -deleted by Black Kite in '08) which are undesirable and against policies. R. Baley (talk) 16:10, 20 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

R. Baley, if that link refers to something I wrote, which it appears to, I'd appreciate a copy, if the file wasn't offensive or a policy violation, or how about undeleting it so that anyone can read it? I have nothing to hide. (And if I do, I'd want to know!) --Abd (talk) 01:06, 21 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I decline. Request forwarded (diff) to the deleting administrator, Black Kite (section link). R. Baley (talk) 02:26, 21 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I also decline to undelete it, but if I quote the opening section of it - "This is a page for users to leave articles, essay suggestions, or comments for my review. This may be used, as an example, by users on article or civility parole ... Leaving material here gives me permission to use the material elsewhere on Wikipedia, with me taking responsibility for it as my own edit..." the reason for it being deleted is probably fairly clear. Black Kite 08:28, 21 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Mmmm.... as far as I can see, that is not a violation of any kind, and that Black Kite thinks it is may suggest that ArbComm address this issue of "proxying." It was just a more specified location for that kind of suggestion, and more public than email or my page User talk:Abd/IP, which is important when my Talk page is semiprotected. It's my view that we should always keep lines of communication open with banned users; when we don't, we get Scibaby et al. That communication should only be with consenting editors, so the "exhausted patience of the community" does not apply. We recently had many editors cooperating with ScienceApologist in working on an article, while not only banned but blocked, and I supported that. Why not extend that possibility of cooperation to all banned editors? I request, then, undeletion of that page to my user space, so that I may review the history as well. In order to avoid unnecessary disruption, I will CSD tag it for deletion after I review it, unless others request it remain. --Abd (talk) 15:31, 22 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

No, the whole "taking responsibility for it as my own edit" thing seems to directly contradict the GFDL, which requires that all edits be attributed to their creator. Copying content from one page to another requires that you provide a list of contributors or otherwise provide a reference to the text's history. As such, that page is improperly licensed and should not be restored. I note that I'm now the third admin to decline this. Hersfold non-admin^(t/a/c) 16:17, 22 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

FWIW, the new CC-BY-SA license requires this too, not that it was applied to text contributions at that time. Hersfold non-admin^(t/a/c) 16:19, 22 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Two more weeks to gather evidence

3) I ask arbs to give me and Abd two more weeks to gather evidence before they start making proposals in the workshop (until Monday 3rd August). There are megabytes of conversation related to this case, just reading it takes me a lot of time, and I have only gone throught a fraction of it. I have problems backing up my statements in the workshop because there are so many problems that I haven't sorted through yet. Also, I want to address in my evidence whether WMC's prior blocks have been found problematic by the community, and I want to make clearer wich evidence covers the time frame of the ban, and which evidence is about the current problems with the current ban being just a continuation and/or a logical consequence of long-term problems that remained unacknowledged by Abd over a long time. Arbs will also be able to see better if the evidence supports or not a expansion of the scope.

Comment by Arbitrators:

Diminishing returns for these sorts of cases. — Rlevse • Talk • 23:10, 21 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Not seeing value in this; the scope is well circumscribed, and it should not take more than the standard one week to present evidence here. In fact, if it is taking more than a week, that begs the question of whether (a) the evidence is relevant to the scope or (b) there was a reason to take the case in the first place. Risker (talk) 16:56, 22 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I want everyone to have a full and fair opportunity to locate evidence and present it cogently to us ... but I would prefer to move to a proposed decision in much less than two more weeks. Ultimately, though, it's really up to the drafting arbitrator, who to an extent dictates the pace of the case from the committee's point of view. Newyorkbrad (talk) 00:08, 23 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Comment by parties:

Proposed. Notice that, for example, today I'll be busy so I won't be able to gather evidence (and, indeed, I shouldn't be editing wikipedia right now!). --Enric Naval (talk) 08:35, 20 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Support. I could use the time as well, in fact, I'm a bit worried about even a week more, it might not be enough. I do have kids, a business to run, and a Meetup in New York this weekend that I've promised to join. Note that this support is not support of expansion of the scope of the case. I'm aware, at the present, that my evidence may look like I'm expanding the scope, but I'm not. The situations mentioned there will be placed in context and the many editors mentioned are not targets, specific wrong-doing is not being alleged. (If it were, I would have notified them, and some of those names were only mentioned at this point so that I could make blanket statements of completeness, i.e., this list of editors was all editors who qualified as stated.) If there are behavior problems with the "cabal," they would be raised as enforcement requests for Wikipedia:Requests for arbitration/Fringe science, not here. The most that is being shown is a kind of broad involvement that should be a matter of concern, but not necessarily of sanction, except where that prior involvement led these editors to become specifically involved in this much narrower case, as can be seen in those showing behavioral problems in this very request, with warning after warning being issued by clerks. --Abd (talk) 15:54, 20 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I changed it to two weeks, since I was also wary that one week would not be enough and I would have to ask for another adjourning. I also changed "me" to "me and Abd". --Enric Naval (talk) 16:37, 20 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Two weeks okay by me. There are some wedge issues here, and taking the time to do it right could be quite useful. Besides, I've got some actual article work to do that I should get done before I'm site-banned, as some have been predicting. I suppose I could email some ~~of my meat puppets~~ cooperating editors should I not get it done in time. It's just finishing stuff that I began, stuff that was controversial for a short time, but then consensus was found. Some here -- except for Enric once in a while -- aren't likely to mention that. Maybe I'll ask Enric to "proxy" for me. Hey, Enric, if I email you some good edits that you could easily verify, not controversial, would you make them for me? Or would you think that a violation of WP:MEAT? --Abd (talk) 01:32, 21 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Don't much care. I've said everything I need to for the moment. The train-wreck remains entertaining; but drawn out for another two weeks it will probably become dull. Abd is busy shooting himself in the foot; given more time he may manage to do so slightly less messily, which would be good. The downside is that I'll probably be tempted into more self-defeating sarcasm, but its a fine balance William M. Connolley (talk) 21:38, 20 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Oppose. Enough junk; Stephan is correct William M. Connolley (talk) 22:33, 21 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Comment by others:

I personally would like to see what Enric gathers to get a feel of it all. So far I have found the evidence and the difs very enlightening and would find that the more difs should be an advantage to everyone prior to deciding anything here. The idea of this case is to stop the disruptions so lets give anyone a chance to show what they feel a need to show. If it goes off target it can always be reverted and the situation can be stopped by an arbitrator. Thoughts of others? --CrohnieGal^Talk 11:50, 20 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

A period of five days might be reasonable, but really this is up to ArbCom and the clerks, not us. Mathsci (talk) 17:16, 20 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Support. Let Enric have all the time he needs. I admit that I would likely make use of it myself. Scope to remain unchanged by my !vote. --GoRight (talk) 21:53, 20 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Oppose. Taiwan cannot make enough hard drives to store the amount of low-content text this case will produce in two weeks. The Great Wikipedia Dramaout goes to July 23rd. It makes sense to give participating editors a chance to chime in on the evidence page. But 24 hours are as likely to produce useful results as 24 weeks, in my opinion. --Stephan Schulz (talk) 07:12, 21 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Let me get this straight. A party proposes this. An adverse party supports it. And the third party accepts it. Consensus of the parties! And Stephan is opposed? May I suggest that he do something useful with the time? Evidence and proposals can be refactored, so, in fact, 24 weeks would be better than 24 hours, this is, after all, a wiki. There are issues, even issues raised here, where a 24 week page, continually refined until settled, would be quite appropriate. What if, for example, the factions involved got together and persuaded "members" to withdraw distracting and redundant comments, leaving only the best and most cogent, or combined and signed proposals? However, there is a point of maximum return for effort, and it's probably quite a bit short of 24 weeks! It's longer than 24 hours, editors have outside responsibilities, etc. --Abd (talk) 14:29, 21 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Abd, please move this remark to the section "comment by parties". Mathsci (talk) 15:37, 21 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Tradition seems to be that parties may respond in the "others" section. Parties get privileged position, that's all. Mathsci, you could have had this privilege too, you could still have it. I'm sure that if you requested to be added as a party, it would be done. A clerk may move the comment if the clerk decides it's better that way. --Abd (talk) 17:02, 21 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I stand by my comment. --Stephan Schulz (talk) 14:53, 21 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Concur 100% with Stephan. Raul654 (talk) 15:40, 21 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]
But of course as a member in good standing of the "Raul/WMC/SS/KDP/... Majority POV Pushing Society" this would have been understood by all coming in. Your comment here is actually a tad redundant in that respect. (Comment made for illustration purposes only.) --GoRight (talk) 16:03, 21 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]
The difference here is that, unlike you, I'm not making transparently false claims. Stephan's point -- that giving Abd an extra two weeks would only result in an extraordinarily low signal-to-noise ratio on all pages he touches -- is well taken. Raul654 (talk) 16:14, 21 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Surely if I add piles of irrelevant and "false claims," this will simplify ArbComm's job; no arbitrator is actually obligated to read all the "twaddle." If I cover up the "signal" with dreck, effectively mooning the jury, surely that would be a great reason to site-ban me or perhaps demand that I find a mentor or some other remedy. What I see on the evidence page, though, is a bit of the reverse. Again, anyone gets to make false claims here, but making false claims can be grounds for being sanctioned, for they are disruptive. --Abd (talk) 17:08, 21 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

@Raul - Am I mistaken here? I thought that this was actually Enric's motion? --GoRight (talk) 17:58, 21 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

It is Enric's motion. What is your point? I oppose it all the same. I don't want Abd filling up these pages with his content-void walls of text, and Enric's motion is bound to encourage exactly that. Raul654 (talk) 18:07, 21 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

As I've mentioned privately to the arbitrators via clerks-l, I feel that extending this case opens up severe risk of further disruption, and I believe the attacks and name-calling in this very section are evidence of that. In any event, there are already several statements that are close to or over the defined evidence limit, Enric's included (although I will grant it has been shortened). Hersfold ^(t/a/c) 02:33, 22 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Motion to freeze the Workshop page pending completion of evidence

4) For two weeks, while the parties and others prepare and condense evidence for completeness and clarity, the Workshop page should be protected and work on findings and proposals suspended.

Comment by Arbitrators:

Well, since I don't think that anyone needs two weeks to present evidence here (remember, we want evidence specific to this issue, not philosophical treatises), then there is no particular reason to extend the evidence phase. Risker (talk) 17:06, 22 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

See my comment above. Beyond that, I don't see the desirability of "freezing" the workshop, though I do think that everyone should present only proposals that they believe should be seriously considered for adoption as part of the decision, and not mere debating points. Newyorkbrad (talk) 00:09, 23 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Comment by parties:

Proposals are being made based on charges that have not been supported with evidence. There is reasonable fear that if more time elapses, the comments will multiply. It would seem to make sense that the community have before it clear and complete evidence before making proposals. Without the evidence being complete, I see a clerk having difficulty identifying what is relevant and what is not, and some editors are supporting or opposing proposed findings based on prior opinions and impressions, and quite possibly factional affiliation, rather than specific evidence. We have the advisory jury of the community debating the verdict before the trial. --Abd (talk) 04:51, 22 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Risker: Evidence text is relatively brief, once evidence has been compiled. Compiling relevant evidence and sorting through it for what is relevant, and presenting it cogently could be impossible for some, difficult for others, and time-consuming for anyone. Having precompiled much of the evidence, it still took me a full day, maybe 12 hours, to write the RfAr, and that was very narrowly focused. From what other editors have brought up, it became necessary to expand what's covered, though I'm still keeping it focused on the needs of the Abd-WMC dispute (though it might look otherwise at the moment, because the existing evidence hasn't been boiled down yet, I've laid part of the foundation, but have built none of the house.) --Abd (talk) 18:16, 23 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Newyorkbrad: I would propose *in general* not opening workshops until the evidence phase has been completed to the satisfaction of the editors presenting evidence (within reason). Debate on the Evidence page should be highly discouraged. Alternatively, the workshop could be open for proposals, but without any debate other than preliminary endorsements, with no opposing comments, as in an RfC. (That way, parties would know better what evidence might need to be presented.) I have made only one proposal on this page, other than motions. It didn't require evidence, because it's general. However a series of proposed findings and remedies have been created here, without supporting evidence on the evidence page, as far as I've seen. That's a waste of time and dangerous, and has encouraged much premature debate. I don't need this page frozen, but the complaint about allowing additional time for evidence -- you won't know if it was necessary until you've seen it! -- was that it would encourage more waste of time here. The claim that these motions are dilatory should be considered in the light of who is harmed by delay. As far as I can see, only me. Is there some ongoing disruption that would make a fast decision necessary? If so, the behavior should be enjoined, quickly and without prejudice. --Abd (talk) 18:16, 23 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Oppose William M. Connolley (talk) 07:56, 22 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Comment: I asked the arbs not to make proposals while evidence was still being compiled, but the editors that have been directly involved in the matter are already familiar with the events. They have already finished their evidence, and myself I made a couple of proposals below when I finished that part of my evidence. --Enric Naval (talk) 23:54, 26 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Comment by others:

Oppose, Abd started with proposals before adding any evidence whatsoever so its hipocritical of them to now demand the workshop be frozen because others are making proposals. There is so such data now that its unfair on others to make them stop for Abd's benefit. Spartaz ^Humbug! 05:44, 22 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Not a demand, Spartaz. It's a proposed motion. If ArbComm wants this page to continue to grow ad interim, I have no personal problem with it, though it wastes time for me and others to create proposals and respond to comments that would not necessarily be made if the evidence were all in. I trust that ArbComm will decide based on what it considers best. --Abd (talk) 15:18, 22 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I'd suggest you just concentrated on completing your evidence if this is such an important point for you rather then wasting your time on frivolous motions like this. Spartaz ^Humbug! 15:28, 22 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Oppose Per comments to proposal of prolongation of period of preparation of evidence, per clerk's comments and per projected date of completion in mid-August. As the initiator of the case, Abd should have prepared the bulk of his evidence before it started. Mathsci (talk) 05:54, 22 July 2009 (UTC) It's 1000 words, not War and Peace — Abd's writing skills are needed on the evidence page not on Wikipedia Review. Chop-Chop. [reply]

I had evidence prepared, and it was filed with the case. However, attempts have been made to expand the scope, and, when this case was open and evidence and proposals started coming in, I realized that the issue of the cabal, which I'd hoped to avoid, was becoming highly relevant. The level of disruption in these pages has diverted me from that task, plus I have RL responsibilities that I cannot continue to neglect. --Abd (talk) 15:18, 22 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

You've spent more time arguing this case off-site than you have presenting evidence over the past few days, so the limited-time argument seems somewhat unconvincing. If you want to refocus on developing evidence, you don't need an ArbCom motion. Just lead the way. MastCell ^Talk 16:05, 22 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

A number of editors have commented on this, assuming that the length of a post correlates well with how much time it took. Actually, posts on WR are fast and easy to write, because, there, I truly DGAF. Further, what many editors have missed is that raw discussion like what happens there can help me to develop a sense of what may resonate and what may not. I use Talk discussion the same way here, to test the water, but I'm much more cautious. I can tell what's likely to find consensus by the response (or non-response) on a Talk page. WR is like an eXtreme Talk page. It's an efficient use of my time, in fact, it takes little time and I gain relatively much information. An ordinary Talk post, standard Wall-o-Text (TM) takes me easily twice as long, sometimes ten or twenty times as long, as a post of equivalent length on WR. Putting together RfAr evidence text? Triple that or more. I'd much prefer having been able to put this time to work converting reliable sources to article text. During the month before I was banned, that's what I'd started to do. --Abd (talk) 21:31, 23 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Proposed final decision

Proposals by Abd

Proposed principles

Consensus is fundamental to NPOV

1) The surest sign that neutral text has been found is that all reasonable editors, understanding guidelines and policy, will agree or accept it, regardless of personal POV. Where necessary, and without compromising our fundamental principles, we need take extraordinary care that this consensus is discovered, documented, and maintained, which includes supporting process for consensus to shift and grow non-disruptively.

Comment by Arbitrators:

The first sentence is basically right, although it is overly optimistic to anticipate that unanimous agreement among even "reasonable editors" can be reached in every case. It also is true that consensus can change over time, but beyond that, I don't understand the second sentence. Newyorkbrad (talk) 15:17, 16 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I am not persuaded that this is a useful principle, particularly the second part, which seems overly focused on the process of "discovering" consensus than it is in writing NPOV content. Risker (talk) 02:11, 17 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Comment by parties:

Support. This cannot be overemphasized, it was part of the founding vision of Wikipedia. Where we actively pursue true consensus, not merely a rough consensus that excludes minority views, we settle disputes and broaden the community which has an interest in stability, instead of motivating and maintaining disruption. --Abd (talk) 14:50, 16 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Response to Newyorkbrad. Thanks. Unanimous agreement isn't necessary, but is desirable. In fact, consensus organizations which establish good process find that complete agreement is more attainable than expected, but my own conclusion from many years of experience is that majority rule is an important operating principle, necessary for efficiency, that becomes damaging when the strong desirability of full consensus is overlooked. When there is maximized consensus, long-term efficiency is maximized. It's established that consensus can change, but how is not well established. While we may assert some kind of abstract NPOV principle, we have no way of objectively measuring it except through the measure of consensus. If a consensus exists at one time, but is not documented, if the evidence and arguments for the consensus haven't been made explicit and accessible, there is no guidance for the future except an assumption that existing text is "consensus," and the boulder must roll inevitably down the hill, and we will have to push it up again, which is so much work that we often prefer to revert and block a dissident, instead of engaging and recruiting the new editor to help extend consensus by reviewing the basis for it and pointing out, if possible, any defects. --Abd (talk) 16:11, 16 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

@Newyorkbrad, IMO, Abd means in his second sentence that we should held terribly long discussions with dozens of editors involved, so we can then measure consensus using some unnecessarily complicated rule that Abd wants to try out in wikipedia. All of this, of course, with Abd being the one in charge of the whole process. This is what he tried to do with his last poll right before he was banned from CF. (see below) --Enric Naval (talk) 16:36, 16 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

This preposterous assumption is an example of what I've faced for five months at Cold fusion, raw ABF. --Abd (talk) 17:43, 16 July 2009 (UTC) I couldn't control it if I wanted to, and I don't, not even if the community demanded it, and inefficient discussion would entirely defeat the purpose and would simply fail.[reply]

Enric Naval: That was hardly a productive comment. Please limit discussion on arbitration pages to constructive additions only. AGK 03:13, 17 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I'm sorry, but that is what Abd means with that sentence, altough he would have chosen a very different wording. --Enric Naval (talk) 05:41, 17 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

AGK, you are right, my uncivil wording was really inadequate,and it wasn't productive. NewYorkBrad deserves a better explanation (and he doesn't know the context, so he probably doesn't even know what I am talking about). I striked it out and I will make a proper explanation in a couple of hours. --Enric Naval (talk) 12:58, 17 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Rewording: Shortly before being banned, Abd was Hipocrite were making competing polls. Abd tried to make a poll based in Range voting, and tried to merge two polls in one. He was heavily criticized for moving votes around, modifying the poll at mid-polling, using too complicated rules, WP:OWNership issues, etc, and was told to stop touching the poll and even to drop it completely. His behaviour at the poll was part of what triggered his ban. Despite all this, he thinks that the poll was a success, and now he is here making proposals of measuring consensus without giving any acknowledgement or indication that he was ever heavily criticized for his methods. Editors who saw their suggestions and criticims ignored during and after that poll are now understandibly wary of him ever handling any measurement of consensus, since they assume that Abd will not listen to them. (Whether that assumption is warranted is something that deserves a separate discussion, the point here is that Abd has lost the trust of many editors in measurement of consensus) His second sentence looks a lot like what he did in that poll.

Also, Risker points out the sentence is more focused in the process than in the final result. Abd has a long history of supporting new processes of discovering consensus, as he has always been interested in voting systems (yeah, I know, I have to prove this in the evidence section, I will link here when it's done) with his support of Wikipedia:Delegable proxy and his editing in relatively obscure voting systems like Instant-runoff voting or Approval voting, which he edited heavily before getting interested in cold fusion (Abd's edit count) (Abd used Range voting in the poll, and Approval voting is a type of range voting). This makes me fear that Abd is more interested in experimenting with measurement of democratic votes than in measuring WP:CONSENSUS consensus by wikipedia standards. There are more indications that make me think this, but it will be better if I put them into the Evidence page and link them here later. Also, part of a trend where process is put over results, so not an isolated incident that is being blown out of proportion. Posting in talk page. --Enric Naval (talk) 14:52, 17 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Response to Mathsci. This proposal is an expansion on and explanation of the five, not a substitute for them. I thank Mathsci for pointing to the essay and the MfD, which was, when MfD'd, indeed a rant, though in the process of conversion to one more neutral and less topical, with participation and comment from others invited. The MfD, Mathsci nominating, snowed Keep; some of the criticism at the time was justified and may have been addressed, but I'm not claiming it's ready for WP space. A move is not a decision I will make. --Abd (talk) 17:53, 16 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Response to MastCell. Yes, that's a problem, but it doesn't relate to the desirability of consensus. If we exclude editors without adequate opportunity for them to participate, if they are met with hostility and threats and blocks, most will become, if they were not before, "unreasonable." They may create, as Scibaby did, as many as 300 sock puppets. We don't know if he would have been reasonable if welcomed and channeled toward constructive work on what I call the "backstory," with an opportunity to participate in expansion of consensus, and where intrinsic unreasonableness, if present, would have become obvious, and he'd then have been rejected, not only by those opposed to him in POV, but by the whole community, including supporters of his POV and those neutral. Once we understand that consensus only begins with "rough consensus," and that when we stop there, we may be institutionalizing disruption, we will confine stern response to necessity. It only takes two to discuss, not dozens, and discussion of changes can expand from there as needed. --Abd (talk) 18:14, 16 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

my response to WMC

This is an ancient debate, actually, I could trace it to fourteen hundred years ago.... "Editor's consensus" in the pollicy quoted refers to local consensus, not to overall project-wide consensus. If there were actually a disagreement between a true consensus of the community and the Foundation, represented by Jimbo or otherwise, we'd have a problem, but, to be brief, it ain't gonna happen. It was not suggested that any principles were to be "superseded." Rather, consensus is how we interpret NPOV, how we judge that it has been found. This crucial question of how we determine that the conditions described exist is why consensus is fundamental. Suppose, for a moment, that there was some real contradiction here. There is article text, of some importance, that has been (how?) determined to be NPOV, but a general consensus considers it biased. What's going to happen? Whoever takes on the job of maintaining that "NPOV" text is going to find it quite difficult, editor after editor will appear and try to change it, there will be endless disruption.

Now, let's narrow this down. Suppose there is a limited set of editors working on an article. Suppose that five of them think existing text is NPOV and meets WP:V. And one sees it differently. She has a different point of view than the five, and when we have a different point of view, we may notice things that are hidden to others. With the same sources, the same facts, there is no effective limit to the possible variety of expression. I've described a situation where the local consensus is at 83%, we'd normally call that "rough consensus," easily. Should the five editors resist efforts to change the text to satisfy the lone dissenter, or should they attempt to find text that they still consider NPOV, but that is also acceptable to the dissenter? To me, the article will become more reliable and more stable if consensus is at 100% than if it is at 83%, and it is less likely to attract outside disruption. Then the question becomes how the majority is to consider the problem. Should they all discuss it together? I'd suggest not, in fact. I'd suggest that the lone editor first attempts to identify a member of the majority who might be the most willing to consider the problem, most likely to understand and respect a different point of view. If the two of them can agree, we've doubled the support for new text. If the two of them can convince another, we've removed the consensus on the old text.

Suppose, though, that the single editor can't convince any of the five. What can the editor do? Let's suppose that there exists some text that would satisfy all the editors, but the five can't be bothered to look at it. Let's even assume that this reluctance is quite legitimate. After all, as far as they can see, the text is just fine! Would we agree, though, that 100% consensus is better than 83%? We have various ways of addressing this, but they aren't necessarily as efficient as they could be. I wasn't, here, specifying how we would do it, but we do have, for this, RfC and other WP:DR processes; but if an editor is considered disruptive because they are in the minority, if they are defined as a "civil POV-pusher" because they attempt to convince others to improve the article, we defeat those processes. And that's the point here. We need take care to maximize consensus, it's important, and if we don't do it, what we will see is continual disruption. The short term gain (avoiding debate on what seems settled) is balanced by long-term, continual loss in terms of energy to maintain the project, to stop it from sliding back down the hill. There are ways to do it that are efficient, we use them irregularly, but they take discussion. Not necessarily large-scale discussion, it might be discussion between two editors. It might just be one writing in an attempt to find another editor to agree. To the majority, this is likely to look like "POV-pushing." And this is why banning editors from Talk pages is far more damaging to our process than banning them from articles or restricting reverts.

And this is why, when Hipocrite was edit warring at Cold fusion, and complained to RfPP that Abd was edit warring again at Cold fusion, when, in fact, he was the edit warrior, and I didn't revert him at all that day, and when he had, after requesting protection, made a totally outrageous edit to the lede, thus leaving the article in seriously damaged state, I offered to agree to a mutual page ban on the article. He grabbed at the chance. That was the situation when WMC declared his ban; we were already page banned, by agreement, though details hadn't been worked out. What WMC did was to extend it to Talk.

The effect? We've blocked or banned the most knowledgeable of our editors on the topic: ScienceApologist, Pcarbonn, JedRothwell (COI editor who confined himself to Talk since 2006), and now myself. (I'm not an expert, but I have spent six months researching the topic, in serious depth, and I was familiar with it in 1989, but skeptical since then, until I did this research.) The article is a disaster, nobody who knows the field is likely to respect it. It looks okay if you don't know what's in the recent peer-reviewed and academic secondary sources, sources that the article pretty much claims don't exist. --Abd (talk) 05:17, 20 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I'm returning this comment, but collapsed, because obviously it was too long for WMC's tastes, and collapse is one standard response to claims that comments are too long, rambling, or off-topic. In time, I will bring out of collapse a summary of what's most important about this comment. Meanwhile, it is, in fact, on-topic, in my opinion, and it should be readily accessible to the arbitrators who eventually must go over this mess, hence it should remain here. Arbitrators will decide whether to read it or not.

--Abd (talk) 14:12, 21 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Ah, that explains at least part of the edit warring ([1][2][3][4]): WMC believes that this is his section. Take a look at where this is: Proposals by Abd. And this does make clear what the case is about: WMC develops some opinion, and then ignores all rules to implement it. Sometimes it's brilliant, that's why we have IAR. But sometimes it is ... not. And he hasn't learned how to back down quickly. --Abd (talk) 15:03, 21 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Reject In case it wasn't clear. Second sentence is plain not good. Also, assuming that "all reasonable editors" will agree to a text is unrealistic. Some editors disagree deeply with what the sources say about the topic they like/hate, so it's imposible that they are happy about any text that actually reflects the sources. --Enric Naval (talk) 23:40, 26 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Redacted proposal to strike second sentence. That will be made as a separate proposal. The important part was the first sentence! --Abd (talk) 02:44, 30 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Note There is a straw man argument here, from Enric, above. No assumption that "all reasonable editors will agree" is necessary or proposed. All that is stated is that this, if it happens, is the surest sign of NPOV; the surest sign may not be attainable within practical limits. If we posit two alternative texts, one which is considered neutral by 99% of editors, and one which is considered neutral by 100% of editors, the latter is more neutral. How we would move from 99% NPOV to 100% is a structural and process problem, and the ease or difficulty of this has no effect on its desirability. In arguing against this, usually critics suggest that the 99% of editors have to give up something to please the remaining 1%. That's a false assumption that contradicts the conditions of the claim. If 100% of editors agree that a text is neutral, we are constrained to consider that text unquestionably neutral, since we all agree on it (until someone objects!). If it's only 99%, the 99% are satisfied, sure, and we cannot expect them to be exercised to search for better text; but, in reality, it only takes one editor from the 99% and one from the 1% to work on a compromise. One editor working with one other editor. Both self-selected or otherwise volunteering. Thus the claims about "wearing out editors" are spurious. If an editor with a minority idea can't find anyone willing to discuss it, that's the end of it until the situation changes. This is connected with the proposal for not debating unsupported proposals. If you feel you must "correct" everything that is "wrong," then you will be irritated by proposals that are clearly "against consensus" and you will ultimately be motivated to stop such "disruption," especially if it is repeated, which tends to happen when nobody listens. Rather, shunting minority proposals that are not close to adoption to subpages or otherwise confining them, but encouraging and allowing them, keeps the door open to possible improvements in consensus and thus in certainty of neutrality, without irritating the majority. If I have some wild-hair idea, and someone moves it to a Wild Hair Idea subpage, all it would take is another involved editor moving it back to prove that it's not isolated, at least, or we could have a page for Emerging Ideas. As our scale increases, there can be increasing refinements to this. I'd be silly, however, to personally edit war to move that proposal back to the top level talk page. Basically, if I can't find any support, it is a Wild Hair Idea, and I'm quite prepared to accept that some of my ideas, no matter how Excellent (or otherwise!) are not going to be accepted, and they might as well be on the Wild Hair Idea subpage until they find some sympathy. In general, minorities understand that they are minorities until it gets close.
Please see the 2003 mailing list post by Jimbo at [5]. While that's old, Jimbo's claims there that those holding fringe science views will agree that the view is considered fringe by a majority of scientists, assuming there is source for that (and maybe even if there is not), and I can confirm that from many years of experience with consensus process. See also the MeatBall wiki pages that are external links from WP:NPOV. Finding neutral text is often just a matter of finding accurate and neutral framing. I am convinced that the 2004 DoE report on Low Energy Nuclear Reactions (Cold fusion) came to radically different conclusions, in the body of the report, than did the 1989 panel, but I'd be stupid to argue against text stating that the report claims to have come to the same conclusion as 1989. And the apparent contradiction is resolved if we understand that the bureaucrat making that comment was concerned about funding decisions, the purpose for both panels, and, for that, the conclusion was practically identical. (Modest funding under existing programs.) The position on the science, though, was radically different, and all this could be described in NPOV text, reliably sourced and verifiable, in an article on the history of Cold fusion. Conflicts arise particularly when minority views are entirely excluded, even though reliable source exists for them, and this is often done by the cabal, on the argument of undue weight. Jimbo, in the cited mail, addresses this, suggesting subarticles, an approach that the cabal generally opposes, because it would allow full expression of fringe theories, to the extent that they are covered by reliable source, and the cabal generally seeks to repress fringe content, not to present and balance it. --Abd (talk) 14:32, 30 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Comment by others:

Not the way most WP articles are written and not helpful as a substitute for WP:Five pillars. No need to transfer extracts of the userspace essay User:Abd/Majority POV-pushing onto this page: it was already severely criticized in the MfD by multiple users. Mathsci (talk) 15:23, 16 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Although their purpose is unclear, Abd's second sentence in the proposal and his userspace essay might be an attempt to justify the pushing of a fringe viewpoint by slowly tiring out mainstream (= majority point of view) editors. Mathsci (talk) 18:29, 16 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Not to put too fine a point on it, but I believe that the problem here has been in parsing the definition of "reasonable editors". MastCell ^Talk 17:54, 16 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Reject. This kind of wooly principle has become a staple of arbcom announcements, and this one, to quote from Macbeth, is "... full of sound and fury, signifying nothing". WP:NPOV and WP:CONSENSUS are already policies, and MathSci has already mentioned the WP:FIVEPILLARS. The community has already established policy, and that is not a job for anyone else. Unless there happens to be a philosopher king lying around. Verbal chat 18:11, 16 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Curious that Abd chooses to use the workshop for more grandstanding rather then supplying evidence for arbcom to look at. ~~If I were cynical I'd suggest that this case has been cooked up to give them an opportunity to promote their own agenda rather then a genuine disagreement where dispute resolution is required.~~ Spartaz ^Humbug! 18:06, 17 July 2009 (UTC) - struck per instructions. Spartaz ^Humbug! 21:45, 17 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Spartaz, this page (and this section in particular) is for the discussion of the proposed principle, not for making unfounded speculation as to the motives of those involved. Please strike your comment and refrain from making further statements of this nature. Thank you. Hersfold ^(t/a/c) 21:31, 17 July 2009 (UTC) (later edit: Thank you for your understanding.)[reply]

Reject. Poorly written and to me, over analyzed. Let's stick with the way we already do consensus, not this new way that has been refused. --CrohnieGal^Talk 11:23, 19 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Reject. For one, useful consensus is not typically "discovered", it is constructed. You can only discover the lowest common denominator. NPOV is not achieved by accommodating each and every opinion, but by weighting arguments and sources. --Stephan Schulz (talk) 15:55, 22 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Reject per Stephan. Raul654 (talk) 15:57, 22 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Support per NPOV. The second sentence seems to me to mean that we should make an intense effort to find NPOV wording (as opposed to giving up and accepting wording that is acceptable from many, but not all, significant POVs). Risker, this principle is about writing NPOV content. It's about finding NPOV content via a process of discussion and consensus among editors. As I quote Abd on my userpage, "Individual opinion about NPOV is unreliable, ultimately." ☺Coppertwig (talk) 00:13, 25 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Reply to Enric Naval who said "Some editors disagree deeply with what the sources say about the topic they like/hate, so it's imposible that they are happy about any text that actually reflects the sources". You seem to ignore the possibility that there are editors who are willing to write NPOV text based on the sources rather than on their own personal beliefs. Proponents of a fringe theory may be happy when they see the theory described accurately (without presenting it as true) in proportion to its degree of prominence in the sources. ☺Coppertwig (talk) 22:16, 29 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Reject WP:NPOV explicitly rejects this line of argument; viz. "The principles upon which these policies are based cannot be superseded by other policies or guidelines, or by editors' consensus." (emphasis added) Short Brigade Harvester Boris (talk) 23:45, 26 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

WP:IAR explicitly rejects the idea that we are bound by any policy. May I assume that the text of WP:NPOV is consensus? If consensus changed, could it say something different? And if the Foundation froze that page and that text and insisted on it, what could a consensus of editors -- i.e. all or most of them -- do? I'd suggest it would be singularly foolish for the Foundation to do that, they wouldn't, that simple. Boris's opinion, in religion, would be called "fundamentalist." It's the idea that policies exist in the abstract and we are all bound to follow them, no interpretation is necessary. In fact, there is always interpretation, decisions about where to draw the line, how to satisfy competing "principles," and the only way to make these boundary decisions is through a decision-making process, and the best and least disruptive guide for that process is editorial consensus. We have no other guide except that used by Boris and the rest of the cabal: their own factional position, considered by them fundamental and not a matter of interpretation. Editorial consensus will never reverse "the principles on which these policies are founded," because those principles are fundamentally sound, consensus is always wiser than any individual (it must be, if it's a deliberated consensus!), and the cabal, in fact, disagrees with and frustrates those fundamental principles. If it followed them, we'd have no problem, though we'd certainly still have plenty of debate. Constructive debate, productive debate, and, indeed, efficient debate. Not this crap over a proposed principle that ought to be noncontroversial! (But it's only proposed because there is, indeed, disagreement with it, which is why it's important it be stated by ArbComm.) --Abd (talk) 14:47, 30 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]
BTW, that was a nice example of wikilawyering, Boris, thanks. "Editors' consensus" means, in that context, a local consensus, not a broad one. Jimbo and the WMF would not resist a coherent, broad consensus, they'd be stupid not to respect it, or, to be more accurate, there would have to be a damn good reason. Because they could, if they did resist it, see an immediate loss of most of the editorial labor, and most of the small donations, and if we were capable of forming a coherent consensus (we aren't yet, except by osmosis, which takes too long), we could start our own damn wiki, practically overnight, beginning with all the content of this one, practically nothing lost, and no liabilities, and with the funding and labor immediately available. Ain't gonna happen, even if we develop the structures that could do it, because consensus is wiser than that, and so are Jimbo and the board. Jimbo, I'm sure, understands exactly what I'm saying, whether you do or not.--Abd (talk) 15:00, 30 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Oppose strongly, this just calls for calling everybody who will not follow a certain side of the outcome an 'unreasonable editor', and voilá, you have the consensus that you want (and guess what, the other half of the editors do the same and have their version of consensus). --Dirk Beetstra ^{T C} 08:27, 31 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Broadening of consensus is always desirable

2) While full unanimity on text may be unattainable, maximization beyond rough consensus is always desirable, provided that it can be done efficiently. Tendentious debate involving unwilling editors is to be avoided.

Comment by Arbitrators:

Comment by parties:

Proposed. I'll get to how to do this below. Organizations that depend on unity for maximum function have learned to take extraordinary measures to satisfy the last hold-out, but, of course, there are practical limits. The key is to leave process open so that isolated disagreement can be channeled into small-scale, non-disruptive discussions between willing editors, where a new idea can be considered without requiring a larger community to immediately take it on. --Abd (talk) 03:01, 30 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Comment by others:

Oppose Extremely poorly drafted proposal which has little or nothing to do with wikipedia policies. Mathsci (talk) 08:30, 30 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Oppose Wikipedia is not an exercise in experimental democracy and consensus does not mean that generally supported positions can be filibustered out by stubborn editors holding out on a fringe view. Spartaz ^Humbug! 10:34, 30 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Oppose, you want to exclude again people from debate, because they do not support a certain view: a) full unanimity would be possible if the above passes, you just call the 'others' unreasonable; b) remove unwilling editors does the same. --Dirk Beetstra ^{T C} 08:31, 31 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Support This seems obvious and clearly a core part of achieivng WP:NPOV. --GoRight (talk) 14:12, 31 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Comment. This seems to be information-free. Logically, the header says something different from the body, and the body is so circumspect that its essentially empty. Was is "efficiently"? What is "tendentious debate"? And is it OK if "unwilling editors" are excluded? --Stephan Schulz (talk) 14:26, 31 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Oppose as written Not understandable as presently written. Short Brigade Harvester Boris (talk) 14:31, 31 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Support. One of Abd's other proposals below, "Don't debate proposals with no support", demonstrates one way of implementing this. This seems an obvious principle, essentially consensus and NPOV; balance is provided; the last sentence addresses a concern raised by Abd's detractors; and I don't understand the oppose rationales given, except Beetstra's (per which I decided to put "support" rather than "strong support"). It seems contradictory to me that Mathsci and Spartaz oppose this principle, which contains "Tendentious debate involving unwilling editors is to be avoided", yet at the same time suppport the proposed remedy "Abd banned". (Note to avoid misinterpretation: I don't consider Abd's editing to be "tendentious".) Do these editors believe that full unanimity is always attainable? Or that achieving more than mere rough consensus is not desirable? ☺Coppertwig (talk) 14:30, 2 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Don't debate proposals with no support

3) When a proposal or article talk page comment is made, editors ~~should~~ need not argue against it or reject it until it has received support from at least one other editor, beyond noting objection if needed. That objection need not be explained, and often ~~should not~~ it's a good idea not to, because that may encourage useless debate. "I'd object to that, but if anyone else supports it, we can discuss it," is civil and sufficient.

Comment by Arbitrators:

Comment by parties:

Proposed, revised argument. This is proposed as advice; one of the situations where following this advice would be beneficial is with "wall-of-text" proposals on article Talk pages. By not debating or objecting to such a proposal, if, indeed, it is useless, the proposal is not thereby accepted, and if the editor edits the article according to it, while the editor may claim "discussion," if there was no response that is only a low-level defense, especially if the proposal was not clear and sufficiently succinct. Arguing with a proposal encourages counter-argument, and this can go on endlessly. The proof is in article edits; Talk page discussion is a device to improve consensus but does not control. If an edit is reverted, there is some obligation to explain why in Talk, and that a refutation of this "why" may be buried somewhere in prior discussion is moot. We are ordinarily not obligated to read prior discussion, especially if it is long and confusing. I edited the original proposal to change "should not" to "need not" which closer reflects the advisory intention. --Abd (talk) 04:07, 2 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]

original argument by Abd, a somewhat different approach

Proposed This is basic deliberative process, the requirement that a motion be seconded before being debated. Centuries ago, peer decision-making bodies learned that it is a phenomenal waste of time to debate proposals that have no support except from the one proposing it. If an editor proposes an outrageous edit to an article, objecting is in order, but arguing against the edit, unless the group is small and congenial, is a waste of time. If nobody supports the proposal but the proposer, there is no need to waste time arguing against it, and doing so then invites counter-argument; plus the argument against the proposal may go too far, drawing in another editor to disagree with it, and on and on, in an all-too-familiar sequence.

In this case, I've been accused of writing "wall-of-text" comments on Talk, which are only a problem if editors feel obligated to read and respond to them. It's asserted that "nobody reads these." That's not true, but if it were, then ignoring them would be perfectly fine; at most, if it seems that some immanent and harmful action is to be taken, the very fact that I proposed it on Talk, with a too-long explanation, would be no defense against being reverted, only, possibly, against some claim that I edited without discussion. I can't demand that anyone discuss anything, and editors forfeit no rights by not responding to moot -- unseconded -- proposals. If we could establish an understanding of this principle in the community, we might avoid half the disruption we see. We'd also become more tolerant of long rants, because we can ignore them or collapse them or fast-archive them, especially if no real discussion results. --Abd (talk) 03:17, 30 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

reply to Short Brigade Harvester Boris: Sigh. This is not proposed as a rule to be enforced, not a "requirement," but a suggestion, advice if you will, that could avoid a lot of the crap we've seen. There is no "bureaucracy" involved, none. It's relevant to this case because much of the objection to "walls of text" comes from a belief that it's necessary to respond to anything one disagrees with. If we knew that ArbComm would not consider a proposal here that wasn't seconded, however, we could save a whole lotta disruption, reducing the work load on arbitrators. (An arbitrator could second, and if no arbitrator is willing to do that, well, how much chance is that proposal going to have to pass? "Second," by the way, doesn't mean, necessarily, "support," it means, "worth considering.")

Comment by others:

Oppose Enforcing Robert's Rules of Order ("the requirement that a motion be seconded before being debated") certainly violates the spirit of Wikipedia is not a bureaucracy, if not the letter. Short Brigade Harvester Boris (talk) 03:39, 30 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I'm experiencing a bout of cognitive dissonance in reconciling your initial reference to "the requirement that a motion be seconded" and your followup statement "This is not proposed as a rule to be enforced, not a 'requirement'". Short Brigade Harvester Boris (talk) 14:37, 31 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I mentioned formal deliberative process where that is, indeed, a requirement. We don't do requirements here, usually. But that doesn't mean that waiting for a second becomes stupid. It's still efficient, and editors who complain about wall-of-text really should consider this one. If nobody reads it, why bother complaining? Think it's too much? Collapse it, letting anyone who wants to read it, read it, but keeping the page clean. The section header should be kept out of collapse so that it remains in the table of contents, generally. --Abd (talk) 04:07, 2 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Oppose. Incompatible with Wikipedia culture and practice (which even now often sees "nobody objected when I proposed it on talk" style arguments). ~~It might be a good idea for Wikipedia 2.0, though~~After minimal thought, not even that. Such a rule would really encourage traveling cabals. --Stephan Schulz (talk) 07:27, 30 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Oppose Not how wikipedia works. Mathsci (talk) 08:31, 30 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Oppose We don't do this and I can't see why we should either. Spartaz ^Humbug! 10:34, 30 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Oppose. This seems to be a reflection of my comments "dear wise one" that you commented on paragraph starting with "Crohnie, please read what I write carefully." I will let you all read Abd's comments. --CrohnieGal^Talk 12:25, 30 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

~~Oppose~~Comment (after change), if someone suggests an improvement on a talkpage, that improvement can immediately be implemented, as no-one is allowed to oppose to it, and no-one is allowed to discuss it as long as there is no second support for it? Or do you want to say now, that no-one is allowed to be bold in improving an article, because it first has to be discussed on the talkpage, and such a discussion may never take place if that one person will never get a support? Dangerous draft, this. --Dirk Beetstra ^{T C} 08:37, 31 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Beetstra, that's a preposterous interpretation of the proposal. There is nothing to prevent an editor from, elsewhere, discussing the proposal to find a second, either before or after making it. It already happens frequently that editors make a proposal and nobody replies. So? "no one is allowed" isn't what's proposed. You want to discuss it, fine. But don't then blame the proposer for back and forth debate that then ensues, and that, if there was no support even to discuss it, wasn't needed. This proposal doesn't change our process, if passed, it might nudge our process toward efficience, or it might simply allow some editors to more efficiently use their own time. The big point is that if you are inclined to disagree with a proposal and not inclined to think it needs discussion, jumping in to disagree with it will be likely to encourage counter-argument, but you remain free to do so if you think it will help something. If you have concluded that an editor is tendentious, though, it's just tossing fuel on the fire if you are right.

I wrote above that, if it was important to express objection, simply stating "I object to this," without argument, was enough. That's not an argument, it's a position. Discussion on a talk page is not required before making a bold edit. If one is reverted, properly the reverting editor will explain the reversion, but it might be very simple, such as "we don't have consensus for that." If we consider the first edit a "motion," then the reversion is an "objection." What's clear is that if an editor never gets any support, there is an impasse. If the proposer cannot find any support, and opposition exists, the presumption is usually status quo. If there has been no response, the proposer might consider refactoring the proposal, making it more succinct or approachable, you can do that with comments with no response. Or the proposer might look at article history and find possibly interested editors and approach them individually. Or might go to the Talk for the one objecting and ask why, and it then can become a two-person negotiation (or the editor can be asked to stop). Nothing is gained by arguing against an unseconded proposal, except in the situation where one actually educates the proposer to drop it because it's truly a bad idea. That can be done, sometimes, but if the proponent thinks of the opposition as biased or ignorant, it almost never works.

It's also apparently easy to misunderstand this proposal as discouraging discussion. Discussion is the equivalent in deliberative process of meeting in committee or as the "committee of the whole," where brainstorming is normal. However, what I have in mind with this proposal is situations where the rapport for that doesn't exist. If you imagine that you must argue against every proposal from the minority, you will then come to resent those proposals, because they will waste your time, over and over. What this suggests is that you might be partly responsible for that waste through a belief that you must answer. Answering dumb proposals in Talk is not required, and might even be better not done, especially if you can't do it nicely. --Abd (talk) 04:07, 2 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Abd, you rewrote the proposal, and now it reads much better. I don't oppose anymore (strikethrough applied), but I don't see too much utility.

As an explanation: The 'should' in the first sentence in the original could give the following situation: a) I propose something really silly ("grass is orange!"), b) you read it, and think, "this is really silly", and give ":I'd object to that, but if anyone else supports it, we can discuss it. ~~~~". Indeed, friendly and sufficient .. but .. ":I'd object to that, because when I walk outside, I see the cows and they all eat green grass. And ... Green is generally the colour of grass, because of the compounds in it that convert carbon dioxide and water to sugar are green (they absorb at ..). blah blah blah. But if anyone else supports it, we can discuss it. ~~~~" would initiate discussion, even if there is no support, and you give an explanation etc. etc. Maybe I am a 2nd year primary school kid, and I would be very gratefull for the full explanation (though mine here might be a bit too far ..). The former action would not get that response, I might even react "What are you opposing against, ****, when I walk here through my garden, all my grass is orange-like. I don't understand why my goat was dying. You unhelpful ***!". Hope this explains. --Dirk Beetstra ^{T C} 09:27, 2 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Weak support. I'm starting to warm to this idea. I'm biassed against it because I felt very frustrated when I ran up against something similar in the WP:ATT dispute here (two consecutive threads). Essentially, this idea gives a bit more weight to keeping an older version. I can see it being useful in situations (as sometimes occur) where an enthusiastic, creative and hardworking editor generates large amounts of new article text which is opposed by others who don't really have time to look at it in detail or provide complete rationales for rejecting it. It would require expansionists to keep an eye on the talk page (or search back through the talk page archives) for proposals they might support, but it would free up status-quo-ists to keep their thumbs on good articles without too much effort, which could be useful in situations such as with this frustrated expert. At the Circumcision article, for example, I feel that I put a lot of effort into it in the past and now just want to keep an eye on it without spending a lot of time, so requiring a seconder before I have to explain (again?) why I oppose some extensive change can be a plus. Of course, it doesn't prevent all change, nor would I want it to; need to avoid WP:OWN.
As I understand it, this would allow a bold edit and if nothing further happens, it stays. If the edit is reverted without a real rationale, just "please get consensus before making this change", and the first editor explains why they want the change but nobody answers, this would mean they can't put the edit in. That's where I'm not sure I support it: perhaps they deserve an explanation of why their edit is opposed (per "help the clueless" below). But maybe that's OK, provided it's documented as a standard guideline or essay so people know it isn't being applied only to them. Perhaps it could be a modification of the WP:BRD essay. If a second person supports the edit then usual processes for discussion and consensus apply.
This would be one way to solve the problem Crohnie and Enric Naval have raised about feeling obligated to read long posts.☺Coppertwig (talk) 15:16, 2 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Help the clueless

4) If an editor makes a clueless proposal, or attempts to contradict an established consensus, suggest that the editor try to identify an involved editor willing to discuss it and, on the one hand, help the editor to understand the consensus, and, on the other, to be an ear to consider possible changes to consensus. If possible, refer the editor to an involved editor with a similar POV, one who has been part of forming the existing consensus.

Comment by Arbitrators:

Comment by parties:

Proposed We might avoid half the current blocked editor rate if we did this. For full value for this, it's assumed that we actually do have broad consensus on articles, so that responsible and reasonable editors with various POVs are available. But all it takes to work is editors willing to listen and sympathetically explain. If there is one with the new editor's POV, we might see this: "Yes, I know that what you are saying is True (TM), but this is an encyclopedia, and facts reported here must be verifiable and well-established. We will just have to be patient, because, you know, Truth(TM) will out, and if it doesn't, well, Wikipedia isn't going to fix it. If you try to put that text in the article, and insist, it will destabilize the consensus, which we carefully and with much work negotiated to make sure that it was fair to our FringeTruth(TM), and, since there are more of them than us, we will Lose(TM) and we may end up with less not more. Hence if you try to do that, I'd have to report you to a noticeboard. However, here is what we can do ... there is room for a subarticle on RecentDiscoveryFavoringTheTruth(TM), there has been reliable source on it, and I don't have time to research and write it. How about you do that and bring the material to me for review? It's usually a lot easier to clean something up and try to make it compatible with consensus than to do the original work. Besides, look around, try doing some Recent Changes patrolling, get some experience helping with Other Stuff than Our Important Topic, become familiar with how this place works. If you respect it, it's a very tolerant community, there is a lot of room here." --Abd (talk) 03:45, 30 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Comment by others:

Oppose. A completely batty suggestion and not at all how wikipedia functions. Editors rarely self-identify as clueless. Abd is wasting time with suggestions like this. Mathsci (talk) 08:38, 30 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Then don't waste your time responding to it! No self-identification is involved in what is proposed, so the response is ... batty. --Abd (talk) 04:14, 2 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Oppose What exactly has this to do with this case? Spartaz ^Humbug! 10:36, 30 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

It's an extension of the prior proposal, how to deal with editors who post rambling comments.--Abd (talk) 04:14, 2 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Comment, I can't be for or against, what on earth does all of the above mean please? Maybe I am dense, I don't get it. --CrohnieGal^Talk 12:30, 30 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Totally in line with the disregard of unreasonable editors (vide supra), unwilling editors (vide supra) and the view that someone first has to find support before discussing a change. In violation of WP:BOLD, I would say. Oppose. --Dirk Beetstra ^{T C} 08:40, 31 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I do find it offensive that what is proposed is misstated to oppose it. But this whole discussion is an example of what's being suggested above about "seconding." What is being discussed is article Talk, and a very common claim that there is a problem with "POV-pushing" in Talk. In fact, we restrict COI editors to Talk precisely because we expect them to push a POV, but we dislike banning them because they are often experts on some aspect of the field of the article. What I'm trying to describe are methods of addressing the problems without banning the editor; most of those commenting here very readily fall back on the ban as a way to deal with what this is suggesting be handled differently.— Preceding unsigned comment added by Abd (talk • contribs) (I think).

Well, Abd, if the opposition comes from 'misstating', then maybe it is just not clear? Are you arguing here that 'all this opposition is crap, because they do not understand me, so actually, this proposal should pass'?? --Dirk Beetstra ^{T C} 09:12, 2 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Support. Excellent advice. Essentially, this encourages involved editors to act in a mediator-like role, and the more of that the better. This fits in with the proposal above about requiring seconders, and frees up Majority POV-supporters not to have to respond to endless messages, while avoiding having to ban anyone. Mathsci, it's not about self-identifying as clueless; the advice is to those who see others as clueless. Abd, in case the editors in question might see links to this idea as part of the discussion of their situation, consider using a more charitable word than "clueless". Beetstra, does this proposal look any better to you if you consider it as an alternative to banning rather than as an alternative to extensive discussion with the editor? I see this, along with the proposal above, as a way to allow editors representing minority POVs to continue to have some influence on an article without exhausting the other editors. ☺Coppertwig (talk) 15:32, 2 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Administrative recusal upon claim

5) Absent emergency or specific duty, an administrator should not insist upon the right to use tools when involvement has been claimed, but should recuse. Recusal does not mean "unblock" or "unprotect" or "revert that edit under protection." It means abstinence from future action. An administrator seeing new disruption caused by an editor who has claimed involvement should take this to a noticeboard, disclosing the reason for recusal. Ignore all rules continues to apply, if serious harm will be caused to the project by failing to immediately respond, for example, involvement should not prevent an admin from use of tools, but the admin should promptly disclose the action on a noticeboard.

Comment by Arbitrators:

Comment by parties:

Proposed This one has been the subject of much comment in previous ArbComm cases over recusal failure. The argument has been that, then, anyone who is blocked will try to wikilawyer out of it by claiming involvement. However, this principle is useless for getting unblocked, for the admin can just say, "Because you have objected, I recuse. Here is how you can request unblock. Good luck." Recusal is an abstinence from action, not an undoing of action. And if an editor claims bias on the part of a series of admins, goodbye editor, the last block will be indef and there will be nobody willing to unblock. There is a boundary situation: an admin warns an editor, saying, if you repeat that, I'll block you. The editor says "You're biased, you *****." Can the admin block the editor. Yes. But not for saying *****, and only for repeating the prohibited action, and nothing beyond that. Basically, the admin could have simply blocked instead of warning, and should not lose the ability to protect the project by warning instead of blocking. Because bias has been alleged, the admin should probably report the block to AN/I, stating recusal from further action. While a closing admin for a discussion should be uninvolved, involvement is not created simply by an accusation, and I suggest that admins specifically accused of involvement routinely recuse because that is the least disruptive and simplest procedure, and because it preserves not only neutrality of administrative action, but appearance of it as well. Appearances count.

extended comment by Abd

Anecdote: I was blocked by Iridescent last August. For a good example of how to do it, take a look at the sequence there. She concluded I was attacking Fritzpoll. (I think she was incorrect, but that doesn't matter, she believed it, and she was, in fact, obligated to act on that belief.) She blocked me, indef, but wrote "indef until this is sorted out" or something like that, and then she recused from any further involvement. What that left me with was no complaint against her of any substance. It was now between me and the community. Recusal works to defuse and depersonalize disputes. Consider what would have happened in this case if WMC had, instead of declaring a ban based on no specific violating behavior, had warned me, "I consider your editing at Cold fusion disruptive, if you continue disruption, I'll block you." He had no right to block me for non-disruptive edits, and he could not create that right by the device of declaring a ban. But the warning I just mentioned, he could certainly give. Even though I already considered him involved, I doubt that I'd have done anything about this, no noticeboard, I'd have considered it a mere threat, and if I edit disruptively, it goes without saying that I can be blocked. I could take it as a courtesy notice. If he'd blocked me, my behavior would have become the issue, especially if he then recused. (In any case, unblock requests based on claims of admin involvement are seriously stupid. It's actually irrelevant to the unblock. Politically, it can be tricky, admins like to see admission of error, and if the editor didn't make any mistakes, it is actually harder to argue for unblock. But an involved admin can make a good block, so involvement is never an unblock argument, the question with block and unblock, as with all issues, is the welfare of the project.) The block would have been reviewed, without disruption, by a neutral admin, presumably, from an unblock template, unless it was a short block (I did not bother asking for unblock from the 24-hour block WMC had laid on me, I don't create disruption over a mere minor delay.) Failure to recuse can cause enormous disruption, and this RfAr is a case in point. Administrators who do not understand recusal policy should be desysopped, they are quite dangerous. I've very concerned about the number of admins who have steadily argued against the policy. Freedom of speech is great, but when someone is being entrusted with tools, we can and should consider their positions on how tools are used. It may be time for ArbComm to reprimand and warn administrators who argue against sensible recusal policy, that they can lose the privileges, and when admins argue this way before ArbComm, it should not be ignored.

General response to comments. It is completely predictable that factional editors accustomed to administrative support from allied administrators, or those administrators themselves, would oppose this. The claim that this comes out of my personal desire for protection is pure ABF, and silly. I could be the worst possible editor and the most skilled wikilawyer, yet this principle would stand, and would be useless to me for preventing sanctions. Spartaz expresses a position that has been rejected by ArbComm many times, but never explicitly enough. It's time. Nobody is "forced" to recuse, and there is no way to prevent even a clearly biased admin from pushing a block button. WP:IAR continues to apply, even if this were taken as a fixed rule. Recusal means that a decision is made, efficiently, by an uninvolved administrator: recusal does not mean "unblock," and screaming "bias" is singularly ineffective as an unblock argument. An editor who demands recusal frequently, without good cause, is disruptive, and will be effectively banned even without a discussion.

Spartaz's argument is based on the idea that some administrators understand a situation better than others, because of experience with it. That's certainly true, but if that understanding can't be communicated when necessary, sufficient to convince an uninvolved admin, who will listen to both sides, it's highly likely to be biased. Involved editors always understand situations better than uninvolved ones, each in their own way, but we need to deal with conflict among them, and we do that by encouraging neutral decision. What recusal does is to avoid debates over bias; instead, the issue becomes the editor's behavior. As I describe in my collapsed discussion above, it works. In a recent discussion on her Talk, Iridescent wrote she considered her block of me the most controversial thing she had ever done. My view of it was quite different. Given her understanding of the situation, it was perfect, because she immediately recused, and, more than that, she fully recused, she didn't try to prove she was right. I was left, not with a dispute with her, but facing the community. If I had whined tendentiously about her being biased -- she wasn't -- I might still be blocked! That history also shows that recusal doesn't mean "unblock." It simply means that an admin, faced with involvement or a claim of such, sidesteps the issue easily and entirely by turning it over. The admin still does his or her duty under IAR. I'm not claiming that an admin should be desysopped for failing to recuse, faced with some vandal's claim of involvement! However, it's still a good idea! The admin should make sure that the block is long enough to be reviewed, that's all. Most vandals don't make such claims, actually.

We are seeing, here, the cabal fighting to retain its privilege and power. With one possible exception, these are not neutral opinions, they are biased, factional opinions. Raul654 claims that "Abd does this frequently." He hasn't, here, or in his evidence, cited one example, and there are none. I've been blocked three times. The first, as a police "Everybody stop!" action, immediately rescinded. The second, by Iridescent. No claim of involvement. The third, by WMC, and in this case the claims of admin action while involved were long-standing, yet I did not even put up an unblock template. I claimed that JzG was involved when he made certain decisions. Not with me -- he had actually supported me with his tools, with Yellowbeard. ArbComm confirmed I was correct about JzG, while the cabal claimed that I should be banned for "pushing" the issue, as it continues to claim. I now assert that Raul654 was and is involved in his use of tools, I will present evidence to support this, but he hasn't used them against me, he's merely threatened to. I can think of one other claim of admin involvement, starting long ago when I wasn't personally involved: WMC, as documented in my evidence. It was the same with JzG; I encountered and warned the admin about action while involved when I was completely neutral, there was no personal dispute, and the Cold fusion POV aspect only came up later. This is the first case where I'm claiming involvement where I was the target. And, I submit, the ultimate cause for this was that I confronted three cabal administrators, Raul654 and WMC (in RfC/GoRight) and then JzG.

The cabal is not organized. It does not ultimately protect its own, except temporarily; in fact, it leads them off the cliff by supporting them when their positions are blatantly insupportable. An organized cabal would be far more clever, and, on the one hand, possibly more dangerous, but, on the other, tractable, because it would be possible to negotiate with it. There is no negotiation with the cabal confronted here, precisely because it isn't organized. There is a legitimate aspect to its activities, and the only issue is that it becomes unrestrained, and damages the balance of the project, through collective action. This proposal isn't about the cabal, though it shows how to defuse claims of factional bias without debate, rather this proposal is about the principle of recusal, to protect the project against damage to its reputation and against unnecessary disruption over claims of administrative bias.

response to Crohie. Thanks. Our system need not answer the question, "how many," but I'm going to say "Three," as a guess. This proposal does not require or even suggest that an editor be unblocked upon a claim of bias. It merely suggests that the admin who faces such a claim should step back and let someone else make the next decision, and specious claims of bias are relevant as disruptive, so I always advise blocked editors to avoid this unless they are prepared to prove it, and, as well, to wait longer for unblock. It should not necessary to prove bias to request recusal. An editor who repeated this a few times, however, with a few different admins, would almost certainly be indef blocked, and admins would become increasingly reluctant to unblock.

Suppose that there is a cabal involved. Perhaps cabal admins watched for the unblock template and rushed in. Okay, at this point we have a possible cabal, not merely a small-scale dispute, and it will probably be necessary for ArbComm to address it, lower-level dispute resolution process is likely inadequate to resolve it without disruption. Any editor believing denial of unblock is unfair, and who continues to believe this after a series of unblock denials, may appeal to ArbComm, and in a case like this, ArbComm would consider if the claims of involvement were reasonable. If they were, then it would address that, and, where this has happened once, it has likely happened other times as well, because the great bulk of admin actions are never reviewed. Most blocked editors just disappear (or come back quietly as new accounts). Few editors have what it takes to bring a matter before ArbComm, unless somehow they attract an advocate, and it's often complicated by some level of actual misbehavior. (GoRight had certainly violated policies, but what I did then was to look at the context. The cabal focused on him and completely avoided looking at its own involvement.) A cabal trait would be that offenses normally dealt with by warning or dispute resolution process are, instead, promptly and severely addressed with incivility, tag-team reversion, and blocks, which then encourages the blocked editor to violate as well, thus justifying further blocks or bans, sometimes even by uninvolved admins who look at behavior in isolation. Incivility or other policy violations by cabal members is unaddressed until it becomes so widespread and disruptive that it is impossible to ignore it, as happened with JzG and ScienceApologist. In both cases, had friends of the editor acted effectively to restrain their friend, we might have avoided much disruption.

Many seem to assume I'm complaining about the existence of the cabal. I'm not. I'm suggesting that there are factions involved here, and we may all benefit if they are acknowledged and identified, and if they are better organized within themselves, as they see fit -- and we cannot prevent this in any case -- not if they are "crushed." Crushing opposition is a cabal effect, and very harmful to the project. The problem with the cabal is that it may present the appearance of many independent judgments, a false consensus, when it is really representing an established factional position only, with the individual judgments being predictable and thus almost certainly not neutral. And it's very visible here, as it was in RfC/GoRight. There may be many cabals, but, here we are looking at what might be named the Global Warming Cabal, after the first incident that made it plain to me that it existed. RfC/GoRight and the evidence and comments is well worth reviewing carefully in order to understand cabal behavior.

Clerk recusal. Crohnie raised this. Yes, I asked for recusal, because the clerk made certain comments showing a judgment about case issues, it's basic for a clerk not to do that while a case is active, or to recuse, if the clerk believes that commenting is more important. However, it's minor, and probably harmless. I don't see it being continued, so water under the bridge. Had I thought it of continued importance, I'd have made sure it was considered by ArbComm. Nothing about this proposal involves "threats of desysop." Acting while involved is not automatic desysop, at all. However, insisting on the continued right to do so probably is. Hence WMC's bit is seriously at risk, because that's his position and the oft-expressed position of the cabal. I'm glad to see you moving away from that. Notice how strongly the cabal admins have expressed the contrary.

Beetstra's comment. Beetstra is not a cabal admin, though he has called for me to be banned before, in the JzG case; he has consistently argued against restrictions on administrative discretion, which he imagines this proposal is. (Spartaz isn't currently listed with the cabal, but will be, I expect, for reasons that will be given in the Evidence.) Requiring that there be a discussion of involvement for routine recusal guarantees unnecessary disruption, because a definitive determination can be very complex. Recusal is simple. If we want to make it more complicated -- I do not see it needed at this point -- we might require a "second" from a responsible editor. And "responsible" means that this editor could be held accountable for repeated "seconds" without reasonable basis. The point of good process is to avoid unnecessary dispute; if we have to discuss involvement, we've lost sight of the purpose of it all: efficiently facilitating the project while maintaining, not only neutrality, but the appearance of neutrality as well. If we are going to require a second, we would then make recusal truly mandatory upon a seconded request. It would still be advisable upon a solitary request. Note, as well, that an admin may, under IAR, disregard -- temporarily -- recusal requirements, as with any rule, and, if the admin provides notice and the action isn't later considered "bad faith" or incompetent, there is no risk to the bit. I've defended an admin who so acted (and his "deletionist" factional affiliation was different from mine, he'd blocked my "inclusionist" wikifriend). I'll note, though, that this case was one of the few that I've "lost," perhaps because it was decided the admin clearly should have recused and it was decided there was no emergency requiring he block, and he's been desysopped. Making recusal rules plain and simple will protect administrators, not make their tasks more difficult. The belief of an administrator that their personal knowledge is crucial, and therefore they must personally maintain control, is probably a strong sign of real involvement, even if difficult to prove. --Abd (talk) 18:07, 1 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Comment by others:

Oppose Obviously a tailor-made "get-me-of-the hook" proposal by Abd. It is completely unworkable and favours disruptive wikilawyering editors. Mathsci (talk) 08:48, 30 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Oppose Its a long standing trick of tendentious editors to try and argue that an admin is involved and thereby force them to recuse to avoid scrutiny by admins who actually understand the issues. Undertaking admin actions on editors or articles when not acting as an editor does not make you involved. Spartaz ^Humbug! 10:38, 30 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Partially Agree with some, not other parts. I think the recusal policy is important. But the problem I am having is what administrator is not involved with Abd? He has even stated he wants Hersfold to recuse from this case (dif provided if you need it.). When is claiming an administrator is involved being seen as 'crying wolf' too many times? I have a problems with this and threats of dysop. --CrohnieGal^Talk 12:41, 30 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Oppose Involved admins must recuse, but the hazards of requiring recusal "when involvement has been claimed" are self apparent. Short Brigade Harvester Boris (talk) 13:35, 30 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Oppose - Spartaz described perfectly what Abd does frequently. Raul654 (talk) 14:23, 30 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Oppose, I could live with such a statement when there is some significant support for calling an admin involved (that needs independent editors saying that, or editors who, by themselves, decide that they are involved), but the claim alone is by far not enough. 'Will the last remaining uninvolved admin please involve himself by taking action?' --Dirk Beetstra ^{T C} 08:47, 31 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Reply to Abd. Again a wall of text, unreadable, so I only bothered to reply for the part to me. Abd, this is about recusal, I do not see, like in the other part where you mention this, what my previous (ancient?) call for your ban is doing here, that would be more appropriate as a response somewhere else on this page (there where I did not remark, heh, maybe that is why you need to do it here, maybe you wonder if and what I will respond there?), it is totally out of line to mention that here, does not make any sense. My response, short and clear, is against your "..an administrator should not insist upon the right to use tools when involvement has been claimed, but should recuse..". I Oppose to this one, in this form, as you fail to say, who has to claim this. If the subject of the 'conflict' is the claimant, then no (and you are often that claimaint that claims that someone is involved, but maybe if you would rephrase it, I could agree. "... we might require a "second" from a responsible editor. And "responsible" means that this editor could be held accountable for repeated "seconds" without reasonable basis. The point of good process is to avoid unnecessary dispute ..." .. hmm .. and who is going to decide who is the second 'responsible' editor? Do we also need a third for that, to decide if the second is actually responsible and not actually involved himself so also he should recuse (even if that is not an admin!), &c. &c. Like in an American lawcourt, where, I believe, first a process is necessery to collect an 'independent' jury of 12 (?). A whole process to define everything. Wikilawyering, Abd, that is what it is. We are all volunteers here, and everybody makes mistakes, what you define here is process to make sure that if admins make mistakes or step over the edge, that they can be punished for it. I do believe you mean it in good faith, and with the best meaning of it all, but that is exactly how it is going to be used. Hence, oppose, per WP:NOTLAW. --Dirk Beetstra ^{T C} 22:44, 1 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]

"We are all volunteers here, and everybody makes mistakes, what you define here is process to make sure that if admins make mistakes or step over the edge, that they can be punished for it." - Could you please clarify why you think punishment is involved here? In what way is mere recusal for the good of the project by upholding the highest standards of neutrality a punishment? --GoRight (talk) 02:50, 2 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]

No, GoRight, what I mean is that I anticipate what will happen if an admin does not recuse, while involvement has been claimed .. and what will happen if an admin is opposing to an edit or performs an action (as I expect that many will cry wolf and claim involvement): we will get lengthy processes for almost every action that an admin takes. Recusal can very easy come after that action (not before), we now already get many lengthy ArbComs (and if principles like these pass, there are MANY to come) because Abd (and you apparently), think that the admin has to recuse before taking action. If an admin takes an action, while one thinks he is involved, then a) review if the action is OK (we have {{unblock}}, blacklist de-listing requests page, talkpages for protected pages, &c. &c.), b) see if the admin really is involved, and from then on the admin can/should recuse (if he really is involved), but don't start discussions, 'oh, but the previous action should not have been taken in the first place' (and failure to acknowledge that .. well see this attempt (I know, one can also read that remedy as 'preventing further damage')).

This proposal shifts the time of action to a time in discussion which is very dangerous, and many admins already bring up their actions themselves already, some recuse from action in the future, but do not moan about the actions already taken. Abd clearly says here 'I do not acknowledge the ban applied by William M. Connolley, as he is involved' (and that is very similar to the Abd and JzG case). No, follow the ban, don't wikilawyer, discuss it somewhere else, and if a) the community thinks that the ban should not apply, then lift the ban, and b) if William M. Connolley is really involved, he should recuse from then on. And if the admin already does that by himself before taking action, well that is already very clearly described in WP:UNINVOLVED. --Dirk Beetstra ^{T C} 09:09, 2 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Unsure. I think I'm starting to "get" it. In a case of a new and disruptive editor, it would mean that more than one admin handles the situation. There would tend to be rapid escalation of block length, and only a few admins would be needed. Abd, what about a situation where an established editor argues (with some justification) that each of almost every admin is "involved" with them? May I suggest rewording this one to be advice rather than a requirement? (e.g. "would be well-advised to" or something rather than "should"). The way I would put it is: actually acting while involved (as determined by community consensus later, if necessary) is the offense. Acting while not (considered by broad consensus to be) involved but while claimed to be involved is not an offense. However, it's nevertheless advisable to recuse, for two reasons: first, in case there's a chance that community consensus will later determine that you were indeed involved; thus this advice removes excuses for acting while involved, ("but I didn't realize I would be considered involved!") since recusal was an available and recommended option. Secondly, because recusal in the face of a claim of involvement helps give those affected by the admin action the impression that they were treated fairly, even if nobody but them can see any reasonable argument for involvement. ☺Coppertwig (talk) 15:54, 2 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Proposed findings of fact

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Comment by Arbitrators:

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2) {text of proposed finding of fact}

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1) {text of proposed enforcement}

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Proposals by User:Raul654

Proposed principles

Meatpuppetry

1) Restoring edits from banned users is meatpuppetry. Meatpuppetry is prohibited. Users who act as meatpuppets for banned users may be blocked.

Comment by Arbitrators:

Two comments. First, the term "meatpuppetry" has a variety of meanings to different people, and using it can divert attention from the substance of the discussion to quarrels over definitions. It would be better if this were expressed directly in terms of the underlying conduct (e.g., "Restoring edits from banned users is prohibited"). If the conduct is prohibited, it is prohibited regardless of what label is put on it. Second, as reflected in the discussion below, we might be best served with a somewhat refined or more nuanced version of the proposal. Newyorkbrad (talk) 19:22, 19 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Comment by parties:

Oppose. Restoring edits from banned users is not meat puppetry, per se. The use of the term "banned" here is also not necessary. Blocked users are in the same position. Edits from blocked or banned users may be reverted on sight. Raul has, below, quoted me accurately. There is no policy as claimed. It is acknowledged that acting as a meatpuppet for a blocked or banned user -- or any user, for that matter -- can result in a block. However, once an edit has been made, the edit is in the database and can be read by anyone unless oversighted. Whether or not to restore an edit should depend, not on the ban or block status of the original editor, but on its usefulness to the project. I'm insufficiently familiar with the Scibaby case to say much about it; I reverted a Scibaby edit back in without any reasonable notice that it was, in fact, Scibaby; however, the edit itself was to User talk:GoRight and my judgment was that he'd rather see the edit directly; the whole thing was rather silly, since GoRight can read it anyway; GoRight later decided to restore it to respond to it. The other alleged "meat puppetry" would be with User:JedRothwell, who is not banned, there has never been the required community ban discussion; if he's banned, it's an administrative ban, originally issued by JzG, in the presence of his involvement in long-term conflict with the editor; that account is blocked, but it was an inactive account, not used since 2006, blocked during a recent RfAr/Clarification for unclear reasons. JedRothwell, however, is a well-known expert in the field of Cold fusion, he knows the literature extremely well, having edited much of it. When he pops in as IP, he often has much to say of relevance to the article or what's going on. He's also blunt and caustic, but no more so than another COI editor we tolerate at the article: Kirk shanahan. With one restored edit from Rothwell, I recall removing the arguably uncivil part (usually it is on the level of a general claim of Wikipedia bias or general uselessness). It has never been found that a specific reversion to restore an edit by Rothwell was, itself, disruptive or improper; what's been claimed over and over is that such reversion is prohibited, but IAR recognizes no absolute prohibitions, and, as noted, there is no policy prohibiting such, unless ArbComm decides to establish one. The existing policy allows restoration of content if the editor restoring is willing to take responsibility for it, and "content" is a general term that does not solely refer to articles.

Those who claim that I inappropriately restored edits, please provide specific examples where the content violated policy. --Abd (talk) 06:39, 18 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Jed was banned exclusively for his comments in Talk:Cold fusion (since it was the only page he posted to) and you restored his comments, taking full responsability for them. In other works, per our banning policy, we should have had to ban you too if you hadn't stopped. --Enric Naval (talk) 08:43, 19 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Well, banning from a small number of incidents, and with no showing that the specific restorations were disruptive, would be a tad overreactive, I'd think. Enric's interpretation would be correct under the proposed principle, however, which is why it's so offensive. Restoring edits from blocked or banned editors, which takes place quite in the open and with obvious personal responsibility, is not "meat puppetry," per se, nor is it "proxying"; to establish these would require verification of improper intent. It is an editor making a decision that content (for articles or for discussion) is useful, and that's why I requested -- so far no satisfaction of this request -- that specific examples be provided. Enric has always argued, since the beginning of this dispute, that restoration was per se contrary to policy, and that's a serious misunderstanding, and an obvious one. I restored a spelling correction to Cold fusion made by ScienceApologist, that had been reverted because of his topic ban, and under the proposed principle, that would be "meat puppetry." This was, in fact, taken to AE, where the complainant, Hipocrite!, was pretty roundly criticized for disruption. I'm amazed that Enric or others would edit war with me over some harmless content on a Talk page, but I did not revert war back, nor did I pursue DR; quite simply, it wasn't important enough. Nor did any editor pursue DR with me. Now that there is a nice coat-rack erected, all this is being brought up, even though it was totally irrelevant to the page bans issued by WMC, as far as I've seen. What does Raul's proposal have to do with this case? --Abd (talk) 17:12, 20 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Support but make the changes proposed by NYB. I hae seen in other discussions that "meatpuppeting" is taken as inaccurate by the community and that there are problems when using that label. --Enric Naval (talk) 23:36, 26 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Comment by others:

Given Abd's behavior with respect to Jed Rothwell and Scibaby, and his own misconceptions about what our policies are (To wit: There is no policy against restoring reverted edits of banned or blocked users if the edits themselves are not disruptive or policy violations - Abd, July 14, 2009), a clear principle to this effect is needed. Raul654 (talk) 23:44, 17 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I would agree that that particular statement is misinformed; edits by banned users are to be reverted on sight, regardless of merit. There's a (rarely used) CSD criterion for specifically this purpose, WP:G5. However, once reverted, if the edit does have merit and an editor can independently verify its worth and has independent reasons for making it themselves, they can do so to put it in under their own name. Granted, though, that's a little complicated and can elicit suspicion itself. Hersfold ^(t/a/c) 01:53, 18 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I agree with Hersfold here. I think Raul's interpretation is not at all what the policy states, per WP:BAN: "Wikipedians are not permitted to post or edit material at the direction of a banned user, an activity sometimes called 'proxying,' unless they are able to confirm that the changes are verifiable and have independent reasons for making them." (emphasis mine). There is no rule prohibiting Abd or anyone else from restoring a Scibaby edit provided they have verified the legitimacy of it, and realizing that by doing so they take full responsibility for the edit. Oren0 (talk) 05:57, 18 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

"Verifiable" means restoring edits to articles which improve the article, and can be verified against reliable sources. Given that Abd was restoring, among other things, talk page edits by banned users, he fails that exception on both counts -- his edits were neither verifiable nor did he think of them independently. Raul654 (talk) 06:03, 18 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Ok, yeah. I can't think of any reason you'd need to restore a talk page edit; that is proxying. Hersfold ^(t/a/c) 06:05, 18 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Perhaps then "Unless they can be independently verified and there is a good, editorial-based reason for doing so, restoring edits..." ? Hersfold ^(t/a/c) 06:06, 18 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Question, what is the definition of "restore" being applied here? A simple revert? Adding a comment that contains the same or similar content? What is the time duration required to have elapsed before the topic mentioned by a banned user is once again safe to discuss? These are all applicable questions given the manner in which this principle is likely to be applied. --GoRight (talk) 07:07, 18 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Reject: "Restoring edits from banned users is meatpuppetry." - This is a ridiculous statement. This would allow Raul to block anyone expressing even a vaguely skeptical statement related to AGW. Once they had done so he could easily twist it into resembling something Scibaby said some place. While policy allows the edits of banned users to be reverted on sight, and for good reason, it does not forever ban any mention of a topic of the same or a similar nature. This proposal is merely a transparent attempt to ban minority points of view. Meat puppetry is inherently acting at the direction of another user, not simply the act of restoring material that may have value to the project. Current policy clearly states that users are permitted to restore edits of banned users so long as they are willing to take full responsibility for the content. --GoRight (talk) 07:17, 18 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

If a banned user makes a spelling correction and their edit is reverted, must we now leave the word misspelled lest we be blocked for meat puppetry? This could easily happen with a RollBack could it not? --GoRight (talk) 07:17, 18 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Support. proxying for banned users is simply unacceptable. Spartaz ^Humbug! 07:02, 18 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I have no problem with this statement depending on the definition of "proxying." Does proxying require that the user be acting at the direction of the banned user, or not? How do we distinguish between "proxying" and WP:AGF adoption of a valid point that happens to have started with a banned user? --GoRight (talk) 07:11, 18 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

It depends how consistently the user is doing it. Reverting and restoring a minor edit is within policy. Advocating on talk pages on behalf of fringe views put forward by banned users is clearly not acceptable. Starting a crusade to advance the agenda of the banned user is even worse. Where you fall on that continuum is why we expect admins to exercise discretion and common sense Spartaz ^Humbug! 16:45, 18 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

You did not address the fundamental point of my question. To be a meat puppet do you need to be acting at the direction of the banned user, or not? Is merely expressing a similar POV sufficient to label someone a meat puppet? --GoRight (talk) 17:11, 18 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I suspect the correct answer is somewhere in the middle between the two poles you cite but that is undoubtedly something the arbcom will look at. I know where I stand and I can guess where you stand but I can't see the point arguing the point because ultimately it doesnt matter two hoots what we think as were aren't arbiters. Spartaz ^Humbug! 17:42, 18 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Support. Banned/blocked means you don't edit, period. The spelling errors and other minor things will be noticed by someone editing the article. --CrohnieGal^Talk 19:33, 18 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Question for Raul: I thought that the scope of this proceeding was limited to a review of the actions of the involved parties as they relate specifically to User:William M. Connolley's page ban of User:Abd. Am I wrong on this point? Has the scope been increased?

Assuming I am correct for the moment, what is the relevance of your proposed principle to the case being discussed? Did User:William M. Connolley allege meat puppetry as part of his reason for issuing the ban in question? I don't recall seeing any such allegation but I could have missed it. If so, please point it out. On the other hand, has User:Abd accused User:William M. Connolley of being a meat puppet of someone else in this matter? I don't recall seeing such an allegation on his part either. --GoRight (talk) 21:15, 18 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

See Carcharoth's comment in accepting the case. I'd say it's safe to say that the arbs may look at things a bit more broadly. Guettarda (talk) 05:41, 21 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Support. Rather obvious, perhaps in a slightly rewritten form. Neither Abd nor GoRight seem to understand wikipedia policy. Mathsci (talk) 22:08, 18 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Support. This is not controversial -it's basic. Though occasionally one may take responsibility for the rare and helpful mainspace edit, it should never appear as if you are seeking out a banned editor's edits to restore (could be construed as disruptive). "Comments" by banned users (almost any non-mainspace edit) should never be made at their direction or restored. R. Baley (talk) 14:34, 19 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]
What degree of similarity in comments would you require to label someone as a meat puppet? How would you prevent this from being used to extend the bans of some individuals to others who are not otherwise banned but hold similar points of view? --GoRight (talk) 20:36, 19 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

The business of reverting edits by banned users has always been fairly controversial, for instance in the sense that despite hardliners on the issue, the language of the relevant policy has been deliberately kept soft: edits "may be reverted" but efforts to harden into "are reverted" and "will be reverted" have always been rejected. Editors are "are generally expected to refrain" from reinstating such edits. Reinstatements "may be viewed" as meatpuppetry. Of course reinstatement does not in itself make it so, that would be "will be viewed", a wording no one has ever suggested. User talk and talk pages have historically been places where the policy was weaker again. The idea has been of course to leave room for common sense to win the day. Whether instances of reinstatement by Abd were common sense or not could be a matter for discussion (with diffs), but is it a matter that rises to the level of a finding? Doubtful. Was it meatpuppetry? Seems rather a stretch and proved here merely by assertion. 86.44.42.17 (talk) 03:38, 24 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Support - although I also don't like the use of "meatpuppet", and I think it can be more neutrally worded. - Bilby (talk) 00:46, 22 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]
The Banning policy says this: "Users are generally expected to refrain from reinstating edits made by banned users in violation of the ban, and such edits may be viewed as meatpuppetry. Users who reinstate such edits take complete responsibility for the content by so doing." My interpretation of it is that reinstating such edits is not absolutely prohibited (the policy uses the words "generally" and "may be viewed", and for reinstaters the policy says "full responsibility for the content", not "automatically regarded as a lackey to the banned user"), but that a great deal of caution should be exercised when doing so, because the reinstater needs to make sure the edit is indeed a good one. This kind of quality control is something most editors do for their own edits, but it needs to be taken special care of when reinstating an edit that you yourself didn't write. I think the blanket term "is meatpuppetry" goes a little bit too far, because it implies that any reinstatement of an edit from a banned user must be a bad edit. A reinstated edit from a banned user should be assessed on its objective merit and value to the article, and if the edit is good, the reinstater should not be sanctioned for it. Sjakkalle (Check!) 14:06, 22 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I would agree with this interpretation Sjakkalle if we were only discussing edits on article pages, but my understanding is that the main objection came when Abd starting restoring talk page comments from banned users. Fixing occasional spelling and grammatical errors in actual articles is one thing but inserting a banned user back into a discussion of content that they have specifically been told they can't contribute to - by virtue of being banned from the project - is clearly not something covered by this interpretation. Spartaz ^Humbug! 14:26, 22 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Spartaz, rarely, (once or twice?) I restored Talk page comments from IP edits signed as "Jed Rothwell." All of the comments I restored were helpful to the project, in my opinion, that's why I restored them. I was reverted and didn't insist, even though the reversion of me was actually improper. Then, very recently, I saw an edit by an unknown user to User talk:GoRight that was reverted by Raul654 with no explanation. I knew that GoRight would want to see it, probably want to reply, no matter who it was from. So I restored it, and Raul654 started screaming "meat puppetry" and threatening to block me. Huge disruption over an edit that wasn't disruptive in itself. I was, of course, reverted by a familiar name. (These are never truly ininvolved administrators, watching Talk:GoRight!) It was GoRight's Talk page, Spartaz. On Cold fusion, and Jed Rothwell, he wasn't banned, he's been blocked, in a rather irregular way. He has no right to edit, theoretically, because he hasn't appealed the block (it's not clear he even knows that it exists), but that doesn't and shouldn't deprive me of the right to consider something from him useful. There has been no community ban. If I could quote something from his web site on the Talk page -- and I can -- why can't I quote a post that he dropped here as IP?

I think that's fair enough. I too have a hard time imagining a situation where a talk page edit from a banned user would be something which should restoration. If someone wants to make the discuss something on the talkpage, and just happen to have a legitimate viewpoint similar to that of a banned user, they should be able to write it in their own words. Sjakkalle (Check!) 14:59, 22 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

It's not fair if credit is deprived from a banned editor for a helpful suggestion! What is banned is disruption, not helpful suggestions, which is what the edit from Jed Rothwell was as I recall. In neither relevant case, by the way, was the user actually banned by ArbComm or a consensus of uninvolved editors, these were what I call "administrative bans." The Scibaby ban has been by default, accepted, though not logged, but I can verify that there is a lot of grumbling over it, and it may be time to actually examine the circumstances, the necessary range blocks are highly disruptive. I did look, a little, and from what I found, it stinks. Police riot. Involved administrators, protecting the article they own, Global warming. Familiar names. Look at the block log for User:Scibaby. Look at the block log for sock number 1, User:Obedium. (if that was a sock, that couldn't have been proven by checkuser, I'm pretty sure, because of the timing.) When they aren't necessary, bans and blocks can cause more disruption than they prevent, much more. I'm not going to name names, but a "highly placed Wikipedian" commented about Scibaby at WikiConference New York, "Aren't most of his edits harmless anyway?" What's really involved here is Raul654's ego. He's not about to let Scibaby "win." Myself, I don't care about Scibaby, I care about the project. As long as the project doesn't lose, he can win. How about we make him a checkuser and put his expertise at evading blocks to use? --Abd (talk) 05:21, 30 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

"How about we make him a checkuser and put his expertise at evading blocks to use?" - Heh, an interesting point. It made me think of another. If someone (not Scibaby) reverts one of Raul's edits and Scibaby subsequently restores it, are we now allowed to remove the edit that Scibaby restored on sight? And if Raul (or anyone else for that matter) then restores his original edit can he (or that other someone) be blocked for acting as a meat puppet of Scibaby? Hmmm. Maybe I should reconsider my position on this point ... nah. --GoRight (talk) 03:08, 2 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I believe you may have a misinformed impression of the level of reverting actually taking place in some cases. We are not simply talking about bald reverts of banned user comments. They are also complaining about even taking some nugget of the comment from a banned user which is pertinent to a discussion of improving an article, and pulling that into the talk page under your own signature. [Insert hypothetical administrator who would propose such a thing] would have you banned for such practices.

To give a hypothetical example, Scibaby is known to want to introduce material into the global warming articles related to methane and cow flatulence. Now, if some editor sees a comment from Scibaby on one of the talk pages that mentions this topic and it even provides a reference to a peer-reviewed paper in a scientific journal discussing such effects, and then that editor thinks hey, maybe this SHOULD be mentioned in the article and they pluck the same reference out of Scibaby's post perhaps including a bit of explanatory text and repost it Raul (mentioned here because he is the main Administrator chasing after Scibaby) is highly likely to call that reverting the comments of Scibaby. I disagree. Scibaby is banned, but discussions of cow flatulence and the effects of methane on climate change are not. --GoRight (talk) 15:23, 22 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Support If you're banned, you're banned. If you want to comment, appeal your ban. Nothing controversial here. Verbal chat 15:33, 24 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Somewhat support Sjakkale makes some good points - for one thing, even some of our worst editors who get banninated to the seventh hell may actually have made edits which were completely correct, necessary, uncontroversial etc other than the ones that gotthem there. However the problem here is possible proxying for banned editors, a far more deliberate act which should not be condoned at all. Orderinchaos 16:12, 25 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Reject per Sjakkalle. Reverting or quoting is not in itself meatpuppetry; else two editors reverting to the same version in an ordinary editwar (or even reversion of vandalism) would be committing meatpuppetry. It's a question of intent. ☺Coppertwig (talk) 21:31, 25 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

So are you OK weith Abd restoring talk page comments from banned users? Spartaz ^Humbug! 15:37, 2 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]

It depends. Although restoring such a comment might in itself be no more meatpuppetry than jumping in and reverting during an ordinary editwar, it could violate the banning policy, (or not, depending on the situation). Personally it doesn't bother me if any editor in good standing chooses to restore a talk page comment from a banned user, provided the comment itself is not intrinsically objectionable. ☺Coppertwig (talk) 16:42, 2 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Wikilawyering

2) Wikilawyering [refers] to certain quasi-legal practices, including... Misinterpreting policy or relying on technicalities to justify inappropriate actions. - Wikipedia:Wikilawyering

Comment by Arbitrators:

Just as with "Meatpuppetry" above, "Wikilawyering" means many things to many people. It might again be best to avoid the use of this type of term and just focus on the specific types of conduct that are being prohibited or discouraged. Newyorkbrad (talk) 19:24, 19 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Comment by parties:

Agree. @NewYorkBrad, while you are right in that we should focus in specific conducts, "wikilawyering" is an accurate term and it is accepted by the community, similar to how "trolling" is also accepted by the community as an acceptable accurate block summary. If the wikilawyers are offended by the term then they should stop engaging into it. --Enric Naval (talk) 23:33, 26 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Oppose. That is one lousy definition of wikilawyering, which refers to insisting upon the letter of the guidelines and policies, or interpretations of same, neglecting the purpose of those guidelines or policies. Wikilawyering isn't illegal or legal, or quasi-legal. It's not a "legal" thing at all, it's polemic, and "misinterpreting policy" is not wikilawyering, it's simply a mistake (unless it is deliberate, and founded on the letter of the policy instead of the intention). Wikilawyering abounds here on this page, with the spirit and purpose of policies being neglected in favor of insistence on following the letter of a policy, as interpreted by an editor and being used to condemn another, without regard for the purpose, which, in the end, is always the welfare of the project. --Abd (talk) 05:29, 30 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Comment by others:

Not hard to see why this is needed here. Raul654 (talk) 16:48, 18 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Agree, this practice needs to be stopped as it always causes disruptions. --CrohnieGal^Talk 11:27, 19 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Support, see Abd's response in the meatpuppetry section above -to my recollection, this is pervasive throughout his editing history. R. Baley (talk) 14:40, 19 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Support; although one person's appropriate is another's inappropriate, and one person's misinterpretation is another's interpretation. ☺Coppertwig (talk) 00:20, 28 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Support, needs to be said. --Dirk Beetstra ^{T C} 08:49, 31 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Proposed findings of fact

Abd has engaged in meatpuppetry

1) Abd has engaged in meatpuppetry on behalf of banned users Jed Rothwell and Scibaby [6].

Comment by Arbitrators:

Comment by parties:

Preposterous. It's not even on the map with Scibaby, but Raul hasn't presented actual evidence with any clarity. That's typical for Raul. He's a checkuser and oversighter, after all, why would he need to bother with real evidence? He's too busy whacking the moles in the game he helped to create. As to JedRothwell, again, where is the evidence? JedRothwell has expertise in the field of Cold fusion and makes occasional comments that are worth considering. (He's not banned, but so what? There is a block against an old account of his, issued three years after he last used it, based on ... what? He may be considered a blocked editor, but it's all quite shaky. I've never argued that editors could not revert his edits on sight, I've only claimed that restoring them may sometimes be appropriate.) I will, in my evidence, I expect, cover the edits involved, but allegations of meat puppetry were not part of any discussion connected with WMC's ban, as far as I'm aware. (Enric Naval has long made this charge, over and over, and he might have mentioned it before AN/I where it would have, again, been quite peripheral. However, it has never been shown or decided by consensus that my rare restorations of content from blocked or banned editors was improper. I've never been warned over it, as far as I recall, by any neutral editor, nor have I been blocked for it, and, from Raul's history with other editors, it's quite clear that if he believed he could make the Scibaby charge stick, he'd have blocked me.) --Abd (talk) 17:26, 20 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

"I've never been warned over it, as far as I recall, by any neutral editor" <-------------- but you have been warned multiple times by editors that you don't consider neutral, right? And what did you do about their warnings, may I ask? --Enric Naval (talk) 17:52, 20 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I considered them and either accepted them or rejected them or compromised. I usually explain my position quite thoroughly, that's one of the complaints against me, actually. Only when an editor repeats the same spurious charges, over and over, do I start deleting them without comment or asking the editor to refrain from posting to my Talk. What, pray tell, am I supposed to do? I consider the positions on meat puppetry expressed here to be preposterous, and, while it's certainly not a common action for me, I've reverted in enough edits from blocked or banned editors without consequence, most frequently with no comment at all, and if the reality were as is being claimed (it is wikilawyering to claim that reverting a banned editor's content back in is a violation of policy based on a literalist interpretation of "ban," and a misinterpretation of "may be reverted" to morph it into "must be excluded"), and given that I've been closely tracked since WP:PRX days, I'd have been blocked. Instead, there never has been a community discussion that involved me and confirmed this position. I claim that if the project is improved, any editorial action like that is allowed, and unless an action is clearly against policy, AGF and IAR establish a presumption that what is not prohibited is allowed, and an editor may follow their own lights on this, until consensus against it becomes clear or there is collision with the rights of other editors. With policies, that means broad consensus, not just a local handful of editors screaming for blood because they are attached to a particular outcome. Or it means an ArbComm decision. Can anyone point to a relevant discussion or decision, if the policy is as alleged?

Once again, this proposed finding is not based on specific evidence provided, as far as I've seen, just general claims and charges. Verdict first, trial later. The alleged Scibaby meat puppetry only happened once, period, so I can assume the incident! It's this sequence: Original edit by alleged Scibaby sock], revert without comment by Raul654, my restoration with explanation, an explanation I've seen many times when I was so bold as to remove vandalism from an editor's talk page, and this wasn't vandalism. By the way, I've claimed in some places that I wasn't aware that this was a Scibaby sock. From my edit, I now see, this was obviously not true. Now that I see the discrepancy, I think I know what may have happened. My original simple revert was lost in a profusion of windows, and there may have been an access problem, Wikipedia was giving me error messages frequently, or I just closed the edit window accidentally. Later, when I realized that the edit hadn't been saved, I'd already looked around more, I knew more, and I redid the edit, and added the note about Scibaby. But I'm not sure. R.Baley -- recognize the name? -- reverted me. And I then commented, and more discussion ensued. GoRight eventually arrived and confirmed my impression that he'd want to respond to the edit. Now, tell me, was GoRight "meat puppeting" for Scibaby by restoring that edit? If so, and if this was done in the full view of a series of administrators who watch that page, and who had been claiming he'd be blocked for "proxying" for Scibaby, why wasn't he blocked or even warned? Discussion continued and Raul eventually made this enlightening comment. Raul watches GoRight talk and looks for edits that he suspects might be Scibaby, then checkusers the editor. Cool, eh? Wouldn't you like a tool like that? To use whenever you like? To check IP for a user who has a POV that is banned? Oops! We don't ban POVs, do we? I mean a user who has a POV like that of a banned user. If someone has been banned for what Raul thinks is your POV, checkuser restrictions, where disruptive editing is required before checkuser may be performed, apparently mean nothing. --Abd (talk) 02:22, 21 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

@both Abd and GoRight. I expected Abd to stop and think "Hey, if so many editors are warning me about doing a certain thing, then maybe I am wrong about that thing?", and then stop doing that thing. IMHO, this is the root problem here. --Enric Naval (talk) 16:21, 22 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Support in case it wasn't clear. Abd directly stated that he thought that Jed was an expert and that we should have Jed's opinions in the talk page. And that we were missing important opinions and information due to Jed not being present in the talk page. I'm not going to search diffs because they are buried in the middle of seas of verbiage, but his comments in the case here should be enough. --Enric Naval (talk) 23:30, 26 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Comment I have not argued as Enric Naval claims. That's his impression. I do believe what he says, we have lost something important because of the block of Rothwell, though really the problem was long-term incivility and abuse from JzG, going way back, that's why Rothwell became uncivil (though he's normally quite gruff and blunt), but this has nothing to do with the very few (one or two?) restored edits, which were about those edits only. --Abd (talk) 05:49, 30 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Comment re Crohnie. This is a great example of how the cabal works. There is no evidence presented on the Evidence page showing any pattern of restoring edits of a banned user, much less "meat puppetry." None. Raul's evidence essentially shows that I disagreed with him, not that I did anything reprehensible. For Raul, that's enough! Disagreement with Raul is Not Allowed. In the Scibaby sock revert Raul654 says it's a sock, do we believe him? I don't know, in fact. I do know that there is a whiff of disregard of checkuser policy in this case, Raul has acknowledged watching GoRight's talk page for posts that might be Scibaby, so he can checkuser and block, that's a matter of concern. I should diff this , there was one edit restored to a user talk page. The user subsequently restored that edit himself so that he could respond, and nobody has claimed that he didn't have the right to do that. I was merely anticipating it, and correctly. Crohnie acknowledges no familiarity with Rothwell, and doesn't know the history, and hasn't seen evidence, but merely unsubstantiated claims by cabal members, and so she supports this finding? That's reprehensible, in fact. We should base findings of fact on evidence, not on mere claims, and support of a finding should be testimony that the editor has seen evidence personally. Otherwise it's all just a popularity contest. Diffs showing a pattern? Showing that the restorations were contrary to policy? The cabal doesn't need that, because it believes that it is the community, its opinion is consensus. Crohnie has fallen in with the wrong crowd, unfortunately. It's time that ArbComm notice the problem, as a minimum.--Abd (talk) 05:49, 30 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Comment by others:

Follows from above. Raul654 (talk) 16:38, 18 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Support. Spartaz ^Humbug! 16:46, 18 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

He is proud of it. Mathsci (talk) 22:13, 18 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Reject. ~~Abd cannot be a meat puppet of Jed Rothwell because Jed Rothwell is not banned.~~ Abd cannot be a meat puppet of "banned user" Jed Rothwell because Jed Rothwell is not banned. No direct community discussion of banning of Rothwell has ever been held, nor has a clear community consensus in support of a ban ever been demonstrated. Reverting the comment on my talk page was a courtesy to me, not a demonstration of support for Scibaby. --GoRight (talk) 23:01, 18 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

It's possible to be a meat puppet for anyone; if you edit on their behalf, it qualifies. If person X asked me to !vote on an AfD a certain way, and did so without question or independent review, I'd be their meatpuppet. I'm not saying this has been done, necessarily, just that your statement above is inaccurate. Hersfold ^(t/a/c) 23:35, 18 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

In general you are correct. I have clarified my meaning above. You do point to a key point, that such editing had to be at the direction of ther other user (i.e. "If person X asked me to ...") in order to be a meat puppet of that user, correct? Where is the evidence that Abd acted at the direction of either Jed Rothwell or Scibaby?

Support. I think a couple of editors should read WP:MEAT again if they haven't already the User:Hersfold explains the problem pretty well. Also, an editor can be banned by an administrator and continue to be banned as long as there is no one available to unban. Please stop saying the editor isn't banned when he obviously is. For disclosure, I do not know the editor Jed Rothwell.--CrohnieGal^Talk 11:33, 19 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Response to Abd. You have no idea what I have looked into since this case has started. What difs I have looked at or how I came to my conclusions. With what you have been pounding me with, your goal is to try to get my perfect record here at this project, dirty! On my talk page you warned me that I had nothing to worry about as long as I didn't become uncivil here at arbcom. Are you looking for those buttons to push? You almost had me but instead I am asking for someone to make Abd assume good faith and follow no personal attacks which is what the comments addressed to me are, assumptions of bad faith, that I just follow the crowd. He can't know what I've read or what I haven't, please refactored or remove. I say that this cabal stuff has gone far enough, it is a personal attack above. If you don't want editors to make comments about you and Rothwell then I suggest you stop posting that you are restoring his posts and talking to him via email. You have said it many times, even in this arbcom case, and you've said you'ld do it again. This is a violations of WP:MEAT with a banned user. You said it, so don't blame me for agreeing that you have done it and would continue to with others. You set up a whole page for banned editors to share with you that got deleted because of policies, let's be real. --CrohnieGal^Talk 14:04, 30 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

"Also, an editor can be ~~banned~~ indefinitely blocked by an administrator and ~~continue to be banned~~ as long as there is no one available to ~~unban~~ unblock, that block may be considered to be a ban." - That is a more accurate description of what WP:Banning policy actually states. So the question becomes, how do you know that there is no administrator available to unblock Jed Rothwell? Without such a determination Rothwell is more accurately described as indefinitely blocked than banned. --GoRight (talk) 21:05, 19 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Well until an adminstrator comes along and unblocks them they are banned, we don't need to poll all 1800 or however many there are these days. And to answer your earlier is obvious Abd was meatpuppeting because they knowingly restored the edits of a banned user. Spartaz ^Humbug! 06:22, 20 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

"Well until an administrator comes along and unblocks them they are ~~banned~~ indefinitely blocked." - Sorry but this statement disagrees with WP:Banning policy as it is currently written. The indefinite block only becomes a ban after we know, for a fact, that there IS no administrator willing to unblock. The policy is currently mute on what process is to be used to actually determine that no administrator is willing to unblock. If you find that situation unacceptable, well help find a consensus on how to address it in the policy. --GoRight (talk) 06:55, 20 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Sorry but this statement disagrees with WP:Banning policy as it is currently written - Gee, I wonder why that is? Raul654 (talk) 05:28, 21 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I can only assume that you somehow missed this, which restored the text of the policy to its state at the time of the events being discussed here and was performed well in advance of my comment here. You wouldn't be trying to give people any false impressions, would you? Regardless, I stand by my comment under either wording. --GoRight (talk) 17:50, 21 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I have to indicate that Sarah had also changed the text to that state. However she reverted herself because she couldn't deal with the current page (which was filled with lenghty rantings and it was ridiculous for anoyone from outside to come in and the discussion and that others thought like her), and that she had to go to bed and she hadn't time to start a new section to discuss it[7]. So WMC wasn't alone in his opposition to that change. Also notice how experienced admins have later explained why the change is not good. --Enric Naval (talk) 18:12, 21 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Response to Enric Above "And what did you do about their warnings, may I ask?" - What would you have him do, Enric, simply give up and let the majority POV pushers have their way even though his actions do not violate any policy? Do you not think that there is any benefit from requiring such warnings to come for neutral parties? Given your apparent alignment with the individuals in question I guess I can understand why you might take this position. --GoRight (talk) 00:50, 21 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Response to Enric Above "I expected Abd to stop and think "Hey, if so many editors are warning me about doing a certain thing, then maybe I am wrong about that thing?", and then stop doing that thing." - And why, exactly, should he do that if he believes that he is right? Must everyone bow before the opinion of Enric and his friends lest Enric decide that they should be summarily banned and ~~rabidly~~ vehemently pursued for the egregious offense of having a differing opinion along with being willing to express it? It is no secret that you have become ~~obsessed with~~ highly focused on having first Rothwell, then Abd, and recently myself all banned and have used every method you could devise to effect that purpose. Note that none of your targets has called for your banning. Hmmm, says I, perhaps you should take your own advice to stop and think about that and why it might be. --GoRight (talk) 22:52, 23 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Agree I think my first interactions with Abd, before I knew anything else about him, was warning him about this and removing Jed's comments and Abd's restorations from the Cold fusion talk page. Clear proxy editing and meatpuppetry and an ongoing problem, even during this case. Verbal chat 15:25, 24 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Oppose: I find it difficult to imagine Abd editing at the direction of anyone. He places community consensus and concern for the project first, and always seems to have an explanation of the reasons for his actions. ☺Coppertwig (talk) 13:59, 26 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Reject My rationale is explained farther down, in the second of two paragraphs (different locations) that start with "Question:" V (talk) 13:14, 29 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Abd's wikilawyering

2) Abd frequently proffers his own interpretations of policy which are at odds with what policy actually says. He uses these false claims about policy to justify his own inappropriate behavior. This is wikilawyering.

Comment by Arbitrators:

Comment by parties:

Very accurate. In my evidence you can find the comments of many editors telling him over many months that he doesn't understand or misunderstands policy, but at this point in time he still thinks that he has the correct interpretation. --Enric Naval (talk) 08:47, 19 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Opposed. Let me translate Raul's proposal. "what policy actually says" is not what policy actually says, it's what Raul believes it means. This proposal is internally contradictory, not uncommon with Raul's bullying bulls or fatwas. "Wikilawyering" doesn't refer to attempts to state the substance or meaning of policy, but to relying upon the actual wording of the policy in contrast to the substance. Thus, if I were "wikilawyering," I would not be stating what is at odds with what the policy "actually says," I would be doing the opposite: I'd be doing what he asserts in the second part: making a false claim about the real policy, i.e., the "intent of the law," based on accidental meanings of the text, in order to justify my own behavior (or that of others.) Occasionally, I consider that the wording of a policy does not reflect the intention. Further, I may sometimes err in my understanding of actual practice; after all, I've only been seriously editing this project for less than two effing years. I'm quick, but not that quick. But I do understand the basic principles on which this project was founded, why it worked to the extent it has, and why it has fallen short of the original ideals, in some respects, and I do express this native and instinctive understanding, which, to those who are rule-bound, can be puzzling. And to those who want everyone else to follow rules, with IAR applying only to them, infuriating. Underneath this case is a phenomenon I will need to address, as will ArbComm. My very presence can sometimes be disruptive, this did not begin here. However, I will say this: I've been ejected before for "disruption," where those with the power made that decision, and the results have not been good for the organizations, not necessarily because I was crucial, though sometimes I was, but because a society which rejects "gadflies," or those who mention the nudity of the emperor, has become rigid and unable to adapt to changing circumstances. For good social reasons, though, mentioning the nudity of the emperor needs to be properly confined and contained. It is not a simple problem.

I will note one fact: it seems that whenever Jimbo makes a bold decision, the community descends into an uproar. His activity is disruptive. For better or for worse? My position is that we need this kind of disruption, but we should take measures to contain it, and what it will require is nondisruptive means of rapid and efficient development of deep consensus, and this is something that is vigorously opposed by those who might lose some power were it to happen, or, at least, that is what they fear. --Abd (talk) 17:56, 20 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Comment by others:

An extremely common Abd behavior. Raul654 (talk) 16:57, 18 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Seems accurate. Mathsci (talk) 22:13, 18 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Reject. Abd's statements regarding policy are always backed by the clear text and spirit of the policy in question. --GoRight (talk) 23:02, 18 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Absolutely, almost a textbook case. Spartaz ^Humbug! 08:48, 19 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Agree Sadly I have to agree to this. I have been talking a lot to editors about this case, including Abd, and I find a lot of wikilawyering going on to justify things. --CrohnieGal^Talk 12:02, 20 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Endorse. Also note the salient point from Abd's long response above, "I've been ejected before for 'disruption,' . . ." -apparently from multiple "organizations". Food for thought, R. Baley (talk) 22:42, 20 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Support. No way around it. --Stephan Schulz (talk) 15:59, 22 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Agree All too obvious. Common behaviour from Abd, and a huge problem for those attempting to work on the same articles. Verbal chat 15:22, 24 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Endorse Orderinchaos 16:15, 25 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Reject. I don't remember seeing any examples of such. We all find ourselves having to interpret and apply policy at times; if there is disagreement about how to apply it in particular situations, try WP:DR. ☺Coppertwig (talk) 00:20, 28 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]
I don't remember seeing any examples of such. - You must not be looking very hard. if there is disagreement about how to apply it in particular situations, try WP:DR - you do realize that arbitration workshops -- including this page -- are part of the dispute resolution process, right? Raul654 (talk) 16:29, 29 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

We've discussed this here. ☺Coppertwig (talk) 21:16, 1 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Support Abd has done this on many occasions, and I did remark about this to Abd when Abd disagreed with a certain action, where the action may have been harsh, but well within policy/guideline (outside of the Cold Fusion case). --Dirk Beetstra ^{T C} 08:53, 31 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Reject - Per Coppertwig. --GoRight (talk) 03:26, 2 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Abd/GoRight disruption of dispute resolution proceedings

GoRight and Abd have on multiple occasions attempted to derail dispute resolution proceedings against the other.

Comment by Arbitrators:

Comment by parties:

This isn't quite the phrasing I'd choose, but it comes close to expressing the basic problem. For whatever reason, GR has chosen to pile in on Abd's side, and is completely ignoring Abd's many flaws. So, support William M. Connolley (talk) 22:55, 23 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Yeah. GoRight has made every effort to disturb attempts to get Abd banned. I am still unclear on why. --Enric Naval (talk) 23:27, 26 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Raul cites his own evidence, which is better than some others have done. Except that this compilation of evidence, like that when I first came across Raul654, completely impeaches him, he's unreliable, he makes statements, central to his argument, that are just plain false, and he should know better, he's either seriously reckless or worse. See my response at User:Abd/Response to Raul654, which quotes his full evidence section. In short, his evidence sucks. Read it and weep, for Raul654 is about as highly privileged an editor as exists, and that he's been allowed to get away with this for so long is a tragedy. "Attempted to derail dispute resolution proceedings?" I attracted negative cabal attention when I was completely uninvolved, and I read RfC/GoRight and was completely horrified at what was being done, so I compiled evidence, neutral evidence, evidence that was never impeached, and that was, on the contrary, commended by the uninvolved editors, including two who are now sitting arbitrators, and entirely opposed by cabal editors. This polarization is typical of the cabal, and you can see it here in this RfAr. --Abd (talk)

extended comment by Abd

At that point, I was looking at those who had edit warred with GoRight and when they supported the RfC written, like the bad evidence section cited, by Raul654, and certified, as the above is supported, by WMC. WMC doesn't compile evidence, he's too much of a block 'em, I don't need no stinkin' evidence or reason, kind of administrator. Sure, GoRight was grateful. Sure, he's going to speak up when he sees me being deceptively attacked. But it's not, unlike the cabal, because of shared POV, I think our POV on his major interest, Global warming, is opposing. He has no POV, as far as I'm aware, about Cold fusion. No, it's because I'm standing up for basic wiki principles and policies, as enunciated by ArbComm and as defied by the cabal, openly in many cases. These are people who supported ScienceApologist, not only in his good work, and there was much of that, but in his defiance of policies, and they complained about sanctions against him and considered it a shame, that ArbComm had gone down the tubes. I trust ArbComm, and they don't. If ArbComm decides that I'm disruptive, I'm out of here, because, like Socrates, I believe in consensus, and ArbComm is the closest device we have for estimating large-scale consensus. My work is to improve that, that's why I proposed delegable proxy, it's a possible way to deal with the participation bias problems that make the cabal as disruptive as it is, and the same structures used as the related Asset voting could be used to create a content review body that would represent true, broad, editorial consensus. Without contested elections. No losers. (No, delegable proxy isn't vulnerable to manipulation by sock puppets, the opposite, but that will take some explaining, and it won't be here). And all this is highly threatening to the cabal, because they can maintain their agenda by preventing such large-scale consensus from forming. Fortunately, they are not seriously organized, or it might be hopeless. --Abd (talk) 06:33, 30 July 2009 (UTC) |}[reply]

Comment by others:

Mutual trolling societies are harmful to the project. Raul654 (talk) 21:53, 20 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Reject - This is as ridiculous as Raul's claims on his WP:ATTACKPAGE page (a policy violation ... and note that Raul does not accuse me of misinterpreting that). This is also a prime example of his modus operandi. The fact that Abd and I tend to "participate" in some of the same proceedings is obviously an attempt on our part to "derail" the proceedings. We have our own little two person cabal, it seems, and Raul fears we may destroy the project. At least that's the view from inside Raul's myopically POV world. It would be amusing to write a parallel to Raul's screeds (here and on the evidence page) titled "Raul/WMC/SS/KDP/... Majority POV Pushing Society" and I could easily provide just as many examples (probably more) of where those same individuals support one another's positions in dispute resolution proceedings. However unlike some individuals who engage in disruptive activities for their own amusement, I do not. Last but not least, could Raul please explain how this is even relevant to the case at hand, or is he just using this proceeding as a stage to get attention for himself or his own amusement? --GoRight (talk) 01:29, 21 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]
- Last but not least, could Raul please explain how this is even relevant to the case at hand - because it gives the arbitrators a good idea of how much credibility to assign to your statements -- namely, none. Raul654 (talk) 14:27, 21 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Looks that way to me. Spartaz ^Humbug! 06:33, 21 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Yes it seems like it. Mathsci (talk) 07:38, 21 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I can say that when I see one the other is usually nearby. I've been curious about why this is.. --CrohnieGal^Talk 12:57, 22 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Common interests. Common views. Nothing surprising or nefarious. --GoRight (talk) 00:02, 23 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Comment to GoRight. I could understand your response with "Common interest. Common views." if the two of you were meeting in article space, whether talk or article. But the two of you appear together it seems everywhere, including boards, multiple editors talk pages and so on. The common interest in those are defense of each other, this can't be denied, sorry but that's what I see at least lately. --CrohnieGal^Talk 21:09, 25 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]
"The common interest in those are defense of each other, this can't be denied ..." - It can be denied, and I am doing so now. The common interest is generally related to a discussion of some aspect of relevant policy, not each other. To the extent that Abd and I share common views or interpretations of policy and have a common interest in helping others who are the victims of misinterpretations of those policies (i.e. such as the Wilhelmina Will case) the fact that we show up together should be considered unremarkable. I will openly admit that I pay attention to Abd's contributions for this very reason. He stumbles across such cases regularly and so he acts as a sort of automated filter for myself. No harm in that. As for the assertion that we show up "everywhere" together this is ridiculous. Simply review my history on Global Warming. While Abd may appear from time to time there is clearly no real correlation in our editing. Why? Because in that area we DON'T have common views OR common interests. Similarly for Cold Fusion. I have not provided any content to that page since I have little interest in it, whereas Abd does. Our overlap even in that case is related to the correct interpretation and application of policies. That is not "defending each other" as you would call it. --GoRight (talk) 17:22, 26 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Response to WMC "For whatever reason, GR has chosen to pile in on Abd's side, and is completely ignoring Abd's many flaws. So, support" - We are all entitled to our opinions and I certainly don't begrudge you yours. I believe that the evidence I am compiling is in as neutral a form as it can be made. I have not expressed any opinions related to your behavior in the underlying area of discussion as defined by the scope of this case, at least none that I can recall right now. So to say that I have taken Abd's side is at least somewhat inaccurate on your part.
I admit that I have defended Abd against what would appear to me to be personal attacks or unfair misrepresentations of his behavior, but I would do the same for anyone if I noticed an injustice being committed. The bulk of my comments (excepting those related to Raul's disruption of these proceedings and off topic proposals made in the pursuit of sanctions against myself) and all of my proposals have focused strictly on principles based on or surrounding the interpretation of existing policy. I do not regard that as having taken sides either. YMMV, and apparently does. So be it. --GoRight (talk) 05:49, 24 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]
GoRight claims I am disrupting these proceedings. All of my proposals have unanimous or near unanimous support (excluding Abd and GoRight, obviously), while GoRight has yet to convince a single person that any of his proposals have merit. I will leave it as an exercise to the reader of this to determine who is being disruptive here. Raul654 (talk) 06:05, 24 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, Raul, it is true that the same names seem to be appearing in unanimous or near unanimous support of your proposals. Hmmm. Regardless, I am not seeking popular support here but rather good policy and good precedent. The arbiter's are the one's who shall decide which proposals have merit and which do not. If my proposals have no merit with them then they shall be ignored and no harm done. That does not make them disruptive. The inappropriate pursuit of personal grudges unrelated to this case is, IMHO of course, another matter. --GoRight (talk) 17:52, 24 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Raul, it is true that the same names seem to be appearing in unanimous or near unanimous support of your proposals. - if by "the same names" you mean "most everyone who has commented on this case but me and Abd", sure.

Regardless, I am not seeking popular support here but rather good policy and good precedent. - I suppose I must have missed those, because all I've seen from you so far is attempts to rewrite policy to validate yours and Abd's previous violations of the meatpuppetry policy.

The arbiter's are the one's who shall decide which proposals have merit and which do not. - I see no reason to expect them to consider your proposals any more valid than everyone else, all of whom have rejected them as transparent attempts to rewrite policy to make meatpuppetry acceptable.

If my proposals have no merit with them then they shall be ignored and no harm done. That does not make them disruptive. - actually, when other people have waste time debunking your false claims about policy, harm is done. When other people have to waste time debunking your false statements about Abd's behavior, harm is done. Both of the above behaviors are disruptive. But frankly, no reasonable person has so far bought into any of your claims (about anything - policy or facts, including claims that your own behavior is OK), so I'll just end this thread here and let the arbitrators deal with you. They're reasonable people and they won't have any trouble seeing through your (thin) smokescreen. Raul654 (talk) 18:20, 24 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Just a quick observation for you. If you were to stop doing those things then the supposed harm would drop to zero. Nobody's twisting your arm here, I assume. I know that I am not. I trust that the arbiters are quite able to read and make their own judgments sans your input. --GoRight (talk) 00:33, 25 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Letting your many falsehoods stand unchallenged would be even more disruptive to the arbitration process than debunking them. Raul654 (talk) 05:34, 25 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Nonsense. No evidence of such. Please assume good faith and try for genuine dialogue rather than trying to legislate away opinions you disagree with. ☺Coppertwig (talk) 00:20, 28 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

No evidence of such. - false.

Please assume good faith - This guideline does not require that editors continue to assume good faith in the presence of contrary evidence. -- Wikipedia:Assume good faith. Raul654 (talk) 22:13, 28 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

and try for genuine dialogue rather than trying to legislate away opinions you disagree with. - genuine dialog has been tried by many people with Abd. It fills many, many archive pages. Yet he continues to violate Wikipedia guidelines, personally attacking anyone he disagrees with, labeling them as part of a "cabal". This is not to mention Abd's penchant for claiming to be involved in a dispute with everyone (so as to dissuade admins from punishing him for his misbehavior). Raul654 (talk) 22:13, 28 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Raul654, do you or do you not approve of behaviour which has been variously referred to as "cabal" or "mutual trolling society", i.e. a pattern of supporting particular people? ☺Coppertwig (talk) 21:16, 1 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Your question makes an incorrect supposition, by equating the "mutual trolling society" behavior I identified with Abd's allegations of a cabal. Mutual trolling society behavior is the tendancy of disruptive users to support each other against sanctions for their misbehavior regardless of the evidence. (Gee, there wouldn't happen to be any of that going on around here, would there?) On the other hand, Abd's "cabal" consists of all the editors who oppose his misbehavior (none of whom are disruptive), regardless of whether or not they've ever interacted with each other before. The two are most certainly not the same thing. I oppose the former. I don't really care about the latter because it's figment of Abd's imagination, a kind of wiki-persecution complex. Raul654 (talk) 06:41, 2 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Abd has driven away subject matter experts

Abd has actively driven away subject matter experts from cold fusion articles, at least one of whom has cited Abd by name as the reason he quit.

Comment by Arbitrators:

Comment by parties:

Sadly, yes William M. Connolley (talk) 22:50, 23 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Agree, the impossible-to-follow talk page and the continuous whitewashing by CF advocates has driven away both experts and non-experts, see evidence here. --Enric Naval (talk) 23:22, 26 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Follow the byzantine path of the diffs and you will find that the editor "driven away" was Woonpton, whom I've defined as a cabal editor, but one who stopped serious editing long before I arrived at Cold fusion. Driven away because the project started to enforce civility standards, take a look at User:Abd/Cabal#Woonpton, I happen to have compiled that little bit. (Woonpton is not an administrator and would be, by herself, harmless or even useful, but has the idea that Wikipedia is coddling fringe POV-pushers, and she's shown the cabal characteristics in what little editing she's done, such as substantial contributions to RfAr/Fringe science. I did not drive her away. She decided long ago to stay away, my guess is that she can't stand the discussion, but discussion is not a necessary part of non-disruptive editing. All you have to do is have some cooperating editors, if she wanted to assist the cabal in making sure that POV-pushers don't carry away Cold fusion, she could make edits to the article providing sources, etc., and even if someone reverted, someone else could carry on the discussion. The cabal has a legitimate function, and that would be it. Cooperation. Where it gets illegitimate is where it tries to control or dominate.)
As to the case cited by Raul, User:Kirk shanahan is a COI editor, uncivil and condescending, and I've encouraged him to explain his Calibration Constant Shift theory, and I might be the only editor who understood him. You might be surprised. He considers the Pons-Fleischmann effect to be a real anomaly, though non-nuclear. That is, his explanation involves an unexplained effect, theorized and not proven. I restored his papers to the bibliography. He's a rare bird, and therefore a precious one, a critic of cold fusion who has recently published under peer review. Unfortunately, he's highly biased, but he stopped editing the article before I arrived. The really bad version that Woonpton supported in her transient vote was suggested by him and largely written by him. No, he hasn't been driven away, though he complains about this or that, but he's disgusted. By our editorial policies. Even when the article is largely controlled by critics, as it has been since Pcarbonn was banned. People aren't driven away by talk on the talk page, generally. They leave when they find that nothing they do is effective, they aren't able to get content into the article and have it stay. He'd written a subarticle on Calorimetry in cold fusion experiments, which was fairly good, though it needed work. It was AfD'd by JzG and deleted, as I recall. There is a copy at User:Abd/Calorimetry in cold fusion experiments, I've intended to clean it up and try to get it restored. I didn't delete it, Pcarbonn didn't delete it (he suggested it or created it, I think, so that Shanahan could focus on more detail than would be appropriate in the main article. Deleted. That's what drives editors away! In any case, his theory is sufficiently notable that we should cover it. It's notable because there was response to it in a peer-reviewed journal, besides its own existence in that journal as primary source. It's mentioned in some other papers, I think, such as the 2004 DoE review document by Hagelstein.
As to Mathsci's comment below, I can comment on Shanahan's positions because I know the recent literature, at least to a degree. His theories don't involve difficult science, they are not abstruse, though it's easy to misunderstand them, But Shanahan makes many comments that are flat-out contradictory to what's in the literature, which makes me think that he's not familiar with the current research, or he's not absorbing it. Now, Mathsci, how do you know enough to criticize my comments on Shanahan? You have never shown any familiarity with cold fusion research, which is a huge field, there are about 3000 published papers, as I recall, with some surprising recent developments. Your expertise would presumably be with the mathematics used in quantum mechanics. If we are lucky, quantum electrodynamics or quantum field theory. Perhaps you'd be qualified to review the work of Takahashi on Tetrahedral Symmetric Condensate, but you've declined to look at it. So far, anyway. In any case, as to the point here, I certainly did not drive away Shanahan, the timing doesn't fit at all; but what I did do was confront Shanahan on the incompleteness of his explanations and the contradictions between what he was asserting and what's actually in the literature being discussed. If I was wrong, his explanation would benefit all of us. But some experts can't stand being challenged. The best actually appreciate it, because it creates teaching moments. If we can record that, and get it into the article, assuming it can be sourced, we'd have made the article much less likely to be misunderstood.
My position on experts is that they are generally COI and should advise us, not edit articles unless it's not controversial. (Experts may create a lot of good articles, where troubles start is where they try, as Mathsci does, to OWN the article. If an expert can't convince ordinary editors to keep the article the way he or she wants, the article isn't well written or it's OR!) The best position for experts is as advisors, and if we were strict with COI guidelines, that would be practically automatic. Pcarbonn is, I think, a cold fusion researcher now (I don't know whether he was before). A scientist. COI editors are presumed to advocate a POV, to have a kind of agenda. We made a mistake to ban him from Talk. We allowed ScienceApologist to edit Talk! (His topic ban was only from article pages). We need the advice of these people, and it's a shame that SA didn't work on the cold fusion article by advising us in talk. I'm sure he'd have been easier to deal with than his supposed supporter, Hipocrite. But SA was, at that point, blocked for disruption. He's back, and welcome to be so, by me. --Abd (talk) 07:26, 30 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Comment by others:

Subject matter experts are a rare and valuable resource to the project. I can think of nothing so harmful to the project as Abd's behavior in this regard. Raul654 (talk) 17:18, 21 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]
This seems to be the case. See Kirk Shanahan's email quoted below. In discussions with experts who have simple points to make (EdChem, Kirk Shanahan), Abd does not appear to be taking in what they are saying and instead talks about unrelated things. He dismisses Shanahan as narrow: how can he make such an evaluation? It appears the two experts above agree on the cautious evaluation of sources on fringe science: Abd has been unwilling to accept this and his persistent meandering and evasive discussions do not create a fruitful environment for editing. His absence from cold fusion since the topic ban has seen a return to normal conditions of editing. Experts in chemistry are likely to be very irritated by Abd's frequent statements that cold fusion deserves to have many new articles written on it to chart the progress of this emerging science. However, this seems to be his personal view - so far there seems to be little evidence that it reflects cold fusion's place in mainstream science. The constant repetition of these extreme fringe views is unhelpful and disruptive. Mathsci (talk) 17:15, 22 July 2009 (UTC) Abd has never written a non-stubbed article in his wiki-life. His accusations of article ownership show an evident confusion about what happens while creating the first draft of a long article, with "inuse-section" templates in place. Perhaps if he had created or made substantial edits to non-stub uncontroversial mainstream articles he would have a little more clue. His comments are off-topic and probably designed to cause offence (aka WP:BAIT).[reply]
Reject Subject matter experts who argue against Wikipedia Policy we do not need. Shanahan's complaint is not with Abd, he names several people calling them all wiki-lawyers, and then adds this: "In order to get a NPOV article, the RS rule must be relaxed to take this situation into account, and no one seems to be willing to do that. So, any time I try to contribute, I get Wikilawyered." I guess you missed that part, Raul. Hmmm. A subject matter expert that wants to add material for which he cannot produce a WP:RS. That sounds like a likely WP:COI to me, like he has some WP:OR that he wants Wikipedia to endorse. Shouldn't the User:Pcarbonn topic ban be applied to him given that it seems others want it to be applied to Jed Rothwell for those exact reasons? --GoRight (talk) 20:13, 22 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Actually, I think this is a subject-matter expert grappling with the limits and edge cases of Wikipedia's content policies. Kirk's summary of the problem:

no one is doing _any_ work in the field except the fanatics (who have abandoned critical review), and thus _no_ negative articles get published and there is no base of information for news reporters to use to write cogent descriptions of the mainstream side. Yet a chemist can look at the pro-CF papers that are published and tick off multiple problems in analytical technique that invalidate the _conclusions_ presented in the papers, and it is those conclusions that end up in news reports and in Wiki articles.

In other words, our basic content policies are in tension with one another. We want to present a neutral, properly weighted and contextualized view of cold fusion (per WP:NPOV). However, the only people publishing on the topic are what Kirk termed "fanatics", restricting the available range of reliable sources such that simply counting them yields a false, non-neutral impression of the true state of knowledge and expert opinion. That's a real problem, cogently expressed by someone with actual expertise who has presumably left Wikipedia, and I'd be a little hesitant to disregard it as "he didn't want to follow our policies, so good riddance." I think he wanted to follow our policies, but found them in irreconcilable tension in this case. MastCell ^Talk 20:25, 22 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

This is all well and good. Are you suggesting that any of this is Abd's fault, and hence Abd is the cause of the subject matter expert leaving as this proposal asserts? If not, then I would ask that you clarify your comment accordingly.

I otherwise stand by my assertion. If Shanahan is unwilling or unable, regardless of the reasons, to follow the established standards and policies like everyone else is expected to do then we don't need him. This appears to me to be a case of the Majority POV Pushers (used as a general category and not aimed any anyone specifically) being stymied by their own standards. Anyone who has followed this debate knows full well that the scientists still conducting research in this field have NOT abandoned critical review. There are papers being published in legitimate peer-reviewed sources. The fact that the sources favored amongst Shanahan and his supporters here have (apparently) consciously chosen to not publish articles in this area is no one's fault but their own, and it most certainly is not the fault of Abd. --GoRight (talk) 19:03, 23 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Reject: the word "actively" could be interpreted as implying that Abd intended to drive someone away, which I don't believe for a second. In the diff given, Abd was mentioned only in a list of several editors. ☺Coppertwig (talk) 00:22, 28 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Would you support this proposal if the word "actively" were deleted? Raul654 (talk) 22:15, 28 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

That's a fair question, but no, and I would still reject it if "experts" was replaced by "expert" to match the number of such people mentioned in the evidence; see the second sentence of my comment. ☺Coppertwig (talk) 21:16, 1 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Abd's personal attacks

Abd has made numerous personal attacks against other editors, both on-wiki and off-wiki

Comment by Arbitrators:

Comment by parties:

Support, see also the warnings received by Abd, search for "personal attacks", and see other examples of other bad behaviour towards other editors. See also accusations to admins. --Enric Naval (talk) 23:11, 26 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Comment by others:

I wasn't sure if I should include Abd's hypocrisy in claiming to applaud the civility restrictions here and then going to WR to make personal attacks, but I decided not to. The FOF is clear enough as is. Raul654 (talk) 05:43, 25 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Attacking the clerk [8] does not seem a very good way to proceed. If Abd had any kind of convincing arguments - apart from his wholly unsupported statements about a "cabal" - he would not need to resort to this kind of highly offensive, tendentious and disruptive editing. Abd does not seem to show any awareness that his behaviour is confrontational and highly unconstructive. Mathsci (talk) 22:19, 28 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Proposed remedies

Note: All remedies that refer to a period of time, for example to a ban of X months or a revert parole of Y months, are to run concurrently unless otherwise stated.

Abd banned

1) Abd is banned from Wikipedia.

Comment by Arbitrators:

Comment by parties:

Abd is a net negative to the project. When he was a fairly quiet net negative, that was merely irritating but tolerable. Now he seems determined to be a noisy net negative, this would appear to be the best solution William M. Connolley (talk) 18:40, 18 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

A one year full ban could finally make him get the message that he has to change his behaviour in order to collaborate productively in wikipedia. And he woldn't be able to re-interpret it as an endorsement of his position, like he did with the advice in the last case (see #6 of here in evidence). The evidence I found shows that advising, encouraging, criticizing, etc, has gone on for months with no effect, and no acknowledgement of being a problem in his editing. --Enric Naval (talk) 08:57, 19 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Mind you, a shorter full ban could serve the same purpose. Also, this has to be coupled with an indefinite ban from Cold fusion and its talk page, and from editing policy pages and their talk pages. If he wants to edit those again, he has to ask for a review of his edits by the community or by Arbcom. --Enric Naval (talk) 09:15, 19 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Comment by others:

He contributes little and causes many problems. Clearly a case of someone we are better off without. Raul654 (talk) 16:46, 18 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Its hard to see anything that Abd has contributed recently that hasn't been a ridiculous drain on other editor's time and energy. Their abject refusal to adapt their approach to meet the needs of other editors is unacceptable. Spartaz ^Humbug! 16:55, 18 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

On a technical point, ArbCom has traditionally issued bans only up to one year. Stifle (talk) 20:16, 18 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Recently they have been banning outright. Spartaz ^Humbug! 08:49, 19 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Unfortunately at present his own private agenda seems to take precedence over wikipedia policies. His net contribution is negative at the moment. Mathsci (talk) 22:11, 18 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Reject. Abd has provided tireless services to the project and always seeks to find a fair and reasonable position duly supported by discussion and consensus. This is the ideal of the project and his efforts should be commended, not punished. --GoRight (talk) 23:07, 18 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Approve Abd has been a disruptive influence on the cold fusion talk page, and dismisses criticism. For example, after I suggested he write shorter text on the cold fusion talk page and focus on the main article, he responded with this: [9]. Olorinish (talk) 01:07, 19 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

~~Undecided~~ Weak support at the moment but leaning towards this if necessary. The dif above from Olorinish is some of what I've seen that tells me that Abd has too strong an agenda that he wants to go forward with if this case goes his way. I feel that Abd feels he has done a lot 'of research' on this subject that he feels he is an expert of sorts to build this article and more. I also don't like the feeling I'm getting that Abd is experimenting with the project towards some goal he has. This case has a feel like when Guido was experimenting with the project which was also rejected. I really think that Abd needs to start reading and listening to what the other editors are saying to him. After reading some of the responses below mine, I have to say I changed to a weak support. I also know about Wilhelmina Will and Abd sort of bulldozed into that. Did he help keep her here yes, I think that Wilhelmina Will is still here but if I remember correctly other editors also helped her to understand that what she was doing was not right and that she had to stop what she was doing until she understood all of the issues that were causing concerns for so many. So yes, Abd did help but I think a lot of editors also felt that Abd wasn't helping in a lot of ways too. As for the link also supplied about the surprise at being blocked for the edit/revert block, the editor Abd suggested it to refused it outright at the time as did others who said 'no' to the idea of editing while blocked/banned. I don't have the link right now but will supply upon request though Coppertwig may have it already linked below, not sure. So I have changed my post here accordingly. --CrohnieGal^Talk 21:25, 25 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Reject. Abd provides significant benefit to the project. Wilhelmina Will is still editing today, but likely would have been lost to the project if not for Abd's intervention. Abd has put a lot of work into studying cold fusion, buying books on the topic, and can contribute a lot to the cold fusion articles (for example, one of the articles he created, Robert Duncan (physicist)^{(21:16, 1 August 2009 (UTC))}). Often Abd's proposals gain consensus after discussion, for example in this discussion which involved a convenience link to lenr-canr.org, a site which had been mistakenly blacklisted. Abd listens to others, respects consensus and modifies his behaviour in response to feedback. (Examples: "at that point I believed that the community had a consensus on harmless edits" [10] and "The goal is consensus between us, not a specific content decision" [11]). Abd's dedication to finding consensus by listening to views on all sides inspired me with the optimism to start a set of compromise proposed placename guidelines which gained a surprising amount of support in what had seemed a hopelessly polarized situation and have recently been made policy (Wikipedia:Naming conventions (West Bank)).
The way to avoid having too much material included about minority views on cold fusion is to make convincing arguments about due weight and reliable sources, not to ban a series of editors who make opposing arguments nor criticize people for not finding the arguments convincing. Rather than banning, try modifying policy to restrict the allowed lengths of posts if that's the problem. ☺Coppertwig (talk) 14:17, 25 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Besides: no valid reason for banning has been given, such as clear violations of warnings from uninvolved administrators about policy or guideline violations. ☺Coppertwig (talk) 01:21, 29 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I would prefer restrictions upon which a later ban is based should they be violated (i.e. if not violated he could continue to edit) - particularly with regard to wikilawyering and personal attacks. Orderinchaos 16:16, 25 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Would you apply those restrictions to only Abd or to everyone equally? I have seen some long posts made by others who are likewise party to this case. Should the same restrictions be applied to them as well, or even made globally applicable? Thou shall not make posts greater that 200 words in length? Seems a bit arbitrary and unworkable to me, but if fairly applied and the Arbiters find merit in it I would certainly make an effort to comply. --GoRight (talk) 16:36, 25 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Given the entire issue is related to the continuing behaviour of a particular individual, I would say it should apply to the one individual. The reason I do not favour a ban is that I believe he is working in good faith, just at a radical tangent to the project at the present. I admit to my own share of long posts, although I tend to keep them for when they're needed. Orderinchaos 17:31, 26 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I feel this is too strong. While I disagree with much of Coppertwig's claim, above, (I'm not convinced that all of Abd's work with Wilhelmina Will was exemplorary, and in particular I've seen little evidence that he really does listen to others) I acknowledge that Abd has done some excellent work under the right circumstances, with a number of editors being clearly very grateful for his assistance. I'm hoping that a lesser move than a total ban will help to curtail some of the problems with his editing. - Bilby (talk) 16:54, 25 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

GoRight prohibited from intervening in dispute resolution proceedings to which he is not a party

2) GoRight is prohibited from intervening in any dispute resolution proceeding (including but not limited to noticeboard threads, RFCs, or arbcom proceedings) in which he is not named as an involved party. GoRight is prohibited from requesting to be added as a party to such proceedings.

Comment by Arbitrators:

Comment by parties:

With some regret, yes, because he has been so unhelpful to this case William M. Connolley (talk) 22:56, 23 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Strong support, in the ANI ban review, his comments were unhelpful, and I had this conversation in my talk page where I had to point out many many inaccuracies and omissions in the "facts" he presented to me. I don't think that his input is reliable for DR, and I don't want to waste so much time pointing out all his mistakes, only to have him generate more inaccurate "facts" to pursue the same point. This is not about freedom of speech, this is about efficency in getting disputes solved so we can write articles better. GoRight is throwing sand in the cogs of DR, continuously throwing inaccurate statements that other persons have to correct. Also, not understanding policy, or trying to reinforce it in ways that go against its spirit or against current practice, with no clear benefit to actually writing articles. That is not helpful and it should be stopped. --Enric Naval (talk) 23:07, 26 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Comment by others:

Needed in response to the "Abd/GoRight disruption of dispute resolution proceedings" FOF above. Raul654 (talk) 17:24, 21 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Rude and uncalled for: People can make their opinions known wherever they wish, and the decision makers can weight them accordingly. Calling someone a troll and saying their opinions merit no weight are personal attacks and everything that's been said about GoRight following Abd around and defending him could be said about you and WMC. That you are an admin and GoRight is not does not give you any more right to give your opinion in a dispute resolution setting than he has. Oren0 (talk) 02:22, 22 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

people can make their opinions known wherever they wish, and the decision makers can weight them accordingly. - aye, they are, and I'm making sure they have *all* the facts -- including GoRight's previous history of throwing sand in the gears of the dispute resolution process where Abd is concerned.

everything that's been said about GoRight following Abd around and defending him could be said about you and WMC - except that (a) I don't follow WMC around, and (b) I have not defended him. In fact, I haven't so much as mentioned his name in a single post here.

Calling someone a troll and saying their opinions merit no weight are personal attacks - see Wikipedia:Call a spade a spade, and specifically Users too often cite policies, like our policy against personal attacks and our policy against incivility, not to protect themselves from personal attacks, but to protect their edits from review.

That you are an admin and GoRight is not does not give you any more right to give your opinion in a dispute resolution setting than he has. - nice non-sequitur there. Nowhere did I say that admin opinions should count more than non-admins -- I said that GoRight's opinion should count for nothing because based on his past history, his comments are (a) mostly fallacious, and (b) designed to obstruct the dispute resolution process. Raul654 (talk) 03:02, 22 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Truth be told, I'd like to see this sort of remedy implemented more often and more aggressively by ArbCom across the board. Any parties who are consistently contributing far more heat than light to any proceedings ought to be given the boot. (A variation on this theme was extremely effective in one of the Everyking cases.) I wonder, however, if this ought not start out as an injunction – temporary or permanent – so as to offer immediate relief to the participants in this case. TenOfAllTrades(talk) 13:28, 23 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

That's not a bad idea, but it has to be proposed by the parties to the case. Enric or WMC - as parties to this case, would you please suggest an injunction prohibiting GoRight from further participation in this case? Raul654 (talk) 17:51, 23 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Arbcomm need to take this case by the scruff of the neck and wring some sense from it. I've tried to help but alas my help was seen not to be helpful - it is up to them now William M. Connolley (talk) 22:56, 23 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Reject: This is a blatant attempt to stifle dissent. Agreeing with Abd is not a bannable offense.^{(13:31, 26 July 2009 (UTC))} We reach consensus by discussion, not by banning the expression of viewpoints some people disagree with. ☺Coppertwig (talk) 14:17, 25 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

This is a blatant attempt to stifle dissent - On the contrary, it's an attempt to prevent GoRight from exhibiting his usual behavior of disrupting DR proceedings against Abd. Agreeing with Abd is not a bannable offense - no, but lying about Abd's actions is. Raul654 (talk) 19:03, 27 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

"Lying"? Perhaps a better wording would be that your opinion differs from GoRight's about some situations? Perhaps you'd care to give examples? ☺Coppertwig (talk) 00:22, 28 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Just to pick one incontrovertible example (made 2 days after GoRight's workshop proposal)- here Abd states that "We have a claim that Arkady Renkov is a sockpuppet, but no identification of the puppet master, nor any clear confirmation of policy violation". Abd's first clause ("We have a claim that Arkady Renkov is a sockpuppet") is false because Arkady explicitly admitted that she was a sockpuppet earlier in that very thread; the second clause is irrelevant; and the third clause (nor any clear confirmation of policy violation) is a wholly false statement about policy - "sockpuppet accounts may not be used in internal project-related discussions, such as policy debates or Arbitration Committee proceedings." --Wikipedia:Sock puppetry. So there you go - a crystal clear example of Abd making a false claim about policy, which demolishes GoRight's claims that Abd's statements about policy are always accurate. Raul654 (talk) 21:59, 28 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I've replied here. ☺Coppertwig (talk) 22:46, 29 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I've replied to Coppertwig here. In essense, Coppertwig is trying to redefine "sockpuppet" to be malicious and prohibited by definition, so as to render vacous the statement in the sockpuppetry policy that sockpuppets are prohibited from participating on policy pages. Raul654 (talk) 05:41, 30 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I've replied here. ☺Coppertwig (talk) 21:22, 1 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Concur with Tenofalltrades - we need more of these sorts of remedies for people who genuinely do not assist the cases to which they are added. Orderinchaos 16:18, 25 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

"we need more of these sorts of remedies for people who genuinely do not assist the cases to which they are added." - I am not actually clear on what you mean by this, can you please elaborate? --GoRight (talk) 16:38, 25 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Comment. GoRight, if you look at some of the noise surrounding this case, you seem to be smack in the middle of a lot of it. Especially you and Raul. If the two of you need, and it sure seems like it to an outsider, I think maybe both of you should do a DR yourselves, but you both definitely need to stop it here in this case. I really don't think this is at all helping Abd or WMC, look for yourselves. I personally can't say right now anymore than I've already said, which I think is clear enough about this, I think GoRight would do everyone a favor if s/he found something different to do than this case. Of course this is just my opinion right now. --CrohnieGal^Talk 21:35, 25 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]
If I am being disruptive here, I am quite certain that I can expect to be appropriately admonished or sanctioned as the arbiters see fit.
I have already stated that I believe that much of Raul's commentary in pursuit of his personal grudges is off topic. I can certainly see how my replies to him can be seen as enabling his continued pursuit of those matters in this forum. I clearly wish that these off-topic points and proposals had not been made but once they were I feel I have a right to respond to them.
I find the following portions of your comment interesting, "Especially you and Raul." as well as "I think GoRight would do everyone a favor if s/he found something different to do than this case." You clearly state that BOTH I and Raul have been generating noise here and yet you only call for me to go away. Can you please clarify why? --GoRight (talk) 18:54, 27 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Compare the somewhat similar/related proposals I made under principles and remedies on the workshop in the Abd and JzG case. Newyorkbrad (talk) 19:25, 19 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Comment by parties:

Generally I'm strongly against the pointless reaffirmation of policy, but this one seems to get forgotten far too readily and people need reminding William M. Connolley (talk) 18:46, 18 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

It would probably be better to provide a short summary here rather than simply "we have this policy" - that's the usual way these principles are handled. Hersfold ^(t/a/c) 23:37, 18 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

OK. I've plucked out some of the bits I like William M. Connolley (talk) 18:24, 19 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Agree, ~~but it needs a short summary, like Hersfold says.~~ now it's good. --Enric Naval (talk) 08:58, 19 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Support, with a caveat: increasingly, as the language of the policies and guidelines matures, it should, in theory, become increasingly accurate as to actual practice; substantial deviation between the text of policy and the practice is harmful to the project, as editors will expect, for example, to be protected against administrative abuse by the "letter of the law." The proper balance between IAR, which is essentially the normal discretion of the executive function, and "equal protection under the law" is one which always involves some tension. I have not argued that WMC could not ban me under IAR. It's remarkable that he seems to assert, on the one hand, that his ban was proper under that principle, but, on the other, that this was not his reason (perhaps I'll come back with diffs.) However, IAR isn't restricted to administrators, it applies to all editors, and the problem arises when an admin takes a tenacious position, especially when there is a level of involvement or bias. If I believe that, for example, global warming criticism is pernicious and inherently disruptive and damaging to what society needs to do, urgently, and that, to boot, it is Not True, I may easily believe that IAR would require me to act to prevent this garbage from being put in articles, and blocking the editor might seem the most efficient action to me. Hence we require evidence of policy violations to justify blocks, long-term. Short term, in my opinion, an admin can do just about anything, provided the user affected is experienced, and that the community responds with a just decision quickly. We've lost a lot of admins and editors who retired because of some problematic IAR decision by another admin that wasn't promptly corrected. --Abd (talk) 18:18, 20 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Abd, this section is for discussion of the proposed principle. Your comment, particularly near the end, seems to focus more on past events in a rather accusatory tone (edit: with no apparent information to back up the claims) rather than the merits of the principle. Please remove it and focus more on the latter. Thank you. Hersfold ^(t/a/c) 23:28, 21 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Clerk Hersfold removed a portion of the comment above me as "unfounded," fair enough. So....

A fundamental issue here is that WMC is very much an IAR administrator. That can be good and bad. Here's some of the down side that may have triggered the loss of an admin:

[12] Abd notifies Hipocrite of this RfAr.
[13] WMC reverted it.
[14] Rootology reverted.
[15] WMC reverted again.
Discussion ensues on WMC Talk, 5 editors support WMC in his revert warring. Rlevse warns WMC, who argues with it.
21:12, 14 July 2009 Guettarda warns Rootology about use of rollback to "edit war." (The single revert above.)
21:38, 14 July 2009 Rootology responds.
23:50, 14 July 2009 Rootology begins deleting his Talk page with "that does it," and formally retires.

Dealing with a group of editors who mutually support each other in illegitimate actions can be seriously frustrating. Because other events took place in that two hours between Guettarda's wikilawyering objection (it was a single version revert, it doesn't matter what tool was used), we can't be certain that this was the cause, but the sequence almost certainly contributed. A pile-in of editors as happened on WMC Talk over this can make it seem that the whole place has gone insane. But these are all very familiar editors to those following this RfAr: WMC, Short Brigade Harvester Boris, Stephen Schulz, R. Baley, Mathsci. Guettarda is not so familiar to me, but in researching WP:Requests for arbitration/Pseudoscience, there he was, standing with JzG, ScienceApologist, and WMC.

All this was mentioned because IAR is fine, but when editors apply IAR without regard for consensus, insisting on actions that the community would certainly reject, it becomes destructive. IAR works when an editor respects consensus. --Abd (talk) 03:39, 25 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Notice Abd's gracelessness and inability to retract: he ignored a direction instruction from the clerk, who was obliged to do Abd's work for him. @A: None of your diffs have anything to do with IAR. I don't think this has anything to do with Rootology's leaving, but if it has, the problem is R intervening unhelpfully where he wasn't wanted William M. Connolley (talk) 10:15, 25 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Comment by others:

A useful restatement of policy, "Thou shalt not wikilawyer". Mathsci (talk) 07:41, 21 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Support with the clear understanding that the purpose of the policy descriptions is to accurately reflect actual community practices, which includes any exceptions or limitations that are written into them. --GoRight (talk) 20:32, 24 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Support in the strongest terms - all violating this does is wastes productive editors' time. Orderinchaos 16:19, 25 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Support. Yes needed saying. I haven't a clue what all the noise is above, shouldn't it be moved to the talk page or just outright removed? It really doesn't appear to be about this proposal and is more like soapboxing Thanks, --CrohnieGal^Talk 11:33, 26 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Support. Agree with restating this. --Dirk Beetstra ^{T C} 08:57, 31 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Support. Be bold, but be careful. ☺Coppertwig (talk) 21:16, 1 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Response to WMC - "the problem is R intervening unhelpfully where he wasn't wanted" That's sort of a funny statement for you to make under the circumstances. Might there be someone else to which the same statement could be applied? I think yes. --GoRight (talk) 03:41, 2 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Wikipedia is an encyclopaedia not a discussion forum

2) The purpose of wikipedia is to build an encyclopaedia. It is not a discussion forum. Editors are expected to edit wiki with the primary intention of improving the encyclopaedia ~~rather than indulging in endless talk~~ and focus their discussion on specific proposed edits to a wikipedia article, rather than on the topic itself.

Comment by Arbitrators:

Comment by parties:

Abd's primary purpose on wiki is debate William M. Connolley (talk) 14:11, 24 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Modified to at least partially address O's suggestion an GR's comment William M. Connolley (talk) 15:12, 24 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Agree. Abd says that he needs to make those long comments to learn about the topic, but there are plenty off-wiki forums where he can discuss about the topic at length without filling the talk pages here. I notice that he already participates at the VORTEX-L mailing list, which is dedicated to CF and is the mailing list for CF researchers and interested people, so why does he need to post also here. And then he says that people don't need to read his comments, I kid you not....... why does he even need to write them here in the first place...... --Enric Naval (talk) 22:58, 26 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Comment by others:

Support I was thinking about a proposal like this, but WMC beat me to it. However, this might be a better version of the second sentence: "Editors are expected to focus their discussion on specific proposed edits to a wikipedia article, rather than on the topic itself." Olorinish (talk) 14:47, 24 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Support WMC's comment above about Abd seems to be the case and is confirmed by Abd's editing record. Mathsci (talk) 14:52, 24 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Support. "Not a social networking site" might put it more generally. --Stephan Schulz (talk) 14:53, 24 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]
~~Weak Support~~ Changing to Support - I certainly agree with the first two sentences. I would much prefer Olorinish's rewording of the last which seems to be more to the main point and less pointed at others. If such a change were made I would change to full support. --GoRight (talk) 15:02, 24 July 2009 (UTC) Acceptable. --GoRight (talk) 17:05, 24 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Support per Wikipedia:What Wikipedia is not, and specifically: Wikipedia is not... discussion forums. Please try to stay on the task of creating an encyclopedia. You can chat with folks about Wikipedia-related topics on their user talk pages, and should resolve problems with articles on the relevant talk pages, but please do not take discussion into articles. In addition, bear in mind that talk pages exist for the purpose of discussing how to improve articles; they are not mere general discussion pages about the subject of the article, nor are they a helpdesk for obtaining instructions or technical assistance. Raul654 (talk) 15:11, 24 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Support as modified. Orderinchaos 16:20, 25 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Support. I agree with the comments of User:Stephan Schulz & User:Olorinish--CrohnieGal^Talk 11:38, 26 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Support. ☺Coppertwig (talk) 00:22, 28 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Support, editors need to be able to be bold, and others need to be able to undo the bold edits without discussion, and discussion does not need to be started for every edit or undo. --Dirk Beetstra ^{T C} 08:59, 31 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

WP:TINC

3) There really is no cabal. If a large group of well-respected editors all disagree with you, then this is generally because you are wrong.

Comment by Arbitrators:

Comment by Parties:

Abd has made curious and ill-formed accusations of some vast shadowy cabal acting against him. This cabal does not exist. Instead, we are seeing the common situation of experienced editors recognising and trying to prevent disruption William M. Connolley (talk) 10:22, 25 July 2009 (UTC) [Update: it looks like Hersfold may be joining the "cabal" [16] William M. Connolley (talk) 16:58, 25 July 2009 (UTC)][reply]
Strong support Abd regularly fails to see this. Personally, I think that's because he thinks that he is right, so anyone opposing him is either wrong or is misleading in purpose. --Enric Naval (talk) 22:50, 26 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Oppose.Well, by the definitions I used, there are cabals, many small ones and perhaps a few large ones. The "accusations" -- observations, really -- are pretty clear, but ArbComm will decide. Still, even if I were 100% wrong about this one, how could we state, as a fact, that there is no cabal? What I've shown, what is visible to anyone who reviews the evidence, is that there is a group of editors who regularly take certain extreme positions related to fringe science. It's not personal, and I saw this before they were "disagreeing with me." It's not truly a large group, considering how many editors there are, what makes it possible to identify the cabal is that the same names keep showing up over and over, across many articles, and, when there are disputes involving those articles, these editors will pile in, and cabal positions are clear and quite different from the consensus of uninvolved editors. And we can see that here, but I saw it first and most strikingly in RfC/GoRight, see User:Abd/Cabal and follow the links to that RfC and the evidence pages I created, when I was completely uninvolved, and had no previous contact with any of those editors, nor with the articles. That work by a completely uninvolved editor is fairly unusual, most people have to be involved to motivate themselves to do it. It just happened.
Woonpton What you propose as proof that there is no cabal is merely a proof that, if there is one, it isn't well-organized, if it's organized at all. I see no sign of a seriously organized cabal; I see some signs of small-scale off-wiki coordination, but I'd be astonished if it included you! I've considered calling it the Keystone Cops Cabal, because it is, in fact, bumbling and often at cross purposes, it's not a disciplined Secret Society. (If it were, allowing things to come to the point of this RfAr would be extraordinarily dumb.) It's just a constellation of editors with a strong POV that naturally cooperates. You have that POV, you had it before you knew about me, AFAIK, that's what your contributions show. But we see the operation of the cabal most clearly when there is a discussion that attracts many neutral editors as well as cabal members, usually because the cabal piles in and then others show up later. (If a discussion has snowed the other way, I haven't ever seen the cabal pile in to reverse it. The cabal seems to only function when it believes it's in the majority, that it would be minority is contradictory to the cabal world-view.) The difference in opinions can be like day and night. That's what shows in RfC/GoRight. And it shows here. There are almost no neutral editors who have commented. There is the major cabal, as defined in the document, based on many past discussions, beginning before I was involved, myself and a couple of supporters, and there is MastCell, very few others. (Some of the others have been marginally identified with the cabal in some way or other, but, remarkably, there is, with these marginal editors, a visible softening of view. It would be worthwhile, at some point, to do a more extensive study, across many more discussions.) I know of no cabal arbitrators that I would even suspect. Raul654 was an arbitrator at one time. Somehow, Wikipedia survived, though I was told at one point that as long as he was on ArbComm, change would not be possible.
Beetstra You are not a cabal administrator, the only alignment that you have with the cabal is that you sometimes disagree with me, but your disagreement is personal, not group-think, transient, and you end up doing the right thing. Always. So far. Your opinion about who is on the side of policies and guidelines is just that: your opinion. ArbComm did not support you on the use of the spam blacklist, the only disagreement we have really had -- except for your rather rude support for my being banned in RfC/JzG 3 -- what were you thinking of? -- you struggled hard to keep them from deciding what they decided in RfAr/Abd and JzG on that. But the sky did not fall, did it? (That support for my ban got you on that first list I put up, starting to discuss the cabal, but those lists explicitly stated that these were just incidents, anecdotes if you will, and that it would be overall pattern that would matter.) --Abd (talk) 09:09, 30 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Comment by others:

Support. Abd and I disagree quite often, though we have had very constructive discussions. Still, the disagreements with Abd result from my agreement with the policies and guidelines, not due to the existence of the cabal. --Dirk Beetstra ^{T C} 11:11, 25 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]
- Reply to response from Abd "Beetstra You are not a cabal administrator...". So you say that there is a Cabal (IMHO ... then there may be even be more than one Cabal) of people against you, ánd other, individuals who disagree with you. Heh. Still, I do NOT believe that they are conspiring against you or against Cold fusion, they still are separate individuals, who share the same thinking. I have not expressed myself strongly on Cold fusion, so that is probably why I am not included in that list. Rubbish, Abd, there is no cabal.
- And now the rest. What is that doing there? It has, as usual with your ramblings, nothing to do with this case. What are you trying to say me there? --Dirk Beetstra ^{T C} 08:22, 31 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Support. This is something that ArbCom can usefully state. --Stephan Schulz (talk) 11:20, 25 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Support - pending further evidence, as I assume Abd has more to say on this. At the moment there's nothing in the evidence to show anything more than a group of like-minded editors. - Bilby (talk) 11:36, 25 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Bilby, there is more evidence, perhaps, than you've seen, but the cabal is just that: a group of like-minded editors who cooperate in a manner that frustrates the application of RfAr/Fringe science. It isn't anything more than that, except that some cabal members have admin privileges and aren't shy to use them serving their "like mind," even when it's contrary to policy. --Abd (talk) 09:09, 30 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Support yeah, I wouldn't join any cabal that would have me. Spartaz ^Humbug! 16:22, 25 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Comment As far as I know, there's no cabal, and I would be very surprised if Abd's evidence, if it ever materializes, proves the existence of a cabal. But even if I turn out to be right about this, I have trouble with the wording of the second sentence. I watch some fringe science topics where most of the editors are fringe theory advocates and there aren't many science-literate or policy-minded editors around, and when one of the latter does appear, the hapless intruder is often shouted down and driven away. (The very fact that the "cabal" doesn't rush to the aid of science-literate editors in these backwater fringe topics is more indication that there's no cabal). I don't think it's a good idea to suggest in general that whenever a lot of people disagree with you, that means you're wrong; that's only true if the people disagreeing with you are upholding policy instead of trying to subvert it. In other words, who is working to maintain the quality of content by working to uphold content policies, and who is working to undermine content policy, is more important than how many people are in each group in any particular dispute. I understand the reason for the proposal, but I think the second sentence is maybe not well thought, and the first sentence should follow from examination of evidence which has yet to appear.Woonpton (talk) 17:05, 25 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

That is why I said "well-respectd" William M. Connolley (talk) 17:37, 25 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Support. I don't know where the claims of the cabal is going but I don't think there are any. There are many Cliques on Wikipedia but that is to be expected. Many people become good online friends and usually they do because of the same interest and ideals. No, there is no cabals. --CrohnieGal^Talk 22:17, 25 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]
How should I put this? Let's just say that the people who believe that There Is A Cabal are unlikely to be converted by an ArbCom pronouncement that there is none. So I don't see the utility. It might be well to propose, instead, that one shouldn't rattle on about a cabal in an ArbCom case if one is unwilling or unable to produce evidence of said cabal. But that ought to be common sense. MastCell ^Talk 04:40, 26 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Indeed. Thanks, MastCell. It stands out. A sensible comment; in a case like this, it's practically proof that you aren't a member of the cabal. You aren't a member of my mini-cabal either. (It's hardly a cabal, the three of us here: myself, GoRight, Coppertwig, we are like-minded editors in certain ways but not as to POV, more as to what's fair on-wiki. And I'm not aware that we are opposing ArbComm or policy, but, then again, the cabal thinks it isn't either. We also have no block buttons and we don't push for editors to be blocked. You are absolutely right, declarations that There Is No Cabal, even if there were no cabal, would just raise suspicions. After all, how could you know that there is no cabal? What could be said is "there is no evidence of a cabal here." If that were the case! It isn't. What's happening here is that the term "cabal" is being constantly pushed to mean something silly and extreme, and, if there is a conscious motive behind this, it would be to distract from what's really happening: a group of editors who cooperate in pushing an extreme position not supported by ArbComm and the community at large. Because the action is harmful, because the wikiview is negative (the cabal's world is full of POV-pushers and trolls, enemies to be banished), because of a number of administrators involved, the word cabal is appropriate, even essential. --Abd (talk) 09:09, 30 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Support. The cabal exists only in Abd's head. It consists of all of the editors who oppose his disruptive behavior - which is pretty much everyone who interacts with him for more than 5 minutes. Raul654 (talk) 19:09, 27 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Comment Agree with MastCell, Raul654 and others. I have no idea why Abd expects his capricious claims about good faith editors who do little common editing to be taken seriously. A large proportion of his evidence is devoted to what he calls a "cabal". It seems entirely unsupported and as such is a waste of ArbCom's time. Hopefully measures can be taken so that this behaviour will not recur. Mathsci (talk) 23:28, 27 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Mathsci, "little common editing?" Cabal membership was estimated by looking at common editing, especially certain RfAr cases and other process where fringe science or editorial behavior around fringe science, was being considered. The first clue for me was more than a year ago with RfAr/GoRight were I saw that what one might have assumed were uninvolved editors were actually editors who had edit warred with GoRight, tag-teaming. These editors all edited the same articles. You weren't a part of that, but you did show up in quite enough common page edits, pushing the cabal position, that you qualified. It was necessary to confront the cabal because of the pile-in here, as well as elsewhere. I didn't invent the term, I first saw it used off-wiki, major media source, I think, referring to ... WMC. In any case, the level of common editing is such that if any of these accounts turn out to be alternate accounts, i.e., socks, they'd be guilty of disruptive sock puppetry and blocked. I see sock suspicion raised all the time by less common editing. (The cabal is not a sock farm, those are actually opposites. A cabal is many acting as one (for a reprehensible purpose), a sock farm is one appearing to be many.) Really want to know why you were considered a cabal member? Ask yourself how you came to be so interested in this Abd editor, such that you followed him around. Were you ever interested in the spam whitelist before (you argued tendentiously against what Beetstra ultimately accepted)? All of a sudden you just happened to have very strong opinions against everything that Abd was doing? Do you think that and RfC/JzG 3 and the ensuing RfAr were unconnected? Why, in the RfC and RfAr, were you supporting an administrator who had clearly violated recusal policy, and attacking and seeking to have banned an editor who merely pointed this out, civilly? It was open and shut! If not for JzG's massive prior service, he'd have been desysopped, that's quite clear. You have been arguing and struggling against policy, but you think I'm disruptive. Typical. That's a cabal trait! --Abd (talk) 09:26, 30 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

This kind of comment should probably be removed to the discussion page by the clerk or Abd himself. It makes no sense at all to me - it seems to be some kind of rant. Anyway, back to Handel House Museum in namespace. Mathsci (talk) 13:26, 30 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Oppose. The first sentence appears to be an alleged fact requiring evidence to support it, not a principle. Re second sentence: It does sometimes happen that only one person holds a given opinion but eventually convinces the whole group. Decisions are made based on good reasons, not by counting votes. ☺Coppertwig (talk) 00:26, 28 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Proposed findings of fact

Abd in violation of previous arbcomm remedies

1) In Wikipedia:Requests for arbitration/Abd and JzG, Abd was advised to heed good-faith feedback when handling disputes, to incorporate that feedback, and to clearly and succinctly document previous and current attempts at resolution of the dispute before escalating to the next stage of dispute resolution. He has failed to follow that advice.

Comment by Arbitrators:

Comment by parties:

The failure to be clear and succint is all too obious, as is the failure to heed good-faith feedback William M. Connolley (talk) 14:14, 24 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Support I also think that this is a huge understatement. From all the warnings received along time, this seems just the continuation of a longtime trend. --Enric Naval (talk) 00:14, 26 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Oppose, of course, because I have fully attempted to follow the advice, which had another aspect as well, to escalate sooner, when it became apparent that the earlier stages of WP:DR were not going to be successful. Like many remedies, some of the exact meaning of this was unclear, but "heed good-faith feedback" cannot mean "obey" it, it means to satisfy it to the extent possible without compromising the project. WMC and Enric are confusing being "clear and succinct" in general discussion with what ArbComm was describing, the documentation of a dispute, which I did, clearly and succinctly, with the filing of this case. If not, ArbComm will tell me so, I'll assume. It got a lot more complicated with the pile-on from the cabal; I could have chosen to ignore that, and I don't know to what extent ArbComm will address cabal issues in this case (it only needs, perhaps, to consider the cabal in considering the weight of the evidence presented, to be a bit more careful than it might otherwise be); the primary case I filed is very simple: alleged admin recusal failure. If it were a false claim, then my disruption would become an issue. Notice that I could have been disruptive, WMC could have been "right" to ban me, every charge here against me could be true, and WMC could have violated recusal policy, in a damaging manner. There has been no disruption from uninvolved Heimstern's close determining the one-month ban, only from WMC's refusal to let go. If he'd recused at that point, by which time all reasonable argument that he wasn't involved had flown out the window, because if he wasn't involved before, he was now, and if any further action had been taken by an uninvolved administrator (there are only a handful of involved admins in the cabal), I'd not be here arguing this case. Usually, an editor stirring up as much fuss as has been stirred up would be, practically on the face of it, considered disruptive, but that's only a decent assumption if the editors are uninvolved. That's why WP:BAN requires a consensus of uninvolved editors for a community ban. Thanks, Jehochman, that snippet of text has been invaluable. A set of involved editors may make a huge fuss against an editor it opposes, and ArbComm may need to decide if and how to sanction carefully. --Abd (talk) 15:19, 30 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Comment by others:

He has failed to follow that advice - if anything, a bit of an understatement. Raul654 (talk) 14:16, 24 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Support Seems to follow his own rules. Mathsci (talk) 14:54, 24 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Oppose: Abd has heeded feedback by bringing this case to Arbcom relatively quickly; by posting many concise comments, at considerable expense in terms of his time and effort given his condition; by agreeing to abide by the original administrative page-ban even while he disagreed with it, and accepting the community page-ban, etc. His opening statement in this case links to clear, well-organized summaries in point form of the history of the dispute and current state of the dispute as asked for in the remedy cited above. ☺Coppertwig (talk) 13:59, 26 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Whatever the other issues in this case, I think this one is pretty much unarguable. Basically, any critical feedback has been attributed to the existence of a cabal, whose members appear to linked primarily by the fact that they've provided critical feedback to Abd. The quality of evidence Abd has presented has fallen well short of what one might hope, given the obviously (and intentionally) inflammatory nature of the wording he's chosen. I don't see how this is "heeding good-faith feedback" or effectively using dispute resolution - quite the opposite, and the previous admonishment seems a reasonable starting point here. MastCell ^Talk 22:30, 26 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Support Not only has he failed to follow that advice, he goes so far as to state ArbComm...roundly ignored the complaints about me.[17] The impression one gets is that nuanced and tactfully worded admonishments just don't get through to him, and the only way for Arbcom to get his attention is to whack him over the head. Short Brigade Harvester Boris (talk) 02:49, 27 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Reject - Per Coppertwig. --GoRight (talk) 07:49, 27 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Support. I tried to talk and listen to Abd. Now I am a member of the large cabal because of what, I thought that Abd needed time away from the Cold fusion article for awhile, I spoke up at the finge case and I commented here. Oh my that does make me a vast conspirator of some sort, not! I'm sorry for my sarcasm, but this cabal claims had me weary but i didn't expect to be named in this conspiracy since I have minimal contacts with most of the accused 'cabalist' and I never touched the Cold fusion article or talk page before. I am having a hard time not believing that these claims of cabals should be removed as a violations of WP:Civil and WP:NPA. Would someone please answer this for me, why is this attack allowed never mind being allowed to be expanded upon? Anyways, I stand behind my contributions here to the project. Thanks, --CrohnieGal^Talk 14:08, 27 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Abd is being allowed to make assertions that there is a cabal because he has provided evidence to that effect on the evidence page. Whether or not the evidence supports those assertions is up to the Arbitrators. Hersfold non-admin^(t/a/c) 15:19, 27 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks Hersfold, I'm just frustrated with this because I take it as an insult. --CrohnieGal^Talk 16:23, 27 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Even if I were not part of the "cabal" that you're upset about being lumped in with, I would still think you're in good company. :) Raul654 (talk) 16:27, 27 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks I am actually. Looking into the editors that I've had no contact with before I am very impressed with the history. All I do mainly is vandal patrol. Good company indeed. --CrohnieGal^Talk 16:33, 27 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Crohnie, if all you did was vandal patrol, you wouldn't be here, and I would not have found your previous comments in RfAr or other discussions. And if you consider what you can easily see here of the editors called "cabal," and you find this acceptable behavior, you have thereby fully confirmed that it's legitimate to name you as a cabal editor. If you consider this "good company," that's fine, and there is not, and will not be, an attempt to ban the cabal from doing good work, though it might get more difficult for them to ban editors, a non-vandal-patrol project that you've participated in. I'm not your judge, I just present what I find and see and understand. ArbComm will decide if you are even mentioned. You aren't an administrator, and ArbComm is going to be much more concerned about administrative actions that may have been colored by factional affiliation. If you don't revert war, and are careful about even single reverts in conjunction with other cabal members (except if fighting true vandalism) and if you are more careful about condemning other editors in the future, I don't see how being called a member of this cabal could harm you in the future. The cabal position was once more common, but those editors largely retired as it became clear that they were opposing consensus and their "work" became more difficult. --Abd (talk) 15:33, 30 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

@CG - I wouldn't take it as an insult because if you read what Abd has actually stated on the matter he clearly does not mean it as a pejorative. It is simply a reasoned result based on objective evidence and nothing more. He makes no accusation of nefarious intent or action that I can see, indeed he seems to go out of his way to discount such interpretations. Contrast that with the proposals of certain other participants which baldly refer to both Abd and myself as "trolls" without any such disclaimers. Should I be any less insulted by that than you seem to be about being lumped in with some "virtual cabal"? Had I been Abd I might have chosen WP:TAGTEAM (not that I take a position on you specifically either way) rather than the term "Cabal", but that's a matter of personal style. --GoRight (talk) 18:27, 27 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

No, that's actually the least convincing, most tortured, and most transparent of Abd's arguments. He intentionally chose the word "cabal" with a mind to its connotations - he's said as much - and bragged offsite about having the balls to drop the C-bomb. So the idea that he's used it as a "reasoned result based on objective evidence" rings a bit hollow, as does Abd's claim that he means to imply no bad faith. Abd, like anyone with a basic understanding of English, knows that the word "cabal" is a pejorative implying bad faith and nefarious intent. I wish people would be a bit less prodigal with the word "troll" - I definitely wouldn't apply that term to you or to Abd - but the fact that you've been called names doesn't make this nonsense about a "good-faith" cabal anything other than nonsense. And please don't get me started on WP:TAGTEAM... :) MastCell ^Talk 05:38, 29 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I didn't use tag team because most cabal activity here hasn't been tag team activity, it's been creating participation bias in various processes. Cold fusion isn't central to the cabal agenda, it's a bit of a backwater for it; but cabal editors did show up there from time to time. Enric is pretty much a Cold fusion specialist, far more than other cabal editors; recent cabal interest in Cold fusion destabilized it; that attention was attracted by RfC/JzG 3 and the RfAr. Cabal is a group perjorative, though some of the admins frequently joke about the cabal. But I've been very careful to specify that the negative character of the cabal isn't bad faith. I'm confident that all the cabal editors believe that they are working for the welfare of the project. I'm not aware of any COI, for example. "Nefarious intent?" Well, to ban an editor for their POV is nefarious. To create an entire category of editors and claim, with some success, that these editors should be banned, "Civil POV-pushers," is nefarious. The cabal pushes its POV, often uncivilly, but it claims that it's POV is NPOV. So it is uncivilly pushing NPOV. Note that Woonpton identified the problem with Wikipedia as being concern over civility instead of NPOV and RS. (See User:Abd/Cabal#Woonpton). The problem with that, MastCell, is that incivility poisons our consensus process, which contaminates and impedes the mechanism by which we determine what is NPOV. NPOV isn't an absolute, it's relative, one text is more NPOV than another, and the only way to measure it, for community purposes, is degree of consensus found. We have our own opinions about NPOV, but they are unreliable, because we all have POVs and the skill of being able to truly see beyond our own POV is rare and uneven. One thing is completely clear: if all editors agree on a text, we may safely assume it's neutral. Call that 100% NPOV. 100% is not necessarily attainable, but it would be desirable, if possible. The alternative to this is raw power, and that's what the cabal attempts. If not for administrative members, it would have much less power, there are too few of them. If admin tools are needed to "enforce NPOV," as distinct from behavioral policy, it's almost certainly not NPOV, it's merely a position held by the editors with the tools, who imagine that they know better than everyone else. --Abd (talk) 09:51, 30 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Well we can certainly quibble about his choice of terms but clearly the way in which he has scoped them and the manner in which the lists of names were derived is certainly consistent with it being a "reasoned result based on objective evidence". Or do you disagree with that?

"And please don't get me started on WP:TAGTEAM... :)" - I believe that I correctly discern your none too subtle meaning here but I also suspect that there are many here who would prefer that we NOT undertake a thorough discussion of WP:TAGTEAM and its implications in this case ... and most of them would NOT be from the "side" that you had presumably intended. :) --GoRight (talk) 22:42, 29 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

State of the Cold Fusion article

2) Before WMC stepped in to page-ban A and H, the Cold Fusion page had degenerated to a state of semi-permanent protection and the talk page had become an unintelligible morass of competing polls and walls of text. Afterwards, protection was removed and normal editing resumed; the talk page became a peaceful venue for useful discussion.

Comment by Arbitrators:

Comment by parties:

This is what happened William M. Connolley (talk) 17:02, 25 July 2009 (UTC) Note that GR appears to offer at least qualified support for this view [18] William M. Connolley (talk) 22:47, 25 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Agree with description. --Enric Naval (talk) 22:48, 26 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Oppose. There was no edit warring at Cold fusion until Hipocrite arrived at the beginning of May, fresh from, already, trying to get me banned. He simply continued that activity, he didn't care about Cold fusion. This RfAr isn't about Hipocrite, as such, but all the edit warring involved him, I was only involved with reversion in the first incident, May 21, though if you look at the revert history, you'll see many reverts preceding May 21, generally bald reverts. I didn't revert back, but continued to discuss. May 21, I confronted this, and did make a couple of reverts. The definition of revert on the relevant pages is a little unclear; for sure, when "revert" is defined, it's about rejection of content without attempt to find compromise, not about edits that alter content to attempt to satisfy objections. If we set aside those edits, I think I hit 1RR or -- maybe? -- 2RR. If we include edits that restore any reverted content from the same day, it would be 3RR, same as Hipocrite, and if we include the initial edit that restored content after discussion, with sourcing improvements, it would be 4RR. Protection on May 21 was appropriate, and I thanked WMC for it. On Jun 1, in fact, because the complainant at RfPP was the primary edit warrior creating the edit war that he complained about, and because he clearly gamed RfPP (acknowledged later by an RfPP admin), he should have been blocked for edit warring, no question. That second protection was for two weeks, which was excessive, given that there was only one persistent edit warrior, but it was lifted by WMC after the topic ban. It could have been lifted sooner, because I'd agreed to a voluntary indef article page ban with Hipocrite, all WMC or any interested admin would have need to do would have been to confirm the already accepted ban. (Hipocrite jumped at the offer; his goal was to get me banned! Mine was consensus, and I don't need to edit the article to facilitate consensus, it's practically a detail.) Since quick unprotection would undo the gamed version -- I wouldn't have to be the one to do it, it was blatantly POV, not even Hipocrite supported that version -- I could certainly give up editing the article for a time. A total of two weeks of protection resulting from a single editor is hardly "semi-permanent protection." This is a thoroughly biased claim. Definitely, if you ban, including from Talk, as has happened, the most knowledgeable editors on one side of a topic (Pcarbonn first, very long-term experience with the article, civil, followed guidelines, etc., then me), an article is going to become "peaceful." The goal of the project is not peaceful talk pages, it is improved text, and with controversial topics, that certainly takes a lot of discussion, including disputes. Or edit warring. The edit war of May 21 didn't involve much Talk, but it improved the text, because Hipocrite, approaching 3RR, realized he'd have to do some actual work, to balance what he was asserting as Fringe POV, but reliably sourced, with opposing material that was also reliably sourced. I certainly accepted that. Likewise the edit war of June 1 would have resulted in improvements, if Hipocrite had simply been blocked for what he had clearly done: sustained revert warring using bald reverts with no effort to reach compromise (except that one balancing act when he was forced), but proving that will take time. Even experienced editors use a level of reverting on occasion, it's why we have WP:IAR. Normally, I'm reluctant to do even a single bald revert. I much more frequently will make a new edit with compromised text, which some seem to consider a revert, when this is a wiki, and that can be a very efficient method of negotiating improvements. It's ironic that I'm condemned for too much discussion, but when I actually act in the most efficient way to improve the article, that's when I'm banned. --Abd (talk) 16:05, 30 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Comment by others:

I agree that this is basically what happened, and I've tried to provide more evidence portraying the degree of chaos at the page in my evidence section. For a quantitative idea of the difference, the talk page had approximately 175 edits in the three days before the bans (81 from Abd and 16 from Hippocrite by my rough count), almost all related to polls. In the three days after the bans, there were around 35 edits, mostly related to discussing specific improvements to the article. I counted these off the screen so could be off by one or two here or there.Woonpton (talk) 20:07, 26 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Oppose. This is a one-sided interpretation. Obviously banning several editors on one side of a dispute will lead to an article that seems improved in the eyes of those on the other side of the dispute. The goal of Wikipedia is NPOV articles, not quiet talk pages. ☺Coppertwig (talk) 00:26, 28 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Ermh... There were two editors banned, one on each "side" if you insist on having this about "sides. It seems indisputable that the environment there improved dramatically after the bans, and that productive discussion, which had been impossible for some time on the talk page, had resumed. Since the FOF makes no claims about the quality of the article, and simply refers to the objective reality that after the bans, protection was lifted and normal editing resumed, and since no one in this section so far as I can see, has made any claims about the quality of the article pre or post bans, it seems rather a non sequitur to say This is a one-sided interpretation. Obviously banning several editors on one side of a dispute will lead to an article that seems improved in the eyes of those on the other side of the dispute. Woonpton (talk) 21:50, 29 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

"the environment there improved dramatically after the bans" - This depends on what you want to consider the "environment" to encompass. I shall dispute your indisputable truth from the following perspective, the "environment" has lost an important voice in the discussion ... and not just any voice but one that consistently seeks consensus and a WP:NPOV article which includes all significant points of view. --GoRight (talk) 22:10, 29 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Clarification: when I said "banning several editors on one side of a dispute" I meant page-banned Pcarbonn, arguably-banned Jed Rothwell, and (formerly, perhaps) page-banned Abd. We need to be careful not to ban people for their POV, especially when several people with similar POVs are banned. ☺Coppertwig (talk) 00:06, 2 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Oppose "degenerated to a state of semi-permanent protection and the talk page had become an unintelligible morass of competing polls and walls of text" - This might be true in the period of time covered by the two edit warring instances, but in general I disagree. Prior to that Abd had been working with others on the page and together they had agreed to certain improvements to the page. If any "degeneration" occurred I would argue that it was mostly instigated by the actions of Hipocrite. He certainly arrived at the page with his "guns ablazin", dead set on reverting material that had already been agreed to by the editors closely involved with the topic. This was clearly disruptive to the status quo that had been achieved through deliberation and consensus building of which Abd was a part.

I have no way to know (and hence I am making no specific allegations here) if Hipocrite's actions were part of a deliberate plan to draw Abd into an edit war and thus create a rationale for action against him, or merely an example of over-heated and rash judgment on his part. The fact that Hipocrite came into the situation the way that he did when he had shown no interest in the article for at least a month prior should cause any critical thinker to pause and go hmmmm. Couple that with (a) his immediate and unconditional acceptance of the ban (i.e. I decided then I didn't care enough to argue about it, and I still don't) which is in direct contrast to the apparent passion he had shown in the run up to it by immediately engaging in full on edit warring with multiple editors to the point of requiring page protection not once but twice, (b) his statement at ANI that he would gladly accept the ban if it kept Abd off the page (i.e. I am happy to remain banned from Cold Fusion as long as it gets Abd out of the hair of the editors, (c) his plea to WMC a short while later to have his ban lifted to otherwise reduced, and (d) WMC's quick acceptance thereof and this all just appears a little too "convenient" for my tastes. Was it a mere coincidence that this all left Abd as the only one banned from the page (as WMC still asserts), or was it the result of a more deliberate plan? And a plan that included whom? We will never know.

Is it likewise a mere coincidence that Hipocrite has "conveniently" left the project for the duration of these proceedings and that WMC was edit warring to keep him off of the list of parties, or was that all part of a "plan"? And again, a plan by whom? Hmmm. It does make one think. I suspect that Hipocrite may, as is often the case, come out of his self imposed retirement at some point. Will it be just another in a long line of coincidences should that happen shortly after the close of these proceedings? It shall be interesting to see. Only time will tell. --GoRight (talk) 01:25, 31 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Support The talk page of cold fusion did seem to be chaotic. Abd seemed to be acting as if he WP:OWNed it. The statements by Coppertwig and GoRight reflect their adherence to Abd's fringe POV. There might be some parallels between these three and User:Jagz, User:Elonka and User:Zero g (the controversial fringe science articles in that case were centred on eugenics and race and intelligence). Mathsci (talk) 01:53, 31 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Proposals by User:Stephan Schulz

Proposed principles

Expert opinion is essential

1) Many topics covered on Wikipedia are so complex that expert knowledge is necessary to properly understand and contextualize them.

Comment by Arbitrators:

Comment by parties:

support William M. Connolley (talk) 11:14, 20 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Support. However, just as with the expertise that is essential to good medical care, the final decisions should be in the hands, not of experts, but of ordinary editors, the "patients." Expertise should be solicited, welcome, and respected, but it should not dominate or control. Generally, true experts may be COI on the issues. I do not believe that experts should be excluded from writing articles -- at all -- but where controversy appears, experts should refrain from incivility and from edit warring to maintain preferred content, but patiently explain the issues to the community. The consensus that we should seek with all articles obviously should include the consent of experts as to the accuracy of the articles and their freedom from the kinds of misinterpretations that non-experts may easily fall prey to. Experts, as well, who have extensive knowledge of fringe fields, should be similarly welcome in discussion and be a part of the consensus we seek. By the way, Cold fusion is an interdisciplinary field, that's one reason why it's such a problem article. --Abd (talk) 13:54, 21 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Agree. I have found this problem both in science-related and in history-related articles. We needed the help of experts to untangle certain points in the articles, and to counter some POV pushers that misrepresented sources in ways that a non-expert could not notice without a lot of investigative work in that field. Also, assesing which sources are really important and which ones aren't, and knowing where to search for sources. --Enric Naval (talk) 16:36, 22 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Comment by others:

Proposed.--Stephan Schulz (talk) 09:23, 20 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Support. This is particularly true of interdisciplinary topics in science. Mathsci (talk) 09:49, 20 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]
I think this is undeniably true, but it's dramatically at odds with the project's prevailing ethos and self-image, where real-world expertise is treated as an unnecessary luxury - nice if it happens to be available, but hardly essential. Real-world expertise has never saved an editor from being drowned out, blocked, or banned if they can't figure out The System. I'm hopeful that as the project has grown, the old attitudes toward expertise are evolving (case in point). On the other hand, most of our articles - including our best work - continues to be written and maintained by enthusiastic and curious amateurs. I don't think we can resolve this fundamental tension in this ArbCom case. MastCell ^Talk 17:00, 20 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]
"essential" is incorrect. If that were true we would have no science articles at all, or at least significantly less. Change "essential" to "useful" or even "highly desirable" and perhaps I could by in. Having made that distinction clear, I otherwise agree with User:MastCell on the cultural aspects. --GoRight (talk) 05:22, 21 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Cough - the reason why some of our scientific articles are so good if because of the involvement subject experts helping to write them. Driving them away with relentless drivel, rampant tinfoilhatism and never ending walls of text does little to ensure that the quality of articles in other areas improves. (not this is not specifically aimed at Abd but if the tinfoilhat fits as they say you are welcome to draw your own conclusions. Spartaz ^Humbug! 17:24, 21 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

My tinfoil hat always fits, it's designed that way. Experts, however, I've talked to many, are driven away by senseless article edits that undo their work, deletion of articles they create, and incivility, not talk page drivel, which any expert would reasonably expect from a non-expert community, and which an expert can scan and easily ignore, unless he or she is the unusual expert who feels that all errors must be corrected, such as, say, Mathsci appears to be; most experts who have regular public contact have learned that this would be an endless project, and only worthwhile when good results are expected. Experts, because they know a topic well, can also generate somenew v of those "walls of text," and part of the problem is Wikipedia standard page design, which anyone in publishing, as I was, can tell you "sucks," to use a technical term. Further, what Spartaz considers "drivel," an expert may consider cogent commentary, grist for the mill, relatively knowledgeable, for a non-expert -- or as the contribution of another expert. --Abd (talk) 16:52, 30 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

earlier version of Abd reply to Spartaz

I don't think that experts are driven away by masses of ignorant commentary, or long commentary, on Talk pages, and that's irrelevant to most science articles anyway, long comments mostly arise when there is serious controversy. No, they are driven away because they discover that making an article right is pushing a boulder up the hill, and then it rolls down when some other editor "improves" it who doesn't know beans. Yet experts alone may sometimes be responsible for this; if the article were crystal clear in the first place, if it explained the subject very well, those harmful changes would be less likely, and general community support in maintaining the article more likely, since anyone reviewing the damage would be more likely to recognize it. I will be talking in New York about how we might improve this process and make it more reliable. Experts -- and many others -- are driven away by Wikipedia's incredible inefficiency, and it's essential we address that. It can be done without sacrificing the wiki principles. --Abd (talk) 17:35, 21 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Having Abd give a talk on expert retention and our treatment of science articles is sort of like having the fox give a lecture about hen house security. Raul654 (talk) 17:38, 21 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Wouldn't you want to know the opinion of the fox? Besides, I don't eat hens, only roosters. Hens I love for the eggs. Allowing Raul654 unconstrained, independent, unrequested checkuser access to help prevent "POV-pushers" that he banned from editing articles owned by his cabal is like ....? Like appointing Josef Stalin as Commissioner of Elections? What? I'll tell you what it isn't, for sure. It's not confidence-inspiring, like much administrative activity connected with the cabal. --Abd (talk) 16:52, 30 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

As usual, Abd is making wild accusations without a bit of evidence to back them up. (And if Abd has any, he should present it thusly. Otherwise his continued failure to present evidence shall be taken as an admission that his claims are meritless) Abd should have learned his lesson from a few months back when GoRight tried this tactic that and ended up looking like an idiot. Raul654 (talk) 00:29, 1 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Meh. It was a logical conclusion given where the original request was located. Well, that coupled with your legendary exploits in the pursuit of a sockmaster of your own creation and the borderline abuse of WP:CHECKUSER policy along the way. Still, when I noticed my error I corrected it. No shame in that. Sorry to disappoint. --GoRight (talk) 00:46, 1 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]

First, Scibaby choose to employ sockpuppets, and he did so prior to ever being checkusered. So your claim that I somehow created him is transparently false. Second, the checkuser policy which you cite (apparently without reading) says that checkusers may perform of their own voilition any check which is reasonably performed in order to address issues of disruption or damage to the project., which is most certianly the case where Scibaby is concerned. So, your claim of checkuser abuse, as with most of your statements about policy, is completely without merit. Third, given that you have on multiple occasions meatpuppetted for him, it's more than a little hypocritical for you to try to claim that I created him. You personally have had far more to do with his continuing disruption here than I do. Fourth, you claim that Still, when I noticed my error I corrected it. No shame in that. - that's a rather generous way of saying that you threw out false claims that I violated the checkuser policy despite the fact that I didn't even have internet access at the time the check was performed. So yes, your behavior leaves much to be ashamed of. Raul654 (talk) 05:57, 1 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]

"So your claim that I somehow created him is transparently false." - Created not to be taken quite so literally. I mean "created" in the sense that your obsession with him/her only encourages them to continue because of the level of disruption you enable them to achieve with things like, umm, huge IP range blocks which keep legitimate editors and administrators from doing useful work, or even this wikidrama that is playing out here. Your actions are at the center of all that, not mine, which makes your claim that "You personally have had far more to do with his continuing disruption here than I do" rather laughable.

"any check which is reasonably performed" - The key word there is reasonably. I question whether it is reasonable for you to be checkusering any new user who edits a GW related page that expresses a skeptical POV, especially in light of your obvious intention to block anyone that even sounds like a skeptic by labeling them a meatpuppet of Scibaby. He has become your not so secret weapon against those who you disagree with on content issues. Which of course brings us to a number of points from the check user policy that you "conveniently" forgot to mention here:

The tool is to be used to fight vandalism, to check for sockpuppet activity, to limit disruption or potential disruption of any Wikimedia project, and to investigate legitimate concerns of bad faith editing. The tool should not be used for political control; to apply pressure on editors; or as a threat against another editor in a content dispute.
"Fishing" is broadly defined as performing a check on account where there is no credible evidence to suspect sockpuppetry. Performing checks without evidence is inappropriate.

Sorry, but your policy of checkusering any new accounts which make any type of comment skeptical of AGW is, IMHO, a borderline abuse of the privilege. The key word there being borderline, something you seem to have missed above.

"you threw out false claims that I violated the checkuser policy" - My concerns over your fishing expeditions are not limited to that one instance you point to. I can point to several other instances where I raised the same point and you WERE the one to make the pronouncement. So the fact that you weren't the one to respond to a post on YOUR talk page in this instance doesn't really change the validity of my point one iota, and I am hardly the only one who is critical of your practices with respect to your obsession with Scibaby. This is not new news.

"I didn't even have internet access" - Sorry, and this may come as a surprise to you, but I don't frequent your user page all that often so such a message is rather useless as a method of alerting me to your personal whereabouts. --GoRight (talk) 08:53, 1 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I mean "created" in the sense that your obsession with him/her only encourages them to continue because of the level of disruption you enable them to achieve with things like, umm, huge IP range blocks which keep legitimate editors and administrators from doing useful work, or even this wikidrama that is playing out here. - this Wikidrama is playing out here because Scibaby is able to recruit like-minded editors who parrot his talking points and meatpuppet for him, such as Abd and you. As for encouraging him, the IP blocks were put in place to discourage him, and they provably work -- removing them substantially increased the number of edits he makes. So, as usual, you are demonstrably wrong.

I question whether it is reasonable for you to be checkusering any new user who edits a GW related page that expresses a skeptical POV, especially in light of your obvious intention to block anyone that even sounds like a skeptic by labeling them a meatpuppet of Scibaby. - first, as you have a history of meatpuppetry on behalf of this banned user, and since your comments about Wikipedia policy and happenings have time and again been far off the mark, I frankly do not care whether you think it is reasonable to check new editors on GW articles who make skeptical edits. The opinion of a scibaby meatpuppet is not something I give a whole lot of weight to. Second, your allegations of fishing (performing a check on account where there is no credible evidence to suspect sockpuppetry) is wrong because new editors editing global warming articles from skeptical POV is an extremely specific MO. And not only are you wrong, but you are quantifiably so -- the abuse filter has tripped only 300 times in 2 weeks of edits (so that's 300 out of hundreds of thousands of edits), and the abuse filter is looking at a broader set of behaviors than I am. Third, the use of checkuser against Scibaby has nothing to do with political control, and everything to do with the fact that he is a rampant sockpuppeteer.

So the fact that you weren't the one to respond to a post on YOUR talk page in this instance doesn't really change the validity of my point one iota - you're right -- the charge of fishing was just as invalid when you leveled it at me for one of Nishkid's checks as when you leveled it at me for my own checks. It's just that by doing it at me for one of Nishkid's checks, you have gone the extra mile to prove you have no idea what you are talking about and are just spouting off ignorantly.

Sorry, and this may come as a surprise to you, but I don't frequent your user page all that often so such a message is rather useless as a method of alerting me to your personal whereabouts. - see above, re: spouting off ignorantly. Raul654 (talk) 06:23, 2 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I shall let most of this go at this point since the primary points, and counter-points, have already been made. I do wish to follow-up on one point. You state "recruit like-minded editors who parrot his talking points and meatpuppet for him, such as Abd and you".

First, this statement just further illustrates that Raul objects not only to simple meat puppetry for Scibaby, which is obviously a justified position under policy, but he also objects to "like-minded editors who parrot his talking points" which is far more serious concern. This is Raul's way of saying that he objects to anyone that happens to have a view in common with something that Scibaby ever said. In other words, anyone who is skeptical of AGW. I have no doubt that he would prefer that all such editors simply be summarily blocked or banned for their POV. But of course this is NOT supported by policy which is why this is such an important concern.

Second, could you please indicate for us the percentage of Scibaby's thousands of edits that Abd and I combined have ever reverted? And of those, what percentage were done solely to act as a meat puppet for Scibaby as opposed to raising a legitimate point of debate related to improving the project? --GoRight (talk) 16:09, 2 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Support with caveat: This particular arbitration arose mostly because of Abd's efforts in the Cold fusion article. THAT subject isn't so complex as many others, simply because if CF is real, nobody yet knows for sure how it happens. Should it be real and become thoroughly understood, then at that time the article's complexity is likely to increase significantly. But until then, if it ever happens, the article can only be about what is known: Claims vs Counterclaims, and many experiments that were mostly conducted under the radar of the more prestigious journals. ALL here are likely qualified to edit the article at that level! I therefore submit that this section of this page is not particularly relevant to this Arbitration case. V (talk) 20:32, 22 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]
I supporta principle along this lines, though "essential" is be a bit too strong (and I feel it is stronger than the "...is necessary to properly understand and contextualize..."). We must realise that there are also dangers to 'using' experts (maybe too technical, maybe strong POV, may have things to gain, etc.), and that experts (very probably) can be substituted by a reasonable group of editors who know what they are talking about, though who are not necesserily experts (and as such, this is relevant to the CF case). Secondly, for some subjects there are no true experts yet, which also defeats 'essential'. --Dirk Beetstra ^{T C} 07:45, 24 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Like you said, Beetstra. Experts almost always have a strong POV, and my claim is that we might much more routinely consider them COI: allowed to create articles when their work is not controversial (which covers a lot of the most useful work by experts), strictly required to avoid revert warring with other editors. Note that a COI editor can ask for admin or other help if an ignorant editor is damaging an article, and we should make this easy and reliably accessible, but there is a reverse problem: if an article is incomprehensible to editors, it will be incomprehensible to most readers, and verification will, in fact, be impossible. The best articles require cooperation between experts and ordinary editors willing to learn about the topic. If the expert, writing about it with sourced material, which should be readily available to experts, can't teach the ordinary editor with suggested edits in Talk (or BRD edits of the article), something is missing, and additional experts are needed. And if we give special deference to experts, then we have the credentials problem, as well as possible bias from what experts we trust over others. So my view is that anyone who claims to be an expert, should rigorously abstain from edit warring, and we should probably enforce that. Most experts do, in fact, have some kind of COI in their field of expertise, except for amateur experts, who often aren't credentialled.... We should be particularly reluctant to ban anyone who claims to be an expert, or about whom that is claimed, if they show that through knowledge of the sources and cogency as recognized by other experts, and they are restricted to Talk, and we should use other measures to deal with tendentious debate, if we want to retain experts, whose advice should be solicited and respected, which means carefully considered, not "slavishly followed," which isn't anything more than meat puppetry. I've done it, there was a young, enthusiastic editor who started revert warring with an apparent professor in the field. I sat them down on a user page I'd set up and negotiated them through real consensus process, and it worked with surprising ease. They ended up cooperating, and the project benefited, and, without that, we'd have had one or two blocked editors and maybe a banned one. --Abd (talk) 16:38, 30 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Support the general principle . . .but there are cases where experts claim that their profession demands that they edit in ways which are antithetical to building a comprehensive encyclopedia (see Talk:Rorschach_test). I am also unsure about the word "essential". . . but in general it's much better to have experts who know what they're talking about than not. R. Baley (talk) 14:13, 25 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Support. general idea of this per User:Beetstra and User:R. Baley --CrohnieGal^Talk 11:48, 26 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Oppose. Goes too far. Participation of experts is very helpful, but people who are not experts in a given subject can still read about it and verify whether a given fact appears in a reference or not. There are different degrees of expertness: someone who is an expert in one subject may still be quite good at reading and summarizing references in many subjects within a much broader field. Experts can still be biassed or make mistakes. We need the participation of many editors. ☺Coppertwig (talk) 00:26, 28 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Comment I agree with MastCell, and I also agree with Enric. Subject matter experts know the literature and can summarize the viewpoints in a neutral way, and can be valuable to the project. However, many of the people who claim expertise in a field aren't really experts in the sense of understanding and dispassionately summarizing the literature (eg the continued reference to Jed Rothwell as an "expert" in cold fusion). Being a promoter of a fringe theory doesn't really make one an expert for the purposes of writing an encyclopedia. But there are a lot of idiots with PhDs, and as MastCell rightly said, many very good articles have been written by enthusiastic amateurs.

When I first came to the project, consequent to being appalled at the content quality of Wikipedia articles I'd seen, I assumed, naively, that the problem must be that editors here simply didn't have enough training and experience in reading and summarizing the literature on a topic. I thought my skills at writing, reading, interpreting and summarizing research literature would come in handy to help improve the encyclopedia. It didn't take me long to see that that wasn't the problem at all. Experienced, policy-grounded content editors are actually very good at searching out, reading, and summarizing reliable sources; I've come to have a lot of respect for these editors. They don't need any help along those lines; they're doing fine. The problem comes when their efforts are hampered and impeded by those with a different agenda from creating a neutral, respected encyclopedia. Woonpton (talk) 22:53, 29 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

When there is an article on a fringe science topic, as Cold fusion has been considered -- certainly a reasonable position, though we should be careful about assuming that this continues when source supporting "fringe" is old and there is more recent, strong source indicating the opposite -- and when the literature is voluminous, only a "believer" is likely to know the literature well. Further, as Mathsci notes above, some fields are multidisciplinary. Cold fusion is an intersection between Electrochemistry and Nuclear physics. Who's expert? An electrochemist (very likely a believer, if this is a random electrochemist) or a nuclear physicist (likely not, but I don't know how "very.") My answer is both, and I also assert, for articles on a fringe topic, experts who are "believers" or "proponents" can be crucial to an article's balance. Jed Rothwell is not just a "promoter" of Cold fusion, he is a writer and edits very much of the published work on it, he maintains lenr-canr.org, which is the best on-line library on the topic, often recommended in reliable source, knows most of the major players (including skeptics), and has been doing this since, at least, the early 1990s, I forget the date. Most of the papers he has copies of he can't put up on his site because of no permissions, but it's entirely possible that he is more knowledgeable about what is in reliable source than any of the involved scientists, and I'm certain that he knows more than almost every skeptic, excepting perhaps Dieter Britz, who is a very rare bird, a skeptical electrochemist who keeps abreast of the literature, he and Rothwell cooperate on maintaining their on-line bibliographies. He's got no patience for theory, which he claims to not understand, his knowledge would be in the actual experimental reports. So I'd certainly agree that being a promoter of a fringe topic doesn't make one an expert, but being an expert in a fringe topic will often make one a promoter; skeptics are frequently less informed, because being informed takes work, and a skeptic may not have sufficient motivation to do that work, except for a few. Rothwell puts his money where his mouth is, he's funded or provided support in the form of expensive equipment to many of the researchers.

I can't tell what Rothwell would have been like if he'd not been met with years of incivility from JzG and others; as it is, it would be difficult to convince him to go through an unblock procedure, he believes Wikipedia is hopeless, and that has happened to lots of experts, all over the project, not just in fringe topics. We could fix this, but not where the cabal remains in control, except for selected experts who support cabal positions, and not where the cabal opposes changes fixing how we deal with experts because it might affect their control over topics of interest to them. --Abd (talk) 17:13, 30 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Consensus is not achieved by default(ing)

2) Meaningful consensus is only achieved by informed editors agreeing on a question, or at least agreeing to disagree. It is not achieved by wearing people out with sheer mass of text, wikilawyering, and nagging. So-called "consensus" that is only achieved by driving off or wearing out all opposing editors has no value. Discussion styles that have this effect are disruptive and wasteful.

Comment by Arbitrators:

Comment by parties:

Agree. Abd's comments have that effect on other editors, even if he doesn't believe that they do, and even if he thinks those long comments are necessary for discussion, as shown here. --Enric Naval (talk) 16:46, 22 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Comment by others:

Proposed. --Stephan Schulz (talk) 15:15, 22 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Support. Mathsci (talk) 16:49, 22 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Support with caveat: Nobody is required to study all of a long post. Why is there an implication that just because some long post exists, it must be studied entire (not skimmed or ignored)? Abd's many long posts haven't worn me out, at all.... V (talk) 20:43, 22 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]
I strongly disagree with V's comment above. People who want to contribute to a wikipedia article are likely to attempt to read or skim every recent post on the talk page because those posts often lead to article edits. I have done this for the cold fusion article for two years, and I believe Abd's text is extremely tedious and distracting to the other editors. As I see it, he does far more soapboxing than improving the article and should therefore be banned. Olorinish (talk) 02:58, 23 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Olorinish, soapboxing and repetitions can be ignored. Abd's text is tedious only if one forces oneself to read all of it. The CORRECT counter to "freedom of speech" is the right to not listen. Shall I say to YOU: "I don't like the way you say what you say; therefore you should be silenced?" No? Then why are you saying that about Abd? V (talk) 14:32, 23 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

The purpose of the wikipedia organization is to produce a useful encyclopedia, not to provide a forum for people to have free speech. Editor time is valuable and limited, so filling talk pages with useless text should not be allowed. Therefore, the correct counter to someone who fills talk pages with useless text should be a review by a panel of authorized experts/administrators, possibly followed by a ban. Olorinish (talk) 16:07, 23 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Who defines "useless text"? Anything that does not support your POV? Most of Abd's text has been about Cold Fusion, one way or another. A considerable portion is about reasons why some particular item (usually a pro-CF item) might be included in the article. Which is exactly what the Talk page is for. When the proposal is opposed, that's where a lot of repetition enters the discussion. Did it ever occur to you that if there was less opposition to including something (either "pro" OR "con") in the article, there would be less argumentation about it? See my comment farther down, starting "I support Shanahan's point..." V (talk) 16:42, 23 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

This is why talk comments need to be on point and brief to allow everyone to participate in discussion so consensus can be reached. Long rambling blocks of text either disenfranchise the writer or the reader and - most worrying - they tend to disenfranchise the reader when the writer insists on repeating the block of text ad nauseum. Spartaz ^Humbug! 05:37, 23 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Support. Concur with everything said by Olorinish. Raul654 (talk) 05:41, 23 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Support. "Discuss until consensus is reached" does not equate to "drown one's fellow editors in verbiage until they give up." Also note that "you don't have to read it" is erroneous, because Abd bases his subsequent actions on what he has written before. Short Brigade Harvester Boris (talk) 14:44, 23 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]
I support "Meaningful consensus is only achieved by informed editors agreeing on a question, or at least agreeing to disagree." but not the rest. I agree with V's comment above. I would disagree with Boris above in the following sense: one can easily skim Abd's posts to see if there is anything of import at the time in them. If there is, you read the relevant portions only. If there is not, you simply ignore it. If at some later time Abd takes an action pursuant to something you missed you are free to object at that time and must read the relevant post in detail only then. I find it simply absurd that the length of Abd's posts has become the main rallying point against him, not their substance. If that is the worst of Abd's sins here on Wikipedia then ArbCom's decision should be quite easy IMHO. --GoRight (talk) 16:01, 23 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks, GoRight; I was about to say some of the same thing. And Boris is a bit wrong on one point; Abd does not base his actions ONLY on what he has written before, else why would he be asking for consensus? And, I might remind all here a basic thing about the Editing Process: It involves distilling a lot of information. Duh, Abd provides a lot of information. If a would-be editor can't distill it, by skimming for gems and ignoring redundancies, what good is that person AS an editor? Whose competence should ACTUALLY be on trial here? V (talk) 16:25, 23 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I do hope you're not trying to imply the other editors involved in this case are incompetent... Hersfold non-admin^(t/a/c) 17:22, 23 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

*I* don't imply any such thing. Any person who complains about the basic work of voluntary editing is, in my opinion, directly saying something about per-self's limitations as an editor. V (talk) 18:09, 23 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

That's what I thought you were saying. In which case, I would remind you of the general warning issued to everyone involved in this case here and ask you to retract or reword your statements above accordingly. Attacks will not be tolerated. Hersfold non-admin^(t/a/c) 18:14, 23 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Now you are blatantly misinterpreting what I wrote. ***I*** am not the one revealing a problem if some Person A complains about Fact B. The truth of that situation is that either Fact B is true (directly a problem), or Person A is unable to handle it in some fashion (directly a different problem). The INTENTION of Person A's complaint, almost always, is to put some focus on Fact B. That doesn't mean it can't backfire, and especially it doesn't mean it should never backfire. Let me give a specific unrelated-to-this-arbitration example: I live in a region that has a lot of jets flying around. Some people complain about the noise. Now, is the noise the problem, or the people? Me, my hearing is quite good and I want to protect it, so I put in earplugs, after which the noise doesn't bother me. Others can do the same. If they refuse, and would rather complain instead, what is the real problem there?

So, back to Wikipedia. I wrote that the editing process involves distilling information. I pointed out that doing so is voluntary. This Arbitration concerns, essentially, complaints about the quantity of information to distill, that is provided by one person, Abd. There is no doubt that the quantity is real. But why exactly must that be perceived as a problem??? The ones complaining don't have to edit the Cold Fusion article! They don't even have to read all of what Abd writes, as I also pointed out above. Do they simply want the task of editing to be easier? Who ever said that worthwhile tasks must be easy? Therefore I ask you, "In what way is it an "attack" to state something that is true?" V (talk) 20:11, 23 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

The attack comes in when you ask "Whose competence is really on trial here?" - when I asked if you were calling people incompetent, you replied that you were, so I don't see how I'm blatantly misinterpreting anything. If how you explained things just now is the point you're trying to make, I don't see why you didn't put it that way in the first place. That I understand, and it doesn't involve insulting anyone's intelligence. Hersfold non-admin^(t/a/c) 20:16, 23 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Actually, I wrote, "Whose competence should ... be on trial here". And no, I did NOT call people incompetent. I wrote words to the effect that the complainers were calling themselves incompetent editors, by complaining about the length of Abd's posts. I attempted to explain the logic of that, above. I can try again: If I say, "I can't handle that!", or "That is too much for me to handle!", am I not saying I am incompetent to handle that? Therefore if I attempt to be clever, and say, "Abd writes too much", it logically follows that that is just a blame-shift, from myself to Abd, and my incompetence to handle what he writes, as an editor, is still revealed. V (talk) 21:16, 23 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I would also support the following from V above: "And, I might remind all here a basic thing about the Editing Process: It involves distilling a lot of information. Duh, Abd provides a lot of information." This is an excellent point in Abd's favor here. It would be hard to argue that Abd is anything other than thorough and industrious at pulling together material for the things that he is focused on. When Abd is focused on content, as he was in Cold Fusion, these qualities can be highly beneficial to the project because he knows the policies well and he pulls in much applicable material for consideration that is otherwise hard to find. Even if that material is voluminous as some claim, it is none the less far more compact and digestible for other editors to review than is the entire of the internet and all other published sources. This seems obvious to me. YMMV. --GoRight (talk) 17:47, 23 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

GoRight says "When Abd is focused on content, as he was in Cold Fusion, these qualities can be highly beneficial..." He is correct that Abd does focus on content. The problem is that Abd hardly ever focuses on content RELATED TO EDITS OF THE ARTICLE. He rambles but does not propose edits to the article that can be debated concisely. That is the behavior that should stop. I realize that this is a judgement call, so I suggest that people look at the history of the cold fusion talk page. If other people think he is sufficiently focused, then fine. Olorinish (talk) 20:30, 23 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Now this is a different complaint, and has some validity. Very often Abd presents data about something that he suggests could be presented in the article, without proposing specific text changes on the Talk page, regarding presentation of that "something". Then the argumentation begins, most often about whether or not some source or other is acceptable. However, in one sense it is perfectly logical to ask the other editors about a "something" to include, before getting to the details --why waste effort on writing proposed text when the whole idea of including the "something" has to be debated hotly first??? And that leads me again to what I wrote farther down, that begins, "I support Shanahan's point...". V (talk) 21:42, 23 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Agree. --Dirk Beetstra ^{T C} 09:50, 24 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Support. I keep reading that you don't have to read the long postings but if you don't doesn't this give an editor the opportuntity to state that no disagreements with what I've said so 'edit made'? I see this kind of thing all the time so you have to read what is presented in discussions to know what, where, how and so on the editors in the discussion is planning on doing. Long postings of text is very harmful in my opinion and causes disruptions because editor do not read the long posts and the editor(s) who wrote the long posts uses that as a reason for change. Usually this causes edit wars, feuds, and actually can lead to name calling, assuming bad faith and down and down it goes. Not a good picture but this really happens and needs stopping. --CrohnieGal^Talk 11:59, 26 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Any evidence anyone has done that? ☺Coppertwig (talk) 00:26, 28 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Support. ☺Coppertwig (talk) 00:26, 28 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

No personal attacks

3) Comparing other editors with Stalin violates WP:NPA and is unacceptable.

Comment by Arbitrators:

Comment by parties:

Perhaps I should explain the reference and the context? From Wikiquote: The people who cast the votes decide nothing. The people who count the votes decide everything. I made it a question. The context:

Raul:Having Abd give a talk on expert retention and our treatment of science articles is sort of like having the fox give a lecture about hen house security.

Abd:Wouldn't you want to know the opinion of the fox? Besides, I don't eat hens, only roosters. Hens I love for the eggs. Allowing Raul654 unconstrained, independent, unrequested checkuser access to help prevent "POV-pushers" that he banned from editing articles owned by his cabal is like ....? Like appointing Josef Stalin as Commissioner of Elections? What? I'll tell you what it isn't, for sure. It's not confidence-inspiring, like much administrative activity connected with the cabal.

I'd say there is some valuable argument here, but that, of course, will be ultimately up to ArbComm. I just know that Raul has been uncivil to editors he finds inconvenient for a very long time, ~~and, were it necessary to prove it here, I would, but making his privileges the focus of this RfAr would be far too much for right now. It's enough that it be made clear that what he does is visible.~~ ArbComm may decide to do something, or not, I have no idea, really. I didn't bring up the cabal to go after Raul, I'd have preferred to avoid it, but he's sure been waving big red flags. In any case, the meaning of the comparison with Stalin is precisely parallel to the original "fox guarding the henhouse" comment from Raul, a careful match, not escalating If one was uncivil, so was the other. And that the cabal only complains about incivility or offenses on the other side, and completely ignores that on the part of its own, is, again, a cabal trait, saying a great deal about Stephan Schulz, a cabal administrator, one of the first I saw, after Raul and WMC. (I didn't realize he was an admin, actually, because I never saw him use his tools while involved, it was always WMC, or Raul654, or R. Baley, as far as I recall. I just saw tag-team reverts and !votes in RfC/GoRight.)

This was brief. I've been saying for quite some time that the cabal hates my writing when it's profuse, but it hates it even more when it's brief. I was banned from Cold fusion when I reduced my writing to mostly edit summaries and article text, with only a relatively small amount of article Talk, compared to before, yet the number one argument presented here is my trademarked Wall-o-Text. --Abd (talk) 00:27, 31 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Comment by others:

Proposed in reaction to [19]. --Stephan Schulz (talk) 16:38, 30 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Reject - Josef Stalin had many supporters, did he not? So while some people may consider such a comparison an attack, others may actually consider it a compliment. --GoRight (talk) 20:12, 30 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Ah, GoRight, you really ought to watch out for the wikilawyering. It wasn't a compliment. It was a clear implication that Raul is not necessarily trustworthy (precisely what he'd claimed about me, though I'm not guarding the henhouse and I am a fox, red beard and all, though it's almost all turned grey or white now, so I'm an old fox), and I'd say the way he obviously mangles evidence here, manufacturing much of it out of his wishful thinking presented as fact, leads me to little confidence as to how he handles secret checkuser evidence. It's a serious problem, and the appearance of bias, if nothing else, is causing problems and quite a bit of discontent among highly established editors. We'll see if the arbitrators comment on it. --Abd (talk) 00:27, 31 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

If everyone would just read what I actually wrote, they would recognize that I never claimed that you were giving Raul a compliment. I never took any position on what you meant either way. The current proposal that we are !voting on clearly states that any comparison to Stalin is automatically a personal attack. My comment refutes that assertion with laser-like precision, and nothing more. Clearly not ALL comparisons to Stalin are personal attacks as the current proposal claims and so it should be rejected as false simply because it is false on its face.

As an example, Stalin was arguably instrumental in the crushing of the Third Reich in WWII. In that sense the entire world owes Stalin a significant debt of gratitude regardless of whatever else he may have done. So comparisons to Stalin related to that part of his record would clearly NOT be a personal attack ... at least in the sense implied by the current proposal. Please correct me if I am wrong here, but are these Proposed Principles not supposed to have some broader applicability than simply this one case?

I also want to make something perfectly clear here, I DO NOT SPEAK FOR Abd. Let me repeat, I DO NOT SPEAK FOR Abd. Any views that I express are mine, and mine alone. --GoRight (talk) 15:20, 31 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

You are correct, GoRight, and with your explanation I can see that. However, I misunderstood your argument, and I expect that, given all the AGF I've come to have easily for you, I still misunderstood it, others would also, and so it was important for me to counter the impression of wikilawyering; I also consider that there was still a level of wikilawyering involved, even now, because the substance was passed over for the possibility of a positive interpretation. In response to an assertion that wasn't speculative at all, that baldly compared me to the fox with respect to the henhouse, I proposed a possible parallel in the other direction. This was not a positive comparison suggested; rather it was tinged with criticism. I'd say, legitimate criticism. Raul is guarding the henhouse, with checkuser and oversight, is he trusted to do so neutrally? Trust is the issue, not necessarily actual abuse. A Functionary not trusted by the community to be exemplary in behavior should not have those privileges, even if they never abuse them, and that's recently been established with checkuser and oversight privileges, by ArbComm, with Jayjg. That's a question before us, in fact. Yes, you do not speak for me, you speak for yourself, as I don't speak for you, we have quite different opinions on some things, even things related to this case, but your positions are always reasonable on some level, at least, and worthy of consideration. Thanks. --Abd (talk) 18:28, 1 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Support Hardly complimentary. Spartaz ^Humbug! 20:25, 30 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Support Clearly designed to cause offence. An attempt to make indirect personal attacks using loopholes in wikipedia civility guidelines. Mathsci (talk) 21:02, 30 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Oppose. Too general. Stalin may have had both good and bad qualities, as GoRight points out. It would be un-Wikipedian to make a "list of people Wikipedians are not allowed to compare someone to". ☺Coppertwig (talk) 21:16, 1 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Proposed findings of fact

Not enough experts

1) Wikipedia has difficulties in attracting and retaining experts. Especially for topics that are also subject to "balanced" coverage in the popular press, experts have a hard time defending real NPOV (reflecting the considered opinions of experts on a topic) against popular misconceptions. Randy in Boise seems to be able to tie up valuable contributor time forever.

Comment by Arbitrators:

Comment by parties:

Alas, all too obvious William M. Connolley (talk) 11:15, 20 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Support. However, in some fields, experts are more likely to be blocked or banned than ordinary editors. Experts tend to imagine, funny thing, that they know the field better than others, so incivility can be a problem, as an expert tries to explain an issue to someone who either doesn't have the background or doesn't have the patience to follow the explanation, and loses his or her temper. And it can take a lot of words, and experts can think their topic of expertise is highly interesting! My own view is that we need far more sophisticated ways of dealing with the problem of experts. For starters, many or most experts have a COI on the topics of expertise, so it is arguable that experts should advise us in Talk, and leave the editing to non-experts. We need both protect experts from unreasonable behavior by other editors and protect other editors from abuse by experts. Itchy block fingers don't help. Mathsci asserts expertise in math, and I have no particular reason to doubt that. However, it's clear what the result is for him: heavy attachment to articles he has substantially edited. When an editor finds that the article is unnecessarily obfuscatory or full of jargon that might take a huge amount of research and study for an ordinary reader to follow, and tries to edit it to make it comprehensible, Mathsci may edit war, or call for administrative assistance, and there is a fairly clear case of that recently involving WMC. Mathsci, to demonstrate his credentials as an editor to me, pointed me to articles he'd created. With The Four Seasons (Poussin), I commend him for his fascinating article. I assume he has no WP:COI there. However, Differential geometry of surfaces and Plancherel theorem for spherical functions, he also asserted as examples, are impenetrable jargon, very poorly written for a general-audience encyclopedia. I'm pretty confident that these topics could be far better described in ordinary language, if not thoroughly explored without establishing the specialized language (which can be done,it's an aspect of good technical writing. What we have here is what some kinds of experts will produce if not stringently edited. There is a reason why experts use specialized language: it's precise. But that very precision can be a barrier to understanding; hence an introduction to a topic will avoid the specialized language at the beginning. But this introduces lack of perfect expression, which can be horrifying to an expert. Mathsci's profession is a barrier to his being a good managing editor on topics where he is expert. A much better article would result from a cooperative interaction between experts and ordinary readers, and the latter would insist on comprehensibility, while the former may be more concerned with accuracy. If they find consensus, it's likely to be pretty good! But would Mathsci permit this "ignorant editor" to work on the article? From my observations, not. --Abd (talk) 19:17, 20 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

As to Kirk shanahan, see Mathsci's comment below, he is a kind of expert, to be sure, and he confines himself to Talk, as he should, but his suggestions can be highly misleading, he knows his own subspecialty and is a bit obsessed by it, and his comments about other editors can be quite uncivil, making my point above. He is a rare bird, one of the most recently published under peer review with criticism of the excess heat phenomenon that was the core discovery -- or allegation -- in 1989. Most other scientists, among those who have reviewed the evidence in depth, as can be documented, have accepted excess heat as real, or possibly real, explanation still not clear. Shanahan is actually quite isolated, but valuable as someone who has criticized cold fusion since the early 1990s, so sometimes he can point to evidence that the rest of us would miss. He does so with heavy bias, though, his interpretations and reports of what is in RS are unreliable. Pcarbonn, apparently an expert, currently a researcher employed in the field, topic banned. ScienceApologist, a physicist and possibly a particle physicist, still allowed to edit Talk, but banned from the article (as he possibly should be from COI), but he doesn't. I wish he would. And JedRothwell, possibly one of the most knowledgeable people in the world on the overall topic, not as a scientist, but as a writer and editor (he edits papers for scientists whose native language is not English, apparently he's currently working on papers on cold fusion for Naturwissenschaften), blocked and considered by some to be banned, even though he confined himself to Talk since 2006. An IP editor showed up in December whose POV resembled, to a non-expert (JzG) that of Jed Rothwell, blocked by JzG as a sock, quite blatantly an error. Basically, if an expert in the field, someone familiar with the research, starts editing the article, or even just commenting in Talk, they will meet severe opposition. That's what happened to me as I developed my knowledge of the field through reading the sources, and reported what I found, and even more opposition when I stopped talking and started actually editing, adding sourced material. Yes, sources satisfying WP:RS. I'm still not a true expert, but am far more so, I'd guess, than any other current editor I've seen show up at the article. It's all relative. SA has more knowledge of nuclear physics, I'm sure, but is Cold fusion a nuclear physics article? There is a contradiction involved in asserting that it is! Does he know the recent research published under peer review, and the peer-reviewed secondary sources on this particular topic? It is quite arguable that it's a chemistry or electrochemistry article, and opinion among electrochemists -- experts in calorimetry -- and nuclear physics -- experts in physics that developed largely with an assumption that the chemical environment was irrelevant to nuclear processes -- is apparently quite divergent. What's the mainstream view? Mainstream what? --Abd (talk) 19:17, 20 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Support Every once in a while you encounter a "Randy in Boise" guy, and it takes ages to get rid of him, or even to get him to understand his position that is not supported by sources, and to explain the problems with the sources that he presents. Experts have better things to do with their lives than wasting time in volunteer projects that allow this thing to prolongate so much in time. If they don't see clear support from wikipedia then they will just go away, or they will go to more obscure articles with no controversies, leaving those articles to be controlled by Randy in Boise, who will makes a mess that someone will later have to clean up. --Enric Naval (talk) 16:57, 22 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Comment by others:

Proposed. --Stephan Schulz (talk) 09:23, 20 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Support. One such expert Kirk shanahan has privately communicated with me by email his own experiences at cold fusion. He has given permission for his comments to be disclosed if that is deemed appropriate. Mathsci (talk) 09:54, 20 July 2009 (UTC) I have replied to part of Abd's irrelevant and rambling comments about me on the discussion page where this sort of off-topic stuff belongs, if anywhere. [reply]

Here is Kirk shanahan's email that he has said I may reproduce:

“

The problem with getting more involved in the Wiki CF article is not whether I have the time or not, it is in whether or not I can expect any return on the investment I make. So far, after two attempts to modify the Wiki article (2005 and 2008), I have to conclude I can expect no return (the 'return' being an inclusion of why the mainstream doesn't think cold fusion is real in the article). Therefore any addition to the debate going on (on Cryptic C62's CF page right?) is pointless.

You see, everyone is happy as long as there is no one trying to add mainstream thought to the article. But as soon as I try, the Wikilawyers come out of the woodwork. First it was PCarbonn and Jed Rothwell, then V, then Abd. I suspect the supply is endless. The fundamental problem is that Wiki editors are unwilling to realize that there is nearly no RS on the mainstream side, since, as is noted in the current article, the field was declared 'pariah' around 1993-4. They don't want to understand that that means no one is doing _any_ work in the field except the fanatics (who have abandoned critical review), and thus _no_ negative articles get published and there is no base of information for news reporters to use to write cogent descriptions of the mainstream side. Yet a chemist can look at the pro-CF papers that are published and tick off multiple problems in analytical technique that invalidate the _conclusions_ presented in the papers, and it is those conclusions that end up in news reports and in Wiki articles. In order to get a NPOV article, the RS rule must be relaxed to take this situation into account, and no one seems to be willing to do that. So, any time I try to contribute, I get Wikilawyered. The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result to occur. I like to think I am sane, so I have deliberately stopped any significant contributions to the CF debate at Wiki, except to occasionally point out some facts like my most recent comment on the Widom-Larsen theory and the SPAWAR results. It's not really relevant to the science anyway.

”

In my experience, the problem is that the people who most readily adopt and self-apply the mantle of "expert" tend to be closer to enthusiastic amateur than true subject-matter expert. And the more loudly someone asserts their "expertise", the more likely they're pushing a minoritarian point of view way out of proportion to its actual relevance. To extend Stephan's analogy, Randy in Boise is likely to assert that he is an "expert" on the sword-skeleton theory, since he has researched and published extensively on it (on his own website) while Thucydides, Donald Kagan, and Victor Herbert Davis are totally silent on the topic.
People who are working to make this a more serious, respectable reference work don't need to constantly fall back on their "expertise" - they have recourse to actual reliable sources. MastCell ^Talk 17:03, 20 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]
I honestly don't mean this to be a snide comment, but is there a point here? What is it? Yes we have trouble retaining experts. So what? Are you planning an as of yet unwritten proposed remedy for this? I am also a bit vague on how this applies to the case at hand. This just strikes me as being a random fact. Can you please attempt to enlighten me on these points? --GoRight (talk) 05:36, 21 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Yes we have trouble retaining experts - Abd and other anti-science crackpots are actively driving away actual subject matter experts. But since GoRight is having difficulty making the connection to this case, perhaps Stephan Schulz should rewrite this proposal to be less abstract and make the Abd connection more clear. Raul654 (talk) 05:40, 21 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I support Shanahan's point that, basically, there has been too much demand for WP:RS over WP:Verify in the CF article. The demand prevents much data that readers might find interesting (regardless of "pro" or "con") from getting added. The demand is also somewhat inconsistent with respect to the whole of Wikipedia, in my opinion, since many articles include news of recent events, without waiting for third-party reviews of second-party descriptions of those events. For them, WP:Verify seems "good enough". To the extent that CF detractors insist that the phenomenon is not real, it seems to me that WP:Verify should be good enough for that article, too, for sources of claims and counterclaims. But if it should ever become Officially Verified (whatever that means in the scientific community), then at that time it could be quite appropriate to clamp down on sources, restricting them to the WP:RS set like the other solid-science articles. V (talk) 21:02, 22 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Nevermind Stephan, I have done so myself above. Raul654 (talk) 17:19, 21 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Raul is making serious charges with no evidence. "Driving away actual subject matter experts?" Examples? The history shows the opposite, the experts who have been driven away were not driven away by me. Does anyone notice that the "expert" Shanahan is arguing against RS guidelines? I've stated he's valuable, but his view is highly biased and highly misleading. He tells half the story, and what he says is often not supported by the sources. Cold fusion work is now being published, for example, in Naturwissenschaften, which is a mainstream, major interdisciplinary journal. That's been happening for some years now. Surely there would appear some skeptical responses (and, indeed, there are some); at least if the "rejection" of cold fusion was based on science, and not simply on fear, which it appears much of it was. Simon covers this: for quite some time, and there is evidence it still is true, if you supported cold fusion, or even tried to research it, there went your career. We have one impoverished article for a field that could justify many articles, on the history, the various kinds of research and the techniques, the theories, of which there are many, and the very name "cold fusion" is misleading. It might not be fusion at all, though the consistent, verified detection of helium correlated with excess heat makes fusion very likely as a part of the explanation. It's clear that it's not what was expected in 1989, and that explains a great deal of the difficulty in the field. --Abd (talk) 17:25, 21 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Abd could you move your comment to the appropriate section or could a clerk please move? Thanks, R. Baley (talk) 17:31, 21 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Well, my understanding is that parties may respond in situ, the "parties" section is a privilege, not a prison. It seems that R. Baley is not alone, so I'd appreciate clarification from a clerk or discussion on Talk. I could see an argument for avoiding threaded discussion on the Workshop page as well as on the Evidence page, but that isn't the status quo. --Abd (talk) 17:39, 21 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

No matter how you interpret the "Parties" vs "Others" section, it's self-evident that this comment would be better placed as a comment to Raul's actual suggestion, and not as a reply to his announcement that he made one. --Stephan Schulz (talk) 19:35, 21 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Weak oppose, not really relevant in this way. The (real) experts that have been driven away/banned were driven away/banned after lengthy discussions on relevant noticeboards (WP:AN/WP:AN/I/WP:COI/N/WP:RS/N, &c.), or even arbitration cases because of continued 'violation' of policies and guidelines (i.e., not by one editor alone, and AFAIK certainly not by User:Abd alone). The problem is that the remaining experts in the relevant cases (e.g. Cold fusion) were 'driven away' because there are editors who only seem to want to listen to the 'real' expert's opinions (those experts who were banned) and do not want to follow the consensus that is developing with the remaining experts, or who will not see that although the expert's original input was true, it was (totally) not neutral, (totally) not to the point, or 'cherry picking'. Instead, they insist that that information needs to be incorporated as the experts incorporated it originally.

Some parts of Wikipedia are actively attracting experts, and are very closely cooperating with them with great success, and I have in the past been involved with retention of some experts in varying fileds (who nonetheless do have a very strong conflict of interest!). However, there are several other cases where the only solution is blocking/banning.

We must accept that certain experts do not see/do not wish to see/do not want to see/disagree and hence disobey 'what Wikipedia is not'. Yes, not having those experts around may be a loss, but not having the experts here does not mean that the information on Wikipedia becomes untrue, or that that is the end of Wikipedia! --Dirk Beetstra ^{T C} 08:45, 24 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Is Beetstra referring to editors like Pcarbonn or like Kirk shanahan? Or perhaps SA? I think that in the present case Stephan Schulz means a professor, post doc or Ph.D. in chemistry or physics at a university or a research scientist at a recognized research establishment, not a fringe advocate like "Jed Rothwell" or "Steven B. Krivit" with no advanced training in science. These are self-proclaimed "experts" - I think Abd has even called them "experts". Where fringe science or pseudoscience is involved, wikipedia must follow the mainstream scientific method and make cautious use of sources: that is what editors like EdChem with some established expertise in science can help with. Mathsci (talk) 05:40, 25 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Steven Krivit has been called a "leading authority" on cold fusion in a press release from the American Chemical Society (see my evidence section). ☺Coppertwig (talk) 00:31, 28 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Try writing a wikipedia BLP on Steven B. Krivit, with definitive evidence that he is a leading scientific authority and not just a journalist, hooked on cold fusion. It is also possible to make assertions of this kind unchallenged in a google knol, like this one on cold fusion by Jed Rothwell. [20] Mathsci (talk) 22:52, 29 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I was meaning this quite general. E,g, Jed Rothwell and Steven B. Krivit may not be acknowledged experts in the field, they undoubtedly know quite a bit. They do have a POV, which they strongly show. Same goes for some other editors who have been banned. They do know the field, and they do know how to portray it in the way that it looks positive (that does however mean you also know the negative parts which you may want to ignore). Those people could have been very useful, if they would have, very, very strictly, followed WP:NPOV. However, they got banned, mostly by community sanction. What is left behind, are other experts who try to follow WP:NPOV, and which do not have a gain in showing it positive or negative. And those are editors who, I feel, are now either not helping on these articles anymore, or which are afraid to help.

Other fields on Wikipedia have, and still are, actively cooperating with (even commercial) expert entities, and I can show editors who are actively attracting more of these. It can be done.

But this statement is as such not relevant to this case. Wikipedia does not have this problem, there are numerous example cases out there where experts are very helpful, and have been actively retained and are very strictly honouring our policies and guidelines. If written for Cold fusion, yeah, then it might be true. --Dirk Beetstra ^{T C} 09:17, 31 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Per GoRight: relevance to this case? Also not sure about "real NPOV" (who decides?) etc. ☺Coppertwig (talk) 00:31, 28 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Weak support, but note that to me, as far as cold fusion is concerned, this reads as supporting more use of peer-reviewed scientific literature and less of popular media, which would result in a more positive presentation of cold fusion. It also seems to me to support welcoming people such as Jed Rothwell (who has extensive knowledge of the literature) to participate on the cold fusion talk page. ☺Coppertwig (talk) 21:16, 1 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Proposals by User:GoRight

Proposed principles

I am actually a tad reluctant to even make these proposals as they are being made strictly in response to Raul's proposals above. For that reason I see them as being out of scope and arguably a distraction from the case at hand. However, since Raul has seen fit to make this proceeding a WP:BATTLEGROUND for his personal grudges which are wholly unrelated to the case at hand I feel that I must present some additional good faith alternatives to his proposals above.

Pursuant to this comment I have considered each of my proposals below. To the limited extent that the partial reversion of a few of Jed Rothwell's comments is pertinent to this case, I believe that all of these proposals are applicable, in scope, and I would ask that they be given serious consideration.

I believe that adopting them would have benefits which reach far beyond this one case given the stated intentions of certain administrators which are likely to cause additional disruption across the project unless these points are made clear.

The policy was written so as to specifically recognize that in cases were there is benefit to the project for doing so, the content of even banned users may be reverted so long as the editor performing the revert has verified its content, has their own reasons for considering it beneficial to the project, and is willing to accept responsibility for the content under their own name.

Restoration of Constructive Content

1) The simple act of restoring content, either by revert or refactoring, which is pertinent to the advancement of the project and otherwise within policy shall NOT be construed as proxying or meat puppetry regardless of the origins of that content or the namespace in which the restoration occurred. Any user who performs such a restoration takes full personal responsibility for the content actually restored.

Comment by Arbitrators:

Comment by parties:

No. --Enric Naval (talk) 16:59, 22 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Comment by others:

Proposed The advancement of the project should not be hampered by the automatic and unthinking application of other principles or policies such as WP:MEAT. If constructive content is identified it should be adopted regardless of its origins. --GoRight (talk) 16:40, 21 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Reject. Patently contradicted by Wikipedia:Banning policy, which states: Wikipedians are not permitted to post or edit material at the direction of a banned user, an activity sometimes called "proxying," unless they are able to confirm that the changes are verifiable and have independent reasons for making them... Users are generally expected to refrain from reinstating edits made by banned users in violation of the ban, and such edits may be viewed as meatpuppetry. Users who reinstate such edits take complete responsibility for the content by so doing. Notice that it does *not* say "taking responsibility" for an edit is not meatpuppetry, nor does it say it is not a violation of policy. Also notice that policy only allows someone to take responsibility for edits which are "verifiable" (presumably referring only to article edits) and where the person doing the restoration has "independent reasons for making them" and that GoRight has conviently omitted both of these conditions from his proposal. This is a rather transparent attempt by GoRight to retroactively justify his and Abd's violations of the policy. Raul654 (talk) 16:44, 21 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

"Wikipedians are not permitted to post or edit material at the direction of a banned user, an activity sometimes called "proxying," unless they are able to confirm that the changes are verifiable and have independent reasons for making them." - Note the key phrase "at the direction of" requires an established communication between the puppet and its master. Note also that "unless they are able to confirm that the changes are verifiable and have independent reasons for making them" does NOT limit its scope to mainspace articles as Raul asserts.

"Users are generally expected to refrain from reinstating edits made by banned users in violation of the ban, and such edits may be viewed as meatpuppetry. Users who reinstate such edits take complete responsibility for the content by so doing." - Note the key phrase "reinstating edits", again no restriction on mainspace articles. Note also that the key phrase is "may be viewed" not must or shall be viewed. Note that the phrase "unless they are able" which suggests that such edits are permissible as long as they are verifiable and the editor making the restoration has independent reasons for doing so. One such reason might be that the edit actually contained constructive content that was pertinent to the advancement of the project. ArbCom should affirm that that such cases do not constitute meat puppetry.

Now note the part that Raul leaves out from the banning policy, "Wikipedia's sock puppetry policy defines "meatpuppetry" as the recruitment of new editors to Wikipedia for the purpose of influencing a survey, performing reverts, or otherwise attempting to give the appearance of consensus. It strongly discourages this form of editing, and new users who engage in the same behavior as a banned or blocked user in the same context, and who appear to be editing Wikipedia solely for that purpose, are subject to the remedies applied to the user whose behavior they are joining.". Note that Abd is clearly NOT a new account, nor is he editing solely for any of the purposes called out above. I would argue that the same applies to myself as well, but you can come to your own conclusions on that count. --GoRight (talk) 17:41, 21 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Note the key phrase "at the direction of" requires an established communication between the puppet and its master. - it requires no such thing. If I do an action because someone else did it first (like restoring their edit, or reposting their talk page comments), I am acting at their direction, even if I have not had an a-priori contact with them.

Note also that "unless they are able to confirm that the changes are verifiable and have independent reasons for making them" does NOT limit its scope to mainspace articles as Raul asserts. Yes, it does. Talk page edits are not required to be "verifiable", while article edits are (--Wikipedia:Verifiability). The sentence is clearly referring to article edits, GoRight's wikilawyering not withstanding.

Note the key phrase "reinstating edits", again no restriction on mainspace articles. - that's because the immediately prior sentence restricts it to "verifiable" mainspace edits.

Note also that the key phrase is "may be viewed" not must or shall be viewed. - Restorations of banned users' edits should be rare and only done in non-controversial cases. Determining whether or not an edit was meatpuppetry is up to other Wikipedians. If *any* of them choose to call it meatpuppetry, then it is meatpuppetry. And that should serve as a big red flag to anyone thinking about doing it.

Note that the phrase "unless they are able" which suggests that such edits are permissible as long as they are verifiable and the editor making the restoration has independent reasons for doing so. - nice try, but you are totally ignoring the sentence that directly addresses this point: "Users are generally expected to refrain from reinstating edits made by banned users in violation of the ban." This means that such edits should be avoided, even if they are permissable under the letter of the banning policy.

Note that Abd is clearly NOT a new account, nor is he editing solely for any of the purposes called out above. I would argue that the same applies to myself as well, but you can come to your own conclusions on that count. - GoRight is hanging his hat on applying the restrictions against acting as a meatpuppet as applying only to new users. Well, the arbcom is not obligated to follow that precise definition -- if they choose to view Abd as acting as a meatpuppet for Jed and Scibaby, despite the fact that Abd is not new, they they are well within their rights to do so. Raul654 (talk) 18:29, 21 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

"If *any* of them choose to call it meatpuppetry, then it is meatpuppetry." - I think that given the context this clearly demonstrates Raul's ultimate goals in making these proposals. Well, that coupled with his prior statements regarding the impact of such ArbCom rulings on the community. He is merely trying to setup ArbCom to be his excuse for blocking people he disagrees with by labeling them meat puppets of Scibaby on his say so alone. Note that this discussion, [21] [22] [23] [24] in regards to Raul's checkuser practices is also quite illuminating, especially given his recent admission at the end of this. Quite a bit of power he is trying to carve out there. I would urge the Arbiters to consider this point carefully in their deliberations. As to the rest of this I have made my points and shall rely on the arbiters to render a fair and even-handed ruling. --GoRight (talk) 20:14, 21 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I think that given the context this clearly demonstrates Raul's ultimate goals in making these proposals. - You have acted as a meatpuppet for Scibaby on a number of prior occasions, and have tried twice now to wikilawyer your way around the consequences (first by editing the banning policy, and now by trying to get the arbcom to adopt these ridiculous proposals that have no basis in policy). My ultimate goal here is that nobody is allowed to meatpuppet for him, and if you continue to do so, that you are banned for meatpuppetry. Clear enough? Raul654 (talk) 20:58, 21 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, your disruption of this proceeding in the pursuit of your own personal grudges which are totally unrelated to this case is duly noted. --GoRight (talk) 21:26, 21 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

My disruption of these proceedings? Pot, meet kettle. Black. Raul654 (talk) 22:26, 21 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Strongly reject. Please reread the policies and not over analyze things. --CrohnieGal^Talk 13:15, 22 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]
What possible reason could you have to "strongly reject" the restoration of constructive content? Please elaborate. --GoRight (talk) 13:49, 22 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Oppose Doesn't seem helpful. Mathsci (talk) 16:54, 22 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Support if a phrase is inserted such as "merely because it is being restored": that is, that it is not to be automatically considered meatpuppetry just because someone is restoring content from a banned user, but that it can still be meatpuppetry if there are other circumstances making it such, i.e. doing it as a favour to the banned user (whether or not there was direct communication) rather than for the purpose of improving the project and with full responsibility. ☺Coppertwig (talk) 00:31, 28 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Strong reject Contradicts both policy and practice. Would add a ridiculous burden for other editors and adds an untenable loophole to be exploited by blocked and banned editors and other wikilawyers. Unhelpful and would add to our problems. Verbal chat 16:49, 2 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Meat Puppetry Inherently Requires the Direction of a Puppet Master

2) Meat puppetry inherently involves having the puppet act at the direction of a puppet master. To successfully demonstrate that an editor is acting as a meat puppet requires that reasonable evidence be presented to demonstrate that the accused is explicitly acting at the direction of another editor.

Comment by Arbitrators:

Comment by parties:

Too narrow interpretation of policy, basically renders it useless. --Enric Naval (talk) 17:01, 22 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Comment by others:

Proposed --GoRight (talk) 17:05, 21 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Reject. Flatly contradicted by Wikipedia:Banning policy, which says that Users are generally expected to refrain from reinstating edits made by banned users in violation of the ban, and such edits may be viewed as meatpuppetry.. Notice there is no requirement that the person restoring the banned user's content be doing so at the behest of the banned user. As with GoRight's other proposed principle, this is a transparent attempt by him to retroactively justify his and Abd's previous violations of the policy. Raul654 (talk) 17:08, 21 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Note the selective nature of Raul's quoting of policy. Just a few minutes ago he quoted this above: "Wikipedians are not permitted to post or edit material at the direction of a banned user". Highlighting is mine. --GoRight (talk) 18:16, 21 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

GoRight seems to think "at the direction of" requires direct communications between the banned user and the meatpuppet. He is wrong -- it means acting at the behest of another user, even if you've never talked with him or her. GoRight's interpretation is contrary to both the spirit and the usual application of the policy. Raul654 (talk) 18:33, 21 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I shall rely upon the arbiters to decide whether Raul's implied meaning of "at the behest of" means the same thing as "at the direction of". The policy clearly states "at the direction of". --GoRight (talk) 18:54, 21 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

What poppycock. The contortions you are going through to enable Abd's disruption are becoming laughable now. Spartaz ^Humbug! 19:09, 21 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

If you are correct then undoubtedly the arbiters will see it as you do. Regarding the actual meaning of "behest", I simply refer you to an impartial source. So, if by "contortions" you mean "a clear reading of the actual text", then I stand guilty as charged. --GoRight (talk) 20:22, 21 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

actually i'd prefer you not to try and reinterpret my text in your own meaning, nor would i like you to put words in my mouth. Spartaz ^Humbug! 21:31, 21 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

It was never my intention to do either, but if I did I apologize. If you want I can give you a revised response but please provide a clarification of your original meaning first. If not, then we appear to be done here. --GoRight (talk) 22:46, 21 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Strongly reject. Please reread policy and guidelines about this. It's been made clear on multiple ocassions that this is not what is meant. --CrohnieGal^Talk 13:13, 22 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]
I would respectfully suggest that you might do the same. If this is not what is meant then perhaps the policy and guidelines should be updated to reflect what actually is meant, as you claim, since it has also been pointed out on multiple occasions that this IS what the actual text says. --GoRight (talk) 13:58, 22 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Oppose Incorrect interpetation of meatpuppetry. Mathsci (talk) 16:55, 22 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]
QUESTION: What if Person A gets himself banned, and Person B comes along who has independently formed similar opinions, but has never heard of Person A? If Person B examines an article History and decides that something Person A wrote (and got reverted) belongs back in the article, there appears to be nothing in the Rules to distinguish Person B from a meatpuppet of Person A. Yet, in this example, Person B clearly is no such thing; the assumption of meatpuppetry will be made by whoever supported the banning of Person A. Therefore, the Question is, "How should meatpuppetry be defined, to prevent such assumptions from being made?" V (talk) 18:35, 23 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Oppose. First of all, a lot of the purpose of the meatpuppetry policy is that it's difficult to tell the difference between meatpuppets and sockpuppets, so it's easier to just treat accounts as sockpuppets if they act like sockpuppets, even if they're really meatpuppets. Requiring proof takes away that simple enforcement. Secondly, meatpuppetry occurs (as I understand it) if someone talks about a dispute and their friends, hearing it, go and edit, even if there was no explicit request made. I think it can be considered meatpuppetry even if someone edits based on a guess as to what someone wants, rather than taking responsibility for the edit themselves. ☺Coppertwig (talk) 00:31, 28 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Oppose This isn't what the policy says, and arbcom can't make new policy. Verbal chat 16:50, 2 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Portions of the existing WP:BAN policy are acknowledged and reaffirmed.

3) The following [highlighted] portions of the now existing WP:BAN policy are hereby ~~emphasized and affirmed~~ acknowledged and reaffirmed:

In section titled "Editing on behalf of banned users":

Wikipedians are not permitted to post or edit material at the direction of a banned user, an activity sometimes called "proxying," unless they are able to confirm that the changes are verifiable and have independent reasons for making them. Edits which involve proxying that have not been confirmed to that effect may be reverted. Wikipedia's sock puppetry policy defines "meatpuppetry" as the recruitment of new editors to Wikipedia for the purpose of influencing a survey, performing reverts, or otherwise attempting to give the appearance of consensus. It strongly discourages this form of editing, and new users who engage in the same behavior as a banned or blocked user in the same context, and who appear to be editing Wikipedia solely for that purpose, are subject to the remedies applied to the user whose behavior they are joining.

In section titled "Enforcement by reverting edits":

Users are generally expected to refrain from reinstating edits made by banned users in violation of the ban, and such edits may be viewed as meatpuppetry. Users who reinstate such edits take complete responsibility for the content by so doing. It is not possible to revert newly created pages, as there is nothing to revert to. Such pages may be speedily deleted. Any user can put a {{db-g5}}, or its alternative name {{db-banned}}, to mark such a page. If the banned editor is the only contributor to the page or its talk page, speedy deletion is probably correct. If other editors have unwittingly made good-faith contributions to the page or its talk page, it is courteous to inform them that the page was created by a banned user, and then decide on a case-by-case basis what to do.

NOTE: The highlighting above only illustrates the points which are being ~~emphasized and affirmed~~ acknowledged and reaffirmed within this principle. There is no intent that the actual text of the policy be so modified.

Comment by Arbitrators:

Comment by parties:

No. Goes against the spirit of the policy, renders it useless, tries to write policy in stone by having Arbcom reinforce it (I expect GoRight to later point out at this principle every time that he tries to restore the edit of a banned editor). Others points other flaws below. Kind of reminds how Martinphi wikilawyered about WP:FRINGE so he could run loops around it. --Enric Naval (talk) 17:05, 22 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Comment by others:

Proposed --GoRight (talk) 14:40, 22 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Clarification My sole purpose in making this proposal is simply to explicitly affirm that these rules are not cast in stone nor is someone that makes a good faith restoration of content automatically a meat puppet. Exceptions, as Raul would refer to them, are written into this policy and reflected in actual practice for good and valid reasons and other proposals being made appear to downplay or eliminate entirely any notion of such exceptions being valid in any way. --GoRight (talk) 17:09, 22 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Oppose - GoRight has highlighted basically every caveat and exception in the above policy, and wants the arbcom to affirm them as if they are somehow representative of the policy. They are not. The policy is that edits by banned users should not be restored. "Affirming" exceptions to this rule is perverse. Raul654 (talk) 15:01, 22 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

QUESTION: How specific is that word "restored"? Verbatim? Saying an equivalent thing in different words? Does this mean that all some POV-pusher A has to do is (1) Get another POV-pusher B to present all aspects of the opposite POV, and then (2) A works to get B banned, thereby disallowing the entire opposing POV? Has anyone besides me noticed this seems to be getting tried in the CF article? V (talk) 18:45, 23 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

"Has anyone besides me noticed this seems to be getting tried in the CF article?" - You are not alone, although the regular editors at CF (i.e. the ones who focus most of their effort there specifically) may be getting unfairly caught in the cross fire. --GoRight (talk) 18:10, 24 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

WMC reaffirms WP:BURO above. My proposal simply extends his affirmation into a specific policy as it is currently written. My proposal also makes WP:IAR, another policy BTW, explicit in this context for when there is good reason to do so. Note that "at the direction of a banned user" is not an exception, it IS the rule. Neither is the bit about users taking responsibility an exception, that IS the rule. Note that both of these statements would be wholly unnecessary in the text of the policy if your interpretation thereof were, in fact, the correct one. --GoRight (talk) 15:47, 22 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

My proposal simply extends his affirmation into a specific policy as it is currently written. - translation - after two failed attempts to rewrite policy above, you've decided instead to try to get the arbcom to re-affirm the parts of the policy you like -- which coincidentally are exceptions to the rule.

Note that "at the direction of a banned user" is not an exception, it IS the rule. Neither is the bit about users taking responsibility an exception, it IS the rule. - no, the rule is that you shouldn't be restoring edits by banned users. The exception to that rule is if a banned user happens to make a verifiability good main space edit, you can restore it (although other users are perfectly free to label it as meatpuppetry). You want the arbcom to re-affirm the exception, rather than the rule. Raul654 (talk) 16:05, 22 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Sorry, I simply cannot let this slip by. Your statement, "you shouldn't be restoring edits by banned users" is more accurately stated as "you shouldn't be restoring edits by banned users at their direction" if one wants to reflect the letter and the spirit the actual policy. --GoRight (talk) 16:15, 22 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Actually, if one wants to adhere to the actual letter of the policy, you shouldn't be restoring edits unless you are "able to confirm that the changes are verifiable and have independent reasons for making them". I notice you seem to keep neglecting those two requirements and have instead repeatedly tried to substitute the meaningless phrase "for the advancement of the project" in their place. Raul654 (talk) 16:19, 22 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I am not neglecting anything. I am proposing principles that ArbCom is free to accept or disregard as they see fit. And note that I have highlighted those very points in this very proposal and you complained about it calling them exceptions. No, Raul, you are the one that wishes to discount them, not me. See your own proposals in that regard. I'll tell you what, Raul, if I add those points to my other proposals will you remove your objections? --GoRight (talk) 16:57, 22 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Oppose Arbitration is not for changing the emphasis of wikipedia policy and it is outwith the purview of the arbitration committee to do this. Spartaz ^Humbug! 15:37, 22 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I am not suggesting that the emphasis in the actual policy be changed. The emphasis here merely highlights the points being stressed and affirmed by this statement of principle. --GoRight (talk) 15:47, 22 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Oppose The policy already exists - no need for emphasis. None of these proposals of GoRight have been helpful, Mathsci (talk) 16:57, 22 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Response to Enric "Goes against the spirit of the policy, renders it useless" - I would simply point out that I have not changed a single word of the policy here. All of the highlighted text already exists. An affirmation here merely acknowledges that fact, so it cannot go against the spirit of the policy or render it useless. --GoRight (talk) 16:34, 23 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Additional Response to Enric "I expect GoRight to later point out at this principle every time that he tries to restore the edit of a banned editor" - I hereby openly acknowledge that Enric is 100% correct on this point. While I do not make a habit of wholesale reverting the edits of banned users, on the rare occasion where I might do so my reasons for citing this principle would be: (1) I would not seek to restore any such content unless I believed that it had value to the project and I was willing to take full responsibility for it, and (2) referencing this principle would help to reduce the unnecessary disruption and drama that would ensue if someone attempted to paint me (or anyone else for that matter) as a meat puppet simply for restoring constructive content in these types of circumstances. Either the highlighted principles are part of the policy, or they are not. If they are then they should be accepted and respected. If they are not then they should be removed from the policy statement to avoid further confusion and disruption on these points. --GoRight (talk) 18:09, 23 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Oppose The Wikipedia community has a term for "asserting that the technical interpretation of Wikipedia policies and guidelines should override the underlying principles they express." The term isn't regarded positively. Short Brigade Harvester Boris (talk) 16:40, 23 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

This is true, but in what way is this proposal "asserting that the technical interpretation of Wikipedia policies and guidelines should override the underlying principles they express?" It does not. I assert that the underlying principles that you refer to specifically include the points I have highlighted. If they did not why were the highlighted portions included in the text of the policy in the first place? I am quite confident that whomever drafted this description of the underlying practices was both diligent in their efforts to reflect the actual practices involved and careful in their wording. Can you provide an explanation for why the highlighted portions of the policy where included and phrased the way that they were if they do not constitute any reflection of an underlying principle? --GoRight (talk) 17:12, 23 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Comment Certain administrators and others would refer to the portions highlighted above as being "the exceptions". I just want to make an important point crystal clear: these are NOT exceptions to the policy, they are exceptions which are part of the policy. As such they cannot simply be ignored as some might desire. --GoRight (talk) 17:00, 23 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Support. Policy is policy. Trying to pretend the explicit exceptions are not there is ludicrous. ☺Coppertwig (talk) 00:31, 28 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Oppose Unnecessary and would simply be a tool for wikilawyering, like other proposals. Verbal chat 16:54, 2 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Expert opinion from all viewpoints of a topic is essential

4) Many topics covered on Wikipedia are so complex that expert knowledge is necessary to properly understand and contextualize them. This concept extends to all of the various significant published viewpoints within a topic, and articles should provide background on who believes what, and why, and on which points of view are more popular.

Comment by Arbitrators:

Comment by parties:

Comment by others:

Proposed --GoRight (talk) 17:31, 30 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Oppose. See my comment to Stephen Schulz's proposed principle "Expert opinion is essential" above. ☺Coppertwig (talk) 21:16, 1 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Template

5) {text of Proposed principle}

Note: All remedies that refer to a period of time, for example to a ban of X months or a revert parole of Y months, are to run concurrently unless otherwise stated.

Proposal by User:Objectivist

1) Sources for the Cold Fusion article should explicitly follow the WP:Verify guidelines and not be required to follow the WP:RS guidelines, until such time (if ever) that the subject matter becomes "mainstream science".

Comment by Arbitrators:

Comment by parties:

Oppose. Reliable source guidelines are even more important with controversial articles. The problems I see are that reliable sources, including peer-reviewed secondary sources that are seen as favorable to cold fusion, are excluded, while lower-quality reliable sources (such as regurgitated media comments, twenty-year-old news repeated without checking to see if it is still true, or shallow off-hand remarks in tertiary source) are allowed. I do believe that sometimes we can allow material that is from primary sources, but only with consensus, and never in violation of WP:V. The problems at Cold fusion arise from failure to seek consensus, and from blocking, banning, or simply steadily reverting editors and experts who are familiar with the field. Kirk shanahan may have been offended if his seriously POV edits were reverted, but he was always allowed, and welcomed in discussion, at least by me, and it seems by Pcarbonn as well, though he's been confronted when he has been less than clear. Cold fusion writers and researchers have been blocked and banned, from even participating in Talk. It's imbalanced. Making special exceptions for cold fusion is a Bad Idea. We need the opposite. --Abd (talk) 03:54, 25 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Another view. Perhaps V is referring to insistence on peer-reviewed secondary or academic sources, which isn't required for non-science articles. This may be a misunderstanding. An article like Cold fusion covers not only science, but history, and lower-quality sources are allowed for the history part. But we still need coverage in some kind of RS to establish notability. There is a paradox here. Cold fusion is not pseudoscience, in spite of what some have asserted here, the consensus on that is established. However, if it were, wouldn't it then be contradictory to require the highest quality sources? My view is that if a fact is found in sources meeting RS guidelines, even if it is claimed to be of "low quality," it belongs in the project, somewhere. It may require attribution and framing and so forth, but as soon as we start excluding material because it's "fringe" or "pseudoscience," we start excluding notable facts. The fact isn't the claim that is found in the source, per se, it's that the source exists! What a sufficient number of people believe, as an example, is a proper object of knowledge. --Abd (talk) 04:06, 25 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Oppose We already have WP:FRINGE for this. --Enric Naval (talk) 22:37, 26 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Comment by others:

Proposed The intent is to remove the primary cause of most of the argumentation, and, therefore, one cause of long postings by anyone, not just Abd. V (talk) 21:57, 23 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Oppose - this is well outside the case's scope, but even if not, WP:V and WP:RS are intrinsically connected. After all, according to WP:V: "The threshold for inclusion in Wikipedia is verifiability, not truth—that is, whether readers are able to check that material added to Wikipedia has already been published by a reliable source, not whether we think it is true." (Emphasis mine). - Bilby (talk) 22:25, 23 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

It is the argumentation about what qualifies as "reliable source" that has been the biggest problem on the CF Talk page. For another example of "fringe science", and one that has almost no Standard Reliable Sources associated with it, in terms of the Scientific Community, see the Dean drive article. Why, then, does that article exist? It can only be through some sort of relaxation of WP:RS standards. Verifiability, that data about it was published somewhere, sufficed. V (talk) 22:40, 23 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

The purpose of this case isn't to look at the cold fusion article, as such, but Abd's and WMCs behaviour. Thus I see this as an unconnected issue. That said, your statement above, "It is the argumentation about what qualifies as 'reliable source' that has been the biggest problem on the CF Talk page." suggests determining standards for what consitutes a reliable source, which, of course, is what WP:RS and WP:RSN do. It's not necessary (and not possible) to drop WP:RS from WP:V. - Bilby (talk) 00:12, 24 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

And this Section is for proposed solutions to those behavior problems. I reiterate that the Fundamental Cause of that behavior (of Abd, at least) is the excessive demand by others for WP:RS when so much of the data about this subject is not available from those sources. So, if that Cause is removed, it logically follows that improved behavior will result. V (talk) 03:44, 24 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

If the sources aren't sufficiently reliable, then they can't be used. If the problem is that there are those placing overly strong expectations on what constitutes a reliable source, then there's WP:RSN. WP:V is a core policy - it can't be dropped or put aside, and WP:RS is a central part of that. - Bilby (talk) 07:56, 24 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

According to WP:IAR you are mistaken. The only problem I see with IAR is, who defines what is an "improvement" to the article? In the Cold Fusion article, some of the most recent research, even if published in a recognized RS source, is not yet allowed to be mentioned, simply because there are not yet any secondary RS references to that research, per WP:RS. V (talk) 13:31, 24 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Support A most excellent suggestion given that Cold Fusion seems to be accepted as being in the Fringe science category. This certainly would cut squarely to the heart of the problem, IMHO, and as icing for this little cake it would encourage the continued involvement of acknowledged experts such as Shanahan. Delightfully out of the box thinking, IMHO, and supported by established policy, namely WP:IAR. --GoRight (talk) 22:30, 23 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Oppose per Bilby. Raul654 (talk) 22:42, 23 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Little confused here - User:V doesn't appear to have edited since early 2008. Guettarda (talk) 22:49, 23 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I signed on as "Objectivist", but was using "V" as a signature-handle before officially signing up. If somehow I have acquired two talk pages, it wasn't a deliberate thing on my part. It was (still is?) a glitch in the user-identification software. It's plain enough that I still have the "V" as my signature-handle. V (talk) 22:54, 23 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I found that quite confusing, too. But you seem to have been around for quite a while and have a good understanding of the topic? Splette :) ^{How's my driving?} 22:58, 23 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Oppose 'waiting until the subject becomes mainstream science' is POV already in my view (even with the caveat ('if ever'). Just because the Flat Earth Society may push out some 'publications', no notable scientist even feels the urge to respond to, does not make it a verifiable (and thus good) source for an article. Splette :) ^{How's my driving?} 22:56, 23 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

And you have spelled out the heart of the rationale for this proposal. If the Flat Earth Society publishes something, it can be verified that it was indeed published. The article can then say, "So-and-so claims such-and-such", referencing that publication. There is no POV at all in that. The preceding phrase inside quotes is exactly true, that a claim was made. And anybody obtaining a copy of the publication can verify that the claim was made. Who cares how "reliable" that source is, regarding the accuracy of claims made? --if Wikipedia is indeed about verifiability not truth????? V (talk) 23:18, 23 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Wikipedia is a general encyclopedia, not a meeting place for fringe or pseudo scientist lovers. Therefore, due WP:WEIGHT has to be given to the different views of one theory. Just the fact of some scientist publishing something at some point, does not necessarily meet either WP:V or WP:RS Splette :) ^{How's my driving?} 23:53, 23 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

And these sorts of things have been discussed ad nauseum on the Cold Fusion Talk page. Thank you for providing such an excellent introduction, for all here, about the heart of the problem there. Taking a cue from GoRight above, I submit that WP:IAR is the best way to solve the problem. LET the article become chock-full of claims and counterclaims, all of them properly identified as such, with verifiable references to actual publications. LET the reader be appropriately forewarned about what he or she is about to encounter there. LET the article be an experiment! Because you can be quite sure the detractors will have as much to say --and as much freedom to say it-- as the proponents. It will hardly be ONLY a meeting place for pseudo scientist lovers. V (talk) 03:44, 24 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

It occurs to me that I don't recall ever seeing WP:BURO brought up in the arguments on the CF Talk page (I may have missed it, though). I respectfully ask all those who are "pushing for" the Rules to review it. V (talk) 16:56, 24 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I'd like to add another comment regarding the POV statement in the "Oppose" message above. It is a simple fact that much data about the topic simply does not exist in Official Reliable Source publications. At this time, then, the only way the article can completely cover the topic is if RS restrictions are lifted. I wrote "until such time as it becomes mainstream" because I know that if the subject ever does enter the mainstream, then at that time there will exist lots of up-to-date RS material. Thus there would no longer be any need to reference "lesser" sources, to have a complete article on the subject. V (talk) 16:37, 24 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Strongly Oppose The RS page says it pretty well: "Wikipedia articles[1] should rely primarily on reliable, third-party, published sources (although reliable self-published sources are allowable in some situations - see below)." Olorinish (talk) 23:34, 23 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Oppose Unhelpful proposal. Mathsci (talk) 23:49, 23 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I challenge you to back that statement up with evidence --or at least a rationale. V (talk) 18:53, 24 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Kirk Shanahan said it all. Like Abd, you are trying to make wikipedia represent cold fusion as "emerging science" and adopt the point of view of fanatics. There's very little that is rational about that. Mathsci (talk) 05:08, 25 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Hear-say is not evidence (although it might include a rationale). Kirk is wrong about me. I think the topic is fascinating, and would like others to BE ABLE to more easily see the data. That's all. I'm simply against censorship. That means I welcome anti-CF data in the article, the same as I welcome pro-CF data in the article. Let the reader decide what to think about it all! Meanwhile, Abd (somewhat above) has partially pointed out a conundrum: An editor who thinks CF is junk science should NOT require RS, while an editor who thinks CF is valid SHOULD require RS. It's a hypocrisy thing, revealed when actions are inconsistent with words.

Also, there is a little matter regarding "notability" of sources: Would you care to explain how some Source that has basically ignored the CF field for 15+ years can be "notable" about it? I suspect "ignoramus" would be a more accurate description! Consider some evidence offered in this video: ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nNRB0K_dw0 ) The same Robert Duncan who was in the "60 Minutes" episode mentions that not long after the show was aired, he received a phone call from some "notable" person who accused him of becoming a charlatan (or something like that). Duncan was unable to talk to him about merely looking at some of the evidence. Duncan saw lots of evidence and became a CF proponent. Abd was originally neutral, saw lots of evidence, and became a CF proponent. Me, I've seen a fair amount of evidence, and LIKE THE IDEA, somewhat want it to be true, but cannot consider myself a True Believer. I've played with and liked a great many wildly different ideas over the decades, and simply know better than to quickly jump to Believer status (most of those ideas were duds, see?). Anyway, the Really Notable Sources, people who have been conducting experiments, have mostly unable to present their data in places that Wikipedia considers RS, thanks to those so-called "notables" who thought that the data gathered 20 years ago was sufficiently thorough, and have become ignoramuses on the subject since. There is a paradigm about Science making progress only after enough old fogeys die. One of my wild ideas is to think about the science-politics fallout that will happen, should CF be proved real. To Those Who Think They Know, Remember: "It ain't what you don't know that hurts so much as what you do know that ain't so." The only question is, "Which group of Knowers is right?" Maybe CF will prove to be as illusory as the canals of Mars. And maybe not. I reiterate that I want the CF article to be complete, not censored by the side-effects of "standard policy". V (talk) 06:25, 26 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

This is not a forum or a blog, User:Objectivist. Please stop posting your private opinions here. You're wasting ArbCom's time. Mathsci (talk) 06:32, 29 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

It is fact, not opinion, that people who are ignoring WP:BURO are in-effect censoring the Cold fusion article, from being up-to-date, through bureaucratic-rule-stickling source-restriction. And WP:IAR explicity is about improving an article. Who here can say that an up-to-date article is not an improvement over an out-of-date article? V (talk) 14:48, 29 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Comment: This idea that if something is "fringe" then it is somehow exempt from the requirement that statements be cited to reliable sources, seems to be frequently and mistakenly held by those advocating for fringe theories, but it's not consistent with policy or with the goal of producing a respected encyclopedia. Woonpton (talk) 01:02, 24 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Kirk Shanahan does not appear to be advocating in support of fringe theories. Quite the opposite I might expect. --GoRight (talk) 01:44, 24 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I'm not sure if that last remark was stated clearly enough. Kirk Shanahan's work, as a CF detractor, has not been included in the article for much the same reason that much proponent data has been excluded: inadequate RS. V (talk) 03:44, 24 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Strong oppose, what you basically say is that we can include here all rubbish material that we can find, because we can't find any proper material. This completely negates previous ArbCom decisions, like Wikipedia:Requests for arbitration/Cold fusion/Proposed decision#No original research and Wikipedia:Requests for arbitration/Cold fusion/Proposed decision#Neutral point of view and sourcing. --Dirk Beetstra ^{T C} 16:44, 24 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Yes and no. "One man's rubbish is another man's treasure", to paraphase an old saying. Neutral POV can be maintained as easily as specifying like, "The following section presents claims that have been published, but the accuracy of each claim is disputed." And to say, "we can't find any proper material" is to distort the truth of this special situation. There is plenty of RS material dated approximately 1989-90. But there is very little after that time, because the field was rejected by the mainstream. It would not be correct to IMPLY, by preventing inclusion of non-RS material after that time, that almost nothing in the field has happened since then. Yet exactly that is being done by sticklers for the RS rules. Therefore, the only way to provide a complete and up-to-date picture of the field is to allow inclusion of non-RS material. As an example, consider the TV show "60 Minutes". They had an episode ( http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/04/17/60minutes/main4952167.shtml ) in which they contacted a professional researcher who had relevant credentials. I quote from the linked article (3rd page):

"60 Minutes turned to an independent scientist, Rob Duncan, vice chancellor of research at the University of Missouri and an expert in measuring energy.

"When we first called you and said 'We'd like you to look into cold fusion for 60 Minutes,' what did you think when you hung up the phone?" Pelley asked Duncan.

"I think my first reaction was something like, 'Well, hasn't that been debunked?'" he replied.

We asked Duncan to go with 60 Minutes to Israel, where a lab called Energetics Technologies has reported some of the biggest energy gains yet."

Anyway, is "60 Minutes" RS? Hah! Therefore it doesn't matter, per Wikipedia's Rules, that Dr. Duncan came away convinced that the original debunkers had, in essence, goofed. Nevertheless, the existence of claims made in the TV show can be verified/watched by anyone ( http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=4955212n ). Who here can say precisely WHY the Rules should not be bent, for this unique subject/situation, so that readers can be brought up-to-date? V (talk) 18:42, 24 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, the program is RS. There is also a transcript CBS News has published. V, we don't need a change to the rules, we need the rules to be enforced, and your argument may simply be functioning to convince some readers that there is serious POV-pushing going on. It's not peer-reviewed RS, to be sure, but it's absolutely fine for the history. We can and should report it.--Abd (talk) 18:05, 30 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Hmm, enforcing, that is where the problem started, Abd. CBS is a reliable source in one way, it is reliably sourcing that some people do something, or that something has happened. It is not a reliable source for saying 'and they proved that CF was possible' (e.g.), the latter statement needs peer review (as that is based on what the subject was saying), the former does not (as that is a verifyable part of the contribution). --Dirk Beetstra ^{T C} 09:22, 31 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Oppose. Everyone above already said it, there are guidelines/policies that we have to follow for writing an article. We don't start changing them for one article because editors feel it's the easiest road. No, WP:RS, WP:V, WP:WEIGHT, all of them need to be followed, maybe with this article, more strictly, not less. --CrohnieGal^Talk 22:10, 25 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

There is only one editor arguing for this. Proposal that has not been seconded, folks. Might be worth discussing, but it's a bit of a red herring. I understand why V proposed it, SPAs often think this way. RS is a very important bulkwark against filling the project with non-notable fringe. --Abd (talk) 18:05, 30 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

This proposal has nothing to do with "easier". The proposed road is simply the ONLY road that has ALL the relevant data on it. Not to mention that Wikipedia's policies explicitly include occasional exceptions to the usual rules, per WP:BURO and WP:IAR. It seems obvious to me that an article that completely covers the topic would be an improvement over an article that excludes lots of relevant information. But the RS does not exist, to allow the article to become complete in accordance with that rule. Therefore it is logical to make an exception. V (talk) 06:54, 26 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Oppose. Sorry, I don't understand what this is supposed to achieve. ☺Coppertwig (talk) 00:31, 28 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Template

2) {text of proposed remedy}

Proposed principles

Page protection

(As all the evidence isn't available, I'm just proposing a couple of principles that I see as applicable to the case as I understand it, independent of further claims). - Bilby (talk) 13:47, 24 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

1) Because Wikipedia is "the encyclopedia that everyone can edit," the vast majority of articles and other pages can be freely edited by anyone (except for blocked or banned users). While it may be necessary for an administrator to protect a page, ~~where possible~~ editors and administrators should pursue reasonable efforts to resolve the concerns which made protection necessary. Such efforts may involve pursuing dispute resolution, mediation, voluntary and involuntary revert restrictions, article or topic bans, and, on occasion, blocks or site bans.

Comment by Arbitrators:

Comment by parties:

Support. As an admin, I prefer to block users rather than protect pages William M. Connolley (talk) 10:30, 25 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Support. Admins can topic ban people from articles if they have caused massive disruption, and the other editors in the page have asked for this measure. Also, he can look at comments made in noticeboards and in other pages about the situation in the article. --Enric Naval (talk) 22:39, 26 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Comment by others:

Proposed - The first line of this is taken directly from the Sarah Palin protection wheel war decision, but I've added the rest. I acknowledge that full protection is a necessary evil, but I still see it as against the core philosophy of Wikipedia. Thus it seems to me that we should be endeavouring to solve the problems that led to the protection, should such be possible. I'm not saying here that WMC's actions were the right ones, though, nor that article bans should be proposed by individual administrators - they're different issues. - Bilby (talk) 13:43, 24 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Support - Although you may want to reword the following bit as it took me a couple of readings to figure it out: "where possible editors and administrators should pursue ...". For some reason I had a tendency to parse it as "( where possible editors and administrators ) should pursue ..." as opposed to the intended "( where possible ) editors and administrators should pursue ...". Perhaps a comma after the word "possible" would make it clearer. --GoRight (talk) 14:13, 24 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

It's probably better without the "where possible" in the first place. :) - Bilby (talk) 14:19, 24 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Agreed. You might also consider changing "on occasion" to "on rare occasions" to emphasize that we hope such actions are not needed on a regular basis. --GoRight (talk) 14:40, 24 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Agree. From the reaction of the editors who regularly edit the article, I think the banning of the two editors was an excepted relief to them. I think the regular editors at the article found peace after the bannings and were able to accomplish more without the disruptions, at least that is how I read everyone after this was done. --CrohnieGal^Talk 22:03, 25 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Reverting during protection

2) Uninvolved administrators may choose to revert a page that has been protected due to an edit war back to a stable version that predates the dispute. Doing so should not be seen as indicating the administrator's approval of that version.

Comment by Arbitrators:

Comment by parties:

Support, though I'd disagree with the word "stable" since I think that can be hard to establish. If there is a good reason to revert back, uninvolved admins can use their good judgement to restore an earlier version (in the case involved, I used my good judgement to trust GR's good judgement). This is particularly true when protection is for a long time, or there is reason (existing protracted failure to reach agreement on the talk page) to suspect that the just-protected version may sit around. It also acts as a spur to those in the discussion. Doing so should not be seen as indicating the administrator's approval of that version is slightly problematic because the admin has to have some reason for preferring that version William M. Connolley (talk) 10:48, 25 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Support, it's annoying when it's my edits that are getting reverted, but it's the correct action. --Enric Naval (talk) 22:41, 26 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Comment by others:

Proposed - The initial sentence is a rewording of what is at Wikipedia:Protection policy, with the addition of "uninvolved". The second part is new, and may need a better writer, but it seems to me that an otherwise uninvolved administrator acting to revert to a stable version shouldn't necessarily be seen as part of the content dispute. It's here because the claim is that WMC was involved because of a prior personal dispute with Abd and because of a content dispute with Abd due to WMC's revert of the page. Reverting as described at WP:PP shouldn't be seen to entail the latter. - Bilby (talk) 13:43, 24 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I have a tendency to support this because I have seen many cases where an uninvolved administrator simply comes in and protects a page to stop an edit war but leaves the page in whatever state it was at the time of the protection. In most cases this guarantees that the page is in a controversial state, so reverting to a prior stable state clearly seems preferable. Indeed, this is also essentially what I had tried to propose in this case. On the other hand, I think Abd also makes a fair argument that if consensus on a more current version of the page can be quickly found via a poll or other discussion that such a choice would be even more preferable as it would preserve as much work as possible. I think that we should all be in agreement that leaving a protected page in a controversial state should be avoided, and in that sense WMC was right to act in some fashion in this case. --GoRight (talk) 14:24, 24 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]
I'm not so sure of this personally because admins are supposed to always lock at the wrong version and wait for a consensus to develop before changing. Spartaz ^Humbug! 05:06, 25 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Any modification to a fully protected page should be proposed on its talk page (or in another appropriate forum). After consensus has been established for the change, or if the change is uncontroversial, any administrator may make the necessary edits to the protected page. To draw administrators' attention to a request for an edit to a protected page, place the {{editprotected}} template on the talk page

The protection policy is explicit, changes to protected pages need a consensus on the talk page and should not be touched unless the consensus is there. The only exception I could think of would be a BLP vio or libellous material. Spartaz ^Humbug! 05:13, 25 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Interesting. So by this argument you would claim that WMC violated protection policy by restoring to the version I had proposed? Obviously there was no real consensus for it, right? WMC acted so quickly that only Hipocrite had expressed support. So is that your position in this case? Could you please clarify whether that is you intended position, because on the surface that seems to be an implication of your statement? I just want to make sure that I am not misunderstanding here. --GoRight (talk) 07:17, 25 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I wouldn't have made the change but there is room for diversity of opinion here. Arguably WMC could have said to themselves well two sides of the dispute are endorsing this so we have a rough consensus to revert to this stable version. To be very clear though, even if this isn't the action I would have taken myself, it does not mean that I think this was an abusive admin action - simply that its the kind of action where there is room for diversity of approach. I'm relatively conservative (with a small c) as an admin and I don't tend to block users or edit locked articles lightly. Just because I agree with the proposals about Abd's behaviour doesn't mean that I (or anyone else) has common cause for everything that WMC does as an admin. I don't endorse his action in reverting the article and while I do not condemn it because there is room for different approaches, it wasn't the best admin action he has taken in my opinion. That and 50c will buy you some candy. In other words, if that's all you have against him then you are all wasting your time and ours here - but we knew that already. Gosh, wikipedia admin thinks other wikipedia admin made an ordinary decision. Spartaz ^Humbug! 07:51, 25 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

The policy is a tad more complex than that, unfortunately. It also states, in relation to content disputes:

Since protecting the most current version sometimes rewards edit warring by establishing a contentious revision, administrators may also revert to an old version of the page predating the edit war if such a clear point exists. Pages that are protected because of content disputes should not be edited except to make changes which are uncontroversial or for which there is clear consensus (see above).

This is where I got the first part of the proposed principle from, and it makes a lot of sense to me, fitting in well with what Abd was saying. Abd argued that Hipocrite had made modifications before the article was protected, and protecting the page rewarded Hipocrite by fixing it in Hipocrite's preferred version. So the policy allows an admin to revert to a stage prior to the edit war, thus presumably not favouring any of those involved. This is what WMC did. As the second part of the policy refers to editing, I'm assuming that the intent was to distinguish between reverting back to a prior version and making edits to the page. Making further changes would require consensus. - Bilby (talk) 07:56, 25 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

perhaps yes. Its a grey area and my personal view that we should generally stick to the wrong version doesn't means that I think admins who do stuff diverently are wrong, evil or abusive. Its just my approach and opinion on this. I think the point raised was no clear safe revert point on this article and anyway, WMC made it clear that he did the revert for lulz rather then from a careful consideration of the situation. Then again, its such a tiny minor point anyway in the wider sense of the disruption of the the article that it should be a question of who the hell cares except Abd anyway? (by the way did you know your handle means car town in Danish?) Spartaz ^Humbug! 08:10, 25 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Fair enough. My only concern is to be clear that reverting along the lines described is not evidence of involvement in a content dispute, in and of itself. Otherwise anyone reverting to a pre-edit war state is determined to be "involved" for any subsequent actions. (The "car town" is cool - in Australia it refers to a medium sized marsupial that looks a bit like a rabbit only with a nasty temperament and teeth. They bring easter eggs for those who don't like rabbits).- Bilby (talk) 08:53, 25 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Proposals by User:Enric Naval

Proposed principles

Administrators blocks can be brought up for review by any editor

1) Any editor can bring an administrator block up for review in the relevant noticeboard if he sees a problem with it. Idem for bans from pages. The community can, among other things, lift the block/ban, endorse it or extend it in time and/or scope.

Comment by Arbitrators:

Comment by parties:

Proposed. Abd was saying that asking ANI to review his ban was disruptive. I later said that, if Arbcom rejected this case, then I would bring it to ANI again. Abd said that I was menacing with more disruption[25]. --Enric Naval (talk) 00:40, 25 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Comment by others:

Reject. I believe a general Wikipedian principle is that on the one hand, usually anyone can start a discussion about anything at any time, but on the other hand, starting a discussion takes up the time of other editors and should only be done if there is a good reason sufficient to justify the time taken up. Starting discussions can be considered disruptive if there isn't sufficient reason. I do not disagree with the statement, but I believe that passing it as an arbcom principle would give it too much weight; it has to be balanced in relation to other principles. ☺Coppertwig (talk) 21:16, 1 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Comment This seems to be exactly how wikipedia functions at the moment. Mathsci (talk) 23:59, 1 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Proposed findings of fact

The community found no problem with WMC's blocks when they were brought up for review

1) Some blocks made by WMC were found worrysome by some editors, and those editors brought the blocks to the community for review. The community found no problem with them.

Comment by Arbitrators:

Comment by parties:

Proposed. Based in my evidence. --Enric Naval (talk) 00:40, 25 July 2009 (UTC)::[reply]

Agree, oddly enough William M. Connolley (talk) 17:04, 25 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Comment by others:

Support. I know it was for the block/ban of Cold fusion which is what I am supporting this about. It was brought to ANI and there was a lot of support for it until it was stopped by Abd. --CrohnieGal^Talk 21:54, 25 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Support. There was a general feeling of relief at t:CF, and widespread support on WP:ANI. --Stephan Schulz (talk) 22:12, 25 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Support. Raul654 (talk) 22:04, 26 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Reject - As has already been noted by others the ANI discussion on the ban was cut short due to Abd's request and desire to avoid unnecessary community disruption. Given this any claims of there being an established consensus there are exaggerated at best. Also, the need to even hold that discussion is questionable given that Abd had not taken any actionable steps with respect to the ban at that time. In that sense the discussion itself was unnecessarily disruptive as well as provocative. Luckily Abd did not take the bait and his good judgment in that instance cut the whole thing short (which is consistent with his prior feedback from ArbCom). --GoRight (talk) 23:07, 26 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Nonsense. Abd was strongly criticized and the ban supported by a large number of editors, several of which were uninvolved by any reasonable definition of "involved". Claiming "well, I asked for it to be shut down just before all my supported chimed it" is a childishly transparent tactic. --Stephan Schulz (talk) 23:42, 26 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I think that the observation "several of which were uninvolved" in the same sentence where you assert "the ban [was] supported by a large number of editors" puts the whole thing in an appropriate context. Regarding "just before all my [support] chimed [in]" please note that while I commented in that discussion I had not !voted because the whole thing was disruptive and unnecessary. Perhaps others felt similarly? --GoRight (talk) 02:01, 27 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

GoRight's analysis doesn't quite agree with mine. When I decided to ask for an early close of the AN/I discussion, it was indeed to avoid useless disruption; had I chosen to stick it out and contest it, I'd have had to raise the issue of the cabal then and there, and I was assuming that I wouldn't; but analysis of !votes had already made it plain to me that these were mostly involved editors, so had a ban been decided, it would have been by the uninvolved editors, and I cut that process short. Involved editors tend to !vote first, uninvolved ones later, due to the nature of involvement. By the way, at the time that I made that analysis, I was considering some editors as uninvolved that later analysis based on the diagnostic arbitration cases, which I hadn't reviewed, turned out to be actually involved. (Note that not all editors I would consider involved for that purpose are necessarily named in the current cabal evidence, there are a few marginal cases that I left out as insufficiently relevant here). Once I knew that this would go to ArbComm, as I did at that point, allowing further dispute below that level would be disruptive. In requesting rapid closure, my edit summary mentioned Durova. Durova resigned her admin bit to avoid disruption. She could easily have contested it, and, my opinion, might have prevailed. But the disruption would have been enormous. She placed the welfare of the community above her personal privilege, and I will never cease recalling that with admiration. ArbComm had requested me to avoid useless dispute that wasn't going to be resolved, and there was no way to resolve this at AN/I; give the number of exercised cabal editors, the most I could hope for was enough support to block consensus on the face. Asserting cabal involvement then was utterly impractical, and I hoped, perhaps foolishly, that the cabal would not confront the issue here, leaving the case fairly simple. Didn't happen that way! This is not a coherent, cunning cabal, or it would behave differently. It's dangerous, but more like a bull in a china shop.

Now, when I decided to ask for rapid close, I was waiving my right to contest that ban. Forever. I am not, here, arguing that the ban was invalid. It was valid. And it's over. That's not why we are here. What I do argue, however, is that my "plea" was "no contest," not "guilty," and, without a separate finding, that closure should not be presumed to be evidence against me, and the "consensus" expressed there should be reviewed in the light of the cabal evidence. I think, in fact, I should get a barnstar for that no-contest plea. If there is not an appropriate one, it should be created! Call it the Durova Order of Merit for Avoidance of Unnecessary Disruption or something like that. But, of course, that's self-praise, deprecated, right? I could hope that I'd deserve it, but I won't make one and put it on my user page!

One more point about AN/I pile-on. When the cabal shows up like that, and rapidly creates a mass of votes in a particular direction, it will almost always, if the cabal isn't easily identified, create a tendency for some neutral editors to agree with it, even if, by an independent examination of the evidence -- there wasn't any evidence presented!, that was one of the problems with the AN/I community ban -- they wouldn't !vote that way. The initial pile-on was from editors who had prejudgment from other contexts, most especially that RfC for JzG. I've seen this in other contexts where the cabal wasn't involved, a mass of supports for a ban, for example, can snowball in the absence of evidence. Why? Well, because editors who want to look at evidence, not having any, may abstain, or, in the case of the topic ban of Wilhelmina Will, they asked for evidence, and when it was not supplied, they didn't !vote. Other editors will assume good faith on the part of the claimant and the early voters and will support based on that, which is a problem. It's a human problem, we do this kind of thing. We tend to move in groups. I'm not operating a cabal. I didn't ask GoRight and Coppertwig to comment here, or notify them of this (but they knew it was coming, I'd been very open about that, anyone following my contributions would have known. There are many editors I've helped, and, I'm sure, if they knew about this RfAr, they'd be here commenting in my defense. But I have not informed them. I haven't asked anyone specific to come here. I discussed this at Wikipedia Review, but, note, this case was already being discussed there, Mathsci was already there. I could do a certain amount of canvassing to match what Short Brigade Harvester Boris did. I haven't. I'm depending entirely on the wisdom of ArbComm and its willingness and ability to see through what is happening here. I know that some arbitrators can, so I'm depending on them to point it out to others who might miss it. By the time I'm done, the evidence will be as clear and cogent as I can make it, given my time limitations, that's all I can say. In the end, it's not my decision, and I like it that way. See, I'm involved. I recuse. In the end, what some cabal members may not realize, the number of support or oppose !votes here means almost nothing, unless arbitrators are convinced by the arguments, and if it's a matter of arguments, it doesn't matter how many editors have supported a proposition.

Except with one thing: ArbComm may legitimately be concerned about disruption. An editor who is "right" may also be disruptive, and if I were, as claimed, regularly pissing off otherwise uninvolved editors, by being unreasonable, as claimed, or even if I just had some incompatible personality, not even my fault, ArbComm may need to consider the welfare of the project over any possible unfairness to me. But, if the upset is coming almost entirely from an identifiable faction, it's a different matter. And that is why I had to name the cabal and identify members. It's not uncivil, and no specific wrongdoing is alleged for any cabal member, per se. If, for example, Woonpton did anything wrong, it would be visible in her personal actions. I'd say that there were problems with those actions, and it's visible here, but I've seen nothing that would require a personal sanction, nothing that isn't all too common. The cabal membership is asserted only to show prejudgment, or high likelihood of rapid formation of a negative judgment, based on POV position and prior opinion. --Abd (talk) 23:06, 30 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

"GoRight's analysis doesn't quite agree with mine." - Yet another example of how I do NOT speak for Abd, nor do I try to. He is perfectly able to speak his own mind on such matters. --GoRight (talk) 16:13, 31 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Support The fact that Abd himself requested closure of the WP:ANI discussion on the ban as it was WP:SNOWballing against him speaks volumes. (And the fact that Abd then complained that a discussion that he asked to close early did not garner adequate participation is the height of... something.) Short Brigade Harvester Boris (talk) 23:59, 26 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]
"And the fact that Abd then complained that a discussion that he asked to close early did not garner adequate participation is the height of... something." - I think you must have Abd confused with someone else. Has he even responded to this? --GoRight (talk) 02:01, 27 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Yes GoRight, Abd did respond to this, he called all of us a member of some kind of cabal. I couldn't be the uninvolved editor I said I am because? --CrohnieGal^Talk 12:33, 27 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]
"Abd did respond to this" - I was actually referring to this specific FOF, to which Abd does not appear to have responded even now. --GoRight (talk) 18:31, 27 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Support There was an unequivocal response when Enric Naval brought the matter up at WP:ANI. Abd abruptly requested the termination of the ANI thread when it was not going the way he wanted. Mathsci (talk) 06:26, 29 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]
"when it was not going the way he wanted." - Abd has clearly stated his reasons for requesting the close. This does not appear to be among them. --GoRight (talk) 16:16, 31 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]
- Not everything Abd writes or claims is correct. His statements about a cabal for example seem to be pure fantasy. His statements about mathematics have been goobledegook. In this ArbCom case his edits seem to be "spinning" things to place himself in the best possible light post facto. Mathsci (talk) 23:53, 1 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Proposals by User:Coppertwig

Proposed principles

Bans should be clear

1) In order to avoid contributing to long-term disruption, administrators should avoid creating situations where it's unclear whether an editor is banned or not, and bans should be carried out with a reasonable effort to give the banned editor the impression that they have been treated fairly, properly, civilly and respectfully. This applies to all types of bans: page-bans, topic-bans, project-bans etc.

Comment by Arbitrators:

Comment by parties:

Comment by others:

Proposed. This is not intended as an excuse for (arguably) banned editors, but as a guideline for administrators, to help keep disruption to a minimum. ☺Coppertwig (talk) 20:32, 1 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]

This doesn't seem useful as a general wikipedia principal. The problem is usually with the disruptive editor, not the random administrator who deals with him/her. Mathsci (talk) 22:47, 1 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for your comment. Could you explain why you don't see it as useful? Disruptive editors create problems. Administrative actions which appear to be unfair tend to cause editors to be more likely to be disruptive (e.g. creating lots of sockpuppets to combat what they see as unfairness); also, unclear bans can lead to time wasted in discussion as to whether there is a ban or not. ☺Coppertwig (talk) 23:12, 1 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]

As applied to Abd. WMC and other editors involved here, I think that what you have written is unhelpful and shows a biassed understanding of what has happened. I hope this clarifies things. Mathsci (talk) 23:20, 1 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]

So is it your position that bans should actually be left unclear and ill-defined and thus almost guarantee future disruption? I don't want to put wards in your mouth so please clarify further --GoRight (talk) 04:31, 2 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]

What was unclear about a page-ban in this case? It was clear to Hipocrite. Only Abd filled multiple pages with his wikilawyering and threats of an ArbCom case as soon as WMC took any action. Abd's evasive, lengthy and often irrelevant statements would make any kind of discussion unworkable. Mathsci (talk) 08:17, 2 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]

"What was unclear about a page-ban in this case?" - Have you not been following along? It is unclear whether WMC was involved personally with Abd prior to his taking administrative action. It is unclear whether a individual administrator has the authority to create such bans sans and specific community discussion on the point. It is unclear whether WMC has the ongoing authority to continue to assert the ban beyond the community "sanctioned" one month discussed at AN/I. Shall I continue?

But none of that was actually my point. I was responding to the generic principle involved, not the specifics of this case. The Rothwell case would be a better example of why this principle is important, but even in this specific case it certainly has applicability as I highlight above.

So, given your comments above, I am left wondering whether you support (generically speaking) "having bans be clear", or not. And if not, then what exactly do you support in this respect? I don't want to assume anything here, so I am simply asking you what you support and what you don't w.r.t. the "clarity of bans". Depending on your position I might be moved to either support or reject this proposal. --GoRight (talk) 15:03, 2 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]

This proposal says, in essence, that administrators have convince disruptive editors to the disruptive editors' satisfaction that they have been treated fairly. That is insanity. Raul654 (talk) 03:21, 2 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I believe the point being made here, and correct me if I am wrong here C, is that if someone is banned it should be crystal clear that they are banned, and if not then that should be equally clear. The Rothwell case is a good case in point. He is merely blocked indefinitely by MastCell and we have no way to determine whether some other administrator is willing to unblock, sans a disruptive community discussion. You would argue that Rothwell is banned. I and others obviously disagree. Wouldn't things be improved if his status were made clear and thus we could all agree? --GoRight (talk) 04:31, 2 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Respected editors need to behave accordingly

2) Administrators, long-time editors and editors who have gained the respect of others need to avoid behaving in ways that set a bad example or bring the project into disrepute. One reason is that when a respected editor does something it tends to give others the impression that it's OK. Also, establshed editors tend to be seen as representing the project and might damage its reputation, particularly in the eyes of victims of such behaviour, who might tell their friends etc.

Comment by Arbitrators:

Comment by parties:

Comment by others:

Proposed. ☺Coppertwig (talk) 20:32, 1 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]

This proposal seems to make no sense at all. What does "editors who have gained the respect of others" mean? Mathsci (talk) 22:44, 1 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I'm sorry it's not clear. Do you understand the part about administrators avoiding setting a bad example? By editors who have gained the respect of others, I mean editors whose actions tend to be supported by others because of who they are rather than just the merit of their action; i.e. whose actions are supported by others when they do things that would not be supported if someone else did it. ☺Coppertwig (talk) 23:12, 1 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Administrators are not here to set an example - they are appointed to use their buttons to help things move smoothly in producing a reliable encyclopedia. I don't agree that editors can be classified as you attempt to do. Perhaps looking at the quality/quantity of namespace edits might be one reasonable way to classify, but people do all sort of different things which are equally useful on-wiki. Fringe POV-pushing or the encouragement of it is not one of them. Mathsci (talk) 23:28, 1 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Edit summaries when editing protected pages

3) Providing an informative edit summary with a rationale is particularly important when editing protected pages and can help reduce ensuing confusion and disruption.

Comment by Arbitrators:

Comment by parties:

Comment by others:

Proposed. A clearly understandable rationale in the edit summary in WMC's reversion of cold fusion while protected (instead of "let's wind everyone up") might have eliminated much of the ensuing disruption, possibly avoiding this whole arbitration case. In this edit of April 2008, if WMC felt that it was justified by WP:BLP, then including the letters "BLP" in the edit summary would have gone a long way towards reducing my difficulty when I found myself in the position of explaining the edit to a journalist. ☺Coppertwig (talk) 20:32, 1 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Comment A reasonable general principle but one that seems to be being used here by Coppertwig to frame WMC. From her/his evidence and statements here, it seems that Coppertwig refuses to see any failing on the part of Abd and wholehearted supports his brand of POV-pushing. This kind of unquestioning support coupled with constant advice on presentation (possibly also off-wiki) is what I would call being part of a tag-team. For my part, I don't claim that WMC is a perfect administrator or why indeed we would expect that to be the case of any administrator. There's nothing black and white here. WMC's actions are completely reasonable - this kind of proposal seems to be a wikilawyering device for inferring that they are not reasonable. What's the big deal if Abd is not allowed to edit a page or two? It's certainly far more worrying that at the moment he has so far shown himself incapable of finding unrelated subjects to involve himself with on wikipedia. It is difficult for administrators dealing with extreme POV-pushers, particular those who take meticulous care with their edits in staying on the right side of the civility code. That does not seem to be quite the case with Abd's editing. Mathsci (talk) 23:13, 1 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Wow, you got all of that out of a one sentence proposal? I'm impressed. "What's the big deal if Abd is not allowed to edit a page or two?" - Well, in this case the "Big Deal" would be that Wikipedia would have a seriously flawed article that pushes a specific POV to the exclusion of all others (not that Abd is the only one fighting the Majority-POV pushing, but he is clearly effective at countering that particular bias). --GoRight (talk) 04:40, 2 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]

It was Copperwtig's wikilawyering statement afterwards about the use of this proposal against WMC that was problematic. Not being able to edit two pages of wikipedia would not normally create a problem for most wikipedians. Abd was doing more harm than good on those pages, no matter how much you praise his fringe POV-pushing and repeat his meaningless neologisms (Majority POV-pushing). Doing that identifies you as the third member of his tag-team. Mathsci (talk) 08:32, 2 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]

"Doing that identifies you as the third member of his tag-team." - Fine. If we are to divide up into teams I'll be happy to be on the team that fights against political thuggery, even if it isn't the popular choice amongst many participating here. And by stating "Abd was doing more harm than good on those pages" you self-identify yourself as a member in good standing of the Majority POV Pushing Society (as if there were ever any doubt), but having Raul state "I agree with Mathsci 100%" is sort of like the secret handshake for the MPPS. --GoRight (talk) 14:44, 2 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Ahem. Knock it off. Now. Hersfold ^(t/a/c) 14:57, 2 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Please clarify to whom this is directed? Both myself as well as M, or just me? --GoRight (talk) 15:11, 2 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I agree with Mathsci 100% - this proposed principle is irrelevant to the case at hand. Raul654 (talk) 23:48, 1 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Proposed findings of fact

Template

1) {text of proposed finding of fact}

Comment by Arbitrators:

Comment by parties:

Comment by others:

Proposed remedies

Note: All remedies that refer to a period of time, for example to a ban of X months or a revert parole of Y months, are to run concurrently unless otherwise stated.

A proxy for Abd

1) An individual will be found to interpret community consensus about Abd's behaviour. Whenever anyone gives Abd a warning or a request, the interpreter's responsibility will be to inform Abd whether complying with it is expected.

Comment by Arbitrators:

Comment by parties:

Comment by others:

Proposed. This is an efficient way to quickly resolve situations such as have occurred where there is disagreement as to whether there is consensus for Abd to be required to change his behaviour in some way. Based on the first two sentences here and other behaviour by Abd (such as quickly accepting the community page-ban) I expect that this would be likely to work well. ☺Coppertwig (talk) 20:32, 1 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Reject. If he cannot function within accepted community parameters without the need for a "translator" (read: apologist), then he shouldn't be editing here. Also, Whenever anyone gives Abd a warning or a request, the interpreter's responsibility will be to inform Abd whether complying with it is expected. - this is possibly the most ridiculous proposal I've ever seen in an arbcom case. When someone gives you a warning, you had better comply with it unless you have a damn good reason not to. This proposal is just an excuse for Abd to pretend he doesn't have to comply with warnings, like the many other warnings he's gotten and ignored.Raul654 (talk) 23:52, 1 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]

"When someone gives you a warning, you had better comply with it unless you have a damn good reason not to." - I hereby warn you, Raul, to stop running checkuser on so many new accounts without reasonable evidence of sock puppetry. I hereby warn you, Raul, to stop issuing IP blocks for large segments of the known universe in the pursuit of one person and to the detriment of many others. Hopefully you can take your own advice. (Comment made to illustrate how ridiculous Raul's comments can be, in the sincere hope that doing so will help him to understand why he shouldn't be throwing stones at C through the windows of his own glass house.) --GoRight (talk) 04:59, 2 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Perhaps I should have prefaced that by saying when someone who knows what they are talking about gives you a warning. Warnings from users with a history of disruption do not qualify. Raul654 (talk) 05:03, 2 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]

And without this completely predictable reaction on your part, my illustration would have been necessarily incomplete. Thanks for your participation. --GoRight (talk) 05:31, 2 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]

All you have illustrated here is your own penchant for wikilawyering, while at the same time you have failed to address any of my points: (a) that Abd has profound history of ignoring warnings about his behavior, and (b) that this proposal is simply a green light for him to going on doing that. Raul654 (talk) 05:59, 2 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]

"this is possibly the most ridiculous proposal I've ever seen in an arbcom case" - I thought that was one of your points. Are you now saying it wasn't one of your points? If it is not a point, then what is it? Also, you might want to note below that I likewise oppose this proposal. --GoRight (talk) 14:30, 2 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Oppose An unreasonable and completely unworkable suggestion which fails to recognize the fundamental problems with Abd's editing. Mathsci (talk) 23:44, 1 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Oppose as written The proposal has a vague hint of a mentorship but without any capabilities for enforcement or restraint on Abd's behavior. Perhaps a strict mentorship by a person of Arbcom's choosing (not Abd's choosing) with clear authority to enforce via bans, blocks etc. could be workable. Even then I would be skeptical. But this -- no. Short Brigade Harvester Boris (talk) 23:54, 1 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Oppose - I recognize that C has good intentions here, but I don't believe that Abd needs a keeper or an interpreter. YMMV. --GoRight (talk) 04:59, 2 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Proposals by User:Z

Proposed principles

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1) {text of Proposed principle}

Comment by Arbitrators:

Comment by parties:

Comment by others:

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2) {text of Proposed principle}

Note: All remedies that refer to a period of time, for example to a ban of X months or a revert parole of Y months, are to run concurrently unless otherwise stated.

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1) {text of proposed remedy}

Comment by Arbitrators:

Comment by parties:

Comment by others:

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2) {text of proposed remedy}

Place here items of evidence (with diffs) and detailed analysis

Abd's Evidence for consensus

In his present surface-level evidence section [26] Abd states that WMC edited a protected page, "ignoring an expressed consensus." The link to diffs yields a similar claim, "WMC edited Cold fusion while under protection, contrary to full consensus, as shown in [6] and [7], for the version of May 31."

The diffs given to support this "full consensus" link to two different polls, each offering two different versions of the page for editors to vote on. The first link (as you can check if you follow the diffs above) takes you to this poll which gives voters a choice between two versions, the version of 2:54 June 1, 2009, which has two supporters, Abd (10 points) and Krelikraver (10 points), and the version of 3:51 June 1 which was given 0 points by the same two editors, Abd and Krelikraver. There are no other votes for or against either of these two versions. Below this poll is a section labeled "Deprecated proposals, withdrawn by Abd" which lists two versions, the version of 19:01 May 21 which Abd has given 6 points, and the version of 16:51 May 31 which Abd has given 8 points. There are no other votes for or against either of these deprecated and withdrawn versions in this section.

The second link leads to this poll which gives voters a choice between two different versions, which you'll notice are the same two listed under "Deprecated proposals, withdrawn by Abd" in the poll above, the version of 19:01 May 21 which was rated "Acceptable" by Hippocrite and Verbal, and the version of 16:51 May 31 also rated "Acceptable" by Hippocrite and Verbal. There are no other votes for or against either of these two versions, or any other versions, in this poll.

Summarizing the data from these two polls, cited in the diffs given by Abd to show that there was a "full consensus" for the May 31 version: two versions, May 21 and May 31, were each supported by three people (the same three people): Verbal, Hippocrite and Abd, V & H in one poll and Abd in the other, although both of these "consensus" versions were marked "deprecated" and "withdrawn" by Abd in his poll. Sixteen people edited the talk page during the two days of the poll wars; 3/4 of them did not vote in either poll. To assert that these three people represent a "full consensus" that WMC should have honored when reverting the page is not reasonable, even if we ignore the fact that the three people supported two different versions. True, Abd gave the May 31 version two more points than the May 21 version, but we can't count the points because we don't know how many points Hippocrite and Verbal might have assigned the two versions, had Hippocrite chosen to ask people to vote on a point system rather than to designate whether the version was "Acceptable" or "Not Acceptable." If anyone cares, the version that I voted for and the version that Abd moved my vote to are not listed in either of these diffs.

At any rate, the many objections to the way the polling was conducted and the furor that surrounded the polling (illustrated with a few examples in my evidence section)) belie the claim that consensus existed on the page at the time of WMC's edit, which is being portrayed as an edit in defiance of consensus. There was no consensus. Woonpton (talk) 08:38, 28 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Comment by Arbitrators:

Comment by parties:

Comment by Abd. Woonpton has made a few mistakes.

I'd agree with Woonpton that "full consensus," understood broadly, hadn't been expressed; in that situation, it could be argued, WMC should not have edited the article at all. However, there certainly was no consensus on the version WMC reverted to, and, in fact, that version fully implemented, under protection, all of Hipocrite's reversions, both before May 14 and after, whereas subsequent compromises had been made, which is all I wanted. I'll show how I determined that there was full consensus, as expressed at the time, below.
There were no poll wars. It takes two sides to have a war, and while there was certainly disagreement about the polls, I did not oppose Hipocrite's poll, and I respected it in the sense of not neglecting it. For convenience, I later transcribed !votes from that poll into mine, making the appropriate conversion of approval = 10, and noting what had been done. In the end, polls are simply a device for collecting and estimating consensus, and any decision would be made by an RfPP administrator, on request, so fighting over polls was, to borrow a term from WMC, "stupid." At any time, any editor who thought I was not serving consensus could have changed any of it. And should I have -- very stupidly if one has attracted the attention of a cabal! -- edit warred to keep dissent out, and if I had somehow prevailed, even a cabal would have been unable to prevent the deciding neutral administrator from being informed. There would have been no edit warring, and, I'm sure, within a few days we'd have had a far more explicit consensus. A week cycle is about the minimum, because of editor's schedules, though it was already snowing for May 21/31, and it's possible that an ad-interim decision could have been made on one of those.
Woonpton misrepresents the state of the poll at the time of WMC's decision. I had, by that time, collapsed two versions with no expressed support. I had placed these versions in the poll myself. In removing them, I made it clear that anyone could restore them. Woonpton had, indeed, expressed support for one of these versions, and had she left her vote in place, or corrected it if it was in the wrong place, as suggested, it would not have been removed from the visible poll. It was still there in collapse.
Woonpton has misread the page she cites. What she calls a "section," "Deprecated proposals, withdrawn by Abd" was a collapse box. That was a title for the collapse, not for what followed. Nobody else misunderstood this. It was in place because that was where the proposals had existed, and they were numbered, so anyone looking for v3 or v4 could easily find them. I could have placed the collapse in a different position -- and I later did.
So, not two versions, but four versions were open for vote in my poll, and the poll instructions allowed anyone to add new versions if they wished.
Consensus isn't a matter of polls, but of editors. And from the poll !votes we can find a consensus that had been expressed. Woonpton was the only editor who had expressed anything different, with her withdrawn !vote, in fact, and her !vote, even if had been left, would have been an outlier; she was aware that the version she !voted for had serious deficiencies, but she is obviously a skeptic (in a way that defines, for the purpose of this RfAr, the cabal). Going back to what would be a highly controversial version, almost as controversial as the status quo (Hipocrite's gamed version, as protected) would not be something that an RfPP admin would have considered, I'm sure, it would have lost, as well, a great deal of work. Why was this version even in the poll? Because it had been suggested by the COI editor User:Kirk shanahan, a heavy critic of cold fusion research since the early 1990s.
There were three explicit supports for May 31, if we look at both polls. However, Krellkraver had supported June 1. He had not yet returned to consider other versions. June 1 (from the middle of the second edit war) was like May 31, only more so! It represented the state of the article when Hipocrite requested RfPP; i.e., it's what would have been protected if Hipocrite hadn't gamed the process. So I assumed that Krellkraver would have supported May 31, though possibly with less strength, and, in fact, when he returned, he did. He gave it a full 10. The archived poll is at [27].
Thus my claim that all editors who had !voted by that time, still early, looking at both polls, supported May 31 can be shown to be founded in the facts, and it was born out by subsequent expressions. WMC could have picked either May 31 or May 21; from the poll results, as they stood, May 31 had only a slight edge, an edge that wouldn't have been visible at all in a pure approval poll.
Instead he picked May 14, having been given an excuse by GoRight's proposal. GoRight acknowledged that he was unfamiliar with the versions and had not studied them, and he was suggesting some kind of compromise based on assumptions about stability that were not true. Again, at the time WMC picked May 14, there were only two supports for May 14, and following this would have involved considering GoRight's proposal as a new poll, which he explicitly disavowed wanting to do, and May 14 only looked good in comparison to the status quo, Hipocrite's gamed version with a drastically POV lead. (Not even Hipocrite supported that version; I suspect, in fact, that he started a new poll to avoid making a statement about his own version, since it would have been obvious had he !voted in my poll; his version was included in that poll. It's one that garnered no support; so Hipocrite had edited the article expecting no consensus, knowing that he'd have been reverted if protection were delayed. As to WMC, editing an article under protection is properly reserved to edits made to enforce clear policy or serving clear or at least substantial consensus. WMC knew he was disregarding consensus, he expected the edit to be controversial. That's the opposite of administrative responsibility: WMC's edit summary for the reversion: (Lets wind everyone up)
Had WMC picked May 21 (the version he'd protected before) or May 31 (the version before any revert warring began the second time), nobody would have been "wound up," and we would have turned to negotiating changes, starting with the ones that had been proposed, with edits, June 1. That process is now underway in the mediation, moving glacially. But moving. I believe that if WMC had not banned me from the Talk page, we'd now have consensus on the controversies involved in the second edit war. Hipocrite was intransigent, but he's gone. Verbal and Enric Naval will only go so far, they back down when there is reasonable sourcing and work on compromises, especially Enric. The section on "Be-8 theory" was a version that incorporated Enric's suggestions, and, I predict, that section or something better will emerge from mediation. If I'm not site-banned!
None of this is absolutely central to this case, except the ban that followed from my criticism of WMC for his choice. WMC's revert was an improvement to the article, for sure, over the as-protected version. However, by banning me, WMC prevented normal process from going further; I'd have predicted that, before protection expired, we'd have had, at least, May 31. Had he merely banned me from editing the article, same result. I'm not crucial to the Cold fusion article, in the long run, but in the short run, I'm it, I know the sources, I have access to them, and I've been exercised to work on it. I have sought to exclude nobody, not even the very biased Kirk shanahan, certainly not Enric Naval, Verbal, Woonpton, and not even Hipocrite, though the latter's behavior was so outrageous that I doubt he'd have lasted long if he hadn't "retired." --Abd (talk) 16:59, 29 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Comment by others:

Brief response to Abd. I can't read this whole thing, but I'll reply to just one or two things my glance caught as I quickly scanned down the vast length of this post:

my analysis is strictly of the evidence Abd provided in the form of two diffs to support the claim that WMC had edited "contrary to consensus." My description and analysis of those two diffs is accurate, as people can see by looking at the diffs themselves), and shows that the consensus claimed is not supported by the diffs. Abd's response to my analysis is at least twice as long as the analysis itself, and on a quick scan it seems that it doesn't confine itself to a rebuttal about those two diffs, but covers a great many things, including the insinsuation, apparently intended to cast doubt on my analysis, that I'm a "skeptic" (I'm not sure what that's supposed to mean, but I am a scientist by nature and training; I have a solid science background; I am a retired statistician. The science of drawing conclusions from evidence, of teaching people not to draw conclusions that aren't supported by evidence, has been my life's work). If that qualifies me for the cabal, then I'm proud to be a member. But that has nothing to do with the fact that the diffs Abd provided as evidence to justify the claim that there was a consensus, do not support that claim. If Abd has better diffs to support the claim, he should provide them. I'm done here.Woonpton (talk) 17:55, 29 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Comment by Bilby - I don't think that the Arbs will have much trouble forming their own opinions after they view the polls. However, in the interests of clarity:

Abd commented "I did not oppose Hipocrite's poll" - I'm afraid he did. He stated, immediately after Hipocrite started a new poll, "I object to this new poll as splitting and confusing work on this issue."
You cannot translate someone's support in one poll to a numerical value in the other. Because a) one poll had more options than the other, and b) support in a non-ranged poll does not equal full support in a ranged poll.

In all honesty, I still can't see how any consensus can be drawn out of the mess that those two polls made. - Bilby (talk) 18:30, 29 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

It's very simple, Bilby. Ignore the poll structure, just look at the expressed opinions. Treat an explicit zero as rejection. Treat a 10 as explicit approval, the same as a simple approval in Hipocrite's poll. 10 clearly indicates full approval. If you like, take the numerical votes into the second poll, instead of the absolute votes in the second poll into the first. There are many ways that the analysis can be done, and I'll claim that any reasonable analysis" will support May 21 and May 31 over all other versions. There are two kinds of range polls: absolute sum and average. There are advantages to each, but I believe that all the methods I've seen will come up with the same results. It looks complex because of that second poll being started. Yes, I did "object" to it in that sense, but I didn't take the disruption to a noticeboard, and I worked with the poll and did not reject or devalue its results. The way that I pulled those votes into the range poll, to assist in analysis, gave them maximum strength; were we going to make a decision strictly by the !votes, those votes would have been as decisive as possible. Editors decided which poll to !vote in, which means that they decided how to express themselves. Most of the !votes were exact equivalents, a zero in the range poll is either the same as no vote in either poll, if one uses sum of votes, or it will drag down the average vote, but average vote in this situation, I'd not advise, precisely because of the two polls. In the sum-of-votes poll, a zero is quite the same as no vote in the second poll, and that's totally appropriate. The only question is what to do with intermediate votes, and a deciding admin might want to take weak opinions into account. So Hipocrite indicated, not in his vote, but in comment, that he preferred one version, but accepted the other, and this could be translated into a weaker vote for the second. But if Hipocrite wanted to express a weak vote, he could easily have done it, simply by voting in the other poll. Anything he could express in his poll, he could have expressed precisely in the Range poll. Conversely, a vote in the range of, say 6-10 could be considered "acceptance" of the version, and the higher the number is the clearer that is. But someone who voted an intermediate vote in the range poll has explicitly expressed that, an intermediate vote. There is a whole theory of "voter satisfaction" maximization behind range polling, suffice it to say that it's a subject I've studied for years, and, indeed, range polls have been shown to be very efficient for discovering consensus more rapidly than is possible with approval polls, because with range votes it's possible to indicate weaker preference strength than all-or-nothing, and, from that, predict reasonably well how a !voter would vote with altered options. (It's a mistake to think that Range analysis is limited to just adding up or averaging the results, one can, for example, sweep the "approval cutoff" and see what happens, which simulates a series of Approval Polls. The special problem here was that approval polling is quite enough when there are only two options, but in order to proceed with full openness and no prejudgment, there had to be more than two options. Technically, as well, if the answer is A or B or no consensus, there are three options. Still, approval polling works well, usually, especially if, should there be no consensus, there is then a new poll, possibly with new options, and !voters will shift their votes. If voters vote Range like they do Approval (all or nothing), Range reduces to approval, and it's never worse.

I never claimed that the poll had reached a conclusion. I'd have waited at least a few more days, unless it became more clear than it was -- which was still quite clear on two options as being about equally acceptable. My !votes, in spite of our supposed dispute, essentially agreed quite closely with Hipocrite's on what a good compromise was. If I'd voted in his poll, we'd have had May 21 or May 31, the same result as the overall set of polls indicated.

Bilby, you've missed the trees for the forest. The trees are the expressed voter opinions, in context, which we can see if we look at them one at a time. Voters often express complex opinions, it's one of the problems with Wikipedia process -- classical deliberative process is deliberately restricted to Yes or No to a motion covering a single topic, with complex decisions being made interatively until the required consensus is found (it's a very powerful method, far more powerful than single-ballot methods with more complex choices, but the latter is only used in the name of efficiency, not for power of discovery of consensus). What you and Woonpton haven't done is an analysis of each voters opinions, instead, there has been focus on alleged complexities that supposedly make it too hard to see what was expressed. Both polls existed simultaneously, which means that voters decided where to vote, and one voter eventually made some expression in one poll and some expression in the other and *all* the votes make sense, except perhaps for Woonpton's withrawn vote, which I was forced to neglect because she chose to withdraw it, and even if it had been left in, it would have had no effect on the obvious results, it was moot, nobody else chose to support that version.

Further, this doesn't really matter, it's a relatively minor point, we would not be here if that's all WMC had done. WMC took a content position by making that edit, and if there was no consensus there, there was no consensus to follow, as required for editing the article under protection. Rather, WMC decided whom he wanted to please and displease, and, perhaps, poke. He -- correctly -- anticipated that it would be controversial, thus establishing what it wasn't, i.e., an edit as an admin to a protected article serving consensus. If the polls weren't clear, he shouldn't have edited the article without consultation, probably not at all on his own initiative, the editors should have asked when ready. And if we conclude that his edit was legitimate, nevertheless it was disputed, and that can't be denied. There was now a content dispute between myself and WMC (with some support for my position from GoRight, as I recall, plus, by the time I was banned, much clearer support for what I've claimed was already visible at the time of his edit). WMC explicitly rejected my argument in that dispute, then banned me as part of the same underlying situation. That's disallowed under recusal rules no matter what we think about wikilawyering conflict to avoid admin action. --Abd (talk) 22:26, 30 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I'm a tad surprised that you seem to continue to think it is ok to translate votes from a smaller approval poll to a larger range vote. In case it helps, my stance is:

I can't see how you can translate votes from a smaller poll to a larger one. As a quick and dirty example: if I give you a choice between chocolate and icecream, and you pick chocolate, I can't assume that you would make the same choice when given a choice between chocolate, icecream and marshmallows. (I'd pick chocolate in the first, and marshmallows in the second). In this case, Hipocrite's poll had only two options. Yours had seven. It is incorrect to assume that someone's choice on Hipocrite's poll would remain the same if they had chosen to vote on yours.
Approval polls cannot be reasonably translated to range polls. You assumed that if Hipocrite and Verbal had voted in your poll, they would have given a full 10 points to each of the items they voted for in Hipocrite's poll. You cannot make this assumption. The other direction may be possible (10 points in a ranged poll = support in an approval poll).
The big one is simple - you can't vote for other people, even if believe that it is how they would have voted. Hipocrite and Verbal did not vote in your poll. You placed votes for them, based on how you believed they would have voted, using evidence from an alternative, but not identical, poll. There was no need to do this, and it was, to me at least, wrong. I'd be very surprised if ArbCom saw this differently, but they might, like me, want to assume that you had good intentions.

This is an important issue, because you argued that WMC edited against consensus. I would argue that he didn't edit, but reverted to a pre-edit war state, as per policy, and that there was no consensus to edit against. Nor any probablity of finding one as things were going. In addition, when WMC reverted only two editors had voted in each poll - to few to be meaningful. - Bilby (talk) 00:50, 31 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]