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SheriffIsInTown POV pushing editing pattern

SheriffIsInTown (talk · contribs) has been consistently POV pushing against Imran Khan and the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI), figures in Pakistan’s political crisis. I reported them on this noticeboard recently, and I hoped that the issue would be resolved after my report, but I am reporting them again as their WP:CPUSH behavior pattern has persisted, primarily against Imran Khan, warranting a topic ban.

POV pushing on Imran Khan BLP
On the Imran Khan BLP, Sheriff has added exclusively negative criticism about Khan, including citing an opinion piece instead of reliable inline citations and following a one-sided narrative. In this discussion, they argued that one sexual harassment allegation should have an independent section, followed by accusing both me and the user who added the section (WikiEnthusiast1001) of POV pushing in favor of PTI because we advocated for a merge into another section to fit the article's structure.

Following a somewhat resolution to the dispute, they added a large section about Khan's comments on rape and allegations of victim-blaming but was entirely one-sided, failing to mention other viewpoints or any context, essentially only covering the negatives which forced me and another user to step in and add context [1] [2]. Even worse, Sheriff already knows that Khan's comments on rape were contested as out of context, as they edited on a page talking about the allegations but did not add the other viewpoint.

Previously, they put false information on Imran Khan’s BLP article that was not supported by any of the 3 citations they gave and citation bombed to make it seem like a proper piece of information. I asked them twice on why they did this in the talk page, but they only responded when Saqib intervened in this discussion.

Even more concerning, they cited an opinion piece for 2 paragraphs of information on Imran Khan's page without even mentioning it was an opinion piece. They also used that one opinion piece as a citation for two paragraphs about contentious information on an already contentious protected BLP, without inline citations or even a mention of the opinion piece or its authors which was discussed here. Sheriff further made bad faith accusations towards me when I explained it was necessary to mention it is an opinion piece. They were extremely reluctant to revoke the opinion piece.

In response to the lengthy negative opinion piece Sheriff added, I balanced it with a short paragraph summarizing three positive opinion pieces [3]. However, even after this, instead of allowing for balance, Sheriff selectively extracted negative points from these generally positive pieces and showed further compulsion to add only negative content. [4] Sheriff has also added imbalanced criticism of Imran Khan's time in office, which other users including me have had to correct.

Khan is a controversial figure in Pakistani politics and his BLP is a high-priority and a GA nomination which is why these editing patterns are even more concerning. Sheriff argues that I have added 'promotional content' and they are balancing that, but as seen, most of these changes on the Imran Khan BLP occur without me even adding any content and are unprovoked.

Talk Page Behavior
Discussions with them often result in WP:IDHT by them. Past aggressive remarks: [5] and [6]. They have accused me of bad faith and portraying Imran Khan as suffering because I used the word 'Campaigning', exhibiting IDHT in the discussion. Additionally, talk page discussions give an insight into Sheriff's POV as there are instances where Sheriff's comments on talk pages have veered into personal opinions. They stated that There was a legal issue about this because PTI failed to conduct intra-party elections properly. When you don’t follow the law, there are consequences. [7], which the "consequences" remark inserts their political opinion regarding PTI into a talk page. In this comment Claiming it was a false flag operation is a serious accusation. Simply stating that it wasn’t isn’t sufficient; it requires an explanation of why it wasn’t a false flag. [8], Sheriff challenges PTI's claim of a "false flag operation," which seems to stray into political bias, as it focuses on discrediting a political claim rather than representing the information in a factual manner. Additionally, another user pointed out that even after this report, Sheriff left remarks on an edit summary in the Imran Khan BLP [9]. The remark "One happy family, add a relevant photo of good time." is a further POV statement against Khan and is an insight into why they have added selectively imbalanced information and negative opinion pieces onto the Imran Khan BLP.

Edit Warring on Election Pages and 3RR
A major example of this behavior is that they reverted three times [10] [11] [12] on 2024 Pakistani general election, out of which 2 reverts were done within 24 hours, when already being told not to by multiple editors in this discussion, I decided to initiate a civil discussion first to avoid an edit war with Sheriff, though they still continued edit warring, continuing to quickly reduce the PTI's seats despite no consensus. Though this was solved, it is a repeated and worsening pattern of adding imbalanced content against Imran Khan and the PTI, exhibiting WP:IDHT in the talk page and then other users stepping in to resolve it.

Other Users Confirming This Behavior
Saqib - Saqib has raised concerns multiple times over SheriffIsInTown's POV pushing behavior patterns against PTI and Imran Khan on several pages including on Sheriff's talk page, primarily Sheriff removing PTI on election pages as well as in this discussion and here.

WikiEnthusiast1001 - WikiEnthusiast1001 has accused Sheriff of disruptive editing on the Imran Khan page and other pages recently. They also balanced out Sheriff's one-sided edits on Imran Khan and pointed out: This section is oddly worded and would be clearer if titled 'Controversies.' It presents a one-sided view without mentioning Imran's later clarifications. As Titan and I have noted, your strong involvement with this page suggests a potential bias. It might be best for you to take a break from editing and come back with fresh perspective. Take some time to unwind—there's more to life than just editing Wikipedia In their edit diff.

Saad Ali Khan Pakistan - Saad Ali Khan Pakistan has has accused SheriffIsInTown of bullying and constantly reverting his edits on election pages here and here. He recently urged admins to take action against Sheriff for said disruptive behavior.

I urge admins to take action for the POV pushing behavior, as multiple other users have taken notice of it, and the diffs on the Imran Khan BLP are clear. The resolution to this negative editing pattern which has to be constantly corrected for NPOV, would be a topic ban on pages related to Imran Khan for SheriffIsInTown. Titan2456 (talk) 20:44, 17 November 2024 (UTC)

Most of the accusations mentioned here were addressed in a previous ANI, where the majority of uninvolved editors dismissed their report. After Drmies closed the discussion, they approached Drmies to reopen the discussion, but their request was denied, and they were instructed to present stronger evidence, which they have been attempting to gather since then. As I mentioned, most of these accusations were already discussed and dismissed in the previous ANI. If an admin highlights anything new, I will gladly address it. Most issues arise from OP adding promotional or biased content, which compels me to step in and balance the narrative. Their support for PTI and its leaders is clear from the user box displayed on their user page, as seen in this revision:

This user supports the
Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf

They are not a neutral editor and are not here to contribute to building an encyclopedia but are instead driven by a political agenda. So far, I have only managed to address a fraction of their edits. In nearly every article related to a PTI figure that they have edited, they predominantly added promotional content, much of which still requires balancing—a task I intend to continue as time permits. I anticipate that they will return here repeatedly, as the promotional content they add can only be counterbalanced with material they may not favour, given their support for PTI and its leaders. They are upset with me because I am the only one standing in their way. Sheriff | ☎ 911 | 22:24, 17 November 2024 (UTC)

Hello, Titan2456, please post an ANI notification on the User talk page of every editor you mention in your opening comments, not just Sheriff. They should know that their comments might be discussed. No comment yet on the substance of your remarks. Thank you. Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 22:50, 17 November 2024 (UTC)

To SheriffIsInTown, most of these accusations were not taken up in the previous ANI, in fact several incidents brought up occurred after the first ANI. As mentioned, everyone is free to have their opinions on their user pages. Digging up old, now removed, revisions of my user page is not appropriate. This thread is on the POV pushing on the Imran Khan BLP which is very concerning as other users have pointed out as well.

This user supports the
Pakistan Muslim League (N).

As for the old pro-PTI userbox, I can easily find an old pro-PMLN userbox that existed your user page. Again, userboxes are irrelevant in this thread, and everyone is entitled to their own opinions as long as it does not affect the content of the encyclopedia, which the POV pushing on the Imran Khan BLP has. Titan2456 (talk) 20:28, 23 November 2024 (UTC)

It reflects an extreme level of battleground mentality to retrieve old versions of a deleted user page from the internet. The diffs I shared were entirely on-wiki and permissible for use. I created the articles First 100 days of Imran Khan’s premiership and Premiership of Imran Khan, which, up to the revisions shown, consist exclusively of my contributions. How much support for PML (N) do you see there? In contrast, your edits consistently reflect support for PTI. Sheriff | ☎ 911 | 21:33, 23 November 2024 (UTC)

Here, they express a clear intention to specifically expand the criticism and allegations section against Ishaq Dar, a political opponent of PTI—the party they have openly declared their support for. Can we trust an editor who has openly aligned themselves with a political party and then explicitly states their intent to add criticism and allegations to articles about leaders of the opposing party? Shouldn’t their edits be reviewed for neutrality? Furthermore, they repeatedly file ANI reports against me for merely attempting to balance their edits, which ultimately wastes everyone’s time. Sheriff | ☎ 911 | 01:44, 18 November 2024 (UTC)

So much to unpack, so maybe I'll go section by section. The POV pushing appears to be neutrally balanced. The wording could be better, but that's why there's a talk page. Aggressive behavior? I mean yeah it's aggressive but it feels more like a slap on the wrist type of warning that could be given, nothing more. The 3RR was discussed last time. Two NOTFORUM remarks doesn't feel like enough and they aren't exactly forum-like comments anyways. So, what actually do you want accomplished? Do you need someone to wag their finger at Sheriff and tell them to calm down? From what I can tell aggression is not equal to disruption, but making constant ANI reports about one user is. Conyo14 (talk) 02:35, 18 November 2024 (UTC)

Thank you for your response Conyo14, my primary concern is the POV pushing, which as stated is about not including other viewpoints (only adding criticism) when already knowing of such information. The opinion piece citation, only adding extensive amounts of negative information as well as watering down positive language on the Imran Khan BLP is WP:CPUSH. The reason for filing 2 reports was that following the report, Sheriff continued the same behavior, hence I have reported them again, with new information. The information added by Sheriff itself is not neutral, as it is covering contentious topics and presenting only one-sided views and criticism, it is POV. I acknowledge that most of these were solved in talk pages but the discussions involved WP:IDHT, with Sheriff ignoring points. For the 3RR example, it was only resolved after Saqib stepped in and the Imran Khan BLP after WikiEnthusiast1001 did. Similarly, in a recent discussion regarding the PTI's seat count, they have claimed to refuted Al Jazeera, BBC and multiple other newspapers with these remarks, which provides no source and ignores multiple sources given, it also ignores past and repeated discussions. These are repeated editing patterns and not isolated incidents which is why I have brought it to ANI. Regarding actions, if a user continues to cite opinion pieces, misrepresent sources to favor negative information, and present one-sided views on a specific BLP, I believe a topic ban from that specific BLP is a reasonable solution if this behavior persists after the first ANI report. I hope this clarifies this. Thank you. Titan2456 (talk) 16:25, 18 November 2024 (UTC)

It seems more like countering your POV. In case you did not hear it, Conyo14 stated, So much to unpack, so maybe I’ll go section by section. The POV pushing appears to be neutrally balanced. This means they took the time to review your over 8,000-byte report, examined your evidence, and concluded that what you called POV pushing was actually an effort to achieve neutral balance. As I have explained before, in case you didn’t hear it, most of my edits were made to counter the overly promotional and one-sided content you added. That’s why my contributions might seem more negative—they balance out the positive bias you had already introduced. You left no room for me to add anything positive because your edits were so overwhelmingly favourable. Why would you submit an 8,000-byte report? Do you think I don’t face challenges with other editors? Yet, I don’t file such extensive reports against anyone because I have no political affiliation. Filing such a lengthy report suggests more than just volunteerism—it points to a deeper affiliation. You might have a conflict of interest here. A topic ban is warranted—not for me, but for you. You should be restricted from editing any post-1970 Pakistani politics-related articles to prevent further use of Wikipedia for advancing PTI’s political agenda and for targeting living opponents of PTI. Sheriff | ☎ 911 | 20:00, 18 November 2024 (UTC)

What promotional information did I add on the Imran Khan BLP which prompted you to cite a negative opinion piece for two paragraphs without mentioning it was an opinion piece? When you added a paragraph about one large negative opinion piece, I was forced to balance it with some short sentences on some positive opinions (which there were multiple), which you did not allow for by selectively extracting negative information from positive opinion pieces, why was this? What promotional content did I add for you to add one-sided claims about Imran Khan's comments on sexual violence? Also, which living opponents of PTI have I "targeted", are you talking about Ishaq Dar? I have added no information on his article, please follow up, as I want to know which opponents of PTI I have disproportionally represented. Titan2456 (talk) 21:58, 18 November 2024 (UTC)

Sheriff, it is not wrong to express support for a political party. It becomes a COI if Titan were working with a campaign or for the political party's headquarters. However, it will be very good to keep in mind during the next ANI report, if there is one.

Titan, again, that statement isn't POV pushing, but it was worded very poorly. The wording is much more appropriate now. Conyo14 (talk) 00:32, 19 November 2024 (UTC)

Expressing support for a political party is not inherently problematic, but when that support influences their editing and compromises neutrality, it becomes an issue. Based on my observations, the content they add to articles about PTI tends to lack neutral language and leans towards being promotional. For instance, the section titled "Education Sector Reforms" on PTI president's article focuses solely on achievements and could have been phrased in a more neutral manner. Sheriff | ☎ 911 | 01:27, 19 November 2024 (UTC)

To Conyo14, Yes, the wording is better now following the balancing corrections added by me and other users. The situation is that these are repeated incidents that I cannot keep correcting. If it was just citing an opinion piece or adding extensive negative information to Imran Khan’s time in office, I would give Sheriff the benefit of the doubt, but continuing to add Khan’s controversial comments on rape without him and his government’s clarification, despite Sheriff knowing this and expanding negative content from positive opinion pieces is a bit too far to be good faith. If you believe that filing an ANI report again for this is not the right course of action then please advise me what would be if this pattern is repeating over and over on a contentious high priority BLP. Thank you Conyo14. Titan2456 (talk) 01:57, 19 November 2024 (UTC)

The appropriate course of action for you would be to refrain from adding promotional content in the first place and instead ensure that the content is balanced, so I don’t need to intervene to correct it. Regarding content related to sexual misconduct, please note that there are standalone articles addressing such matters for other political figures, such as Andrew Cuomo sexual harassment allegations and Donald Trump sexual misconduct allegations. The content I added was fully sourced, so there is no basis for you to criticise me for including it. Sheriff | ☎ 911 | 02:18, 19 November 2024 (UTC)

As mentioned in the above comment, they added promotional content to the article on PTI president Parvez Elahi, as shown in this diff. Upon closer inspection, I identified issues with the first part of the content, while the second part references a PDF that will take me some time to review thoroughly. The first part, as noted in my edit summaries, was sourced to the university’s website, claiming the university was built by Elahi. There were two sources cited: The first source was a message from the vice chancellor. I removed it, explaining in the edit summary that it was a “Primary source, sourced to Vice Chancellor’s message.” The second source did not mention Elahi at all, so I removed the content with the edit summary “And no mention of Elahi in this second source.” For now, as long as this ANI remains open, I will continue reporting my findings on their apparent bias in favour of PTI. Sheriff | ☎ 911 | 04:37, 19 November 2024 (UTC)

Spot on @Titan2456, I agree that a topic ban should be placed on Sheriff. Here, Sheriff makes a peculiar comment: "One happy family, add a relevant photo of good time." Similar to statements from Khan's opposition, this is highly unencyclopedic. Strangely, he placed the 2018 image in the Removal from office section, even though Khan was removed in 2022. Possibly biased? WikiEnthusiast1001 (talk) 05:29, 20 November 2024 (UTC)

There is nothing inappropriate about the comment. In the picture, they are smiling and can reasonably be described as "happy." Additionally, the fact that the picture is from 2018 is irrelevant since the section discusses the Army's role in Khan's removal. This is the only picture I could find where Khan and Bajwa, the head of the Army during his tenure, are present together. Why is it that no pictures of Khan interacting with Army personnel are being included in articles about him? While he may have had conflicts with the Army, we, as volunteer Wikipedians, do not. Moreover, why does Titan appear to be adding the cropped version of the same picture with Pompeo that excludes Bajwa? They are even placing that cropped picture of Khan with Pompeo under the Domestic appointments section, which does not align with the section's content. In contrast, the version, showing Bajwa, would have been far more relevant to the Domestic appointments section since Bajwa's tenure was extended during Khan's time. Sheriff | ☎ 911 | 11:39, 20 November 2024 (UTC)

@WikiEnthusiast1001 Since you are already here, why not explain your action to remove the only criticism from the COVID-19 response section while filling it entirely with achievements and praise? The section is now heavily imbalanced and lacks a neutral perspective due to the removal of criticism. How about we hold you accountable for this action and consider a topic ban, given how readily you suggest such measure against me? Sheriff | ☎ 911 | 12:53, 20 November 2024 (UTC)

You are unfairly accusing me of removing criticism when I only removed excessive detail. Readers could easily hover over the citation to see the criticism, which was unnecessary and overly detailed. As @Titan2456 and @Saad Ali Khan Pakistan have pointed out, you seem overly attached to this page, treating it as if you own it. You've harassed multiple contributors, including me, by falsely accusing me of removing sources simply because they were Indian during the Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Robert Cawthome (2nd nomination) discussion. Your stubborn refusal to admit your mistake there and in this second ANI shows that YOU are the problem. WikiEnthusiast1001 (talk) 04:24, 21 November 2024 (UTC)

You did not remove excessive detail, as I highlighted in my earlier comment with the diff. You actually removed the only criticism in the COVID-19 response section, replacing it entirely with achievements. Should I paste here exactly what you added and removed in that edit? Accusing me of being overly attached to the article is baseless. Over your eleven months of account activity, your average monthly edits on this article surpass my own throughout my account’s lifespan—if we’re using that metric. Regarding the AfD, yes, I voted to keep and defended my stance with the sources I found. Ultimately, I was proven wrong, and you won the debate. However, that does not justify taunting me over and over and over again. I even approached your talk page to request that you drop the stick, yet you refuse to hear. Sheriff | ☎ 911 | 11:33, 22 November 2024 (UTC)

Per WP:DETAIL you are supposed to summarize the main article, not add tens of negative Op-Eds. Titan2456 (talk) 16:15, 24 November 2024 (UTC)

So, you are saying that per WP:DETAIL, adding all the following positive coverage by Enthusiast was okay: At the start of the pandemic, Imran Khan resisted a nationwide lockdown despite criticism from the opposition and others. He explained that while his government considered lockdowns implemented in other countries, they determined such measures would devastate Pakistan’s struggling economy, where many depend on daily wages.

“The Pakistan situation is not the same as that of the US or Europe...25 percent of our population is living in grave poverty,” Khan said in a televised address. “If we shut down cities, we might save people from corona, but they will die of hunger.”

Instead of placing a nationwide lockdown, Khan implemented targeted measures, shutting down COVID-19 hotspots by using military technology to track and trace those exposed. This "smart lockdown" approach aimed to isolate affected areas while minimizing economic disruption. "The ISI has given us a great system for track and trace," the prime minister, Imran Khan, said. "It was originally used against terrorism, but now it is has come in useful against coronavirus."

Khan's strategy proved effective, when he was praised by the World Health Organization (WHO) for his government's response to the virus by establishing temporary isolation wards. Bangladesh's The Business Standard lauded him for his "Smart Lockdowns", while the Imperial College of London ranked Pakistan at fourth for coronavirus reproduction in the country based on data from 20 July 2020. Pakistan achieved a rating of 0.73 rate, countries below 1 rating were considered the best for their efforts against Covid. In The Express Tribune, Muhammad Zohaib Jawaid said the PTI government achieved a "V-shaped economic recovery."

In September 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) said Pakistan was "among countries from whom the international community should learn how to deal with the Covid-19 pandemic."

In July 2021, Pakistan was ranked among the top 10 countries for its handling of Covid-19 by The Economist. Khan commended the National Command and Operation Center (NCOC), established by his government, for playing a significant role in the achievement. Pakistan secured the third spot with a score of 84.4. The top-ranked country was Hong Kong, scoring 96.3, followed by New Zealand with a score of 87.8.

In the East Asia Forum, Shuja Nawaz wrote Pakistan's "serious economic crisis exacerbated by COVID-19 forced Khan to seek external assistance" from the IMF, Saudi Arabia and China.

But following one paragraph of criticism which was removed by Enthusiast was not okay per WP:DETAIL: In an opinion editorial wrote in March 2020, Ayesha Siddiqa wrote Khan "appeared confused and not in charge of the situation. From poorly explaining the risks associated with the spread of the deadly coronavirus to badly calculating the pros and cons of a lockdown, the Pakistan Prime Minister has looked clueless". In April 2020, Imad Zafar penned an opinion editorial in The Asia Times, wrote Khan's government was "playing the blame game by bashing opposition politicians to divert the masses’ attention from the pandemic’s effect". In April 2020, the government's responses led to pandemic-related response confusion, being "lackadaisical" and having "deprived the country of a clear sense of direction."

References

Sheriff | ☎ 911 | 17:13, 24 November 2024 (UTC)

@Drmies or other available admins: I would like to point out that the OP keeps altering the original report after responses have been made. I believe this practice should be avoided, as earlier comments only address the initial report and not the subsequent changes. Given this concern, I request the closure of the report, as it is impractical to continually track and respond to the modifications being introduced. Sheriff | ☎ 911 | 00:22, 23 November 2024 (UTC)

The report shouldn’t be closed as the POV pushing on the Imran Khan BLP has not been addressed. My changes to the report only includes one new point which occurred after the report, with the remaining alterations being minor clarifications to the report. However I will stop altering the report if that is of concern to admins. Titan2456 (talk) 00:50, 23 November 2024 (UTC)

You should not modify a report or any comment that has already received a response. This is part of basic ethics about any discussion on Wikipedia. Sheriff | ☎ 911 | 01:15, 23 November 2024 (UTC)

I don’t believe there is a Wikipedia law preventing me from editing my own report, besides, admins will decide when it is closed, not you. Titan2456 (talk) 14:42, 23 November 2024 (UTC)

I was not deciding on my own, I was requesting the admins. 🙂 Sheriff | ☎ 911 | 14:50, 23 November 2024 (UTC)

@Titan2456: Actually, there is. You should NOT alter your posts after someone has replied to them. It's considered disruptive and can result in sanctions. See WP:REDACT. — The Hand That Feeds You:^Bite 17:43, 24 November 2024 (UTC)

Understood, I stopped altering it after Sheriff informed me, thank you. Titan2456 (talk) 18:01, 24 November 2024 (UTC)

Additionally, this report was frivolous to begin with and has already run its course, with only one uninvolved editor, Conyo14, commenting and dismissing the POV concerns raised against me. However, the counter-evidence I presented regarding the OP and the other involved editor, WikiEnthusiast1001, requires evaluation. Unfortunately, we have not received any input from uninvolved editors regarding their behaviour. Sheriff | ☎ 911 | 01:12, 23 November 2024 (UTC)

A slight correction: Conyo14 did note that the OP’s repeated filing of an ANI constitutes disruptive behaviour, which, in my view, supports my stance that this was a frivolous ANI. Sheriff | ☎ 911 | 02:25, 23 November 2024 (UTC)

That is why it is best to wait for an admin response rather than bludgeoning and rushing for a closure of discussion. Drmies also raised concerns over the POV pushing, which is why more admins must be heard from on the POV pushing. Titan2456 (talk) 02:29, 23 November 2024 (UTC)

I was correct to raise the concern about your modification of the report which has already received scores of replies. It is totally unfair for you to do that, you should revert those edits made after the report started receiving replies. Nobody is trying to bludgeon, I merely stated the feedback we have received so far. Drmies' concern has already been addressed, and I have clarified my position in response. Additionally, most Wikipedia editors are volunteers, and ANI is an integral part of Wikipedia. We cannot compel anyone to provide feedback. When participating in a forum, you should accept the voluntary feedback given and move forward. Sheriff | ☎ 911 | 04:21, 23 November 2024 (UTC)

It has received only 2 replies by admins. By that logic Conyo14’s concern has already been addressed, we have to wait for an admin decision. The last part of your comment is unwarranted, everyone knows this information that applies to closed discussions, I can also say the same for violating consensus and BRD multiple times to add opinion pieces and one-sided information. You cannot disavow a report involving you as frivolous, wait for admins. Titan2456 (talk) 14:47, 23 November 2024 (UTC)

This discussion has been closed. Please do not modify it.
The following discussion has been closed. Please do not modify it.
I agree too. Saad Ali Khan Pakistan (talk) 13:09, 21 November 2024 (UTC) (blocked sock of LanguageXpert) I have been editing in Wikipedia since 2017 and I tried to be as neural as possible while editing pages. I never involved in unnecessary changes or edits which are not related to that person. I mainly focused on constituency pages and electoral history related pages because they were not updated like electoral pages of India. I edited over 900 constituency pages of National Assembly and Provincial assemblies of Pakistan and didn't favor any party or went against any party or politician. I was editing daily until Sheriff came and started bullying by reverting edits I made before 2024 elections. I wanted to add election boxes in constituency pages so that during and after election results it would be easy for the editors to edit and write results. He came and reverted my edits and even after elections when majority of Media sources from Pakistan and the World were showing PTI backed Independents separate from other Independents having support of no parties. He started to argue with me and reverted my edits again. I stopped editing since March because I don't have spare time to waste on a person who likes to bully and argue with other editors like he owns Wikipedia. If a person writes information without credible source their edits should be reverted but if someone reverts edits for no reason than I consider this harassment and bullying and this needs to be stopped. An Institution like Wikipedia should not tolerate bullies like Sheriff which misuse their influence and bully other editors. I request Administration to take serious action against bullies like Sheriff. Saad Ali Khan Pakistan (talk) (blocked sock of LanguageXpert)

User:SheriffIsInTown, I'm a bit surprised you made this edit. Drmies (talk) 19:02, 20 November 2024 (UTC)

• I don't have an opinion on the conduct of either party or on the content of the article. The filing editor had filed a request at DRN for moderated discussion, and then filed this case here. I have closed the DRN discussion because we do not discuss a dispute at DRN that is also being discussed in another content forum or a conduct forum. Robert McClenon (talk) 19:06, 20 November 2024 (UTC)

  I support that decision, thank you Robert McClenon. Titan2456 (talk) 19:13, 20 November 2024 (UTC)

@Drmies There was certainly scope for improvement, and I accepted the subsequent revisions made to that content. That being said, that diff was part of the previous ANI filed against me. Sheriff | ☎ 911 | 19:28, 20 November 2024 (UTC)

Sheriff, you did not accept subsequent revisions, that is false, and this proves it’s not a one-off mistake. First, you undid my edit of mentioning it is an opinion piece, then you argued that it was a reliable source which did not need a mention of the opinion piece status, then when addressed in talk, you accused me of Why do you consistently choose the most positive angles for PTI and Imran Khan and never balance it with contrary views to maintain neutrality? I am simply correcting the one-sided narrative, which came across as a chancellorship campaign, portraying him as suffering and still fighting and campaigning from jail. simply because I told you it was necessary to mention it is an opinion piece. Finally after you were convinced, I added a short few sentences about 3 positive opinion pieces, which as per WP:DUE would actually require more information than the 1 negative opinion piece. Regardless, you didn’t even allow for that and selectively extracted negative information from these mostly positive opinion pieces. Admins, I once again urge you to take notice of this behavior. Titan2456 (talk) 20:45, 20 November 2024 (UTC)

The edit you claim I undid was actually the result of an edit conflict. I had been working on several other language changes in that section for a while and had the editor open. It seems I published my edit around the same time as you, which inadvertently resulted in reverting your changes. Sheriff | ☎ 911 | 21:46, 20 November 2024 (UTC)

SheriffIsInTown, in the hatted portion of this discussion you mention the possibility of an "off-wiki PTI cabal". Please don't make conspiracy theory allegations like this unless you have some proof to support your claims. We're just focusing on editing on this project, not speculating about off-wiki connections which are unlikely to be real. Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 05:36, 23 November 2024 (UTC)

@Liz Understood. I will refrain from doing so in the future. However, I have some screenshots showing that someone approached me with this information. I would prefer not to reveal the identity of my source. My comment was triggered by the repeated appearance of Saad Ali Khan Pakistan in these ANI discussions, despite their account not having been used for main space editing since March. Sheriff | ☎ 911 | 12:04, 23 November 2024 (UTC)

• WikiEnthusiast1001 has been observed removing archived URLs from content likely perceived as negative by PTI and Imran Khan supporters. By removing these links, the content risks being challenged or removed later for failed verification in case of a broken url. This material had been part of a longstanding consensus and previously involved intense disputes. In their edit summary, they claimed to be removing duplicate sources and a source with an incorrect date, but their edits included more extensive removals beyond what was stated. The issue here is their simultaneous request for my topic ban, which would give them greater control over the page to make such changes unchecked. Titan often misinterprets sources to present content more positively, while Enthusiast introduces questionable edits with summaries that omit critical details about their actions. I had to step in and restore those archived URLs, but with my removal from the article, it risks becoming an even more biased fan page than it already is. Ironically, they attempt to turn pages into fan pages and then submit them for GAN, which inevitably fails due to the lack of neutrality and balance, as seen in this case. Instead of pushing for my topic ban, they should be thanking me for bringing balance and neutrality to the article, helping it get closer to GAN. The beauty of Wikipedia is that people come from different backgrounds and with different perspectives which help achieve neutrality and balance. Sheriff | ☎ 911 | 15:23, 23 November 2024 (UTC)

  Your logic is flawed regarding "removing archived URLs from content likely perceived as negative by PTI and Imran Khan supporters." If I were genuinely trying to turn it into a fanpage or saw the content as negative, I would have removed the entire URLs, not just the archived versions. I removed the archived URLs because I believed they were unnecessary, given that the live links were still accessible. I realize now that this was a mistake and will include archived links moving forward. Before making false accusations, take the time to investigate. For instance, I replaced an inaccurate source claiming Sita died in 2012 with a reliable one providing the correct date. Additionally, I corrected the chronological order of references, which you restored without verifying. Since when does a permanently dead link like Hutchens & Midgley 2015 take precedence over live URLs? WikiEnthusiast1001 (talk) 02:22, 24 November 2024 (UTC)

  Per WP:CITEORDER, the ordering does not matter. Sheriff | ☎ 911 | 03:37, 24 November 2024 (UTC)

  After I informed them about WP:CITEORDER, Enthusiast proceeded to mass revert all the changes I had made throughout the day, despite my edits being done in smaller increments with clear explanations in the edit summaries. Their edit summary for the mass revert stated Restoring chronological order undone by Sheriff and removing duplicate AP link, but their actions reversed far more than just that but they blame me for ownership issues. Sheriff | ☎ 911 | 17:29, 24 November 2024 (UTC)

HATting discussion initiated by now blocked sockpuppet. — The Hand That Feeds You:Bite 18:01, 22 November 2024 (UTC)
The following discussion has been closed. Please do not modify it.
This shows how neutral he is. In election pages of 1988 and 2015 Senate Elections MQM and PMLN ran as independents but they are shown as party but he is only showing PTI candidates as Independents. How can he do these kinds of edits without any discussion or consensus. Saad Ali Khan Pakistan (talk) 19:45, 20 November 2024 (UTC) (blocked sock of LanguageXpert) I do not recall ever editing the two Senate election pages you mentioned. Can you provide diffs showing me listing independent candidates as belonging to PML-N or MQM, or even supporting such a claim? It’s interesting how you appear in every ANI filed against me—this is the third one where you’ve shown up, repeating the same unfounded allegations. The last time, after seven months of inactivity, you surfaced specifically for my ANI. Your contribution frequency speaks for itself. For the onlookers: Saad Ali Khan Pakistan (talk · contribs · deleted contribs · logs · filter log · block user · block log), you are definitely not here to build encyclopedia but rather here to just target me. Sheriff | ☎ 911 | 20:09, 20 November 2024 (UTC) I went inactive just because of you. You were keep reverting my edits without no reason. You are the reason why Pakistani pages of Wikipedia are not updated like Indian or other countries. I wanted to contribute as much as possible but I will get bullied by reverting my edits by you. I give my time and effort and you come from no where and revert my edits by just one click. You should be ashamed of your behavior. Wherever any case will be filed involving you I will raise my voice to show your reality. Saad Ali Khan Pakistan (talk) 20:23, 20 November 2024 (UTC) (blocked sock of LanguageXpert) So, you are accepting that you are not here to build an encyclopedia but your life's mission now is to target me. Sheriff | ☎ 911 | 20:33, 20 November 2024 (UTC) I am here to show your reality of you that you are a bully. I don't consider bullies like you to be targeted or discussed. I am just here to give my opinion. My life has much important things to do instead of wasting my time and energy on a person like you who just likes to bully so that he gets discussed by other editors. I am not a supporter of any party and not a person like you targeting just one party and its leader and claims to be so-called "Neutral" which is a joke. Saad Ali Khan Pakistan (talk) 20:52, 20 November 2024 (UTC) (blocked sock of LanguageXpert) I don’t know the validity of Saad Ali Khan Pakistan’s claims but saying that he is not here to build an encyclopedia is absurd, when one takes a further notice at his contributions, he updated every single Pakistani Constituency with 2023 delimitations, a large set of neutral edits he would have nothing to gain out of. Additionally, Sheriff, if you think every user who says something against you is part of a “PTI cabal”, feel free to report them on ANI in a separate thread, as this thread is for your actions. To Administrators: So far, SheriffIsInTown has accused WikiEnthusiast1001, Myself and Saad Ali Khan Pakistan of being part of a “PTI cabal”, needing a topic ban and being not here to build an encycolpedia. Pardon my language but these claims are absurd, while SheriffIsInTown themselves has remained unanswerable for their POV pushing on the Imran Khan BLP, which is this threads topic. Titan2456 (talk) 20:53, 20 November 2024 (UTC) See constituency pages of NA-1 Chitral, PK-1 Chitral, PK-2 Chitral, PK-3 Swat which he reverted for no reason. I edited them before and he said it is against neutrality and when i tried editing again during and after election he reverted them again. I have seen Indian Lok Sabha pages which added candidates in election boxes before polls but he didnt let me add election boxes before election. every constituency of National Assembly is showing PTI backed Independents as regular independents which makes readers confusing. See 1988 elections MQM candidates an as independents but they are shown separate from other independents because they had support of MQM but he still showed PTI candidates as Independents. Saad Ali Khan Pakistan (talk) 21:08, 20 November 2024 (UTC) (blocked sock of LanguageXpert) Since you are speaking on their behalf, how do you explain their appearance in an ANI which you filed against me in October after being inactive since March? Did you approach them, and if so, how? Their actions—showing up in an ANI against me after seven months of inactivity and then appearing in this ANI again—clearly suggest they are not here to contribute to building an encyclopedia but are solely targeting me. Can you explain what else they have contributed to over the last eight months? Feel free to report them on ANI in a separate thread, as this thread is about your actions. However, when you accuse someone of wrongdoing in an ANI, your own behaviour can also be scrutinised. Separate ANIs are not necessary for that. Keep in mind that if you file an ANI against another editor, your actions will also be subject to evaluation. Sheriff | ☎ 911 | 22:06, 20 November 2024 (UTC) Are you really asking that question? When someone is tagged/mentioned in an ANI report, you get a notification as I tagged Saad Ali Khan Pakistan in both reports. Titan2456 (talk) 22:13, 20 November 2024 (UTC) Even if I were away from Wikipedia for seven months, I wouldn’t return solely to participate in an ANI or constantly monitor my notifications to ensure I don’t miss appearing in one. It’s simply not practical—unless someone is so driven by a battleground mindset that they make a deliberate effort to check their notifications daily to seize every possible opportunity. Sheriff | ☎ 911 | 22:26, 20 November 2024 (UTC) Moreover, how do you hear about ANI's against me? Are you part of some off-wiki PTI cabal that I have heard so much about? Sheriff | ☎ 911 | 20:39, 20 November 2024 (UTC) This has been long due 👉🏽 Wikipedia:Sockpuppet investigations/LanguageXpert. Sheriff | ☎ 911 | 00:09, 21 November 2024 (UTC)

Sanctions

At this point, I think some page-blocks needed handed out, at least temporarily to force these participants to discuss the issue rather than constantly reverting and/or edit-warring over the article. This is beyond ridiculous. — The Hand That Feeds You:^Bite 17:49, 24 November 2024 (UTC)

Full protection of the article Imran Khan would be ideal, restricting edits to administrators only based on edit requests at the talk page. This would ensure that no content is added based on a misinterpretation of the sources. Sheriff | ☎ 911 | 18:07, 24 November 2024 (UTC)

I agree with HandThatFeeds. The page may just need some temporary blocks on the involved participants until order is restored. Imran Khan is a good start. Then maybe the election pages. The original complaint I think has been thoroughly discussed enough to end the bickering here, until the next ANI complaint at least. Conyo14 (talk) 17:41, 25 November 2024 (UTC)

I was dragged to ANI by the OP and had no choice but to defend myself. So far, the only editor who raised any concerns was Drmies, who questioned just one of my edits, and even then, it was unclear, with the comment "I'm a bit surprised you made this edit." That specific edit was already part of the ANI filed by the same OP in October. I acknowledged that I had made a mistake in not properly attributing the content, and I accepted the necessary changes in later revisions. Allowing this situation to set a precedent would imply that persistent complaints and enough bickering at ANI could lead to a ban, regardless of whether there was a genuine reason for it. This would effectively reward disruptive behavior—if I make enough noise at ANI, I could get the outcome I want. It would tarnish my record, and I want to avoid that if my editing actions don't justify a ban. Sheriff | ☎ 911 | 18:36, 25 November 2024 (UTC)

1) The subsequent revisions were not accepted and it took a lengthy discussion, which involved multiple unnecessary bad faith accusations towards me.

2) As mentioned, multiple instances of this behavior, spanning multiple months on the same BLP, always pushing towards a negative stance is the concern, not isolated mistakes.

3) To SheriffIsInTown, I still request a response for this comment, which is yet to receive a response: “What promotional information did I add on the Imran Khan BLP which prompted you to cite a negative opinion piece for two paragraphs without mentioning it was an opinion piece? When you added a paragraph about one large negative opinion piece, I was forced to balance it with some short sentences on some positive opinions (which there were multiple), which you did not allow for by selectively extracting negative information from positive opinion pieces, why was this? What promotional content did I add for you to add one-sided claims about Imran Khan's comments on sexual violence? Also, which living opponents of PTI have I "targeted", are you talking about Ishaq Dar? I have added no information on his article, please follow up, as I want to know which opponents of PTI I have disproportionally represented.”

4) After this is addressed, I would support the page block TheHandThatFeeds proposed to prevent the continuation of this behavior, thank you. Titan2456 (talk) 22:33, 25 November 2024 (UTC)

From this point on, I will only respond if an uninvolved editor raises a concern. Our back-and-forth has already made this ANI unnecessarily lengthy. Sheriff | ☎ 911 | 22:37, 25 November 2024 (UTC)

I would also like to point out that SheriffIsInTown is still making changes to the Imran Khan page. Titan2456 (talk) 03:21, 26 November 2024 (UTC)

Nothing's been implemented, and I doubt anything will be. Unfortunately for the involved, this will more than likely taken back to the respective talk pages and this ANI will have no repercussions, aside from a sock being found. Conyo14 (talk) 16:26, 26 November 2024 (UTC)

Just a further notice, SheriffIsInTown has yet again placed imbalanced undue weight on negative sources on the Imran Khan BLP. They have again cited an opinion piece without mentioning it is an opinion piece and reduced a news report into an opinion piece.

In April 2020, the government's responses led to pandemic-related response confusion, being "lackadaisical" and having "deprived the country of a clear sense of direction." The third source, added by Sheriff, is an opinion piece is not mentioned as an opinion piece.

In The Express Tribune, Muhammad Zohaib Jawaid said the PTI government achieved a "V-shaped economic recovery." This source, which I added, is a report not an opinion piece, yet has been given undue weight by SheriffIsInTown and has been reduced to a short sentence.

The only difference between the two topics is one speaks positively about Khan and one speaks negatively. Not sure if it would be a better idea to take this up with the NPOV noticeboard as I don’t want to waste the admins time. Titan2456 (talk) 00:41, 27 November 2024 (UTC)

They are misrepresenting everything here. As I mentioned earlier, I will no longer provide lengthy responses to defend myself unless an uninvolved editor or admin specifically asks me to explain. Please do not interpret my lack of response or defense as an admission of guilt. Sheriff | ☎ 911 | 00:57, 27 November 2024 (UTC)

References

Multiple individuals involved in dispute blocked for sockpuppetry/private evidence

• I do find something a bit odd here with respect to the "Other Users Confirming This Behavior" section mentioned by OP in the initial post: Saad Ali Khan Pakistan (talk⁺ · tag · contribs · deleted contribs · logs · filter log · block user · block log · CA · CheckUser(log) · investigate · cuwiki) has been blocked as a sockupppet, while Saqib (talk⁺ · tag · contribs · deleted contribs · logs · filter log · block user · block log · CA · CheckUser(log) · investigate · cuwiki) has been ArbCom blocked. This was not obvious to anyone at the start of this thread on 17 November, though I would encourage users to read this thread anew in that light. — Red-tailed hawk _(nest) 17:53, 26 November 2024 (UTC)

Wider POV pushing against PTI

I am now aware that the POV pushing committed by SheriffIsInTown is not only against Imran Khan but also against his political party, the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf and POV pushing in favor of its opponent, the Pakistan Muslim League (N).

They have been using an agitating amount of WP:IDHT in discussions. They are currently saying that the Allegations of rigging in the 2024 Pakistani general election has nothing to do with Shehbaz Sharif, the person who won the elections and is facing the rigging charges, while Sheriff is removing his template, for context that is the equivalent of removing Joe Biden from Attempts to overturn the 2020 United States presidential election.

As mentioned before, they have tried multiple times to remove the PTI from election pages using edit warring and ignoring consensus and the fact that all media outlets unanimously say PTI contested the elections. [13][14] They also resorted to political opinions in discussions saying that "PTI is only a big party because they rigged elections in 2018", [15]. Their behavior is clearly disruptive and political.

They downplayed language critical of the PMLN by changing a source’s mention of "historic rigging" to less assertive phrases [16] and making Imran Khan's imprisonment appear as merely "suggested" by himself to "may be" politically motivated [17]. However, when it comes to PTI figures, Sheriff used stronger language, as seen in the Imran Khan BLP and adding extensive negative information and opinion pieces.

They have been observed trying to remove criticism and controversies from Asif Ali Zardari and Qazi Faez Isa, opponents of the PTI without proper reason. [18][19]

Violating WP:AGF is not usually something users are given warnings or sanctions for, but they have done it again and again for me, to a point that that is just how they start discussions now saying all my edits are just POV without any proof.

Even in this ANI report itself, Sheriff begins by saying that no one with a userbox supporting a political party should be editing on these pages, which firstly goes against what Wikipedia stands for: that anyone can edit. Secondly, all of their arguments such as: Can we trust an editor who has openly aligned themselves with a political party Have been completely discredited now that they have been found using a pro-PMLN userbox on their user page. Surprising they would make such arguments when they themselves know they had a similar userbox.

There are so many of these edits to shuffle through on BLPs, election pages, talk pages and political events, showing a consistent bias on the accord of one user, and multiple other users have raised the exact same concerns. All of this evidence is not included in the ANI report, which further warrants a topic ban. Titan2456 (talk) 21:25, 29 November 2024 (UTC)

As mentioned earlier, I will not provide lengthy replies in my defense unless an uninvolved editor or admin raises a concern. As HandThatFeeds noted, volunteer editors are tired of the ongoing back and forth. The OP’s continued posting in this thread, despite no uninvolved editor supporting their allegations, seems like an attempt to keep this ANI open. I request the admins to either close this ANI or, if they find my behaviour problematic, raise specific concerns so I can address them. Sheriff | ☎ 911 | 22:47, 29 November 2024 (UTC)

Category:Requests for unblock under sustained attack by MidAtlanticBaby

See Category:Requests for unblock and examples at User talk:5.167.250.250, User talk:80.85.151.106, User talk:90.5.100.140, User talk:126.15.241.147, and User talk:201.170.89.89. This is the WP:LTA known as MidAtlanticBaby. I've handled about 25 of these in the past hour or so. In general, my approach is to block the IP address (it's always a VPNgate proxy) for a year without TPA, delete the page and salt it. Anything less, anything less, doesn't work. Anyway, it's too much. This has been going on in various forms for months. I give up and will no longer patrol Category:Requests for unblock until we figure out a way to better handle MidAtlanticBaby, ideally automatically. This isn't me taking my ball and going home, not at all. I simply can't keep up and can't be productive with this garbage sucking all my time and energy. --Yamla (talk) 23:04, 20 November 2024 (UTC)

I'm sorry you've had so much of your time wasted on that nonsense. You are too valuable an administrator and community member to have to continue with that. Bgsu98 (Talk) 23:09, 20 November 2024 (UTC)

Thanks, Bgsu98. Arguably, this discussion should be merged into Wikipedia:Administrators'_noticeboard#Seeking_opinions:_protection_of_the_help_desk_and_teahouse. If anyone thinks that's accurate, feel free to do so. For me, it's time to go cook supper. :) --Yamla (talk) 23:12, 20 November 2024 (UTC)

We need to get better at dealing with determined bad actors who have the resources or sophistication to keep switching proxies/VPNs like this. And yes, that has include the WMF going after them in meatspace. HJ Mitchell | Penny for your thoughts? 23:13, 20 November 2024 (UTC)

Its incessant. If the Foundation doesn't clamp down on it forthwith, I'll be following suit with Yamla. Maybe they can cook me dinner.-- Ponyo^{bons mots} 23:26, 20 November 2024 (UTC)

Has ArbCom raised this with the WMF at all? -- asilvering (talk) 04:32, 21 November 2024 (UTC)

(Non-administrator comment) I'll ask a question to the admins as I truly want to help; do you guys want us to revert the weird edits before the IP is blocked, where it kind of goes back and fourth in reverts, or just leave it there? Considering MAB will read this, feel free to not answer. win8x (talk) 23:34, 20 November 2024 (UTC)

As long at it isn't hugely obscene, leave it and report the IP. Mass mutual reversions do nothing but fill the page history. DatGuy^Talk_Contribs 23:39, 20 November 2024 (UTC)

Got it. This could be useful to tell people, because right now this fills up the edit filter log, and as you said, page histories. win8x (talk) 23:46, 20 November 2024 (UTC)

(Non-administrator comment): Doesn't ptwiki require a login now? We should see how that's working and seriously consider doing the same. Sumanuil. _{(talk to me)} 01:25, 21 November 2024 (UTC)

This is pretty drastic. Besides, MAB as recently as today, used logged-in accounts to do the usual. Clearing your cookies is easy, so I don't think this would even change anything. win8x (talk) 01:30, 21 November 2024 (UTC)

Per HJ Mitchell above, given the particulars here situation it seems clearly preferable for WMF to take them to court if their identity is known. I know WMF has been questioned recently as regards the personal information of users, but there is no reason that seeking legal remedy against one of the most disruptive serial bad-faith actors in site history should be seen as a violation of trust or principles. Remsense ‥ 论 03:07, 21 November 2024 (UTC)

Do you really expect WMF to be able to track down someone using an anonymous peer to peer VPN service designed to evade nation state surveillance and censorship? It's probably better to let Bbb23 (talk · contribs) and other moderators who enjoy routinely blocking people handle it. 2602:FE43:1:46DD:A8D1:430:2300:D52F (talk) 03:39, 21 November 2024 (UTC)

No, it's not preferable. I meant exactly what I said: if the WMF has that information, they should pursue legal action. If they don't, then obviously that's not an option. Remsense ‥ 论 03:42, 21 November 2024 (UTC)

They don't have that information. At most, WMF has a few IP addresses that the providing ISPs can possibly track to a relatively small number out of thousands of innocent third parties. 2602:FE43:1:46DD:A8D1:430:2300:D52F (talk) 03:47, 21 November 2024 (UTC)

Neither you nor I know what the WMF knows or does not know. When people play with fire for months or years on end, sometimes they make a mistake. Remsense ‥ 论 03:49, 21 November 2024 (UTC)

They knew exactly who JarlaxleArtemis was and couldn't do shit for decades about him because his ISP and the VPN providers he used refused to play ball. It took him threatening Merriam-Webster to get rid of him via unrelated legal action. I imagine WMF Legal is similarly constrained with MidAtlanticBaby. —Jéské Couriano v^_^v ^{threads critiques} 08:06, 21 November 2024 (UTC)

@Jéské Couriano didn't he threaten a senator? I thought that was his downfall. Not that I wish prison on these people, we just want them to go away. Anyway, the climate is changing and ISPs, governments, etc ate increasingly willong to act on online abuse that wouldn't be tolerated in meatspace. HJ Mitchell | Penny for your thoughts? 12:27, 21 November 2024 (UTC)

@HJ Mitchell: It was threatening Merriam-Webster that ultimately did him in, per news reports. (I will not link them per WP:OUTING.) —Jéské Couriano v^_^v ^{threads critiques} 19:38, 23 November 2024 (UTC)

Late, but I know there are some ISPs who respond to abuse reports regarding WP. I managed to stop an LTA by reporting them to their ISP - actually I never got a response from the ISP but the LTA disappeared shortly after and hasn't been seen since. wizzito | say hello! 00:51, 30 November 2024 (UTC)

Let's hope we should do the same against any other LTA. Ahri Boy (talk) 03:52, 30 November 2024 (UTC)

I think the WMF could do that. As others said, the LTA is using VPNGate, which has an anti-abuse policy here. VPNGate sounds like they would disclose information, provided the WMF's lawyers do something. win8x (talk) 03:50, 21 November 2024 (UTC)

I'm going to start a discussion over on the WP:AN thread about this. Remsense ‥ 论 03:53, 21 November 2024 (UTC)

VPNGate doesn't really have that info either. They have the IP address the client connects from. However, if MAB is smart, they are using multiple levels of VPN, anonymous proxies and/or open WiFi access in countries without cooperating legal agreements with the US and other entities where WMF has legal standing. 2602:FE43:1:46DD:A8D1:430:2300:D52F (talk) 03:56, 21 November 2024 (UTC)

I don't know if MAB is that smart. From what I know, MAB is *probably* from the US. Besides, MAB was blocked by a CheckUser. Yes, it was 5 months ago, but that tells me that he wasn't using a VPN at the time. The WMF themselves could have that information. (Just want to say I have 0 expertise in this and I am maybe saying some bullshit) win8x (talk) 04:03, 21 November 2024 (UTC)

It's clearly worth investigating. Remsense ‥ 论 04:08, 21 November 2024 (UTC)

CheckUser isn't a magic bullet as CheckUser blocks are often based on behavioral "evidence". It all comes down to luck and how much time and money WMF wants to spend on a fairly benign troll and if they want to repeat that process for each of the minor vandals out there doing something similar. Or WMF could just force people to login with an account tied to a confirmed email address in order to be able to edit which is the more likely outcome of the community pushing them to take action in cases like this. 2602:FE43:1:46DD:A8D1:430:2300:D52F (talk) 04:18, 21 November 2024 (UTC)

I wouldn't calll MAB "benign". They are more than a troll, they are a vandal and actively try to get extended confirmed so that they can harras an editor they think, wrongly, is responsible for them being blocked. They regularly make death threats against editors and admins who revert their vandalism. They suck up a lot of editor time and are incredibly persistent, easily making dozens and dozens of edits over the course of an hour or two. They are one of the worst sockmasters I've come across in my time here. Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 04:36, 21 November 2024 (UTC)

If that's your concern, I will say I would not be interested in pursuing this if I thought account-only was a remotely possible outcome. It would almost surely be a greater fiasco if you want to think purely cynically about it. Remsense ‥ 论 04:38, 21 November 2024 (UTC)

@Yamla, you've checkuser blocked this IP's /64 before, is that still relevant? – 2804:F1...28:4E68 (::/32) (talk) 05:54, 21 November 2024 (UTC)

If you look at the comment that started this discussion, it was Yamla saying that they were done dealing with this persistent pest. Can't say I blame them. Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 08:02, 21 November 2024 (UTC)

The IPv6 above is talking about the previous IPv6 commenter. I assume the answer is "not relevant", since the checkuser block on that range predates MAB. -- asilvering (talk) 08:26, 21 November 2024 (UTC)

It probably isn't directly relevant to MAB, but, assuming the range is static, it may be relevant as to whether their comments in this thread should be taken seriously, especially given that the IP was first blocked for a month as a "self-declared troll" before being re-blocked for six months as a CU block. Aoi (青い) (talk) 08:30, 21 November 2024 (UTC)

I don't think they should be taken seriously. See for example, Special:Diff/1169582215. This is a self-declared WP:ANI troll once again returning to WP:ANI. I suggest my previous 6 month block of the /64 wasn't long enough. I have no reason to believe this is MAB operating from this IP address but haven't looked. --Yamla (talk) 10:49, 21 November 2024 (UTC)

(Non-administrator comment) Well, banning him is just adding salt into the wounds, and not solving the current problem itself. I'm so late into this but I feel like my input is the only way that can stop and unban him (and you guys too from doing the ongoing work), and I think by looking through his contributions I can see patterns as to what triggered MAB from what "events" he must've seen, and it was clear that his behaviour was affected by what he'd seen afterwards. Had that "event" not happened he would've otherwise edited productively like a normal editor, but what we don't know yet is what that "event" was, and this is the sort of thing we should ask him about. I think the best way is to follow a similar process I did on Pbritti's Admin election and go through certain links to reverts and comments by other editors (maybe even positive ones too) that may have lead him to doing something unwanted afterwards, and ask him how he felt after he'd seen that "event", and what he'll do differently next time he sees it. Obviously, nobody likes their work being reverted, but a simple undo or something in the comment can be doubly dangerous depending on the person they're reverting or commenting against, as it can lead to undesirable behaviour leading to unwanted sanctions. We just need editors to be more aware of who they're reverting and try and go easy on these editors, and maybe follow a 0-Revert-Rule philosophy if it's an editor that known to cause issues after seeing their work undone; and I believe MAB's case is no exception. If anybody wants to unblock talk page access and try that idea, be my guest, but to also to be aware that certain words may cause him to get upset. A^♭m ^(Ring!) _(Notes) 09:48, 21 November 2024 (UTC)

@Abminor: This has already been attempted and failed by multiple users and administrators. MAB isn't interested in dialogue anymore, if ever he was. —Jéské Couriano v^_^v ^{threads critiques} 09:59, 21 November 2024 (UTC)

Your conception of this situation is deeply troubling. Anyone who makes a single death threat on here is rightfully gone, in all likelihood for good save the remote possibility of seriously compelling contrition on their part. That you are taking MAB's statements at face value and privileging whatever grievances are contained within as if they actually exist in proportion to the damage they're gleefully causing everyone around them is already either totally uninformed or otherwise naïve to the point of negligence. That you think anyone should ever have to be in a community with them again on top of that is delusional. Remsense ‥ 论 10:04, 21 November 2024 (UTC)

That's really sad. Maybe it's dependent on what was in the dialogue that cause him to cancel that out?

As for the death threat, he probably did that because he got instantly stressed by something, and didn't mean to in truth. But OK then, if nobody is brave enough to unblock him then expect to see more threads like these in the future, and more unwanted problems. I'm sorry if I caused anybody stress and made things worse, which wasn't my intention. A^♭m ^(Ring!) _(Notes) 10:27, 21 November 2024 (UTC)

My core point is simply that there is no plausible reading of their behavior as being in good faith or wanting to do anything but damage the project. That they would somehow revert to what we would consider within the bounds of acceptable conduct is inconceivable. Remsense ‥ 论 10:36, 21 November 2024 (UTC)

Unblocking someone because they have caused serious disruption up to the extent of issuing death threats would set an absolutely terrible precedent and would be a green light for other blocked users to cause the same disruption knowing it could get them what they want. We have occasionally unblocked people who have initially thrown a tantrum but later cooled down and shown some contrition but in this case the user is too far beyond the pale and has exhausted users' time and patience so much that there is no good will towards them. Valenciano (talk) 11:02, 21 November 2024 (UTC)

@Abminor, I assure you that this has been tried and was counterproductive. I don't think there's any way to logic this one, I'm afraid. -- asilvering (talk) 12:56, 21 November 2024 (UTC)

In their more recent messages they have stated outright that they believe they're entitled to threaten to kill people if they feel like it, and they have left death threats for anyone who has tried to talk to them (at all) for most of this year. So no, trying to understand their point of view is not a workable approach here. Ivanvector (^Talk/_Edits) 19:55, 21 November 2024 (UTC)

His "work" for the better part of a year has been spending multiple hours a day trying to spam literally every part of the site into submission while making lurid death threats towards everyone on the site who had the misfortune of interacting with him. Anybody who does this for a single day is worthless to have around as a contributor, anybody who does this for multiple months is actively dangerous to everyone else trying to contribute. jp×g🗯️ 19:29, 21 November 2024 (UTC)

this is an LTA. what we absolutely should not do is give MAB what they want. they have made countless death threats and spammed dozens and dozens of pages on-wiki, as well as discord, IRC, and UTRS, with their screeds for months upon months now. this is not someone we want on any of our projects, point blank. ... sawyer * he/they * talk 22:40, 21 November 2024 (UTC)

That sounds very frustrating, @Yamla, and I'm sorry we don't have better tools available to manage this.

I am trying to move T354599: Provide IP reputation variables in AbuseFilter forward. That would allow for AbuseFilter variables that could target specifically edits from VPNgate. We just recently got approval from Legal for implementing this work. There's another task, T360195: Analyze IP reputation data and how it maps to on-wiki editing and account creation activity, which would help us craft more relevant IP reputation variables in AbuseFilter, but we could probably get started with some easy ones (like the proxy name) as that analysis work won't get done until early 2025. If you have any input on what types of IP reputation variables would be useful in AbuseFilters for mitigating this type of abuse, please let me know here or in T354599: Provide IP reputation variables in AbuseFilter . KHarlan (WMF) (talk) 10:23, 21 November 2024 (UTC)

KHarlan, a sincere thanks for trying to tackle issues in this area. I'll give it some thought and comment there. --Yamla (talk) 10:39, 21 November 2024 (UTC)

It's good to hear that WMF is aware of this general problem and is working on solutions. It's unfortunate that it won't be implemented until next year but, hey, it's better than what we currently have so I wish them luck. Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 05:42, 22 November 2024 (UTC)

In order to combat these recidivist socks, I raised the Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)#CheckUser for all new users but was told it was impossible, so for those of us who write in areas where POV pushing recidivists are active it seems that no relief will ever come. Mztourist (talk) 05:39, 26 November 2024 (UTC)

• They've now taken to writing in German: diff I didn't translate the post when replying to them. 331dot (talk) 10:19, 28 November 2024 (UTC)

  I feel that the development of new security measures might be hastened and the new measures might be rolled out as early as January. Ahri Boy (talk) 12:44, 28 November 2024 (UTC)

It's always a VPN Gate proxy, right? Just block everything here? Not like the list is private or something. 222.120.66.185 (talk) 08:08, 30 November 2024 (UTC)

Shh... Tone it down to avoid drawing attention from MAB. Ahri Boy (talk) 09:39, 30 November 2024 (UTC)

Those are the entry points. Blocking them won't do anything. 98.124.205.162 (talk) 17:36, 30 November 2024 (UTC)

Brusquedandelion's disruptive behaviour at the recent Talk:Australia RfC

Brusquedandelion is a generally constructive editor with a good understanding of Wikipedia's policies and code of conduct, but they show a lack of restraint when it comes to (perceived or actual) ideological differences and are prone to lashing out against other editors. Brusquedandelion has previously been brought to AN/I for exactly that reason and continued to do so briefly on their talk page after the AN/I notice. They have recently engaged in similar conduct at the recent Talk:Australia RfC, and that behaviour is my reason for creating this.

The RfC was started by OntologicalTree, a confirmed sockpuppet of KlayCax. OT was blocked one week ago from today, so the RfC was able to run its course. Brusquedandelion was quite disruptive and less than civil throughout the RfC, bludgeoning the process and throwing personal attacks at every reply to the RfC that supported or discussed anything directly contrary to OT's proposed option (myself included).

Talk:Australia diffs:
"Please tell us what your actual objection is rather than using word count as a shield."
"It would be more honest if you just tell us what your actual objection is... It helps no one to hide your actual beliefs like this."
"The best possible faith interpretation of multiple people not even bothering to mention the g-word in their votes is that they are simply unable to grasp basic reading comprehension."
"Your claim that this in an encyclopaedic article, not a political tract reveals your true intentions, for your edit is entirely political in nature; you just believe your own politics are neutral, much as fish doubt the existence of water."
"Fortunately, not one of the proposed options states that colonialism constituted terrorism, ethnocide, and genocide. Please remember that on Wikipedia, WP:COMPETENCY IN reading comprehension is strictly required."
"If you haven't actually done the survey you suggest others do, why do you feel so confident voting on a matter you are have professes your own ignorance own? Remember, WP:COMPETENCE IS REQUIRED."
"And may I remind you, one of the handwringers have straight up admitted to having a conflict of interest on this subject, due to nationalist sentiments and grievance politics. Odd that it is me you are dressing down, and not them, when their comments are against the spirit of letter of at least half a dozen Wikipedia policies."
"I have generally not reiterated my own viewpoints in different places, only made different viewpoints in multiple places. The fact that multiple people tried to bludgeon this discourse by handwringing about word count rather than getting to the crux of the issue merits being pointed out."

This report is already getting quite long, so I'll leave it at this for now. Sirocco745 (talk) 01:07, 26 November 2024 (UTC)

I agree that @Brusquedandelion has engaged in battleground behavior and engaged in personal attacks. Because they are otherwise a constructive editor, I propose a three-month topic ban from all edits related to colonialism and genocide, broadly construed. voorts (talk/contributions) 02:29, 26 November 2024 (UTC)

I support this proposal. While Brusquedandelion is a capable, competent, and generally constructive editor, they have demonstrated their inability to remain civil while discussing topics of colonialism and genocide, and I believe their efforts would be best focused outside of these topics for a while. Having strong feelings on a topic is not necessarily bad in of itself, but it's how those feelings manifest themselves through the person's actions that can cause problems. Sirocco745 (talk) 02:37, 26 November 2024 (UTC)

In the thread, you stated that you are sick of this same blame-centric rhetoric that I have to listen to every week being pushed at every opportunity. It's pretty clear from this comment that you are unable to maintain a position of objectivity on topics relating to "colonialism and genocide." Or perhaps only ones relating to Australia, I don't know. Brusquedandelion (talk) 09:34, 26 November 2024 (UTC)

If a comment like Option 1 has a clear agenda to push, and I am sick of this same blame-centric rhetoric that I have to listen to every week being pushed at every opportunity is not indicative of a battleground mentality by someone who is quite possibly WP:NOTHERE, what is? This comment was made by @Sirocco745 who filed this report. They are clearly motivated by some sort of grievance politics (of a racial nature) by their own admission. They followed this up by admitting that I could, if I wanted, call me out on a WP:COI if you really wanted to, and you may be justified in doing so. Their words!

You might feel my response was heavy-handed. Ok. But note that per the usual rules and conventions of an ANI post, a reporter's own conduct is also subject to scrutiny. Did you not read the thread, or did you not think this was worthy of taking into account? Brusquedandelion (talk) 09:41, 26 November 2024 (UTC)

It looks to me that all of their edits happening on Talk:Australia by Brusquedandelion occurred on Nov. 9th and haven't continued since. Have there been any personal attacks since that date or that have spilled over to other articles or talk pages? Of course, personal attacks are not acceptable but before imposing a wide-ranging topic ban, I'd like to see if this is an isolated incident on this one day in this one discussion on this one talk page or are occurring more broadly. I also would like to hear from Brusquedandelion on this matter for their point of view. Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 02:54, 26 November 2024 (UTC)

No, nothing since then. They made four more replies on the RfC after being politely but firmly asked to reign it in by @Moxy and @Aemilius Adolphin at this reply here. The discourse hasn't bled out of the RfC/talk page, and they've been relatively quiet for the past two weeks.

Only thing I can think of that could count would be Brusque replying to my original attempt at settling this without needing to bring it to a noticeboard. They previously said I sounded like I was "channeling the spirit of Cecil Rhodes" on the RfC, and when I mentioned this in my original notification, their only response was to link Cecil Rhodes's article. Reply found here. Passive-aggressive? Maybe. Worth counting as further discourse outside of the RfC? Not really. Sirocco745 (talk) 03:19, 26 November 2024 (UTC)

Thinking a stern warning and explanation of the community norms..... unless there's some sort of pattern of behavior here? It's a contentious topic.... that many people feel has a tone of racism involved. Just need to explain they need to tone it down. Moxy🍁 03:32, 26 November 2024 (UTC)

I would also like to raise an issue of possible canvassing. I was going to leave a message on @Brusquedandelion's talk page about their behaviour when the ruckus started when I found this odd message. It looks like someone was alerting them to the discussion on the Australia talk page and feeding them with talking points.https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:Brusquedandelion&diff=prev&oldid=1255261107 Aemilius Adolphin (talk) 04:49, 26 November 2024 (UTC)

That was also KlayCax. CMD (talk) 05:46, 26 November 2024 (UTC)

It looks like the sockpuppet User:DerApfelZeit went around to a lot of articles in contentious areas and then to user talk pages, trying to stir things up. Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 06:23, 26 November 2024 (UTC)

To be clear, I did not asked to be canvassed. I don't know this person, and given they're banned already I am unsure what the relevance is here. Brusquedandelion (talk) 09:30, 26 November 2024 (UTC)

The relevance, Brusquedandelion, was the consideration that maybe their comments provoked your response on the article talk page. Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 19:16, 26 November 2024 (UTC)

This is correct, for better or for worse. Brusquedandelion (talk) 05:28, 30 November 2024 (UTC)

OP has posted a bunch of comments above, but the actual reason they are reporting me is because of my comment comparing their views to those of Cecil Rhodes. They didn't feel the need to file this report until they posted on my page, including a comment about how they don't know who Rhodes was. I replied only with a link to his Wikipedia page. In a sense, this is probably their strongest case against me, so I am not sure why they didn't mention it in the original post. Perhaps it has to do with the reason I invoked this comparison: OP made a vile series of remarks about aboriginal Australians in which they referred to them and their culture as uncivilized, that one can't trust a treaty signed with non-English speaking indigenous peoples, and that hunter gatherer peoples are not worthy of political or moral consideration. These are all sentiments Cecil Rhodes would have affirmed. Perhaps this qualifies as a personal attack by the letter of the law here at Wikipedia, but talking about Aboriginal Australians this way is against upwards of half a dozen Wikipedia policies. OP will claim, as they did at my page, that I am casting aspersions, but they have actually explicitly admitted they are motivated by racial grievance politics; more on this point later. First, OP's comment that resulted in the comparison, for the record:

the problem is that prior to settlement, the Indigenous peoples of Australia had zero form of officially Th government or judicial system amongst themselves because of the nomadic and kinship-centric nature of their tribes. Additionally, the Indigenous peoples didn't speak English and operated on a significantly different culture to the rest of the civilised world at the time. No centralized governing body means the British had no legal entity to formalize an agreement with, and the cultural differences and physical distance between the various groups and territories of Indigenous peoples meant that even if the British were to create a blanket legal structure for them, they had no guarantee that the terms of such would be satisfactory or even followed by the various groups.

Anyone familiar with the official justifications for colonial policies, past and present, will hear their echo here. The fairly explicit claim that the aboriginals are uncivilized is the most egregious remark here, but the entire comment is rooted in a view of indigenous peoples that belongs to 19th century British imperialists, not on Wikipedia. These ideas about native peoples (in Australia and elsewhere) have been summarily refuted in the scholarly literature on this subject, but regrettably despite their repugnance they persist in popular culture in many nations. If any admin feels I need to back up this claim with sources, I will oblige, as fundamentally grim as it is that such views even need to be debunked.

Some further comments from OP:

The entire paragraph is thick with the negative connotations so common in degradation of foreign colonization and this era of historical hindsight apologetics. Easily fails WP:NPOV and WP:WEIGHT.

Apparently, it is NPOV to take a dim view of colonization. Does OP have a favorable view of colonialism, in particular in the Australian context? A question left for the reader.

Finally, OP is manifestly, by their own admission in the thread, motivated by a politics of racial grievance. First, they tell us that As a fourth generation Australian, I am personally sick of the rhetoric that OntologicalTree is trying to have accepted. Make no mistake, this issue is personal, and OP has found their WP:BATTLEGROUND. Then they inform us:

Option 1 has a clear agenda to push, and I am sick of this same blame-centric rhetoric that I have to listen to every week being pushed at every opportunity. Yeah, you could call me out on a WP:COI if you really wanted to, and you may be justified in doing so.

These comments speak for themselves, since OP is themself admitting their prejudices. Even if OP were right ("Australian whites and their colonization of the country have been unjustly vilified" etc. etc.), this just isn't the website for it; see inter alia WP:RGW and WP:NOTAFORUM.

Returning to what OP has quoted above, the vast majority of my alleged bludgeoning consists of reminding people what the substantive issue at stake is: whether to classify these events as genocide. The RFC was somewhat poorly worded, unfortunately, but there's not much to do about that now. The effect was that a number of replies did not explicitly admit a stance on the core issue, but nevertheless voted against the use of the "genocide" label.

I would prefer a straightforward discussion of the merits, or lack thereof, of the use of this word. It would have made the RFC much more productive. A number of people essentially dodged the core issue on their vote altogether, and I thought this merited being pointed out. I admit I was strident, but I don't think any of my comments about this issue were especially uncivil. I also removed myself from the discussion as soon as people said I was commenting too much. I didn't feel need the need to continue this on anyone's talk page nor over here at ANI.

OP did, however, likely expecting an apology when they posted to my talk page, and reporting me when none was forthcoming. So:

I apologize for my stridency to the community at large. I will make an effort to regulate my tone in future discussions. I do not feel this thread is representative of my general conduct here, and I will certainly make an effort to not let it be the standard I set for my comments in future discussions. I was frustrated by an apparent refusal by certain folks to actually discuss the core issue, but there are more skillful ways I could have gone about this. And I was especially frustrated by certain comments, in particular those of OP, that affirm colonial stereotypes and ideologies.

I do not feel an apology is owed to OP until such time as they own up to the racism of their remarks. With regards to possible sanctions, I don't see how you can argue my criticizing OP's racism, even if I had been ten thousand times ruder about it, would be less civil or worse for Wikipedia's project as a whole than OP's remarks about aboriginal Australians, motivated as they are by racial grievance politics, per their own confession. Said confession also seems like a much stronger argument for a topic ban in particular, compared to anything I have said, since they have admitted an inability to retain neutrality in such discussions, as well as a particularly noxious reason for that inability—though I am only bringing this up since OP themself has asked for this sanction against me. Personally I only hope that OP realizes why such comments are unacceptable, that no one is witch-hunting him or his people, and that such ideologies have no place here anyways. It seems they are otherwise a constructive editor, and if they are able to make a good faith acknowledgement of this lapse, I wouldn't see any need for sanctions against them personally. Of course, all of this is up to the admins. Brusquedandelion (talk) 10:49, 26 November 2024 (UTC)

@Brusquedandelion: you've accused someone of racism. Please provide diffs or quickly withdraw your claim, or expect to be blocked for a serious personal attack. Nil Einne (talk) 15:20, 26 November 2024 (UTC)

Did you not read my comment? It has verbatim quotes that can be found in the linked discussion (Talk:Australia); as far as I can tell, nothing has been edited or archived. Are you an admin and if so is this a formal request for a diff specifically? Because if not please do not go around threatening people with blocks for not providing information they already provided. I am really quite busy today, but if an administrator is formally making this request, I will oblige. Brusquedandelion (talk) 15:36, 26 November 2024 (UTC)

You always need to provide diffs when you make such allegations, whether asked to or not. voorts (talk/contributions) 16:15, 26 November 2024 (UTC)

This is why diffs are important, as they provide context. The first two quotes come from Diff 1, and the last quote comes from Diff 2. I'm no expert, but statements like I certainly don't approve of what happened back then, and I will openly admit that I am not proud of the racism that Australia was built on. I agree that they committed a large number of atrocities and that there is much work to be done to repair the damage done. (Diff 2) do not sound to me like racism. In context, I get the impression of trying to preserve historical context, not proving the OP's racism alleged by BD above.

Diff 1 provides an explaination for why the British did not negotiate with the natives and, even there, their words very much acknowledged that the actions were unjust. (See The British did falsely claim terra nullius... in Diff 1). I also was unable to find any mention of the statement BD put in quotes as "Australian whites and their colonization of the country have been unjustly vilified" on the talk page; I presume these were scare quotes.

If there is missing context or background, BD would be well-advised to provide it. Most of us are laypersons and will likely miss more subtle types of racism, if that is what is alleged. EducatedRedneck (talk) 17:18, 26 November 2024 (UTC)

This is why diffs are important, as they provide context.

The discussion as it stands provides all the context the diffs do, as nothing has been deleted.

(Diff 2) do not sound to me like racism.

Providing an example of a not-racist comment is not a refutation of any racist comments that were also made. Given you were just enjoining us to value the context of the interaction: it is a common strategy for people to preemptively hedge before making an unsavory statement, but the very fact of this statement in the context of the subsequent unsavory statement only reinforces, and does not mitigate, the nature of the statement that follows, since it implies at least some awareness that the commenter understood their subsequent comments could be seen in a certain light and thus felt the need to clarify. "I'm not racist but..." has never been followed by a not-racist statement in the history of the English language.

That said their hedge is not exactly the same as "I'm not racist but...". In principle it could have been followed by a relevant, reasoned, evidence-based, and non-prejudicial explanation for why the proposed RFC should resolve one way or another. Instead the commenter chose to grandstand about perceived slights against white Australians and uncritically regurgitate certain views and dogmas of the British Empire.

Diff 1 provides an explaination for why the British did not negotiate with the natives and, even there, their words very much acknowledged that the actions were unjust. (See The British did falsely claim terra nullius... in Diff 1).

The portion of the "explanation" that comes after The British did falsely claim terra nullius... is an uncritical parroting of the British imperial view of native Australians. The very fact that they do reject the terra nullius argument, but not the subsequent ones, indicates these are views they actually hold or at least held in that particular moment in the context of an RFC that they felt challenged their national pride. I understand such feelings may be fluid and encourage Sirocco to reflect on them.

I presume these were scare quotes

It is a brief summary of their multiple comments that make that point in more words, which I already quoted and did not want to copy again, for reasons of length and redudancy. Given the context of the RFC, do you feel this is an inaccurate summary of those comments, copied again below for your convenience?

The entire paragraph is thick with the negative connotations so common in degradation of foreign colonization and this era of historical hindsight apologetics. Easily fails WP:NPOV and WP:WEIGHT.

Option 1 has a clear agenda to push, and I am sick of this same blame-centric rhetoric that I have to listen to every week being pushed at every opportunity. Yeah, you could call me out on a WP:COI if you really wanted to, and you may be justified in doing so.

Brusquedandelion (talk) 05:12, 30 November 2024 (UTC)

I have already admitted that I conducted myself poorly in the RfC and that my comments/suggestions were driven by my own feelings on the topic in combination with what I already knew about the topic (or at least, what I thought to be true).

Instead the commenter chose to grandstand about perceived slights against white Australians and uncritically regurgitate certain views and dogmas of the British Empire. First off, when writing or talking in a conversational tone, I generally don't criticize or exalt the subject until after I have explained what I know. I later stated my opinion on the subject in the RfC, being that the British's acts against the Indigenous Australians were undeniably racist and wrong in every definition of the word. I do not feel the need to apologize for the acts perpetrated by those settlers; I am not descended from them, only tangentially associated by merit of nationality. I am more annoyed that our government focuses on saying sorry all the time instead of proving sorry by taking actual action to support Indigenous families and communities, and it is this political apologetic rhetoric that I am tired of seeing and hearing on a weekly basis.

The "white" part of "perceived slights against white Australians" definitely isn't correct either. Australia is a country where you could walk past the entire skin colour spectrum on your way to work every day and not think twice about it, and this peaceful co-existence of cultures is something I am very grateful for here. The "perceived slights" part though? Personally, being told on a weekly basis by the government that "the land you live, work and study on doesn't belong to you and it's our fault as a nation that it doesn't belong to the Aboriginal people anymore" doesn't make me feel very welcome in the country I was born and live in.

Regardless, let's get back to the subject at hand, that being your behaviour. You can create a separate AN/I thread if you wish to discuss my personal conduct, but I started this one because, as shown in the diffs of my original post here, you were consistently not assuming good faith and bludgeoning the RfC by replying to almost every comment left by other users that didn't align with what you deemed to be the correct manner, not to mention the personal attacks. The point of an RfC is to draw the attention of uninvolved editors to a discussion with the hope that they will contribute constructively by providing new voices and second opinions to the conversation. Whether you see it this way or not, the general consensus of this thread so far is that you disrupted the RfC and have demonstrated a pattern of using personal attacks when disagreeing with other editors. Please try to stick to the topic of this thread, which is your behaviour. Sirocco745 (talk) 04:14, 1 December 2024 (UTC)

You seem to be fixated on an uncharitable interpretation of Sirocco's comments. You've pointed out that one not-racist comment doesn't mean the person isn't racist, but in my view, you've failed to demonstrate racism in the first place. I do not believe your scare-quoted passage is an accurate summary, no. Similarly, I do not feel that, just because colonizers used something as an excuse, means it is inherently racist or untrue. I can see where you're coming from that it could be, but I also don't believe it's the only interpretation, and we're supposed to WP:AGF. Since this is a matter of judgement, I hope other editors will chime in to give a broader representation of the community either way, not just me saying, "Meh, I don't see it". EducatedRedneck (talk) 14:21, 1 December 2024 (UTC)

I may have come off as confrontational with my comments in the RfC, and I apologize for that. I have always accepted that Wikipedia is not the place to air personal or political grievances and have done my best to keep to that policy, but I slipped when replying to the RfC. My motto is "don't let your motive be your message", but I forgot to keep my personal feelings out of the discussion this time.

First up though, the reason why some of my comments were rooted in a view of indigenous peoples that belongs to 19th century British imperialists is because I was presenting the views of 19th century British imperialists. These views are horribly outdated and illogical based in emotional fallacy, but because I was (probably over)explaining the racist reasonings the British justified their actions with, many of my comments in the RfC could be used to support BD's claim of racism when taken out of context.

In hindsight, "The entire paragraph is thick with the negative connotations so common in degradation of foreign colonization and this era of historical hindsight apologetics. Easily fails WP:NPOV and WP:WEIGHT" wasn't the best way to word my disproval of Option 1. In relation to the RfC, Option 1's rhetoric is that the wounds are still fresh. The problem is that while the damage is still felt, the wounds themselves aren't really fresh at all; Option 1 covers almost 200 years worth of events in a single paragraph and insinuates that they all happened at/around the same time. This is why I pushed against Option 1 and explained British actions and motives.

@Brusquedandelion, I would also like to deny your claim that I started this AN/I thread because of your actions against me specifically. I assume that you've read the opening sentences of WP:ASPERSIONS, since I included it in my initial attempt at reaching out.

"On Wikipedia, casting aspersions is a situation where an editor accuses another editor or a group of editors of misbehavior without evidence, especially when the accusations are repeated or particularly severe. Because a persistent pattern of false or unsupported allegations can be highly damaging to a collaborative editing environment, such accusations will be collectively considered a personal attack."

The large number of diffs that show you being uncivil towards multiple editors in the RfC were always going to be the reason this came to AN/I, not your comments against me. Sirocco745 (talk) 23:02, 26 November 2024 (UTC)

I will respond to this in the next few days, not later than Tuesday 00:00 UTC; it is a holiday weekend here in my country and my time is very limited. If at all possible I ask the administrators not to resolve this thread until that time (unless this is going to be a nothingburger of zero sanctions all round, in which case, please resolve posthaste).

One preliminary comment about the most relevant portion of your comment: if you were simply explaining what the views of the British were, and not agreeing with them, you would have told us so, as you did literally in the prior sentence: The British did falsely claim terra nullius by legally declaring the Indigenous peoples as "fauna" so they could invalidate Britain's first requirement for occupation, which was that if there was an existing population, Indigenous or otherwise, land should only be obtained through negotiation. No such claims are made in any of your other comments. In fact, those comments are themselves placed after a However separating that last sentence from the rest of the claims you assert in authorial voice, implying the function of the subsequent comments is to provide objective, evidence-based, non-prejudicial reasons why negotiation would have been impossible anyways, so the whole terra nullius dogma was merely the British doing their best under unfortunate circumstances. Indeed this is exactly what the concluding remark of the paragraph all but states, to leave no room for confusion as to OP's point: No centralized governing body means the British had no legal entity to formalize an agreement with, and the cultural differences and physical distance between the various groups and territories of Indigenous peoples meant that even if the British were to create a blanket legal structure for them, they had no guarantee that the terms of such would be satisfactory or even followed by the various groups. In summary, treaties would have been impossible, so why bother?

Importantly, the stated justifications are not objective, evidence-based, or non-prejudicial: e.g. the first comment However, the problem is that prior to settlement, the Indigenous peoples of Australia had zero form of officially recognized government or judicial system amongst themselves has been debunked in the anthropological, sociological, and historical literature extensively. As far as we can tell, all human societies (that existed for any real amount of time) have had, minimally, some form of customary law. They have norms governing what is and isn't ethical or acceptable, means for restitution or punishment in the event of the transgression of these norms, and, most importantly for this discussion, a general understanding of informal and formal agreement between two or more parties that granted each a set of obligations and/or privileges. These are, as far back as we can reasonably verify, human universals. Believing they didn't, which, regrettably, literally millions of non-indegenous Australians, Americans, Canadians etc. still do about their respective Indigenous peoples, is a legacy of colonial thinking, and in effect places these people outside the category "human"—turns them into fauna—by denying them what we know to be a fundamental feature of our social life as a species. In this sense, (not so) ironically, OP's comments reproduce the specific British imperial dogma they rejected in the prior sentence. (Mind you, this is not even the most egregious remark here. Again in authorial voice, a little later on, Sirocco informs us the aboriginals are not to be considered civilized.)

Finally, I propose a litmus test: would such comments, if copy-pasted into a Wikipedia article, be considered WP:WIKIVOICE, or attributed text, per the relevant policies? If so, then they are also in authorial voice when written by a single editor outside a mainspace. To me, it is obvious how this litmus test resolves here, but I'll leave it to administrators to confirm this. Brusquedandelion (talk) 00:57, 1 December 2024 (UTC)

Oh for goodness's sake, I do not believe that Aboriginal Australians are sub-human! I have admitted so many times that I didn't conduct myself properly in the RfC and that the wording of many of my comments could easily be interpreted as racist because I talked about racist acts and the reasonings behind them without condemning them immediately after. What more do I need to say, how much more do I need to apologize, and what will it take to prove myself non-racist to you? This is definitely Wikilawyering, but now it's starting to feel like borderline harassment. Sirocco745 (talk) 04:49, 1 December 2024 (UTC)

Theres a lot of battleground behaviour here, which compounded with the personal attacks made in this thread (that they apparantly stand by) leads me to support the proposal above by Voorts. Captain Jack Sparrow (talk) 09:00, 27 November 2024 (UTC)

If you're against battleground behavior, do you not see the comments I copied above from Sirocco as examples of it? If you think my assessment of their comments is a "personal attack" are you stating, for the record, that you think there is nothing racist about those comments? Brusquedandelion (talk) 05:19, 30 November 2024 (UTC)

United States Man's WP:BOLD edits and redirects

So this has been happening for a while now, with a long track record of reverted bold edits which peaked today. United States Man (talk · contribs · deleted contribs · logs · filter log · block user · block log) has constantly been doing WP:BOLD things and reverting others when challenged:
1. November 2023: Was blocked for edit warring.
2. May 2024: Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/1997 Prairie Dell-Jarrell tornado: User said in the nomination The author also recently started 2024 Sulphur tornado, which was overwhelming merged; violation of WP:READFIRST. Reason for nomination was “article is a CFORK”, and the article ended up being kept. Funny enough, this user would literally say "You should focus on the content and not the editor" to someone else just twelve days later when someone pointed out their controversial moves.
3. May 2024: Edit warring on December 2021 Midwest derecho and tornado outbreak; the article had to end up being protected as a result.
4. October 2024: Bold redirected 2011 Lake Martin tornado without consensus before merging it without attribution or consensus.
5. Today: Redirected a 20,000-byte article with the edsum "revert CFORK", and when I challenged this they called it "disruptive edit warring". See 2011 Cullman-Arab tornado.
6. Today: Again redirected a 20,000-byte article with the edsum "revert CFORK", and when I challenged this they called it "disruptive edit warring". See 2011 Central Alabama tornado.
7.Today: Was reverted after boldly removing material, where they then proceeded to revert the challenge.
This behavior clearly won't be stopping soon, so bringing it here. Also see their recent edit summaries, I’m now on mobile so I can’t fetch the diffs. E_F⁵ 20:10, 26 November 2024 (UTC)

(edit conflict) As far as I can tell, United States Man's reverts look far more like "disruptive edit warring" than the OP's challenges to find consensus, which strike me as reasonable. Noting for the record that I reviewed and approved a DYK nomination for one of the articles (Template:Did you know nominations/2011 Cullman–Arab tornado, which is currently in a prep area). Dylan620 (he/him • talk • edits) 20:19, 26 November 2024 (UTC)

• Editing behavior: Myself and United States Man have "butt heads" several times over the last few years, even with both of us earning edit warring blocks during our edit wars in the past. However, this is a very much editing behavior that is very clearly not good. United States Man has a habit of taking a Wikibreak and upon returning from the Wikibreak, immediately reverts edits without any consensus or discussions. Here is a list of these specific instances:

1. Wikibreak October 19, 2024 to November 26, 2024 – First six edits on November 26 were all edit warring/reversions: [20][21][22][23][24][25]
2. Wikibreak September 19, 2024 to October 10, 2024 – First edit was to start an AFD.
3. May 17, 2024 to May 23, 2024 – Commented in an ongoing discussion "Oppose" to something being included in an article and then proceeded to remove it 1 minute later. This day also included several reverts from page moves to edit warring reverts. The edit warring reverts were discussed (mid-edit warring) on the talk page.
4. May 8, 2024 to May 15, 2024 – Several reversions with no talk page discussions, including this edit entirely deleting a 45,000 byte article with "redirect recently created content fork" with no discussion and deleting a 23,000 byte article, with no discussion, only a few minutes earlier.
5. February 29, 2024 to March 11, 2024 – Came back to editing by immediately reverting. March 11 included 3 article-content reversions, with no article talk page discussions occurring, along with the merge of an 11,000 byte article.
6. February 25, 2024 to February 28, 2024 – First edit back on Feb 28 was a reversion.
7. December 19, 2023 to February 10, 2024 – First edit back was an editing-reversion (not revert button click), with the editing summary of "the first tornado was obviously the EF1…". The day included several button reverts including [26][27] before any talk page discussion edits occurred.
8. November 3, 2023 to November 21/22, 2023 – Came back to editing with several reversions and within about 36 hours of coming back to editing, got into an edit war with myself, which earned both of us edit warring blocks over 2002 Van Wert–Roselms tornado.

I can continue going down the list, but this is a clear behavior going back at a minimum of a year. United States Man reverts before talk page discussions, and it seems to be right as they come back from a break from editing. As stated, I have a history with United States Man, but it honestly is annoying and frustrating. Going back a year, articles and content has been created and when United States Man returns to editing, without any discussion or consensus occurring, they proceed to try to single handedly revert/remove it all, and then, like today, proceeds to edit war over it without going to discussions. This is not constructive behavior and should not be the behavior of editors on Wikipedia. The Weather Event Writer (Talk Page) 20:51, 26 November 2024 (UTC)

It also appears that they (somehow) have rollback permissions, despite being blocked for edit warring and being consistently reverted for these behaviors. E_F⁵ 00:24, 27 November 2024 (UTC)

As much as I hate dogpiling, I did kind of promise myself that I would bring this up if USM got taken to ANI over a matter like this. I will preface by saying that I really do appreciate a lot of the work he's put in over the years, and I've even agreed with him in a number of content disputes. But I think most editors who have put in a lot of time on tornado articles have butted heads with him at some point. He has had a sort of "my way or the highway" attitude for quite some time. See this bit of page history for an edit war from 2013. Maybe it was just me returning to regular editing at the time, but I seem to have noticed a number of notable clashes with him starting around 2021. He has also expressed an attitude that his edits don't count as edit warring (as in this instance). Some commentary I've seen from him suggests and attitude that his experience exempts him from policy, as in this discussion. As much as I am grateful for the constructive edits he's made, there are some longstanding issues with his behavior in content disputes that should be addressed. TornadoLGS (talk) 02:18, 27 November 2024 (UTC)

I also highly appreciate their work, but comments like I don't allow people to preach to me on "content disputes" when I tirelessly edit week in and week out and have never blatantly added false information and You should know from my years of content editing that I don't add and leave things unsourced for long at Talk:List of United States tornadoes from January to March 2022 are highly inappropriate, no matter the context. E_F⁵ 02:25, 27 November 2024 (UTC)

( Peanut gallery comment) Speaking of tornado list articles, might yall tornado editors maybe agree on a way to do your citations a bit more concisely? At List of United States tornadoes from January to March 2022, National Centers for Environmental Information produces 347 matches, and National Weather Service 266 matches, across 330 citations. Do we really need the full, unlinked acronym expansions (and retrieval dates) in every case for all of these database records? And not, for example, the database record id, or date more specific than year (universally implied by the article scope)? The whole References section is visually nightmarish, and ProseSize reports 59kb in references; 421kb if html is included.

And I know this has been discussed elsewhere before, but is genuinely encyclopaedically relevant to include trivia like A chicken house sustained roof damage? I suppose at this juncture I'm probably tilting at rapidly circulating windmills. Folly Mox (talk) 15:33, 28 November 2024 (UTC)

@Folly Mox: If A chicken house sustained roof damage is the only damage indicator that the tornado left behind, then yes, it is relevant. I'll try to condense this, since this isn't what the thread it about but albeit is a good findinng:

Tornadoes usually produce DIs, or Damage Indicators. These can range from corn pulled out of fields to houses being swept away and pavement being ripped off of roads (which is rarely seen). Any information about a tornado's DP, or damage path, is better than none. Unfortunately, government agencies like to adopt horrendously-long names, so many references look like that. I try to abbreviate them, but others don't. A list of these DIs can be found here (it's actually really interesting how they rate tornadoes, I'm probably just a nerd though. :) E_F⁵ 16:02, 28 November 2024 (UTC)

If A chicken house sustained roof damage is the only damage indicator that the tornado left behind, then yes, it is relevant. – Yes it's relevant, assuming you decide to include this trivial tornado-ette in the list in the first place. That's the question. What purpose is served by listing trivial, nonnotable, momentary twisters that damaged a chicken coop and uprooted someone's prize azaleas -- if they did anything at all? Answer: no purpose at all. It's busywork for storm fans -- busywork which leads to conflicts which historically have soaked up a lot of admin time to referee them.

These lists should restrict themselves to events which, at a bare minimum, were reported in the local news i.e. not A storm chaser documented a [60-second] tornado on video. No known damage occurred . NWS collects every bit of data -- every report, no matter how trivial -- for statistical and scientific purposes, but our readers aren't served by our uncritically vomiting all of it out here at Wikipedia. It should stop. EEng 17:27, 29 November 2024 (UTC)

(ec) No, that isn't relevant information to have in an encyclopedia at all. In these lists, most tornadoes should be summarized as a group (e.g. simply mentioning the number of EF0s and EF1s), not described with "This weak tornado had an intermittent path and caused no known damage." and "This brief tornado was caught on video. No damage was found." and so on. Just try to imagine that we had a list of "car accidents in the US in March 2022", where not only the major accidents with deaths and so on were noted, but every single accident with minor damage as long as some official police bulletin notes it. Why would every single minor tornado in the history of the US need to be noted in detail on enwiki? "A tornado was caught on video. An NWS damage survey found a leaning power pole.", really? "A brief tornado captured by doorbell security video caused sporadic minor damage."? This needs severe pruning. We have Tornado outbreak of March 31 – April 1, 2023, fine, but do we really need a detailed list of all 146 tornadoes in that outbreak, List of tornadoes in the tornado outbreak of March 31 – April 1, 2023? Fram (talk) 17:29, 29 November 2024 (UTC)

Okay, fine, I’ll start a discussion on the WPW talk page. Can we please stay on topic and address the issues that I’ve brought up, though? Discussing tornadoes on ANI doesn’t seem very… productive. I don’t mean to be rude. :) E_F⁵ 17:38, 29 November 2024 (UTC)

You're right, it's just that there have been so many discussions already about issues related to either tornadoes or tropical storms, comparable to other more or less problematic projects like wrestling or (in the past) roads. When uninvolved or unaware readers come across the articles involved in this report, they are bound to shake their heads in disbelief. Fram (talk) 17:50, 29 November 2024 (UTC)

Or (worse) they may be inspired to initiate similar efforts in some other topic area. Bus fleets (e.g. MBTA_bus#Current) are ripe for a Cambrian explosion along these lines. EEng 03:14, 30 November 2024 (UTC)

Well… it’s complicated, particularly with ratings which tend to be in heavy dispute for months at a time. I could go more in-depth on the issue, but again, that isn’t the point of this report. E_F⁵ 14:22, 30 November 2024 (UTC)

@Folly Mox: Unfortunately NCEI has a rather clunky way of dealing with records where each county segment of a tornado's path gets its own page (or each tornado if it doesn't cross county lines). Local NWS offices do sometimes have aggregate pages for tornado outbreaks, but those are considered preliminary while NCEI is the "finalized" data. TornadoLGS (talk) 21:28, 28 November 2024 (UTC)

Back on topic, but I will also note that USM has had a “grudge” against me, starting in March of this year. I won’t try to drag inactive users into this, but back when I was first creating articles, USM and another user (TornadoInformation12) would sort of stalk whatever I did and try to revert it. Again, I’m on mobile, so I can’t fetch the diff, but things like the Jarrell AfD, Cullman redirect, Pilger redirect, Lake Martin redirect, recent edit warring involving me and a message from TI12 on his talk page are pretty good proof of this claim. TI12 has been inactive for over a month, and likely won’t respond here. Also see my talk page archives from April and May, which contain messages from him, and are relatively tame. The below comment, sent by TI12 at Talk:Tornado outbreak and derecho of April 1-3, 2024/Archive 1 pretty much sums what I just said up:

• Yeah, so the weird tense is because some kid made this article BEFORE the event even happened, based entirely on SPC outlooks and hype. He apparently had no idea that this isn't allowed. Gave him a real serious talking to and I can assure you he won't try anything like that again. The derecho element and sheer number of this event makes it notable though, even if underperformed in terms of intense, long-tracked tornadoes.

The “kid” is directly referring to me; I had made the article. This is an issue that has been happening with several editors in the WPW community, so I’ll just bring up the other editor for consistency’s sake. Both editors have shown unacceptable levels of hostility towards new editors, with TI12 and USM having this hostile behavior that has gone unaddressed for far too long. When the next tornado season rolls around, I’m sure we’ll continue to see this hostility thrusted at new editors if it’s not addressed. E_F⁵ 23:44, 28 November 2024 (UTC)

Repeatedly infantilizing fellow editors is uncivil, you should not have been subjected to that. I apologize on TornadoInformation12's behalf (it is unclear if they will ever be active again to apologize for themselves). Horse Eye's Back (talk) 23:30, 29 November 2024 (UTC)

The talk page (of TI12) does indicate that it is a temporary (albeit long-term) absence; because they did say that their job left them with no free time. Hurricane Clyde 🌀^{my talk page!} 05:39, 2 December 2024 (UTC)

Forgot to ping @Horse Eye's Back. Doing that now. Hurricane Clyde 🌀^{my talk page!} 05:39, 2 December 2024 (UTC)

More instances of incivility from TI12

So now that I have a PC again (thanksgiving, am I right?), I will make a list of incivility incidents involving the latter user, TI12:

• April 2024: I desperately need backup. Look what’s happening with the April 2 article. A bunch of kids are running this page into the ground with unsourced Twitter and YouTube junk and are making outbreak articles before events have event starter. The quality of work and content is PLUNGING! PLEASE help me out and back me up. I’ve never seen it this bad. by TI12 at this talk page. Again, the "kid" is directly referring to me and it is never appropriate to talk behind people's backs, especially when they're new.

• April 2024: For April 2nd. Why?? You know better, and know that other users have established that we have to wait until significant, damaging tornadoes, usually EF3 or higher or causing death have been confirmed. You cannot let the rules slide based on SPC hype and model output, and it’s not debatable. Today underperformed and now I have to mark an article for speedy deletion. We haven’t even had a confirmed EF2. Please, do not do this again and wait until the outbreak over to asses for article eligibility. You know better. by TI12 at this user's talk page, who had 2,000 edits at the time. While unrelated to me, this is a prime example of incivility targeting newer users who may not understand our guidelines, and is unnecessarily harsh.

• April 2024: This needs to be deleted asap. Someone has once again completely jumped the gun and broke the rules we established years ago by making an article before we even had a significant event underway. And guess what?? Today underperformed. No devastating damage, no long trackers, no deaths, no tornado emergencies, but someone had to “let it slide” because you all got excited over a moderate risk and strong wording, again. We have been over this SO MANY TIMES and I am beyond exasperated. How many times have we said to not make an article until it is abundantly clear we’ve had a major event??? We jump the gun with articles year after year and it’s like you guys never learn. You CANNOT publish article unless numerous strong tornadoes or multiple deaths have been confirmed. We have neither here, and it’s not up for debate. Mark this for deletion immediately. Btw, the reason nobody was helping you with this article is because one wasn’t needed at all. You pushed it into existence with zero consensus or collaboration with other users. by TI12 at this talk page archive. Highly uncivil, I had less than 1,000 edits at the time, and funny enough, the article he's referring to is now a GA. The "We jump the gun with articles year after year and it’s like you guys never learn" stands out to me.

• April 2024: We didn’t get a significant outbreak today, and you broke the rules by steamrolling this pointless article into existence. You COMPLETELY jumped the gun and ignored the rules established by editors much more experienced than you. You CANNOT just start an article based on hype, well before we have confirmed EF3+ tornadoes, major damage, or deaths. We have NONE of those things, and you made one anyway, ignoring all the guidelines in the process. You also based it all on early, usually inaccurate information prior to the event even being over. Someone warned you and you ignored them. I am going to mark this for deletion. by TI12 at this talk page archive, again directed at me.

• May 2024: You can't can't publish this without DAT damage points, and that isn't up for debate. I'm not harrasing you, I am holding you accountable, and you are getting upset over it. I will continue to revert whatever doesn't meet wiki quality standards. Not backing down this time. by TI12 at this talk page. Extremely hostile behavior, I tried to find common ground and they basically just yelled at me instead of having a normal conversation.

• May 2024: This has to do with sourcing and quality, not notability. Don't twist the narrative. Also, again I am not harassing you, I am holding you accountable for work that does not meet quality standards. You just think you are getting harassed because you are getting upset at the situation. at the same talk page archive; when I brung up their harshness they just played it off, which someone here should never do, period.

• May 2024: I am trying to teach a young new editor how to put out quality articles, and he keeps putting out stuff like this. I know we haven't always gotten along UnitedStatesMan, but I know you have zero tolerance for nonsense and care about sourced, quality work. I have started a talk page about Quality Control on the Tornadoes of 2024 page. I need support from experienced users so I'm not just arguing back and forth with this guy. Can you please give some input to the discussion? I am exhausted from dealing with this and your input in the discussion would be greatly appreciated.. at USM's talk page. Not only is this canvassing, it's also a show of how these users are connected and hence why I'm bringing both up.

• May 2024: No such option exists. If you want me to not revert your work, then source it properly and make sure it is of good quality. I went through the same thing you are going through when I joined here in 2010. I had no idea what i was doing, and viewed every correction as harassment. I now know it wasn't. You don't have to like me, and you are allowed to be frustrated, but you cannot stop other users from reverting info that doesn't meet standards for sourcing and quality. I DO know how you feel though, because I have been in your shoes. by TI12 at this diff, was immediately reverted by the user and probably violates our hounding policy.

• May 2024: And the most damning comment of all: Sorry, but there's nothing you can do about it. I don't "need" to do anything, and can discuss what I want, with whom I want as along there is an objective to it. Want me to stop? Improve, learn, and do better work. Until that happens, I will do what I need to do to keep things on track and up to par. You are going to have to either improve your work, or deal with me having these conversations and held accountable on a regular basis. by TI12 at this user's talk page. This is gross incivility that I don't want to see come next year, and is completely unacceptable. While I get that I am half the reason these comments were said, they shouldn't have been typed up in the first place. Mind you that I was a new editor at the time of this incident, and was immediately hounded by this user. All of these are from two months alone, and I haven't even looked further than that. E_F⁵ 20:31, 29 November 2024 (UTC)

These examples are unsavory, and I'm sorry you had to go through that sort of treatment, but... TI12 has made only one edit since May, and that one edit was in August. I would suggest revisiting if this behavior recurs when/if TI12 returns, but as of now, I don't think there's much that can be done :/ Dylan620 in public/on mobile (he/him • talk) 23:24, 29 November 2024 (UTC)

I’m aware, the main reason I brought this up was because the two users are connected, and this user expressed intent to return to the project in the future. E_F⁵ 00:31, 30 November 2024 (UTC)

I distinctly remember the April comments because I (as an IP) ended up getting a NOTAFORUM revert from Ks0stm for making somewhat similar (albeit a little less harsh) comments regarding “gun jumpers”. Hurricane Clyde 🌀^{my talk page!} 05:44, 2 December 2024 (UTC)

Clearly you can tell that I didn’t notice the harshness of those threads until this ANI discussion; had almost forgotten about them until this evening. Hurricane Clyde 🌀^{my talk page!} 05:49, 2 December 2024 (UTC)

Alexeyevitch Engvar changes

• Alexeyevitch (talk · contribs · deleted contribs · logs · filter log · block user · block log)

I really wished that it would have not come to this, but I have to report Alexeyevitch for changes of New Zealand English to American English, that's been going on for months.

In September 2024 he changed a spelling of "spelt" to "spelled", despite the former being correct. The same month he changed the NZ spelling of "programme" (NZ English) to "program" (US English). Also in September, he got into an edit war and caused lengthy discussions about whether "spelled" is correct in NZ English as opposed to "spelt" (and other spellings with "-ed" vs "-t").[28][29]. This includes this discussion, where he told me not to participate in it (I did not intend to), and he spelt my name wrong (I believe this is part of his harassment against me -- more on that later).

Today I noticed that he changed an IPA pronunciation of "wilder" from "duh" to "duhr" (in New Zealand English, the "r" is not pronounced).

In October 2024 he edited the page New Zealand English to add original research claiming that New Zealand used to use American spellings such as "favor" (but those spellings were common in English in general at the time).

This follows an ANI thread in July 2024 where Alexeyevitch conspired with an admin to change New Zealand spellings to American ones, and then report to the noticeboard that I was harassing him because I reverted the errors he introduced. (By the way, I do not have a problem with that admin, Schwede66, and I enjoy working with him). The discussion shows more of his English variation changes, going back to 2023.

In that July 2024 ANI discussion we talked about how Alexeyevitch was harassing me. In 2023 he often edited non-New Zealand articles after I had (we both edit a lot of New Zealand articles). In 2024 it got worse, as he found the location of a petrol station I took in the town Paraparaumu, despite me never writing where the location, and then added it to the caption of the image. He has this belief that I live there, or lived there, and he started making a lot of edits about that area of the country. I still do not know why he was harassing me, but this type of thing has appeared to have stopped (or at least I haven't been noticing it because I've written scripts to mute him from watchlists, talk pages, etc).

I believe his English variation changes are part of his harassment against me, because in 2023 and 2024 I went through a large number of New Zealand articles and added the tag "Use New Zealand English" and changes American spellings to New Zealand ones (on New Zealand articles), and he seems to want to undo it. The aforementioned discussion where he spelt my name wrong suggests that it is part of his harssment, because why else would he mention my name?

He also has some form of hatred against New Zealand English for some reason, as his user page says "this user uses MM/DD/YY dates", previously said something like "this user strongly prefers American spellings", his talk page used to say that he may ignore comments that are not written in American English, and he would reply in gibberish that was full of American English spellings.

I really did not want it to come to this, but he has not stopped with his English variation changes since the last discussion.

Proposal: I propose that Alexeyevitch be topic banned from making English variation changes, including spellings, pronunciations, dates, and editing articles and discussing varities of English, broadly construed. I also propose to ban him from interacting with me. ―Panamitsu (talk) 05:28, 27 November 2024 (UTC)

• I thought I'd provide a link to this discussion (User talk:Alexeyevitch#Spelling) that shows this concern over New Zealand English isn't limited to Panamitsu, other editors have brought it up. Are there any other discussions, Panamitsu, where this issue has been discussed?

I think it would help if your complaint was less about your speculations on thie editor's motivations and your claims of harrassment and instead focused on policy violations. Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 05:38, 27 November 2024 (UTC)

Not that I'm aware of. It might be possible that those editors in that discussion have discussed it some place that I'm not aware of. Should I ping them to ask? I don't want to forum shop. ―Panamitsu (talk) 05:40, 27 November 2024 (UTC)

Is there a WikiProject New Zealand? Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 06:10, 27 November 2024 (UTC)

Yes there is, and one of the discussions I linked was on that Wikiproject's notice board. ―Panamitsu (talk) 06:16, 27 November 2024 (UTC)

Apologies, I didn't see the second part of your message. I agree with what you've said. That speculation stuff was discussed in the past ANI thread and there hasn't been much change since then, so nothing really needs to be said about it, although I don't think it hurts to add a bit of context.

What I'm really complaining about is that Alexeyevitch is making engvar changes that contradict MOS:RETAIN and MOS:TIES. This has continued after the pervious ANI thread, despite him being apologetic and agreeing not to make those changes. For this reason I believe a topic ban is necessary, rather than just agreeing not to do it. ―Panamitsu (talk) 07:54, 27 November 2024 (UTC)

I was startled to see this. This is not the standard I live to and most of this has been discussed a few months ago but I've learned to use the correct spelling and date formats in articles. I've stayed distant from the user was commited to stay distant. I've done things I regreted in the past (I acknowledge that) but this isn't how we collectively should move foward.

I've diligently used the New Zealand spelling on New Zealand articles and I'm no longer interested in spellings (unless fixing typos e.g. "untill"). I had forgotten most New Zealanders use "uh" but as a South Islander, it's still used but less commonly even here in Christchurch. Apologies for the silliness you experienced earlier this year, this is not the standard I live up to.

As is, my intent is to improve articles and to avoid discussions with this user and I'm not interested in disccusions relating to spellings, though I had a query about using the word "burned" and others in New Zealand English. I'm unfamiliar with what a TBAN is and how would it be enforced but I would amicablly agree to a two-way IBAN. Once again, apologies for this and this stuff shouldn't happen. Alexeyevitch^(talk) 07:16, 27 November 2024 (UTC)

I am disappointed to see this here, mainly because both editors are otherwise an asset to Wikipedia, but simply cannot play well together. As NZ is a small enough country that anyone editing NZ articles will inevitably end up coinciding with anyone else (thus making an interaction ban somewhat impractical) I'd suggest a firm instruction that each butt out of the other's business. As for the pronunciation example - I've been speaking NZ English for almost 60 years and can assure you that I do pronounce the 'r' in 'wilder'. However, one of the characters in that actual movie mentions taking his cue from the word "wildebeest" which does not have an 'r' in it. Daveosaurus (talk) 07:52, 27 November 2024 (UTC)

Just a comment on the "r" pronunciation: it is used mostly in Southland and Otago, but most of the country does not use it. Source In this case it violates MOS:RETAIN because the non-r pronunciation was used first. ―Panamitsu (talk) 07:56, 27 November 2024 (UTC)

• Support EngVar topic ban indefinitely – User:Alexeyevitch is a great contributor to NZ articles and I have gotten along with them and even thanked them for their work in the past before, so I am very disappointed to see them break the promise and continue to engage in MoS-violating changes that got them brought to the previous AN/I case. Something has to stop, and I think it is that User:Alexeyevitch needs to stop making English variety related changes. I see that interaction bans have been brought up here as well, but I think that's a bad idea – if we stop the two from working on each other's edits, then that would mean User:Alexeyevitch would still be allowed to get away with putting non-NZ spellings in NZ articles, thus making it somebody else's task to clean up the non-standard language. It would not resolve the original problem stated by the complainant in this thread.
  Just a little comment of my own: I myself, being born and raised in New Zealand, strongly prefer DMY dates and NZ/British spellings and pronunciations personally, but I always try to respect the different spelling and date standards used in American/Asian topic articles. — AP 499D25 (talk) 04:11, 28 November 2024 (UTC)

  I have a query about the TBAN. I assume this refers to American English and not to words of Māori origin... e.g. me changing Oreti River to Ōreti River, wouldn't be a breach but changing organiser to organizer would be a breach? The date formatting, pronunciations, and disscusions relating to ENGVAR makes sense but I was quite uncertain about correcting Aoraki/Mount Cook to Aoraki / Mount Cook, Lake Ohau to Lake Ōhau, and so on... Alexeyevitch^(talk) 06:16, 28 November 2024 (UTC)

  I have never seen you introduce an error with macrons so I wouldn't want you to be banned from making those changes. ―Panamitsu (talk) 06:20, 28 November 2024 (UTC)

  I assume this isn't an ENGVAR change but instead correcting names and long-term IP vandalism. As is, this isn't an EngVar change since the article is in New Zealand English and I'm simply correcting the spelling of the name of words of Māori origin. Alexeyevitch^(talk) 06:26, 28 November 2024 (UTC)

  Thanks for the explanation. I assumed this was for American English (e.g. organise to organize) and date formatting in New Zealand articles specifically, and not for fixing spellings of words from Māori origin. Alexeyevitch^(talk) 06:37, 28 November 2024 (UTC)

  Yes, that's what I've proposed. ―Panamitsu (talk) 06:54, 28 November 2024 (UTC)

I'd consider changing Oreti River to Ōreti River the fixing of a spelling mistake. Just be careful not to change a (hypothetical) mention of Ooreti to Ōreti as that is a legitimate variant spelling. If in doubt - ignore spelling mistakes (someone else can fix them) and add content or references instead. Daveosaurus (talk) 07:28, 28 November 2024 (UTC)

(Uninvolved) An IBAN here would be tremendously problematic due to the high degree of overlap in articles edited (n.b. 27.622 seconds to execute; wish a "total rows" were provided).

No opinion on the proposed TBAN of ENGVAR / DATEVAR changes in mainspace, but I think a TBAN from even discussing ENGVAR is overly strict, as it's clear just from the present thread that there are legitimate variations within NZ-en, and no diffs evidencing talkspace disruption have been presented.

I note that since the prior ANI, Alexeyevitch has changed their sig from Comic Sans to font-family:cursive, which I'm sure we can all agree demonstrates personal growth. Folly Mox (talk) 14:51, 28 November 2024 (UTC)

I agree with the suggestion that an interaction ban would not be a great idea and I have thus removed it from my proposal. Believe it or not, I am actually rather fond of Alexeyevitch sans the engvar shenanigans, and I once considered him my friend. I hope that this conflict can be resolved because I want to work with him on Christchurch articles, which is something that we both have an interest in. ―Panamitsu (talk) 00:45, 30 November 2024 (UTC)

I have one final query regarding -t and -ed someone might have an answer to. I had a discussion about whether "spelled" and "learned" is correct in New Zealand English as opposed to "spelt" and "learnt" etc. I wanted to note Turnagra's comment: which reads that there isn't a clear consensus on what spelling to use and the usage in New Zealand is a near 50/50 split between burnt and burned according to a poll posted by User:Cloventt.

If I'm adding new content the uses the -ed spelling: Moriori learned to utilise the seeds of the tree. It wouldn't be a breach. However, if the existing content reads: Moriori learnt to utilise the seeds of the tree with the -t spelling and I changed it to an -ed spelling it would be an unnecessary edit and a breach of MOS:RETAIN. Is this correct or am I forgetting something here, correct me if I'm wrong. Alexeyevitch^(talk) 03:04, 30 November 2024 (UTC)

I agree with this. I personally use "learned" more than "learnt". ―Panamitsu (talk) 03:06, 30 November 2024 (UTC)

Cheers for the clarification. I was reading an article by the New Zealand Journal of Botany which used the -ed spelling. Alexeyevitch^(talk) 03:12, 30 November 2024 (UTC)

Yes and the Royal Commission of Inquiry into COVID-19 Lessons Learned uses that spelling. ―Panamitsu (talk) 03:17, 30 November 2024 (UTC)

There are 2440 rows in the table, if that's what you're asking. You can check by typing $("#maintable tbody").find("tr").length in your browser's console. AstonishingTunesAdmirer 連絡 17:20, 30 November 2024 (UTC)

PerspicazHistorian and disruptive editing on caste articles

Yesterday PerspicazHistorian created Deshmukhs of Parwa which is apparently generated by AI chatbot[30] which is after I told them not to use chatbots[31]. This user has been partially blocked for edit warring on Veerashaiva (now a redirect to Lingayatism), they also created Lingayat Vani which is a caste based POV fork of Lingayatism relying mostly on WP:RAJ era sources and sources without page numbers and includes mostly irrelevant information to the caste itself . They were alerted about WP:GSCASTE in early August [32], yet are still continuing to disrupt the area. I would request some restriction on this user.- Ratnahastin (talk) 13:25, 28 November 2024 (UTC)

There's a recent prior case that ended with the poster blocked for socking here Simonm223 (talk) 13:30, 28 November 2024 (UTC)

Hi adimistrators,

1)@Ratnahastin Yes the article Deshmukhs of Parwa might have involved some AI written content and I will be editing it soon. I saw the tag on the article. I am glad that you flagged that issue and I am more than willing to make the article format better. Will be editing it soon.

2) The is an ongoing AFD Discussion and it's not good to still put the topic on noticeboard. The article Lingayat Vani is about a community "lingayat vani" not the religious Hindu sect of "lingayatism". The community has history of its own as mentioned by the author many times.

3) "Lingayat Vani" is not to glorify any caste system , we live in 21st century it's should not even be the topic of discussion. Moreover the article also deals with the malpractices of the community and addresses the topic in a neutral way.

4) This page has been tried to be vandalized by many POV pushers and Sockpuppets in the past too. I was blocked from editing Veerashaiva by charges raised by a sockpuppet (User:RationalIndia).

5) Wikipedia has reputation of being a repository of data, not the personal views. I have tried to use Wikipedia:RAJ era sources as minimum as possible and it contains other sources too.

6)@Simonm223 Sir, Thank you for pointing out the prior case. PerspicazHistorian (talk) 19:30, 29 November 2024 (UTC)

Are these open proxies?

Begin copy/paste:

• 185.169.74.104 (talk · contribs · deleted contribs · filter log · WHOIS · RDNS · RBLs · http · block user · block log) – WP:PROXY (datacenter). tgeorgescu (talk) 14:54, 28 November 2024 (UTC)

  Declined. This noticeboard is only for naked vandalism/spamming. Feel free to raise your concerns at WP:ANI. Ad Orientem (talk) 18:19, 28 November 2024 (UTC)

• 2604:CA00:10B:4D58:0:0:1261:687F (talk · contribs · (/64) · deleted contribs · filter log · WHOIS · RBLs · http · block user · block log) – WP:PROXY (datacenter). tgeorgescu (talk) 15:09, 28 November 2024 (UTC)

  Declined. This noticeboard is only for naked vandalism/spamming. Feel free to raise your concerns at WP:ANI. -Ad Orientem (talk) 18:20, 28 November 2024 (UTC)

End copy/paste. tgeorgescu (talk) 18:34, 28 November 2024 (UTC)

For clarity, this was copied from WP:AIV. Aside: you can use {{tqb}} to quote a block on a talk page to make it clear what's copied and pasted. --Chris | Crazycomputers (talk) 22:06, 28 November 2024 (UTC)

Proxy checker doesn't identify them as proxies[33][34]. - Ratnahastin (talk) 23:30, 28 November 2024 (UTC)

whatismyipaddress.com says they are datacenters. I don't know if that counts as WP:PROXY. tgeorgescu (talk) 23:52, 28 November 2024 (UTC)

185.169.74.104 - no. 2604:CA00:10B:4D58:0:0:1261:687F - no. Datacenters can lease server space to eg VPN providers but I’m not seeing it here. Malcolmxl5 (talk) 23:59, 28 November 2024 (UTC)

SPUR failed either, https://spur.us/context/185.169.74.104. These are common IPs. -Lemonaka 09:17, 30 November 2024 (UTC)

Legal threat by Rechinul

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[35] looks to me like a legal threat by Rechinul. He already got indeffed at ro.wiki for issuing a legal threat. tgeorgescu (talk) 18:45, 28 November 2024 (UTC)

That's not a legal threat.--Bbb23 (talk) 18:53, 28 November 2024 (UTC)

It's true the user was indeffed at ro.wiki for making threats, but the block rationale does not say legal threats. All that said, I'm close to blocking the user anyway as WP:NOTHERE combined with disruptive editing and a heavy dose of WP:RGW.--Bbb23 (talk) 18:58, 28 November 2024 (UTC)a

@Bbb23: I am decided to go as far as it takes to prove you wrong—it is not specified how far. Does it entail a court case? I don't know. tgeorgescu (talk) 19:02, 28 November 2024 (UTC)

Exactly, legal threats have to be clear to be blockable; that one is not even close to being clear.--Bbb23 (talk) 19:05, 28 November 2024 (UTC)

I have to admit that some of his edits are highly amusing. tgeorgescu (talk) 19:06, 28 November 2024 (UTC)

Good for blocking as not here. —Alalch E. 19:12, 28 November 2024 (UTC)

Man I wish Wikipedia had the political power this editor thinks it does. Simonm223 (talk) 19:42, 28 November 2024 (UTC)

And now a second new-ish editor is going in and making the changes Rechinul was asking for. Could these be a pair of socks? Simonm223 (talk) 19:51, 28 November 2024 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Sockpuppet investigations/Rechinul. tgeorgescu (talk) 19:56, 28 November 2024 (UTC)

Result: it is improbable (not impossible) that he is socking. tgeorgescu (talk) 22:57, 28 November 2024 (UTC)

Some of them indeed are WP:NPA, WP:FRINGE and WP:ASPERSION. If I had my way I would have kicked them out for WP:CIR for claiming to be an English-native speaker and proving otherwise. Borgenland (talk) 10:28, 29 November 2024 (UTC)

Not to mention their blatant WP:SOAPBOXing of and spamming on Talk:2024 Romanian presidential election. Borgenland (talk) 10:55, 29 November 2024 (UTC)

Just a note to uninvolved editors and admins, given a recent election on Nov. 24th, there is a heightened level of activity on articles about the 2024 Romanian presidential election and its candidates which is just as tumultuous as the 2024 U.S. presidential election is to residents of that country. There is a runoff in early December and so it might be worth putting some of these articles on your Watchlists for the next few weeks. Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 06:16, 29 November 2024 (UTC)

• I have blocked Rechinul for a week for battleground editing and personal attacks. Bishonen | tålk 15:25, 29 November 2024 (UTC).

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User:CyberIdris

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Spark on History of breastfeeding—I'm not going to spend another second of my time convincing this individual, who's recently off the bench for edit warring already, that recognize is not acceptable British English. Someone else can deal with it. If this report seems premature, keep in mind they've simultaneously inserted themselves into the ongoing edit-a-thon quagmire at WP:AN, and their obtuse edit warring here seems tied to their attachment there—not to say they're connected to it directly, as it seems more likely they happen to have caught this axe-grinding opportunity concerning how reverting obvious mistakes in the middle of a contrived fracas is clearly a miscarriage of justice. Remsense ‥ 论 00:20, 29 November 2024 (UTC)

Blocked indefinitely. ~ ToBeFree (talk) 00:29, 29 November 2024 (UTC)

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User:EBKWiki persistent unsourced edits, POV-pushing

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

This editor has been warned many times about unsourced edits, with two level-4 warnings in October and November already ([36], [37]), among a flurry of other warnings on their talk page. Their edits since the last warning (17 November) continue to be unsourced and clearly pushing a specific nationalist/cultural POV: [38], [39], [40], [41], [42], [43], [44], [45]. They're not here to edit constructively. R Prazeres (talk) 04:34, 29 November 2024 (UTC)

Respectfully I disagree with the characterization that my edits are unsourced or push a specific nationalist/cultural point of view. I have made efforts to provide sources for the information I contribute and have always aimed to improve the article in a constructive manner. If there are specific concerns with my edits, I am open to discussing them and making any necessary adjustments. My intention is to contribute to Wikipedia in a neutral, fact-based way, and I welcome any constructive feedback or guidance on how to align my edits more closely with Wikipedia’s standards. EBKWiki (talk) 07:42, 29 November 2024 (UTC)

It is not really a matter of perspective or opinion: you simply are not provid[ing] sources for the information I contribute. These additions are totally unsourced. They do not include your sources.

When you write If there are specific concerns with my edits, I am open to discussing them and making any necessary adjustments, it shows that you're not actually engaging with the concerns raised here, because the examples provided are already perfectly specific and can be acted upon by you. The entire point of citing your sources is so others who aren't already familiar with the material or how it applies can verify the specific information. You sometimes include links to websites in your edit summary, but that is not an acceptable alternative. What's more, your sources are very often clearly unacceptable, or your additions aren't actually verified by what you're linking.

(Also, I'm sorry but please do not use ChatGPT to generate replies if that's what you're doing here. It's incredibly rude, and allows you to avoid engaging with the concerns of others.) Remsense ‥ 论 09:23, 29 November 2024 (UTC)

I would like to clarify that many of my edits have simply been attempts to add information about Iranian or Iranian cultures that are not currently represented in the article. My goal has been to expand the scope and ensure that the article provides a more complete and inclusive view. If there are concerns about the way I’ve presented this information or the sources I’ve used, I am more than willing to address them and work collaboratively to improve the article in a neutral and constructive manner. EBKWiki (talk) 07:44, 29 November 2024 (UTC)

Hello, EBKWiki,

Although I'm interested in knowing if R Prazeres has attempted to discuss their issue with your edits with you before they came to ANI, it seems like your User talk page is chock-full of warning notices so you must have known that there were problems with your editing before now. Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 08:20, 29 November 2024 (UTC)

To be clear: I have not written anything else on EBKWiki's talk page aside from the ANI notice. I was going to add a new warning when I saw, as mentioned above, that they had been warned over and over since July, including multiple final warnings, so I saw no constructive purpose in yet another. Their recent edits are blatant enough to indicate they've either made no real attempt to improve their editing or are unable to understand the problems and that they will continue to harm Wikipedia in their current pattern. Hence, they are overdue for a review here at ANI.

For what it's worth: the recent unsourced edits at Hammam ([46], [47]) appear to be illustrative of the behaviour: they're claiming out of nowhere that "Persian (Iranian) bath" is a general English term for the Hammamm/Turkish bath, when that is straightforwardly false. The only reason to add this is to push a POV in the lead. The urls in the summary of their second edit (an attempt to re-add this right after being reported here) are just promotional sites for travel agencies or businesses in Iran, irrelevant to the issue and hardly a serious effort at citing reliable sources after being warned about that policy many times. R Prazeres (talk) 08:55, 29 November 2024 (UTC)

I have blocked EBKWiki for two weeks for adding unreferenced and poorly referenced content. The editor has been pushing a pro Persian/pro Iranian point of view without providing references to reliable sources, and has failed to engage with criticism of their edits. Cullen328 (talk) 10:47, 29 November 2024 (UTC)

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Legal threats

Hello, all ANI watchers,

I, and another editor received very specific legal threats from User:152.58.93.148 as seen here and here. I have blocked the IP for a week for legal threats. But, thinking about it later, I thought I should acknowledge it here on ANI as it is pretty targeted and specific and could be extended to other admins and editors who have had some contact with this incident with Whatsapp University. I actually had no contact that I'm aware of with User:ShymalWhatsappUniversity but I should ping User:Robertsky who did issue a block towards this editor. Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 07:09, 29 November 2024 (UTC)

This is very likely WP:LTA/IAC, a sockfarm that has been harassing WMF and editors for a decade now, back then they took offence over IAC(which is their organisation) and now they are doing the same for their website WhatsApp university. I think the recent threats by Hindu Raksha Dal/Hindu News were made by the same individual. - Ratnahastin (talk) 07:23, 29 November 2024 (UTC)

I'm also going to ping User:Yamla as I've noticed that they have blocked several IP accounts based in Delhi that have issued similar legal or physical threats to our editors. Maybe a week was too short of a block. I did think that it was kind of amusing that they demanded that I turn over all of my personal information to an anonymous IP address within 36 hours. Yeah, I don't think anyone would agree to that demand. Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 07:27, 29 November 2024 (UTC)

I see the same kind of threats being issued in this discussion, Wikipedia:Reliable sources/Noticeboard/Archive 457#Hindu News and Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/IncidentArchive1172#Hindu News, also by a Shymal, this time from Hindu Raksha Dal. I don't know what the connection is between Hindu News and What's App University. But if this is all the same editor, they came to my User talk page asking for help, I explained the policy basically stating that I couldn't revision delete all of the edits they wanted removed. I guess that is what got their attention on to me. Otherwise, I don't see my connection to all of this. Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 07:40, 29 November 2024 (UTC)

They are probably referring to this action of yours actionMomosixer (talk) 09:48, 29 November 2024 (UTC)

You just registered and the first thing you did is post here. That's very odd. - Ratnahastin (talk) 10:01, 29 November 2024 (UTC)

Not really. As an ANI lurker I saw the lady needed some assistance. Momosixer (talk) 10:07, 29 November 2024 (UTC)

They have no basis to file a lawsuit anyway, their "university" doesn't exist and is a hoax, in reality it's just a troll website. - Ratnahastin (talk) 09:02, 29 November 2024 (UTC)

Thanks for the ping. I am extending the block to 1 year per WP:NOP. – robertsky (talk) 09:07, 29 November 2024 (UTC)

It's a bit amusing—"Whatsapp university" is a common phrase used in India to refer to fake news and misinformation spread through Whatsapp The AP (talk) 09:28, 29 November 2024 (UTC)

Well, TheAstorPastor, the WhatsApp University page is a Redirect to the Fake news in India article so I guess that is fitting. Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 09:36, 29 November 2024 (UTC)

It's a troll website, operated by IAC LTA.

https://www.whatsappuniversity.org/about

https://www.whatsappuniversity.org/

Our friends... Hindu Rashtra Dal NCPRI India India Against Corruption Hindu Raksha Dal - Ratnahastin (talk) 09:43, 29 November 2024 (UTC)

Yes. They seem to be firmly within the Hindutva / anti-Muslim space if their leaders are anything to judge by. Economic Monopoly through Halal Process | Veeresh Malik and Sanjay Dixit | Jaipur Dialogues 2019 Momosixer (talk) 10:00, 29 November 2024 (UTC)

I wonder what the actual Whatsapp would think of a web site infringing on its trademarks... Daveosaurus (talk) 10:15, 29 November 2024 (UTC)

There is a prominent link on their landing page for that eventuality titled as Whatsapp role in spreading fake news. Momosixer (talk) 10:28, 29 November 2024 (UTC)

We must never allow our content to be influenced by any intimidation tactics or threats by the dogmatic fundamentalist extremist factions of any religion. Sadly, all major religions have such extremist factions. I am a Jew and I am acutely aware that there are such extremist groups within Judaism. I used to be idealistic and uninformed enough to assume that Tibetan Buddhism lacked such extremist factions. I was wrong. Any editor of any religion who engages in any intimidation tactics intended to influence or censor our content, whether through legal threats or allusions to violence, must instantly be blocked indefinitely. We offer legitimate forms of dispute resolutions in all such cases. Our editors have the obligation to cover religious disputes with rigorous neutrality, summarizing high quality reliable sources. Every editor must strive to live up to those high standards, and those that don't need to be warned, and if necessary, sanctioned and blocked. That does not mean that we capitulate to the unreasonable demands of such extremists. Cullen328 (talk) 10:22, 29 November 2024 (UTC)

These people don't seem to be editing Wikipedia articles. It seems they only want talk page discussions referring to them deleted. Momosixer (talk) 10:28, 29 November 2024 (UTC)

I am Indian myself, and I hear the phrase "Whatsapp University" almost on an everyday basis. It's unusual to me that they associated themselves with the phrase that is literally used to convey that the news is fake and information is wrong. The AP (talk) 13:37, 29 November 2024 (UTC)

It's intentional, they did the same thing with IAC which was the name of the movement they appropriated and latter claimed that it was the movement that stole their brand name. They are always claiming common terms to be their "brand" so they can disrupt Wikipedia's process and threaten editors with legal action. - Ratnahastin (talk) 15:37, 29 November 2024 (UTC)

They're trolls and we should WP:DENY them as much as possible. Simonm223 (talk) 15:40, 29 November 2024 (UTC)

Noting that Momosixer who commented in this thread has been blocked as a sock likely related to IAC as well, see Wikipedia:Sockpuppet investigations/Blaxstocatamazon. - Ratnahastin (talk) 04:33, 30 November 2024 (UTC)

User:जनेश ठकुल्ला

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User:जनेश ठकुल्ला, Janesh Thakulla, was created 26 November, and has been used only for posting their biography to their user page and user talk page, and to an attempted hijack of Astitva...Ek Prem Kahani [48]. Speedy U5 at their user page was declined, and my attempts at welcome and uw-usertalk to explain the problem have been reverted. That account is currently under a one week block at Nepali WP for the same behaviour. Clearly WP:NOTHERE. Wikishovel (talk) 12:05, 29 November 2024 (UTC)

Indeffed per NOTHERE. Bishonen | tålk 12:31, 29 November 2024 (UTC).

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User:ZanderAlbatraz1145 Civility and Content

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User:ZanderAlbatraz1145 has been publishing bare urls to mainspace articles for some time. I have informed them that they should add text and format their references, but they have refused to do this multiple times. They have also been uncivil too a high degree with me and other editors. Their civility has been brought up before on their talk page. Below are some comments:

"Get your garbage off my talk page. You took an issue with an edit, you can contribute to it instead of removing it. That's how Wikipedia works, lend a helping hand, pick up where someone else left off. Fix mistakes, not erase them. Show some goddamn consideration, not for me, but for the readers." 1

"Thanks for the help, idiots. If it weren't for me, this information would have been lost to time forever." 2

"Jesus Christ, do I have to do everything myself. And how is it that whenever I write out all of the information, it ends up coming out like shit." 3

"Why was this removed?! God, people on here are so stupid. Why, what's the significance?! Tell me, please, it's a fucking unproduced screenplay. Cited and sourced correctly. For God's sakes leave it be so I don't have to come back and clean up your mess. This piece of information could have been lost to time forever because of your ignorance. Thank goodness I swooped in to re-re-re-replace it" 4

Jon698 (talk) 19:55, 29 November 2024 (UTC)

I am embarrassed to say the least, admittedly. But these are all unfairly taken out of context. I also tried to handle this issue calmly at first, but it's past that at this point. As I've said before, and as I've just realized on my talk page, I've never had this type of issue with another editor before. We don't need to be battling each other. You took an issue with an edit, so fix it. Nothing new. That's how Wikipedia has always been. Don't remove it, because that's being counterproductive. ZanderAlbatraz1145 (talk) 19:59, 29 November 2024 (UTC)

Not sure if it matters at this point, but the third out-of-context 'pulled' quote, if you read it, is more a criticism of myself. It's also an answer to this issue; I often don't write out certain links because I'm highly critical of my own writing. Once again, other editors have always generously formatted the link, and written it out, realizing it beautifully in the article. I feel like this user is just picking a battle here. ZanderAlbatraz1145 (talk) 20:02, 29 November 2024 (UTC)

Have you considered trying, per WP:AGF, approaching your interactions with this user as if they mean sincerely what they say, and that they share with you a genuine desire to improve Wikipedia? 100.36.106.199 (talk) 20:22, 29 November 2024 (UTC)

I retract this issue in light on ZanderAlbatraz's recent comments here and on their talk page. Jon698 (talk) 20:24, 29 November 2024 (UTC)

There we have it. Let's draw a line in the sand— 🤝 ZanderAlbatraz1145 (talk) 20:29, 29 November 2024 (UTC)

ZanderAlbatraz1145, please read Referencing for beginners and please agree to properly format your bare URL references with complete bibiographic details. You can always ask for assistance at the Help desk or the Teahouse. Will you agree to do that? Cullen328 (talk) 22:26, 29 November 2024 (UTC)

Way ahead of you.

Just skimmed through that link, even thought I am not a beginner... just lazy.

Thanks. ZanderAlbatraz1145 (talk) 00:56, 30 November 2024 (UTC)

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User:TheCrusadesWereAwesome

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Contrary to popular belief, they were actually bad—mostly because they were tacky and expensive. except that time Richard Lionheart took down the King of Austria's banner hanging from the walls of Acre because he hadn't actually helped enough to take the city for him to deserve that. I will grant that part was awesome.

Anyway, TheCrusadesWereAwesome (talk · contribs) is another immediate Nikola Tesla edit-warring casualty, alas: I will stand my ground. These are good-faith edits as I'm making it more accurate. He was an ethnic Serb from Croatia and the sources already provided support this. So the label of Croatian Serb is far more accurate than Serbian-American. If consensus is wrong I will oppose it and stand up for the truth.

May the Lord bless and keep them. Remsense ‥ 论 20:52, 29 November 2024 (UTC)

I was going to temporary block them from the article, but the added personal attacks made me decide on a site wide block, only 24 hours, though. Any admin is free to increase the timer, if they feel like this user is not here. Isabelle Belato ^🏳‍🌈 20:59, 29 November 2024 (UTC)

...I mean: the name, the bio, the disruptive editing. Surely a clear troll? GiantSnowman 21:07, 29 November 2024 (UTC)

Eh, I saw no reason to assume that when merely "well meaning if acutely zany in a way I find disagreeable" seemed most likely. Remsense ‥ 论 21:12, 29 November 2024 (UTC)

Considering some of their first edits, my guess is that they are a troll, yes, which is why I wouldn't oppose another admin stepping in with an indefinite WP:NOTHERE block. I'm trying to assume good faith here, though. Isabelle Belato ^🏳‍🌈 22:12, 29 November 2024 (UTC)

I am that administrator. After reviewing all of edits that TheCrusadesWereAwesome made, I concluded that an indefinite block is appropriate because I am unable to detect good faith. Cullen328 (talk) 00:45, 30 November 2024 (UTC)

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User:WhiteBear09

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• WhiteBear09 (talk · contribs)

At User talk:WhiteBear09, user is threatening block evasion and abusing talk page access. Could someone be nice enough to revoke it? JeffSpaceman (talk) 21:57, 29 November 2024 (UTC)

 Done voorts (talk/contributions) 22:04, 29 November 2024 (UTC)

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Overzealous blocking by User:ToBeFree

Block evasion has no power here. - The Bushranger One ping only 06:17, 30 November 2024 (UTC)
The following discussion has been closed. Please do not modify it.
The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this discussion. ToBeFree (talk · contribs) CyberIdris, a new editor, was in the past given a temp page block for a slow motion edit war. Three weeks later CyberIdris voiced concerns of an excessive indef block on another new editor, Nnamdi Kinghenry, who had been copy-editing and introducing some relatively simple grammar mistakes[49]. Nnamdi Kinghenry is apparently a part of a group of new users doing good faith copy-editing as an onboarding step, that included user Brown Stella. User Remsense, concerned about grammar mistakes, was mass reverting every edit from these users, and CyberIdris objected to one of the reverts of a Brown Stella edit[50] on the grounds that it, from what I can see, isn't vandalism and doesn't contain any obvious errors unlike other edits. I also think these kind of pointy reverts can discourage new editors from contributing. This led to a content dispute between Remsense and CyberIdris over that edit, that concluded with CyberIdris telling Remsense to "please discuss it on talk"[51]. ToBeFree then indef blocked CyberIdris for edit warring even though it had not gone over 3RR, and took no action against Remsense who also contributed (and made 5 reverts including reverts prior to CyberIdris's particiation). ToBeFree has a prior history of issuing indef blocks on users who have gotten into content disputes with Remsense: [52][53][54] Regardless of the context that led up to it (which demonstrates that CyberIdris had a good faith concern for a fellow user), the escalation from one week page block to an indef block even without a 3RR violation strikes me as extremely overzealous for a new user given that, from what I see, no admin ever said anything about revert restrictions to CyberIdris. 331dot, who reviewed the unblock request, is notable for being the admin who endorsed every single bad block that Graham87 made. Remsense does not endorse this block and is surprised it happened[55]. 181.23.146.172 (talk) 00:00, 30 November 2024 (UTC) No one should endorse immediate blocks without due consideration. It's pretty unfair for new people. Ahri Boy (talk) 00:05, 30 November 2024 (UTC) Apologies, but you've chosen to go further down exactly the wrong path, CyberIdris. Like I said on your talk page, while your rhetoric is very soothed and peaceable, your conduct has been anything but reasonable: you decided first to edit war over a ENGVAR issue where you were trivially in the wrong, in order to take a brave stand where you teach us how onboarding is more important than preventing obvious mistakes from being added to the encyclopedia. Now, you're obviously socking to make this post—it is so obvious that it hurts. Your behavior is weirdly deceptive, dismissive, and dogmatic considering the crux of your concern is how we should be more patient with new editors. That you can't actually discuss these points without assuming the soapboxing stance is a subtype of WP:BATTLEGROUND mentality that we don't need at all, even if you weren't trying to get around your block in a manner that'll rightfully ensure that it won't get lifted. I wish you had reconsidered this! Remsense ‥ 论 00:09, 30 November 2024 (UTC) I have a hard time believing CyberIdris is actually a new editor, judging by their immediate knowledge of obscure Wikipedia jargon. That said, 181.23.146.172, if you are CyberIdris, posting this while you are blocked is block evasion and is not helping your case. C F A 00:13, 30 November 2024 (UTC) Blocked the IP for pretty clear block evasion and reset CyberIdris's block. voorts (talk/contributions) 00:20, 30 November 2024 (UTC) For the record, I had attempted to address your concerns in Special:Diff/1260180269. When automatic block expiry just leads to the same behavior as before the block, I find it reasonable to require an unblock request in which the user explains their understanding of the problem and promises not to continue. That's all I personally would be looking for when reviewing the resulting unblock request(s). ~ ToBeFree (talk) 00:28, 30 November 2024 (UTC) Comment: Reopened per my talk page. NightWolf1223 <Howl at me•My hunts> 02:22, 30 November 2024 (UTC) The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Risto hot sir

Risto hot sir (talk · contribs) has been using their puppets for years on several projects and I'm thinking about requesting a global ban against them. They have been active on this project and English Wikiquote several days again. Since they started here and got blocked on 2019, I'd like to ask if there was some more unacceptable behaviours except for only socking, and if yes, is there any evidence for that?
Or, any advice or opinion for such request? -Lemonaka 08:58, 30 November 2024 (UTC)

Hard for us to say anything since we don't know who the other users you suspect of being socks are. If you think Risto hot sir is socking then open a report at WP:SPI. Meters (talk) 09:05, 30 November 2024 (UTC)

Ah, I see you did at Wikipedia:Sockpuppet_investigations/Risto_hot_sir/Archive#28_November_2024 and the user has already been indef'ed. What else do you want? Risto hot sir is already globally locked. Meters (talk) 09:10, 30 November 2024 (UTC)

I'd like to request a global ban against this user on meta instead of just global lock. But normally, a global locked user, unless with serious problem, is unlikely to be banned. I'm not quite sure if it will be possible to pass. So I'm asking is there anything more than socking of this user? -Lemonaka 09:12, 30 November 2024 (UTC)

Personally, I wouldn't bother, but if you do want to pursue this it wouldn't it be up to you to present the evidence and make the case? Meters (talk) 09:21, 30 November 2024 (UTC)

I saw there's some dialogue about their editing controversial topic regarding IPA, then they got blocked. Nothing more serious I could found and their edits on different projects seemed not vandalism or disruptive. They this started socking, is this summary right? -Lemonaka 09:33, 30 November 2024 (UTC)

Lemonaka, this is just my gut reaction here but this discussion is not a good subject for a general noticeboard like ANI. It would be very unusual for the editors who check in here to know anything about the circumstances of this particular editor's block. You might have some success if you contacted the admins who originally blocked this editor or worked on an SPI involving them but I'm guessing 99.9% of the editors who visit ANI will know nothing that can help you with your case. Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 10:03, 30 November 2024 (UTC)

You also search the ANI archives and see if something pops up. Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 10:40, 30 November 2024 (UTC)

I've searched ANI archives before putting up this, and there's no any information about them, in fact once in Special:PermanentLink/1088091180#Politically-motivated and defamatory pages at Wikiquote being auto-linked here? but this is not related to them. As your advice, I will try to contact @TonyBallioni for more information. -Lemonaka 07:13, 1 December 2024 (UTC)

Can we get Drbogdan back?

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User user:Drbogdan has been blocked since July, and many science and space articles are missing his quick updates and extensive positive edits. Shouldn't we have a short/long list of productive editors who've been blocked but are a net positive to the project who could be both rehabilitated and returning-sonable (prepare the fatted calf)? Randy Kryn (talk) 11:36, 30 November 2024 (UTC)

Not blocked - banned. They are of course welcome to explain why they should be unbanned, why they have learn their lesson, will never do it again etc etc. - until that time it's a big fat no from me. GiantSnowman 11:46, 30 November 2024 (UTC)

Only if the said editor appeals per the banning policy, and at least six months after per WP:SO. Until then... – robertsky (talk) 11:49, 30 November 2024 (UTC)

An early "bah, humbug". I, for two, miss him and his always up-to-date edits about scientific advancements and discoveries. Randy Kryn (talk) 13:00, 30 November 2024 (UTC)

Ah no, and they weren't productive. Their "quick updates and extensive positive edits" were nothing of the sort. The quick updates were slapped together edits that were severely lacking and required work from others. The articles would have been better without the edits, and we're not interested in quick edits on topic as we're an encyclopaedia not a news site. Quality is what we're after, not quick. And it was blatantly clear that they weren't interested in working with the community. Their constant "I know better because I have X qualification" was intended as dismissive and a way of avoiding argument and having to listen to any criticism. I worked on a probe that landed on Titan, doesn't make me an expert on Titan or encyclopaedia articles about other moons. Canterbury Tail talk 13:04, 30 November 2024 (UTC)

This is the thread. Secretlondon (talk) 13:08, 30 November 2024 (UTC)

Come on, you should know better than to think this would be how an editor gets unbanned from Wikipedia. Sergecross73 msg me 13:12, 30 November 2024 (UTC)

Of course I know better. It was just a rhetorical question after seeing an old Dr edit. Please close this, with a fond memory flag flying. Randy Kryn (talk) 13:16, 30 November 2024 (UTC)

From reading the thread 'quick updates' seems to mean adding press release type science everywhere. We are better than that. Secretlondon (talk) 13:18, 30 November 2024 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Dan Palraz restored the revision by 216.164.254.3

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

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Dan Palraz has restored the revision on “Capital Punishment in the United Arab Emirates” by 216.164.254.3, the latter being a sock of Jacobkennedy (who was blocked in January). Restoring sock puppetry, especially with unsubstantiated claims, is never acceptable at Wikipedia. Please revert Dan Palraz’s edits. Thank you BabyEinsteinSirr (talk) 12:45, 30 November 2024 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Disruption at contentious topic

Montblamc1 (talk · contribs) has now received pushback from two editors on how not to edit on Wikipedia per NPOV, Words to watch and Wikipedia:RS at Iraqi Kurdistan (an article considered contentious and noted as such at the talkpage). Discussions have taking place at [56][57]. Montblamc1, without presenting any reliable references argues that the terms "Iraqi Kurdistan" and Southern Kurdistan" are used in a Kurdish nationalist context (and that it is "particularly" used by Kurdish nationalists) which a simple Google search contradict ("iraqi kurdistan jstor" and "southern kurdistan jstor" clearly indicate that these are terms that are common in academia). Semsûrî (talk) 14:08, 30 November 2024 (UTC)

To be clear, as Semsuri clearly did not present my position fairly, I will do it myself.

I have argued the following:

1. The aforementioned two terms “Iraqi Kurdistan” and “Southern Kurdistan” are unofficial as they are not used by any international authority, such as the UNGEGN.

2. The context in which they are used needs to specified, and that is, the context of Kurdish nationalism.

Also, the issue about the wording that implied that the terms are “particularly used” by nationalists has already been resolved here[58] in the section titled “Iraqi Kurdistan” and I changed the wording following the short discussion. I asked Semsuri about the alternative wording but received no answer back, and he rather replied arguing against the wording I had already changed.

Furthermore, instead of removing the parts in questions that are disputed, Semsuri opted to revert the whole page to a previous state. That means that parts that I’ve added that are not disputed were removed. Montblamc1 (talk) 14:24, 30 November 2024 (UTC)

You keep claiming that "The context in which they are used needs to specified, and that is, the context of Kurdish nationalism." without any back up so I'm going to keep pushing back on it. Secondly, where does it state that because no international authority recognizes the term, it cannot be used on Wikipedia (when its a commonly used word?) which, again, a simple Google Search would show you. This is POV-push territory for me. Semsûrî (talk) 14:28, 30 November 2024 (UTC)

I never claimed it cannot be used in Wikipedia. Where exactly did you get that from? That’s very different from saying it is not an official designation (toponym) for any area officially. That is what I’m saying.

Also, what do you mean “without any backup”? What is information without context? Why is it so wrong to want to expand on the context wherein these terms are used?

It is becoming increasingly more apparent to me that your reluctance to accept any change to the article is an example of Wikipedia:Status quo stonewalling. Montblamc1 (talk) 22:06, 30 November 2024 (UTC)

You are editing the page based on what RS? Semsûrî (talk) 22:09, 30 November 2024 (UTC)

You can see all sources I have used in the article. If you have any problem with any source go ahead and mention it. Also, notice how you keep changing the reason for your objection. First you claim my addition of the word “unofficial” is “frankly irrelevant” (without explaining why you think it is irrelevant) then you claim my adding the context that Southern Kurdistan is used to refer to an area in the context of Kurdish nationalism as a claim “without backup”, now you’re claiming I’m not using proper sources at all (I assume you mean in all edits Ive made to the article). Again, if you have an issue with any source, go ahead and mention it and let’s discuss it. My source for the fact that Iraqi Kurdistan or Southern Kurdistan is not used by any international authority such as UNGEGN is the absence of evidence of the contrary. If you have proof that it is official and used by the aforementioned authority or other authority then please by all means, provide your “RS”. Montblamc1 (talk) 22:20, 30 November 2024 (UTC)

I am not and have never mentioned that I have an issue with the word "unofficial". Once again, I have to ask you, please give me reliable reference(s) that backs your claim that the words stem from and are particularly used by Kurdish nationalists. The reference you use (Bengio) only states that the word "Bashur" is used by Kurdish nationalists not "Iraqi Kurdistan" or "Southern Kurdistan" (which I argue are common in English-language academic literature). Hope I'm concise and clear now. Semsûrî (talk) 22:56, 30 November 2024 (UTC)

Speaking of the UNGEGN note you added, and I'm sorry I have to repeat myself, it's unsourced. Please add a reference to it. Semsûrî (talk) 23:04, 30 November 2024 (UTC)

As to your first reply,

Yes you have had a problem with the word “unofficial” you mentioned that you think it is “frankly irrelevant” it is all in your talk page, go read it again. Now you’re backtracking and claiming to have never objected to this. Also, why do you keep repeating the same objection on the wording related to the use of the terms even after I’ve already told you that I have changed the wording already following the previous discussion we had… do you not remember me asking you to comment on the alternative wording? You have to pay more attention. If you have a problem with the present wording (that I added immediately after the short discussion in your talk page) of the article then go ahead and mention it.

As to your second reply,

I have expanded on the reason why I have added the word “unofficial” using a Template:Efn. Certainly you know how those work. If you have proof that they are used by the aforementioned authority or any international authority, then by all means, mention it and I would gladly personally go remove the edit. Furthermore, you still have not offered any reason for your decision to revert the whole page back to the previous state. What proper reason do you have to do that? You haven't once mentioned a single objection on any other edit that I have made in the article, but still you have felt the need to revert the whole page back. Again, you still have not explained why you think it is necessary to revert the page other than stating “the present page cannot stand since it is misleading”. You have not explained how any of the other edits I have made are misleading. Montblamc1 (talk) 10:39, 1 December 2024 (UTC)

I need admin intervention now as this conversation is going nowhere. Montblamc1 has no intention of being constructive here. I will repeat myself: Please, back your unsourced claim that the words "Iraqi Kurdistan" and "South Kurdistan" stem from and are particularly used by Kurdish nationalists. The Bengio reference does not claim that. Semsûrî (talk) 10:45, 1 December 2024 (UTC)

So be it. You are either deliberately ignoring my comments or are dyslexic and unable to understand the content of my comments. You are the one who is not being constructive by refusing to take part in a proper discussion. I’m sure an admin will be able to read everything properly and make a fair judgement. Montblamc1 (talk) 22:27, 1 December 2024 (UTC)

You are either deliberately ignoring my comments or are dyslexic – Batten down the hatches -- storm clouds on the horizon. EEng

And I’m glad my memory still serves me well. I knew I recognised your name from before. This is not the first time you’ve failed your attempt to stonewall an article. You’ve done it here[59] and here[60] as well. Keep in mind that Wikipedia is not yours to gatekeep. Just because an edit does not conform to your liking does not make it an “unproductive edit”. Again, I stand ready to and will gladly remove or accept the removal of any edit I have made that you can convince me is inaccurate or against the rules in any way. But as of now you have not made any convincing argument. 1. In stating that these terms are unofficial in the sense that I have explained, your only argument was “it is frankly irrelevant”, and 2. You have not explained why it is wrong to add context to the use of the terms, 3. You have not explained why you deem it necessary to revert the whole article back to a previous state. Montblamc1 (talk) 22:46, 30 November 2024 (UTC)

• Montblamc1 does appear to have failed to identify any RS to support their position, and their edits are thus a violation of WP:DUE. There is no general requirement that terms without UN recognition be described as such in the lead (e.g. Turkestan, Hindustan, Bible Belt, or basically anything else in Category:Cultural regions or Category:Historical regions). If you cannot find adequate sources you should self-revert, otherwise I am prepared to levy sanctions to prevent further disruption. _signed, Rosguill ^talk 22:40, 1 December 2024 (UTC)

  I'll also note that the comments accusing Semsuri of having dyslexia are a personal attack, if a mild one. Editors should not be diagnosing each other with learning disabilities or any other kind of medical condition. _signed, Rosguill ^talk 22:42, 1 December 2024 (UTC)

  I will gladly revert the part in question. I assume, however, that any other edit should stay? Montblamc1 (talk) 22:43, 1 December 2024 (UTC)

  I have not evaluated the other changes and don't see any prior discussion of them on the talk page. Other editors are still allowed to object to those changes, at which point editors should work towards consensus on the talk page. _signed, Rosguill ^talk 22:48, 1 December 2024 (UTC)

  Sure. Montblamc1 (talk) 22:49, 1 December 2024 (UTC)

  My main issue is still the sentence "The latter term is used to refer to a sub-division of a larger area in the context of Kurdish nationalism." which references Bengio misleadingly. She does not claim that and a simple Google Search proves it. This is the third time that I am adressing this here and you have so far completely ignored it. Semsûrî (talk) 22:54, 1 December 2024 (UTC)

  Refer to the talk page. This page is not for this type of discussion. I will gladly discuss with you over there. Montblamc1 (talk) 23:31, 1 December 2024 (UTC)

  There is currently no adequate explanation of your edits at that talk page; you have thus far failed to establish your claims vis a vis Bengio. Although I do see now that you have made further edits to essentially remove the claim regarding "the context of Kurdish nationalism", so the issue is perhaps moot._signed, Rosguill ^talk 01:07, 2 December 2024 (UTC)

  The new sentence is very disingenuous as Montblamc1 now pushes for the idea that the term "Iraqi Kurdistan" is merely a Kurdish nationalist term to promote "Kurdish territoriality", when its just the name of the region in Iraq where Kurds live. Montblamc1's edits scream NPOV and NOTHERE. I am going to revert the page back to the "stable" version and I expect Montblamc to refrain from the POV-push that is very apparent now. Semsûrî (talk) 15:29, 2 December 2024 (UTC)

  @Rosguill what do you say to this strange accusation. I do not understand how this is not a case of stonewalling. He accuses me of being disingenuous and reverts the whole article back without explaining how any other edits I have made are problematic. Montblamc1 (talk) 16:21, 2 December 2024 (UTC)

Personal attacks by User:Keith-264

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User:Keith-264 is an aggressive, unpleasant editor, who cannot work in a collegiate way with others. One can find endless examples on any talk page that this user frequents. Here is one recent representative example: [61]. I suggest that they be very clearly warned that such egregious personal attacks and threats are completely unacceptable. 87.242.222.53 (talk) 15:14, 30 November 2024 (UTC)

No I'm not, the disputed edit has had several versions from people who thought that debacle was an unusual word, an ordinary one or should be in the French spelling. The editor altered it in good faith (albeit with a snide edit summary) and it was reverted in good faith. It's open for discussion on the talk page where this complaint should have been made. Regards Keith-264 (talk) 15:17, 30 November 2024 (UTC)

87.242.222.53 is now edit warring instead of seeking consensus. Keith-264 (talk) 15:27, 30 November 2024 (UTC)

Do you think that what you have written justifies you calling someone a "fatuous ignoramus"? 87.242.222.53 (talk) 15:31, 30 November 2024 (UTC)

Why are you referring to a comment that was made two months ago? M.Bitton (talk) 15:39, 30 November 2024 (UTC)

Because the IP is likely ThoughtIdRetired editing logged out.--Bbb23 (talk) 15:53, 30 November 2024 (UTC)

IP is correct that a simple word need not be wiki-linked, esp. to a rote dictionary definition at Wiktionary, but both IP and the other person are wrong to edit-war. Depersonalize the discission and continue at the article talk page. Zaathras (talk) 15:45, 30 November 2024 (UTC)

• I've blocked the IP for WP:LOUTSOCK (editing project space and avoiding scrutiny).--Bbb23 (talk) 15:55, 30 November 2024 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Persistent disruptive editing by IP 180.74.218.13

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The IP 180.74.218.13 has made several disruptive edits on Formula One and general motorsport articles: altering date ranges, changing hidden comments to undermine WikiProject convention, and moving sections of the article to a non-constructive format. This has been done repeatedly, against multiple users' reversions; they have done so at Kevin Magnussen, Valtteri Bottas, Daniel Ricciardo, Logan Sargeant and Zhou Guanyu, to name a few, and have violated 3RR at Zhou, Magnussen and Bottas. Mb2437 (talk) 16:07, 30 November 2024 (UTC)

have blocked as disruptive for 1 week first. – robertsky (talk) 17:04, 30 November 2024 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Editor modifying comment

Ashlar keeps modifying my comment at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Willow Dawson, because she disagrees with how I've mentioned her. She's repeatedly made changes to my comment ([62][63][64][65]). I reverted all but the fourth edit to my comment ([66][67][68]). It's clear she didn't want to be described as participating in the "expansion" of the article at AfD, but I don't appreciate the changes she's made to my comment, nor with how she has since described me and my editing ("paternalistic", "rabid attempt", and this patronizing response in which she gave me the dictionary definition of "rabid"). These changes were made after the fact that she'd left a response to the same comment. This has been discussed at User talk:Ashlar#Editing my comment, but she's since reinstated the change. Best, Bridget (talk) 16:29, 30 November 2024 (UTC)

@Ashlar, modifying someone else's comment, anywhere, is definitely not okay, even if you disagree with it. If you disagree with something someone has posted, post a response instead of modifying someone else's comment. @Bridget, if someone does this, yes, they're in the wrong, but instead of edit warring over it, consider reverting and then striking the parts of the comment they objected to. Valereee (talk) 16:58, 30 November 2024 (UTC)

(edit conflict) @Ashlar, we just can't edit other's words on the talk page without their permission (or we can within certain circumstances, but this is not one). Your response to @Bridget's that you disagree with that specific statement/characterisation made is more than sufficient for anyone else evaluating the AfD. As for Bridget, the first edit summary clearly shows that they didn't feel that they had worked alongside with you, and you could have taken that into consideration to just have that struck out? – robertsky (talk) 17:01, 30 November 2024 (UTC)

I'm aware of that, and I can see where Ashlar is coming from but I don't agree with it, especially with how she's characterized me and my editing, compared to her editing: "Also, you didn't do anything "alongside" me - you undermined my efforts and your reference to "reviewing my work" is paternalistic and offensive." ([69])

I don't think needs to be said that we both intended to improve the article. That's all I was going for by mentioning "alongside Ashlar" in my comment. I don't think it's misleading or offensive to mention that, and I don't think it should be struck or removed. Bridget (talk) 17:28, 30 November 2024 (UTC)

Aight, die on that hill, I guess. It looks like another editor has reverted; @Ashlar, don't revert again. Just respond if you feel clarification is needed. This could be added to WP:Lamest edit wars. Valereee (talk) 17:37, 30 November 2024 (UTC)

I don't appreciate any of this. I did amend her comment in the first instance. Every subsequent time, I struck out the words - which meant that they were still visiable, which I thought was fair compromise. Rgdsash (talk) 18:51, 30 November 2024 (UTC)

P block both editors from the AfD to allow consensus to form without their disruption of the discussion. Do allow them to continue editing the article as both seem to have the same goal of improvement in mind. Star Mississippi 18:05, 30 November 2024 (UTC)

Note, I gave up editing the article as her constant conflicting edits felt intentionally obstructive. In addition, I wondered if the user acccount parakanyaa, which challenged my opinion of deletion, was a second account by the same user. ash (talk) 18:24, 30 November 2024 (UTC) [nb previous comment deleted in error, reinserted.]

@PARAKANYAA: who you must notify when you mention here is an established editor. If you have evidence and not just an axe to grind, please file at SPI. You're trending closer to a block yourself so I'd suggest treading carefully. Star Mississippi 18:30, 30 November 2024 (UTC)

@Ashlar, please don't edit your comments after someone has already replied. It makes the discussion difficult to follow. Valereee (talk) 18:54, 30 November 2024 (UTC)

Why you keep telling me this when I did that once? ash (talk) 18:55, 30 November 2024 (UTC)

Your OWN comments. Don't edit them after they've received replies. You just did that. Valereee (talk) 19:00, 30 November 2024 (UTC)

Got it. ash (talk) 19:18, 30 November 2024 (UTC)

I am not a sockpuppet. Just because I voted against you in an AfD doesn't make me one. PARAKANYAA (talk) 19:25, 30 November 2024 (UTC)

• Since both editors have dug in their heels over this petty and meaningless dispute, maybe we should just close this. Valereee (talk) 19:07, 30 November 2024 (UTC)

  I'm sorry but what did you want me to say? You already decided before I even got here. You already handed out a lecture about the first action I took, which was reverted and then came to the conclusion that she should have struck out my name as I requested. To be clear, I didn't ask for any of this. I edited 5 Women in Red pages last night, which were marked for deletion. Willow Dawson is the only page where someone felt the need to chase up my amendments and then tag me on an AfD page to bolster their argument. I also didn't ask to have my opinion questioned on that AfD page when no one else's opinion was questioned. Now I've been tagged on this page so she could settle a score. I don't know who Willow Dawson and I certainly don't care enough about her for all of this drama. This incident should be closed as I thought the Pblock already have the effect of resolving the issue. ash (talk) 19:23, 30 November 2024 (UTC)

  Since you asked: what I would have liked you to say is, "Oh, didn't realize I wasn't allowed to modify the comments of other editors. I won't do that again. I asked Bridget to strike my name from her comment, as I thought it was misleading, but when she refused to do so I should have just walked away." What I would have liked Bridget to say is, "Yeah, I should have just struck out what she was objecting to, because in the grand scheme although I didn't think it was necessary, it was a pretty small ask."

  I appreciate you editing WiR. I do a lot of that, too, and I think it's valuable work. Valereee (talk) 19:39, 30 November 2024 (UTC)

  Sorry but this is not a one-off event. Ashlar repeatedly edited another editor's comments, despite being told not to do it and why. (see e.g. this. Their actions and their response above ("what did you want me to say? You already decided before I even got here") are very concerning. GiantSnowman 19:46, 30 November 2024 (UTC)

  Editing someone else's comment is pretty much a bright-line violation of TPO (with very few exceptions, which this obviously isn't one). Now that Ashlar has been directed as to that fact at this debate, if they ever do it again, it becomes pretty straightforward to sanction it. Secondly, the suggestion that PARAKANYAA is a sockpuppet is quite frankly ridiculous given their tenure and editing habits. If it wasn't so ridiculous, I'd step deep into Alanis Morissette territory and ask for the unfounded allegation with no evidence to be struck. Daniel (talk) 21:13, 30 November 2024 (UTC)

User:RangersRus conduct

• RangersRus (talk · contribs · deleted contribs · logs · filter log · block user · block log)

Hello,

I created Draft:Muslim Sisters of Éire and Draft:Brian Teeling and submitted them to AfC. Both were reviewed by User:RangersRus, who declined them due to notability concerns. When I engaged this user to point out that both submissions had more than surpassed WP:GNG, with over half a dozen dedicated articles in mainstream newspapers each, the editor characterised my posts as vandalism and harrassment, and repeatedly removed efforts to engage with them from their talk page. This leaves me with limited option to progress the situation.

I would appreciate if experienced editors could intervene to assess this editor's claims of vandalism and harrassment, and encourage them to engage substantively with the problems I have raised in good faith with their reviews.

I hope this is an instance of a trigger-happy inexperienced editor unable to handle criticism who can be formed into a positive contributor, but I am at a loss to help this along myself.

Many thanks, 51.37.79.136 (talk) 17:01, 30 November 2024 (UTC)

Note: Anon has left the standard notification (Special:Permalink/1260414596) at @RangerRus's talk page, but the latter had reverted the notification (Special:Diff/1260415060), therefore we can take it as them being notified. – robertsky (talk) 17:08, 30 November 2024 (UTC)

• IPs AFC drafts were reviewed that did not meet the notability guidelines. IP clearly unhappy started harassing on my talk page one after the other [70] [71] [72] [73] [74] [75] [76] [77]. IP also reverted the AFC reviews. here and here. Discussion took place on User_talk:51.37.79.136#November_2024 where I gave explanation but IP decided to file this ANI anyhow. RangersRus (talk) 17:14, 30 November 2024 (UTC)

• RangersRus Well, no, you didn't really explain that at all. Draft:Muslim Sisters of Éire, for example, has a full article about the charity in two of Ireland's biggest newspapers, as well as a solid mention in the Guardian and a number of other refs. You declined the Draft with a boilerplate that references must be "in-depth (not just brief mentions about the subject or routine announcements), reliable, secondary, and strictly independent of the subject". I can't see how those references don't meet those criteria, can you explain why you think that? Black Kite (talk) 19:07, 30 November 2024 (UTC)

  I'd say it passes the GNG but NCORP is very strict and you could certainly argue it doesn't pass it. PARAKANYAA (talk) 19:37, 30 November 2024 (UTC)

  Many sources that I went through were not independent of the organization with interviews from its members and after reviewing sources I did not find the organization to pass WP:NCORP. If only IP could have read the criteria needed to pass notable organization. Another reviewer accepted the article Draft:Muslim Sisters of Éire after I told the IP to resubmit again. RangersRus (talk) 20:05, 30 November 2024 (UTC)

• I think sometimes you just have to admit you're wrong - every single reference in that article was a reliable British or Irish newspaper. This was a mistake, it should have been promoted, and it's very difficult - as you've found out - to give reasons for rejecting a draft when it should have been accepted. Even NCORP says "A company, corporation, organization, group, product, or service is presumed notable if it has been the subject of significant coverage in multiple reliable secondary sources that are independent of the subject" - which it clearly had (a quick Google would have found many, many more references that weren't in the article). Black Kite (talk) 22:30, 30 November 2024 (UTC)

  I do not want to say I am right or wrong, just human who can make mistakes. Yes sources are reliable but per NCORP the sources did not meet one of the criteria Be completely independent of the article subject. When I saw the interviews and claims in all the reliable sources, it failed this criteria because Independent content, in order to count towards establishing notability, must include original and independent opinion, analysis, investigation, and fact checking that are clearly attributable to a source unaffiliated to the subject. There are 4 criteria that an individual source should meet and the sources did not meet criteria no 2 above. RangersRus (talk) 22:46, 30 November 2024 (UTC)

  For Draft:Brian Teeling

  another reviewer declined the draft after review and now IP is saying to the reviewer to "amend your review accordingly and move the article to mainspace". RangersRus (talk) 23:03, 30 November 2024 (UTC)

• Yes, I deliberately didn't mention the Teeling article, because I thought that was far more borderline. But going back to MSOE, the Irish Times article alone hits all of those criteria, let alone the other 7 citations in the article. Black Kite (talk) 23:32, 30 November 2024 (UTC)

  That piece still fails the NCORP criteria of being completely independent of the article subject. It's stricter than GNG. PARAKANYAA (talk) 23:57, 30 November 2024 (UTC)

  Thank you PARAKANYAA. @Black Kite: I will take IrishTimes to show you why it is not independent because I do not want to create a wall of source analysis for all. In the article IrishTimes, you can read claims by employees, volunteers and members of MSOE like these: "‘We’re Muslim and we’re just like you’, "I’m kind of like the mother hen watching". "No matter where you go in Dublin you’ll find someone in a tent, someone wrapped in a sleeping bag,” “But the one thing they won’t do is starve. There’s someone doing a soup run every night of the week at least.” "I became Muslim for myself, not for any man. But I also became an immigrant within my own country." "They thought we were nuns and asked what order we came from. They were surprised but they just wanted to know who we were. There was no hostility." Then this large claim by the coordinator at MSOE "In the beginning there were lots of people who were not sure about women in hijabs. But when I told them I was Lorraine from Coolock, I'm a northside girl, it opened a dialogue. It gained trust and understanding. This didn't happen overnight but the trust there is now amazing. “Homeless people are stereotyped, so are Muslim women. They’re stereotyped because they have addictions, because they don’t have a home. They are the forgotten people in our own society.” When the pandemic hit last year, the group put the weekly Friday runs temporarily on hold. "Everybody was terrified at that stage but then I got the call from Tesco saying they still had food for us. If I said no, all that food would get binned. We put a call out on our Facebook and ended up sending 60 hampers a week out my front door, most went to non-Muslim families." And "I was surprised by the hostile mindset people had towards Muslim women. I wondered should I strip off this hijab, go back to being Catholic. Or should I move forward with the faith I firmly believed in.” "The whole point of Muslim Sisters of Éire was to break that stereotype and show people Muslim women are not oppressed, they’re very much a part of Irish society." "We've seen a lot more acceptance and trust from people in recent years. Our biggest donations are from the Irish public, they're amazing. Visibility of Muslim women in Ireland is much better than 15 years ago. There will always be racial issues with all ethnicities but things are becoming easier." "Apart from it being a charity, my main concern was giving my girls the understanding that they can do whatever they want while wearing a hijab" "Before, when I was growing up, we were told to do something and didn’t ask questions. But now we have to explain the logic behind the scarf. Her friends ask questions and she brings those questions back to me. Now she’s in a school where she’s the only Muslim girl but the staff are very nice and she understands the logic behind the scarf." "There was a time when I was scared to wear my hijab in the city centre, that people would say things to me. But since we started going out to the GPO we’re quite well recognised, people smile at us. We have shown that Muslim women can have a positive impact on this society. We are doctors, engineers, teachers. We can do anything we want with our hijab on, it’s just a piece of cloth on our head." "They’re not used to seeing me in it but eventually I’ll get to the stage where I’ll wear it." "“I reminded her that nuns wore them and that her grandmother probably wore a scarf everywhere she went. It’s to do with modesty, it’s nothing to do with oppression. And for me, it’s an identity thing. You can see my face, you don’t have to see my hair and body.” "“We’ve all faced so many obstacles. It’s only in the past three years that it really feels like a game changer in Irish society. We’ve seen a lot more acceptance. That’s the sheer determination of the women and the love they have for the work they do. It’s their determination to make people accept them for who they are. What we do is a gesture of goodwill but it’s also letting people know we’re Muslim and we’re just like you.” "I wasn’t going home and wanted to do something with my time. I live here on my own, I don’t socialise much but then I met some of the sisters through this and they became like family. All week you’re overworked, when Friday comes I find this new energy." "There were some people who would pass by and say ‘Go back to your country.’ That can break your heart because you’re just trying to do something good. But I know at the end of the day I’ll be rewarded for my efforts." “I hadn’t really done charity work before, it blew my mind. It’s amazing the different types of hidden homelessness – people may have a roof over their head but not enough money to eat.”

  Some more claims I did not add and I am sorry for this wall. These quotes coming from MSOE alone sum up the whole article on IrishTimes. So this is not independent and fails the criteria. Source is reliable but it is not independent. RangersRus (talk) 01:25, 1 December 2024 (UTC)

• Are you actually serious? This is an article in probably the most prestigious Irish newspaper about the MSOE, which also includes interviews with members of the MSOE. That's a completely standard newspaper article format. How anyone can think the Irish Times is "not independent from the subject" because it actually interviewed the people it was writing about is completely incomprehensible to me. Black Kite (talk) 11:01, 1 December 2024 (UTC)

  Wikipedia:Independent sources says "Identifying and using independent sources (also called third-party sources) helps editors build non-promotional articles that fairly portray the subject, without undue attention to the subject's own views." I will point you to a discussion and please read comment at the end of discussion by @Aoidh: at Wikipedia:Reliable_sources/Noticeboard/Archive_380#Interviews. RangersRus (talk) 13:00, 1 December 2024 (UTC)

• That discussion is about pure interviews with subjects (incidentally, you'll note I actually commented in it myself, warning about using articles that are paid advertorials, which obviously isn't relevant here). The point is that the Times article (and most of the others) are not interviews. They are articles (in the Times case, an in-depth one) about an organisation where the content is made clearer by including snippets and quotes from people who work for that organisation. This does in no way make them "not independent". If you cannot understand the distinction between these two things, we have an issue here. For example, here is a BBC News article, currently on their front page, about pensions for sex workers in Belgium. It includes interviews with sex workers and human rights activists. The following (all currently on the BBC front page) do the same thing [78] [79] [80]. Do they make those articles non-independent? No, of course they don't. Black Kite (talk) 13:12, 1 December 2024 (UTC)

  Yes the BBC article you shared makes it non-independent and such discussion has taken place on many platforms with same opinions but I would still like to get more opinions and maybe many others like PARAKANYAA who do not think that interviews (whether pure or not) and claims coming from the subject the topic is on is not independent. This is not about what I understand but what majority others do who partake in AFDs and AFCs. Maybe this is best left for discussion on WP:RSN but I would like to hear from @Aoidh:. RangersRus (talk) 13:36, 1 December 2024 (UTC)

• If you think that any reliable-source news article that even contains a sentence of an interview makes it non-independent, you are basically saying that most reliable sources run a high percentage of articles that cannot be used in Wikipedia. And I think we both know that isn't the case. Please do not reject any more articles at AFC on this spurious basis. Black Kite (talk) 13:40, 1 December 2024 (UTC)

  I am not saying that. Every claim coming from the subject the topic is on should be backed by secondary independent source or just be "completely" independent of the subject. RangersRus (talk) 13:52, 1 December 2024 (UTC)

• Not the case - as long as any "claims" aren't stated as fact in Wikivoice and it is made clear they are the subject's words, that's fine (as long as the rest of the article passes GNG, which this does). However I can't really see anything contentious in the article that isn't secondary-sourced anyway. Black Kite (talk) 14:41, 1 December 2024 (UTC)

  I'll note that seeking and publishing comment from one's subjects is standard journalistic practice, and an article on this organization that included no words from its members or staff would be pretty strange. ꧁Zanahary꧂ 15:44, 1 December 2024 (UTC)

• See WP:ABOUTSELF and WP:INTEXT for examples of policy and guideline counter to your impression. ꧁Zanahary꧂ 17:13, 1 December 2024 (UTC)

• IP still continues to post on my talk page and continuing to harass now [81]. I do think this is one of the editors who did the same behavior before on my talk page. RangersRus (talk) 20:11, 30 November 2024 (UTC)

To the anon editor: please do not remove previous AfC templates under any circumstances (unless they are worked on by non-reviewers) as these give other reviewers some indication of what basis the previous reviewer(s) had declined/commented on. The appropriate venue to request for other reviewers to look at the drafts is at Wikipedia:WikiProject Articles for creation/Help desk. – robertsky (talk) 17:20, 30 November 2024 (UTC)

Note that there's a discussion at User talk:TheTechie#Your AfC review of Draft:Brian Teeling where RangersRus asserts that any quote from a subject in an article makes it fail the independent criterion. This is obviously a minority position and I think the matter needs to be settled, because we cannot have someone declining AfCs because they cite articles that include statements from their subjects. ꧁Zanahary꧂ 17:24, 1 December 2024 (UTC)

It is by no means a minority position and has been widely stated by many editors during many discussions and AFD reviews where such sources were clearly declared not independent. This is all coming from experience learning from experienced editors and understanding the guidelines. If you have time, please do begin a discussion on WP:RSN with Brian Teeling sources as example and whatever the consensus be, we can then guide other editors to it. RangersRus (talk) 17:31, 1 December 2024 (UTC)

There is no need to start a discussion at RSN or anywhere else because your understanding of this notability guideline is incorrect. Though I would be interested in seeing any of these many discussions and AFD reviews where such sources were clearly declared not independent. I suspect that many of these discussions may have referred to advertorial-type articles, which masquearade as serious articles but are basically advertising for the subject, and are very common in some countries' media (India and other Asian countries especially). This does not apply to articles such as the ones you have chosen to mistakenly describe as non-independent on the MSOE article. The Brian Teeling article is a completely separate issue and I have not opined on that one at all so far because I agreed that it was more borderline than MSOE. Black Kite (talk) 18:18, 1 December 2024 (UTC)

I am ok to know if I am incorrect but a consensus is better where opinions from multiple experienced editors will help to solve this matter. Even per WP:ORGCRIT, "A company, corporation, organization, group, product, or service is presumed notable if it has been the subject of significant coverage in multiple reliable secondary sources that are independent of the subject." An RSN will help to reach a consensus if not here. RangersRus (talk) 18:36, 1 December 2024 (UTC)

Yes, I know what ORGCRIT says, I've been here for 17 years. The problem is not any of our notability guidelines, it is that you are having problems with the definition of "independent". But, whatever, start a discussion - though it should be based on MSOE, not Teeling, as that article is the focus of the discussion here. Black Kite (talk) 19:18, 1 December 2024 (UTC)

The fact that NCORP is written this way is extremely stupid, and it is why it is my least favorite notability guideline, but sanctioning RangersRus for it when it is routinely interpreted this way at AfD is bad. Sure you could interpret it the way you do, but most people at AfD interpret that ORGCRIT aspect to be pretty much any quote from the subject = non-independent. AfC reviewers are supposed to accept or decline based on survivability at AfD, and articles with sourcing equivalent to this are routinely deleted. PARAKANYAA (talk) 20:51, 1 December 2024 (UTC)

I agree with you about NCORP (its main problem is that it tries to cover so many different types of organisation), but that isn't the problem here; it is the fact that RangersRus is taking the view that if an article includes quotes from the subject, that whole article is non-independent of the subject, which is simply wrong. I'd be interested to see an AfD where that interpretation is taken. No-one is suggesting sanctioning RangersRus here, by the way. Black Kite (talk) 20:59, 1 December 2024 (UTC)

I have seen several AfDs play out with that exact argument resulting in a deletion. I can't recall any specific examples, because all the corporation AfDs tend to blend together in my head, but scrolling back through the Companies deletion sorting I think illustrates that this is generally the interpretation most put forward at AfD. I personally think it is extremely stupid. PARAKANYAA (talk) 21:05, 1 December 2024 (UTC)

I'm wondering if in those AfDs, the sources being discussed contained advertising, advertorials or press releases for commercial companies, which of course would not count towards notability. Black Kite (talk) 21:13, 1 December 2024 (UTC)

• There have been other problems with RangerRus at WP:AFC. He declined Battle_of_Jammu_(1774) because he couldn't verify the sources easily online. Despite that WP:V says that verification needs to be possible, but not easy. He also declined Shuah_Khan because he felt she wasn't notable enough despite being the 3rd fellow and 1st woman fellow of the Linux Foundation. When the author of Shuah Khan reacted with anger, RangerRus get an admin to block them instead of trying to understand why they reacted the way they did. I think RangerRus needs more mentorship before they review AFCs.--v/r - TP 16:48, 2 December 2024 (UTC)

  The issue that TParis is talking (that TParis also got involved in) about has been addressed here that shows why the author of that page was blocked. The author of the page created a new sock account after and was blocked again. For TParis concern with Battle of Jammu (1774), the article was accepted by me after the author improved the sources with urls to help with verification of the content on the page. I do prefer to be able to search and read through all sources and verify the content because I have seen some pages with fake references that do not back the content. I was being due diligent and with author's improvement to references, verification turned out well. I thought about it later that I should have just added comment for the author to improve sources but that is the approach I am going to take moving forward if I come across any such drafts. RangersRus (talk) 17:49, 2 December 2024 (UTC)

  Me getting involved isn't relevant. And you're showing that you still don't get it in both cases.--v/r - TP 20:31, 2 December 2024 (UTC)

The problem here seems to be that RangersRus seems unwilling or unable to follow advice given by more experienced editors. Why not stop reviewing articles at AfC for a few months while you get a bit more experience with the way Wikipedia works. It is certainly not by rejecting articles without online sources. If we did that we would become redundant to your favourite search engine. If you can't verify the sources then just leave the article to someone else. Phil Bridger (talk) 18:52, 2 December 2024 (UTC)

I am willing to follow any advice and do think over any that come my way and that is when I rethink over changing my approach. That is why I said in last comment about draft with verification issues that I will just be adding comment going foward when I review any such similar drafts. RangersRus (talk) 19:08, 2 December 2024 (UTC)

That's progress, but I'm a little concerned with your comment that you would ask the author to improve sources. The best sources are often books that are not available online. Rather than asking for sources to be improved you might like to be honest with the author and say that AfC reviewers' lives would be easier if online sources could be provided. There is no need to "improve" sources. Phil Bridger (talk) 19:42, 2 December 2024 (UTC)

You said it better and advice taken :) RangersRus (talk) 19:44, 2 December 2024 (UTC)

Content dispute and biased editing on the Tulu Nadu article

മംഗലാപുരം has been repeatedly editing the Tulu Nadu article in a biased manner, pushing a perspective that disregards the need for a neutral point of view (NPOV). The user has been removing content and focusing on a specific community, misrepresenting the diversity of the region. While I have attempted to resolve this through discussion, the issue persists and the article’s neutrality continues to be disrupted. I request to help resolve the dispute and ensure the article maintains a neutral, balanced representation. TuluveRai123 (talk) 18:04, 30 November 2024 (UTC)

[82] where is the information related Muslims community? Tulunad has one of oldest Masjid and Beary Muslim and Muslim Mappilas communities live in Tulunad, MLA, MP are also elected from Kasargod that shows numerical strength of Muslims in Tulunad, Your pushing you POV by removing Muslim related content. You can expand article by adding content related to other community , remember wikipedia doesn't belongs to you only to dictate content with multiple accounts, also Tulunad doesn't belongs to only Tuluvas it also belongs to other community, I also added both supporters and opposers of Tulunad state movement, I also added multiple political parties which have opposite ideology, I also added cuisine which is eaten by all communities of Kasaragod, I request admin to restore my version [83], — Preceding unsigned comment added by മംഗലാപുരം (talk • contribs) 18:14, 30 November 2024 (UTC)

I would like to provide further clarification regarding the issue I reported earlier. The user continues to make baseless accusations about me having multiple accounts, which is not true. I only have one account, and there is no evidence supporting their claims. I would appreciate it if administrators could review the situation and take appropriate action." TuluveRai123 (talk) 18:17, 30 November 2024 (UTC)

In addition to the issues mentioned earlier, the user is repeatedly pasting the same content across multiple discussion pages and sections, which disrupts constructive dialogue. This behavior is not only unproductive but also makes it difficult to address specific concerns. I request administrators to review this repetitive behavior as part of the ongoing disruption caused by this user. TuluveRai123 (talk) 18:20, 30 November 2024 (UTC)

User:Sphebri, reverted my edits within few minutes you did the same thing , User:Mr anonymousMr also have same editing pattern, that's why I accused you.

I am pasting same discussion accross multiple discussion pages , because your rising complaint against me across this pages, മംഗലാപുരം (talk) 18:26, 30 November 2024 (UTC)

മംഗലാപുരം, if you have evidence that anyone is abusing multiple accounts then you should take it to sockpuppet investigations rather than make the accusation on an article talk page. And if you do not have evidence you should retract the comment. Phil Bridger (talk) 18:46, 30 November 2024 (UTC)

Incivility in edit summaries by HotDogsforDays

HotDogsforDays (talk · contribs) was blocked last week, but it still appears incivility is still appearing in edit summaries. I have noticed these edits today [84], [85], [86]. Don't think user has learned there lesson as shown in this edit [87]. This has been going on for sometime after warnings and a block on their talk page [88] Magical Golden Whip (talk) 18:40, 30 November 2024 (UTC)

After their block expired, they mostly avoided leaving edit summaries at all. They appear to have snapped yesterday, with Bitch, you clearly don't know how Wikipedia works. Maybe, if you actually read the hidden notes and actually cared about contributing, we change the number every time a new episode airs. Eat dog shit, you fucking 12-year-old monkey.[89], And I think you shouldn't be holding grudges against people for reverting your incorrect ass[90], and Honestly, can I really call that a voice if it doesn't matter at all? It's very clear you don't have any real personality other than harassing me[91]. That first one cannot be justified by any amount of provocation. Since HotDogsforDays didn't learn anything from the time-bounded block, I suggest an indef until they can recognize their problem and commit to avoiding this behavior in the future. Schazjmd (talk) 18:49, 30 November 2024 (UTC)

I've blocked the user for a week. Not quite ready for an indefinite.--Bbb23 (talk) 18:50, 30 November 2024 (UTC)

There are some things that I get angry about, such as child poverty or domestic abuse, but a fucking TV series is certainly not one of them. Just calm down, HotDogsforDays (talk · contribs). It's not important. Phil Bridger (talk) 18:56, 30 November 2024 (UTC)

Not even that...but a series for preschoolers; three year-olds don't care about plotholes. I don't care how much a troll account gets to you (which it really shouldn't), but telling them to GKY (as in go kill yourself) is not proper. At the very least, HD4D needs to stop with the profanity on children's show articles to be unblocked because kids do imitate behavior they see when they're curious. Nate • (chatter) 02:18, 1 December 2024 (UTC)

HotDogsforDays's revert edit summaries are certainly uncivil, but I think blocking them for it is giving the LTA harassing HotDogsforDays exactly what they want. WP:RBI is the best option here — HotDogsforDays, using provocative edit summaries like this is only feeding the troll and doesn't help. C F A 18:59, 30 November 2024 (UTC)

Suspected WP:MEATPUPPETRY in WP:GENSEX

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

---

Over the past several months, it appears that some kind of off-wiki coordination is bringing a slew of editors to Wikipedia who all share very similar patterns and sudden interests in a narrow set of topics, indicative of potential WP:MEATPUPPETry.

Many of them appear to be editing in totally unrelated areas for a while, presumably to gain permissions to editor on some of the articles with higher page protections due to repeat vandalism that is common in the WP:GENSEX CTOP area, and after that many of them exclusively focus on the contentious area, specifically editing articles on Transgender topics, seemingly suddenly switching their interest. Another point of note is that some seem to be very familiar with inner workings of Wikipedia, despite being very new or having not previously shown any interest in it, citing policies to fit their arguments, so it could actually even be straight up SPI. They commonly will upvote each other's points in talk page discussions or make similar edits in articles to try to create false consensus.

Some of the accounts that have shown this similar behavior:

• User:Sean Waltz O'Connell - registered 6 months ago, very consistent editing in other areas until hitting > 500 edits (ECP), then suddenly switched to GENSEX Transgender topics and has focused almost exclusively there since then, creating contentious edits and many hours of tendentious arguing
• User:JonJ937 - registered 5 months ago, edited exclusively on video games until suddenly switching into GENSEX and promoting anti-trans organizations, removing criticism thereof and upvoting contentious issues
• User:BlueBellTree - registered 8 months ago, same pattern, making mostly minor changes such as adding a wikilink or cats and then suddenly switched into GENSEX and upvoting contentious issues
• User:Parker.Josh - registered 5 months ago, similar pattern, mostly adding links and refs in bulk to other topics and then suddenly switching into GENSEX arguing with very similar wordings to some of the others

This area is already contentious enough as it is, so this sudden popping up of new accounts who all rehash each others points, sometimes with strangely similar wordings seems to pass the duck test as it seems like more than just coincidence. Raladic (talk) 19:05, 30 November 2024 (UTC)

@Raladic: Can you provide diffs that support the above? The editor interactions don't really show broad overlap over the whole area (the only page they've all posted on is Talk:World Professional Association for Transgender Health), and it's a bit hard to assess SOCK/MEAT without more specific evidence. It's not unheard of, after all, that there might be independent individuals with interests both in video games and gender-related topics. — Red-tailed hawk _(nest) 19:43, 30 November 2024 (UTC)

That overlap is pretty much their only foray into this space. It appears bizarre that having had no interest in this topic area, that all of them suddenly pivoted to it and all emphatically reusing each others words is one of the most glaring one, some of the wording between this and this, such as emphatic repeating on how well-regarded/well-respected sources and ignoring what other editors have explained on the use of primary sources.

I don't think that it's coincidence that these users have not participated in any talk page prior, no less outside of WP:GENSEX to this and them suddenly stumbling across this topic and emphatically repeating each others words - SW OC, PJ, Jon. BBT is the only one who's shown some amount of talk participation outside of this.

It seems to fit very much the definition of potential meat-based WP:DUCKing.

Also I'd like to point out that it appears to be another example of @Void if removed following me around Wikipedia at every opportunity as I have previously called out in the AE report and several other discussions since that he appeared in out of thin air. Please stop WP:HOUNDING me. Raladic (talk) 21:55, 30 November 2024 (UTC)

This is the fourth time you've falsely accused me of hounding.

If you're going to raise spurious reports about pages I'm active on, I will notice.

From my POV, like the AE you raised against me, this feels like trying to "win" content disputes via ANI. Void if removed (talk) 22:30, 30 November 2024 (UTC)

You may want to read the policy definition of WP:hounding, particularly ...joining discussions on multiple pages or topics they may edit or multiple debates where they contribute, to repeatedly confront or inhibit their work. and Many users track other users' edits, although usually for collegial or administrative purposes. This should always be done with care, and with good cause, to avoid raising the suspicion that an editor's contributions are being followed to cause them distress, or out of revenge for a perceived slight.

This user conduct report here at ANI of potential SPI/MPI user activity did not mention you, nor was it about content, it was based on observation of editing behavior of potentially suspicious activity. I have been fighting vandalism across Wikipedia (as RC patrol and other means) for quite a while and have made several SPI reports of confirmed socks before, so I think I have a reasonable grasp of when I am spotting behaviour that appears a bit out of the ordinary. Raladic (talk) 22:56, 30 November 2024 (UTC)

Raladic, by that metric, you have been hounding me for months.

And I raise the content issue, because it is suspicious to me that after 3 months of you bludgeoning discussions about specific content, you bring every editor that opposes you to ANI (except me, who you already brought to AE). Void if removed (talk) 23:13, 30 November 2024 (UTC)

Again, let me re-iterate, I spotted potentially suspicious activity that is indicative of potential socking. My track record at WP:SPI is 100% of cases I reported came out as confirmed.

This case here is a bit more complex as it smells more meaty, but nonetheless, there's enough signs here that something is ducky based on the similarities of the reported accounts editing behavior. Raladic (talk) 23:35, 30 November 2024 (UTC)

That similarity of editing behaviour seems to be largely just getting drawn into a disagreement with you. You accuse other editors of tendentious editing for not simply capitulating. Discussion with you about one specific well sourced change has dragged on for 3 months, with some inexplicable objections at times, and the diffs you offer up here of textual "similarity" amount to saying the BMJ is a good source. Void if removed (talk) 00:09, 1 December 2024 (UTC)

Stop exaggerating, there have been 2 separate ~2 week discussions 3 months apart. The sourcing changes between those 2 discussions because sources were published between them. LunaHasArrived (talk) 00:20, 1 December 2024 (UTC)

That there have been intermittent quiet periods in this ongoing debate does not change that what happened is an editor made a sourced edit, Raladic reverted it, the editor came to the talk page to discuss it, more than 3 months have passed in which two further, better sources have appeared, and the debate still goes on, and now Raladic is attempting to call the fact that the editor has spent a lot of time on this talk page instead of just giving up "suspicious".

I think this is specious, especially given some of Raladic's recent edits as part of this disagreement, which are bordering on provocative in their editorialising of the sources.

This whole report smacks of intimidation over a content dispute. Void if removed (talk) 09:40, 1 December 2024 (UTC)

The first discussion based just off of the economist went to npov and found that the economist alone did not provide due weight for mention on the wpath page. Your description of the events does not match the reality that this discussion with these sources (and a description of well sourced) has lasted a month not 3. An intermittent quiet period would be a week or 2, not 2 months.

That edit shown is a massive improvement, it takes what's secondary from the economist and the BMJ investigative journalism peices considers what both peices mention (Wpath retaining publishing rights, sending an email to that effect and Robinson saying that she had hoped to publish more) and removes primary claims about the evidence base from the journalists that have not been reported on elsewhere. What you see as editorilising is what's needed to be done on these sort of articles, the entry for the economist at rsp directly says that editors should discern factual content from analytical content and that analytical content is RSopinion. That Raledic has been willing to improve a peice of content that she believes shouldn't be in the article at all shows a good willingness to compromise. LunaHasArrived (talk) 12:08, 1 December 2024 (UTC)

How can editors show interest in a CTOP before achieving ECR? I don't find it unusual that people who want to edit in this area wait to gain the user rights that allow them to do so. ꧁Zanahary꧂ 15:38, 1 December 2024 (UTC)

I was slightly confused by this myself. The accusation here appears to be that editors did exactly what is requested of them before editing in the topic area. If the have gamed ECR or are acting in a disruptive manner that should be dealt with, but waiting 30 days and 500 edits before editing certain contentious topics area is exactly what ECR asks for. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested «@» °∆t° 16:33, 1 December 2024 (UTC)

No, only few articles that are subject to regular vandalism or the likes are actually ECR protected. The majority of articles is not, so there is absolutely no need to wait for ECR to edit or participate in discussions if such a topic is interesting to an editor. That being said, SPI's or the likes are more aware that they can yield more results sometimes, which is why we have the WP:PGAME guideline.

Refer to Template:Contentious_topics/alert/first and Template:Contentious_topics/talk_notice.

CTOP != ECR. Raladic (talk) 16:40, 1 December 2024 (UTC)

Raladic’s claims of meatpuppetry and off-wiki coordination are completely unfounded. I don’t have any connection to the other users mentioned, nor am I engaging in any coordinated effort. It’s not unusual for editors to raise certain similar points on the WPATH talk page since we’re all working with the same sources and applying Wikipedia’s policies. This is how consensus-building works—shared sourcing can naturally lead to some overlapping arguments. Although, after considering this strange allegation, if this reporting user would take a look at the threads I and the other cited users have engaged in - there really isn't much direct overlap. Which begs the question "What basis is there, here?"

Relevantly speaking, I also have had a prior issue with the user who filed this report. I’ve already brought this up with the admin Firefangledfeathers, asking for advice on how to handle the situation [92] . The same user has been actively stone-walling the discussions, edit warring, and reverting consensus wording agreed upon by multiple editors. Examples of their reverts can be found here [93] [94]

Regarding my contributions, I’ve always aimed to follow Wikipedia’s rules and focus on consensus. If you look at the talk page discussions, you’ll see that I and the other editors mentioned haven’t been aligning on every point or acting in any way that could be considered coordinated. The supposed “pattern” really doesn't have a nexus, these things arise naturally when people independently engage with the same issues and consider similar pools of sources.

Raladic’s argument about editors being familiar with Wikipedia policies is bizarre, to say the least. Learning the policies is a basic expectation of anyone taking Wikipedia seriously. Suggesting that knowing the rules is suspicious would imply that understanding the guidelines is somehow wrong, which doesn’t make sense.

It’s also worth pointing out that Raladic often aligns with a group of editors on these pages, which could just as easily be called “coordination” by their own logic. But I wouldn't suggest coordination—it’s just how contentious discussions evolve.

Frankly, this feels more like retaliation than a genuine report. Raladic’s accusations seem to follow controversy on the page regarding their undermining of consensus wording, and some of those who have been addressing this issue on the talk page are now being conveniently accused of meat-puppetry. It looks like they’re grasping at straws to shift attention away from their own actions.

I’ve always made a genuine effort to collaborate with other editors, including Raladic (as can be seen in the admin - FFF's talk page), and to keep things productive and policy-compliant. However, the constant disruption on this article shows that outside intervention might be needed to resolve things. Let’s focus on improving the article rather than throwing around baseless accusations. Sean Waltz O'Connell (talk) 20:10, 30 November 2024 (UTC)

Your account is the most suspicious one out of those listed above, as waiting until reaching ECP requirements before switching to a contentious topic area almost exclusively is a long-standing tactic. Silverseren^C 20:16, 30 November 2024 (UTC)

@Raladic Friendly FYI; you are required to notify any involved parties of ANI discussions. Mentioning them as a ping in the discussion is not adequate. -Ad Orientem (talk) 20:22, 30 November 2024 (UTC)

Apologies about that, my doorbell rang literally as I hit send and I got called away and only just got back to my computer now. Thanks for notifying the involved parties on my behalf. Raladic (talk) 21:56, 30 November 2024 (UTC)

I presume an SPI should be carried out, for sock puppets. Not quite certain how to determine meat puppets. GoodDay (talk) 20:28, 30 November 2024 (UTC)

Speaking from experience, that is simply how GENSEX goes, ie, what seems like a simple contribution, becomes a tarpit.

Eg. Raladic has spent 3 months arguing against including well sourced material here. The complaint here seems to be that other editors get sucked into spending a lot of time making the best possible case for inclusion rather than just giving up. Void if removed (talk) 20:53, 30 November 2024 (UTC)

The complaint is that a large number of anti-trans SPAs have been badgering that page for months, arguing against a number of long-term editors who have been repeatedly having to explain to them basic, policy-based material, such as that investigative reports are primary sources. Silverseren^C 20:59, 30 November 2024 (UTC)

I suggest you strike that personal attack and WP:AGF.

And you are wrong about that report. Stop misrepresenting a report which is a secondary source for the cited information, as primary. It is not. This has been explained at length. Void if removed (talk) 21:03, 30 November 2024 (UTC)

This dispute began in August with Raladic reverting content on WPATH from a WP:RS.

The crux is: it emerged in discovery in a legal case in the US that after commissioning systematic reviews from Johns Hopkins university to inform the 8th edition of its standards of care, WPATH emailed Johns Hopkins researchers to say they required final approval before they could be published, prompting objections from Johns Hopkins via email, after which point no commissioned reviews seem to have been published. Some - including the father of evidence-based medicine Gordon Guyatt - have questioned why these reviews have still never been published and the transparency of this process. This story has over the last few months been covered in The Economist, later in the British Medical Journal in a peer-reviewed report, and most recently in a peer-reviewed article with 20 co-authors.

In the more than three months since it broke, inclusion of well-sourced information has been prevented on (IMO) spurious grounds, and now here Raladic complains about the editors that have engaged in good faith, while Raladic eg. argues material should be excluded by citing Andrea James' personal website to cast aspersions on a BMJ journalist. Void if removed (talk) 21:14, 30 November 2024 (UTC)

How is it an aspersion to note that said journalist is a part of known anti-trans hate group organizations and thus is not a reliable source on the topic? Silverseren^C 21:59, 30 November 2024 (UTC)

What on earth are you talking about? Void if removed (talk) 22:34, 30 November 2024 (UTC)

Is the link you gave not about the BMJ journalist being connected to anti-trans hate groups SEGM and Genspect? Silverseren^C 22:54, 30 November 2024 (UTC)

Generally complaints about "casting aspersions" are either about something said about another editor or are a reference to a BLP violation. The fact that the diff is up at AN/I and hasn't been rev-delled suggests it may not be a bright-line BLP violation. So it's nothing. Simonm223 (talk) 13:13, 1 December 2024 (UTC)

• This report seems heavy on speculation and suspicions and very weak in terms of evidence proving a connection. In my opinion, it should be closed and the OP directed to WP:SPI but I think those editors who have had aspersions cast against them should have an opportunity to respond. It's not a good look for an editor to assume all editors with a different POV are conspiring. There could be some off-wiki site that is publicizing some articles on the project but proving some kind of coordination is almost impossible and is usually brought to arbitration if you have enough evidence to sustain a case. Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 07:30, 1 December 2024 (UTC)

  Yes, I knew it was on the edge, but the fact that all of the in a similar timeframe appeared out of nowhere and centered in on the single same topic definitely is on the suspicious side, which is why I at least wanted to bring it here. Suspicious enough that it is not unfounded.

  This has nothing to do with their POV inherently, just that their editing behavior fits a pattern and that's what I observed, just as I have in previous SPI investigations. In this topic space we (luckily) don't get too many new faces, so when all of a sudden, a bunch pop up at once, it definitely raises an eyebrow. But appears some editors are not as convinced yet, so I'll let it rest unless more concrete evidence manifests. Raladic (talk) 16:23, 1 December 2024 (UTC)

I was notified about this discussion and wanted to address my involvement. While researching a different topic, I came across a BMJ article related to WPATH. I noticed that the controversy mentioned in the article was absent from the Wikipedia entry, so I thought it might be useful to include. I checked the talk page to see if there were any relevant discussions and shared the source there. Beyond that, I only made two additional comments on the talk page and did not edit the article itself. I don’t see how this could be considered a violation of any rules. Parker.Josh (talk)

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Massive disruption across election articles, likely WP:CIR issue

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Dr. Islington has been massively editing election articles across Wikipedia by replacing "pp" to "%" in the swing field of election infoboxes, which is mathematically incorrect. They have been noted (and ultimately warned) about it in both the edit summaries and their talk page. Their response to all of it has been to systematically re-revert without giving any reason nor justification. When inquired about it, this and this were their responses. Evidencing a clear lack of competence to edit Wikipedia, they are basically unable to engage collaboratively and are engaged in a massively disruptive behaviour, which needs to be stopped. Impru20^talk 22:33, 30 November 2024 (UTC)

Blocked. There is a lot of edits that need rolling back, I don't have the time right now. Canterbury Tail talk 00:26, 1 December 2024 (UTC)

Thank you very much. If anyone is able to do them, please do; all affected articles are shown in the user's contribution history. I can do it myself later tomorrow if it's not done already (I'm having some issues at doing so effectively these days as I only have mobile access now). Impru20^talk 00:29, 1 December 2024 (UTC)

I think I've taken care of all that; feel free to revert any edits that I've missed! ~ Tails Wx 01:06, 1 December 2024 (UTC)

User:Impru20, User:Tails Wx, User:Canterbury Tail, I have an idea for you, in case you're bored watching Texas - Texas A&M: go see if you think that Islington is the same as User:McCainMc (CT, you can drop the block if you like). In the meantime, I CU-blocked User:Dr. Campbelln. Roll Tide, Drmies (talk) 01:36, 1 December 2024 (UTC)

I have no idea what that is. Is that some strange American thing, watching Texas? Does it move or do tricks? Canterbury Tail talk 04:00, 1 December 2024 (UTC)

Think of it as like The Boat Race, but with a ball instead of water, and in Texas rather then London. There are some other minor technical differences not worth mentioning hrere. Narky Blert (talk) 12:56, 1 December 2024 (UTC)

Both accounts with an interest in elections and politics in general (especially ones in Connecticut)...I can't say for sure if they're connected, so I'll leave it up to Canterbury Tail or Impru20 to possibly make the final call.

While looking at that, I noticed Jaydon Blue's unbelievable TD catch for the Longhorns, @Drmies – SEC I don't pay attention to, though! At the same time, IU's blowout of Purdue is also going on, so go us! ~ Tails Wx 02:28, 1 December 2024 (UTC)

User:Tails Wx, you KNOW that the Ryan Williams catch last week outdid every single one since Prothro! Should've counted! As for Texas, I dislike A&M more but obviously I need them to win, those jerks that won't even sit down to watch a football game. Indiana is having a magical season, aren't they: congrats. Yes, thanks--well, any block would have to be behavioral: there is no technical evidence or they'd have been blocked already, haha. I dropped a note on User:Muboshgu's page too, because I think I've seen this user before. Thanks, Drmies (talk) 02:34, 1 December 2024 (UTC)

Oh, that's right! It's been a while since I've handled sockpuppets -- thanks for the friendly reminder. And I did root for Oklahoma against Alabama in that game. Sorry! ~ Tails Wx 02:47, 1 December 2024 (UTC)

I was too busy watching Washington vs. Oregon. Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 07:13, 1 December 2024 (UTC)

Why are no administrators commenting on the stunning fact that the Detroit Lions are 11-1 for the first time in their 95 year history? Well, I guess that I just did. Cullen328 (talk) 03:26, 1 December 2024 (UTC)

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Persistent unsourced additions and changes by IP 71.178.147.105

The IP 71.178.147.105 has been making repeated additions of unsourced content or changes to infoboxes of entertainment-related content. This has gone past warnings, and I have decided to bring them to ANI. This is not their first rodeo if you check the first warning message given out in October. Kline • talk • contribs 03:07, 1 December 2024 (UTC)

User:Kline can you offer some diffs here of the conduct you are complaining about? Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 07:09, 1 December 2024 (UTC)

@Liz Here are some diffs I found, there's probably more if you need some more: [95] [96] [97] [98] [99] Kline • talk • contribs 16:14, 1 December 2024 (UTC)

Legal threat?

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Is this a legal threat? '''[[User:CanonNi]]''' (talk • contribs) 04:47, 1 December 2024 (UTC)

@CanonNi Yes, but the users' been blocked by a CU so I don't believe there's anything else to worry about. Looks like a troll, and nothing they said has any basis anyways. Sandcat555 (talk) 05:07, 1 December 2024 (UTC)

Additionally, WP:TPA revoked. – robertsky (talk) 05:39, 1 December 2024 (UTC)

I assume it's the same sockpuppet as Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Incidents#Legal threats farther up on this page. They've been very active over the past month. Lots of ANI reports. Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 07:07, 1 December 2024 (UTC)

See Wikipedia:Sockpuppet investigations/Blaxstocatamazon. - Ratnahastin (talk) 08:31, 1 December 2024 (UTC)

WP:RBI is the best advice. Cullen328 (talk) 08:45, 1 December 2024 (UTC)

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Thalapathy2400 engaging in personal attacks, disruptive editing, edit warring

User:Thalapathy2400 (contribs) has engaged in edit warring, disruptive editing, personal attacks against other users and has amassed six warnings. In this edit, the user personally attacks another editor by calling them a "vagina lover", like a slut/simp, adding no constructive message to the article. The user takes reverts personally and addresses the people reverting as haters, calls reverts to their edits vandalism, continues to add unreliable sources after warnings. A majority of their edits have been reverted, yet they continue disrupting articles and reducing Wikipedia's quality. The user also allegedly inflates box office earnings of movies through unreliable sources. Jolielover (talk) 09:14, 1 December 2024 (UTC)

Yes, he is very disruptive. These people are getting their fans wars into Wikipedia now. I.Mahesh (talk) 11:22, 1 December 2024 (UTC)

User:Skets33 continual disruptive editing

• Skets33 (talk · contribs · deleted contribs · logs · filter log · block user · block log)

This user has been disruptively editing couple of articles including Tikar people, and have been warned multiple times just in the last months but continued with the same behaviour without engaging with the warning on his talk.FuzzyMagma (talk) 11:55, 1 December 2024 (UTC)

Could you provide diffs to support your accusations, so others can more easily follow your argumentation? Synonimany (talk) 15:24, 1 December 2024 (UTC)

@Synonimany 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7 edits. With the same edit over and over again being reverted by three different editors with multiple warning on their talk FuzzyMagma (talk) 18:08, 1 December 2024 (UTC)

here more reverted edit on the same page 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, and 15. FuzzyMagma (talk) 18:13, 1 December 2024 (UTC)

anti-anti-semitism

This recently cropped up over at Talk:Zionism [[100]] A call to action, and off wiki canvassing, what can be done? Slatersteven (talk) 13:32, 1 December 2024 (UTC)

This is only one article amongst many, and not just in this topic area. This one's "what to do about it" conclusion doesn't even call for people to edit Wikipedia. Does Rabbi Shraga Simmons have a Wikipedia account? If not then this is just third party commentary on Wikipedia. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested «@» °∆t° 13:57, 1 December 2024 (UTC)

We are urging all of our members in Israel to join the session to learn how to edit Wikipedia. We are going to work to plan a session for our American base as well.' 'Only last night I attended Wikipedia 101 Zoom meeting where the editing structure was explained, and how to also ascend the ranks of Wikipedia editors to trusted user.' Seems to be it very much is about recruiting and training new editors. And I agree, this is not just an issue with one page, but with the whole topic area. So to at least try and prevent disruption (which is what ANI is supposed to be, preventative) PP might be a good idea for the I-P topic area. Slatersteven (talk) 14:04, 1 December 2024 (UTC)

There's already so much disruption in the area, I'm not convinced these plans are likely to lead to that much noticeable worsening of the problems. I mean most articles which almost exclusively come under the I-P topic area should already be ECP per WP:ARBECR of Arab-Israeli conflict. (This includes Zionism BTW.) Or do you mean full protection of I-P articles? Seems a little extreme to me. Talk pages will often be unprotected or might be only semi because such editors can still make non-disruptive edit requests. These can be protected if need be but we should do this as needed rather than pre-emptively. IMO only thing is to remind editors to be vigilant in removing or at least stopping anything that isn't a non disruptive edit-requests on talk pages by non EC editors; and in giving alerts if new editors crop up in the area (EC or not) so they can be dealt with more easily if need be. Likewise if problems crop up in articles which are adjacent enough to not be ECP but where editors are doing stuff which is covered by ARBECR for the Arab-Israeli conflict. And report anyone gaming EC. Nil Einne (talk) 14:21, 1 December 2024 (UTC)

Do you think this is the only group, even with PIA, that has setup meetings to help teach how to edit Wikipedia or that such groups may have commonly held views? The WMF funds such things to recruit new editors. If they game ECR, edit disruptively, or don't follow the other WP:ARBECR restrictions then that should be dealt with as normal. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested «@» °∆t° 16:47, 1 December 2024 (UTC)

I must be missing the call to action/owc. The "what to do about it" section is all just advice on basic information hygiene and doesn't discuss editing Wikipedia. ꧁Zanahary꧂ 15:33, 1 December 2024 (UTC)

The calls to action people are referring to seem to be stuff in the comments. Nil Einne (talk) 18:37, 1 December 2024 (UTC)

Bad faith GA review

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This review Talk:Crusading_movement/GA4 by Borsoka would appear to be in bad faith and a WP:IBAN would appear to be in order.

Firstly this editor would appear to be WP:INVOLVED as any review to the history and talk would indicate. Secondly, as a regular visitor to the GA review page page they would be aware that this article was listed for review since July and appear to have waited 3 months for it to get to the head of the queue before failing. Thirdly, the taking of an option to quick fail rather a proper view indicates an unwillingness to give any chance to improve the article. Lastly, the rationale for failing is largely spurious. Norfolkbigfish (talk) 16:58, 1 December 2024 (UTC)

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Meatpuppetry and conflict of interest editing

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Yesterday I opened an SPI regarding three relatively new editors: User:EEfamilytrees, User:Robbief66 and User:GuyFromEE - You can view the evidence I submitted complete with diffs at Wikipedia:Sockpuppet investigations/EEfamilytrees. User:EEfamilytrees defended their account by stating "It's no secret that I personally know Robbie and that this is the reason for similarities." My reasons for reporting were that User:Robbief66 was reverting editors that reverted edits by User:EEfamilytrees, most notably in a content dispute over date durations in infoboxes of fictional characters. Another editor, User:FishLoveHam provided instances of the two reverting image files to their suited preference. In addition User:Robbief66 has edited User:EEfamilytrees' user space without any noticeable permission or any resistance to it.

At the SPI, the responding admin stated they were unrelated because EEfamilytrees claimed he knows Robbief66. He also stated "I think this case from the surface level looks like a case of run of the mill MEAT and possibly COI editing." He also suggested that EEfamilytrees claim would need further investigation. In addition Robbief66 has been rather disruptive such as PRODing sourced articles [101][102] - or adding hoax information conflicting the sourced content [103]. This edit is odd too in which Robbie thinks he has been blocked? [104]

I also question what value EEfamilytrees' fake article sandboxes have on Wikipedia, since they could mislead others. There is a fake fictional character: User:EEfamilytrees/Josh Wilson (EastEnders) and a fake actor: User:EEfamilytrees/Robbie Flanagan.

I believe this is sockpuppetry but the SPI outcome states otherwise and I accept that. What can be done to address the alleged meatpuppetry and conflict of interest editing in regards to EastEnders articles?Rain the 1 18:06, 1 December 2024 (UTC)

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Ethiopian Epic Continued Problems

• Ethiopian Epic (talk · contribs · deleted contribs · logs · filter log · block user · block log)

Ethiopian Epic continues to revert edits, removing cited material, and engages in gaslighting and sealioning. EE always insists that I explain why my edits should be restored, and his edit summaries sound even more like IDONTLIKEIT than before.[105] I offered sources and explained my reasoning for exclusion of an uncited claim and EE just claimed that it didn't matter if the source didn't mention it, and then claimed(falsly) the sources mentioned it. I am not sure EE has read any source.[106] Epic stopped reverting the previous edit after @City of Silver reverted EE. Epic also continues to revert on List of foreign-born samurai in Japan even though I explained the problem with the reverts multiple times.[107] Epic has now started reverting on the Yasuke page [108]. I feel like I have to put in a lot of effort just to get Epic to discuss on the Talk Page, that Epic keeps repeating what I say, back to me. I don't know if it is a lack of competence, harassment, or just prefers the previous versions of the articles that I have edited. I think a topic ban and a one-sided interaction ban is due. Tinynanorobots (talk) 18:26, 1 December 2024 (UTC)

I noticed yesterday they'd now started editing Yasuke and planned to give a CTOP alert but then forgot although in any case they only made two talk page comments since I noticed. I've given one now. Besides Yasuke article, the List of foreign-born samurai in Japan edits also seem to be clear covered by the Yasuke CTOP. So if nothing happens and they keep causing problems, you could try WP:A/R/E. Nil Einne (talk) 18:44, 1 December 2024 (UTC)

Whether or not EE complies with the CTOP restriction, they've more than earned a block because the problematic behavior from the last ANI discussion hasn't changed. See my edit summary here for more. City of Silver 19:42, 1 December 2024 (UTC)

@Nil Einne Are you saying that ANI is not the right place for this, and I should take this to AE? I don't want to get in trouble for forum shopping. Also, the evidence is already here. Also, EE responded to your CTOP alert by giving me a CTOP alert. This doesn't show understanding to me. I am confused why Admins aren't taking action here. Tinynanorobots (talk) 07:34, 2 December 2024 (UTC)

Making a bunch of allegations without diffs to substantiate them counts as both a WP:PA and a failure to assume good faith, which is a disruptive editing pattern that it seems you repeatedly engage in. I haven't actually done anything Tinynanorobots is claiming and none of the diffs substantiate his claims.

I'm not sure why Tinynanorobots insists on feuding or trying to start a conflict because I don't have any problems with him. I think he thinks this board will allow him to avoid satisfying onus for his tenacious edits. This user seems interested in pushing some kind of feud with me and I think it's not the first time he's been disruptive. I checked his history and multiple people have suggested that he should be topic banned. Ethiopian Epic (talk) 00:43, 2 December 2024 (UTC)

@Ethiopian Epic: You keep reverting Tinynanorobots without going to the talk page to discuss. Going forward, I'm going to revert you whenever I see you do that. Since you don't seem comfortable addressing me or reacting to me, this means that every time you use unhelpful and/or lying edit summaries like "I don't see any consensus for these changes. Please follow WP:ONUS and discuss on the talk page,", "Don't see this as an improvement," and "It was in my edit summary" and you don't go to the talk page to explain, your change will be undone and the version of the article preferred by Tinynanorobots will be restored. Thoughts? City of Silver 02:25, 2 December 2024 (UTC)

That isn't true. The summary "I don't see any consensus for these changes. Please follow WP:ONUS and discuss on the talk page"[109] was in regard to changes that were contested that Tinynanorobots never got consensus for, so the burden would be on him to explain his changes which he hasn't done.

Tinynanorobots is not engaging in discussion. He hasn't replied to the samurai talk page[110] or the List of Samurai talk page[111] in 4 days and 2 days respectively even though I let him have his preferred version. I don't mind that, there's no rush, but then out of nowhere he makes these uncivil accusations and false claims here still without responding, and doesn't assume any good faith. I do wish he would be less battleground-y. Ethiopian Epic (talk) 04:37, 2 December 2024 (UTC)

I have already made my case on all those talk pages. I haven't responded again because there is no need to repeat myself. Tinynanorobots (talk) 08:08, 2 December 2024 (UTC)

There are numerous tools for dispute resolution, it puzzles the mind why you both aren't attempting to use any of them to resolve this content dispute. Brocade River Poems (She/They) 18:45, 2 December 2024 (UTC)

User:Tinynanorobots Disruptive Editing and Continuous Feuding

• Tinynanorobots (talk · contribs · deleted contribs · logs · filter log · block user · block log)

Tinynanorobots has an apparent history of disruptive editing such as removing material against consensus and edit warring[112][113]. He continues to revert sourced material without following onus when his edits are challenged[114][115]. I checked his history and three experienced people LokiTheLiar, Gitz6666, Aquillion have all previously suggested that he should be topic banned[116].

I let him have his preferred version in all of the articles and am engaging in discussion with him. The discussions are productive but for whatever reason he keeps failing to assume good faith and making uncivil claims through different avenues like his suggestion that I am gaslighting. I don't understand why. The articles need a lot of work so it would be helpful if he wasn't starting these feuds. He also seems to think that BRD doesn't apply to him. Ethiopian Epic (talk) 01:16, 2 December 2024 (UTC)

With all due respect here, the fact that ArbCom in fact did not do anything about that stuff makes it very unlikely that Tinynanorobots will be sanctioned for anything he's done prior to the case. Loki (talk) 07:21, 2 December 2024 (UTC)

Ethiopian Epic, you have made 90 edits on the project in your brief time here. 29 of those edits have been to this ANI noticeboard. That's a high percentage of your contributions. Why do you think you are getting into so many disputes with other editors here? Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 08:41, 2 December 2024 (UTC)

It has been just one dispute, every Notice regarding Ethiopian Epic has failed to lead to a resolution, but results in Ethiopian Epic making a small bit of progress. After the discussion is archived, he makes another disruptive edit. Also, a lot of his responses are in the vain of "I know you are, but what am I?" As opposed to actually addressing the substance of the dispute. Tinynanorobots (talk) 11:24, 2 December 2024 (UTC)

@Tinynanorobots, you need to provide diffs for each and every claim that you make or this will go nowhere. TarnishedPath^talk 11:40, 2 December 2024 (UTC)

@TarnishedPath I thought it was covered by my previous post, but I will present the evidence clearly.

I posted a Edit warring template on EE's talk page[117], as did Hemiauchenia [118] EE responded by posted one on mine.[119]. Despite this, he didn't explain his objections on the Samurai talk page. He even called the section Samurai Reverts like I did on his talk page. When I asked him to explain his edits, he accused me of dodging the question and being vague. Exactly what he was doing.[120] I pointed out that I had already discussed one of the sentences that he wanted to restore on the talk page.[121] He eventually posted there [122], but just to express disagreement and to shift the burden of proof. Not engaging with my arguments or the sources. He has also added ANI notices and a CTOP alert.[123][124][125] Every time after someone added a template to his talk page.

At the same time, his discussion never goes into detail. He removed information from the samurai page that was sourced to 3 different sources, describing it as reduce original research[126] and claiming the information was unsourced[127] When his responses were generic and vague. He asks me about the sources, but doesn't say which one, and claims So the sources above don't actually back up your position which you haven't supported. As for the other edit I requested quotes because I looked at the sources and didn't see the text. Could you provide the quote?[128] There are three different sources supporting 3 different claims in the text that he removed, but about 13 mentioned in the discussion regarding samurai being retainers. There is no indication which sources he is talking about. Tinynanorobots (talk) 14:36, 2 December 2024 (UTC)

These diffs don't substantiate your claims at all. You keep accusing me of being vague, but if that's the case why aren't you engaging in the talk page discussions? [129][130]

You keep making uncivil claims like "gaslighting" without any evidence and failing to assume good faith. Ethiopian Epic (talk) 18:17, 2 December 2024 (UTC)

Here is Tinynanorobots removing sourced material[131]. He was challenged for this [132]. He then reverts again without discussing[133].

On a related article he did the same thing where he avoids onus and doesn't engage in discussion. Here is Tinynanorobots editing against consensus[134]. Here is him getting reverted by a different editor[135]. Here is him adding it back without engaging on talk[136][137]. He thinks BRD doesn't apply to him.

I don't know what happened with Tinynanorobot's previous disruptive editing and edit-warring, but it can at least be said that his behavior is continuing in multiple spots. I don't know why, and I don't have any issues with him. Ethiopian Epic (talk) 18:25, 2 December 2024 (UTC)

@Ethiopian Epic, your comment above crosses a bright red line as far as WP:CANVASSING goes. TarnishedPath^talk 08:44, 2 December 2024 (UTC)

I haven't reviewed this complaint, nor will I, because I don't have the time at the moment and because I agree with TarnishedPath that my notification may border on WP:CANVASS. However, I note that Ethiopian Epic's edits to ANI - the many disputes Liz mentions - are all related to their quarrel with Tinynanorobots, so they are not necessarily indicative of WP:BATTLEGROUND behaviour: they may need someone to look into the matter on its merits and in terms of behaviour, but as I said, that person won't be me. Gitz (talk) (contribs) 09:45, 2 December 2024 (UTC)

Ah I assumed I was required to notify them if I was directly mentioning edits they made. I got the impression from the reminder above that this place is strict about notifications. Ethiopian Epic (talk) 17:45, 2 December 2024 (UTC)

I just want to note as someone who has gone through a similar dredging up of past activity that trying to drag someone to ANI over complaints that ARBCOM felt didn't even warrant a Finding of Facts against the user seems WP:HOUNDING at worst and ill-advised at best, especially when you were told about as much the last time you brought this up at ANI.[138] Brocade River Poems (She/They) 17:26, 2 December 2024 (UTC)

I think EE and Tinynanorobots need to learn to work together collaboratively or they need to both look for other areas to edit. Simonm223 (talk) 18:24, 2 December 2024 (UTC)

I agree. Brocade River Poems (She/They) 18:32, 2 December 2024 (UTC)

BLP violations and disruptive editing by DasallmächtigeJ

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

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DasallmächtigeJ (talk · contribs · deleted contribs · logs · filter log · block user · block log) has engaged in disruptive editing at Talk:Dragon_Age:_The_Veilguard#Neutrality_of_inclusivity_section, implying that video games journalist Harvey Randall is a woke/queer activist because he said that he was queer in a review of a video game [139], which I consider to be a BLP violation against Randall. They also described video game journalism as a pro-woke echo chamber [140]. When asked to tone down his rhetoric, he has refused to do so [141]. If they continue to refuse to moderate their tone I think a topic ban from gender/sexuality should be considered. Hemiauchenia (talk) 19:46, 1 December 2024 (UTC)

Now been blocked for 48 hours by Isabelle Belato. Don't know if the thread should be closed or kept open for their response. Hemiauchenia (talk) 20:29, 1 December 2024 (UTC)

@Hemiauchenia: I think what happens next with this thread is up to you. Do you think this should be closed in light of the block or do you think the matter isn't settled? (You mentioned the possibility of waiting for "their response" but I can't quite tell who you mean. The blocked user? The blocking admin? Others?) City of Silver 21:38, 1 December 2024 (UTC)

I meant DasallmächtigeJ's response. I'm ambivalent. He seems likely to double down once the block expires, so I'm willing to keep it open, but if an uninvolved admin thinks closing the thread is appropriate I won't object. Hemiauchenia (talk) 21:45, 1 December 2024 (UTC)

I'm not opposed to keeping this thread open if you think there is a pattern here of disruptive editing in the CTOP of GENSEX. If there is no need to consider a topic ban, then this thread may be closed. Isabelle Belato ^🏳‍🌈 22:47, 1 December 2024 (UTC)

I mean, I'm seeing occasional edits like this that seem problematic, but he's not exactly regularly coming into conflict about the issue looking back over his edits over the last few months, so I think this thread can be closed. Hemiauchenia (talk) 22:56, 1 December 2024 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

User:Washweans

Washweans (talk · contribs) has claimed to stop editing, but have continued been making (rather weak) personal attacks at other editors, such as: [142][143][144][145][146]. '''[[User:CanonNi]]''' (talk • contribs) 23:44, 1 December 2024 (UTC)

It's also important to note that they have recently vandalized the page mojibake as seen here. Gaismagorm (talk) 00:20, 2 December 2024 (UTC)

• Indefinitely blocked.--Bbb23 (talk) 00:40, 2 December 2024 (UTC)

Homoglyph vandalism

Although they are already indeffed, I wanted to call attention to the Mojibake edit linked by Gaismagorm. Τhis is a particularly pernicious form of vandalism that I call homoglyph vandalism (but I'd appreciate hearing the expression used at Wikipedia, if there is one). It involves replacing one character, say, a Latin capital T (Unicode U+0054) with another one, say a Greek capital letter Tau (U+03A4), or a Cyrillic Capital letter Te (U+0422) which has the identical, or almost identical appearance as the original latin T. You can see this in operation at Washeans's edit, where the first letter of the first word in the expression "The result is a systematic replacement of symbols..." in the original is Latin letter capital T (UTF-8: 54) but was replaced with homoglyph Greek capital letter Tau (UTF-8 CE A4) in the wikicode.

It is not by coincidence that they vandalized this article and not some other one, because the topic of the article is related to the type of vandalism they performed; they probably felt pretty clever about themselves doing it, right up to the point were they got indeffed. I am not aware of useful tools for detecting homoglyph vandalism at Wikipedia, but if there is anything at Toolforge, I'd like to know about it. We need a tool to help vandalism fighters detect and correct vandalism of this sort. Not sure if the AWB flavor of regex is powerful enough to write a pattern that would highlight script characters that appear to be embedded in characters belonging to a different unicode script block, but if it is, that might be one way. Mathglot (talk) 00:59, 2 December 2024 (UTC)

As the editor who had to revert it, and as someone who is probably in the 99th percentile of editors for potential awareness of this issue, it took me a solid 20 seconds staring at the diff to realize what was actually changed. An ability to check for this seems technically difficult—surely it would end up being a "notice one diff by a user and the whole house of cards comes tumbling down" thing? Remsense ‥ 论 01:07, 2 December 2024 (UTC)

presumably so. Sometimes I just search up common words in the search but replace l's with capital I's or the other way around, and use that to find vandalism. Gaismagorm (talk) 01:10, 2 December 2024 (UTC)

Mathglot, please see User:Radarhump. Drmies (talk) 04:11, 2 December 2024 (UTC)

(edit conflict) Diffs highlighting words that look identical, and unexpected differences in the byte length are two of the tells of homoglyph vandalism. I did a test edit to this section to demonstrate this. If you look at rev. 1260701025 of 04:02, 2 December 2024 by Mathglot, you will see that that edit replaced the 'T' in the first letter of the word 'This' in rev. 1260672475 of 00:59, 2 December 2024 with Greek letter capital Tau (U+0422). Note the diff (Special:Diff/1260699524/1260701025) highlighting the word 'This' with no visible change to the word 'This', and then look at the History, and note that the difference in byte length: rev. 1260701025 is one byte longer (363,186 bytes) than rev. 1260699524, because UTF-8 requires only one byte to render a Latin T, but two bytes to render a Tau.

These are two of the clues that help find this type of vandalism, the first being a word that is highlighted with no visible change; and the second is the byte count. The latter is easiest to use when only one word is changed, or multiple words but without additional text being added. But careful character counting may reveal it, if one of the encodings requires more UTF-8 bytes than the other, which is normally the case if one of the characters was Latin and the other was not. Mathglot (talk) 04:36, 2 December 2024 (UTC)

I remember a case of this from a few years ago. The tell was a redlink which I knew should have gone to a DAB page, and the corrupting alphabet was Cyrillic. It was a real head-scratcher until I worked out what was going on. Fortunately, the editor had never been very active, and had given up. I cleaned them out by copying suspect characters in their edits into the searchbar; but that requires familiarity with the corrupting alphabet, and it might have been simpler to link every word and see what turned red on preview. Narky Blert (talk) 08:31, 2 December 2024 (UTC)

User:Marginataen

• Marginataen (talk · contribs · deleted contribs · logs · filter log · block user · block log)

I had to revert dozens of unilateral WP:DATEVAR violations by Marginataen (talk · contribs) bundled in with other changes over the past several days. Now, after I've explained why their reasoning for changes is not valid and told them to reread the actual guideline, they're ignoring that and undoing some of my reversions, like on List of Holocaust survivors and Presidency of Itamar Franco. Remsense ‥ 论 00:25, 2 December 2024 (UTC)

I've blocked the user for one week. Jumping into bulk dmy conversion after coming off a block does not show good faith. Brandon (talk) 01:36, 2 December 2024 (UTC)

Personal attacks in unblock request

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I had filed a report at WP:AN3 against Drisha herjee for edit warring.[147] After that, Drisha herjee went to file a frivolous SPI against me in retaliation which was closed with no action[148] before Drisha herjee was subsequently blocked for edit warring.[149]

Now, instead of realizing their mistakes, Drisha herjee is still falsely accusing others of "vandalism" and sockpuppetry on their unblock request.[150] - Ratnahastin (talk) 03:51, 2 December 2024 (UTC)

User:Drisha herjee is blocked. What action are you asking for, Ratnahastin? I would recommend taking their User talk page off your Watchlist. Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 04:04, 2 December 2024 (UTC)

Ignoring the problem will only make it worse. The correct course of action here would be that their block should be extended or they should be restricted from editing their current area of caste where they are disregarding any advice sent their way by established editors and showing no resolve or commitment to improve. - Ratnahastin (talk) 04:16, 2 December 2024 (UTC)

User:Ratnahastin, they're blocked. I just declined their unblock request. We're not going to beat editors with sticks for not adhering to our guidelines: if they come back from the block and haven't changed their behavior, they'll be blocked again, likely indefinitely. Drmies (talk) 04:19, 2 December 2024 (UTC)

Going with what admins are saying here, bad behavior during a block can never warrant an indefinite block or TPA revocation. Odd, that. City of Silver 04:26, 2 December 2024 (UTC)

City of Silver, I would never say "never". Often TPA is revoked if their conduct is offensive. But I wouldn't do it in this case right now. Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 06:49, 2 December 2024 (UTC)

We do take TPA away, but I wouldn't in this either. Secretlondon (talk) 10:15, 2 December 2024 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

GigachadGigachad, US election statistics, and "flipped" voting regions

• GigachadGigachad (talk⁺ · tag · contribs · deleted contribs · logs · filter log · block user · block log · CA · CheckUser(log) · investigate · cuwiki)
• Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Incidents#Disruptive editing by GigachadGigachad (2023) ^{[archive 1116]}

GigachadGigachad has been warned repeated against violating the policy of WP:No original research with regard to election results in the US. GigachadGigachad argues that they are within the parameters of WP:CALC when they compare various election years and various election regions to arrive at a complex narrative of how a voting region has changed over time. The only sourcing they have been using are webpages with simple statistics, not independent observers making the analysis in the media. An example is this edit adding a comparison between Iowa and Washington DC voting results, saying, "DC and Iowa were the only two jurisdictions that swung more Democratic in 1984." The cited sources are two pages offering election statistics, one page from 1980, and the other from 1984. A major problem with this edit is that comparisons from Iowa to any other state or district should be performed by WP:SECONDARY sources.

GigachadGigachad has also been adding unreferenced lists of regions that "flipped" from one party to another in the election. Such lists presume that flips are typically listed in the media, which is not true. After being warned repeatedly, GigachadGigachad re-adds the lists but this time with a webpage source showing simple statistics. The source does not describe flips as important, and it does not track flips for the reader. Rather, anyone interested in flipped cities or flipped counties must cross-reference at least two webpages and compare at least two different years of election results. Nobody but GigachadGigachad is interested in making lists of these "flips"; the media are conspicuously absent in doing so.

Basically, GigachadGigachad is using Wikipedia as a personal election analysis publishing platform, introducing novel conclusions. Binksternet (talk) 04:14, 2 December 2024 (UTC)

Added courtesy link to to Archive 1116 above. Mathglot (talk) 06:30, 2 December 2024 (UTC)

• Given Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Historical elections, this might be a case to bring to AE. Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 06:46, 2 December 2024 (UTC)

The county flips infomation is included on most presidential, sentorial, and gubernatorial elections across all 50 states, many of which were not introduced by myself. It is merely simple election analysis (that I do not have a monopoly on) related to the county results infomation also inlcuded on those pages. The county flips do not require complex sourcing, as one can compare two lists of county results to see which ones flipped. It is not some complicated analysis. It merely offers users the oppritunity to see how election outcomes have changed over time. GigachadGigachad (talk) 16:33, 2 December 2024 (UTC)

Comparing two lists of county results in order to form a narrative of long-term change is still WP:SYNTH; it doesn't seem trivial to me at all. But the more glaring thing to me is that you're giving the narrative you read into those numbers extremely outsized weight. US national elections have huge amounts of stuff written about them; if a flip is significant, it will have secondary sources (ie. not just tables of numbers) discussing it directly. Without that, putting it in the lead, the way you did in the diff above, is obviously ridiculous. And the more serious issue is that you continue to try and force this lens for understanding elections through on multiple articles after someone has objected, which violates WP:FAIT; you need to slow down, discuss it with people who object, and try to reach a consensus on it before continuing to edit the same thing into so many articles at scale. And, ideally, like I said, this would consist of finding secondary sources and dropping the issue for cases where they can't be found - with the endless amounts of data on elections that exist, you could form almost any narrative you wanted by pulling out the right pairs of datapoints and comparing them; that's why, in situations like that, we need secondary sources actually discussing an aspect rather than just an editor going over the numbers and performing WP:OR. --Aquillion (talk) 20:51, 2 December 2024 (UTC)

Vandal-troll back again

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

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The ongoing harassment, vandalism and outright abuse from the same Fistagon sock is back again, this time under the name Wombshifter 2025 (talk · contribs · deleted contribs · logs · filter log · block user · block log). If someone could please ensure they cannot vandalise any more and also to the much-needed revdel, I would be grateful. Thanks - SchroCat (talk) 05:56, 2 December 2024 (UTC)

Done and dusted. — rsjaffe 🗣️ 06:26, 2 December 2024 (UTC)

Many thanks Rsjaffe, it's much appreciated. Cheers - SchroCat (talk) 06:27, 2 December 2024 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Spammer — Vesan99 / ZooEscaper

• Vesan99 (talk · contribs · deleted contribs · logs · filter log · block user · block log)
• ZooEscaper (talk · contribs · deleted contribs · logs · filter log · block user · block log) (no contribs here)

Vesan99 is spammer (former experienced member, curator of a network of "black" paid accounts), rarely appears in en.wiki, but he and the accounts associated with him managed to have some contribution here. See Wikipedia:Conflict_of_interest/Noticeboard/Archive_215#Vesan99 for details.

It happens that Vesan99 is ZooEscaper (talk · contribs · deleted contribs · logs · filter log · block user · block log). CU comment in russian. ZooEscaper is under global lock as a spambot.

To prevent Wikipedia from being used for undeclared paid edits, please block Vesan99 account, as we done in ru.wiki. ·Carn·!? 10:54, 2 December 2024 (UTC)

User:ZooEscaper never edited the English Wikipedia and had a total of 11 edits on the Russian Wikipedia and Vesan99 hasn't edited since May. I see you filed a long report at Wikipedia:Conflict of interest/Noticeboard/Archive 215#Vesan99 but there was no responses from other editors or administrators.

If you are concerned about Vesan99, I'd file a report at WP:SPI but I don't think there would be any valid results as this account is stale. This definitely doesn't seem like an urgent, intractable problem that needs to be addressed on ANI right now. And I have no idea what you mean by "black" paid accounts, that could use some explaining if this editor ever becomes active again. Right now, it looks like this is mainly an issue for the Russian Wikipedia, not this project. Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 22:43, 2 December 2024 (UTC)

User:Zhenghecaris

• Zhenghecaris (talk · contribs · deleted contribs · logs · filter log · block user · block log)

I said mostly what the problem of the user is in Wikipedia:Administrators'_noticeboard/IncidentArchive1172#User:Zhenghecaris so see here for detail, this user recently added references by fringe researcher Mark McMenamin again after I warned in previous discussion,[151][152] and apparently this user seems used ChatGPT to write the article,[153] and current state of article Kimberellomorpha this uses created is terrible. This user recently uploaded File:Solza_margarita_fossil.jpg to Wikimedia Commons, this is non-free image apparently uploaded from Fandom Wiki, and seems it is non-free image (it is uploaded as fair use image in Russian Wikipedia[154]). So this user contributed another copyright violation after warned in Commons. This user seems does not learn, continuing to add fringe theories and do copyright violations, what is needed is block at least in Paleontology topic. Ta-tea-two-te-to (talk) 11:23, 2 December 2024 (UTC)

Also strange behavior is that this user tried to move user page to nonexistent user page called Paranomalocaris.[155][156] Maybe this user wanted to change name without knowing how Wikipedia works, or tried to make sockpuppet. Either way, I don't think user who do this kind of behavior should have editing privileges. This user also had some problematic behaviors such as edit someone's image roughly to make it like what they claim (File:Zhenghecaris_with_setal_blades.jpg), and complain user's art style. (see here) in Commons. Ta-tea-two-te-to (talk) 11:30, 2 December 2024 (UTC)

(FWIW, I've tagged Commons:Solza_margarita_fossil.jpg as having to either provide evidence of free license or be deleted in 7 days.) Remsense ‥ 论 11:34, 2 December 2024 (UTC)

I just left that as evidence for ANI in Commons (c:Commons:Administrators'_noticeboard/User_problems#User:Zhenghecaris), but after that I will simply put copyvio template for that. (P.S. this user is blocked from Commons for a week.) Ta-tea-two-te-to (talk) 11:36, 2 December 2024 (UTC)

User:Remsense

This user is way out of line, bulk reverting a number of my edits on article dates. The subjects of the articles are all European, and therefore DMY dates should be used, per MOS:DATETIES. This user needs a stern warning. Marbe166 (talk) 11:53, 2 December 2024 (UTC)

This is a surprise addendum to the thread directly above. Now, we've discovered another meatbotting user who refuses to read WP:DATEVAR after being implored to multiple times—and they've likewise done a huge amount of damage across dozens of articles over the past few months because of it that I've now had to go ahead and start fixing. Remsense ‥ 论 11:56, 2 December 2024 (UTC)

MOS:DATETIES outweighs WP:DATEVAR, and please stop the personal attacks. Marbe166 (talk) 11:59, 2 December 2024 (UTC)

Mind linking me to the RFC that decided this, that must've slipped under my radar in the previous two weeks since the last discussion in the series of likely dozens over the years that make it perfectly clear that non-English-speaking countries' date formats do not themselves decide the date format used in articles? Remsense ‥ 论 12:03, 2 December 2024 (UTC)

Diffs? I suppose one is a number of... edits, but I feel like I must be missing something for this to show up on the dramaboards already. The diff linked in this comment is a content dispute belonging at Talk:List of Holocaust survivors (most recent non-bot edit: March 2023). Folly Mox (talk) 12:15, 2 December 2024 (UTC)

I mean, it's bordering on a conduct issue if @Marbe166 is unwilling to go back themselves and undo whatever historical WP:DATEVAR violations have been quietly committed according to this interpretation. Remsense ‥ 论 12:17, 2 December 2024 (UTC)

I'm open to the possibility of conduct issues, but the only diff submitted thus far is the one I linked. The misalign­ment here seems to be conflicting interpretation of MOS:TIES, which underlies both shortcuts linked in the initial comments above. As far as I've been able to determine, the operational definition of strong national ties has never been explicated. There are too many MOS talk: subheadings in too many archives for me to search the whole space right now, but this 2017 thread with participation from multiple MOS regulars seems to indicate there was never an original consensus definition. Folly Mox (talk) 13:28, 2 December 2024 (UTC)

Comment I'd like to see this content dispute resolved so I'm starting a topic at Talk:List of Holocaust survivors Orange sticker (talk) 12:40, 2 December 2024 (UTC)

There's no content dispute: WP:DATEVAR says exactly what it says, and that page abides by it perfectly. If we're going to start an RFC about the date format on that page, I see no reason to change it and no reason for anyone else to want to either. Remsense ‥ 论 12:41, 2 December 2024 (UTC)

I dispute the content of the article, and so there is a content dispute. And while it may turn out that your edits are acceptable, your pattern of choosing to revert changes to articles on a German composer, an Estonian arena, a Croatian terrorist attack and a Turkish singer so they have a date format unique to the United States could easily be regarded as uncivil behaviour. I think both Remsense and Marbe166 are engaging in tendentious editing. Orange sticker (talk) 13:14, 2 December 2024 (UTC)

Your personal taste (and again, your incorrect factual interpretation—the US is not the only country that uses MDY!) of what site policy plainly says should factor very little into whether you can recognize actions as abiding straightforwardly by what it says. I'm not sure what else I'm really meant to do rather than "fix it"—being really annoyed at this cropping up twice in one day is not tendentious. Remsense ‥ 论 13:17, 2 December 2024 (UTC)

But you're not even adhering to MOS:DATEVAR when you've changed[157] an article that was created in dmy format to mdy? That's why, to answer your question below, I think your editing as been tendenatious, as you reverted about 17 edits by the same user in 10 minutes, without first waiting for them to engage with your message on their talk page Orange sticker (talk) 13:29, 2 December 2024 (UTC)

I made a couple mistakes while reverting a couple dozen. A mistake is not tendentious, unless you're just throwing that word around while wringing an extremely specific reading out of that page too. Remsense ‥ 论 13:30, 2 December 2024 (UTC)

Actually, @Orange sticker, while understanding the page is not an exhaustive exercise, can you identify one thing I've done here that's listed or gestured towards on Wikipedia:Tendentious editing? Remsense ‥ 论 13:22, 2 December 2024 (UTC)

• Marbe166 - generally I'd suggest that a discussion about this be had on an article talk page, but since you say this affects multiple articles, and it looks like we're past the point of collaborative discussion, I guess we can touch on it here quickly. If I interpret your complaint correctly, you seem to be saying that you have been editing lots of articles about European subjects to make their date format DMY. What is it about the wording of MOS:DATETIES that makes you think it encourages this? It seems to me that the guidance in that part of the MOS only covers subjects with strong ties to a particular English-speaking country - most of Europe does not seem unambiguously to be covered by that. Girth Summit _(blether) 13:33, 2 December 2024 (UTC)

  I'll dispel any case-law ambiguity and post the most recent MOS discussion on this very point, very clearly reinforcing the status quo—wherein you will find yours truly initially entering on the exact wrong side of history and realize halfway through how wrong I am—but that's mostly beside the point Remsense ‥ 论 13:44, 2 December 2024 (UTC)

  I will say this Remsense - I just looked at the history of List of Holocaust survivors, and it looks like you've made 4 reverts there in the last 24 hours. I'm not sure which other articles this covers, but it needs sorting out on a talk page somewhere - being right about the MOS isn't an exemption listed at WP:3RRNO. Girth Summit _(blether) 14:21, 2 December 2024 (UTC)

  Again, see the case directly above. That represents two completely separate incidents, in which one had already been completely resolved. If I still need to be hammered for crossing a bright line then I accept that, but in practical terms I would not really understand why refraining would've been more ethical/less disruptive to do given the circumstances—it was like being hit with two asteroids from different directions in the same spot. Remsense ‥ 论 14:22, 2 December 2024 (UTC)

  Two completely separate incidents, which have taken place on the same article, resulting in you making four reverts within a 24-hour window. That looks like a 3RR violation to me, and the fact you were in disagreement with two different people about it doesn't fix that. Stuff like this needs to be thrashed out on talk pages, not by repeated reverting. I don't particularly want to block anyone over this, but again, being right does not give you a free pass on 3RR. Girth Summit _(blether) 14:28, 2 December 2024 (UTC)

  I get why it's a bright line, and I'm not trying to lawyer my way out of having crossing it—but I will admit I can't quite square how this is pragmatically equivalent to the vast majority of situations where 3RR is clearly meant to throw cold water on edit warring. But I won't push it any further. Remsense ‥ 论 14:36, 2 December 2024 (UTC)

  Think about it like this: if someone plastered anti-semitic vandalism over that article, we have an urgent need to remove it - that's a 3RR exemption. Date formats, not so much. If there is a MOS violation for a few days while a discussion takes place, it's not a big deal. The point of 3RR is to stop back and forth bickering, and encourage editors to go to the talk page. 3RR is indeed meant to throw cold water on edit warring - I think that's exactly what you were doing, even if you were in the right about the MOS issue.

  Marbe166 seems to be suggesting that you have been bulk reverting a bunch of their edits to date formats - is that true, and is there any place you discussed it with them before doing so? I'm not saying that's a strict requirement, but if I was going to bulk revert a load of edits made by an experienced editor in good standing, I would have gone to their talk page before doing so and explained what I was going to do, and why. That might have avoided them feeling harassed (as appears to have happened here, resulting in this report), and hopefully would have meant that they didn't feel the need to revert your reverts. Girth Summit _(blether) 15:08, 2 December 2024 (UTC)

  Deep sigh. I do wish I didn't keep finding these edge cases that are definitionally not for opening loopholes with: I've gotten a bit better about this but ultimately I think something I need to do is cut my watchlist in half, because I feel the need to play whack-a-mole with so many pages that I feel pressured in some moments to settle everything so that it doesn't get away, making me handle situations like this. It's not a good mindset: an "under siege" variant of WP:BATTLEGROUND I guess. Remsense ‥ 论 16:10, 2 December 2024 (UTC)

• This user is way out of line, bulk reverting a number of my edits on article dates - but your edits themselves were (undiscussed) bulk edits, right? Obviously when someone makes an undiscussed bulk edit it is almost always acceptable for someone who objects to it revert it in bulk, unless the change is so glaringly necessary as to make reversion actively disruptive. That isn't the case here - the relevant policies seem at least reasonably debatable, and more likely Remsense has the right of them. WP:BRD not only applies to bulk edits, it applies in particular to bulk edits; it has to, otherwise any undiscussed bulk edit becomes a WP:FAIT situation due to being difficult to reverse. When someone does start reverting your bulk edits, you need to stop and discuss it, rather than rushing straight to ANI with almost no meaningful interaction. --Aquillion (talk) 20:59, 2 December 2024 (UTC)

User Pavanreddy211 code snippets on user & user talk

• Pavanreddy211 (talk · contribs · deleted contribs · logs · filter log · block user · block log)
• User:Pavanreddy211 (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs)
• User talk:Pavanreddy211 (edit | subject | history | links | watch | logs)

This user's talk page pops up in my recent changes from time to time with IPs posting large blocks of code (not wiki-code; sometimes it's Python, other times I don't know what it is) which the user rapidly reverts. I just blocked the two /24 ranges that have been dropping the code blocks since roughly August and not doing anything else. Then I noticed that between creating their account in July and the IPs taking over, Pavanreddy211 dropped the same code blocks on their own user page and rapidly reverted them, and they haven't done anything else on Wikipedia, ever, except play with these code blocks. I was going to block per WP:NOTHERE, but maybe someone who recognizes what these code segments are wants to try to talk to them first? Ivanvector (^Talk/_Edits) 14:52, 2 December 2024 (UTC)

Consider blocking per NOTHERE. Wikipedia is not a Git repo. Ahri Boy (talk) 15:54, 2 December 2024 (UTC)

Judging loosely on the code, it appears to be some sort of screen mirror/tracking script that sends the data to a JSON file. I'm not sure if they wanted to implement their code here or they used Wiki as a temp host like Git (just use Notepad), but clearly they're WP:NOTHERE. Conyo14 (talk) 16:03, 2 December 2024 (UTC)

I would request RD because it may be a malware code. Ahri Boy (talk) 16:35, 2 December 2024 (UTC)

Blocked indef per WP:NOTHERE. Up to others if revdel is needed. Also best to keep an eye on them in case TPA might need to be revoked, given how much they've been doing this on that page. - The Bushranger _{One ping only} 20:51, 2 December 2024 (UTC)

TheNavigatrr

TheNavigatrr has consistently failed to stop using self-published sources for the Syria war map modules [158][159][160] (just a few examples) despite being told many times [161][162][163]. It would be nice if something could be done about this. Thank you all for your time. Firestar464 (talk) 14:59, 2 December 2024 (UTC)

ArgentinianKingdom: Homophobia

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

There are also blatant WP:CIR issues [164] and possibly a history of sock/meatpuppetry [165]. But I guess this alone should be enough to show that this user is not WP:NOTHERE;

"Get Over it motherfucker stop lying" (30 November 2024)

Im not gay fuck off motherfucker (1 December 2024). This was a random comment they made out of nowhere, and when asked why they said that, they said it was "just fun title"

"Homosexuality is normal" (1 December 2024) -> "Im joking its not normal" (2 December 2024)

--HistoryofIran (talk) 15:24, 2 December 2024 (UTC)

Definitely not here to build an encyclopedia. Might be worth a CU too. Simonm223 (talk) 15:34, 2 December 2024 (UTC)

Yep, I'll make an SPI shortly. And many thanks to Girth Summit for blocking them. HistoryofIran (talk) 15:41, 2 December 2024 (UTC)

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User Conduct

Dear Administrator,

I am writing to express my concerns regarding the behavior of a user who has been consistently adding biased and historically inaccurate information to the Shahi Jama Masjid article, as well as other articles. This user has been identified as engaging in a pattern of disinformation that affects the reliability of Wikipedia content.

Even users on twitter have pointed out the disinformation Post 1 by X user 2nd post by another user

Notably, I have reason to believe that this user has been contributing from multiple accounts, which is against Wikipedia's policies. The primary account, which has been flagged for problematic edits, is Upd Edit , and I suspect this account is fake account of @Kautilya3 This behavior appears to be an attempt to bypass oversight and maintain influence over the content of articles.

I also noticed that this user had made an alarming edit to the Kashmiri Muslim article in 2019, claiming that Kashmiri Muslims were "forcefully converted" to islam and later adapted to it. This edit was presented with a dubious source Edit and this was added when kashmir was in the news similarly he is doing to shahi jama masjid page which is currently in news and i suspect he is part of bigger disinformation network run by india hinduvta nationalist group.

Given the nature of these edits and the fact that this user has a history of making biased and misleading contributions, I request that you review these changes and take the necessary action to ensure that the content of Wikipedia remains accurate and neutral.

Thank you for your attention to this matter. Aliyiya5903 (talk) 16:09, 2 December 2024 (UTC)

1. Never post tweets at us, because we don't care.
2. User:Upd Edit is either one of the worst joe job attempts I've ever seen, or one of the most confusing genuine cases of mistaken identity. They and User:Kautilya3 post nothing alike! Plus, why would they warn themselves about edit warring?

Remsense ‥ 论 16:15, 2 December 2024 (UTC)

Thank you for your response. I understand your point about not relying on tweets for these discussions. However, I would like to emphasize the importance of upholding Wikipedia's standards for neutrality and reliability. The user in question has shown a consistent pattern of edits that appear questionable and biased, which raises concerns.

It is crucial to review any edits that address controversial and sensitive historical topics, especially when they are supported by sources that do not meet academic or historical reliability standards. For example, the edit to the Kashmiri Muslim article included unsupported and potentially misleading claims about forced conversions, which could contribute to misinformation.

I am simply bringing this to the attention of the administrators as part of my responsibility to maintain the integrity of the content on Wikipedia. Thank you for your understanding. Aliyiya5903 (talk) 16:36, 2 December 2024 (UTC)

Administrators don't like it when you generate responses to them using ChatGPT. Remsense ‥ 论 16:37, 2 December 2024 (UTC)

Plus, why would they warn themselves about edit warring? I believe this is a tactic to mislead administrators. I apologize if this comes across as problematic; as a user of the Kashmiri language who is still learning how to navigate Wikipedia and English, I hope using ChatGPT for replies isn’t an issue. Aliyiya5903 (talk) 16:42, 2 December 2024 (UTC)

Anything is evidence of deception if you're desperate enough. Remsense ‥ 论 16:43, 2 December 2024 (UTC)

I also caught this user engaging in problematic edits back in 2020, which may still be recorded on my talk page. At that time, I was mature enough and warned the user that I would Mass delete all wikipedia pages I apologize for my inappropriate tone in that communication .More recently, I have found that other users on twitter have also pointed out this individual's edits, which have contributed to controversial situations, including potential communal tension and violence in Manipur, India, particularly against Christians. I believe it’s important to consider this user's history when evaluating their contributions. Aliyiya5903 (talk) 16:56, 2 December 2024 (UTC)

Aliyiya5903, you say that you "have reason to believe that this user [Kautilya3] has been contributing from multiple accounts". Please present your evidence at WP:SPI rather than cast aspersions. Phil Bridger (talk) 16:55, 2 December 2024 (UTC)

Thank you for your attention to this matter. I will step back from pursuing this case as I find it challenging given my current experience level on Wikipedia. Aliyiya5903 (talk) 17:01, 2 December 2024 (UTC)

I don't know about Kautilya3, but Upd Edit is a very new account (created 21 days ago) and in this time it's the second time that they are being suspected of sockpuppetry: Wikipedia:Administrators'_noticeboard/IncidentArchive1172#Upd_Edit_-_project_sock?. Nakonana (talk) 17:06, 2 December 2024 (UTC)

Jomajor8

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Jomajor8 (talk · contribs · deleted contribs · logs · filter log · block user · block log)

Jomajor8 has created multiple articles related to the Dunszt family. I have nominated two of those (William Dunst (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs) and Dunszt Kft. (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs)) for deletion at AfD as they are not notable. Jomajor8 has removed one of the AfD templates, and blanked an AfD page. They also said: Well that is your problem and also that you are trying to delete all the articles that I wrote (almost) ... azt meg hozzatennem, hogy tudom, hogy magyar vagy es nem relevansak a kifogasaid!! (transl. and I would like to note that I know that you are Hungarian and your criticisms are irrelevant). They also said ([166], [167], these edits have since been suppressed): He is notable business man in Hungary, [Redacted] knows that too as he is from there, he is just putting this delete notice to all my edits. These two edits both qualify as WP:OUTING, as Jomajor8 has included what they believe my name is in both of those edits. Kovcszaln6 (talk) 17:10, 2 December 2024 (UTC)

Noting here I also nominated an article of theirs for deletion (Béla Dunszt), which they also removed the AfD tag from. I posted a COI warning to their talk page but haven't had any response. CoconutOctopus talk 17:15, 2 December 2024 (UTC)

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User:MehdiAlireza making and doubling down on legal threats

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Involved:

• MehdiAlireza (talk · contribs · deleted contribs · logs · filter log · block user · block log)
• Theroadislong (talk · contribs · deleted contribs · logs · filter log · block user · block log)
• Timtrent (talk · contribs · deleted contribs · logs · filter log · block user · block log) - reporting.

I am solely concerned with MehdiAlireza's legal threats expressed at User talk:MehdiAlireza#December 2024. They are self explanatory and diffs are unlikely to be required. The use of wikipedia for advertising purposes is, in my view. tangential, as is their prior 48 hour block 🇺🇦 Fiddle^Timtrent Faddle^Talk to me 🇺🇦 17:55, 2 December 2024 (UTC)

Blocked as Wikipedia:NOTHERE. Hard to understand the legal threat due to poor English (though I kind of see it), but it is clear that the user is solely here to write an article that others have repeatedly told user is not suitable for Wikipedia. — rsjaffe 🗣️ 18:02, 2 December 2024 (UTC)

@Rsjaffe Good enough. Thank you 🇺🇦 Fiddle^Timtrent Faddle^Talk to me 🇺🇦 18:04, 2 December 2024 (UTC)

@Rsjaffe However, this edit left prior to your block notice may change you view. 🇺🇦 Fiddle^Timtrent Faddle^Talk to me 🇺🇦 18:17, 2 December 2024 (UTC)

Yes, I ''kind of think'' there is a threat there, but given the other problems this user caused, the presence of a threat was not needed to block indefinitely. I worded it this way since taking the effort to evaluate whether that is a true threat or not is unnecessary. I did add the info about the threat to the block log, so an unblocking admin will see that. — rsjaffe 🗣️ 18:22, 2 December 2024 (UTC)

A less stout hearted editor might feel threatened by the Mikado-like "I've got a little list" but I think your log entry will cover that at unblock request time. That will doubtless be made by an LLM worded appeal based upon track record. Thank you for the clarification. 🇺🇦 Fiddle^Timtrent Faddle^Talk to me 🇺🇦 18:30, 2 December 2024 (UTC)

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68.38.52.16

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This IP Special:Contributions/68.38.52.16 has targeted, and called a editor's edits WP:Vandalism, when the edits were not vandalism. They're probably having a COI. As seen here: [168] And here: [169] And here also: [170] And seen here: [171]. They started a weird discussion where they essentially want this site shut down for "misinformation". Could it be a legal threat? [172] A week-long block should be good enough, and/or a severe warning. Opinions? First time reporting someone also. Codename AD ^talk 18:38, 2 December 2024 (UTC)

I suspect that this user is the same one that was causing disruption via multiple IPs on the same articles a few months ago - see here; they were given a block of two weeks for edit warring. Breaktheicees (talk) 19:50, 2 December 2024 (UTC)

I have blocked the IP for a week for legal threats and false accusations of vandalism. Cullen328 (talk) 19:57, 2 December 2024 (UTC)

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ip edit warring

2600:1007:b03b:65b3:18ff:46c9:5477:b7ce (talk · contribs) first added the edit here [173] firsts starts adding in the edit that was reverted. Proceeds to revert from the other user and me. 2601:40d:8202:eca0:c9ab:d58e:e5d3:5691 (talk · contribs) [174], [175], [176], [177] 2600:1007:B033:23C4:1849:4CFD:7FD6:5332 (talk · contribs) reverts third users edits [178] and again [179] 2601:40d:8202:eca0:f876:a69b:e135:ee80 (talk · contribs) appears to have just messaged me about the under another ip. [180]. Reverting mainly as this does not any value to the summary. Edits appear to be from the same person and are being a bit disruptive as I did mention to the user that he should take this to the iCarly Season 3 talk page on my talk page. Magical Golden Whip (talk) 20:05, 2 December 2024 (UTC)

(Non-administrator comment) WP:AN3 might be a better place for this. ABG (Talk/Report any mistakes here) 22:29, 2 December 2024 (UTC)

Persistent troublemaker

Special:Contributions/197.244.252.199/16 is a persistent troublemaker. I guess that none of their edits are good. tgeorgescu (talk) 21:33, 2 December 2024 (UTC)

tgeorgescu, you have filed a lot of reports on ANI over the past week so you should know the drill: Please share some diffs of problematic editing, don't just point to a large IP range and ask editors here to search for the problems if you want a response. And if this involves vandalism, please report accounts to WP:AIV. Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 22:48, 2 December 2024 (UTC)

Alejandroinmensidad engaged in BLP and 3RR violations as a SPA (possible SOCK as well)

Alejandroinmensidad (talk · contribs) is a single-purpose account engaged in a disruptive behaviour involving Pedro Sánchez-related edits (with them adding contentious material to a number of articles, namely Pedro Sánchez, Álvaro García Ortiz and Begoña Gómez) in a heavily POV-ish way, in breach of WP:BLP). The last straw has been their breaking of WP:3RR at Álvaro García Ortiz after reverting TheRichic for attempting to reword some of the text to comply with BLP. I had previously attempted to warn them in their talk page, but they responded with indiscriminate accusations of vandalism (which by themselves constitute a personal attack and a violation of WP:AVOIDVANDAL). They were also noted by another user about WP:AC/CT (diff), but the user keeps on with their behaviour. Further, I have also detected evidence pointing to likely sockpuppetry, which I denounced through this SPI (where the situation is more throughly explained). Impru20^talk 22:50, 2 December 2024 (UTC)