Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Incidents

Administrators' noticeboard/Incidents
This page is for urgent incidents or chronic, intractable behavioral problems. Before posting: Read these tips for dealing with incivility If the issue concerns a specific user, try discussing it with them on their talk page Try dispute resolution Just want an admin? Contact a recently active admin directly. Be brief and include diffs demonstrating the problem Do not report breaches of personal information on this highly visible page – instead go to Requests for oversight. When starting a discussion about an editor, you must leave a notice on their talk page; pinging is not enough. You may use {{subst:ANI-notice}} ~~~~ to do so. You are not autoconfirmed, meaning you cannot currently edit this page. Instead, use /Non-autoconfirmed posts. Closed discussions are usually not archived for at least 24 hours. Routine matters might be archived more quickly; complex or controversial matters should remain longer. Sections inactive for 72 hours are archived automatically by Lowercase sigmabot III. Editors unable to edit here are sent to the /Non-autoconfirmed posts subpage. (archives, search)
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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)

Update: MAB is SFB'd. Ahri Boy (talk) 03:36, 3 December 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/enwiki/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)

If any neutral editors have the time, could you please take a look at this thread and give your input? I understand that Wikipedia has no deadlines and that no one is obliged to interact with the various discussions, disputes, etc. that occur daily, but there hasn't really been any significant development since I started this AN/I thread eight days ago. I guess I'm just nervous. Sirocco745 (talk) 02:13, 4 December 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: [1][2][3][4][5][6]
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 [7][8] 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)

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)

My experience with Risto hot sir started with Palindromes and related pages. A problematic editor from the start, Risto was initially an SPA on palindromes, and turned out to be a COI editor using his own book on palindromes as a reference, quoting himself, and attempting to write an article about his book's editor. They were self-described as "for sure the most notable palindromist in the world" and jumped through all sorts of hoops to avoid admitting that they were the author of the book, before finally doing so: "You don't have to be Sherlock Holmes to find out my name. In Finland it's well known". I remember personal attacks, bludgeoning, edit warring, and so on, and I banned them from my talk page. All of this is still on their talk page so I'm not going to diff anything. I have no WP:AGF in this editor, so socking would not surprise me. Meters (talk) 11:27, 4 December 2024 (UTC)

See Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Risto Rekola for extensive edits by this user in an AFD on an article about himself, without mentioning his COI. I don't know who wrote the article. Meters (talk) 11:37, 4 December 2024 (UTC)

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 [9][10]. 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[11] 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[12] and here[13] 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)

  Montblamc1, you'd maybe have a case if you hadn't misused Bengio and generally failed to engage with editors' disagreements when challenged. At this point, other editors are right to be skeptical of your use of sources in relation to Kurdish topics, and you should expect to have to justify your edits on the talk page. While these issues remain unresolved, you should not be opening new points of contention, you should be working to resolve them. _signed, Rosguill ^talk 00:04, 3 December 2024 (UTC)

  Explain to me how it is correct practice to revert the whole page instead of only the parts that are disputed. Montblamc1 (talk) 11:34, 3 December 2024 (UTC)

Persistent disruptive editing by IP 180.74.218.13

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

---

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.

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 [14] [15] [16] [17] [18] [19] [20] [21]. 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 [22] [23] [24]. 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 [25]. 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)

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 [26] . 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 [27] [28]

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)

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

Massive disruption across election articles, likely WP:CIR issue

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

---

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)

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

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: [29] [30] [31] [32] [33] Kline • talk • contribs 16:14, 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 [[34]] 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)

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.[35] 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.[36] 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.[37] Epic has now started reverting on the Yasuke page [38]. 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)

@Tinynanorobots: there's no reason to take this to AE at this time. CTOP sanctions cannot be issued unless an editor is aware CTOP applies to that topic area. I don't think it's likely an admin will consider Ethiopian Epic was aware CTOP applied to Yasuke until I alert them, even if it did come up in previous ANI threads concerning them. So edits after my alert will be the main thing that need to be considered under CTOP and there are very few of those. More generally, it's not that this is the wrong place but that so far no admin has taken action and I expected and it does look like I'll be proven right that there would be no action this time either. While I cannot say for sure why this is the case, my assessment from when I've briefly looked at it is it's one of those cases where behaviour is imperfect but not clearly enough over the line that sanctions are likely. Ethiopian Epic hasn't made that many edits so in so much as they may be edit warring, it's only at a very low level and I think most of the time it's been you they're edit warring with meaning any sanction is likely to apply to you both. Importantly, even if perhaps belatedly they have contributed to the talk pages. Perhaps they haven't explained their concerns well enough but that's very hard to judge since we don't deal with content disputes. Most of the discussions have primarily involved you and Ethiopian Epic, so it's not like there has been a clear consensus against Ethiopian Epic and they're reverting against that. Ultimately it's often very hard to clearly say one editor is in the wrong when two editors have differing preferred versions of a page and both of them are taking part in discussion. If you were able to get clear consensus for your preferred version and Ethiopian Epic kept reverting that is much more of a clear problem. And since it doesn't seem like the two of can reach consensus, it'd likely you'd need to try WP:dispute resolution. Although since everything is voluntary there is always a chance no one else will be interested enough in the dispute to help reach consensus, unfortunately we have no real way of dealing with it when that happens. If they were following you around just to revert you this would be a concern but that also is very difficult to conclude. They aren't going to unrelated articles and reverting you instead they're gone to articles which are highly related and indeed even their reverts have often been on highly related disputes. The comments some others have made sort of mirror my thoughts. In a case like this ARE IMO has an advantage that discussions are more structured. Perhaps more importantly, admins are likely to be automatically approaching things from a CTOP view so will tolerate fewer problems than they might for a general dispute. However I can't say if action is likely even if Ethiopian Epic continues as they are doing and you report them in a few weeks to A/R/E nor can I rule out your actions won't be considered a problem. Ultimately as I said a big issue is that neither of you have consensus for your preferred versions. Nil Einne (talk) 12:53, 3 December 2024 (UTC)

Thank you, this is a clear answer. It is hard to figure out what to do based on all the mixed signals that the admins send. I think that edit warring is unlikely to continue for now, which will allow me to continue to with productive edits while discussing the content issues with EE. I have already responded to his posts and rephrased what I said in the hopes he will understand. Regarding consensus, I believe that regarding the edits on List of foreign-born samurai in Japan that I have consensus, if not for the specific formulation, but for the general direction. I discussed the issue on the talk page before making the change, all those that responded were in favour, and the quote was incorrectly sourced. Is an RfC needed to make the consensus official? Tinynanorobots (talk) 14:07, 3 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"[39] 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[40] or the List of Samurai talk page[41] 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)

@BrocadeRiverPoems It is because of the behavioural problems, content has hardly been discussed, and new disputes keep popping up. I first reverted EE and asked him to use the talk page on 14 Nov[42], he finally posted on the talk page on 23 Nov.[43] And that required a lot of effort on my part and an ANI thread. A similar situation occurred regarding List of foreign-born samurai in Japan</ [44] and as I added new changes to the Samurai article, those too were reverted.[45] and some of my edits on Yasuke were reverted too.[46]

I have thought about a third opinion for the Samurai page dispute, but I don't think it has been discussed enough to qualify. Supposedly the sources don't support the text, but EE won't specify the sources or the claims he thinks are OR. Also, on the List of foreign-born samurai in Japan article, he kept trying to insert a quote attached to a source that doesn't contain that quote. It seems that his trust of inline citations is selective.

Since one of the contested sources for the Samurai article is in Japanese, maybe you could find a relevant quote: After power struggles, the Taira clan defeated the Minamoto clan in 1160.[47] Personally, I don't think that needs a citation, but it is disputed now. Tinynanorobots (talk) 07:10, 3 December 2024 (UTC)

A lot of this could easily be resolved by you participating in talk discussions, and when necessary using the proper dispute resolution methods instead of going from 0 to 100 which I think is disruptive. I would also like if you would follow WP:BRD, as I have followed it. Maybe it's not intentional, but it seems like you are assuming bad faith and trying to game the system by turning content disputes into repeat threads here. Ethiopian Epic (talk) 07:44, 3 December 2024 (UTC)

The claim that you are following BRD is the type of thing I am referring to when I talk about gaslighting. It is also why I find it hard to trust you. I have participated in discussions and have in fact posted more than you, both in number of posts and in number of characters, and in useful information.[48] Tinynanorobots (talk) 09:53, 3 December 2024 (UTC)

You have not responded to two talk pages[49][50] in 6 days and 3 days respectively, and only posted once or twice in them. Additionally, even in cases where onus is on your side to seek consensus for challenged edits you do not do that and just continue to revert without discussion[51]. You aren't following BRD. Ethiopian Epic (talk) 01:45, 4 December 2024 (UTC)

I do not find the cliam that you followed WP:BRD to really be genuine. TNR made an edit, you reverted, and the closest you came to engaging in discussion was days later posting an edit warring notice on their talkpage. Notably, BRD is optional and the moment that someone makes more than one reversion, BRD has already failed. Furthermore, I point your attention to the section of BRD that reads BRD Fails if ...individuals revert bold changes but aren't willing to discuss improvements to the page emphasis added. This [52] does not constitute discussing improvements. You were even invited by TNR here [53] to participate in the Samurai talk-page article and did not do so until after the second ANI case. I would also suggest you read WP:BRD-NOT, BRD is not a valid excuse for reverting good-faith efforts to improve a page simply because you don't like the changes., which is exactly what [54] this is. Brocade River Poems (She/They) 23:30, 3 December 2024 (UTC)

I let them have their preferred versions and have been discussing it on talk pages[55][56]. Prior to discussing it on the article talk pages I was discussing it with him on his own talk page[57]. Ethiopian Epic (talk) 01:53, 4 December 2024 (UTC)

Yes, like I said, after the second ANI case. All of those diffs you linked to are after you were taken to ANI a second time. [58] It's sort of hard to WP:AGF on your argument that you were following BRD when it took being dragged to ANI to get you to participate in discussion. Brocade River Poems (She/They) 03:28, 4 December 2024 (UTC)

The first time was for "auto-confirmed gaming" and unrelated, so the second time was effectively the first time. I wasn't sure what to do because he made a thread when I only edited once. One of my complaints toward Tinynanorobots is that he made threads without waiting for discussion to happen and seemed like he was trying to feud and not assume any good faith. Ethiopian Epic (talk) 04:13, 4 December 2024 (UTC)

This isn't the place for resolving content disputes, so no, I'm not going to post the relevant quote here. You both gave each other edit warring notices imploring the other to use dispute resolution, and then neither of you did so, which is sort of my point. Also, this [59] is an entirely needless reversion on your side of things, TNR. Their edit that you reverted here was constructive per MOS:NON-ENG. Articles that mention the Chinese Warring States Period, for instance, do not refer to it as the Zhànguó Shídài. Brocade River Poems (She/They) 08:45, 3 December 2024 (UTC)

I had already posted on the talk page, because I already had a content dispute about bushi being retainers serving lords, as you know. I pointed EE to that discussion,[60] and added posted new information there.[61] also I had no idea what to post, because EE hadn't given a reason for the edit. It is like being asked to defend oneself without knowing the crime. The lead was well cited, but there is room to debate which facts belong in the lead and which ones don't. Maybe EE had a good reason for preferring the older version? I already had a bad experience on that page, where I spent a lot of time researching, just to have the other editor ignore the sources and arguments that I posted.

I don't remember why I reverted that formatting change. It was restored, and remains part of the current version. I switched to more fine-tuned edits after that. The fact that EE tended to make big edits, and that I switched to partial reverts, conceals the fact that EE has been able to make changes that were kept. Tinynanorobots (talk) 09:48, 3 December 2024 (UTC)

While it can be helpful to specifically address concerns an editor has with your edit, ultimately if your are changing an article, there must be a reason why you feel your version is better. So you should always be able to explain this regardless of what anyone else has said. Nil Einne (talk) 12:56, 3 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[62][63]. He continues to revert sourced material without following onus when his edits are challenged[64][65]. I checked his history and three experienced people LokiTheLiar, Gitz6666, Aquillion have all previously suggested that he should be topic banned[66].

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[67], as did Hemiauchenia [68] EE responded by posted one on mine.[69]. 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.[70] I pointed out that I had already discussed one of the sentences that he wanted to restore on the talk page.[71] He eventually posted there [72], 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.[73][74][75] 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[76] and claiming the information was unsourced[77] 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?[78] 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?[79][80] You keep making uncivil claims like gaslighting without any evidence and keep assuming bad faith. Ethiopian Epic (talk) 18:17, 2 December 2024 (UTC)

Here is Tinynanorobots removing sourced material[81]. He was challenged for this [82]. He then reverts again without discussing[83].

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[84]. Here is him getting reverted by a different editor[85]. Here is him adding it back without engaging on talk[86][87]. 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)

You weren't required to mention them in your comment above and when you did you pinged those specific editors from a ArbCom case who you clearly thought would agree with your position, rather than pinging every involved editor. That is clearly WP:CANVASSING. TarnishedPath^talk 00:55, 3 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.[88] 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)

I am open to any suggestions on how to make that work. I thought that asking EE to give specific criticisms of my edits was reasonable. EE won't even name a specific source he wants a quote from. EE has also reverted every edit that I have made to the Samurai article [89][90] and then followed me around reverting me and others on the two other articles that I recently worked on. It also isn't true that I have my preferred version on every article. EE's edits have purged all uncited parts from the samurai lead, except the uncited sentence that EE prefers. Additionally, I have picked my battles on List of foreign-born samurai, and have not fully restored my preferred version. On the Yasuke article, part of the material that EE removed, will probably be permanently removed, but that is more due to the involvement of other users.[91]

It is strange, but it is the new user who is always wanting to undo changes, and the "established" user who is trying to change the article. Tinynanorobots (talk) 07:43, 3 December 2024 (UTC)

I'm not sure why Tinynanorobots is saying things that are demonstrably false. Tinynanorobots has reverted every edit I've made to Samurai, List of Samurai, and one other article.

Despite this I let him have his preferred versions, I'm participating in discussions, and I'm following WP:BRD. Tinynanorobots is not participating in discussions[92][93], is not following BRD, has only commented once or twice in discussions, and here says I have already made my case on all those talk pages. I haven't responded again because there is no need to repeat myself which I think demonstrates that he doesn't want to collaborate. I don't have an issue with him so I'm not sure why he doesn't. I hope he will start following BRD, collaborate, and be less disruptive with uncivil claims like gaslighting. I've made some suggestions that hopefully help. Ethiopian Epic (talk) 08:25, 3 December 2024 (UTC)

• OK it looks like this is going to pop up until a third party does something. Frankly I don't see anything actionable about Tinynanorobots' editing or article talk comportment. On the other hand, Ethiopian Epic seems to have engaged in a slow-motion edit war: [94] [95] [96] [97] [98] - while none of these violate the WP:3RR brightline, this is something that might be relevant in an arbcom sanctions affected topic area. Simonm223 (talk) 15:45, 3 December 2024 (UTC)

  By this definition of slow motion edit war Tinynanorobots has engaged in one: [99][100][101][102][103].

  And the last edit you've linked is unrelated. Those are older though and there is no issue currently. I let Tinynanorobots have his preferred versions even in cases where onus is on his side to seek consensus for challenged edits (removal of sourced material) which he does not do and just continues to revert[104], but I don't mind waiting. I don't think there will be an issue if he agrees to follow WP:BRD and agrees to use proper dispute resolution. I will continue to do so too. I would also like him to not always assume bad faith. Ethiopian Epic (talk) 01:38, 4 December 2024 (UTC)

User:Washweans

Washweans (talk · contribs) has claimed to stop editing, but have continued been making (rather weak) personal attacks at other editors, such as: [105][106][107][108][109]. '''[[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)

Discussion in this subsection moved to AIV to get a more focused airing. Mathglot (talk) 19:38, 3 December 2024 (UTC)

Moved to Wikipedia talk:Administrator intervention against vandalism § Homoglyph vandalism

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)

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)

I am confused how this is an issue only when I do it. Take a look at the version history of this page. User:Binksternet removed county flip info, as well as the map showing the county flips and county trends that created by another user. This was later readded to the page, with no further protests. Or we can look to this page where User:D&RG Railfan added in the county flips text and map in November of 2023. So I am operating under the assumtpion that this kind of info is acceptable. The fact is other users continue to add this infomation on the most recent election, as well as older ones, so I fail to see how this is me creating my own narratives on this site, when as far as I can tell, it is seen as the acceptable infomation to include.

I am happy to address sourcing issues that fellow users, like User:Alansohn have, but it is weird to single me out for adding in basic county info that other users are concurrently adding. GigachadGigachad (talk) 20:23, 3 December 2024 (UTC)

The issues with GigachadGigachad are far more systemic in the pattern of violations of rules, especially about sourcing. This edit to the article for Ocean County, New Jersey is a perfect example. In addition to the unsourced claim about when the district last voted Republican is the change to elected officials. Arace and Bacchione were elected in November 2024, but will not take office until January 2025, but no sources are provided to indicate that they were elected; old sources for the individuals they will replace have been left in the article. GigachadGigachad knows that they have been elected, knows that they have not taken office but refuses to provide sources. This same set of problems about sourcing and timing exists for all 21 of the New Jersey county articles he has updated.

GigachadGigachad has been notified about these issues on multiple occasions on their talk page and has refused to address the problems. The editor appears to be fully aware of the fundamental principle of wP:V, but refuses to comply with these requirements or to engage in meaningful discussion on their talk page to address these issues.

The editor was "blocked from editing for a period of 2 weeks for persistently adding unsourced or poorly sourced content" in January 2023 and is doing the same things all over again. A block appears necessary at this point. Alansohn (talk) 16:27, 3 December 2024 (UTC)

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)

Yes, it is not urgent. The text highlighted in green, which requires clarification, is my unsuccessful translation of internal ru.wiki slang, and means a user who not only does not declare a paid edits, but hides his real intentions and denies that there was one. ·Carn·!? 13:20, 3 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,[110][111] and apparently this user seems used ChatGPT to write the article,[112] 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[113]). 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.[114][115] 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)

I find the admittance of using AI in some capacity here concerning. I think Zhenghecaris has some WP:CIR issues that have caused them to be disruptive in this topic area. Not sure what the best solution is here. I think some kind of warning to avoid relying on AI at mininum, and to avoid relying so heavily on the research of Mark McMenamin, and avoid writing articles about topics where McMenamin is the only source. Hemiauchenia (talk) 23:05, 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[116] 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)

Some of it is ruby. It all seems benign, but probably still qualifies for U5. Folly Mox (talk) 00:53, 4 December 2024 (UTC)

TheNavigatrr

TheNavigatrr has consistently failed to stop using self-published sources for the Syria war map modules [117][118][119] (just a few examples) despite being told many times [120][121][122]. 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)

Just clarifying, is the only time the map can be edited when a well-known reliable source states "party X has taken control of villages A, B, C, D...", and not if the reliable source claims "party X claims to have taken control of villages A, B, C, D and most of blue province. Party Y launched a counterattack"? Because if the latter is allowed to be used to change control of villages in a province, I will happily revert all edits I made. If a widley respected source says "Party X took control over large parts of Aleppo and the surrounding towns", how is that supposed to be used to change control of villages? Can it be used to "confirm" Party X's claims? This needs to be clarified. TheNavigatrr (talk) 00:19, 3 December 2024 (UTC)

If an independent, reliable, source authoritatively states that "x has taken control of settlement A," then yes, that is obviously allowed. However, from what I understand it's unclear when it comes to the latter. It could mean that there's fighting in the town, nothing more; obviously you'd have to read the actual article to decide what to do. Obviously WP:SYNTH should be avoided.

Regardless, that's not the point of this discussion. You can't go on using random folks on X as sources for the map. Firestar464 (talk) 01:19, 3 December 2024 (UTC)

Beyond Firestar464's comments, there's this: Wikipedia is not a publisher of first instance, nor are we up-to-the-moment headline news. If we cannot find the aforementioned independent, reliable sources to corroborate some assertion on X, then we cannot put the information in until we do, full stop. We are none of us in a race, and no one gives out barnstars to the first editor who "scoops" the rest. Ravenswing 06:58, 3 December 2024 (UTC)

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 (Redacted)

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)

Aliyiya5903, you should have notified both editors you are accusing of misconduct about this discussion. There are notices stating this in several places on this page. Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 23:38, 2 December 2024 (UTC)

I have notified the editors for you. Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 23:42, 2 December 2024 (UTC)

Thank you Liz. I had a good laugh. -- Kautilya3 (talk) 00:48, 3 December 2024 (UTC)

Any other comments, Kautilya3? Have you been targeted in the past? Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 00:58, 3 December 2024 (UTC)

Yeah, I have been targeted plenty of times, but this is the first time I was targeted purely using "I have reason to believe that..." kind of lines.

I don't think this user is going to last, given their pomposity at the get go, and equally pompous reverts continuing, they are going to piss enough people off in short order.

More concerning is that they are trying to add their pompous wisdom to the main space as well, which I found shocking when told this morning. That is quite concerning because it means that we have to carefully look at every bit of content they add to the mainspace to make sure that it is free of their WP:OR. I was ready to take it to WP:AE (they have received a CTOP alert already), but I thought I would wait for at least one more instance of such misbehaviour before crying foul.

That is where things stand. Then I saw this complaint, which is so incompetent that I can't even believe my eyes. -- Kautilya3 (talk) 03:18, 3 December 2024 (UTC)

I appreciate the explanation, Kautilya3. I thought there might be a backstory. I didn't look at their contribution history where I now see their very first edit in 2020 was directed at you. I guess you have a reputation somewhere? Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 03:58, 3 December 2024 (UTC)

Yes, we are getting squeezed by intolerant fundamentalisms from all sides. Anybody that tries to bring out the facts is in peril. -- Kautilya3 (talk) 11:13, 3 December 2024 (UTC)

• I have no other account and I am not Kautilya3. Upd Edit (talk) 10:28, 3 December 2024 (UTC)
• I have warned filer Aliyiya5903 (talk⁺ · tag · contribs · deleted contribs · logs · filter log · block user · block log · CA · CheckUser(log) · investigate · cuwiki) for posting links to purported personal information about an editor in violation of WP:PRIVACY, as they did in this edit. — Red-tailed hawk _(nest) 06:00, 4 December 2024 (UTC)

ip edit warring

2600:1007:b03b:65b3:18ff:46c9:5477:b7ce (talk · contribs) first added the edit here [123] 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) [124], [125], [126], [127] 2600:1007:B033:23C4:1849:4CFD:7FD6:5332 (talk · contribs) reverts third users edits [128] and again [129] 2601:40d:8202:eca0:f876:a69b:e135:ee80 (talk · contribs) appears to have just messaged me about the under another ip. [130]. 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)

@Liz: Sometimes I am tired, and this is kind of a slam dunk: [131] (removal of "anti-capitalism"), [132] (historically wrong king who conquered that country), [133] (block no. 1), [134] (block no. 2), you get the idea...

You will recognize their weird capitalization across several IPs from that range. E.g. at [135] and [136] (see especially edit summaries). tgeorgescu (talk) 02:17, 3 December 2024 (UTC)

No one has responded here yet so I'll give it a stab. I don't like to do long-term range-blocks and this looks like an editor who is editing sporadically. I'd rather handle this editor by page protection so if they return, I'd go to WP:RFPP. Of course, another admin might look this over and release the ban hammer. Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 03:52, 3 December 2024 (UTC)

If you're tired to the degree you can't properly cite problematic diffs, then you shouldn't be filing ANI cases until you get some sleep. An IP range managing less than an edit a day is not so dire an emergency as to require jumping on it without the loss of a minute. Ravenswing 06:35, 3 December 2024 (UTC)

On that note, tgeorgescu, I think over the past week or two, I've seen 4 or 5 cases you have brought to ANI. Maybe you need to change your judgment on what disputes are "ANI-worthy". This case isn't even an active dispute, they are just suspicions about these IP accounts. You don't want editors associating your name with a noticeboard, it sure came back to bite me during my RFA oh, so many years ago. Maybe just open cases that need the attention of the editorial community next time. Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 08:28, 3 December 2024 (UTC)

tgeorgescu, I agree with Liz and Ravenswing. You frequently identify problematic editors and I thank you for that. But do not expect administrators to do your research for you. There are no "slam dunks" without diffs or direct quotes to specific edits, and you cannot expect busy administrators to do the work for you. This is a 24/7/365 project and any editor can take a meal break, a nap, an eight hour sleep, or a vacation of any length as they see fit. But do not expect other people to do your basic work while you are sleeping.

As for Liz's comment, she is a highly respected and highly efficient adminstrator. She can get more done when I am cooking a cheese quesadilla than I accomplish all day long. Cullen328 (talk) 08:49, 3 December 2024 (UTC)

One other thing, User:Tgeorgescu? I don't count myself in the same category as highly busy and motivated admins like Liz and Cullen328; I'm a gadfly whose output on Wikipedia's declined a good bit in recent years. But they're volunteers like the rest of us. Admins need to eat, and rest, and sleep; they need to work, pay the bills, do the taxes, handle the vicissitudes of life, just like the rest of us. People like you and me, we're just as capable of doing the legwork, going through contribution histories, checking sources, presenting the evidence ... and making sure we overburden the system as little as possible. While I've been periodically active at ANI for some years now, I've filed no more ANI cases in twenty years than you have in a week. This is a venue that can (and periodically does) hand out community bans. It is incumbent on us to use this process only for the "urgent incidents or chronic, intractable behavioral problems" cited above. Ravenswing 10:58, 3 December 2024 (UTC)

So, what do you suggest that I should do? I thought that reporting mischief is the thing to do, per Wikipedia:Request directory. tgeorgescu (talk) 13:02, 3 December 2024 (UTC)

I don't know, maybe try the exact thing that they told you to do and provide diffs next time?--v/r - TP 17:25, 3 December 2024 (UTC)

Well, I think that's the problem. There's a huge gulf of difference between "mischief" and urgent incidents or chronic, intractable behavioral problems as mentioned by Ravenswing. The first step would be talking with the editor in question at least if the account is registered. That's more challenging with an IP account but not always impossible. Use discussion in a suitable location, on an article talk page, user talk page, a dispute resolution forum. Basically, ANI is the court of last resort after other efforts have failed, not the first place to go with a suspicion that an editor might be causing mischief. And you can also try bringing your concerns to an individual admin on their user talk page before trying ANI though I'd argue to not become an overly frequent visitor to any one admin. But ANI is like a community theater and the whole community doesn't need to weigh in and participate on every suspicion or dispute you are involved in. You don't want to be labeled a "dramamonger". Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 19:58, 3 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)

WP:BLPN might be a better forum for discussing these edits. It does seem like a lot of edit-warring going on on Pedro Sánchez. Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 00:57, 3 December 2024 (UTC)

This was already brought there a few days ago at Wikipedia:Biographies of living persons/Noticeboard#Pedro Sánchez, but the disruption has continued as the issue has been left unaddressed (and anyway, the BLPN thread does not address neither the behavioural issues nor the sock suspicions, which have evolved ever since). It's now basically impossible to do anything sort of keeping reverting this user if no admin steps in. Impru20^talk 07:27, 3 December 2024 (UTC)

Also, I already pointed it out at the SPI case (see Update 1), but ever since the SPI was opened the user has been conducting a number of random edits through several articles in addition to their focus in the usual ones (while avoiding engaging in any discussion related to the ongoing issues), probably to attempt avoiding being singled out as a SPA. Impru20^talk 07:30, 3 December 2024 (UTC)

One problem I see, Impru20, is that it looks like this has been a solo effort by you to get attention on this editor's contributions, in the SPI, on BLPN, on the editor's user talk page and now here in ANI without receiving much response from other editors. If there is contentious material being posted on this BLP (which gets over 1,000 views/day), we should get more eyes on this article and others where there might be questionable edits. Is there anyone here who is comfortable assessing Spanish language sources that could provide a second (or third) opinion? Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 19:42, 3 December 2024 (UTC)

Is this a solo effort by me, Liz? And this? Maybe this? I am getting attention on this editor's contributions because they are being disruptive; they are reverting anyone who dares to restore a less POVish (and more BLP-compliant) version of the articles, and when they are confronted about that it's just personal attacks from them. The only solutions left are to: 1) keep reverting them (surely not what we are expected to do as per WP:EW); 2) discuss with them (this was done, and failed), and 3) bring the issue to venues where it can be properly addressed if points 1 and 2 are not possible (which was done: firstly to BLPN, then as SPI when I noticed they could be a sock, then here when that was left without solution yet the user kept engaging in disruptive behaviour). There are personal attacks, there is a 3RR violation, there is even behavioural evidence of sockpuppetry (with two users, one logged in editor and one IP, being confirmed socks). What else is required for any action to even be considered? Seriously, I ask you with all honestly, because it's fairly frustrating that they are basically left to do what they please without anyone actually caring. Impru20^talk 20:26, 3 December 2024 (UTC)

Impru20, with regards to Álvaro García Ortiz, it looks to me like Alejandroinmensidad's edits are more accurate than yours, if Google Translate is accurate in translating the cited source. So, why are you trying to keep less accurate content, and why have you not discussed this at Talk: Álvaro García Ortiz? Cullen328 (talk) 21:39, 3 December 2024 (UTC)

I have not edited Álvaro García Ortiz, Cullen328, so it's difficult any edit there could be more accurate than mine. Now maybe you could focus on Alejandro's 3RR violation there, any of the behavioural issues that have been denounced... I don't know, something that has actually happened. Impru20^talk 22:02, 3 December 2024 (UTC)

Impru20, I apologize for mixing you up with TheRichic. However, Alejandroinmensidad reverted false content three times over several days. That is not a violation of WP:3RR. Cullen328 (talk) 22:23, 3 December 2024 (UTC)

Excuse me, Cullen328, but:

1. How is this content false? You may agree or disagree with the wording, but it is not false. One of TheRichic's denounces against Alejandroinmensidad (which I share) is that they treat (unproven) statements of certain people as absolute truths, typically resorting to the sources that fit their view the most (often without any WP:BALANCE or sense of impartiality). Again, I ask you: how is that content "false"? Specially considering your response here is limiting yourself to decry TheRichic's behaviour.
2. As per WP:3RR, reverts conducted just outside the 24-hour period will usually also be considered edit-warring, especially if repeated or combined with other edit-warring behavior.
3. You could maybe skip point 2... if it wasn't because all reverts done by Alejandroinmensidad at Álvaro García Ortiz came after being explicitly warned in their talk page about WP:AC/CT on articles about living people (diff).
4. ANI is about behavioural problems (which have been denounced and evidence provided); the explicit BLP issue was addressed (or attempted to) elsewhere: here it is being brought because of it showing a behavioural pattern and a SPA-theme focus on Pedro Sánchez-related edits (which I said). Aside of 3RR, there have been explicit personal attacks (repeated accusations of vandalism without any evidence nor justification), edit warring and behavioural evidence of SOCK which is not even being addressed. So, what are people intended to do against it? To keep edit warring Alejandroinmensidad to death? Impru20^talk 22:38, 3 December 2024 (UTC)

Hello Cullen328 and Liz, this user Impru20 has been continuously deleting text and references from many users in everything related to the government of Spain for many years ago: [137], [138], [139], [140], [141], [142]. He has deleted on multiple occasions, without any explanation, my contributions, which I consider to be treated from a neutral point of view. That is why I have reverted its vandalism, I have not deleted the text of any user. Alejandroinmensidad (talk) 22:52, 3 December 2024 (UTC)

Impru20, the El Mundo headline translates as The Supreme Court indicts Attorney General García Ortiz for the leak of confidential data from Ayuso's boyfriend: The Second Chamber unanimously opens a case against Álvaro García Ortiz for the crime of revealing secrets. TheRichic's preferred wording was "García Ortiz has been investigated" and Alejandroinmensidad's preferred wording was "García Ortiz was charged by the Supreme Court". Everyone can see that Alejandroinmensidad's summary of the source was accurate and that TheRichic's summary was incorrect. You simply do not understand WP:3RR, which requires more than three reversions in a 24 hour period. Alejandroinmensidad reverted only three times, and they were at 19:14, November 29, 2024, and then roughly 27 hours later at 22:10, November 30, 2024, and then roughly 48 hours later at at 22:04, December 2, 2024. Three reverts in three days is not more than three reverts in 24 hours. Cullen328 (talk) 22:59, 3 December 2024 (UTC)

Cullen328, Alejandroinmensidad has literally breached WP:AVOIDVANDAL in front of your face in this very same discussion and you still have nothing to say about their behaviour? Also, they are linking literally random, occasional and entirely unrelated edits to the discussion to blame me of "vandalism"... and you still have nothing to say to it? On another note: Alejandroinmensidad, bold edits are not vandalism, the edits of mine you link have nothing wrong in them. Heck, half of the edits you link are not even mine (one is yours), for God's sake! Impru20^talk 23:42, 3 December 2024 (UTC)

Also, Cullen328, I am not understanding what your reasoning is here. You have now edited part of your previous comment ([143]), when all of it is essentially off-topic. This is not an issue of edits at Álvaro García Ortiz (an article which I have not even edited), but an issue of general behavioural concerns, which Alejandroinmensidad is exhibiting with impunity in this very same thread. I have provided detailed diffs, links and evidence yet still none of it is being addressed and I am now being singled out for edits I did not even made. I understand that every editor who opens a thread here is equally subject to BOOMERANG, but it's the first time I see it being applied to someone for edits done by other people, including the denounced editor's! Impru20^talk 23:57, 3 December 2024 (UTC)

You have hundreds of text changes from other users in articles related to the government of Spain for years, just looking at your history to realize that most of the edits are vandalism. Alejandroinmensidad (talk) 00:30, 4 December 2024 (UTC)

I want to clarify a couple of things:

1. A headline by itself is not information, it can be biased and you have to read the rest of the article.

2. If we read the El Mundo's article, at no point does it say that the attorney general has committed any crime, but rather that a criminal procedure has been opened and he and his surroundings are being investigated for an ALLEGED crime.

3. In Spain, the term "imputar", translated in the article as "charge", is synonymous with "investigar" (to investigate). In fact, the term was modified a decade ago because it led to the erroneous conclusion that the person who was "imputado" was being accused. The accusation phase comes later, when the judge issues the "auto de acusación" (indictment), and then the person is "accused of" or "charged with" a crime. At this point, it can be said that the person is accused.

4. "[...] García Ortiz was charged by the Supreme Court for having revealed the emails of the boyfriend of the president of the Community of Madrid" (what the article says) is just saying that he did it when we do not know what happened and a court of justice is investigating if anything happened.

Having said all this, yes, I rewrote the article because the person is not accused of anything (yet), has not committed any crime (yet), and we cannot interpret the information in the article as it suits us. Greetings. TheRichic (Messages here) 06:49, 4 December 2024 (UTC)

In Spanish and English, the terms charge (imputar) and investigate (investigar) are not synonymous. In the article in "Mundo" it is clearly explained that Álvaro García Ortiz is charged of leaking the emails. Alejandroinmensidad (talk) 08:41, 4 December 2024 (UTC)

Impru20, I made an error in confusing you with TheRichic. I immediately apologized and then struck out the portions of my original comment that were inaccurate. That is what editors are supposed to do when they make a mistake. You are the editor who accused Alejandroinmensidad of BLP violations at Álvaro García Ortiz and you also accused that editor of violating 3RR. I decided to investigate one of the three articles you listed in your original post, and picked the middle of the three. I learned that there was no BLP violation, that Alejandroinmensidad's edits were more accurate than TheRichic's, and that the editor did not violate 3RR, at least in recent months. That is the full story. Cullen328 (talk) 00:36, 4 December 2024 (UTC)

• I closed Wikipedia:Sockpuppet investigations/Napoleonbuenoenparte with no action and an explanation.--Bbb23 (talk) 00:45, 4 December 2024 (UTC)

Alejandroinmensidad, please be aware that Impru20 has made nearly 200,000 edits to the English Wikipedia and has never been blocked for vandalism. The term "vandalism" has a very specific meaning and can only be applied to editing with the deliberate intention of damaging the encyclopedia. Impru20 is not a vandal and false accusations of vandalism are disruptive. So, please stop. Cullen328 (talk) 00:46, 4 December 2024 (UTC)

Cullen328, I am not referring to him, I am referring to his editions. It removes content from many users without giving any motivation. In addition, he always does it in articles referring to the government of Spain. In any case, I will not answer his provocations again. Alejandroinmensidad (talk) 00:54, 4 December 2024 (UTC)

Calling a user's edits vandalism is the same as calling the user a vandal. Just don't do it.--Bbb23 (talk) 01:07, 4 December 2024 (UTC)

Alejandroinmensidad is obsessed with calling another editor a vandal even in an ANI thread and against repeated warnings, but somehow they are still assumed to be able to work collaboratively? You cannot discuss anything with this guy (and this is not an assumption, this was tried and failed). At the very least, there is an obvious WP:CIR issue here, and they will only keep edit warring everyone as they see any edits undoing their own (or those contents they prefer) as "vandalism". Impru20^talk 06:42, 4 December 2024 (UTC)

It is exactly what TheRichic has stated above. Further, it's telling that, so far, the BLP violations at Pedro Sánchez (which are what started the whole ordeal) have not even been addressed; Alejandroinmensidad added false statements, and others they added were done without BALANCE (as I pointed it out to them several times: diff diff); these were reverted by Alejandro exhibiting the exact same behaviour as here (i.e. falsely accusing others of vandalism). They also accused me of "removing links" when they removed references themselves under accusations of "vandalism" just to attempt to re-assert a version of the articles that depicted Sánchez and his government in the worst way possible of the several available (diff). You cannot cherrypick sources and information to present a biased view of the person without contradictory information (which exists in this case) being presented as well. There is a BLPN case opened on Wikipedia:Biographies of living persons/Noticeboard#Pedro Sánchez yet, somehow, almost everything is being ignored to attempt to present Alejandroinmensidad's behaviour as legit, when it is one of the most egregious SPAs I have seen as of lately, being here only for the purpose of these Pedro Sánchez-related edits (also, as commented on the SPI case, they only resorted to making random edits to other articles when the SPI case was opened and they were noticed about it, diff). Impru20^talk 07:32, 4 December 20Im24 (UTC)

Impru20, if your concern is about Pedro Sánchez, then why the heck did you make false claims of BLP problems and false claims of 3RR violations at Álvaro García Ortiz? Administrator time is limited. Throwing false claims in with possibly legitimate claims is a waste of time that makes administrators reluctant to look further. I would rather get some sleep. Cullen328 (talk) 08:16, 4 December 2024 (UTC)

Cullen328, I explicitly mentioned and linked Pedro Sánchez in my first post and Wikipedia:Biographies of living persons/Noticeboard#Pedro Sánchez in subsequent ones; spoke about Pedro Sánchez-related edits; linked to other venues where the situation was also thoroughly explained; and only mentioned Álvaro García Ortiz as part of the articles in which Alejandroinmensidad had a focus on. Liz understood it perfectly in their first reply. It is you who then became focused with Álvaro García Ortiz for no reason even when I told you that it was not the main cause of concern (only as part of the larger SPA effort). With all due respect (and maybe I cannot stress the issue of respect enough, but I have to say this), but you cannot just say what you said here when you already had an error (rather major, as it redirected the focus of the discussion into me having to refute a false claim) by confusing edits of other users with my own edits and now accuse me of doing what I did not do. The presented evidence was there for reading. The 3RR claim was not false: reverting just outside the 24-hour window is explictly acknowledged as EW; WP:GAME exists; and the reverts were conducted right after a warning about living people's biographies being contentious topics was added to the user's talk page. Administrator time may be limited, but so is that of other editors (such as mine), and frankly: it's frustrating that I have had to provide a detailed (while summarized, because too lengthy ANI cases are typically accused of WP:TLDR) description of the situation so for it to be also systematically ignored. Impru20^talk 08:45, 4 December 2024 (UTC)

Requesting reversal of premature closure of talk page section by TheRazgriz

I have recently engaged in lengthy talk page discussions with TheRazgriz regarding his edits on the 2024 United States elections page. Upon informing him today that I was escalating to the dispute resolution process, TheRazgriz prematurely closed a talk page section that dealt with the nature of our disagreement at hand, labeling it as "resolved" when it was not. There was no snowball as claimed in the closure message, and the subject matter that was absorbed into another section in the body was still in dispute. While the issue of the content in the lead was in fact resolved, the greater context of the claims that were made and were discussed in the section were not. The last comments in that section were made only 10 days prior, and the most recent comments involving this dispute were made today. BootsED (talk) 02:13, 3 December 2024 (UTC)

(Non-administrator comment) I've undone the closure and fixed the formatting issues that were broken by the user in accident that resulted in broken indentations of the existing discussion. Raladic (talk) 02:28, 3 December 2024 (UTC)

Thank you for your assistance! BootsED (talk) 02:30, 3 December 2024 (UTC)

For transparency and clarification: The dispute had migrated away from that topic and into a different topic on the page well over a week ago, and as noted by @BootsED here the resolution finding was accurately portrayed. Disputed content was not removed via closure. As point of that specific topic had been addressed and is no longer an issue, therefore unlikely to require further contribution, I fail to see the point in un-closing it. But it is what it is. Just want it clear this isn't a conspiracy of nefariousness. TheRazgriz (talk) 02:55, 3 December 2024 (UTC)

Well, here's the point: it's poor practice to close a discussion in which you're heavily involved, certainly so in any issue that lacks a very strong consensus, and doubly so in a contentious topic such as the 2024 United States elections page. (Heck, I wouldn't dare to close a CT discussion I was involved in even for a snowball.) That's the point. Ravenswing 06:27, 3 December 2024 (UTC)

I also think you should have more than 224 edits before engaging in closing discussions. Doug Weller talk 08:22, 3 December 2024 (UTC)

It's always worth considering if a discussion even needs a close. In this case, it seems unlikely that the resulting close was something which would be useful to link to in the future. If editors have moved on, it also seems unlikely that a close is needed to stop editors adding to a discussion where it's moved past the point of being useful. And in fact, if editors do feel they have something useful to add, I'm not convinced it would definitely be useless. It's possible that the close will stop editors wasting their time reading a discussion where there's no need but IMO in a case like this the benefits of that are definitely outweighed by the disadvantages of making an involved close, and probably outweighed even by just the negatives of closing. As for collapsing, well the page isn't that long. And frankly, it would seem better to just reduce time before automatic archiving rather than collapse that specific discussion. Or even just manually archive some of the older threads. Noting there are bunch of older threads which seem to be way more unlikely to be revived or that anyone needs to see. Nil Einne (talk) 11:58, 3 December 2024 (UTC)

@Ravenswing & @Nil Einne, I agree with both of your valid points, and they will be considered in the future. No arguement from me against either of those good points.

@Doug Weller, I expect you have mistakenly assumed I have only ever edited WP from this (somewhat new-ish) account in making that comment. That is incorrect. I have left uncounted thousands of edits as an IP User since 2007, though I only have begun to edit CTOP and political content since creation of this account.

To all of you, thank you and have a good day. TheRazgriz (talk) 13:09, 3 December 2024 (UTC)

Point taken. But remember a lot of people won't know that. Doug Weller talk 13:35, 3 December 2024 (UTC)

And that is a perfectly valid point, which is why I spent so much time tinkering with my userpage to help those who may make that mistake. :) Thank you. TheRazgriz (talk) 13:49, 3 December 2024 (UTC)

• Pinging Pbritti, who earlier today stated on TheRazgriz's talkpage that "I noticed you do a lot of closing". I'd like to know more about that, please, Pbritti, as this ANI thread has so far only been about one instance of inappropriate closing. Is there a wider problem that we need to address here? Bishonen | tålk 13:29, 3 December 2024 (UTC).

  That line is a surprise to me as well. If memory serves, I believe I have only closed 2 topics in total. I believe maybe 3 or 4 if including manual archiving within that categorization. The topic which @BootsED brought to attention here is the only one which I can imagine would be contentious in any way. It is certainly the most recent I have performed. TheRazgriz (talk) 13:46, 3 December 2024 (UTC)

  I stumbled on a closure of Talk:Bryson City, North Carolina, where TheRazgriz closed a discussion to to conserve space. I don't think this is intentionally disruptive behavior (even if it were, it's not exactly amy sort of serious offense). TheRazgriz has evidently been productively engaging on that article since before they registered. I only mentioned it because I figured that TheRazgriz might think such closures are standard. They're not, but they're also not worth starting an ANI over. A good first step to preventing this sort of escalation from repeating is removing the notice at the top of User talk:TheRazgriz, as that might give the impression that they are an editor unwilling to respond directly to constructive criticism. ~ Pbritti (talk) 15:22, 3 December 2024 (UTC)

  Just an aside, we can't tie a registered account to an IP editor and I don't think we should make any assumptions here about anyone's previous identities if they edited unregistered. Unless they choose to disclose, exceptions only for trolls and vandals. Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 19:31, 3 December 2024 (UTC)

  No no, @Pbritti is correct, and my userpage makes that public info.

  Thank you for that, it would otherwise be a perfectly valid point to make. But in this case, it is both true and public knowledge by me to all of WP.

  (Additional edit to clarify, it is public that I edited for years as an IP user, and one of the first contributions on this named account was in reference to one of the IP edits I had made. What is not public is what my current IP is, which changes every so often for security reasons) TheRazgriz (talk) 20:08, 3 December 2024 (UTC)

  @TheRazgriz: We're glad you registered, by the way. You've been pushing hard for some useful overhauls on CTs. Glad to see someone make the leap from IP to registered and bring that experience with them. ~ Pbritti (talk) 20:49, 3 December 2024 (UTC)

Persistent addition of unsourced content by 2A01:CB10:830C:5200:0:0:0:0/64

2A01:CB10:830C:5200:0:0:0:0/64 (talk · contribs · deleted contribs · logs · filter log · block user · block log) - Keeps adding unsourced content to articles, and hasn't responded to warnings. /64 has previously been blocked in April 2024 for a month, then most recently in June 2024 for disruptive editing for 6 months, with the block noting that behaviour "continued right off block", which also seems to be the case here. Examples of addition of unsourced content: 1, 2 (not in cited source), 3 (not in cited source), 4, 5 (not in cited source). Waxworker (talk) 15:30, 3 December 2024 (UTC)

User:BrandtM113 WP:LAME edit war, no attempts at discussion, frequent warnings

On David Madden (executive), there is a red link for Michael Thorn, a president of Fox, and Sarah Barnett, a president of AMC Networks. User:BrandtM113 has, five times in the last 3 years, come to the page to remove the red links. [144] He has never left an edit summary, so I have no explanation for this unusual fixation.

In March 2022 I sent a message to BrandtM113 [145] telling him about WP:REDLINK and how red links are useful in helping editors find gaps in knowledge, and stopping new pages from being orphaned from birth. With the complete lack of edit summaries, I don't know if he thinks Thorn and Barnett should never have a Wikipedia article, which is quite the claim.

Repeating the same edit with no summaries, no talk page discussion, is disruption even if it is over several years. I think a WP:CIR block may be useful. His talk page has more notices than I care to count for removing content without a summary, adding content without a source, repeated disruptive edits (doing the same edit, again) [146], outright vandalism [147]. This user has had more than enough warnings and it's literally like talking to a brick wall with the lack of edit summaries or discussions. Unknown Temptation (talk) 17:50, 3 December 2024 (UTC)

Blocked for 6 months. Let's see if that is long enough time to get their attention. Oz\^InterAct 19:07, 3 December 2024 (UTC)

Well, 99.7% of this editor's 6,297 edits are to main space, they have made few edits to Talk space and fewer to User talk space. They don't often have an edit summary but they are very active and all of the talk page warnings are more than a year old so perhaps they have taken the advice on board. I was hoping that they would resond here but now they are blocked as I was writing this. I hope they file an unblock request and start communicating. Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 19:11, 3 December 2024 (UTC)

Today, the user made the exact same edit that was made in 2021, 2022 and 2023, after having being told in 2022 about the exact Wikipedia policy that made that edit disruptive. I don't call that taking advice on board. If there is some crucial reason to remove those red links on the David Madden page, it should have been said in an edit summary or on the talk page. If a kid on my street played knock-and-run on my door once a year for four years, I'd still consider that as annoying as doing it once a day for four days. Unknown Temptation (talk) 19:29, 3 December 2024 (UTC)

The user did not edit between 22 October 2023 and 24 October 2024, after two warnings in September 2023. That's a year of not editing, rather than a year of constructive editing. Unknown Temptation (talk) 19:33, 3 December 2024 (UTC)

And I don't understand why you let this little error get so under your skin that you brought this to ANI. Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 03:29, 4 December 2024 (UTC)

Adding some formatting to an infobox that the relevant wikiproject dislikes is not "outright vandalism". Espresso Addict (talk) 22:52, 3 December 2024 (UTC)

Vandalism related to Wisit Tongmo

Since April 2024 at least, a person has been vandalizing Wikipedia by adding his own name, Wisit Tongmo (or วิศิษฎ์ ทองโม้ in Thai), to pages. He has appeared through a bunch of sockpuppets (see categories & investigations). But blocking his accounts seems to be in vain, as he still comes as IPs. His recent IPs include 2001:44c8:663c:53f9:7d16:7576:dabb:3299 (talk · contribs) & 2001:44C8:663C:53F9:ECD2:4516:5460:E49A (talk · contribs).

Wikidata has created a filter, LTA 273, to prevent adding his name to pages, which appears to be very effective (as seen in this log).

So, is it also possible for the English Wikipedia to have some filter which prevents the addition of the following phrases to a page?

1. "Wisit Tongmo" (or "WisitTongmo");
2. "วิศิษฎ์ ทองโม้" (or "วิศิษฎ์ทองโม้");
3. "วิศิษฏ์ ทองโม้" (or "วิศิษฏ์ทองโม้").

Letter case is irrelevant.

Thank you. -- Miwako Sato (talk) 22:29, 3 December 2024 (UTC)

As the first 12 characters of their dynamic IPv6 addresses are the same, might I suggest a rangeblock before considering an LTA filter? Departure– (talk) 22:31, 3 December 2024 (UTC)

The two IP addresses used today were in the same /64 IPV6 range, so I briefly blocked them to stop today's disruption while we're discussing further steps. — rsjaffe 🗣️ 22:57, 3 December 2024 (UTC)

May I refer you to WP:EFR, which is thataway →. - The Bushranger _{One ping only} 05:46, 4 December 2024 (UTC)

Cycling through IPs

I have a question about vandalism accounts. I help edit a series of reality TV articles and, from what I can tell, there appears to be a single user who will edit with either rumored spoilers for upcoming episodes or flat-out fake information. They don't use an account and the IP used will eventually be warned/blocked but then they will just pop up sometime later using a similar but different IP. Is there any potential resolution for this that isn't an endless game of whack-a-mole? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Noahp2 (talk • contribs) 07:53, 4 December 2024 (UTC)

WP:RANGE? Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 08:25, 4 December 2024 (UTC)

We'll need some IP accounts first to see if a range block is appropriate. Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 09:35, 4 December 2024 (UTC)

Undisclosed paid editing

• RayanTarraf (talk · contribs)

Never disclosed their paid editing.

According to User:DubaiScripter: Glimpse Digital Agency is a Marketing, Digital Marketing and design production studio set up in Dubai in 2017 by Lebanese Rayan Tarraf.[148][149] Hypnôs (talk) 10:47, 4 December 2024 (UTC)

I note that this user has not edited since March this year, and has only made three edits, none to mainspace, since 2017. Phil Bridger (talk) 10:59, 4 December 2024 (UTC)

So? DubaiScripter (talk) 11:10, 4 December 2024 (UTC)

And what do you mean paid editing? Who paid who? DubaiScripter (talk) 11:11, 4 December 2024 (UTC)

You disclosed in 2017 that you were paid to edit.[150]

If you are unaware of this, are there other people that have had access to your account? Hypnôs (talk) 11:35, 4 December 2024 (UTC)

Who is getting paid for editing? Rayan Taraff or Dubai Scripter? Do you have any diffs of problematic content that they have added to articles? Isaidnoway (talk) 11:16, 4 December 2024 (UTC)

Thank you @Isaidnoway I just noticed a big discussion on social channels going around the article of Baalbek in Lebanon. Apparently, Some editors are using Wikipedia for political benefits in order to push war agenda. Which is terrible of course. I went straight to the article in order to see what is happening and found that many referenced articles have actually no backing or reliable sources. Two minutes after requesting access to edit, I received the notification of Hypnos questioning my integrity which makes me think that what is being said online is actually true. DubaiScripter (talk) 11:26, 4 December 2024 (UTC)

incase you want to see what I'm talking about https://www.instagram.com/khalilshreateh/reel/DB1rDyqNjCc/ DubaiScripter (talk) 11:28, 4 December 2024 (UTC)

DubaiScripter disclosed that they were paid by RayanTarraf's company to edit[151], and have created the page Rayan Tarraf three times. But since they seem to be unaware of this, the account is possibly used by someone else now.

Regarding Rayan Taraff, I can't go into details due to WP:OUTING, but the pages they created are either related to them or have a promotional tone.[152]

Since joining the Mohammad & Obaid AlMulla Group in 2017, Beshara has played a key role in its growth and success.

American Hospital Dubai, under Beshara's guidance, has achieved significant healthcare innovations, particularly in the field of robotics and artificial intelligence. Hypnôs (talk) 11:49, 4 December 2024 (UTC)

I'm sorry but you are assuming too much. Not related, Nor paid. These pages were my attempts at learning on how to create new articles for known companies and figures that are not already on Wikipedia which I obviously failed to do but that certainly doesn't mean I'm paid and the section you quoted about American Hospital CEO is depicted directly from their articles which you can find online. And if you are talking about the option where you choose if you were paid or not for an article that was also a failed try when i was trying to find my way around understanding how this works. So again, no I never got paid nor do I know these people in person.

Now the real question is... Why is @Hypnôs very insistent on diverting from the original issue which is using Wikipedia for Political gain? DubaiScripter (talk) 13:02, 4 December 2024 (UTC)

DubaiScripter, you have stated that you are indeed a paid editor, paid by Glimpse Digital Agency. --Yamla (talk) 13:12, 4 December 2024 (UTC)

Yes, as I have mentioned in my previous reply. I had chosen that option in one of my attempts to understand why the article is being rejected but I can confirm that was by mistake. not really paid by anyone. DubaiScripter (talk) 13:15, 4 December 2024 (UTC)

DubaiScripter, please be exactly specific. What exactly is your relationship to Rayan Tarraf and to Glimpse Digital Agency? --Yamla (talk) 13:27, 4 December 2024 (UTC)

Also, please watch this video https://www.instagram.com/khalilshreateh/reel/DB1rDyqNjCc/ which explains exactly why @Hypnôs is doing this. He is plainly mentioned in there. DubaiScripter (talk) 13:24, 4 December 2024 (UTC)

You need to stop this - I suggest you read the contentious topic notification on your talk page. Simonm223 (talk) 13:26, 4 December 2024 (UTC)

My last message: Whoever is reading from the esteemed and amazing non-biased Admins... That are obviously more experienced and much better than me. Please check the this issue and don't let misinformation run loose on Wikipedia. https://www.tiktok.com/@zeez870/video/7435060973855116562?q=baalbek%20wikipedia&t=1733319093938 DubaiScripter (talk) 13:40, 4 December 2024 (UTC)

Also, @Hypnôs I've noticed that in the talk page your name is mentioned 27 times and that in trying to block the removal of exactly what I came to check. All, I can say is that this issue is blowing up on social channels and it's only reflecting badly on Wikipedia Admins and Wikipedia as a reliable source. I also, noticed that you are only interested in historical pages that are related to the Jewish community which makes me believe that you are biased but again it that's my assumption. I could be wrong DubaiScripter (talk) 13:13, 4 December 2024 (UTC)

Troublesome single purpose account

Bringing everyone's attention to User:AngadSingh2004, who is a single-purpose account that has never edited any topics outside of Disney Star and related articles since their account was created in June 2023.

The user in question performed several ill-advised moves to Disney Star and related articles as bold moves that were reverted as controversial.

After a request was made at WP:RMT here to revert the controversial undiscussed move, and the reversion was completed by @Robertsky, User:AngadSingh2004 posted about the reversion on the article's talk page here, replying "Are you dumb or something" when advised that moving the article without consensus was disruptive.

User:AngadSingh2004 came to WP:RMT to again try to bypass the RM process for a controversial move by requesting the page be moved (here). This move was declined at WP:RMT because it didn't meet the criteria for an uncontroversial move, and the editor was advised to open a full RM discussion.

The editor finally opened the full RM discussion, here. However, during the RM discussion, presumably when they realized things weren't trending the way they wished, the editor went ahead and deceptively edited other people's RM votes, editing them from oppose to support (see here, here, here). When confronted about this on their talk page, they said they "thought it was a glitch".

Shortly after the requested move was inevitably closed as "not moved" with very clear consensus to not move the article, the editor decided to unilaterally proceed with the move anyway, moving the article with the reason "Perform requested move, see talk page". When confronted about this on their talk, they said:
"The discussion was useless, no body agreed with the real proofs I have provided and the people opposing didn't give any concrete region, not did they look up about the company or website themselves."

This WP:SPA is pretty clearly WP:NOTHERE to participate in Wikipedia in any capacity other than disruptively editing the small set of articles that are within their interests, and seems to be operating in bad faith, especially when it comes to deceptively editing other people's RM votes, deceptively trying to skirt around the RM process, personal attacks, and deciding unilaterally, after clear consensus, that the opinion of the community apparently doesn't matter. RachelTensions (talk) 13:50, 4 December 2024 (UTC)

Please Advise on a Move Discussion

I request that an Admin provide some uninvolved observations on the course of two recent move discussions here: Talk:Expectation of privacy (United States). Everyone involved knows what they're talking about, and we have a basic consensus that the current article title needs to be fixed, but we're going around in circles on finding a solution. Thanks. ---DOOMSDAYER520 (TALK|CONTRIBS) 14:38, 4 December 2024 (UTC)