User talk:Factchecker atyourservice/Archive 4

Keith Ellison

Contentious changes, particularly on a biography of a living person, should not be made without consensus of other editors. You have now re-instated your preferred version twice without any other editor agreeing with it and if you continue reverting, I will take it to the edit-warring noticeboard. I do not think by the way that it is constructive to approach any article with the sole intention of inserting negative information about individuals. You seem to have no interest in this particular subject other than allegations that were briefly mentioned in a limited amount of reliable sources, but are extensively discussed in fringe websites. TFD (talk) 14:55, 24 February 2017 (UTC)

You're attempting to game the system by raising clearly empty procedural attacks on clearly proper edits. The centerpiece of these attacks have been the absurd claim that sourcing brief summaries of analysis from top quality mainstream sources somehow deviates from what those sources say. And on top of that you can't even seem to read clearly when blindly reverting, since you have accused me of removing commentary in defense of Ellison when in fact I'm the person who wrote it in the first place.

Consensus is not a veto and you should not make affirmative efforts to seriously misrepresent source material.

And obviously, if edits are "contentious" there has to be a reason why, and you seem to have zero interest in stating any actual objections in any of the edits you reverted. Centrify (f / k / a Factchecker_has_annoying_username) (talk) (contribs) 15:02, 24 February 2017 (UTC)

Unhelpful feedback of old Keith Ellison edits

I'd like to take a moment to respond about your nonconstructive feedback of edits I made five years ago to the Keith Ellison article. You said I committed "seriously incompetent editing based on ignorance of the subject matter" when I cleaned up that segment, which was messy/unclear at the time. I take exception to your accusations and stand by my edits. Yes they were bold, but they made the section clearer and improved the neutrality of the POV. I'm not ignorant of the subject matter -- to respond to your accusation that I was fabricating sources, a little investigation on your part will show that Michael Brodkorb was indeed a paid Republican Party of Minnesota operative in 2006, when he also anonymously ran the website Minnesota Democrats Exposed, which is the site I sourced in my edit. Funny how I remember this stuff even 11 years later!

As Judge John Hodgman often says, "People like what they like", so I suppose it's fine if Islamophobia happens to be your personal passion (as it seems from looking at your contributions). However, please don't bully others on WP who are trying to strengthen articles a NPOV.

Yours in Christ, Fmitterand (talk) 07:11, 8 March 2017 (UTC)

Actually I said it was either incompetent editing or improper spin—your comments here confirm the latter impression. Also, I'm not sure if you go around saying "Islamophobe" to anyone who corrects you, but it's silly. Factchecker_atyourservice 21:58, 8 March 2017 (UTC)

The "permanent campaign"

I intended this reference to the "permanent campaign" to be uncontroversial, allowing general information to be on another page rather than appear to refer specifically to Donald Trump's 2020 campaign. There are advantages and disadvantages to keeping the campaign structure, the FEC filing and so on, but they are not specific to this topic. Would it be more evenly weighted if we removed the section title and the first line? This would no longer be a section, merely a second paragraph in the lead reading: "Although the early campaign filing is unusual,[2] the permanent campaign is not unusual in American politics, dating at least from the presidency of Bill Clinton under the advice of Sidney Blumenthal.[1]"
We can discuss at Talk:Donald Trump presidential campaign, 2020 if you prefer. I have also posted this question there. Jack N. Stock (talk) 16:03, 5 March 2017 (UTC)

You don't seem to understand basic content policies, for example WP:WEIGHT and proper use of editorial voice. I have no idea how you could have persisted as an editor for so long with these very deep misconceptions. And there is no reason why we should be talking about this here on my talk page. Centrify (f / k / a Factchecker_has_annoying_username) (talk) (contribs) 16:54, 5 March 2017 (UTC)

Per WP:OWNTALK, "the purpose of user talk pages is to draw the attention or discuss the edits of a user." Jack N. Stock (talk) 17:52, 5 March 2017 (UTC)

And yet for many obvious reasons the standard practice is to discuss article content at the article talk page. User talk pages are for discussions that don't belong on an article talk page. Centrify (f / k / a Factchecker_has_annoying_username) (talk) (contribs) 18:11, 5 March 2017 (UTC)

WP:TENDENTIOUS EDITING; WP:COMPETENCE

You've been edit warring nonsensically for several days and so far other editors have refrained from templating you. However, by now it is plain that you are operating under some very deep misconceptions about how WP is supposed to operate.

"Sweden bashing" refers to a perception

But that's not supported by any of the sourcing. You are inventing stuff out of thin air, and then putting those words in WP's editorial voice. This is useless from the ground up.

You also seem to think that reliable sources are mere opinions if you disagree with what they say. That's just asinine. // Liftarn (talk) 07:25, 10 March 2017 (UTC)

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Thanks-but no thanks

Please do not contact me in future-thanking, talk page, etc.We hope (talk) 21:21, 13 March 2017 (UTC)

Refactoring

Was this really justified? It seems to bear relevance to development of the article. - Sitush (talk) 21:51, 13 March 2017 (UTC)

@Sitush: I got the sense it had a tone of gloating and was just an opportunity for the editor to air the completely unsourced contention that Brown was a drug dealer, which so far as I know nobody has said, and which is a dubious characterization of the alleged bartering. And it was straw-mannish at that—if Brown actually thought he had paid for the cigars, then that certainly seems less blameworthy to me. It was a gut reaction, admittedly. I've been criticized for removing talk page comments before so I will defer to you. Factchecker_atyourservice 22:13, 13 March 2017 (UTC)

What?

I don't understand how this[1] is considered a violation of WP:NOTFORUM. That portion of text you removed was pertaining directly to the subject of the article... Boomer Vial^{Holla! We gonna ball!} 04:31, 14 March 2017 (UTC)

Virtually all NOTFORUM comments pertain directly to the article subject, including any old baseless smear somebody might post. The claim about Brown being a drug dealer is found only in obviously fringe sources. And the WP editor's comment wasn't even directed at the article, he was really just offering his own musings about how good or bad Mike Brown was. See my other comments above. Factchecker_atyourservice 23:55, 14 March 2017 (UTC)

Article talk pages

Article talk pages are for disusing how to improve that article. They are not for.

How to improve (or issues with) other articles [2].

Users [3]

General concerns about Wikipedia (see link about what talk pages are for).

Soapboxing (see link for uers).

Your interaction as SPLC is now becoming disruptive and I am asking you to please stop.Slatersteven (talk) 19:05, 24 March 2017 (UTC)

Mmmhmm User:Slatersteven you posted this an hour after my last word about SPLC. Also note I wasn't soapboxing or talking about users or general concerns about Wikipedia. It is also very common and not remotely problematic to briefly discuss how content presentation in two closely related articles relate to each other. More careful attention appreciated in future thanks. Factchecker_atyourservice 15:05, 25 March 2017 (UTC)

You commented on other users and what they "really" meant (as well as asking what hey would do on another page). Yes, (by the way) you talked about "policy implications", that is about policy not specific pages. Yes (by the way) your insistence on talking about one page on another page looks like you are trying to score points and soapbox about something you think is unfair (hence it "policy implications", you seem to be trying to establish a precedent). You (to my mind) were using the SPLC talk page to try and soapbox about what you perceive as editors (ans Wikipedias) bias, no one is fooled. I am asking you not to do it again either on SPLC or any the talk page. They are for disusing the article whose talk page it is, not any other issues.Slatersteven (talk) 15:23, 25 March 2017 (UTC)

Ahem. @Slatersteven:

• I'm not sure what you mean by saying I asked "what they really meant".
• Asking what an experienced editor would do in a closely related situation at a closely related page is entirely proper
• Asking a question very clearly related to article content may often have policy implications, and that doesn't make the question inappropriate—even if, as has been noted, the question is about a very closely related article
• I suggest you go read the policy on soapboxing; you may find it edifying to discover that it is not even remotely related to the conduct you are complaining about; how have you gone on this long without understanding such an old policy?
• More generally what do you think is being accomplished via this rant? It's clear that you're wrong, I had stopped posting questions at the SPLC Talk long before you posted this complaint, it's now nearly 24 hours later, and I'm sure there are more constructive ways to spend a Saturday.

Cheers. Factchecker_atyourservice 15:33, 25 March 2017 (UTC)

And I note that you have not really tried to discus tisa issue with half the effort on the right talk page.Slatersteven (talk) 15:35, 25 March 2017 (UTC)

I'm discussing it right now even as you force me to respond to this nonsense. Kisses, Factchecker_atyourservice 15:37, 25 March 2017 (UTC)

wise guy

And that "wise guy" comment is unacceptable and I ask you to strike it. When you decide to have a polite conversation I will respond to your question.Slatersteven (talk) 19:15, 25 March 2017 (UTC)

Decline to strike, comment was innocuous, this pearl-clutching is a waste of time and we'd all be better off if you just explain what you meant, because it was obviously open to multiple interpretations and I explicitly asked you to provide some clarification. Factchecker_atyourservice 19:24, 25 March 2017 (UTC)

There is currently a discussion at Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Incidents regarding an issue with which you may have been involved. Slatersteven (talk) 18:23, 26 March 2017 (UTC)

Help needed

Hello. Given that you are considerably more skilled at structuring Wikipedia texts, and managing discussions than I am, I would appreciate your help with finding a solution in the following article. Thank you.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_and_crime David A (talk) 04:45, 3 April 2017 (UTC)

@David A: I've started looking at it but it does seem like a largeish dispute. I'm not sure I'll find time to understand the discussion about statistics tonight. Factchecker_atyourservice 23:39, 3 April 2017 (UTC)

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3rr

Your recent editing history at Gatestone Institute shows that you are currently engaged in an edit war. To resolve the content dispute, please do not revert or change the edits of others when you are reverted. Instead of reverting, please use the talk page to work toward making a version that represents consensus among editors. The best practice at this stage is to discuss, not edit-war. See BRD for how this is done. If discussions reach an impasse, you can then post a request for help at a relevant noticeboard or seek dispute resolution. In some cases, you may wish to request temporary page protection.

Being involved in an edit war can result in your being blocked from editing—especially if you violate the three-revert rule, which states that an editor must not perform more than three reverts on a single page within a 24-hour period. Undoing another editor's work—whether in whole or in part, whether involving the same or different material each time—counts as a revert. Also keep in mind that while violating the three-revert rule often leads to a block, you can still be blocked for edit warring—even if you don't violate the three-revert rule—should your behavior indicate that you intend to continue reverting repeatedly.

You've made 6 reverts in about 28 hours. 4 in the last 24 hours. This is not a BLP issue. All material is sourced and it concerns an institute. Please self revert.Volunteer Marek (talk) 21:20, 7 April 2017 (UTC)

I already explained why that prose misrepresents the source, and you haven't said one word at talk. No, I won't self-revert, and yes, the edit is exempt from 3RR, as should be evident, go read the specific BLP section I already referenced. As I already suggested, why don't you try re-writing the prose in a way that satisfies you while still addressing the issues I raised—instead of just reverting back to obviously problematic material about LPs. Factchecker_atyourservice 21:43, 7 April 2017 (UTC)

I agree with Factchecker. David A (talk) 03:34, 8 April 2017 (UTC)

Notice of Edit warring noticeboard discussion

Hello. This message is being sent to inform you that there is currently a discussion involving you at Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Edit warring regarding a possible violation of Wikipedia's policy on edit warring. Thank you. Volunteer Marek (talk) 07:52, 9 April 2017 (UTC)

3RR block

You've been blocked from editing for 36 hours due to violating the Three revert rule (I could not find evidence of BLP violations that would allow you to benefit from 3RRNO). Please be more careful in the future. And in regards, to this edit—VM alleges that you wikistalked him to another article, making a revenge revert, and I see his point. Please also refrain from this conduct in the future. Use dispute resolution instead of escalating. El_C 08:32, 9 April 2017 (UTC)

Unblock request

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This user's unblock request has been reviewed by an administrator, who declined the request. Other administrators may also review this block, but should not override the decision without good reason (see the blocking policy).

Factchecker atyourservice (block log • active blocks • global blocks • contribs • deleted contribs • filter log • creation log • change block settings • unblock • checkuser (log))

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Request reason:

I request unblock because the reverts complained of were clear BLP violations, and by the time the complaint was raised, what was in fact occurring was not revert-warring, but was instead back-and-forth incremental revision between myself and another editor, Vice Regent, in which Marek was not participating. My most recent edits left VR's writing largely untouched. The earlier reverts complained of also removed conjectural interpretations of weak sourcing that amounted to accusations of racism or xenophobia against living people and thus they're exempt from edit-warring accusations. This was all being done in good faith after some discussion with Vice Regent on the talk page. Furthermore, after the 3RR warning, I asked Marek to suggest changes—a day and a half later, after making progress with Vice Regent, I got no suggestions from Marek but this ANI complaint instead. ==Summary== *The sanction is punitive and unnecessary. The ANI complaint interrupted constructive editorial back-and-forth between myself and User:Vice regent which had emerged after unhelpful straight-reverting by Marek and another user after my initial rewrite. Marek declined to suggest how the text could be changed and his only talk page comment primarily detailed his suspicions about my allegedly devious purposes and actions. The other user Vice Regent by contrast discussed all the issues (though we disagree on some) and accomodated my concerns in his own revisions, and thus my most recent edits left his writing mostly untouched. Most of my edits (and all of the most recent ones) were revisions, not reverts. We were making progress when the complaint was filed. *I didn't attempt to game 3RR because I don't think 3RR applies. "Gatestone has been accused of making false claims about Muslim issues" was a conjectural interpretation of one poorly sourced claim and one tangential mention in a single RS that cannot be easily paraphrased. Thus it was poorly sourced under the BLP policy. *My edit at the Russia article, which I've edited before, was not stalking, but Marek himself has stalked me periodically since I threatened to bring him to ANI for harassing another user (not myself), and thus I think perhaps Marek's aggressive reverting and insistence on bringing this to ANI may be a bit of harassment itself. *WP is a consensus driven project, but the BLP policy makes clear that removing inaccurate or misleading claims about living people is important, and that such claims must be both clearly established and very well-sourced. Moreover all these users should know that it's their WP:BURDEN to achieve consensus for the disputed article text, and when a user makes good-faith removals of material that is a conjectural interpretation of poorly sourced discussion about living people, that is not edit-warring, it's a prompt to discuss how the disputed claim can be fixed before being restored. ===Isn't BLP applicable? WP:REDFLAG?=== To start, the question of whether this dispute implicates BLP. Of course it does; although it's been argued that Gatestone is an institution, not a person, the WP prose I first removed said that "Gatestone has been accused of making false claims about Muslim issues". But it's a corporation, and corporations don't write articles, people do; the articles at Gatestone are all signed by individual people. If Gatestone is being accused of making false claims about Muslim issues, that means one or more people working for Gatestone have been accused. The idea that only the material about the organization's founder is BLP material is simply wrong. Moreover, (1) "accused" is loaded language that no source I've seen has used in talking about Gatestone; (2) the source that describes some claims about no-go zones as "false" mentions Gatestone only in passing and does not say Gatestone actually made any false claims—also, the definition of "no-go zones" that the source describes is false is not the definition used by Gatestone, which in any event describes them as "so-called no-go zones"; and (3) the source that does claim Gatestone made "false" claims is published in a non-RS, written by a non-journalist, and the inaccuracies it points out are pretty trivial and have nothing to do with Muslims and instead revolve around distinctions betwene different EU-related groups and a poorly worded headline that is contradicted by what the body of the report says. Hence the concern with "Gatestone has been accused of making false claims about Muslim issues". It's a conjectural interpretation of weak sourcing. Yet despite the obvious problems, Marek has reinserted this language repeatedly ([4] [5] [6]) while ignoring requests that he make edits or comments about how to make the wording less problematic. BLP policy tells us to remove that without discussion, an exception which would be meaningless if an editor can be easily blocked for invoking it. Shouldn't the editors who have the burden of establishing that a claim belongs in an article have the burden of raising BLP-appropriateness issues at BLP/N and weak-source-appropriateness issues at RS/N? Separately, this is also the sort of claim that is supposed to require multiple high-quality reliable sources clearly making the claim]] even if not in a BLP. ===Alleged subtle "gaming" of 24 hour revert window=== This is just seeing sheep in the clouds, kind of like when Marek saw "straight up dishonest misrepresentation" in a diff by another user that wasn't even poorly worded in the first place (more on that below). All of my edits, except perhaps the last couple, removed contentious claims that were poorly sourced. They were "poorly sourced" not because the source was poor, but because they were a conjectural interpretation of a source that was contentious and that was about living people. This is why I repeatedly stated the BLP exemption and refused to self-revert when templated for 3RR. I saw no need to "game" any 24 hour window and I didn't try. In any event admins aren't bound by 3RR when blocking for edit-warring so this supposed method of gaming seems unlikely to work. And I think it's quite reasonable to expect based on WP:BURDEN that it's the job of the editors wishing to add axe-grinding paraphrase of weakly sourced material to go raise it at BLP/N and RS/N. Not the guy who says can't we just track precisely what the sources have written about the article subject?. ===Accusation of harassment=== First off, Marek falsely claims I've never edited the Russian Interference article before but I have edited it and participated a little at Talk. I have edited other Trump related articles extensively, as Marek can attest because he's also active at some of them. As with many articles, I have looked at the election-interference article periodically and found nothing that seemed to need attention. Next, harassment is an interesting accusation because back in January, after I threatened to take Marek to ANI for relentlessly harassing another user at an article Talk page,a little over an hour later Marek showed up and began reverting me at an article (and in his case, he had actually never edited that article or posted at its talk page before). On top of that his edit and its justification seems pretty pointless and even disruptive to me—a website making a self-published claim about different newspapers its authors have written for. How droll. Who cares? And why would an RS publish on such a topic? This precisely the kind of thing we allow article subjects to say about themselves. No need to make the edit and it seemed clearly in response to my ANI threat. When Marek began reverting me at Gatestone, I looked to see if he had said anything about the issue at the Talk page yet (he hadn't). Looking at his edit history I saw the edit summary oh wow, that's a straight up dishonest misrepresentation of the source. Two things that always catch my eye: alleged source misrepresentation and accusations of dishonesty. Always interesting, whether or not true. I have often accused others of source misrepresentation, but the accusatory tone of Marek's edit summary suggested to me that something was amiss. And sure enough, there no misrepresentation in the original—"allegations of unauthorized disclosure of classified information against him" made perfectly clear that allegations of unauthorized disclosure were raised against Nunes. But this was then replaced with "he came under investigation for ethics violation the House Ethics Committee announced", which makes it sound like Nunes is guilty and flies in the face of the Wiki convention of describing allegations as allegations (the introductory paragraph of the news article refers to them as "ethics charges" and later uses language about "the suggestion that he violated ethics laws", but by contrast the phrasing "investigating ethics violations" makes it sound like the violations were known to be committed, and that the investigation is into other questions such as who knew what and when—a common development in these matters. In any event, in response to the marginal chance that someone could somehow misconstrue the language, I rewrote it as: "On April 6, 2017, Nunes temporarily recused himself from the Russia investigation after the House Ethics Committee announced that it would investigate the allegations that he had made unauthorized disclosure of classified information." Of course, there's absolutely nothing wrong with that, it addresses Marek's concerns while fulfilling the important goal of avoiding phrasing that implies guilt. The policy on harassment says: "The important component of wikihounding is disruption to another user's own enjoyment of editing, or to the project generally, for no overriding reason." None of that is present here. The connection to the Gatestone dispute is a pure coincidence of when I happened to be looking at VM's edit history, and the very recent edit summary that happened to jump out when I did. ===The content dispute itself=== Just to note, there wasn't much pure reverting by me; most edits had successive changes. The pure reverting was mainly by Marek and another user, neither of whom said boo on talk except one comment by Marek on April 8 accusing me of various trickery. By contrast when Vice Regent began editing on April 8 it was after some discussion between the two of us, and his edits were obviously geared towards some of my concerns. My subsequent edits left his rewritten lead alone completely and the rest of his writing largely intact. Marek's blunt revert-without-discussion and policiing of 3RR have not helped move the dispute along. The dispute revolves around one solid RS that has only brief and tangential discussion of Gatestone, and one weak non-RS that makes claims that are directly about Gatestone, but they're fairly trivial and the piece contradicts itself, raising further doubts about the source. Neither of them is a good basis for the claim that "Gatestone has been accused of making false claims about Muslim issues". ====Bloomberg article==== First, the better source, a Bloomberg News article. I haven't noticed any problems from a sourcing standpoint—but it's only a passing mention of Gatestone with an extremely tenuous link. Gatestone isn't mentioned until the 10th paragraph of the article (out of 13 paragraphs total) where it says:

Meanwhile, though, the idea of European no-go zones took root. After riots broke out in some French suburbs in 2012, analyst Soeren Kern of the Gatestone Institute, a New York-based think tank, wrote that France was trying to "reclaim no-go zones," including the areas that had been listed in Pipes's 2006 report. Kern defined them as "Muslim-dominated neighborhoods that are largely off-limits to non-Muslims." In other reports, Kern has written that Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and Sweden also have no-go zones.

Notice the Bloomberg article doesn't say that Gatestone made the claims that are said to be false—that entire neighborhoods of Paris or London are "off-limits to law enforcement and governed by Islamic sharia law". The Gatestone report doesn't mention Sharia law, it defines the zones as "Muslim-dominated neighborhoods that are largely off limits to non-Muslims", which is different than what Bloomberg disputed. Most importantly, the Gatestone report refers to the areas as "so-called 'no-go' zones", and every single use of the term in the Gatestone report is bracketed with "scare quotes". Notice also, the only thing the Bloomberg article explicitly says about the Gatestone report is that it referred to some of the same areas that Pipes referred to in his 2006 report. In this report, he had described a French government report on "sensitive urban zones", translating the term as "no-go zones". He later said to Bloomberg there were no places in Europe where authorities were unable to enforce the rule of law, but Bloomberg seems to oversimplify what he has said, which is that the issue is more complex, that there are gradations of danger, that the reality is different for police and other government employees than it is for tourists and other civilians, that he writes the French areas he originally discussed are not "full-fledged" no-go zones, and writes, "However one sums up this complex situation – maybe partial-no-go zones? – they represent a great danger." So in brief it's clear that Bloomberg is citing him for the claim that there are no areas off-limits to police, which is the claim that Bloomberg calls "demonstrably untrue". But again, Gatestone never made that claim, Bloomberg doesn't say Gatestone made that claim, Bloomberg doesn't say Gatestone made false claims. Bloomberg only notes Gatestone published a report referring to some of the same areas. Bloomberg specifically notes Gatestone uses a different definition of the term "no-go zones". Again, in the actual Gatestone report, it refers to them as "so-called no-go zones" and uses "scare quotes" every single time it uses the term. It's not endorsing the use of the term, it's not making any claims that are false, and it's not being accused of anything. Hence "Gatestone has been accused of making false claims about Muslim issues", and ominous and sinister-sounding but entirely uninformative claim, was quite problematic as far as the Bloomberg source goes. ====Snopes blog post==== The Snopes article is trickier, though it depends on what it's being used for. Snopes is a novelty website that has made a name for itself debunking urban legends and internet rumours. Lately it has been attempting to rebrand itself as a more general purpose fact checker, but it is, as noted at RSN, still a mom-and-pop operation. It's not a serious entity with serious practices or a serious reputation. The author is a former race and pop culture blogger at The Guardian who has a communications degree from a state college and a one-year "journalism" degree from community college—a course described as preparation for a four-year degree. Respectfully, this guy is not a journalist. What the Snopes post does show, successfully and uncontroversially, is that the Gatestone report got a couple details wrong when discussing an actual incident in which the British government rejected a set of policy recommendations. Snopes seems to vaguely imply, but doesn't actually say, that the Gatestone report called the recommendations mandates. In fact, the report doesn't call them mandates, Snopes's own screenshot shows that the report refers to them as recommendations, not mandates, and the report goes on to say the recommendations were already rejected by the British government. So far, all we've got is an inaccurate headline. It also notes that the original report failed to note that the recommendations were issued by a human rights group, not the EU. Ok, fine. If all we want to say is these two things then I'm not going to the mat over the weak sourcing. Trivial claims can have trivial sourcing. But "Gatestone has been accused of making false claims about Muslim issues" ?? No way—that was inflammatory and misleading, and it had to be removed and BLP says don't bother discussing such removals, just do them. ==Conclusion== This ceased to be a real edit war when Marek stopped reinserting the loaded language about "false claims about Muslims" on April 7, and this block will not assist effective resolution of the content dispute. Factchecker_atyourservice 7:53 pm, Today (UTC−4)

Decline reason:

Polemic masquerading as an unblock request. If you think you should be unblocked, please try again with a proper request that directly - and briefly- addresses the reason for your block. regentspark (comment) 00:55, 10 April 2017 (UTC)

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The following discussion has been closed. Please do not modify it.
I request unblock because by the time the complaint was raised, what was in fact occurring was not revert-warring, but was instead back-and-forth incremental revision between myself and another editor, Vice Regent, in which Marek was not participating. My most recent edits left VR's writing largely untouched. The earlier reverts complained of also removed conjectural interpretations of weak sourcing that amounted to accusations of racism or xenophobia against living people and thus they're exempt from edit-warring accusations. This was all being done in good faith after some discussion with Vice Regent on the talk page. Furthermore, after the 3RR warning, I asked Marek to suggest changes—a day and a half later, after making progress with Vice Regent, I got no suggestions from Marek but this ANI complaint instead. Summary The sanction is punitive and unnecessary. The ANI complaint interrupted constructive editorial back-and-forth between myself and User:Vice regent which had emerged after unhelpful straight-reverting by Marek and another user after my initial rewrite. Marek declined to suggest how the text could be changed and his only talk page comment primarily detailed his suspicions about my allegedly devious purposes and actions. The other user Vice Regent by contrast discussed all the issues (though we disagree on some) and accomodated my concerns in his own revisions, and thus my most recent edits left his writing mostly untouched. Most of my edits (and all of the most recent ones) were revisions, not reverts. We were making progress when the complaint was filed. I didn't attempt to game 3RR because I don't think 3RR applies. "Gatestone has been accused of making false claims about Muslim issues" was a conjectural interpretation of one poorly sourced claim and one tangential mention in a single RS that cannot be easily paraphrased. Thus it was poorly sourced under the BLP policy. My edit at the Russia article, which I've edited before, was not stalking, but Marek himself has stalked me periodically since I threatened to bring him to ANI for harassing another user (not myself), and thus I think perhaps Marek's aggressive reverting and insistence on bringing this to ANI may be a bit of harassment itself. WP is a consensus driven project, but the BLP policy makes clear that removing inaccurate or misleading claims about living people is important, and that such claims must be both clearly established and very well-sourced. Moreover all these users should know that it's their WP:BURDEN to achieve consensus for the disputed article text, and when a user makes good-faith removals of material that is a conjectural interpretation of poorly sourced discussion about living people, that is not edit-warring, it's a prompt to discuss how the disputed claim can be fixed before being restored. Isn't BLP applicable? WP:REDFLAG? To start, the question of whether this dispute implicates BLP. Of course it does; although it's been argued that Gatestone is an institution, not a person, the WP prose I first removed said that "Gatestone has been accused of making false claims about Muslim issues". But it's a corporation, and corporations don't write articles, people do; the articles at Gatestone are all signed by individual people. If Gatestone is being accused of making false claims about Muslim issues, that means one or more people working for Gatestone have been accused. The idea that only the material about the organization's founder is BLP material is simply wrong. Moreover, (1) "accused" is loaded language that no source I've seen has used in talking about Gatestone; (2) the source that describes some claims about no-go zones as "false" mentions Gatestone only in passing and does not say Gatestone actually made any false claims—also, the definition of "no-go zones" that the source describes is false is not the definition used by Gatestone, which in any event describes them as "so-called no-go zones"; and (3) the source that does claim Gatestone made "false" claims is published in a non-RS, written by a non-journalist, and the inaccuracies it points out are pretty trivial and have nothing to do with Muslims and instead revolve around distinctions betwene different EU-related groups and a poorly worded headline that is contradicted by what the body of the report says. Hence the concern with "Gatestone has been accused of making false claims about Muslim issues". It's a conjectural interpretation of weak sourcing. Yet despite the obvious problems, Marek has reinserted this language repeatedly ([7] [8] [9]) while ignoring requests that he make edits or comments about how to make the wording less problematic. BLP policy tells us to remove that without discussion, an exception which would be meaningless if an editor can be easily blocked for invoking it. Shouldn't the editors who have the burden of establishing that a claim belongs in an article have the burden of raising BLP-appropriateness issues at BLP/N and weak-source-appropriateness issues at RS/N? Separately, this is also the sort of claim that is supposed to require multiple high-quality reliable sources clearly making the claim]] even if not in a BLP. Alleged subtle "gaming" of 24 hour revert window This is just seeing sheep in the clouds, kind of like when Marek saw "straight up dishonest misrepresentation" in a diff by another user that wasn't even poorly worded in the first place (more on that below). All of my edits, except perhaps the last couple, removed contentious claims that were poorly sourced. They were "poorly sourced" not because the source was poor, but because they were a conjectural interpretation of a source that was contentious and that was about living people. This is why I repeatedly stated the BLP exemption and refused to self-revert when templated for 3RR. I saw no need to "game" any 24 hour window and I didn't try. In any event admins aren't bound by 3RR when blocking for edit-warring so this supposed method of gaming seems unlikely to work. And I think it's quite reasonable to expect based on WP:BURDEN that it's the job of the editors wishing to add axe-grinding paraphrase of weakly sourced material to go raise it at BLP/N and RS/N. Not the guy who says can't we just track precisely what the sources have written about the article subject?. Accusation of harassment First off, Marek falsely claims I've never edited the Russian Interference article before but I have edited it and participated a little at Talk. I have edited other Trump related articles extensively, as Marek can attest because he's also active at some of them. As with many articles, I have looked at the election-interference article periodically and found nothing that seemed to need attention. Next, harassment is an interesting accusation because back in January, after I threatened to take Marek to ANI for relentlessly harassing another user at an article Talk page,a little over an hour later Marek showed up and began reverting me at an article (and in his case, he had actually never edited that article or posted at its talk page before). On top of that his edit and its justification seems pretty pointless and even disruptive to me—a website making a self-published claim about different newspapers its authors have written for. How droll. Who cares? And why would an RS publish on such a topic? This precisely the kind of thing we allow article subjects to say about themselves. No need to make the edit and it seemed clearly in response to my ANI threat. When Marek began reverting me at Gatestone, I looked to see if he had said anything about the issue at the Talk page yet (he hadn't). Looking at his edit history I saw the edit summary oh wow, that's a straight up dishonest misrepresentation of the source. Two things that always catch my eye: alleged source misrepresentation and accusations of dishonesty. Always interesting, whether or not true. I have often accused others of source misrepresentation, but the accusatory tone of Marek's edit summary suggested to me that something was amiss. And sure enough, there no misrepresentation in the original—"allegations of unauthorized disclosure of classified information against him" made perfectly clear that allegations of unauthorized disclosure were raised against Nunes. But this was then replaced with "he came under investigation for ethics violation the House Ethics Committee announced", which makes it sound like Nunes is guilty and flies in the face of the Wiki convention of describing allegations as allegations (the introductory paragraph of the news article refers to them as "ethics charges" and later uses language about "the suggestion that he violated ethics laws", but by contrast the phrasing "investigating ethics violations" makes it sound like the violations were known to be committed, and that the investigation is into other questions such as who knew what and when—a common development in these matters. In any event, in response to the marginal chance that someone could somehow misconstrue the language, I rewrote it as: "On April 6, 2017, Nunes temporarily recused himself from the Russia investigation after the House Ethics Committee announced that it would investigate the allegations that he had made unauthorized disclosure of classified information." Of course, there's absolutely nothing wrong with that, it addresses Marek's concerns while fulfilling the important goal of avoiding phrasing that implies guilt. The policy on harassment says: "The important component of wikihounding is disruption to another user's own enjoyment of editing, or to the project generally, for no overriding reason." None of that is present here. The connection to the Gatestone dispute is a pure coincidence of when I happened to be looking at VM's edit history, and the very recent edit summary that happened to jump out when I did. The content dispute itself Just to note, there wasn't much pure reverting by me; most edits had successive changes. The pure reverting was mainly by Marek and another user, neither of whom said boo on talk except one comment by Marek on April 8 accusing me of various trickery. By contrast when Vice Regent began editing on April 8 it was after some discussion between the two of us, and his edits were obviously geared towards some of my concerns. My subsequent edits left his rewritten lead alone completely and the rest of his writing largely intact. Marek's blunt revert-without-discussion and policiing of 3RR have not helped move the dispute along. The dispute revolves around one solid RS that has only brief and tangential discussion of Gatestone, and one weak non-RS that makes claims that are directly about Gatestone, but they're fairly trivial and the piece contradicts itself, raising further doubts about the source. Neither of them is a good basis for the claim that "Gatestone has been accused of making false claims about Muslim issues". Bloomberg article First, the better source, a Bloomberg News article. I haven't noticed any problems from a sourcing standpoint—but it's only a passing mention of Gatestone with an extremely tenuous link. Gatestone isn't mentioned until the 10th paragraph of the article (out of 13 paragraphs total) where it says: Meanwhile, though, the idea of European no-go zones took root. After riots broke out in some French suburbs in 2012, analyst Soeren Kern of the Gatestone Institute, a New York-based think tank, wrote that France was trying to "reclaim no-go zones," including the areas that had been listed in Pipes's 2006 report. Kern defined them as "Muslim-dominated neighborhoods that are largely off-limits to non-Muslims." In other reports, Kern has written that Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and Sweden also have no-go zones. Notice the Bloomberg article doesn't say that Gatestone made the claims that are said to be false—that entire neighborhoods of Paris or London are "off-limits to law enforcement and governed by Islamic sharia law". The Gatestone report doesn't mention Sharia law, it defines the zones as "Muslim-dominated neighborhoods that are largely off limits to non-Muslims", which is different than what Bloomberg disputed. Most importantly, the Gatestone report refers to the areas as "so-called 'no-go' zones", and every single use of the term in the Gatestone report is bracketed with "scare quotes". Notice also, the only thing the Bloomberg article explicitly says about the Gatestone report is that it referred to some of the same areas that Pipes referred to in his 2006 report. In this report, he had described a French government report on "sensitive urban zones", translating the term as "no-go zones". He later said to Bloomberg there were no places in Europe where authorities were unable to enforce the rule of law, but Bloomberg seems to oversimplify what he has said, which is that the issue is more complex, that there are gradations of danger, that the reality is different for police and other government employees than it is for tourists and other civilians, that he writes the French areas he originally discussed are not "full-fledged" no-go zones, and writes, "However one sums up this complex situation – maybe partial-no-go zones? – they represent a great danger." So in brief it's clear that Bloomberg is citing him for the claim that there are no areas off-limits to police, which is the claim that Bloomberg calls "demonstrably untrue". But again, Gatestone never made that claim, Bloomberg doesn't say Gatestone made that claim, Bloomberg doesn't say Gatestone made false claims. Bloomberg only notes Gatestone published a report referring to some of the same areas. Bloomberg specifically notes Gatestone uses a different definition of the term "no-go zones". Again, in the actual Gatestone report, it refers to them as "so-called no-go zones" and uses "scare quotes" every single time it uses the term. It's not endorsing the use of the term, it's not making any claims that are false, and it's not being accused of anything. Hence "Gatestone has been accused of making false claims about Muslim issues", and ominous and sinister-sounding but entirely uninformative claim, was quite problematic as far as the Bloomberg source goes. Snopes blog post The Snopes article is trickier, though it depends on what it's being used for. Snopes is a novelty website that has made a name for itself debunking urban legends and internet rumours. Lately it has been attempting to rebrand itself as a more general purpose fact checker, but it is, as noted at RSN, still a mom-and-pop operation. It's not a serious entity with serious practices or a serious reputation. The author is a former race and pop culture blogger at The Guardian who has a communications degree from a state college and a one-year "journalism" degree from community college—a course described as preparation for a four-year degree. Respectfully, this guy is not a journalist. What the Snopes post does show, successfully and uncontroversially, is that the Gatestone report got a couple details wrong when discussing an actual incident in which the British government rejected a set of policy recommendations. Snopes seems to vaguely imply, but doesn't actually say, that the Gatestone report called the recommendations mandates. In fact, the report doesn't call them mandates, Snopes's own screenshot shows that the report refers to them as recommendations, not mandates, and the report goes on to say the recommendations were already rejected by the British government. So far, all we've got is an inaccurate headline. It also notes that the original report failed to note that the recommendations were issued by a human rights group, not the EU. Ok, fine. If all we want to say is these two things then I'm not going to the mat over the weak sourcing. Trivial claims can have trivial sourcing. But "Gatestone has been accused of making false claims about Muslim issues" ?? No way—that was inflammatory and misleading, and it had to be removed and BLP says don't bother discussing such removals, just do them. Conclusion This ceased to be a real edit war when Marek stopped reinserting the loaded language about "false claims about Muslims" on April 7, and this block will not assist effective resolution of the content dispute. Factchecker_atyourservice 01:28, 10 April 2017 (UTC)

You have got to be kidding. That's over 2,500 words. You were blocked for a violation of 3RR. Did you violate WP:3RR? If so, the block is legitimate. If not, show that you did not. It is unreasonable and unfair to expect a volunteer admin to read more than 2,500 words to determine this. --Yamla (talk) 00:19, 10 April 2017 (UTC)

Note that I specifically suggest you immediately strike the above unblock request, and then work on something more sensible. I'd suggest a limit of 50 words. Maybe 100 at the outside. You are welcome to ignore my advice. It is just advice, after all. But I came here to review your unblock request and just gave up. --Yamla (talk) 00:22, 10 April 2017 (UTC)

No, I did not violate 3RR, as is addressed in the very first section.

And since this block was issued without giving me any opportunity to respond, and will be part of my permanent "record" and used to justify further blocks, including the comments from the admin essentially saying I engaged in stalking, which would henceforth be cited as a history of stalking, it seems I have no choice but to object in detail.

I don't see how I can make a 50- or 100-word unblock request, and the summary makes it pretty clear that the 3RR exemption is established in the very first section. I've bolded parts of the summary that are most relevant. Other than that I am going to have to rely on the good will of admins such that, if anyone doesn't want to read the whole thing, they'll just ignore it rather than decline, or just grant the request and ignore sections deemed extraneous. Factchecker_atyourservice 00:50, 10 April 2017 (UTC)

• I declined your request and then saw your note above and empathize with your concerns about the long term impact on your record. Regardless, you should consider focusing only on the relevant issues: the block for 3RR and the wikistalking allegation and nothing else in your request. --regentspark (comment) 01:01, 10 April 2017 (UTC)

2nd (shortened) request

This user's unblock request has been reviewed by an administrator, who declined the request. Other administrators may also review this block, but should not override the decision without good reason (see the blocking policy).

Factchecker atyourservice (block log • active blocks • global blocks • contribs • deleted contribs • filter log • creation log • change block settings • unblock • checkuser (log))

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Request reason:

I request an unblock because the reverts complained of were obviously valid BLP reverts—a conjectural paraphrase of one poorly sourced claim that makes trivial claims, and one RS claim that is only tangentially related to the article subject (doesn't mention Gatestone till the 10th paragraph out of 13) and which is not easily paraphrased. Marek insists on the axe-grinding paraphrase that "Gatestone has been accused of making false claims about Muslim issues" which used loaded language not found in any source, and which ignores the fact that only the non-RS says Gatestone said anything "false", and they were really just trivial inaccuracies having nothing actually to do with Muslims. (Others have restored that language, but Marek is really the only editor who has repeatedly re-inserted it, ([10] [11] [12]) while ignoring requests that he make edits or comments about how to make the wording less problematic.) My edits have mostly contained incremental changes, not simply reverts. My approach has been to add more detail about the exactl source claims so a misleading summary isn't needed. Others have backed away from the problematic language and thus my most recent edits left the revisions by User:Vice regent largely unchanged (and I did not touch his lead sentence at all because it removed the "false claims about Muslims" language.) The latest edits were back-and-forth revision between me and Vice Regent, admittedly on issues we disagree on, but not a revert war.

The Wikistalking claims are simply false. I have edited that article and participated a little at Talk article before and I watch it regularly. I made a completely valid edit after noticing that Marek had accused another editor of "straight up dishonest misrepresentation". The other editor hadn't done that, and my edit simply attempted to fix a very marginal grammatical concern that Marek noted that didn't have a snowball's chance in hell of confusing anyone. It was just a coincidence that I happened to be looking at Marek's history to see if he had said anything yet at Gatestone talk. Moreover there was nothing wrong with my edit at that article, no reason whatsoever to object, and in fact Marek didn't object.—so it is hard to understand his complaint that this was "particularly nasty". Note the policy on harassment says "The important component of wikihounding is disruption to another user's own enjoyment of editing, or to the project generally, for no overriding reason." That's not the issue here at all.

Finally, Marek has done similar things to me periodically since I threatened to take him to ANI for relentlessly harassing another user at an article Talk page. In that case, Marek showed up an hour after my accusation to begin reverting me, his edit was hardly even justifiable—removing a trivial self-published claim the article subject made about itself—and he had never edited or discussed anything at that article before. So I wonder if his eagerness to file an ANI case instead of discussing how we could reach compromise language is related to that old grudge. Factchecker_atyourservice 01:22, 10 April 2017 (UTC)

Decline reason:

Procedural decline: the block has expired. Favonian (talk) 21:32, 10 April 2017 (UTC)

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If you want to make any further unblock requests, please read the guide to appealing blocks first, then use the {{unblock}} template again. If you make too many unconvincing or disruptive unblock requests, you may be prevented from editing this page until your block has expired. Do not remove this unblock review while you are blocked.

war

warning - you know the details - Govindaharihari (talk) 18:56, 23 April 2017 (UTC)

BLP violations are supposed to be removed without comment, you should review policy before reverting Factchecker_atyourservice 18:58, 23 April 2017 (UTC)

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Gatestone_Institute&action=history - nothing wp:blp violating there - more - i don't like it Govindaharihari (talk) 19:00, 23 April 2017 (UTC)

Misrepresenting a source is misrepresenting a source. Putting words in a source's mouth is misrepresentation. A contentious accusation at a BLP that is based on source misrepresentation is instantly removable. Factchecker_atyourservice 19:02, 23 April 2017 (UTC)

• Ok, I hear you - if you want to claim wp:blp exemption that is is up to you, personally I disagree with you. Govindaharihari (talk) 19:05, 23 April 2017 (UTC)

You're free, personally, to think that the sky is green. Factchecker_atyourservice 19:06, 23 April 2017 (UTC)

• I am reporting you for violating WP:3RR.VR _talk 19:17, 23 April 2017 (UTC)

Surprise. Factchecker_atyourservice 19:18, 23 April 2017 (UTC)

• • Yes - there is no wp:blp excuse for that edit war. Gatestone Institute is not even a biography of a living person. Govindaharihari (talk) 19:23, 23 April 2017 (UTC)

Thanks for demonstrating ignorance of the subject even as you perform drive-by blind reverts and pile on to a baseless admin complaint. Factchecker_atyourservice 19:25, 23 April 2017 (UTC)

Notice of Edit warring noticeboard discussion

Hello. This message is being sent to inform you that there is currently a discussion involving you at Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Edit warring regarding a possible violation of Wikipedia's policy on edit warring. Thank you. VR _talk 19:33, 23 April 2017 (UTC)

You have been blocked from editing for a period of 72 hours for edit warring and violating the three-revert rule, as you did at Gatestone Institute. Once the block has expired, you are welcome to make useful contributions. If you think there are good reasons why you should be unblocked, you may request an unblock by first reading the guide to appealing blocks, then adding the following text to the bottom of your talk page: {{unblock|reason=Your reason here ~~~~}}.

During a dispute, you should first try to discuss controversial changes and seek consensus. If that proves unsuccessful, you are encouraged to seek dispute resolution, and in some cases it may be appropriate to request page protection.  Lord Roem ~ (talk) 21:13, 23 April 2017 (UTC)

As an addendum, this does not fall under the BLP exception to the 3RR rule, considering the nature of the claim + the source that backs it up. Lord Roem ~ (talk) 21:13, 23 April 2017 (UTC)

@Lord Roem:

WP:VERIFIABILITY reads:

Do not leave unsourced or poorly sourced material in an article if it might damage the reputation of living people or existing groups, and do not move it to the talk page. You should also be aware of how the BLP policy applies to groups.

The BLP group policy, meanwhile, refers primarily to size of group and risk of reputational harm. Gatestone is a small group of named authors and analysts, and corporations don't write articles. People do.

"Poorly sourced" material includes prose that is based on conjectural interpretation of source material.

Moreover, there is no source or group of sources which supports the claim that "Gatestone has been criticized for publishing inaccurate articles".

An article was published containing a somewhat minor error in the headline which was repeated in the body. This single article was later given minor corrections, then later (apparently) removed. This is just editorial housekeeping, as another editor noted at the talk page. Moreover it's one article said to contain inaccuracy, yet the Wiki lead prose says "criticized for publishing inaccurate articles". And on top of that it's just some non-RS blog post by a non-journalist, with credentials about as weak as they come, and there he is making trivial criticisms of the trivial error of one article. (The Snopes article makes one glaring error itself.)

Blowing this up into "has been criticized for publishing inaccurate articles" is gross distortion of source material, and those edit-warring it back into the article know both that it is against consensus and that there is a mediator on the scene offering to help, but they're essentially ignoring (and reverting) him.

And that's to say nothing of the earlier incarnations of this axe-grinding claim, made by the same users both edit-warring this known-to-be-hotly-disputed material back into the article and reporting me for a block:

• ("criticized for publishing articles which were 'demonstrably untrue' and 'false'")

• ("accused of making false claims about Muslims")

• ("accused of being islamophobic, and of promoting falsehoods and paranoia")

Vastly better sourcing, which exists suggests merely that Gatestone uses aggressive spin to promote a particular narrative. For whatever reasons, it is insisted to instead use misleading summary of weak and tangential sourcing to make murky claims that sound worse than anything any actual source has said. Even prose that uses the same sourcing, but eliminates misleading and axe-grinding language, has been repeatedly reverted without discussion without regard to the burden of the proponent. This was a pure attempt at a compromise by myself and others despite obvious WEIGHT concerns, and it was thrown back in our face with this edit-warring nonsense.

In fact this is the only time in a long wiki-career of editing contentious articles I can recall a proponent of a criticism repeatedly refusing to allow a lengthier paraphrase or even a direct quotation of the material—when that was needed to present the material without misleading readers—and it's clear that the only reason for that is because the source material itself doesn't sound as bad as the ridiculous WP summary language that's being concocted.

That's the very essence of SYNTH, using semantic sleight of hand to say things that deviate from sourcing. Factchecker_atyourservice 23:18, 23 April 2017 (UTC)

References

FCAYS, you're free to make a request for unblock, but you plainly violated 3RR and aren't showing any indication you'll act differently in the future. If there's a dispute about sourcing/synthesis, that should be resolved through the dispute resolution process.

You've been blocked for this type of conduct in the past; please do not repeat it going forward. Lord Roem ~ (talk) 23:49, 23 April 2017 (UTC)

@Lord Roem: the violation isn't "clear" unless the exemption doesn't apply.

I also wonder why you didn't sanction the other three for edit-warring regarding material they know lacks consensus, which they've got the WP:BURDEN to achieve in the first place, and at the same time they're ignoring attempts by an outside mediator to facilitate constructive discussion. This could have all been a stable process of discussion, and besides prior attempts by myself and others to rescue this awful sourcing via honest paraphrasing (all rejected with no discussion but plenty of scornful remarks), now a founding member of medcom is on the scene trying to help us hash out this dispute, but Mr. VR isn't playing along and has chosen instead to continue a one-man revert campaign of adding increasingly horrible material that he knows lacks consensus among the others editing that article, and, not finding the necessary sourcing, he's taken to concocting SYNTH to produce the desired result, and putting that SYNTH as fact in WP voice. Policies like BURDEN and the BLP exemption are supposed to keep every POV push from escalating into dispute resolution, or at least designate whose job it is to go to noticeboards seeking input, but ok, clearly I'm the problem here. Factchecker_atyourservice 00:17, 24 April 2017 (UTC)

I just want to point out that what Factchecker said above regarding me is not true.

"they're ignoring attempts by an outside mediator to facilitate constructive discussion". Assuming Factchecker is referring to Ed Poor, that's not true. See sections Talk:Gatestone_Institute#Mediation_or_intervention, Talk:Gatestone_Institute#Is_it_pro-Israel.3F and Talk:Gatestone_Institute#What_it_is_and_what_it_does. In those sections Ed makes a comment and either Snooganssnoogans or I engage in that discussion. Similarly, FCAYS is wrong in saying "Mr. VR isn't playing along" - again, I've been discussing actively on the talk page.

"via honest paraphrasing (all rejected with no discussion but plenty of scornful remarks)". Again, false. Jason presented a paraphrasing that FCAYS liked. I responded to that and then made a counter-proposal.VR _talk 02:28, 24 April 2017 (UTC)

Of course I was talking about Ed Poor and of course you're not playing along. After merely acknowledging his presence you then procceded to edit war with zero attempt to hash out this dispute on the talk page.

Snoogans meanwhile simply engaged in a dumb and pointless rant against Ed on unrelated issues (issuing condescending sourcing demands for utterly trivial and uncontroversial tidbits) and, like you, has made no effort to work towards consensus, but instead, like you, has simply gone on edit warring. He, like you, is one of the editors who has insisted on frankly idiotic and dishonest paraphrasing of this source material, as illustrated by the ridiculous examples of your "editing" posted above.

And yes, of course, countless attempts at honest paraphrasing were reverted by you and others who insisted on dishonest paraphrasing intended to exaggerate one flimsy source and one garbage source, to make the article subject sound bad.

Now please don't ever post on my Talk page again because you are nothing but a troll abusing admin process to try to push a dumb POV into an article. Factchecker_atyourservice 17:21, 24 April 2017 (UTC)

May 2017

You have been blocked from editing for a period of 1 week for abusing multiple accounts. Note that multiple accounts are allowed, but not for illegitimate reasons, and any contributions made while evading blocks or bans may be reverted or deleted. Once the block has expired, you are welcome to make useful contributions. If you think there are good reasons why you should be unblocked, you may request an unblock by first reading the guide to appealing blocks, then adding the following text to the bottom of your talk page: {{unblock|reason=Your reason here ~~~~}}.  CambridgeBayWeather, Uqaqtuq (talk), Sunasuttuq 05:18, 7 May 2017 (UTC)

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The Arbitration Committee is the panel of editors responsible for conducting the Wikipedia arbitration process. It has the authority to impose binding solutions to disputes between editors, primarily for serious conduct disputes the community has been unable to resolve. This includes the authority to impose site bans, topic bans, editing restrictions, and other measures needed to maintain our editing environment. The arbitration policy describes the Committee's roles and responsibilities in greater detail.

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You are banned from my talk page

Per this edit by me, you are banned from my talk page until you have a change of heart. If you decide to become collaborative, rather than combative and insulting, I may change my mind. Since 2003, you are probably only the fourth editor to have received such a ban. This is a sad day, but I don't have to put up with your aggression and abuse. You don't seem to have learned much from your long block log, and I suspect it's going to get longer soon. -- BullRangifer (talk) PingMe 03:55, 28 April 2018 (UTC)

Yes, and if you didn't want me to post to your page after being "banned", you shouldn't have ended with an edit summary containing an insult and an accusation of BATTLE that was nonsensical given prior comments that my response reminded you of.

Actually @BullRangifer: a good chunk of my block log is stuff like a mistaken sock block, and marginal 3RR violations with bad editors, e.g. one or two POV pushers who were later indef-blocked, and calling a couple people names after they exhibited very bad editing conduct. I don't seem to have any problem people who like to accurately reflect high-quality fact sourcing rather than skew low-quality coverage in order to paint a picture that is not found in high-quality sources. Factchecker_atyourservice 04:03, 28 April 2018 (UTC)

Both you and BullRangifer need to stay off of each other's talk pages and refrain from commenting on lack of competence or other perceived personal shortcomings elsewhere. --NeilN ^{talk to me} 04:12, 28 April 2018 (UTC)

Indeed. That was my notification, and I have no intent to engage further. I have extended olive branches and gotten abuse. I'm finished with them. -- BullRangifer (talk) PingMe 04:18, 28 April 2018 (UTC)

Olive branches? Hah! @NeilN: may I write a venomous 40 kilobyte essay about bad editors and the bad badness that makes them bad and let Bull know very clearly that the essay refers to him, right on Jimbo Wales's talk page just in case he or anyone else has any doubt? Factchecker_atyourservice 04:21, 28 April 2018 (UTC)

What part of stay off of BullRangifer's talk page did you not understand? --NeilN ^{talk to me} 01:36, 29 April 2018 (UTC)

@NeilN: wouldn't it be so much more constructive and helpful if you would also order him to delete his personal attacks and not make any more even though it is his personal talk page? Factchecker_atyourservice 01:49, 29 April 2018 (UTC)

If you want the essay gone then take it to WP:MFD. --NeilN ^{talk to me} 01:56, 29 April 2018 (UTC)

@NeilN: I am referring to the fact that he insists on leaving a "parting message" falsely implying I have something wrong with facts or that I dispute something about some Pew Research report (well in line with him falsely claiming I read this or that), also that I have an "obsession" with him, when it's all motivated by his deliberately targeted hostility. I mean hell he writes an essay about me and follows me to Jimbo talk page to slam me, and he calls me obsessed for reacting negatively?

Just do me the solidest personal favor you've ever done anybody on Wikipedia, tell him to delete that last talk page section, and I'll regard you as some kind of magnanimous Wiki god, ok? Factchecker_atyourservice 02:09, 29 April 2018 (UTC)

Factchecker, you seem to be having a hard time understanding Wikipedia policy here. User:NeilN told you, several times, to stay off of BullRangifer’s talk page. BR also told you, repeatedly, to stay off his talk page. It is expected that Wikipedians will abide by that kind of request, see WP:NOBAN. Furthermore, users have the right to remove material from their talk page, and if they do, it should not be restored, see Wikipedia:Don't restore removed comments. But you have continued to post on BR’s page, and you have restored things after he deleted them. This is becoming harassment, and if you do it again, there are likely to be consequences. --MelanieN (talk) 02:29, 29 April 2018 (UTC)

@MelanieN: I am quite well aware of policy including, generally, that DS means if I cause an ouchey anywhere I may be memoryholed, nonetheless I was calling upon NeilN to exercise some judgment, although frankly it's ridiculous one of you doesn't delete that stupid little essay on your own initiative and scold BullRangifer yourselves. Factchecker_atyourservice 02:33, 29 April 2018 (UTC)

It's not the kind of pear that grows on trees, and is typically served at the end of a stick. 😆

@NeilN: leaving aside that I'm getting orders and block threats from you and Bull is getting gentle persuasion with a tone suggesting he's in the right, I might point out to you that "sniping" implies somebody taking a shot at another person from out of nowhere, which is darned close to plain misuse of an English word given that it was in response to both a very long attack essay and a shorter version of that attack essay directed at me on the talk page of the founder of Wikipedia. So if you're looking for a metaphor, look for one that implies retaliation rather than ambush. Factchecker_atyourservice 02:45, 29 April 2018 (UTC)

Admins cannot unilaterally order someone to remove talk page sections and essays that someone else doesn't like if they're not against policies or guidelines. We can, however, enforce requests to stay off of talk pages. --NeilN ^{talk to me} 02:51, 29 April 2018 (UTC)

@NeilN: It is a 40k attack essay directed at me and premised on various moronic fantasies about who I support, what I think, and what I read, which he expressly directed at me (in a summarized form) on Jimbo's talk page. It's also worth pointing out that even if these were actually my views it would be improper for him to attack me for them. Anyway, WP:POLEMIC forbids "statements attacking or vilifying groups of editors" so even if it weren't personally directed at me, it's a violation. Factchecker_atyourservice 03:01, 29 April 2018 (UTC)

Again, WP:MFD. --NeilN ^{talk to me} 03:05, 29 April 2018 (UTC)

Yes Neil, I heard you the first time and I acknowledge that you decline my invitation to exercise admin discretion by deleting the obvious violation on your own initiative—rather than making me go to the trouble of nominating it and then enduring further abuse during the deletion "arguments", from other editors who share Bull's views that scum like me don't belong on Wikipedia. Factchecker_atyourservice 03:23, 29 April 2018 (UTC)

"stifle expression of views", please, it is pure fiction that he uses to paper over trying to shut down actual RS discussion while actively pretending that there is some legitimate basis for doing so. He shouts INFOWARS to shut up people who are not talking about infowars. Moreover, he barked the same little speech directly at me on Jimbo talk page. It's targeted and it's dumb.

If you want the deletion to be done under discretionary sanctions then open a request at WP:AE. There, a deletion does not require a consensus among editors for an admin to act. --NeilN ^{talk to me} 13:47, 29 April 2018 (UTC)

@BullRangifer: The pretense that I'm claiming it's about me because I "self-identify with some of the traits and behaviors mentioned", rather than because you fucking quoted it at me on Jimbo's talk page, is dumb. It's these continued PAs that explain why I am continuing to respond to you. Factchecker_atyourservice 03:29, 29 April 2018 (UTC) @BullRangifer: "victim-blaming"? That's dumb. Don't write moronic, monumentally dishonest attack essays and then try to foist them onto people who are vastly smarter than you are. Factchecker_atyourservice 17:12, 29 April 2018 (UTC)

Center for Immigration Studies

Your recent editing history at Center for Immigration Studies shows that you are currently engaged in an edit war. To resolve the content dispute, please do not revert or change the edits of others when you are reverted. Instead of reverting, please use the talk page to work toward making a version that represents consensus among editors. The best practice at this stage is to discuss, not edit-war. See BRD for how this is done. If discussions reach an impasse, you can then post a request for help at a relevant noticeboard or seek dispute resolution. In some cases, you may wish to request temporary page protection.

Being involved in an edit war can result in your being blocked from editing—especially if you violate the three-revert rule, which states that an editor must not perform more than three reverts on a single page within a 24-hour period. Undoing another editor's work—whether in whole or in part, whether involving the same or different material each time—counts as a revert. Also keep in mind that while violating the three-revert rule often leads to a block, you can still be blocked for edit warring—even if you don't violate the three-revert rule—should your behavior indicate that you intend to continue reverting repeatedly. ~Oshwah~^{(talk) (contribs)} 08:00, 6 April 2018 (UTC)

Just an FYI....

You've been mentioned as being uncivil. I pinged you at the discussion and now I'm posting here so you'll be aware of what's going on. I think you've helped motivate some positive changes at the article so please be cautious about how you frame your responses because there is a civility restriction on the TP of Trump-Russia dossier. ^{Atsme📞📧} 23:57, 9 April 2018 (UTC)

Question for you...do you understand what I'm saying in this diff? ^{Atsme📞📧} 11:37, 13 April 2018 (UTC)

@Atsme: Of course, and I don't see how it could escape them that the whole issue was rendered moot when the GOP guy explicitly said the same thing and thus it was no longer relevant to talk about whether a journalist had been correctly interpreting vague media reports. Meanwhile the way causation actually works IRL, if the warrant would not have issued but for the dossier, or more loosely, if the dossier was a substantial factor in bringing about the warrant, then it was indeed "all based on the dossier". Factchecker_atyourservice 04:07, 27 April 2018 (UTC)

April 2018

Please stop attacking other editors, as you did on Talk:Trump–Russia dossier. If you continue, you may be blocked from editing. Comment on content, not on other contributors or people. I am merely confirming what has been pointed out by others. Thank you. Drmies (talk) 16:42, 27 April 2018 (UTC)

Are you kidding, is this a joke User:Drmies? My comment was asking another user to STOP talking about other users, which is practically all he does. Factchecker_atyourservice 16:56, 27 April 2018 (UTC)

No, I'm not kidding. No, that's not what your comment entailed. Drmies (talk) 17:02, 27 April 2018 (UTC)

It's exactly what my comment entailed. Factchecker_atyourservice 17:07, 27 April 2018 (UTC)

"Nothing burger"

Hi, I saw your comment on another user's Talk page: Has any such editor been active on the talk page in the last 30 days? The answer is "Yes". I recall, for example, that the Trump campaign-Russian lawyer meeting was described on Wiki by several editors as a "nothing burger" last summer, a Donald Trump Jr. / Fox News talking point at that time: Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Trump Campaign—Russian meeting. Compare with: GNews scan. So not much has changed and such editors continue to edit articles related to Trump. K.e.coffman (talk) 21:32, 27 April 2018 (UTC)

@K.e.coffman: not to get hypertechnical, but July 2017 is not within the last 30 days. Factchecker_atyourservice 01:11, 28 April 2018 (UTC)

Fruit-based PA

@Atsme: please strike that pear as untrue, else I'll see you at ANI. Factchecker_atyourservice 22:27, 29 April 2018 (UTC)

Well I guess it's not actually a fruit nonetheless I think ANI will need to be consulted. Factchecker_atyourservice 22:29, 29 April 2018 (UTC)

I can see now that this whole discussion was fruitless. ^{Atsme📞📧} 22:49, 29 April 2018 (UTC)

It was a joke about being silenced - did you not get it? ^{Atsme📞📧} 22:31, 29 April 2018 (UTC)

I did not get it. I just now looked up what that thing was—I trust you have a totally innocent reason for knowing about such things :D Factchecker_atyourservice 22:34, 29 April 2018 (UTC)

My apologies if you took it as PA. I'll remove it if you like...but it was more along the line of User:EEng#Alle-wiki-gory. ^{Atsme📞📧} 22:37, 29 April 2018 (UTC)

Oh dear, this has all gone wrong. No. I thought the photo was of a pear and so the "fruit based PA" line was a joke. Factchecker_atyourservice 22:41, 29 April 2018 (UTC)

It usually takes a few rounds to get in sync. 😂 If you're headed over to EEng's page, it may be a while before you get back. ^{Atsme📞📧} 22:47, 29 April 2018 (UTC)

• Since I was pinged here I'll just say that I'm a fruit and none of this bothers me at all. EEng 22:48, 29 April 2018 (UTC)

I have been totally corrupted by Harvard alumni. ^{Atsme📞📧} 22:50, 29 April 2018 (UTC)

Ah, it's going more wrong. Well @EEng: I didn't mean "fruit" in the sense you possibly may have meant, not that there's anything wrong with that, I thought the point of the photo was to call me a "prickly pear" notwithstanding the fact that that is a kind of cactus. Hence the fruit-based "PA" that I was prickly—which I am definitely NOT and I don't know where someone would get that idea. Factchecker_atyourservice 22:54, 29 April 2018 (UTC)

I don't know what you're referring to, but I just meant that I used to work with a nice lady who said I was "a peach". EEng 02:42, 30 April 2018 (UTC)

Awww...now ain't that peachy?! <--- Ah swar, it was Martinevans123 made me do it!! He corrupted me with all the links to shameless u-tube videos he posts on EEng's page! ^{Atsme📞📧} 02:58, 30 April 2018 (UTC)

C'mon Facty, dude. Just man up and grow a pear. Martinevans123 (talk) 07:39, 30 April 2018 (UTC)

I don't give a fig about pears. Worst fruit of all. Nobody likes 'em. That's what people are saying, believe me. Factchecker_atyourservice 20:39, 30 April 2018 (UTC)

Ok...you asked for it...

	How To Avoid Pricks
	When you land in a place that is prickly at best, And feathers get ruffled – you've disturbed someone's nest; Be cautious when offering friendly advice, Lest you suddenly find your two orbs in a vise. Lessons are learned, but to do so takes practice, To avoid getting pricked when you land on a cactus. Atsme📞📧 23:07, 29 April 2018 (UTC)

PAs cut right to the core.

There! That is the fruit-based technically-edible-but-not-very-palatable-and-possibly-quite-painful-flowering-plant-based PA I was looking for.

Now, please strike it before I haul you off to ANI. Factchecker_atyourservice 23:11, 29 April 2018 (UTC)

Be mindful that only a few user pages have been adorned with such creative art...by the artist herself. You are one of the special few - enjoy it. ^{Atsme📞📧} 23:30, 29 April 2018 (UTC)

I don't deserve this kind of herbal abuse. Factchecker_atyourservice 21:28, 30 April 2018 (UTC)

Facty, I hate to say it, but you're being a bit of a fructard. Martinevans123 (talk) 21:34, 30 April 2018 (UTC)

Now every mandarin Wiki-crat on the 'pedia is showing up to lecture me, like I'm some kind of bad apple... Factchecker_atyourservice 21:49, 30 April 2018 (UTC)

😂 - right to the core...^{Atsme📞📧} 22:57, 30 April 2018 (UTC)

Now, now, Atsme, there's no need to get fruity. I think it's time to put this one to bed. King of the Pippins 123 (talk) 14:52, 01 May 2018 (UTC)

That sounds so final. I'd rather send it to the strawberry fields, temporarily. Factchecker_atyourservice 15:30, 1 May 2018 (UTC)

"No one I think is in my tree, I mean it must be high or low." Martinevans123 (talk) 15:50, 1 May 2018 (UTC)

I don't have a fruity Gitmo joke, but this jam is worth preserves'ing and I admit I'm more than a little jelly.

Also FWIW I just read your edit summaries and "slack-ma-girdle" sounds like a homemade laxative. Factchecker_atyourservice 15:59, 1 May 2018 (UTC)

Altering replies

You should not alter a talk page reply after it has been replied to As you did here [[13]].Slatersteven (talk) 18:21, 1 May 2018 (UTC)

@Slatersteven: serious question, why? I made a snarky remark and dialed it back. Of course you've heard of the BBC. Factchecker_atyourservice 18:31, 1 May 2018 (UTC)

Because doing so can be seen as an attempt to make it look like I was strawmaning by refuting something you had never said.Slatersteven (talk) 19:17, 1 May 2018 (UTC)

Nonsense. How? Factchecker_atyourservice 19:26, 1 May 2018 (UTC)

For the record, Slatersteven is correct, though I'll admit I'm bad at this. Drmies (talk) 21:23, 1 May 2018 (UTC)

Here's a pre-prepared alternative I made earlier.. (I'll probably just come back and remove it later). Enjoy. Martinevans123 (talk) 21:32, 1 May 2018 (UTC)

Well for illustration, say I deleted my last comment.

You should not alter a talk page reply after it has been replied to As you did here [[14]]. (me)

serious question, why? I made a snarky remark and dialed it back. Of course you've heard of the BBC.

Nonsense. How? (you)

How do you think your reply might read to a reader ho had not seen my original post?Slatersteven (talk) 22:35, 1 May 2018 (UTC)

Oh my! What reader ho are you referring to, Slatersteven? No - don't answer that question...just alter your comment so as not to create a stir. ^{Atsme📞📧} 22:53, 1 May 2018 (UTC)

All, I generally get the point of not altering something that has been replied to but I've always considered that to refer to something that had some meaningful bearing on some salient point. I see that to that end, I could have just only the snarky part itself, i.e. leaving "that's BBC" but removing "you have heard of that right" and so far as that goes, it's a clear error and I apologize. I do also realize striking out exists but in the same vein, I only considered that it would be necessary to do that if the substance of the removed material would have had some bearing on the other user's reply, which I didn't think it did and still don't really see how it does.

I said, in essence, let's talk about one source at a time and then gave a brief excerpt and we were talking about just that one thing, so irrespective of who the publisher was, I don't see how my subsequent edit could have engendered any confusion at all, let alone make Slater's comment appear straw mannish. So I am sorry for the misunderstanding and will be more careful about striking out instead of editing but frankly I don't see the big deal.

And not to be pedantic but we were just getting around to parsing what "no clear-cut evidence of 'collusion' has been unearthed" means, and that was only source 1 in a list of 4 and now we've gone around in circles for quite some time discussing the nuances of a trivial editing infraction on my part. Factchecker_atyourservice 00:57, 2 May 2018 (UTC)

WP:NPA

Claiming without any evidence on article talk page that another contributor is not competent [15] (when he is very much competent on this subject) is an WP:NPA problem on your part. Please do not do it again. My very best wishes (talk) 14:20, 2 May 2018 (UTC)

"Without evidence" other than showing the obvious wrongness by quoting the policy back to him and explaining why it was wrong? Factchecker_atyourservice 14:23, 2 May 2018 (UTC)

Hence you insist that your comment was fine? My very best wishes (talk) 14:45, 2 May 2018 (UTC)

Was it not fine for some reason? Factchecker_atyourservice 14:46, 2 May 2018 (UTC)

No, your edit was an obvious WP:NPA violation for two reasons. First, you falsely accused another contributor of "incompetence" simply because he cited a book by Luke Harding that qualify as secondary RS. Second, you moved (that is modified) my comment on the page, even after receiving a warning about such things on your talk page. My very best wishes (talk) 15:28, 2 May 2018 (UTC)

It was a "personal attack" to add a colon ":" to your comment to thread it one level deeper? That's downright insane. Don't post on my talk page again. Factchecker_atyourservice 15:31, 2 May 2018 (UTC)

In my opinion, it was worse than personal attack. By moving my comment you misrepresented it as if I was responding to your comment that did not exist at the time of my response. This is unacceptable.My very best wishes (talk) 15:34, 2 May 2018 (UTC)

Nobody thought you were replying to my comment that did not exist at the time of your response. I don't think it was likely anyone would have thought you were replying to my comment that did not exist at the time of your response. Moreover calling this a "personal attack" is nonsensical, and your own bad understanding of WP policies and purposes does far more damage than I ever could by editing an inconsequential formatting character into your comment.

Now, stop talking pls thx Factchecker_atyourservice 15:43, 2 May 2018 (UTC)

DS violations

This your edit simultaneously violated two editing restrictions on the page. First, you violated 1RR restriction. Second, you violated "consensus require" restriction. This text was on the page for a long time [16]. My very best wishes (talk) 14:45, 2 May 2018 (UTC)

That is kind of a silly argument to make when the justification for restoring it in the first place was "no consensus" and the issue warranting removal is a sub-policy of WP:V. Factchecker_atyourservice 14:53, 2 May 2018 (UTC)

I reported this to an administrator who is currently active on WP:DS [17]. Welcome to explain your behavior if you wish. My very best wishes (talk) 15:01, 2 May 2018 (UTC)

I've never thought much of using admin accusations and sanctions to avoid the substance of a content dispute, but it is your Wiki-right. Factchecker_atyourservice 15:02, 2 May 2018 (UTC)

I am sorry, but your comments, such as that one have absolutely nothing to do with content. In is incredible that you continue to defend such your comments. My very best wishes (talk) 15:17, 2 May 2018 (UTC)

This is silly. I didn't say that comment had anything to do with content, did I? Go talk at NeilN please. Factchecker_atyourservice 15:19, 2 May 2018 (UTC)

Hi FCAYS (sorry if you don't like that acronym, it's just easier to type). We haven't met yet but I've observed some of your editing and really appreciate the work you're doing. You seem to be very neutral and primarily interested in the facts. That being said I have seen people get dragged off to the "drama boards" for some really small things, and from what I have seen neutral editors seem to get less leeway than editors with specific political leanings in a specific direction. As I'm sure you know that dossier page is under arbitration remedies, so would you mind if I changed the title of the section you recently started, re: the synth issues? I would like to help improve that page but right now the temperature is just so high. If you would rather just tell me to bugger off then I completely understand that as well. Just a friendly introduction and small suggestion and offer. Mr. Daniel Plainview (talk) 20:32, 2 May 2018 (UTC)

@Mr. Daniel Plainview: Sure and thanks for the intervention. It seemed accurate enough to me, but I was mad. Factchecker_atyourservice 20:47, 2 May 2018 (UTC)