User:Aucaman/sandbox

Statement by User:Aucaman

Note: My older statement is here. The one you're reading is more accurate.

I started editing Wikipedia on Oct. 24, 2005. In the first three months I was involved in editing various controversial articles, but you cannot find anyone complaining about my work.

Sometime in early February, I came across the Kurdish people article. This is how I found the page: [1]. Apparently a group of users (namely, Manik666, Khoikhoi, and SouthernComfort) were pushing hard to label Kurds "Iranian" in the first line of the article and downplay any ethnic/cultural similarity with other groups.[2] The page was protected, and I used the opportunity to work out a compromise.[3] The page was already protected in their favor, so they saw no need to compromise. User:69.196.139.250's behavior seemed the most remarkable. He repeatedly copy-pasted various unsigned (usually bold-faced/capitalized) messages demonizing the other side and their "anti-Iranian agenda".[4][5] This is the same user as Manik666.

Around the same time, I got involved in the Persian people article. There was already a dispute in place, but there was very little discussion taking place.[6] I myself took issue with the use of the term "Aryan" as a marker for some unknown race of which Persians were claimed to be descended.[7] My edit was sitting there for 2 weeks until some anon reverted it.[8] This anon would later turn out to be ManiF.[9] My subsequent attempts to change the wording of the sentence were immediately reverted by ManiF.[10] Seeing how things were not working out, I let ManiF keep his version but asked for a dispute tag to be put in the section until the dispute is resolved.[11] ManiF removed the dispute tag in less than 30 minutes and started accusing me of racism, propagating false information, and others.[12][13][14] He then made some weird compromise offer, and threatened to disrupt other articles if I didn't take back my concerns.[15][16] Since I'd never been in a situation like this, following the vandalism article ("As a general rule, do not remove other people's dispute tags twice during a 24 hour period."), I assumed the other side's edits to be vandalism. Probably due to some meatpuppetry/sockpuppetry campaign by ManiF, there was now an influx of various anon users constantly taking off the dispute tag, which led to the page being protected.[17] ManiF himself violated 3RR long before I did (see context); at least I believed I was reverting vandalism. This is also about when User:Kashk and User:Zmmz started joining the discussions.

Following the page's protection, there was a campaign of false warnings and harassment, mostly by ManiF and Kashk, but also by some anons.([18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25] among others.) Zmmz and Kashk declared me to be illogical and went on to setup an RfC in order to "ban" me.[26] Zmmz and ManiF together spammed some 20+ users asking them to "vote" on the RfC. Zmmz also started intervening wherever he saw my name, constantly demonizing me by referring to the RfC.[27] At some point I couldn't help but to respond to one of the personal attacks.[28] Although I took off the response within minutes and apologized for it, Kashk and Zmmz continued their campaign of harassment - this time pointing to my "personal attacks" record. At some point I brought this up with the admins in which case both Kashk and Zmmz were warned. But Zmmz continued to harass me (not even sparing my personal user page [29]) until he was blocked for it.[30]

It now appears that ManiF, Zmmz, and Kashk are part of a POV-pushing team involving users Zereshk, SouthernComfort, and Khoikhoi. They persistently try to overrepresent Iranian contributions to the world at the expense of other groups. This spans across some 40+ articles and involves many other users (most of whom are probably not aware of this arbitration). A good list of articles has been provided by Zereshk himself when recuiting for users on the Farsi Wikipedia: [31]. I believe such actions lead to the disruption and fractionalizing of Wikipedia and directly undermine its credibility as a neutral source of information. Aucaman^Talk 00:10, 1 May 2006 (UTC)