Wikipedia:Requests for arbitration/Silverback

Case Opened on 14:23, 1 November 2005 (UTC)

Case Closed on 05:46, 28 November 2005 (UTC)

Please do not edit this page directly unless you wish to become a participant in this request. (All participants are subject to Arbitration Committee decisions, and the ArbCom will consider each participant's role in the dispute.) Comments are very welcome on the Talk page, and will be read, in full. Evidence, no matter who can provide it, is very welcome at /Evidence. Evidence is more useful than comments.

Arbitrators will be working on evidence and suggesting proposed decisions at /Workshop and voting on proposed decisions at /Proposed decision.

Involved parties

172 (talk · contribs) -- Concern over Silverback's conduct related to the deletion of Categories:Totalitarian dictators, Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda, and his own RfC

Commodore Sloat (talk · contribs) -- Concern over Silverback's conduct related to Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda

Silverback (talk · contribs)

Statement by party 1

Please limit your statement to 500 words

Statement by 172

For further details see Wikipedia:Requests for comment/Silverback.

In the past several weeks, Silverback has been exceedingly argumentative on talk pages. He has made it tedious to keep arguing with him, as he offers weak (but vehement) defenses in talk that usually ignore the overwhelming evidence brought to his attention by other editors.

Silverback has repeatedly engaged in revert wars and disruptive arguments on talk pages while ignoring the three revert rule, Wikipedia:Etiquette, Wikipedia:Assume good faith, Wikipedia:Harassment, and Wikipedia:Don't disrupt Wikipedia to make a point. Most disruptively, he insults fellow editors who disagree with his opinions, often implying that they are "immoral," "unethical," or engaging in "abuses of power" with no basis, and drags fellow editors into endless circular arguments on Talk pages, most notably over his personal issues with other editors. Silverback generally does not play well with others. Lately I have been his principal target of harassment.

Each day Silverback's denouncements of me on pages completely unrelated to my edits become more extreme. His pattern personal attacks and incivility was clearly articulated by User:Bishonen, who relayed to Silverback on 00:12, 15 October 2005, "You've made it clear that you dislike not only his editing, but his ideology, himself, and what you guess or believe about his private life. So what, really? You're an experienced editor, you know Wikipedia is no place for airing opinions about those things. "Comment on content, not on the contributor." [1] When the advise apparently fell on deaf ears, Bishonen stated to Silverback on 00:12, 15 October 2005, "I don't know him, but I don't see anything in your specific accusations to warrant any attacks on his 'character' whatsoever. I don't see why he should put up with continuous abuse from you, either. Just stop it." [2] That comment was made before some of Silverback's most egregious behavior on his own RfC.

Concurrently, Silverback remains involved in a POV war on pages unrelated to the Categroy:Totalitarian dictators dispute. On 18:08, 13 October 2005, Csloat noted on that his conduct has been shown similar patterns on Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda: "[H]e's doing the same sort of thing on Talk:Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda and has been for several weeks now. It's tedious to keep arguing with him and he steamrolls edits of the page itself (and reversions) with deceptive edit summaries, offering weak (but vehement) defenses in talk that usually ignore the most significant edits he makes. [3]

While a long-term ban might not be in order, Silverback is in clear need of a personal attack probation. His behavior with respect to me has also been extreme enough to warrant the kinds of restrictions that have been applied to Everyking with respect to Snowspinner.

Statement by csloat

For a while Silverback has constantly steamrolled the page Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda with edits that have been refuted in talk. He is rude, disruptive, and refuses to engage in discussion about it; he simply makes his points in an imperial manner and makes his changes. When I or others resist this and present further arguments in talk he simply repeats his position and then engages in personal attacks. He reverts his changes - frequently violating the 3RR, and even once being blocked for it - in spite of arguments against those changes. He did the same to 2003 invasion of Iraq as well. He sometimes makes major changes including massive deletions in order to make a point rather than in order to improve the entry. He also utilizes deceptive edit summaries -- for example he will make a minor grammatical correction along with a major substantive change, while his edit summary will only account for the grammatical correction. When this is pointed out in talk he will defend himself on the grammatical correction but pretend he doesn't know what you mean about the major substantive change. This behavior is annoying and disruptive and makes it impossible to assume good faith. I have elaborated on this in the RfC but will outline just a few pieces of evidence of his conduct here:

1. here is an example of deceptive edit summaries -- summary states that "the most recently discussed quote appears to be properly attributed" yet the dispute there was not about attribution of the quote at all, but its propriety to a particular section of the article. More recently, see this edit and this one and note the edit summaries -- in both cases he deceptively only addresses one word of the article in his edit summaries, while his edits delete the information in a whole sentence. My reversions of those edits point this out in the summaries and I discussed this in talk at this location.
2. here the user has made many reversions and deletions on this page with cryptic explanations at best. The example linked here shows him blanking some 80% of the page, including most of the relevant information, in order to make some kind of point about the significance of Able Danger. He's been pushing this point over and over, despite it being refuted, and sometimes engages in bizarre edits of unrelated material in order to make a point. See his edit summaries in for October 3-5 along with the edits (and reversions by myself and others) for more evidence of this sort of behavior.
3. 2003 Invasion of Iraq: Here he makes a revert to an earlier version, eliminating rewrites that had been discussed and justified in talk (see here) as a result of an argument between myself and another user. Silverback stepped into this debate by reverting to the other user without addressing these arguments.
4. His personal attacks are scattered throughout the talk page of Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda and the Archive of that discussion page; see for example this section or this one or my attempts to address his deceptive edit summaries here.
5. (New example added 10/22/05):Silverback has already been taken to task by others for removing their words on discussion pages as well as on the RfC page. I noticed he did this to my response to him on the RfC page recently in order to make it seem like I had not responded to him and that I was responding to another user. Here he deleted my comments and then he "restored" them here, in a place where they do not make any sense and where I seem to be responding to another user's comments (I notice he specifically chose a user who had proposed an "agreement" which my first sentence seems to refer to after Silverback's changes). This is an obvious attempt to undermine the RfC process by creating confusion and by making it seem as if his "agreement" proposal was ignored.--csloat 20:12, 22 October 2005 (UTC)

Addendum to statement by csloat

Silverback alleges above that I do not understand the 3RR and then accuses me of deception. I linked my entry on the 3RR page through diffs; no attempt was made to hide the fact that Silverback and I had an exchange on that page that followed. As you can see from the exchange, Silverback asserts that he did not violate the 3RR but he is simply wrong. What he did was revert with a minor change in order to try to skate around the 3RR, but substantively his change was still a reversion (this was noted by an admin the previous time he violated the 3RR as he made roughly the same argument there; this time he added the bizarre comment that the 3RR process was "immoral" but otherwise made the same claim). Nevertheless, this is only one of the many problems with his conduct I noted above. User 172 and I did not sign this page due to violations of the 3RR; we did so because of larger problems with this user's conduct on these pages. His 3RR violations were a symptom of these problems, not the problem itself. A much bigger problem is his frequent use of personal attacks to substitute for argument and discussion, and that problem is displayed in his addendum above -- e.g. dismissing my attempts to resolve the issue by commenting on his user talk page (as is wikipedia policy) by calling those attempts "nothing more than self serving mischaracterizations" -- this is sheer namecalling that he never backs up with any evidence or analysis of the claims at issue. He then discusses the 2003 invasion of Iraq edits I linked above (ignoring many of the other examples I offered, as per his usual style) and claims that my edits were some sort of violation of consensus. Yet he should be well aware that the issue there was not consensus - Wikipedia editors are encouraged to "be bold." What I did was make substantive changes to the page and justify each of those changes with an elaborate explanation that can be found in this diff which I also linked above. Silverback went in and reverted my changes without so much as a comment on the arguments I developed on that talk page. The issue is not the number of times he reverts a page; the issue is the way he steamrolls these edits while paying no attention whatsoever to the arguments made justifying alternative wordings.--csloat 01:53, 20 October 2005 (UTC)

Statement by party 2

Please limit your statement to 500 words

Statement by Silverback

It should be noted that User:Redwolf24 has already unilaterally handled this "dispute" by blocking Silverback for 24 hours, essentially preempting action by the ARBCOM. See the RfC/Silverback for details.

172 has made no attempt to settle this dispute. I've made offers which he has refused or ignored. He started the RfC/user:Silverback, and that is not complete, in fact, he has had his say, and I am only beginning mine. But he didn't like what I was writing. So he is trying to shortcut the process again. He refused mediation, he thinks we are irreconcilable.

The strange thing: This is not even an active dispute. It was over once I lost the vote for undelete. I had no intention of engaging 172 on anything. We only got into this because of his misconduct on the vote for deletion of Category:Totalitarian dictator. And I have documented my decision to let that slide, until 172 also went after the article by the same name, and the previous deletion caused by his misconduct was being used as a speedy delete excuse. I consider the whole affair over. And I don't think anything will ever happen between us again, unless he interferes with the operation of the system again. I believe that those who abuse the system should exposed. I guess if the arbcom takes this up, it should consider some sanction against 172, but I am not seeking that, although his unwillingness to participate in the dispute resolution process that he felt a need to initiate is frustrating.

I recommend against taking this up. And if 172 wants to drop the RfC, I am willing to drop that too.--Silverback 08:39, 19 October 2005 (UTC)

addition to Statement by Silverback

Csloat's "pleas" on my talk page are nothing more than self serving mischaracterizations of what was going on. His report of the alleged 3RR violation that no admin has commented on, was deceptively reported to you above. Perhaps the reason that no admin acted is that they had the assistance of my responses to the report, which csloat chose not to include in his link. [4]. It wasn't a 3RR violation, and csloat's failure to be able to understand that is probably more responsible for his frustration than anything I a have done. These two are trying to short circuit the dispute resolution process, and have never tried to resolve the same dispute (their disputes are different) by doing anything other than normal editing in response.

In response to csloat's "2003 invasion of iraq" allegation against me of a single revert (yes, one) is that the agreement he reached with one other editor on that page means nothing. That page needs many more for a true consensus. Csloat is used to a much less busy page, spending most of his time guarding his "Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda" territory.

So, if they are jumping ahead to the arbitration case, what is the status of the still only partially worked RfC? Is it officially still active pending a possible acceptance of this for arbitration? Or does their request for arb represent an abandonment of the RfC? --Silverback 00:08, 20 October 2005 (UTC)

Preliminary decisions

Arbitrators' opinions on hearing this matter (5/0/1/0)

• Recuse Fred Bauder 13:07, 19 October 2005 (UTC)
• Accept. →Raul654 23:25, 19 October 2005 (UTC)
• Accept. James F. (talk) 17:27, 20 October 2005 (UTC)
• Accept. Kelly Martin 20:16, 20 October 2005 (UTC)
• Accept ➥the Epopt 14:06, 21 October 2005 (UTC)
• Accept Jayjg ^(talk) 00:30, 31 October 2005 (UTC)

Final decision

Principles

No personal attacks

1) Wikipedia:No personal attacks

Passed 6-0

Revert warring considered harmful

2) Revert warring is considered harmful - Wikipedia:Revert

Passed 6-0

Assume good faith

3) Wikipedia:Assume good faith

Passed 6-0

Findings of fact

Personal attacks by Silverback

1) Silverback has repeatedly made personal attacks and other derogatory comments about 172. [5]

Passed 6-0

Edit warring

2) Silverback has edit warred on numerous articles, including Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda, 2003 Invasion of Iraq, where his conduct has been accurately characterized as "abrasive"

Passed 6-0

Remedies

Personal attack parole

1) Silverback is placed on standard personal attack parole for six months. If he makes any edits which are judged by any administrator to be personal attacks, then he shall be temp-banned for a short time of up to one week.

Passed 6-0

Revert limitation

2) Silverback is limited to one revert per article, per week. If he should exceed this, he may be blocked for a short time, up to three days.

Passed 6-0