[WikiEN-l] threats and abuse from IP user

Sun Aug 24 00:25:18 UTC 2003

>Toby wrote:
>Furthermore, you apparently protected the page to win an edit war
>that you were taking place in.

I did nothing of the sort and how dare you suggest it. An anonymous user 
appeared and added in highly POV rascist material into a page. The material 
could not be substantiated and the language used suggested it was someone 
trying in a very blatent way to POV the article. I reverted the addition and 
notified those who had worked on the article as I suspected they might be 
better placed to deal with the issue. The user in question proceeded to 
re-insert his anti-zionist rant and verbally abuse everyone else who touched 
it. I checked his list of contributions to try to ascertain whether this was 
a rather naive newbie with a problem of grasping NPOV, or a vandal. (The 
page in question had been subject to nakedly sectarian vandalism for a 
while.) All the evidence I could find was of a user who had made other 
contributions that had been seen as vandalism and had been reverted 
elsewhere. When he continued abusing other users, in the belief that he was 
a vandal I blocked him.

He then came back as a new IP added in the same POV stuff and called people 
''fucking morons'', ''fucking hypocrites, etc

Among his talk page comments were

<Sarcasm> Yes, I'll admit it: everyone here on Wikipedia is a paid 
propogandist for the worldwise Zionist colonialist genocidal conspiracy! 
That's why we have articles on Israeli terrorism and Deir Yassin massacre, 
and why the Palestinian page doesn't even *contain* the words "terror" or 
"terrorist" or "terrorism". </Sarcasm>  Look, there are lots of facts in the 
world. It's a fact that the Israelis assassinated Muhammad Sadr, the Islamic 
Jihad leader in Hebron. It's a fact that afte that, two Palestinian militant 
groups, Islamic Jihad and Hamas, claimed responsibility for a deliberate 
attack on a civililan bus that killed quite a few people, including many 
children. It's a fact that the Israelis then killed Abu Shanab, one of the 
founders of Hamas, in the Gaza strip.

I have disagreed with some users on the page who have been pushing a less 
than NPOV pro-Israel stance. I reverted and requested the banning of a user 
who inserted rascist anti-Israel attacks all over wiki. I have regularly 
reworded mentions of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict on the current events 
page to remove one-sided comments from either side and ensure equality of 
language and interpretation. I was NOT involved in an edit war with this IP 
contributor. I was simply doing what I was doing with /everyone else/, 
ensuring that NPOV standards were followed. The behaviour and threats of the 
user in question pretty much shows that he was not some poor newbie wrongly 
treated but someone determined to vandalise articles.

/If/ I had abused my sysop powers to 'win' against an opponent, I would not 
have drawn attention to the fact by contacting other users, by putting a 
note on the Vandalism page and sent a note about it around on the wiki list, 
would I?

I stand over my decisions and resent your gross and dishonest 
misrepresention of them.

JT

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