[WikiEN-l] Re: [Wikipedia-l] Eric's abuse of his sysop powers

Mon Oct 20 20:43:00 UTC 2003

James-

this does not belong on wikipedia-l. I have therefore copied it to
wikien-l, and all replies should go there.

1) There was an edit war on the "Mother Teresa" page after you moved away  
about 20K of text to a separate "criticism" page in clear violation of our  
neutrality policy, which states that no preference should be given to any  
side.

2) I have warned you repeatedly not to make any substantial changes to the  
article while the major issue of whether the text was to be moved to a  
separate page was not settled. You ignored these warnings and pushed  
forward to edit the text, including your movement of 20K of text to a  
separate page, and complain that these edits were reverted together. This  
is simply disingenuous and you know it.

3) A sysop protected the page in an attempt to cool down the edit war.  
This was a largely symbolic gesture since we are both sysops, but we chose  
not to edit the page while it was protected. However, this precluded non- 
sysops who had announced that they wanted to make edits to the page from  
doing so. To prevent this unfortunate situation, I unprotected the page  
with the comment:

        "removing protection for now (I was involved so I won't edit for
         another few hours if Jtdirl won't, but others should be able to)"

I did not edit the page for the next few hours and nor did you, the edit  
war seems to be over and I considered the matter settled. To call an  
unprotection to allow *others*, non-sysops, to continue editing the page  
while I myself refrained from doing so an abuse of sysop power is, again,   
very disingenuous.

The important facts in this matter are this:

You moved virtually all the criticisms of Mother Teresa to a separate page  
without discussing this on the talk page first. Three users (myself, Bryan  
and Jiang) disagreed with this. I and Bryan Derksen reverted your changes.  
It might be argued that it would have been "wiser" to just wait a day or  
two and then address the matter again, but that is clearly wrong -- had we  
done so, you would have reorganized the entire article(s) according to  
your idea of NPOV, making it very difficult to reach any kind of consensus  
on the matter.

In addition to that, you continue to play your usual games, which consist  
of
- personal attacks (always singling out one contributor, even though  
several users have expressed disagreement with your actions)
- false accusations of abusive behavior
- disingenuous tactics like your behavior in the edit war, piling changes  
upon changes to bully your way through
- making false claims (e.g. repeatedly claiming that the criticism section  
was merely based on "a single TV show", whereas I have shown you the  
multitude of sources on which it was based, including several books and  
newspaper articles and an editorial in "The Lancet")

I chose to ignore your continuous stream of attacks against me, but other  
users would not have shown the same amount of patience and be driven away  
by your behavior, which resembles that of a schoolyard bully.

In spite of this unacceptable behavior on your part, I have repeatedly  
offered to seek a cooperative, consensual solution for the alleged or real  
NPOV problems on the page in question. In fact, I was working on reaching  
a consensus with Bryan and other contributors while you continued  
reverting to your style. Everyone can see this by taking a look at  
[[Talk:Mother Teresa]].

It is time for you to stop playing strategic games against other  
contributors, and to start working in the spirit of mutual cooperation.  
Now is a good moment to do so -- I fully approve of your recent edits of  
the article (provided you haven't again started moving away the criticism  
section). Yet you continue your bullying tactics against other  
contributors. You do not want peaceful cooperation, you want to pick  
fights and win. That is not how Wikipedia works.

I can and will work with you on this article, provided you make a serious  
commitment to seeking consensus on your changes. That cannot always be  
done, of course, but there are reasonable courses of actions in the cases  
where it can't (act based on established precedent, hold a vote, ask Jimbo  
etc.). Just trying to get "your way or the highway" will not lead to any  
kind of solution.

So here's my offer: Make the changes to the criticism section you find  
important. I will edit the parts which I don't like and if we can't agree,  
we'll go to the talk page. Once the criticism section is edited, we will  
take a look at the entire article and if it is too long (32K), we will  
summarize individual sections and split them away, regardless of their  
content. If it is still below that size, we won't do that. If the  
criticism section is still too dominant, we will together try to expand  
the other sections of the article. How about some wiki-cooperation for a  
change?

Regards,

Erik