[WikiEN-l] Mintguy RFC

Tue Aug 24 12:07:59 UTC 2004

I stopped posting to this newsgroup a long time ago, because I found it an overwhelming effort to keep up-to-date with everything that was going on. So it's been quite a while since I have found it necessary to post on here.

Although I have disagreements with other users from time to time, just recently I found myself coming into conflict with a number of users simultaneously and I have been hitting the rollback button far more than normal. My wiki-stress level is at boiling point.

I have had a disagreement with Bobblewik about the removal of the words "Great Britain" from articles when I have judged that the use of Great Britain rather than United Kingdom (or other)  is contextually accurate. This caused me to start an RFC for Bobblewik. This RFC didn't receive popular support and I have not pursued the issue. I have since found myself in conflict with this user in another matter.

I ended up a revert war with that well-known troll Kenneth Alan and after both he and I had reached and exceeded the three-revert-rule, I decided that the only course of action was to block his account for 24 hours. When KA came back from this ban he directly obscene language at me and I blocked the account for 48 hours. I now recognise that I overstepped the mark in terms of my rights to block him. My actions here were caused by frustration at the fact that no progress had been made on doing something about this user on RFC. After consulting with other users, I decided that I should go through the arbitration process with KA. This action is now in progress.

Now we come to the most recent conflict which has ended up with me being listed on RFC. 

A few days ago I and a number of other users noticed that pages related to TV programmes were being moved by User:Netoholic, so we questioned him about it he said that he was moving them under the guidelines at [[Wikipedia: Naming conventions (television)]]. When I looked at this page I discovered that the policy had been written by Netoholic just a few hours earlier. So on the talk page I queried the situation. The talk page showed there was a straw poll in progress on the subject of what should be used to disambiguate television programmes, but there was no indication of when the poll was due to finish. The so-called convention that Netoholic had adopted and was in the process of implementing had 5 votes and one of the other options had 2 votes. Several users argued with Netoholic that this straw poll had not received enough publicity and that no result had been declared. It was therefore queried as to why this user was unilaterally moving pages when no formal decision had been made. I ended up in a revert war with Netoholic on [[Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions]] because in my opinion he was falsely claiming that some kind of consensus had been reached, when in actual fact more people had complained to him about the policy he was implementing than had actually voted for it. Netoholic clamed that because I edited this page 4 times I had broken the three-revert rule. But in my opinion my first edit was not a revert, and so I hadn't. While this argument was running, back on the [[Wikipedia: Naming conventions (television)]] page several more people cast their votes on the straw poll, and the policy that Netoholic had unilaterally declared to be the accepted convention, was now losing by 8-5.  I made a proposal that the straw poll be declared null and void; that the so called policy be declared a draft proposal; and that we restart a new poll with proper procedures and sufficient publicity. Several users agreed with this and [[User:Gtrmp]] drew up a poll and put it in his user space. Netoholic decided to ignore the suggestions of starting with a clean sheet. He drew up his own poll which rather than list different options, is just to decide whether the policy he drew up should be endorsed or not. Furthermore he has put a time limit 20 days on it. So if we are to change his policy it would need 20 days before we even got to the stage of beginning the vote on an alternative, and then I guess another 20 odd days before any change in policy is implemented.

It appears that Netoholic has decided to change the disagreements over a naming convention very personally and has sought to turn the whole thing into a personal matter between him and me. He has sought to dig-up evidence against me, in order to suggest that I am unfit to retain my admin status. This evidence now forms the basis of the complaint at RFC. Among the list of charges brought against me are the incidents related to Kenneth Alan. I have nothing to be ashamed of  in the list of other charges with one possible exception. I blocked a user called narythegreat for a period of 10 minutes, because he was systematically changing instances of the word "theatre" to "theater" in articles related World War II and was not listening other users concerns about this. When he began to revert everything back, I made this block, just so that his re-reversions could be checked without going through the whole revert-re-revert procedure. If this was over-stepping the mark then I apologise.

Regards

User:Mintguy