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This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Worm That Turned (talk | contribs) at 21:49, 8 October 2011 (→Outside view by David Eppstein: endorse). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

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In order to remain listed at Misplaced Pages:Requests for comment/User conduct, at least two people need to show that they tried to resolve a dispute with this user and have failed. This must involve the same dispute with a single user, not different disputes or multiple users. The persons complaining must provide evidence of their efforts, and each of them must certify it by signing this page with ~~~~. If this does not happen within 48 hours of the creation of this dispute page (which was: 18:06, 8 October 2011 (UTC)), the page will be deleted. The current date and time is: 17:20, 23 January 2025 (UTC).

Users should not edit other people's summaries or views, except to endorse them. All signed comments other than your own view or an endorsement should be directed to this page's discussion page.

Statement of the dispute

This is a summary written by users who are concerned by this user's conduct. Users signing other sections ("Response" or "Outside views") should not edit the "Statement of the dispute" section.

Desired outcome

This is a summary written by users who have initiated the request for comment. It should spell out exactly what the changes they'd like to see in the user, or what questions of behavior should be the focus.

  • User:Kiefer.Wolfowitz (KW) voluntarily agrees
    • to be more aware of civility in interaction with other editors, and to refrain from innuendo
    • to restrain himself when it comes to discussing younger editors, emailing oversight if he feels there is inappropriate personal information on wikipedia, and avoiding taking matters into his own hands
    • to state his views clearly and succinctly at RfA, instead of engaging in extended arguments, even if he feels strongly that a particular outcome is not acceptable
    • to be more careful when expressing concerns about copyright, taking any issues to the relevant noticeboards or contacting a trusted administrator privately, instead of making repeated public accusations.

Description

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Although a few editors have raised issues with User:Kiefer.Wolfowitz (KW), such as...

... this RfC does not focus on those issues, but instead is aimed at resolving three separate areas of particular concern.

Incivility

The incivility displayed by KW rarely reaches the level of personal attacks, but more often works at the level of innuendo. The comments he makes are generally obfuscated so that the common reader will think nothing of them. The issue comes from the innuendo being so commonplace, the failure to adhere to WP:CIVILITY, and the resulting detriment to the collaborative editing environment. Here is a sample of the comments;

Behaviour regarding younger editors

KW has very strong views regarding editors under the age of majority, and frequently this leads to disruption. Although the editors targeted have reacted with great restraint when faced with KW's behaviour, some of them stopped editing or greatly reduced their editing following incidents in which KW played a part; and there are also safety concerns regarding the possible impact of some of KW's statements.

One of the most egregious cases was at the RfA for Dylan620 - where he made a total of 79 edits - well over double the candidate's 32. This is clearly excessive. The edits included the question How are you performing in school?. Many of the edits had sneering edit summaries such as →Oppose: don't you feel better after an outburst of ressentiment after your sense of injured merit rather than mumbling "I didn't know" or "I don't understand"?Please write again. I care.; another example comment was extremely condescending "Rschen, please go to bed. Tomorrow try to find Hodge's penguin book on logic and start to read and work some exercises." It is, of course, permitted to Oppose an RfA on the grounds of age, and doubtless KW's intentions were good; but his behaviour went way beyond simply making a !vote and explaining the reasons for it. RfA candidates, and others taking part in the RfA process, should not have to endure this level of disruption.

Only a few months later, when the same editor added an asperger's userbox to his own user page (making clear from the edit summary that its addition was something to which he had given careful thought), KW reverted 5 times in 4 hours, against 4 different editors. He reverted Dylan620, reverted Strange Passerby, reverted Demiurge1000, twice, reverted Ryan Vesey. Even being generous and not considering the first edit to be a revert - that's still over the 3RR bright line. However, for some reason KW believed that he was justified because the other 4 editors started it. When he was warned about the edit warring - he ignored the warning and posted a return warning on Demiurge1000's page. When told unconditionally to stop, he suggested he had not reverted four times, and made curious comments about "young great apes" and "you should have read a proper dictionary", then attempted to claim that the other editors were the ones at fault (See WP:NOTTHEM).

Having been fortunate enough not to be blocked for this blatant edit warring on another user's userpage, KW reacted to advice about it from administrator User:Worm That Turned by suggesting it was an "indexing error", and suggesting that he would not discuss further. But KW then completely changed the tone of his reply with a misleading edit summary, appearing to call the admin a bore, and telling the admin that he wastes his mind.

An even more serious instance of KW's inappropriate behaviour regarding younger editors was Guoguo12's RfA, where KW used the fact that a teenage candidate had requested oversight to remove personal information from his own userpage, many months previously, as an argument for opposing the candidate. This has serious implications with regard to child protection on Misplaced Pages - it is very common that minors are encouraged to request oversight if they make a potentially unwise edit, and discouraging other minors from following that advice, in a highly public forum such as RfA, could put them at risk.

Accusations of plagiarism and copyright violation; lack of understanding of copyright

According to KW's own edit summaries, a task he undertakes is to "remove neoconservative digression beloved of sectarians and anti-semites". He feels articles related to certain USA political parties have an "ideological bias", which he solves by removing what he sees as OR/POV in them. The problems arise when KW follows his disgust at political views which he dislikes, with accusations of copyright violation or plagiarism against editors who wrote the material with which he disagrees.

Socialist Party of America

The first example of this was at Socialist Party of America. KW found a paragraph that, in his own words, drove him bananas because of statements about the party. One hour sixteen minutes later, he re-wrote his comments on the talk page to mention for the first time copyright violation and plagiarism, as well as COI. He then chose an editor to accuse of COI and plagiarism, User:Chegitz guevara, with sneering political comments. KW continued, with many more revisions of his own comments, to expound his personal views on the true history of the party, and to claim that "the SPUSA cabal" had created the article; "an abuse of the public's trust".

KW went on to state "This plagiarism was due to User:Peter G. Warner", as well as claiming Peter had committed multiple instances of it. Peter made a remarkably calm reply under the circumstances, but KW immediately responded, with unintentional irony, by accusing Peter of making personal attacks and of unreasonably questioning his (KW's) good faith.

KW made many more accusations of plagiarism against Peter. He started on the talk page of the article itself , and later included there the fantastic logic "nobody wrote that you had not committed plagiarism", but also spread his accusation across multiple venues, including bringing it up in a WP:POINTy manner at E2eamon's RfA , Peter's talk page, WQA after Peter protested KW's behaviour, and repeating the accusations at WT:Copyright problems.

Peter made clear, very early, that he considered the plagiarism accusation false. At this point KW should have stopped making further accusations in different locations, at least until he found an experienced editor who agreed there was a problem. Instead, when challenged, he admitted that he knew the potential impact of his accusations against an academic editing Misplaced Pages under their real name; "I and Peter are both academics, and we are both well aware of the seriousness of plagiarism." (KW does not use his real name.) To continue the accusations under these circumstances, after multiple warnings, verges on harassment.

Not only that, but KW's own analysis of the alleged plagiarism was tenuous at best. KW had to remove large parts of the text in order to find similarities between a few isolated fragments, and it was clear that the material added by Peter presented similar ideas - not matching words or even structure. The closest matching phrase was "Shachtman and his lieutenant, Michael Harrington" - and since many of those words are names, the worst issue was the word "lieutenant".

Socialist Party USA

KW has also made accusations of plagiarism without presenting any evidence - again regarding a U.S. political party - against User:TrustIsAllYouNeed. Regardless of whether there were indeed issues with the material contributed by that editor, an accusation without any evidence is unhelpful and uncivil.

Freedom in the World

KW had a run in with the retired, long-standing administrator and content contributor, User:Rd232. Once again, KW's initial concern seemed to be the political point of view of the text - his first complaint was to suggest there was "POV pushing" - and once again he followed this with accusations of copyright violation. Rd232 had to come out of retirement to deal with this. KW even violated copyright himself by copying large swathes of a book onto WP to test for copyright (admins only).

Again KW left an inappropriate copyright warning - but this time he left a speedy deletion request on part of the article, completely misunderstanding the purpose of the tag. The issue was resolved by User:Moonriddengirl, from whom Rd232 had sought advice on dealing with the accusations, and who said "this certainly doesn't look to be a flagrant problem by any definition", "the content should be tweaked", and "The blanking for a week is unnecessary". KW followed her comments by accusing Rd232 of incompetence, and claiming - just as he had done with Peter - that Rd232's protests at the accusations were personal attacks and "violations of AGF".

John F. Banzhaf III

Further evidence that KW does not fully understand copyright was when he copied and pasted text from within Misplaced Pages without attribution (Kiefer's copy & original edit). He may have done similar elsewhere, as he was even mentioned he was "cannibalizing other articles". Copying text without attribution is in violation of the WP:CC-BY-SA license, and therefore against editing guidelines.

Applicable policies and guidelines

{List the policies and guidelines that apply to the disputed conduct}

  1. WP:COPYVIO
  2. WP:CIVILITY
  3. WP:AOHA
  4. WP:NPA
  5. WP:EW
  6. WP:POINT

Evidence of trying and failing to resolve the dispute

(Provide diffs of the comments. As with anywhere else on this RfC/U, links to entire articles aren't helpful unless the editor created the entire article. Edit histories also aren't helpful as they change as new edits are performed.)

Attempts by certifier Worm That Turned

  1. Discussions at WP:ANI archived here
  2. Suggestion of a one to one workshop - - which although KW was against, he did participate in
  3. The one-to-one Workshop, where instead of discussion, KW called some of the issues "laughable" and instead asked for Worm That Turned to be sanctioned. It is unclear who he was asking to impose the sanction, since Worm That Turned had proposed this as a one-to-one discussion. At this point, the Workshop discussion was regarded as a failure.

Regarding this RfC:

  • KW suggested that an RfC was a "threat"
  • KW raised the RfC at the Administrator's noticeboard, an hour after discussion of it had been closed at WP:ANI, without informing Worm That Turned.
  • KW refused to "take part" unless a "serious" administrator (implying Worm That Turned was not one) approved. He went on to state that Worm That Turned was inexperienced and that he doesn't know what he's doing
  • When offered an attempt to solve this informally - on a one to one basis - KW attempted to dictate how any discussion regarding problems should take place. His unreasonable terms included the fact that the entire discussion should be by email and that no RfC would be called for 2 months
  • KW attempted to deflect the RfC/U by asking for an interaction ban with both Demiurge1000 and Worm That Turned.
    • Prior to warning KW for his 5RR offence, KW and Worm That Turned had only positive interactions, to the extent that KW put a "strong support" on Worm That Turned's RfA and Worm That Turned gained an oppose vote for strongly agreeing with KW; so there was little grounds for claiming that the suggested interaction ban served any other purpose than to prevent the RfC.
    • KW implied that the interaction ban was the suggestion of User:fetchcomms - but Fetchcomms had specifically stated he was unaware of the history. He was only explaining how to make an interaction ban request.
    • Since that request, Demiurge has not interacted directly with KW, and only discussed him minimally, and Worm That Turned has kept his interactions with KW to a minimum. KW on the other hand has continued to instigate conversations at Worm That Turned's talk page, has posted images of the Spanish Inquisition referring to RfCs, and even brought up the topic at WT:RfA in a WP:POINTy manner.

Attempts by certifier Demiurge1000

  1. Demiurge1000 requested that KW withdraw his accusations about Peter Werner. (KW's response was to suggest that he regarded the request as "a joke".)
  2. Demiurge1000 asked at Misplaced Pages talk:Copyright problems for clarification on whether the material contributed by Peter Werner constituted copyright infringement.
  3. Demiurge1000 sought clarification from KW, on KW's talk page, about his potentially misleading comments on Dylan620's RfA; also mentioning the issue of making dozens of comments on the same RfA. (KW's ultimate response to this query was "you are not welcome here, and I ask you not to post again", which he followed by an edit summary of "hide idiotic discussion".)

Other attempts


Users certifying the basis for this dispute

{Users who tried and failed to resolve the dispute}

  1. Worm · (talk) 18:04, 8 October 2011 (UTC)
  2. --Demiurge1000 (talk) 18:24, 8 October 2011 (UTC)
  3. Since Kiefer.Wolfowitz has previously stated that he will not take an RfC/U seriously unless it is "approved" an arb , and since I have previously attempted to explain that RfC's don't need Arbitrators to approve them, and he should really try to just resolve these problems by discussion I can endorse that this dispute has been ongoing for a while, and sadly attempts to solve this by less formal means has failed. --Elen of the Roads (talk) 20:17, 8 October 2011 (UTC)

Other users who endorse this summary

Response

This section is reserved for the use of the user whose conduct is disputed. Users writing other sections ("Statement of the dispute" and "Outside Views") should not edit the "Response" section, and the person writing this section should not write a view below. Anyone is welcome to endorse this or any other view, but no one except the editor(s) named in the dispute may change the summary here.


I have responded at length before to these charges by Worm and Demiurge1000, at ANI, etc.

Elen has not indicated that she has read the charges, examined the evidence, and agrees with them. Until a Wikipedian of her stature (or greater) affirms having read the charges and agreeing with them, I shall not participate in this process.

I am the primary author of Shapley–Folkman lemma, which is now in the featured-article nomination process, and as I have stated to my peers, I am travelling this week. I expect that the FA process will occupy me for at least 2 weeks. If a respected Wikipedian confirms having read and agreed with the complaints & the evidence, then I would consider participating after the FA, most probably in December of January.

Users who endorse this summary:

  1.  Kiefer.Wolfowitz 20:43, 8 October 2011 (UTC)

Views

This section is for statements or opinions written by users not directly involved with this dispute, but who would like to add a view of the dispute. Users should not edit other people's summaries or views, except to endorse them. All signed comments other than your own view or an endorsement should be directed to this page's discussion page. Users editing other sections ("Statement of the dispute" or "Response") should not normally edit this section, except to endorse another person's view.

Outside view by David Eppstein

I have no opinion on the political disputes described here, but Wolfowitz has performed very valuable service to the encyclopedia bringing mathematical articles such as Shapley–Folkman lemma as well as related biographical articles such as Jon Folkman, Graciela Chichilnisky, and Andreu Mas-Colell up to a high editorial standard. I would hate for the issues described in this RfC to overshadow his improvements to article space and cause him to stop contributing in this way.

Users who endorse this summary:

  1. —David Eppstein (talk) 21:43, 8 October 2011 (UTC)
  2. Geometry guy 21:47, 8 October 2011 (UTC)
  3. Worm · (talk) 21:49, 8 October 2011 (UTC)

Outside view by ExampleUsername

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