Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/OccultZone and others/Evidence

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Any editor may add evidence to this page, irrespective of whether they are involved in the dispute. You must submit evidence in your own section. Editors who change other users' evidence may be blocked without warning; if you have a concern with or objection to another user's evidence, contact the committee by e-mail or on the talk page. The standard limits for all evidence submissions are: 1000 words and 100 diffs for users who are parties to this case; or about 500 words and 50 diffs for other users. Detailed but succinct submissions are more useful to the committee. This page is not designed for the submission of general reflections on the arbitration process, Wikipedia in general, or other irrelevant and broad issues; and if you submit such content to this page, please expect it to be ignored. General discussion of the case may be opened on the talk page. You must focus on the issues that are important to the dispute and submit diffs which illustrate the nature of the dispute or will be useful to the committee in its deliberations.

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Evidence presented by Worm That Turned

To the clerks; I have granted an extension to 1,500 words and 150 diffs to WTT. Courcelles (talk) 15:43, 4 May 2015 (UTC)

Timeline and admin shopping

Swarm's block and aftermath

Since June 2014, the vast majority of OccultZone's edits at Rape in India have been reversions[1], primarily regarding the accuracy of the statistics and which incidents are "notable". These edits formed parts of regular edit wars, never going over 3RR. On 22 March 2015, there was an edit war involving multiple parties and 23 edits. At the ANEW request, all participants were blocked by Swarm, with OccultZone getting a longer block for his history of edit warring on the article. This block was OccultZone's first ever block.

6 hours later, Bgwhite unilaterally unblocked OccultZone as unwarranted. Swarm gave his reasoning but did not pursue the matter. After being unblocked, OccultZone subsequently contacted me (Worm That Turned) off-wiki to request block log redaction. He also contacted JamesBWatson and arbitrator Euryalus on wiki regarding the blocks. Finally, he created an SPI regarding everyone on the opposing side at the edit war. DoRD looked into the matter and declared the accounts unrelated. After much questioning and further circumstantial evidence, DoRD closed the case.

OccultZone was not happy with this result, so took it to ANI. He was especially unhappy with Salvadrim! for not blocking a "little brother". Whilst the ANI was on-going, OccultZone contacted Callanecc on the matter, as well as JzG. OccultZone subsequently took conversation with Callanecc off-wiki and contacted around that time Roger Davies. Over a week after DoRD had declared the accounts unrelated, OccultZone was still insisting they were sockpuppets all over the place (see ANI thread for examples). OccultZone also contacted Collect[2] and Ubikwit[3] around this time (I believe regarding Swarm's previous blocks).

Bgwhite's block and aftermath

Meanwhile, after reversing three of Swarm's five blocks, Bgwhite had protected the article and started conversation at the talk page. After a reasonable amount of discussion, Bgwhite attempted to draft a compromise - every participant at the talk page agreed it was good, including OccultZone.

When the protection expired, there were subsequent changes by an IP against the consensus at the talk page. OccultZone contacted Ponyo regarding the IP, before reverting as a sock. Bgwhite was approached at his talk page, and reverted a different IP, before semi-protecting the article. When the logged out editor logged in to make the same edit, Bgwhite rolled back[4] the edit and fully protected the page.[5]

OccultZone went after one of the IPs involved, reporting him to a number of places and putting a warning on the IPs talk page. The IP reverted the warning, and OccultZone subsequently went past 7RR.[6]. Padeton stopped the edit war with a dummy edit, which OccultZone accepted. Three hours later, Bgwhite blocked OccultZone for violating 3RR. Diannaa accepted an unblock request as the edit warring had stopped.

OccultZone again went down the path of "misuse of tools",[7] contacting John Vandenburg, Risker, The Ed17 and Magioladitis.

My (Worm That Turned) involvement

I had been contacted earlier and decided to review the situation - I posted my opinions at OccultZone's talk page. I stated at that point that neither block was inappropriate (though both could have been handled better). I suggested discretionary sanctions to reduce disruption as Callanecc had discussed regarding the area in January. After discussing the matter with OccultZone and sleeping on it, I issued a topic ban on Rape in India under discretionary sanctions - saying I would review it if upon further evidence and allowing a single further SPI.

The SPI was reviewed by both DoRD and Mike V who stated again that the accounts were unrelated. During the course of the request, OccultZone pinged EdJohnston and RegentsPark. I will mention here that OccultZone seems to hold the odd view that those who are not socks should not bother to defend themselves and asked me off-wiki to enforce this view. He also delibrately misrepresented what one of the checkusers told him off-wiki (will send evidence of this directly to ArbCom).

After the SPI failed, OccultZone contacted Ponyo[8], Chillum[9], DeltaQuad and Elockid. Elockid subsequently blocked two of the accounts (by no means all) OccultZone had been complaining about. I didn't lift the topic ban immediately and OccultZone contacted Bishonen, Thydruulf, Guerillero, Yunshui and PhilKnight. I eventually relented, as I believed that disruption would reduce now the actual sockpuppets had been removed and accusations would stop, so lifted the topic ban. Unfortunately, OccultZone didn't stop his "crusade", and picked up a few more, notably Kumioko ban[10] and Nadirali topic ban[11]. An interaction ban proposal between OccultZone and Zhanzhao was not successful, but was enough for OccultZone to check with Sandstein if that made me involved.

HJ Mitchell's block and aftermath

Throughout this period, the majority of administrators (and some non-admins) have told OccultZone to drop the matters and move on. Eventually, HJ Mitchell blocked OccultZone for 3 days for not dropping the stick. OccultZone immediately pinged Floquenbeam and Dennis Brown. Eventually, Magog the Ogre unblocked, advising OccultZone to drop his crusades. Immediately, OccultZone returned to previous cases.[12][13][14][15]. Nakon therefore reinstated the block.

At this point, I hoped that I could persuade OccultZone to move on and accept a voluntary topic ban from "drama". My last ditched attempt failed, and this case was requested, attempting to contact arbs on their talk pages - GorillaWarfare, DGG and Dougweller.

Contact methods - off wiki communication may be on other matters and may be even more pervasive.

Bot-style editing

OccultZone appears to be working hard to increase his edit count and has made ~17,500 edits in the past month.[16]. 5000 edits now goes back 1 week.[17] The very high number of edits has the effect of avoiding scrutiny of his edits. He regularly goes over 8 edits per minute for sustained periods - eg 65 edits in 5 minute on 28 April or 30 edits in 2 minutes on 16 April.

Recently OccultZone has been adding portal pages to categories of the form "<YEAR> establishments in <COUNTRY>" (about 1000 times in the past 2 days.[18]) His high speed editing means that care is not taken and errors carry forward a long way. (E.g. Had to fix 20 edits in a row because he's not checking them properly[19]) He has created over 10,000 category talk pages[20] OccultZone states his mass edits have global consensus, but my understanding is that categories are designed to categorise pages only. There is no need to access portals from the category, nor are they an area which regularly need discussion. It might be that the community thinks these edits are worthwhile, but WP:Bot policy states mass edits like this should be discussed first.

OccultZone states that he is "the major contributor of many wikiprojects"[21], which is interesting considering how little he's edited the Wikipedia talk: space (a total of 344 times). Doesn't appear to be discussing these changes with the wikiprojects.

Noting that other editors who have done this sort of "WikiProject tagging" in the past have set up bots to do so.(category, example)

A quantity over quality methodology can be very detrimental to Wikipedia - for example, OccultZone reviews articles quickly (eg, 8 in 1 minute[22] or 15 in 5 minutes[23]) leading to a large number of articles deleted after his review. Examples of an article after he "reviewed" it.[24] Highlighting the Speedy deletions of articles he approved in 2015 only:

• Obvious hoax (founded 2030)[25]
• Spam articles[26][27][28]
• Non-notable [29][30][31],
• Copyvio [32]
• Technical deletion (article was a copy of another article with "version 2" on the end)[33]

Evidence presented by Zeke Essiestudy

Unjustified reblocking by Nakon?

Nakon blocked OccultZone for "continuing to wield the stick" after OccultZone added a simple link to an ANI thread here. This doesn't seem plausible, considering it was a maintenance edit and not an addition to an actual ANI discussion. He engaged an unauthorized topic ban from the Wikipedia namespace here on OccultZone. OccultZone claims Nakon is implying he only edited the Wikipedia space after his unblock and before his reblock, which is not true.

Indefinite IP block by Bgwhite

OccultZone posted some evidence of Bgwhite misusing his administrative tools here, but the most peculiar one is this. Bgwhite got engaged in an edit war with 173.55.156.155 (nickname: Oneseventhree) on Olympic Hockey Nagano '98 here. It looks like Bgwhite might have a bone to pick with Oneseventhree, reverting every edit Oneseventhree attempts to make to the article. On June 15th, OST was simply tinkering with the article to display a wikitable. After about two reverts, Bgwhite immediately came down hard on Oneseventhree, applying an indefinite block for being a "vandalism only account", and protecting the page for two months. This is pretty questionable, as once the IP 173.55.156.155 is assigned to a new user, the new user is going to be like, "Hey! What is this? Why can't I edit? I'm not a vandalism only account!". It'll also be mentioned that Bgwhite was involved in the dispute with Oneseventhree. I think Bgwhite will need some scrutiny too (not sure about Swarm).

Evidence presented by OccultZone

Per [34] below evidence may reach 1,500 words

First block : by Swarm

I had made this this edit because I was notified about this ongoing trouble on my talk page.[35] I had reverted it to a prior version that had consensus, and some sources alleged a living person of a crime that had not been yet proven, content violated WP:COPYVIO, and the listed incidents all were non-notable(see WP:NLIST). I also posted on the talk page,[36] I was the one to post about it for the first time as well.[37] We had also discussed the clear sock puppetry on the WP:ANEW,[38] which is another exemption from reverting per WP:3RRNO. In short words there was not even a single reason or possibility to think that I had done anything wrong or anything that was unclear. However, just a few hours later of that report, I saw that I've been blocked for 72 hours(!) and other 3 editors who had been inappropriately blocked, though we all were following the consensus and reverting a blatant sock puppet(now blocked as one) who was restoring the copyvio and used offensive speech.[39] Article history shows that none of us(Padenton,(2 revert) Human3015(1 revert), Vtk1987(2 reverts)) had violated WP:3RR, I had made only 1 revert in last 5 days, and 4 edits in last 8 days. It was even more troubling that Swarm logged multiple entries of the block. There was no warning prior to the block.[40]

I requested for the unblock, I saw one message from an admin[41] that supported the unblock request, and very soon I saw that Bgwhite has unblocked me,[42] while I was happy with the unblock, I was doubtful if it was right for him to do or not, because of the history[43][44] that I had with Bgwhite making him an involved admin, these histories were rather negative than they were positive. It would've been better if any other admin had unblocked me. I think I knew the consequences, and in fact he didn't came there just to unblock and move on like unblocking admins generally do, but he was engaging himself in on going arguments and he already started to oppose me the way he used to do that before,[45] he also told that he would block me.[46] I thought of just agreeing with what he says for avoiding the further trouble.

Bgwhite had unblocked Padenton,[47] Human3015,[48] he also imposed full protection on the concerning article[49] after reading this message and now he was working as an editor there.[50][51]

I was confident that Swarm had mistakenly blocked me. But after I saw Swarm's reaction,[52][53] over this unblock, I was wholly amazed with his attitude, incivility, rigidness to justify the blocks without citing even a single policy. He was rejecting the policies and standards of WP:3RR, WP:ANEW among others and the conclusion of his statement was "If you make more than 10 edits on an article, it is long term edit warring, and any edit can be considered as edit war." Such notion was rejected by JamesBWatson, he explained that these edits were made over the course of several weeks and these reverts were unrelated to other reverts.[54]

Second block : by Bgwhite

Below events occurred in 16 hours.

• On 06:02, 29 March 2015, Bgwhite first reverted to his preferred version[55], then he protected the article.[56] Reason was "persistent vandalism",[57] though none of these edits[58][59] were WP:VANDALISM.

• I also had concerns about the ongoing activity on this article, that's why at 5:34, I had requested protection from another admin.[60]

• At 08:27, he imposed full protection,[61] and he had reverted to his version.[62] His reason was again "persistent vandalism", though there was still no vandalism.[63]
• I had an edit war on the UTP of a IP sock who was vandalizing atleast one[64] namespace and also involved in above article that led to protection.[65] IP got blocked after he himself filed a report on AN3.[66] Before he was blocked, I had doubts if WP:DENY applies on the UTP of IPsock as well, I myself attempted to ask the admin who had blocked this IP, whether if an IP is allowed to remove warnings from talk or not.(discussion) I accepted that, and given the circumstances of that time, I knew that someone will be trying to find a reason to block me. I tried to make every attempt to avoid anyone from thinking that I was going to revert, I even left a dummy note in the edit summary that the previous edits that were opposing my reverts are correct.

• However, 4 or 3 hours later, Bgwhite blocked me for 24 hours for the conflict that was already over, he not only violated WP:INVOLVED, but also WP:NOTPUNITIVE.(also see Purpose and goals)
• None of my last 50 (or more) edits concerned the above activity either. There was no warning prior to the block.[67]
• In his blocking rational, he is not addressing if conflict was ongoing or I attempting anymore,[68] although he told me to "walk away from Rape in India", he also told me to stop addressing about sock puppetry that includes this kind of IP hopping,[69][70][71] while one CU had just blocked the technical master of this IP.[72]

Since Bgwhite was already an editor on this article,[73][74] who also discussed as a disagreeing editor,[75][76][77] he was violating WP:PREFER even when he had just protected the article after reverting to his version.

I was unblocked[78] by Diannaa, who also referred block as "bad block".[79] Bgwhite reacted only after he saw that I have been unblocked,[80] he claimed that I have sent harassing emails to Swarm. Swarm rejects this claim.[81]

Worm That Turned

Had contacted him for oversighting matter as mentioned before[82], he was one of those who I never interacted. He told on-wiki that he had nominated Swarm for adminship.[83] If I had ever knew that, or he had himself told about it before, I would've never contacted him again about this matter.

He would discuss about the varieties of restrictions, he would talk about 1RR [84] I asked him to provide even a single instance where I violated 3rr, he could not. He said that he would impose topic ban from this subject or 1RR or both.[85] He imposed a WP:AC/DS topic ban, even after I had voluntarily retired from this article until the successful SPI.[86]

Problems with T-Ban

• He solely targeted me. An enforcing admin should watch the conduct of all sides and notify everyone about WP:AC/DS. We had those who edit wars, misrepresent sources,[87][88] etc. why he didn't even warned them?
• Never cited even a single diff that would constitute a single disruptive edit. Topic ban must be made only where there is obvious disruption,(WP:DISRUPTSIGNS) so obvious that anyone can agree.
• No prior warning or sanctions.
• One article in question, only WP:ABAN could be a choice, but even that would require obvious disruption.
• Conceived this entry as legible for sanctions. Officially, it was just a reminder, and he was pointed that this remainder cannot be taken for enforcing any sanctions[89] however, he misused that remainder for sanctioning.[90]

I didn't objected to the topic ban, because I didn't wanted myself to look obsessional, given my experience with WP:ARE, I was 100% sure that this topic ban has no merit and it has been inappropriately imposed. Later discussion can be found here.

Reason behind

There is some obvious reason behind that T-Ban. Swarm had said "the article is under discretionary sanctions.."[91] It seems like WTT, the nominator of Swarm's RFA, just went to fulfill that wish. Since there was no policy based reason to impose topic ban, he never imposed WP:AC/DS T-Ban on any one, he never even notified anyone about any AC/DS sanctions.(evidence) I had also checked all logs since 2007, WTT cannot be found anywhere.[92] Simple, he just imposed topic ban so that he could make Swarm's block for 1 revert in 5 days look real.

Etc

WTT claims that I have adminshopped because I contacted Bishonen[93] in regards to the topic ban that WTT had imposed. I had my WP:ARCA appeal ready, just a few minutes before he would remove the T-Ban.[94] He never made claims about adminshopping before.

When I was blocked by Nakon, WTT tried to take benefit from my compulsion,[95] he proposed a wide ranging topic ban, which would cover ban from all administrator noticeboards and asking for any administrative actions. I disagreed with it.

Instead of describing that how the topic ban would benefit en.wiki, he just told that I should be indeffed.[96]

Question: WTT comes up with topic bans, when he cannot even point to a disruptive edit. Looking at his posts, he has clearly checked every of my edit just to find a reason to block or find any violation of policy. What will happen when he will actually find one? Asked before, he got no answer.

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