Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Mzajac/Evidence

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Evidence presented by RoySmith

Mzajac used their status as an admin to intimidate another editor in a content dispute

In Special:Diff/1193469606, during an argument which seems to be partly about a content dispute and partly about behavior, Mzajac wrote "Maybe you could try to accept the idea that I will keep editing Wikipedia and that I will remain an admin". To be fair, this was in response to a statement by User:Mellk that "you should not have sysop privileges". Still, it seems like an inappropriate thing to say. Admins need to be very careful to keep their content editing and admin actions distinct and avoid even the appearance that they are using their status as an admin to prevail in a content dispute. In this edit, Mzajac appears to have gone out of their way to connect them. RoySmith (talk) 18:17, 16 January 2024 (UTC)

Evidence presented by Red-tailed hawk

Mzajac move warred at Battle of Kyiv, has a history of other Kyiv-related issues, and continued his move war following the expiration of a topic ban

As correctly noted in the preliminary statements, Mzajac very rarely uses the administrative toolset. I also note that Mzajac was, in December 2020, topic banned from Kyiv, broadly construed, for one year. That the user took administrative actions at Battle of Kyiv, therefore, warrants close examination.

In September 2020, Mzajac engaged in move-warring in an attempt to move the then-Battle of Kiev page to Battle of Kyiv. This involved twice moving the former to the latter (1, 2), each time overwriting an existing redirect, and even after a user had reverted the admin's bold move. After the admin boldly moved the page a second time, a user reverted the admin's move-over-redirect again, telling the admin to use RM. A few months later, the user was topic banned from Kyiv, broadly construed, after an AE discussion in which evidence was presented related to the administrator's general warring over the name of the Ukrainian capital.

One might think that all of this would be enough to change behavior, and to get the administrator to uphold the heightened standards of behavior that are expected of administrators. Alas, one would be wrong.

In February 2022, a mere three months after Mzajac's topic ban from Kyiv timed out, the user used his deletion tool in order to free up the page for a page move, despite knowing that the page move would be contested. And, even though the page move was contested, and the result was no consensus, the administrator did not so much as lift a finger to self-revert their third bold move of the page. Rather than attempting to gain consensus at any point during this multi-year process, the administrator has used advanced permissions to get a Kyiv-related page renamed to his preferred version as a fait accompli. — Red-tailed hawk _(nest) 03:50, 17 January 2024 (UTC)

Evidence presented by Tamzin

Mzajac was unresponsive to AE in 2020 and was TBANned

All users are expected to respond in a timely fashion to inquiries at WP:AE, and administrators are expected to respond in a timely fashion to any concerns about their conduct. Mzajac fell short of both of these expectations in Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Enforcement/Archive277 § Mzajac. Ymblanter initiated the thread on 1 December. After 15 days of Mzajac evading scrutiny, El_C closed the thread with a topic ban, writing

Yesterday, I found to my disappointment, that Michael has continued to edit disruptively in the topic area, even as participants (including yours truly) patiently awaited his reply here. A highly unusual (and frankly, bizarre) thing to do, not to mention for someone with advanced permissions. Certainly, not to his credit. Earlier today, Michael made a brief statement that offered no explanation for, well, anything. That, too, is not to his credit. As has also been discussed in this report, because Michael is an admin, he may yet face further scrutiny and censure from the Committee itself.

-- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (they|xe|she) 04:09, 18 January 2024 (UTC)

Mzajac was unresponsive to AE in 2022 and was strongly criticized

When Ymblanter brought Mzajac back to AE in 2022, Paul Siebert explicitly requested Mzajac's participation, in addition to the baseline expectation. Mzajac replied

composing a reply to this enforcement request will take more of my time and attention than individual article edits in spare moments. I hope you can appreciated that this is serious and not something I can just rattle off

He said nothing further in the remaining five days of the thread's pendency. Dennis Brown, in closing the thread, wrote

In my opinion, the behavior of Mzajac (as an admin) was extremely subpar and it appears to be an ongoing issue. We just can't do anything about it here. Only WP:RFAR may review instances of "Repeated or consistent poor judgment" outlined in WP:ADMINACCT. Whether it is ripe for Arbitration or not, I do not know, as that is a pretty high threshold. I'm not going to bother to warn or instruct Mzajac, for as an admin, they are expected to know what the standard of conduct is, even when they have so woefully failed to live up to it.

-- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (they|xe|she) 04:09, 18 January 2024 (UTC)

Mzajac was dismissive of ADMINCOND concerns in this case, even while acknowledging unfamiliarity with admin policies

Mzajac's response to being told they had improperly reversed another admin's deletion of their own redirect was to complain that editors would react so aggressively against a name that made fun of a media corporation and to describe the arbitration proceedings as over the top. In a subsequent comment he wrote that he would have assumed using admin tools was appropriate since the deletion was performed apparently against process, without any discussion, and after [he] had contested the speedy deletion nomination, a fundamental misunderstanding of both WP:RAAA and WP:INVOLVED. He then protested that the basic policies at play were too complicated: Yes I guess see where it violates the rule now that I have untangled these arbitration allegations and reviewed what wheel warring means. But to be honest, I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about which of the interface elements I have had access to for much of two decades are non-admin, admin, or add-on gadgets. I try to follow the rules as I know them and only take actions that seem warranted. As this did.

-- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (they|xe|she) 04:52, 18 January 2024 (UTC)

Evidence presented by Dennis Brown

Failure to be accountable

During the AE discussion brought up earlier by Tamzin that was closed by me [1], the singular statement made by Mzajac was: "Re: User:Paul Siebert, composing a reply to this enforcement request will take more of my time and attention than individual article edits in spare moments. I hope you can appreciated that this is serious and not something I can just rattle off. —Michael Z. 04:43, 14 February 2022 (UTC)" and I closed it almost 5 days later in the only way I could. Between the time that he made that statement and when I closed the discussion, Mzajac made a number of edits elsewhere on the English wiki, (59. I believe [2]) to such pages as Minsk agreements, Talk:Russia–Ukraine relations, and others in the same topic area. This isn't cleaning up a few loose ends because he is busy in RL, this is willful disregarding ADMINACCT at a board set up to review Arbitration matters.

On a more personal note, I am puzzled why we have admins that have topic bans to begin with. Dennis Brown 2¢ 12:40, 18 January 2024 (UTC)

Evidence presented by AirshipJungleman29

RoySmith's evidence unfairly misrepresents Mzajac

I am uninvolved with the topic area and the editors in the dispute. I find that RoySmith's evidence above uses unfairly misrepresents Mzajac by saying their invocation of their admin status was a statement of power. [3] clearly shows that Mellk first brought up Mzajac's mop in a discussion on Talk:Russia: "And this [source misrepresentation] is coming from a sysop". Six minutes later, Mellk posted on Mzajac's talk page with a diff from that conversation. The Mellk-initiated discussion about Mzajac's sysop status then continues on that page. I fail to see how Mzajac could have "gone out of their way to connect [content editing and admin actions]" when they were, at most, responding to the connections of others.

Like Dennis Brown above, I am also confused on why admins can have topic bans. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 17:14, 20 January 2024 (UTC)

• If this better goes somewhere else, I apologise, and ask that it be moved. This area of WP is a little unfamiliar to me. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 17:16, 20 January 2024 (UTC)

Evidence presented by Ostalgia

Full disclosure: as mentioned previously, I have been involved in disputes with Mzajac in the past. These are not the observations of a neutral editor, but the experiences of someone who has more often than not found himself on the opposite end of spirited discussions. NB: my interactions with Mzajac have been usually limited to EE – perhaps he acts differently in other areas, but my opinion of him is limited to my exchanges with him in an area we "share".

Mzajac misrepresents evidence at noticeboard discussions

Mzajac opened an ANI case against user Paul Siebert [4], accusing him of sharing their personal theories on the existence of national groups, in particular “Clearly, no Ukrainian [. . .] nation existed in XIX century” (ellipsis in the original), stressing that it’s particularly unacceptable to voice personal conspiracy theories about the non-existence of a nation precisely when such conspiracy theories are being used to incite genocide in Ukraine. This was accompanied by news articles on Putin and the following text: Analysis: Saying ‘another nation doesn’t exist is something we need to pay attention to because it usually precedes atrocious actions,’ one historian said. One would assume from this that Siebert was a genocidal maniac, but his actual comment was a general argument against Primordialism, as well as a recognition of the multiethnic character of the Russian Empire. [5] Furthermore, Mzajac intentionally omitted a crucial bit from the quotation he provided: Clearly, no Ukrainian (as well as Russian) nation existed in XIX century (bolding mine), which far from revealing anti-Ukrainian bias on the part of Siebert simply indicates a historical perspective on the development of modern nations in general, which is absolutely legitimate. This dishonest framing was also noted by Ealdgyth. [6] The ANI thread was soon after closed by Salvio Giuliano as a “storm in a teacup”.

Mzajac engaged in suboptimal behaviour during a RSN discussion

In December of last year Mzajac opened a discussion at RSN with regards to the use of the Great Russian Encyclopedia as a source [7], stating that the source is linked in over 100 en.Wikipedia articles. The source appears to be repeating blatant non-WP:NPOV Russian propaganda and should be deprecated as an independent neutral WP:RS. He proceeded to cite a few obvious examples: the GRE articles on Russia, Ukraine and Zaporizhzhia, which show Russia’s borders as claimed by the Russian government and not as internationally recognised, concluding that [GRE] is not reliable and should not be used for any citations. Thus portrayed, the case for deprecating the source would seem clear-cut – except that the GRE is not used to source anything of the sort suggested by Mzajac (had that been the case I believe we would all have agreed to remove it from the offending articles). In the 100+ examples in the link he provided the GRE was being used in articles about rocks, mountains, sportsmen and historical figures of various grades of obscurity and other uncontroversial topics, as was pointed out by several users. In many cases the articles used as sources had been written by leading specialists in their fields.

Mzajac then proceeded to bludgeon the discussion, replying to virtually every opposing comment, usually repeating the same arguments even when they had been questioned or outright disproven by fellow editors. When confronted directly by the fact that his own evidence of the use of the source did not support his claims, he usually stopped responding to a user and moved on to the next. At least two editors ([8], [9]) involved in the discussion explicitly complained about the bludgeoning.

At one point during the discussion Boynamedsue referred to Ukraine as “the Ukraine” accidentally (he previously referred to it as Ukraine). Mzajac challenged this, and Boynamedsue rectified immediately, commenting that “the Ukraine” had been standard for most of his life and old habits die hard. Mzajac responded with a tirade that included do you also write “Eskimo” and “Negro” when you’re not being condescending to national and racial groups, with the excuse that you’re old enough that casual prejudice feels normal? Wake up. It’s the 2020s now. [10]

Another questionable moment was Mzajac moving from trying to deprecate GRE as a source to arguing that [a]ll Russian sources on Russian history […] are potentially problematic (ellipsis mine). This in itself is questionable, but in the same comment he also suggests that Russian-language writing has a pervasive bias in refusing to acknowledge that Rus and Russia are different things.[11] He came to this conclusion without, by his own admission, having knowledge of Russian [12]. To argue for discarding the entire historiography of a country is unacceptable. To go beyond that and argue for discarding the written body of work of one of the most spoken languages in the world is ludicrous. But to do both of these things without even knowing that language is just incomprehensible.

Mzajac has adopted extreme POV positions in content disputes

In the talk page of Arkhip Kuindzhi, during a debate on how to reflect the painter’s nationality, Mzajac’s posited that [a]lthough known by several names, Ukraine has always been a definable country, region, and territory during historical times. This is not true of any nation, not only Ukraine (this issue was also at the heart of the aforementioned dispute with Paul Siebert), and it also goes against policy/MOS considerations. But even more worrying is the claim that Ukraine is the homeland of Pontic Greeks, when the Pontic Greeks are an ethno-cultural group that existed in the region for millennia before the Slavs (let alone Ukraine) established a state on the shores of the Black Sea. [13]

This ported to another discussion. After I argued for using historical placenames in historical articles (by MOS:PLACE), and mentioned that the listed place of birth of a person is not only a set of geographical coordinates but the distinct legal/political entity (i.e. city, province/state, country) where that person was born, Mzajac accused me of using this argument in order to justify ignoring reliable sources and wiping out Ukrainian identity and of posting offensive colonial nonsense, echoing Putin’s essay and speeches inciting genocide in Ukraine. [14] I do not believe that I have, at any point, "echoed" anything even vaguely inciting genocide, and this accusation I found to be far beyond the pale.

Re. RoySmith’s comment – Mzajac seems to issue veiled threats

Continuing the previous discussion on Arkhip Kuindzhi, Mzajac doubled down on the claim that I was using offensive statements about Ukrainian nationality as guidance in my edits, and stated that I was definitely unlikely to continue getting away with such public speech for much longer. [15] I cannot know what he meant by that, but coming from an administrator I took it as a threat of sanctions. Since I believed was basing my position on policy and I had sources backing me up, I did not feel anything would come of it, but it was still a less than pleasurable experience and later that day I disengaged from the article entirely.

Closing remarks

I am aware that these are not instances of misuse of administrative tools, but merely instances of conduct (in my opinion) unbecoming an administrator. I have some other examples of this behaviour if deemed necessary, but you may consider that this is not the place for these observations, plus I have probably exceeded the word limit already, for which I apologise (bear with me, I do not believe I have participated in such cases before). Ostalgia (talk) 20:13, 26 January 2024 (UTC)

Evidence presented by {your user name}

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